Lesson 225
God is my Father, and His Son loves Him.
Father, I must return Your Love for me, for giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me. I must return it, for I want it mine in full awareness, blazing in my mind and keeping it within its kindly light, inviolate, beloved, with fear behind and only peace ahead. How still the way Your loving Son is led along to You!
Brother, we find that stillness now. The way is open. Now we follow it in peace together. You have reached your hand to me, and I will never leave you. We are one, and it is but this oneness that we seek, as we accomplish these few final steps which end a journey that was not begun.
INITIAL INSIGHT: Jesus tells us often in the Course how much God loves us and how much we love Him. He is gently reminding us of our true relationship with our Father. Between these reminders, which seem to spark something in my mind, and the clear understanding of the ego alternative that the Course is designed to bring to my attention, I am learning that I want that relationship. Letting go of the ego thoughts in my mind actually reveal it to me. I am beginning to feel the feel the love of God, and from God, and that feeling gets stronger every day.
DAILY APPLICATION: There are many ways to return Home, and many Helpers to get there. I don’t think it matters which path we choose, but I also don’t think we, as our ego self, make that choice. I think that it is already decided, though I am not sure how that works. In The Way of Mastery, Jeshua talks about lineages. I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. I just know that I feel a strong connection to Jesus and I love that connection.
I think of Jesus as my elder brother and I am so very grateful for his help. I know that we are joined in this venture and I know that I have reached my hand to him and he took it. I feel him with me all the time. I also notice that I am not interested in other paths. That was not a conscious decision, it just is. This doesn’t mean I have anything against them, or that I don’t appreciate what they offer that is useful to me. I just am not drawn to them the way I am to Jesus and the path we walk together.
One night when I was still working, I was at a town council meeting to do a presentation. As I looked around the room at these “strangers” I remembered my purpose. I came there to speak about their water quality and to bind them to my company so they didn’t buy from someone else. In remembering my true purpose, everything changed. I didn’t know anyone, but I felt a kinship with them.
I asked the Holy Spirit to show me the light that they are. I thought of them as God in various interesting disguises. There was one person in the crowd who had been expressing disapproval in little ways and I could feel the negativity, but when I spoke, this all changed, and the change had nothing to do with my words. I felt like we were joined in a common purpose.
I looked directly at the unhappy woman and she was calm and attentive. My presentation didn’t change; I was still talking to them about the quality of their water. But even though I did not stand there telling everyone how holy they are, they were affected by my vision. Everything happens at the level of mind. The actions that follow are just projections of those thoughts.
I realized that the room filled with God, and this projected outward in a way that meets the requirements of the time/space story we were experiencing together and appeared before us as me talking to them about their water. But in actuality, it was a joke we were playing on ourselves, because we were just love interacting with love, and the reflection of that showed itself in the changed attitude of the room. Change your mind and you change the world. Can you imagine the world when millions of us are happily joining with each other?
INSIGHTS FROM HOLY SPIRIT: In 2007, I was learning that there is nothing to fear from God, and I was learning that God is Love. But there was still fear of God in my mind and fear of loss when I thought about giving up self. Here is a message from Spirit I received while still struggling with my fear.
Me: Holy Spirit, how can I best release what is keeping me from fully experiencing my love for God?
Holy Spirit: Your life is filled with symbols that will be useful for this. Each body in your world is a symbol of the separation you want to exist between you and God. Each body seems to be separate from the other body and in that gap, you place the fear of wholeness to keep the bodies apart. Even in your closest relationships, you are careful to keep a separation. As your children have grown up, you have placed in the gap between you the fear that they will take their bodies away from you and that you will not have them anymore, and so you begin to distance yourself mentally and emotionally.
They choose mates and you see your status as a special person threatened and your fear seems to be confirmed, and so you push harder and the gap becomes larger. This gap you have created to prove your separate existence; this gap you imagine exists between yourself and every other body is symbolic of the gap you imagine exists between you and your Father.
As you become willing to heal, you will use the body symbols to do this work. Be willing to close the gaps you imagine exists within the Sonship. The opportunities will be made available to you. Your part will be to stay mindful so that you recognize the opportunity when it is presented and to be willing to see differently.
This is the same process you have been using for healing and so is familiar. Just notice that you are using it for the purpose of allowing all separation to be undone, including the idea there could be any small gap between you and your brother. The gap you see between you and a brother is just a picture of the gap you have created in your thinking. Notice when you feel the need to widen the gap. You often step away from or move your body to a different place.
Me: Holy Spirit the thought that comes to my mind is when I divorced my first husband and life seemed to get so crazy I literally moved my body to a different state. Later I learned that I had taken the problems with me and had to deal with them after all, but I do see that I was attempting to protect myself from the pain of loss by moving my body away from what seemed to be the source of that loss. I was trying to prove that I was fully separate from that person and so fully separate from the pain. I stuffed fear of intimacy into the gap between myself and everyone else to prevent that kind of pain from repeating itself.
Holy Spirit: As you notice these attempts to protect yourself through separation and allow Me to help you see differently, you will allow the gap to close. As you accept healing on the level of your special relationships, this will translate into healing at the level of the only real relationship you have, and that is the one with your Creator. So continue your good work. Allow whatever is in your life at the moment to be your path Home. Choose love over separation and you will notice that more often you will feel less like a separate autonomous person and more like an aspect of the Whole.
As you experience feeling one with your other selves, you will experience less fear and more love. This change in your relationships will be mirrored in your relationship with God and you will begin to experience less fear and more love when you think of Him. You will begin to experience the gap between you and God closing. It was never there to begin with, but it does seem to you to be there and so you must choose to see it as closing.
GRATITUDE: Thank you, Holy Spirit, for helping me to become clear on this.
REGINA’S TIPS
Please take time this morning to read, “What is Forgiveness,” to contemplate Lesson 225, and to spend time in meditation. If you have 30-minutes for meditation and would like a gentle audio to guide you, I recommend this meditation by Michael Langford and Karen Worth:
God is my Father, and His Son loves Him.
Today’s lesson says, “Father, … You have given all Your Love to me. I must return it, for I want it mine in full awareness, blazing in my mind and keeping it within its kindly light, inviolate, beloved, with fear behind and only peace ahead.”
With the realization that this is what we want, we practice giving love (attention) to life-awareness by gratefully spending time in awareness-watching-awareness meditation.
The lesson also says, “Brother, we find that stillness now.”
With this in our hearts, we practice forgiveness today. If we see an idea that someone has done something to us, we pause and notice that we are not affected at all. The mind may be agitated, but we are the presence that is aware of the mind; we are not the mind. If the agitation continues to attract our attention, we use a spiritual practice to see through the illusion of being affected. With right-gratitude for this healing opportunity, we practice inquiry, rest-accept-trust and/or right-reason in order to free ourselves from the illusion of meaning when there is none.
MY THOUGHTS
Sometimes the agitation of unforgiveness attracts my attention enough that I must use a process to release it, but this is rare. I cannot imagine not forgiving. I know I used to spend hours, days, weeks in unforgiveness. Before that, I spent years holding onto grievances. I suffered so much from unforgiveness that looking back on it, I am amazed that I ever chose to hang onto it like that. I am so very grateful to A Course in Miracles for the help I have received through this discipline. I am beyond grateful to Jesus for his loving help. I look forward to the time when there is nothing in my mind to forgive.