My thoughts* on ACIM Urtext Lesson 85, for March 25, 2024. This Will Shock You on Many Levels
WARNING: Possibility of Hitting Intense Triggers in many ways. Powerful, intimate, AND global.
Today’s review will cover these ideas:
1. (69) My grievances hide the light of the world in me.
* I cannot have complaints about the stories that I see or that I think I have experienced. If I do, I take on the mentality of the frightened ego and remove myself from the truthfulness that God is wanting me to see.
* I understand that this seems like a hard pill to swallow. But it is REAL.
* I cannot have the intention of holding myself to some invisible standard either. In other words, I cannot allow myself to fall for the temptation to feel guilty.
* I had this happen yesterday and I am NOT about to share with you what the issue was but you can trust that it was severe. Guilt, like ANY other grievance, separates us from the Creator and our true identity.
* Fears about those or that which Spirit has told us is safe RUNS IN the SAME FAMILY as does GRIEVANCE.
* It has nothing to do with ignoring, putting on rose-colored glasses, or denying the suffering and emotions that may come with the temptation and challenges. It has to do with recognizing God and His authority as our Creator, and as the God that He is, to DECIDE FOR US ‘WHAT IS WHAT.’ As well as what is only confusion and illusion.
²My grievances show me what is not there, and hide from me what I would see.
* I suggest that if you understand the rather archaic language used here you will hear that God IS what we WANT to see. “…what I would see” would be correctly understood as what I WANT to see AND what is TRULY there which again would be God, the Father LOVING on His Son.
³Recognizing this, what do I want my grievances for?
⁴They keep me in darkness and hide the light.
⁵Grievances and light cannot go together, but light and vision must be joined for me to see.
* Think of light as truth, as God, our Creator Who is omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omni present (everywhere).
* Consider the use of the term ‘vision’ as it is used in the Bible and other works ancient and contemporary. It has been ‘blown up’ to appear as if it were something that only ‘Saints’ or ‘Prophets’ can do and Jesus is telling us here that this something that we ALL may achieve and experience AND that it is the NORM that we WANT to step into as the world is transformed, from the chaos and confusion brought on by the frightened ego that was fabricated by the Son of God (to REPLACE God), to its paradisical glory in the presence of God as it was in the time of the Garden of Eden.
* Remember that ‘FORM’ is secondary to the REALITY that IS God. What I am saying is let it all be metaphor, and let God BE God. It will take on a feeling of being lived By God rather than as the demi-gods that the frightened ego gave us that have NO place in REALITY and/or/these are one ~ the Mind and Will of God and REALITY ~ the Mind and Will of God.
* One could say that ‘light and vision’ represent the Will of the Father (light) combined with the Will of the Son (vision). Remember that it takes only the slightest will of the Son to allow the Holy Spirit to step in and bring the light.
⁶To see, I must lay grievances aside.
* To lay grievances aside I MUST be willing to SEE them. This is a step that we have wanted to discount. But it is the Holy Spirit that we want to show them to us for only in this way do they NOT HARM us further.
* My ‘treasure’ must be to be willing to see and feel love in all things, places, and events to the extent that I allow the ‘offense’ to dissolve and see only the Love of God reaching out to His Son. (It may well be felt rather than ‘seen.’) I wish I could share with you the events that testify of this to me but if I did it would only get scrambled in the words and the emotions that the words would arouse, and the meaning would be lost. Please, take the time to look at your own life experiences and give the possibility of God’s True Existence a chance. This desire, and yes, it will grow into a desire that will be fulfilled, will give you the vision of God Who is the Source of your True Existence.
⁷I want to see, and this will be the means by which I will succeed.
* As I finished up that last comment, I could not help but feel that Spirit may ask me to tell my tale briefly. If He does, please use this moment to ask for His help to hear what He wants me to share and not just the frame or form of my story.
2. Specific applications for this idea might be made in these forms:
²Let me not use this as a block to sight.
³The light of the world will shine all this away.
⁴I have no need for this.
⁵I want to see.
3. (70) My salvation comes from me.
²Today I will recognize where my salvation is.
³It is in me because its Source is there.
⁴It has not left its Source, and so it cannot have left my mind.
⁵I will not look for it outside myself.
⁶It is not found outside and then brought in.
* God is not to be found outside of ourselves, but within.
* Christ, also, resides within as Self. Our individual Souls make up the Body of Christ, of CREATION, of ALL THAT IS or EVER WILL BE, SEEN AND UNSEEN.
⁷But from within me it will reach beyond, and everything I see will but reflect the light that shines in me and in itself.
* Here is something from ‘my story.’
* I was the daughter of a violent, chemically addicted ‘young soul’ (young souls tend to get deeply into the carnal side of existence because they crave the ‘experience’ of existing in form and want to embrace it with a frenzy) who brought the addiction to sexuality into this sphere.
