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Gentle Healing Lesson 169, Text, Manual for Teachers. 10-11-19

LESSON 169
By grace I live. By grace I am released.

Yesterday, I contemplated grace as a gift of God that is always available to me. Today, I am contemplating that grace is past learning and yet the goal of learning. It is in learning that I don’t want anything in my mind that threatens my choice for peace and in practicing releasing such thoughts that I prepare for grace and am able to accept it. Jesus says that grace not only comes to the mind thus prepared for it, he says that it becomes inevitable instantly.

I feel the rightness of the statement that grace is acceptance of the Love of God within a world of seeming hate and fear. How else could we ever see this world as Love if it were not for the grace of God. My eyes certainly don’t show me the Love of God. My ego mind isn’t even interested in looking for the Love of God. But as I have released many mistaken ideas, I have learned to desire the peace of God above all else and in many little ways I am beginning to see something else, or at least the shadow of something else in this world.

I have opened my mind and heart to the call to waken and I am no longer shut tight against God’s Voice. I realize that no matter what I think I know about the world, about my spiritual nature, about God, I am wrong, and I am OK with that. In fact, I am quite comfortable with the I don’t know mind. I am given ideas that are helpful to me in the moment, and I hold those thoughts loosely knowing that they will shift and expand into something that is helpful in the next moment. Neither idea is right or wrong, just helpful until I am ready for something else.

I have always thought that when someone has their awakening moment and they are able to see the world differently, that is the result of grace. The learning and practicing made way for grace. Like Regina, my experience has been a slow and gradual movement toward awakening. But the moment the entire Sonship awakens, I think that is when God leans to us and takes the final step. And that is what grace is inevitably bringing us to.

I know the world is not ready for the final Awakening in which we experience the revelation of the Father and Son as one. But, from time to time, I questioned why it was that I had not experienced my personal awakening within the world. Jesus says this about the timing:

“We have perhaps appeared to contradict our statement that the revelation of the Father and the Son as one has been already set. But we have also said the mind determines when that time will be, and has determined it. And yet we urge you to bear witness to the Word of God to hasten the experience of truth, and speed its advent into every mind that recognizes truth’s effects on you.”

Did anyone find that helpful? Yeah, me either. Haha. Anyway, I think he is referring to the last step that is taken by God and not to our individual journeys.

The next several paragraphs in this lesson are so inspirational to me that I don’t know how to talk about them. I can’t say it any better than Jesus did. I think I know that God Is and all things are encompassed by God. This means, of course, that we are all encompassed by God right now, and it means that we are God, not as the ego human self we pretend to be, but we, in perfect union with each other and with God, are God.

This union of Father and Son is not part of what we are learning here. It isn’t about salvation, forgiveness, Christ’s Vision, or even awakening in the world. This final step is beyond any of that and it is beyond any experience we try to hasten. But, our awakening within this world through true forgiveness, this is something we evidently can hasten. At least, we can help each other awaken and we can relieve suffering while still in the dream state as we practice forgiveness.

Now, here is something interesting.
“All learning was already in His Mind, accomplished and complete. He recognized all that time holds, and gave it to all minds that each one might determine, from a point where time was ended, when it is released to revelation and eternity. We have repeated several times before that you but make a journey that is done.
For oneness must be here. Whatever time the mind has set for revelation is entirely irrelevant to what must be a constant state, forever as it always was; forever to remain as it is now. We merely take the part assigned long since, and fully recognized as perfectly fulfilled by Him Who wrote salvation’s script in His Creator’s Name, and in the Name of His Creator’s Son.”

Jesus says that we can’t really understand this and so there is no sense in talking about it further. All that it says to me is that nothing has really happened and that I am perfectly safe regardless of how I seem to suffer. I already accept that is script and all other scripts I have lived and may yet live are ancient history even though I seem to be living them now. It helps me to know this.

When I have done something I regret and start to feel guilty for it, what I understand is that I am simply playing out a script and that script was written by us and that I am experiencing this because I want to do so. I volunteered for this experience. What this does for me is to take me above the battleground so that I can be aware of the lesson it holds for me rather than getting lost in the experience itself. This hastened my awakening within the world. I wanted this because it will ends my suffering while I remain and because it is preparing the Sonship for the grace of revelation.

Now Jesus is telling us something that is perfectly understandable and is relevant right now. He says,
“Suffice it, then, that you have work to do to play your part. The ending must remain obscure to you until your part is done. It does not matter. For your part is still what all the rest depends on. As you take the role assigned to you, salvation comes a little nearer each uncertain heart that does not beat as yet in tune with God.”

I get very emotional when I read things like that. I have a part to play and my part is essential and especially that last phrase that tells me my role is going to bring salvation nearer to each uncertain heart that does not beat as yet in tune with God. That brings tears to my eyes and touches me deeply.

As has been true for me now for many years, I play my part by forgiving the world I see. And now I ask for the final gift, grace. Grace provides an experience that is between Heaven and time. This sentence was helpful to me: “What is the face of Christ but his who went a moment into timelessness, and brought a clear reflection of the unity he felt an instant back to bless the world?”  Alisha did that for me. So did Regina and Cate. Others have as well. I am eternally grateful to them because they showed me it could be done. If each person who awakened left the world at that point, who would witness to the truth for us who have not yet joined them?

