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“To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All the rest must be forgotten.”
Since all minds are connected, then the correction of anyone’s perception is on some level a healing of the entire racial mind. The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world. Angry people cannot create a peaceful planet. It amuses me to think how angry I used to get when people wouldn’t sign my peace petitions.
Forgiveness is a full time job, and sometimes very difficult. Few of us always succeed, yet making the effort is our most noble calling.
A miracle is a release from internal bondage. Our capacity for brilliance is equal to our capacity to forget the past and forget the future. That’s why little children are brilliant. They don’t remember the past, and they don’t relate to the future. Be us as little children, that the world might finally grow up.
The past is merely a thought we have. It is literally all in our minds. The Course teaches, “Give the past to Him Who can change your mind about it for you.” To surrender the past to the Holy Spirit is to ask that only loving, helpful thoughts about it remain in our minds, and all the rest be let go.
As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Be ye not anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow shall be anxious for itself.”
‘The ego bases its perception of reality on what has happened in the past, carries those perceptions into the present and thus creates
a future like the past.’ If we felt that we were lacking in our past, our thoughts about the future a...
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“Past, present and future are not continuous, unless you force continuity upon them.” In the present, we have the opportunity to break the continuity of the past and future by asking the Holy Spirit to intervene. This is the miracle. We want a new life, a new beginning.
We die to one world in order to be born into another. “To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present.” The world of time is not the real world, and the world of eternity is our real home. We are on our way there. We are pregnant with possibilities.
We can all contribute to a global rebirth to the extent that we allow ourselves to be awakened from our own personal dream of separation and guilt, to release our own past and accept a new life in the present. It is only through our own personal awakening that the world can be awakened. We cannot give what we don’t have.
We’re all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life—our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances—exactly as they are.
We don’t realize that the present is always a chance to begin again, a light-filled moment.
Until we’re healed of our internal demons, our fearful mental habits, we will turn every situation into the same painful drama as the one before. Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we’re frantic, life will be frantic.
The term crucifixion means the energy pattern of fear. It represents the limited, negative thinking of the ego, and how it always seeks to limit, contradict or invalidate love. The term resurrection means the energy pattern of love, which transcends fear by replacing it. A miracle worker’s function is forgiveness. In performing our function, we become channels for resurrection.
A miracle worker is not geared toward fighting the world that is, but toward creating the world that could be.
we recognize that the real transformation of the world comes not from what we’re doing, but from the consciousness with which we’re doing it.
When we outgrow our immature preoccupation with the small self, we transcend our selfishness and become cosmically mature.
Childishness is when we’re so preoccupied with things that ultimately don’t matter, that we lose our essential connection with things that do.
Childlike implies spirituality, as in tenderness, and a profound not-knowing that makes us open to new impressions. Childlike is when see ourselves as children in the arms of God. We learn to step back and let Him lead the way.
Any thinking person knows that the world is in many ways moving in a downward spiral, and an object continues to move in whatever direction it’s currently headed. Only the application of a stronger counterforce can change its direction.
At the last moment, when things look the worst, God does tend to appear. Not because he has a sadistic sense of humor, waiting until we’re totally desperate before showing us his muscle. He takes so long because it’s not until then that we bother to think about Him. All this time, we thought we were waiting for Him. Little did we know, He was waiting for us.
There is really only one drama going on in life: our walk away from God, and our walk back. We simply reenact the one drama in different ways.
If we treat miraculous principles like toys, they will be like toys in our lives. But if we treat them like the power of the universe, then such will they be for us. The past is over. It doesn’t matter who we are, where we came from, what Mommy said, what Daddy did, what mistakes we made, what diseases we have, or how depressed we feel. The future can be reprogrammed in this moment.
Not later, but now. Not elsewhere, but here. Not through pain, but through peace. So be it. Amen.
Heaven, according to the Course, is neither a condition nor a place, but rather the “awareness of perfect oneness.”
Perennial Philosophy
There is a line in a song from the play Les Miserables that says, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
In every relationship, in every moment, we teach either love or fear. “To teach is to demonstrate.”
If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed. If I project guilt onto another person, I will always end up feeling more guilty.
When surrendered to the Holy Spirit, when He is in charge of our perceptions, our encounters become holy encounters with the perfect Son of God. A Course in Miracles says that everyone we meet will either be our crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them.
