Practicing Salvation with You
. . . on reversing our understanding of cause-and-effect
The end of judgment is the beginning of peace, because it is the reversal of cause and effect. The end of judgment is itself an effect of the underlying reversal; it testifies to peace because what is brought into alignment with God's Will can only testify to peace.
When we say peace, we are referring to a way of being with one another in relationship, a way that recognizes the other as one's own self, and thus understands everything as either love or a cry for love, meriting only love in response. Who needs to judge and evaluate when there is only one need and one response to that need?
Walk, then, in gratitude the way of love. For hatred is fogotten when we lay comparisons aside (W-pI.195.8:1-2).
Forgiveness in A Course in Miracles means seeing without comparing; it means that we are aware of the inclination to compare and we choose not to. It is an understanding of what we are in truth and an application of that understanding.
Forgiveness means becoming unwilling to allow exceptions, because that is not what Love is (T-7.V.5:7). On this foundation is our happiness created and sustained and extended.
Fear always makes exceptions. Healing never does. Fear produces dissociation, because it induces separation. Healing always produces harmony because it proceeds from integration. It is predictable because it can be counted on. Everything that is of God can be counted on, because everything of God is wholly real (T-7.V.6:3-8).
Therefore, let us give attention only to integration. Let us remember one another only as Creation knows us. Let us live our shared conviction that nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists (T-in.2:2-3).
It is easy to say this and it is hard - murderously hard - to practice it. I promise, the minute you get serious about giving up judgment, the ego will literally summon demons, F-16s and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to change your mind.
Ego is not going quietly into the good night (e.g., T-3.I.4:2).
On that front, the key thing is: don't panic. Be nonviolent. Be gentle. Let the demons and the other crucifiers do their thing. Ego's gotta ego. You do not.
Stay focused. Ask yourself: what does judgment do? What is its function? Not what the Text or Workbook says about judgement, not what Tara Singh says.
What is its function in you? In your experience?
If you ask sincerely, and do not rush into answers, then eventually the Holy Spirit will say something along the lines of: Judgment evaluates. It decides this is good, this is bad, this is necessary, this is not. These evaluations are always premised on the body which, to ego, is basically a collection of appetites - for sex, safety, food, drink, health, sensation et cetera.
Ego doesn't really make intellectual arguments. It is rather a way of seeing the body as if the body were the cause of our happiness or lack thereof, rather than an effect of a decision to know - or forget a while longer - what we are in truth.
Ego is our willingness to be passive, to forego responsibility, to ignore what is right in front of us. Ego is what hides from us that the secret to salvation is seeing we are doing this to ourself (T-27.VIII.10:1).
How differently you will perceive the world when this is recognized! When you forgive the world your guilt, you will be free of it. Its innocence does not demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on its sins. This is the obvious; a secret kept from no one but yourself (T-27.VIII.13:1-4).
Here is a thing we don't talk enough about in the Course community. Bodies judge; bodies evaluate; bodies take care of bodies, theirs and their chosen favorites. Bodies cannot escape being bodies.
Bodies doing body things - and bringing forth a world thereby - is not the crisis. We do not have to panic about this. We don't have to give it the slightest bit of attention.
The real crisis, the thing we need to deal with, is we think we are the body. We think we are a body in the world. We think the body and the world cause us to feel things and think things and thus to behave this way or that.
That's backwards. The divisions brought forth by the body are not our divisions, and the world those divisions make is not our world, because we are not bodies. The world is an effect of a decision to see from a body, as a body. The body is an effect of a decision to see ourselves as limited, small and split off from creation.
A Course in Miracles is given to help us see this error in perception, and undo it.
Sometimes people say, okay, I'm not a body. What am I?
Here is another thing we don't talk about enough: when you ask that question of someone other than yourself you are refusing responsibility; you are pretending that you are not doing this to yourself, that some body or some thing else is doing it.
Therefore, anybody willing to answer that question is also confused. They are indulging your unwillingness; they are sharing in it. They are using it to avoid their responsibility for facing the fear of love.
Be honest: if I tell you you are Love Itself, does that really and truly solve the problem of separation? Is eating no longer eating? Gardening no longer gardening? Is your cancer healed? Do the dead rise?
We have to go into forgiveness for ourselves. We have to answer the question "what am I" for ourselves. The lonesome valley is an illusion but it’s not trivial. We have to walk alone until we learn what we are in truth cannot be alone.
A Course in Miracles helps, if we give attention to it and don't resist the radical refactoring of identity and function that it teaches.
I spent a few hours at the Amherst Orchid Society's annual show this weekend. Orchids are beautiful in a way that defies easy understanding; they're not just flowers. They feel intelligent. It's hard to explain. And orchid growers are correspondingly obsessed and passionate. Their intensity is infectious.
I sat quietly in the crowded hall and partook of a bountiful and uncontainable Love. There are no words.
As the world understands cause-and-effect, that experience was caused by the orchids and the orchid growers.
But that is backwards.
The beautiful orchids and the inspiring orchid growers were an effect of my decision to stop resisting what I am in truth and instead let it shine.
Make way for love, which you did not create, but which you can extend. On earth this means you forgive your brother, that the darkness may be lifted from your mind. When light has come to him through your forgiveness, he will not forget his savior, leaving him unsaved. For it was in your face he saw the light that he would keep beside him, as he walks through darkness to the everlasting light (T-29.III.4:1-4).
Is it clear? You share your light with me so that I can remember it is mine as well. It is ours to give. Of course I "walk in gratitude the way of love." You will not abide anything less.
Love,
Sean
Sean love this especially the peice about the ego doing ego things reminds me of Jesus telling us about how his servants came to the master to tell him about the wheat been infected by weeds . And like forrest gump that's all I'll say about that. I'm still in a void but I'm at peace
After reading this a second and third time, it led me here:
6 It is not difficult to relinquish judgment, but it is difficult indeed to try to keep it. ²The teacher of God lays it down happily the instant he recognizes its cost. ³All of the ugliness he sees about him is its outcome. ⁴All of the pain he looks upon is its result. ⁵All of the loneliness and sense of loss, of passing time and growing hopelessness, of sickening despair and fear of death; all these have come of it. ⁶And now he knows that these things need not be. ⁷Not one is true. ⁸For he has given up their cause, and they, which never were but the effects of his mistaken choice, have fallen from him. ⁹Teacher of God, this step will bring you peace. ¹⁰Can it be difficult to want but this?
[CE M-10.5-6] https://acimce.app/:M-10.5-6