Month: February 2020

Lesson 59: Review of Lessons 41 – 45

Here are the main ideas from Lessons 41 – 45:

41. God goes with me wherever I go.

42. God is my strength. Vision is His gift.

43. God is my Source. I cannot see apart from Him.

44. God is the light in which I see.

45. God is the Mind with which I think.

There’s a trite church billboard slogan I saw one day that I immediately scoffed at until I began doing the Course workbook. It read: “If God feels distant, who moved?”

My kneejerk reaction was negative, but as I ponder the review of these past five lessons, it seems cogent to ask who moved if we ever feel like we’ve lost our connection to God. God never goes anywhere that we are not. The Holy is always there to provide its presence and strength, to be our Source to meet all our needs, to provide the light of peace and love and guide our thoughts to become Holy.

If you’re not feeling that in any moment – you moved, not God. Whenever we feel “abandoned” by the Holy, we can be assured that our ego has thrown up a barrier of some sort, whether it’s a feeling of despair, fear or sorrow. The ego wants us to believe that we are on our own here in this world of form – that only it can “save” us from the suffering of the world through its weapons of attack, competition and fear.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 28, 2020 — Catching the happy virus”

Lesson 58: Review of Lessons 36 – 40

The ideas from Lessons 36 – 40 are:

36. My holiness envelopes everything I see.

37. My holiness blesses the world.

38. There is nothing my holiness cannot do.

39. My holiness is my salvation.

40. I am blessed as a Son (Child) of God.

Singer and songwriter Rickie Byars sings about living in a “Wholly Holy Way,” proclaiming that love is all around us, seeking to learn from failure and asking to walk in each day a little wiser. Her song helps us to understand what this lesson means when it talks about our “holiness.”

For those of us who grew up in more fundamentalist Christian traditions, such as the Southern Baptist Church, humans are considered the furthest thing from “holy.” Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant strain of religion, once compared himself (and therefore the rest of humanity) to “a stinking bag of worms.” This form of religion teaches that there’s nothing good about us and God had to send his son, Jesus, to die on a cross to even make the human race into something that didn’t make God puke every time He (and, yes, it was always a He) thought of us.

This idea that we could be “holy” was preposterous.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 27, 2020 — The worm turns”

Lesson 57: Review of Lessons 31 – 35

Here are the main ideas from Lessons 31 – 35:

31. I am not the victim of the world I see.

32. I have invented the world I see.

33. There is another way of looking at the world.

34. I could see peace instead of this.

35. My mind is part of God’s. I am very Holy.

Author Wayne Dyer once told a story about a day he was running on the beach near his home in Hawaii and a woman stopped him and told him she was thinking of moving to the area.

“How are the people here?” she asked him.

“How are the people where you live now?” he asked back.

“Oh, they’re horrible. Rude, mean, nasty. Nobody cares for each other there,” she told him.

“Well, folks are a lot like that here,” he told her and they said their goodbyes.

A little further down the beach, he was stopped by another woman who also expressed a desire to move to this island paradise and wanted to know how the people were in this area. He asked her the same question as the previous woman, “What are they like where you come from?”

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 26, 2020 — Peace, Schmease”

Lesson 56: Review of Lessons 26 – 30

Here is a review of the main ideas for Lessons 26 – 30:

26. My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability.

27. Above all else I want to see.

28. Above all else I want to see differently.

29. God is in everything I see.

30. God is in everything I see because God is in my mind.

The reason I am not an enlightened master is that I forget a lot. One of the things that makes me such a good pastor, is that I forget a lot. When you talk to your pastor, you expect they’ll keep your confidence. I’ve found that’s easy for me because I tend to forget what people tell me anyway. Go ahead, tell me your deepest, darkest secret. My CRS (Can’t Remember Shit) affliction will keep it safe from the world for eternity. Thus, I am horrible at gossip.

The reason I remain in my body, in this world we have all created with our collective ego belief in separation, is that I have forgotten who I truly am. My ego tells me my true “self” is created by my past, which shaped my worldviews and my opinions about things, which I reinforce by posting messages on Facebook and arguing with anyone who dares to disagree with how I see the world.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 25, 2020 — A Cure for CRS”

Lesson 55: Review of Lessons 21 – 25

Here are the main ideas from Lessons 21 – 25:

21. I am determined to see things differently.
22. What I see is a form of vengeance.
23. I can escape from this world by giving up attack thoughts.
24. I do not perceive my own best interests.
25. I do not know what anything is for.

In 2016, the presidential candidate that I didn’t support won – and I went on the attack. I posted on social media every day about the need to “resist” and fight back and undo what I perceived to be a massive injustice. I railed against those who voted third party or chose to stay home on their butts while the nation went down the tubes. I was angry. I was scared.

My attacks and negativity lost me a lot of friends, both online and in real life, but also gained me a bunch more who were with me in solidarity attacking the new regime that we felt had been thrust upon us in some form of cheating or scandal. We knew we were right and everyone else was wrong.

Then, my attack thoughts and actions began to manifest in my body. I almost passed out one morning while sitting at my desk as my heart’s rhythm went wonky and made me swoon. My father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 53. I was 51 at the time, so this episode sent me to a cardiologist for the first time in my life.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 24, 2020 — Resistance is futile”

Lesson 54: Review of Lessons 16 – 20

Here are the main ideas from Lessons 16 – 20:

16. I have no neutral thoughts
17. I see no neutral things.
18. I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing.
19. I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.
20. I am determined to see.