Focusing on their guilt drives the nails of self-loathing more deeply into our own skin. Focusing on their innocence sets us free. Since ‘no thoughts are neutral,’ every relationshi...
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Our perceptions of other people often become a battleground between the ego’s desire to judge and the Holy Spirit’s desire to accept people as they are. The ego is the great fault-finder. It seeks out the faults in ourselves and others. The Holy Spirit seeks out our innocence. He sees all of us as we really are, and since we are the perfect creations of God, He loves what He sees.
Forgiveness is “selective remembering”—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is “capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.”
Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have thought, and what you have not thought that God would have you think.” In other words, where were my thoughts not aligned with God’s?
“It’s true—God’s not looking at her and thinking, ‘Sophie Ann is such a bitch.’” As long as I chose to see her that way, as long as I was not willing to give up my focus on her errors, I could not be at peace because I was not sharing God’s perception. As soon as I saw this, I released my tense fixation on what I perceived to be her guilt. From that point forward, the situation began to shift.
If you’re judging a brother, you’re wrong even if you’re right. There have been times when I have had a very hard time giving up my judgment of someone, mentally protesting, “But I’m right.” I felt as though giving up my judgment amounted to condoning their behavior. I felt, “Well, somebody’s got to uphold principle in this world. If we just forgive things all the time, then all standards of excellence will disintegrate!”
But God doesn’t need us to police the universe. Shaking our finger at someone doesn’t help them change. If anything, our perception of someone’s guilt only keeps them stuck in it.
Treating someone with compassion and forgiveness is much more likely to elicit a healed response. People are less likely to be defensive, and more likely to be open to correction.
Forgiveness is the choice to see people as they are now. When we are angry at people, we are angry because of something they said or did before this moment. But what people said or did is not who they are.
‘By bringing the past into the present, we create a future just like the past.’ By letting the past go, we make room for miracles.
Only love is real. Nothing else actually exists. If a person behaves unlovingly, then, that means that, regardless of their negativity—anger or whatever—their behavior was derived from fear and doesn’t actually exist. They’re hallucinating.
Forgiveness is a discernment between what is real and what is not real.
When people behave unlovingly, they have forgotten who they are. They have fallen asleep to the Christ within them. The job of the miracle worker is to remain awake. We choose not to fall asleep and dream of our brother...
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A Course in Miracles tells us that whenever we are contemplating attacking someone, it is as though we are holding a sword above their head. The sword, however, doesn’t fall on them but on us. Since all thought is thought about ourselves, then to condemn another is to condemn ourselves.
When someone has behaved unlovingly—when they yell at us, or lie about us, or steal from us—they have lost touch with their essence. They have forgotten who they are. But everything that someone does, says the Course, is either ‘love or a call for love.’ If someone treats us with love, then of course love is the appropriate response. If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love.
Our power lies in remaining nonreactive. Forgiveness works in the same way. When we attack back, and defense is a form of attack, we initiate a war that no one can win. Since lovelessness is not real, we’re not at the effect of it in ourselves or others. The problem, of course, is that we think we are.
“The ego is the choice for guilt; the Holy Spirit the choice for guiltlessness.” The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they’ve done right. The Course likens the ego to a scavenger dog that seeks out every scrap of evidence for our brother’s guilt and lays it at its master’s feet. The Holy Spirit, similarly, sends out its own messengers to seek evidence of our brother’s innocence. The important thing is that we decide what we want to see before we see it. We receive what we request. “Projection makes perception.” We can find—and in fact,
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What we think of as people’s guilt is their fear. All negativity derives from fear. When someone is angry, they are afraid. When someone is rude, they are afraid. When someone is manipulative, they are afraid. When someone is cruel, they are afraid. There is no fear that love does not dissolve. There is no negativity that forgiveness does not transform.
We can’t get rid of darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat, because there is nothing to hit. If we want to be rid of darkness, we must turn on a light. Similarly, if we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.
In a case like that, it feels as though we’re hurt by what someone else did. But what really has occurred is that someone else’s closed heart has tempted us to close our own, and it is our own denial of love that hurts us. That’s why the miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own heart open, regardless of what’s going on outside us.
