Lesson 347

Anger must come from judgment. Judgment is
The weapon I would use against myself
To keep all miracles away from me.

 

Today is a day of listening and being still so we can hear the gentle Voice for God and know that the only true judgment is we are the Son He loves. But it is not just to know or believe that. We need to come to the experience of it in the holy instant, a moment outside of time. The only way this is possible is when we commit ourselves to choosing compassion, kindness, harmony, peace and patience as our goal. It is possible when we commit to a life of application of the Course principles, and when we are vigilant for God and His Kingdom, rather than to our ego. When we do so, we willingly place before the Truth all the ways we are withholding love. We become happy learners because we happily see everything that is unlike love as another opportunity for healing. We continually surrender our thoughts of judgment and specialness to the Presence within, which shines them away. When we stubbornly persist in holding onto grievances, we ask for help to heal our resistance. We can then at least admit we don't like how we feel and are somewhat willing to make space for the miracle.

"Miracles honor you because you are lovable. They dispel illusions about yourself and perceive the light in you. They thus atone for your errors by freeing you from your nightmares. By releasing your mind from the imprisonment of your illusions, they restore your sanity." (T.1.I.33.4)(ACIM OE T.1.I.46) We keep the miracle away from ourselves through our decision to judge and to hold onto anger. We justify our anger and make ourselves victims of the world, but we are asked to take note today that what we are seeing is not the truth. To see the false is to be in the wrong mind because, in actual fact, we are seeing what does not exist. This means we have made a judgment that is not true. Everything we see comes from judgment and none of it is the truth. It is how we keep ourselves in misery. We set goals for our happiness, yet in our insanity we choose to judge the circumstances of the day, which is precisely how we keep happiness away. We are actually choosing not to be happy, as insane as that sounds. As Jesus says, we want what goes against our will. "Father, I want what goes against my will, and do not want what is my will to have." (W.347.1.1) Our will is to know who we are. It is to know our Being as love.
 
Jesus is very clear and direct with us when he says that our minds are sick. "Straighten my mind, my Father. It is sick." (W.347.1.2-3) It is a clear statement of the insanity of our minds. We want what goes against our own best interests because, ultimately, we don't know our own best interests. We pursue the very things that continue to bring pain and distress. If we saw that clearly, surely we would see the insanity of it and admit our minds are truly sick. Until we see this is the case, we won't be willing to release our own pursuits and our own judgments, because we think they serve us. Jesus keeps trying to help us see we are unhappy. We don't see it, because we have made an adjustment to this insane world, not unlike a mental patient who decides to be happy in the asylum and even feels safe there. It is this sense of safety we have established for ourselves in the world that makes us resistant to leave. We don't yet rely fully on the Holy Spirit.
 
We may even be comfortable where we are now in our spiritual journey. We may feel we have found a place of comfort and safety in our study of the Course and our happiness at having more peace than we have had in the past. In this place of comfort, we may feel reluctant to go deeper, which would require uncovering more layers of the ego mind. Thus, we settle into a happier state, but we resist taking the next steps to the process of undoing. To be a happy learner is to stay vigilant to all of the ways we try to keep ourselves safe and to learn to welcome the new opportunities to go deeper.

Jesus persists in assuring us happiness can only be found through forgiveness. We don't believe it so we need help to walk through our fear and resistance. We are asked to recognize if our natural state of mind is peace, we are actively keeping peace away from ourselves each time we attack a brother with our judgments and our anger and each time we react to seeming attack coming to us. The thing is, we will make judgments and will have our buttons pushed in situations that arise. Instead of judging ourselves for such events, it can only be helpful if we look at what is happening without judgment and to welcome this as another opportunity for healing. It is not helpful to judge anything going on in our lives as wrong or bad. It is all useful for our healing.

What the ego does is counsel us to see attack coming to us from outside so we can feel justified in attacking back. If we see attack coming from outside of us, we will see ourselves as victims. Seeing ourselves as victimized, by outside people and circumstances, is the ego's goal. Why? We then don't have to take responsibility for the judgments originating in our own minds. We actually want the attacks because then we can see others as the guilty ones and ourselves as innocent victims of somebody's attack. Thus, we are buying our own innocence at the expense of a world of guilt seemingly outside of our own minds. Yet Jesus keeps assuring us the world is an outside reflection of our inner condition. When the inner guilt is healed, we will only see a world without our judgment laid on it.

Jesus is always reminding us we are completely innocent now. We just don't recognize the truth about us in this very moment. He therefore assures us there is no need to manufacture false innocence by projecting guilt. The ego, on the other hand, has told us we are guilty and, by projecting our guilt onto others, we will be relieved of it. Of course the law of love tells us that what we give we receive. It is a universal law with no exceptions. When we realize that to lay guilt on others is how we keep it, we will be motivated to heal the guilt within, because all we are doing is hurting ourselves.

We are not being asked to deny what we see, but only to recognize we are constantly giving our interpretations to events, people and situations that have no meaning except what we give them. The world is neutral. The interpretations we give to what seems to be happening are based on beliefs we hold about ourselves. When I give my interpretation of an event to the Holy Spirit, He always reflects another way to see it. While our interpretations bring us distress, we nevertheless choose to suffer as long as we can blame our suffering on what others have done to us and hold them to account instead of ourselves. This is how we actively choose to keep the miracle away from ourselves. This is truly insanity. That is why we need to acknowledge "Father, I want what goes against my will, [anger, attack, specialness, holding grievances] and do not want what is my will to have [peace, miracles, joy]. " (W.347.1.1) We want it because it keeps us safe from Love. It keeps our special individual self in control.
 
Today, let us bring our attention to the way we go against our own best interests and resist our well being. "What is temptation but the wish to stay in hell and misery?" (T.31.VII.10.1)(ACIM OE T.31.VII.78) We deny this wish. Yet if we really look honestly at our thoughts, we can see we are choosing anger and attack deliberately in order to hide from God's Love, which we believe will annihilate us. As long as we identify with the body and the world, rather than with the Eternal Self we are, we are trying to prove God wrong. We are defending against His Love. We demonstrate our belief in our body as our reality by showing Him, through our death, we can't be the Eternal Self He says we are. This internal conflict, between our wrong-minded thinking and the Love that awaits us, must be resolved. We do this through forgiveness.
 
We really don't know our own will, but the Holy Spirit does. He knows our desires even before we do. It is up to us to recognize the folly of our interpretations, be willing to release them to His healing light, and ask Him to judge for us. We can't see who our brother really is as the Christ Self. We ask that the Holy Spirit show him to us, so we can know his holiness and thus our own. The judgment of the Holy Spirit of our brother will inspire our love rather than our anger. He judges us all the same, as pure and innocent.

The Holy Spirit calls the miracle to come to us. This is what we truly want, but we don't know our own will. That is why we need the Holy Spirit who can act on behalf of our best interests. My judgment keeps miracles away. Today let's commit to giving over our judgments to the Holy Spirit, so miracles can abound in our day. They are natural. When we are not experiencing them, it is because we don't want them. Jesus wants to help us to see everything differently. The value the world has for us is that it reflects the choice we have made in our minds. Every relationship, every situation and every event becomes an opportunity to choose again .

A Course in Miracles

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ACIM OE MN #10

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