One of the main thoughts the ego likes to keep going through our heads is how we are alone in this world. It has a lot of evidence to back that up. Right now, as I type, I am alone in my home office, except for the dogs and the cats, of course. But, no other human is here, so I can say that I am truly alone, physically, in this moment.

That physical world is where the ego wants us to focus, because if we do, then I will notice that when I see another person later today, I will see them as separate – someone with their own lives, their own worries, their own joys, their own thoughts.

This is where the Course asks us to be willing to see differently – to realize there are no private thoughts. That doesn’t mean I can read the minds of those around me, but I can understand that we share thoughts, because those shared thoughts have become beliefs that we have used, collectively, to shape the world we see.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 23, 2020 — Get a room!”

Lesson 53: Review of Lessons 11-15

“I am grateful that this world is not real, and that I need not see it at all unless I choose to value it,” today’s lesson states. This is one of those lines that gets tossed around by those who see the A Course in Miracles as some form of spiritual bypass.

“All you ‘New Thought’ people just put your fingers in your ears and close your eyes and say, ‘this world is not real,’ and absolve yourself from all responsibility to change it,” they say. It would be a fair cop, of course, if that was what the Course taught. But, that’s not what it teaches.

When it says “this world is not real,” it means that Reality, with a capital “R,” has no suffering, no strife, no duality and no fear. There is only Love – which is the only thing that is real – so there is only joy and a peace that surpasses the understanding of this world. It’s a place we can get to in this world, not by fighting or resisting this world, but by looking more deeply at it – looking beyond its egoic constructs into the very heart of the beings that created it.

We are real – not in our bodily form, but in spirit. We are thoughts in the mind of God who have forgotten to laugh – we have forgotten that we were brought forth in pure joy and Love. As such, we created this bodily world with its ideas of death, suffering, greed, hatred, fear and finally death. We created this dream world because we have forgotten who we truly are. This is now our classroom – a place for us to remember who we are by remembering our function in this bodily world – to be instruments of God’s love, peace and forgiveness.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 22, 2020 — It don’t mean a thing …”

Lesson 52: Review of Lessons 6-10

“Reality is never frightening. It is impossible that it could upset me. Reality brings only perfect peace.”

All I feel when I read those words is either a deep anxiety or a deep longing. The Course would tell me it’s all because I am fully invested in my ego. If I weren’t those words would be a relief – an acknowledgement of the deep knowledge of peace that I already possess within my Divine Self.

Let’s just say I am a long way from enlightenment – and almost there. It’s the paradox of the Course. Time, just like this bodily world, is an illusion – a construct we believe in because we are fully invested in our belief in the separation. Today’s review of lessons 6-10 tries to remind us of all of this by helping us see that what we think of as our “past” is no more real that what we believe is “reality” – with a little “r” – that we see in this moment.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 21, 2020 — Saddling the Universe”

Lesson 51: Review of the first 5 lessons

When you’re on a long journey, sometimes it’s good to take a break, pull over at a rest stop, review your progress so far and continue to map out your trip. The Course understands this and gives us frequent review periods during our journey in the workbook. Today, we begin a review of the first 50 lessons that we have supposedly mastered by now. (Right?)

We begin by reviewing the main ideas from the first 5 lessons:

1. Nothing I see means anything.
2. I have given what I see all the meaning it has for me.
3. I do not understand anything I see.
4. These thoughts do not mean anything.
5. I am never upset for the reason I think.

The common thread through all of these lessons is about meaning – what it is and where the things in our world get their meaning. The answer is: We give the world its meaning through our thoughts, beliefs, actions and reactions.

Every one of us was raised in a different context – some of us had loving families, some had distant or abusive families. Some of us were raised in a religion of some sort, some of us were not. Some of us were raised to be politically active, others were not. We were all weaned on different musical genres – or no music at all. We all went to different types of schools and learned at a different pace than those around us.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 20, 2020 – What color is your ocean?”

Lesson 50: I am sustained by the Love of God.

“Sustainability” is a big word in the business world these days. Corporations are seeking ways to do business without furthering or increasing their harm to the environment. Some are even seeking a “circular” economy where waste is minimized by either recycling products wholesale or by the piece, or selling off used items at lower costs instead of scraping them.

They all seek to make their businesses sustainable in some way – so they can survive economic downturns or supply chain interruptions that are currently plaguing businesses due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The ego, too, seeks sustainability. It knows that the key to its lasting power to create a “circular” economy, too, where it keeps us in a circular train of thought, doggedly pursuing the answer to questions it will not allow us to find answers to. We chase our tails, wondering if this spiritual stuff is real or if it’s all just the same crap we’ve believed and rejected throughout our lives. Circular logic is the key to the ego’s sustainability.

The only thing that sustains us, though, is Love – and not the world’s romanticized, watered-down idea of love as something that happens to us personally or is conditioned on whether or not people meet our expectations of them. The Love of God is the only thing that is real – and nothing that unreal can truly sustain any of us.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Feb. 19, 2020 — Won’t you be my neighbor?”