Lesson 249
Forgiveness ends all suffering and loss.
Forgiveness paints a picture of a world where suffering is over, loss becomes impossible and anger makes no sense. Attack is gone, and madness has an end. What suffering is now conceivable? What loss can be sustained? The world becomes a place of joy, abundance, charity and endless giving. It is now so like to Heaven that it quickly is transformed into the light that it reflects. And so the journey which the Son of God began has ended in the light from which he came.
Father, we would return our minds to You. We have betrayed them, held them in a vise of bitterness, and frightened them with thoughts of violence and death. Now would we rest again in You, as You created us.
Journal
All suffering begins with thought and all suffering ends when thought is forgiven. Even when I forgive someone else, I am only forgiving my thoughts about that one and thus I am only forgiving myself. Jesus redefines the word forgiveness in the Course and it holds nothing in common with the more familiar definition. In my mind, I substitute the word undoing for forgiveness.
I am undoing the idea that there is anything to forgive. I am undoing the ego. Once the ego is undone, I need do nothing to regain paradise. Love doesn’t need anything from me to be Itself. Once the ego has been undone within the mind of the Son, paradise lost becomes paradise found without further effort and the cycle is complete. It is then that our imagined world is “now so like to Heaven that it quickly is transformed into the light that it reflects.”
My part in this process is to forgive all things. Since these things (people or situations) are projections from the mind of which I am a part, I am always undoing the (ego) mind. Someone says something to me that is upsetting and I undo the idea that someone “else” has upset me. There is no one else. There is only another aspect of my self and my upset is only my perception of words said.
This is why I often ask for another way to see, a new perception that is closer to reality than the ego perception I currently hold. In this way, I undo another bit of ego thinking. It seems like a slow and tedious process when looked at, but I trust the Atonement which was designed on a far higher level than that in which I find myself at this time. We did this and we must undo it and forgiveness is how we do that.
Regina’s Tips on What is the World?
Our special theme says, “Let us not be satisfied until forgiveness has been made complete. And let us not attempt to change our function. … what was made to die can be restored to everlasting life.”
With these words, our special theme encourages us to stay with our spiritual practice until the final end of the ego.
How do we know when the ego has reached its final end?
Our special theme says that in truth “all the world must disappear.”
My Thoughts
I used to argue with that. I evidently found the idea of our miscreation disappearing to be upsetting. That was because I still thought of myself as a human being and the world as my home. As a human being, I was limited and could not imagine anything better. I couldn’t imagine myself as the Eternal Creator. In fact, there was this idea in my mind that I would be without purpose and bored if I returned to my natural state.
I don’t have any memory at all of what it is like to exist as part of God, but I no longer labor under the misapprehension that it is a limited state and that it would be less than what I am now. I no longer worry about this sandcastle we have built in the mind and no longer feel protective of it. It actually does not now, nor ever did exist, so what is there to lose. All that I am doing is learning that I no longer want to hold onto the thought of a world.
There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. ~ A Course in Miracles, Lesson 132
Regina’s Tips on the lesson
Letting go of I-thought thinking takes us from a dream of suffering to a dream of joy, but that is not yet the end of the I-thought. If we stop our spiritual practice upon reaching this threshold, we can experience a reemergence of the ego thought system.
It is in our best interest to welcome the happy dream as an opportunity to continue our spiritual practice without distraction until we find ourselves ushered across the threshold, through the experience of the ego’s final end, to “Beauty that cannot be contained in illusion.”
My Thoughts
So, upon awakening in the world, we find that we are not finished yet. There is further to go. I have seen that in those people I know personally who have awakened. They continue to meditate, and in fact, they increase their meditation. They see so much that I do not yet see and are so much happier and more peaceful. But I have seen that they also continue to grow into their awakening as will I.
Past Entry
I know about forgiveness, of course, have known since I began studying the Course years ago. At first, I completely refused to understand forgiveness and held onto that resistance device for a very long time. Then I saw forgiveness as an integral part of salvation, something important that I really needed to work on when I had the chance. I began to work seriously with forgiveness when I read Inner Healing by Dan Joseph and he shared his simple three step process. It was so easy and non- threatening that I slipped it right past the ego, and before it could object I had discovered the joy of forgiveness.
This prepared the soil of my mind for the many seeds that would be dropped into it. I got a lot more interested in forgiveness when I read The Disappearance of the Universe. I started working on forgiveness in a different way. Then I discovered Ho’oponopono-I’m Sorry, I Love You Process and really used the heck out of that one. Another favorite is from The Way of the Heart. The most recent is the very helpful forgiveness process from Nouk Sanchez.
In doing forgiveness work over a period of time, my appreciation of forgiveness as grown, as has my understanding. I see another person acting badly and I realize something immediately. That is me over there. That one is mirroring a thought from my mind. Just as it would be a waste of time to correct an image in a mirror, there is no point in trying to fix a world that is just a reflection of my thoughts. So as it turns out, I am always only forgiving my own projections.
Each of these processes have brought me closer to understanding the importance of forgiveness because they helped me see it from different angles. Also because the shear number of times I have used these processes has caused a real shift in my life. I see now that forgiveness is more than something I do to make a difference in my relationships, or to make myself happy.
Forgiveness is a train I board to go Home. The tracks lead directly to God and all I need to do is get on. When I fail to forgive or choose ego over Spirit as my teacher, I have fallen off the train, and so am no longer on the most direct route home. I have to get up, shake myself off and get right back on. Forgiveness isn’t just something I do as a “spiritual person’ anymore. It is not my little sacrifice to God, where I give up what I want for the good of the Sonship.
Forgiveness is my joy, my happiness, my peace. Forgiveness is the purpose of everything that appears in my life, anywhere in my life, even in the peripheral parts of my life. If it is in any way in my awareness, I ask the Holy Spirit what needs to be done with this. What in this event, person, or circumstance, needs my forgiveness. Every forgiveness is inclusive. I forgive myself, the other person, event or circumstance. I forgive the world that is part of this lesson. I forgive the Sonship that is dreaming this dream. No error in the mind is discreet because that would assume some kind of separation.