Lesson 57: Review: “I am not the victim of the world I see.”  “I have invented the world I see.”  “There is another way of looking at the world.”  “I could see peace instead of this.”  “My mind is part of God’s.  I am very holy.”

This is a beautiful progression in our minds.  We get to peace in this systematic way that works when we do it completely.

We start first with a simple awareness of what we think. 

This is a totally essential part of the puzzle.  We have to sit in the noticing of what we find in our minds.  We don’t want to stress about it and get in a frazzled state when we notice something like attack thoughts.  We don’t want to judge them and make war with them.  And we also don’t want to just shove them under the rug.  We want to carefully look at them and carefully pay attention to the messages they contain.

All we need to do is gather information.  We evaluate them with no hint of judgement, no insistence that we did something wrong or that we are meant to feel guilty about having attack thoughts about ourselves or others or God.  We don’t want to get onto that emotional roller coaster that comes up when we meet something with our judging mind.  This may seem like a difficult task, but with simple practice we can learn how to do this.

We want to watch with a neutral mind.

We want to gather information about what is going on and yet stay impartial about all we see.  We don’t want to have even the first hints of blaming our minds for going into that place of attack.  When we blame we get out of Godly thinking.  This then will lead to more attack because feelings of all those non-Love reactive states- guilt, blame, resentment- simply lead us out of God’s garden of eden in our thinking.

What we are learning to do is evaluate what we see so we can make conclusions with the Holy Spirit’s guidance about how to respond to that perceived attack.  We do this in the way that will be helpful and teach us to respond to the attack in a way that allows us to be heard if we want to have acknowledgment that the attack was not something we want to experience.  But then also we want to do so in a way that allows the other person to see how we feel and what we would prefer to hear instead of what we thought was an attack. We must to do this with a mind and heart of love.

We don’t want to get lost in our judgement because that always perpetuates the inner war we feel.  We may want to just realize that our judgement comes through even if we don’t say anything in response to the attack we felt.  We still radiate energetically our emotions and other people feel that.  This is why we want to not get lost in the judgement.  If we let this happen then we won’t be able to relax and also get to the next step of our ending the attack cycle.

Then what we need to do is realize that we can do something to change the attack thoughts we find in our own minds.  This is the most extraordinary way we can live in the world.  We don’t have to suffer at all in the world, or at length if we simply realize that we always have the chance to change our minds.  Feeling like a victim is NOT a must.

±The ego tries to get us to believe fully that victimhood is part of living and therefore we just have to suck it up and bear it without making an empowered choice to choose again and get out of this victim identity. 

We don’t have to just sit and do nothing and let the ego run away with drama in escalating our victimhood.

All we have to do is change our minds.  Doesn’t matter what the world looks like, this is always possible.  Even if we seem to think victimhood has chosen us and we can’t get out a back door.  There is always a way to escape this nightmare.  All we have to do is make it our commitment to choose.  We have to understand that we don’t have to be able to change the circumstance if we don’t know how.  Even if the world claims we can’t get out of what seems like our victimhood.  It’s just a matter of our decision to not identify with the world’s story that our victimhood is permanent.