* He did not enter me at any orifice so I was not abused ‘physically’ when he sexually assaulted me for two years between the years of eight and ten, but I was manipulated, blackmailed, gaslit, emotionally abused, and used as bait and a silencer to the other women he assaulted when he took me to work with him to put up the tile in homes of various economic status in the suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
* I had addictions to masturbation and various forms of porn by the time I was a teenager. It kept my world very exclusive and set me up to be an ‘outsider’ if only in my own mind. Today I am thankful for this because it caused me to find my existence ‘inside.’
* He was still my dad and somehow, I knew that there was love there even if I knew that other things, many other things, were not right.
* He died in 1983 and is not troublesome anymore, yet, when I am in (dis)stress and hit with things (thoughts from diverse places, even very spiritual ones like the concept of oneness and form not being real, and becoming willing to finally allow my very natural sexuality to emerge) I can find myself sexually stimulated and it will bring up moments with my dad that I recall and I play out the role of willing partner as I masturbate.
* Now, I do not know about you but that makes me ILL when I use my logical and intellectual mind. And it would be easy for me to feel guilty and shameful and a sinner, mind you I would not do it in real life, and I find that I do not have ANY urge whatsoever to seek a sexual companion beyond the partner that the Holy Spirit has said is mine. Not even with the fellow that I know I must have had a past life with because the energy is there or the one that I last knew some seven years ago now.
* … you know what I mean, there are things that we have been through here that we would RATHER HIDE and not admit to ourselves because we would feel guilty and I suspect that sex with a parent is not so uncommon because of the dependence and attachment we felt there.
* But let us see it for what it is!!!
* Part of the CONSEQUENCES of belief in separation from God and not who we truly are as INDIVIDUALS, or as a Collective.
* We have things like this in societies as well. How many cultures DO NOT have some form of slavery in their history or even present existence? How many ways has sexuality been manipulated and inappropriately used by us? “If they only knew … What would they think?!!!”
* These are the very things that we CANNOT allow to keep us outside of KNOWLEDGE that God IS REAL, and Who He Says He Is, and that He Will Help us AS we ALLOW Him too.
* We must be willing to ‘see’ them through the vision that the Holy Spirit will give us and denounce them or deny them as real and let ourselves look to the Love of God that we Truly ARE.
* I suspect that this could be the core of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
* That we have within us a ‘button’ set there by the fabricated and frightened ego that says that we are SINNERS, GUILTY, CONDEMNED by our conscience that THINKS that ANY of these scenarios could be truly real.
* Do you see the breakdown of the word conscience?
* Con suggests a falsehood, and science suggests something that can be proven within the world of form.
* I propose we rethink the need to live according to our conscience and decide to live according to our Truth and Reality in the Mind and Will of Our Creator, even God.
4. These forms of the idea are suitable for more specific applications:
²Let this not tempt me to look away from me for my salvation.
³I will not let this interfere with my awareness of the Source of my salvation.
⁴This has no power to remove salvation from me.
* The undoing of the tangled thoughts and emotions of belief in separation from God continues:
* Last evening I had an experience where I felt the ‘fear as when I was in the presence of my father, expecting him to backhand me at any moment’ while driving with my partner. I knew it was not from my partner but BECAUSE my partner was safe and specifically because I had CHOSEN to see him as safe by committing to denying any error I saw and to see only the Love that is God IN him as REAL.
* I felt by the witness of the Holy Spirit that I was being allowed to feel these ‘fearful’ emotions so that I would also be able to see them as UNREAL and let them pass by with me only as the observer of their leaving. They were brief but seemed so ‘real.’
* Acceptance of Atonement is not the end and only the beginning of undoing the terror Christ has dreamed that He has put Himself through.
* This ‘emotional memory of the fear of my dad’ may have been surfacing with what I referred to the other day as my ‘spidey sense’ thinking that it was a prompting from the Holy Spirit to seek safety when, in fact, it was emotions that I had not allowed to release that needed to pass through me. Please do not buzz past this. It may well be an important part of the process of healing that we need to go through individually and collectively.
* Will we not be shaken to the core as the Holy Spirit reveals to us what we have been doing to ourselves?
* Yet, we must be willing to see it, know that only God’s Love is Real and that this witness is what is allowing us to be able to see what we MUST see to be able to release it and welcome in our Truth.
* One might even want to think ‘political’ here in the sense that we need a shift from humanity running the ‘show’ to God’s Spirit being allowed to show us how to best serve each of us where we are right now.
* I did tell my partner what was going on and he was understanding.
* In time, though, I hope to be able to feel whatever comes up in what feels like the present or from the past and understand that all I have to do is #1. be a witness to it, #2.DENY its place in REALITY (not in the physical world where the frightened ego rules at the moment, but in that which Our Heavenly Father desires us to have) so that I may #3 partake ONLY in the Love of God which is my BIRTHRIGHT and yours and restore Heaven to earth now.
* Still, perhaps the sharing of it with my partner is allowing him to have a witness of the teachings of the Spirit as well.
* Perhaps this builds his connection with the Holy Spirit and himself.
* Hmm. I will have to be open to the Guidance that I receive from the Holy Spirit moment by moment.
(ACIM, W-85.1:1–4:4)
Till next time, God bless, debi.
