Thursday, October 15, 2015
Lesson 288: ‘What is the Holy Spirit?” “Let me forget my brother’s past today.”
Jesus teaches us in the Course that our purpose is to forgive and the reason we are here with other people is so that we can be joined in the purpose of our salvation. When we forgive everyone, including ourselves, then we have reached true God energy- or the closest we can come to it while we are sill on the earth. What the Course asks us to do is make forgiveness our mantra and the mind-state-intention to carry with us throughout all our experiences. We are taught to forgive with no reserve. Allow forgiveness to be the number one thing to apply at each juncture in our lives.
The reason this is is because when we feel the energy of forgiveness, even if it is seemingly for someone else, invariably we still experience the feeling of light and the feeling of undoing what appears to be an error. What the Course teaches us to do is make forgiveness the only thing we do while we are embodied. This way we can let go of all of our attack thoughts, let go of our attachment to suffering which occurs whether we are in the role of attacker or one being attacked. The end product is the same, that our certainty is disturbed and we start to believe there is something else out there except for God.
This is why we are asked to get into the habit of forgiving no matter what. Don’t make our brother’s error to be anything other than a mistake in the relationship. It is of no consequence. The Course teaches us that what we must do when we forgive is to forget this mistake or error. What we are asked to do is absolutely have none of our own attack thoughts in response to whatever happened. What we want to do instead is forgive. We want to allow our response to be simply a deep breath, and on the out breath, release the notion within ourselves that this person wronged us in any way.
The Course says in Jesus’s forgiveness style what we must carry with the forgiveness is the forgetting as well. The Course says make our brothers error in fact unreal, as if it never happened. The reason we must do this along with our forgiveness is because our ego is so masterful at keeping a balance or score of what it deems wrongs. The ego gets resentful when it thinks it has been wronged and so it makes the forgiveness with a bunch of drama. The attacks continue in the form of resentment and then expected guilt for the other party. When we forgive and still let this fault be experienced as real then the attack cycle is perpetuated.
The Course says the only way to prevent this inevitable snowball of drama is to stop with forgiveness and make sure that our given forgiveness definitely comes with the knowing that the error never existed in the first place. Our ego is reactive. We have to just know this. What we want to do is simply be committed to the understanding that the fault never happened in the first place.
It’s easy for people who are learning the Course to react to this flavor of forgiveness and say- that’s irresponsible if we don’t put up boundaries to prevent whatever attack happened initially. We want to understand God is definitely not saying stand in the line of fire if we don’t feel called to do that. What we must do is tune into our inner Holy Spirit guide within us and ask how should we respond in this situation? When we are called to get out of the way then we can move ourselves from the situation but do it with an understanding that the other person is simply temporarily less sane than we are in the moment. That doesn’t mean we want to hold onto a grudge and carry the weight of the resentment about that. Forgive that. Then allow it all to be unreal so we can allow any weight of a backlash to be nonexistent. This is the only way to prevent the attack from continuing. That’s why we have to see it as unreal so we can surrender any need to attack.