Lesson 297 Laurie’s Reflections

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Lesson 297: “What is the Real World”|?” “Forgiveness is the only gift I give.”

Forgiveness is something we give to other people.  We often hear in the world that forgiveness is something to give to others to be merciful in a cruel world.  We hear that forgiveness is something we reserve fully for the ones who we perceive as sinned.  The world believes fully in sin.  The world believes our nearly every action is only sin.  We learn to assume that we are all wrongdoers and ones who have fallen from grace.  We believe we are lacking the worth because as sinners we definitely find ourselves without the grace of God.

Sin is something that we all have generally come to accept.  It talks about sin in the Bible.  And people have used the Bible specifically for making points on what God and Jesus say.  The fundamentalist Christians say that if the Bible says it- this is the direct word of God so it must be true.  This is why it is so commonly believed in our world because our Christian religion has shaped so much of our culture and belief system.  How can we say anything in counter to the Bible and not act in blasphemy?  How can we add to the Bible or clarify the Bible and not in that sit in the mind of sin- assuming we are being presumptuous that we know more than God.

The Bible has been often used against people and society.  I believe the truth is that people don’t understand the Bible or we listen and believe certain people’s interpretations of the Bible.  The tragedy is that it seems and is so important to make sense of the Bible.  Because, if we don’t, then we end up hurting other people when we try to force our ideas and our own belief systems onto other people.

People all resonate with something that is true to them as individuals.  We are asked by Jesus in the Course not so sit in judgement about them when people are simply different than we are.  Our egos and everyone’s egos are easily threatened when we bring with us an approach to living and thinking that is different than they have.  Our egos just like to be right.  When they exchange ideas with other egos then all involved end up getting into attack mode with and around the other people- because our egos quickly assume everyone else is wrong.

This is why we must understand and forgive that people are not able to always separate themselves from their egos even with the very best of intentions.  We have to appreciate that no matter how hard we try, we will still get ourselves into the situation in being in the cycle of attack.  Our egos always try to shape the world to be a reflection of what they believe.  We have to forgive its insanity while we also step up and make willingness to meet this insanity with a renewed sense of non-judgement.  When we commit ourselves to staying out of our critical mind we can appreciate what is different instead of complaining about it.  Know that it all has a purpose.  When we don’t rail against it we can instead invite it into our consciousness and simply make space in our minds for a new hit of what we see in the world.

We can appreciate that must practice accepting someone else’s point of view.  This is ever so important.  However, we don’t have to engage in it in any way except for accepting it.  We can make space in a shelf in our minds for the possibility that other people bring unique perspectives.  We can put this on the shelf in our minds and not do anything with it except this single gesture.  This is the way we allow ourselves  to stay out of the criticism in our minds of whatever we don’t entirely groove with- that could be the Bible or religion, or the Course even.

We can have compassion for other people who do react around whatever belief system it is that feels not like our own.  We can appreciate within that the truth is that they probably feel fear that we will try to force our opinions on them.  This is one reason people can get stuck not being comfortable in this acceptance.  Trust that we don’t have to do anything that feels false to us.  We are simply asked to simply release our judgement and allow ourselves to forgive any outstanding attack feelings we have around issues that we believe to be foreign to us.

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