Lesson 82

Lesson 82

We will review these ideas today:

(63) The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness.

My forgiveness is the means by which the light of the world finds expression through me. My forgiveness is the means by which I become aware of the light of the world in me. My forgiveness is the means by which the world is healed, together with myself. Let me, then, forgive the world, that it may be healed along with me.

Suggestions for specific forms for applying this idea are:

Let peace extend from my mind to yours, [name].
I share the light of the world with you, [name]. 
Through my forgiveness I can see this as it is.

(64) Let me not forget my function.

I would not forget my function, because I would remember my Self. I cannot fulfill my function if I forget it. And unless I fulfill my function, I will not experience the joy that God intends for me.

Suitable specific forms of this idea include:

Let me not use this to hide my function from me.
I would use this as an opportunity to fulfill my function. 
This may threaten my ego, but cannot change my function in any way.

 

Journal

I feel enormously blessed to know my function and discover how very simple it is. I simply allow the light of the world to bring peace through my forgiveness. And I don’t forget this. A couple of days ago, I mentioned a problem with getting my furniture moved. I was focusing my attention on the problem and in doing so, I lost my peace.

That’s a funny way to say this – I lost my peace, as if it was a key I misplaced. I didn’t lose it, I knew exactly where it was. It was where it always is, right there in my mind. It was only obscured by the chatter about how much this job needed to get done. I used this situation as practice. It took a day or so to release the idea that the placement of my furniture was the problem, but once I did, the mind chatter about it abated and so I was again, peaceful until another “problem” popped up.

Anyway, my daughter invited me to meet her and my granddaughter at the park. It was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, chatting with my daughter and playing with Eleanor. When it was clear that my granddaughter was tired, I suggested they come home with me and maybe Susan and I could move my couch. It turns out that even with the two of us, it was too heavy to move. I told her that I could just leave everything as it is, that moving it wasn’t essential and I went back to playing with Eleanor.

Susan, in the meantime, called her husband and asked him to come help, and then called my other son in law and told him what was going on, and both of them came over and got everything done in just a few minutes. We spent another hour visiting and enjoying each other’s company. I am glad to have that job done but a lot more important to me was the process of forgiving the belief that moving my furniture was the problem and experiencing the peace that came flooding back into me as a result. It was nice for me, but it was also my little bit toward bringing peace to every mind through my forgiveness.

 

Regina’s Tips

Buddha’s motivation for letting go of ego was the desire to find the end to suffering. His own suffering didn’t motivate him. Personally, he didn’t know suffering. He was motivated by compassion for others.

Jesus said his life was a ransom for many. Could he have had the same motivation as Buddha?

Can we look at the suffering and terror that is caused by the ego thought system, and like them, choose to let go of it?

Please take a moment to listen to this song today. (https://awakening-together.org/tips-from-regina-lesson-82/) And thanks for any effort that you put into letting go of the ego thought system in your mind. It is a gift to all of us.

My Thoughts

I have heard people say that it does not matter if we do this work, that we will wake up anyway. I know why I do it. I want to be happy right now, not some far off time when I awaken. I want everyone else to be as happy as I am. I want suffering to end for all of us.

 

Past Entry

I woke up very happy and I am asking myself if I want to stay happy? Am I ready for joy? How about peace? Am I through with drama? Forgiveness is the only, the only, way this is going to happen. So when I think I see guilt someplace, the question I want to ask myself is, do I want to believe this guilt or do I want to be happy? I cannot have both.

Happiness is a choice. Nothing needs to change for me to be happy. I simply choose happiness. Guilt and fear are the other choices. The ego mind will put up a ferocious argument to this. While I was still confused, the ego would tell me that guilt and fear were my shields against the world. They protected me. From the ego point of view this seemed to make sense and like most people, I believed it.

The ego said that I was definitely guilty but that knowing what I did that made me guilty would keep me from doing it again and being guiltier. And, in addition, if the guilt was too much, the ego told me that I could give it away. I could sling it on someone else, and they would be the guilty one and I would appear innocent in comparison.

On the other hand, I read in the Course that there is no good use for guilt and that I knew what was the right thing without feeling guilty. I learned that ideas leave not their source and so I realized that I could not fling guilt far enough to be rid of it. I learned that fear didn’t protect me from doing things that scare me and even when it did, fear didn’t protect me from fear. Fear was always just below the surface, infecting my life like a fast-spreading virus, draining all the good from it.

Then I learned that neither fear nor guilt are real, but simply the effects of decisions I have made, and that I can make different decisions now. The ego changed tactics and started talking about how hard this is going to be, to let go of guilt and fear. This is where the ego gets very clever. It says that, yes, I must do this work. It is so hard that it will take a long, long time. And each time I try and fail, the ego says I am guilty of failing, and when I become discouraged, the ego says, yes, I have reason to be afraid, because I will never succeed.

Choosing to listen to the ego is the choice I have made in the past. Choosing to believe that fear and guilt protect me, or that fear and guilt are impossible to live without is a choice I made in the past. There is a part of the mind, the ego mind, that wants this to be true and when I identified with that part, I got what I wanted.

My desire became images of the thoughts in my mind, and I tried hard and failed a lot, and I felt guilty for it and despaired of ever succeeding. But at least I kept trying and that was the ego way of keeping me from giving up and finding a better way. Inevitably, though, I began to find my way out of the ego web of deceit, as my desire for God grew stronger and stronger.

God is in my mind, too, and so I learned to hear His Voice as well as the ego voice, and eventually, having chosen that happy Voice often enough, to hear God’s Voice more than the ego voice. I learned to disbelieve the ego and to give my focus to the Holy Spirit instead. I learned to disregard appearances, which are a slight of hand, an illusion made to keep my attention away from the truth. More and more often, I remembered my function.

And that is forgiveness. It is the way I do my part to undo what we did when we innocently made the ego. I don’t battle it, I forgive it and watch it slowly disappear. I began by forgiving the effects of the ego, my neighbor, my coworker, my ex-husband, and all the situations that were guilty and fearful. I gained my strength and found my power through choosing forgiveness more and more often, and eventually, I chose it every time even if it took awhile to make that choice.

In forgiveness, that is in recognizing that nothing was ever really done, that all I feared and all that triggered my guilt and even the guilt itself, were illusions, I discovered that I could simply choose to be happy. In spite of appearances, I had only one problem, I thought I was separated from my Creator. Through forgiveness, I discovered that was not true. Problem solved.

I still see the problems trying to emerge once again to gain my attention, but I see through them as well. How could there be a problem when the only problem has been solved. Echoes. Shadows. Nothing. So insubstantial that a whispered prayer undoes it. “Let me remember that the problem has been solved.” Forgiveness. And in forgiving the darkness in my mind, and the darkness reflected in the world, I become the light of the world that brings peace to every mind.