Lesson 68: “Love holds no grievances.”
We are learning from the Course that we so frequently hold some amount of grievance in our relating to every one. We have this habit of finding fault, we judge what we see. Our egos make a big stink about these every little detail. We so often break down what we see in our ego mind and label everything as good or bad. And we give that bad label almost nonstop. We just get used to the ego being that judging machine that we think is a given and we can’t live in another way. We get stuck because our ego minds refuse to move and change how we do things. We just get so wrapped up in the judgement we think we perceive.
We get out and make the long list of all the problems we believe we see. There seems to be nothing but just this crazy onslaught of problem areas that we see before us and all around us. We hear this array of criticisms in the ego’s mind and we can’t hear anything else. It just thunders its non truth in our minds and claims it has the right of it. It is so good at making us believe what it thinks is true. The ego’s judgement is nonstop and so commonly we just take it in.
We are learning that we don’t want to accept anything but a totally nonjudgmental mind. We want to really focus on getting to a place where we can accept what we see, with an open heart and open mind. The way we do this is step out of that crazy judging mind. We are asked in the Course to accept nothing but a totally loving mind. We want to be vigilant about reminding ourselves that we need to be perfectly clear that we will accept no less than a non judgmental mind. What this means is that we will continue to assert that we accept all we see.
We don’t get ruffled inside because the ego is howling out some complaint. Then what we do is just stay on the task of watching our minds and being clear that we want only love, so if we do slip and let the ego take the reins for some spell, we are learning to forgive ourselves.
We learn that we forgive with an intention of acceptance ♥within love.
The forgiveness is when we let ourselves off the hook for whatever amount of judgement we ended up having.
We are practicing mind watching, and forgiving whenever we get the signal that we have lost our way and returned to the insane perception that something is better any other than it is. Have compassion for ourselves because we are human and make mistakes. This is why forgiveness is a must. Then we just keep going back and forth from mind watching to forgiveness and back again for the length of the process of reshaping our minds. This is the way to get to a place of clear loving. We want to be absolutely certain that we aren’t bearing any sense of grievance. We just need to forgive ourselves if we are.
♦Or we forgive all that we see in the process of getting to the clarity of a mind that holds nothing but the Love of God.
•This is the cornerstone and essence of our peace as well.