Regina’s Tips
This is the part of Regina’s tips that I found especially helpful.

“Suffice it, then, that you have work to do to play your part. The ending must remain obscure to you until your part is done.”

What is our part? Preparing ourselves to accept awakening. Let that be our only concern. It is the ego that becomes over-concerned with finding ways to be helpful. Helpfulness occurs naturally as we prepare ourselves for awakening.

So then, our part is this:
~ self-inquiry, which is inquiring into the ego thought system in order to see its ideas are not true and in order to see we are not the false-self, which is made through identification with thought.
~ Self-inquiry, which is glimpsing awareness many times throughout the day & spending more concentrated time in awareness-watching-awareness meditation
~ surrender, which is discerning between intuition and ego, and then following intuition instead of ego.

Manual for Teachers
WHO ARE GOD’S TEACHERS? P2
2. They come from all over the world. They come from all religions and from no religion. They are the ones who have answered. The Call is universal. It goes on all the time everywhere. It calls for teachers to speak for It and redeem the world. Many hear It, but few will answer. Yet it is all a matter of time. Everyone will answer in the end, but the end can be a long, long way off. It is because of this that the plan of the teachers was established. Their function is to save time. Each one begins as a single light, but with the Call at its center it is a light that cannot be limited. And each one saves a thousand years of time as the world judges it. To the Call Itself time has no meaning.

There is a universal Call for the teachers of God. That means it goes out to all, not just to ACIM students. Everyone gets this call, but not many choose to answer at this time, though all will eventually answer. In the meantime, within the illusion (where we think we are), time drags on and with it, suffering. So, in order to speed things along and avoid some of this pain, we are given a plan for the teachers. Jesus is pretty clear about time saved. He says that each of us will save a thousand years.

I personally became tired of the world as I saw it. This is obviously true, or I would not have accepted the call. I became tired of conflict, tired of drama, and tired of suffering. I became very tired of the instability we experience in time. There is no permanence, nothing to depend on. No matter how happy I might be in any moment, there is the sure knowledge that soon, I will be unhappy. There is another way to experience the world and I became determined to find it.

This plan of Atonement is one of the things that makes A Course in Miracles different from other paths. It is designed as a time saver. A single light in a mind and a teacher of God begins her service to the Sonship. And because that light cannot be limited, that teacher extends the light to others and each of them extends the light to more of us and it goes on and on with many more being awakened. This is how we will make our way back to paradise, to the real world and then to God.

Text
T-15.X. the Time of Rebirth, P 7
7 How fearful, then, has God become to you, and how great a sacrifice do you believe His Love demands! For total love would demand total sacrifice. And so the ego seems to demand less of you than God, and of the two is judged as the lesser of two evils, one to be feared a little, perhaps, but the other to be destroyed. For you see love as destructive, and your only question is who is to be destroyed, you or another? You seek to answer this question in your special relationships, in which you seem to be both destroyer and destroyed in part, but able to be neither completely. And this you think saves you from God, Whose total Love would completely destroy you.

Journal
I see how true it is that through the perspective of the special relationship, love seems to ask for sacrifice. Even in the relationship with my children, I could see the demand for sacrifice from both parties. Sometimes my children ask me to sacrifice my time and my effort on their behalf, and do so in the expectation that because I love them, I will gladly give what they want. I see that I ask for their sacrifice as well. I expect them to give me their concern, their respect, and to do for me what I can’t do for myself.

So, is it any surprise that we would think of God in terms of sacrifice since God is Love Itself, and how frightening this makes Him. When reading about the higher stages of awakening, we are told that ultimately we give up our very self and if one still values the self, this seems like the greatest sacrifice of all. Rather than thinking of it as a loss of self, I prefer to think of it as gaining God.

In reading The Path to No-Self by Bernadette Roberts she has this to say about her experience.

“The major change affected in this Night (Passive Night of the Spirit) is that our initial, deepest sense of being is replaced by the indescribable sense of God’s being, so that God and self are indistinguishable in our singular sense of being. We might describe this change as a movement from the I-thou consciousness to ta simple and singular We consciousness.”

This is the experience of a no-ego is quite amazing and wonderful, but it is not the end. Bernadette goes further and reaches the next state which is no-self. In giving up the self altogether, she says that before there was an I that saw with God, saw God; now “…wherein God is no longer known relative to the self, but instead is known as He is in Himself – known as He knows Himself.” Or put another way, “the Eye seeing Itself.” Can you imagine? Me either.

So, I use the information that Bernadette so generously shares with us to calm the disquiet the ego instills at the idea of its demise. Then I go back to doing what it is that I am to do right now, learning to live life from a place of love rather than fear. Those incredible heights that Bernadette Roberts reached were not her doing. These are steps that God takes on our behalf and we can be assured that when it happens we will be ready for it.

What I understand now in this place on the path where I find myself, is that I have nothing to fear from God. He is not the insane expression of ego-love that has left me wary and cautious. He is not going to ever ask me to sacrifice anything real. What I give up is nothing disguised as something.

That nothing is what I used to think of as my self. And, I still do but not as much as I used to. I no longer guard this self against God in the same way that I did in the past. And where I see myself doing so, I am willing and ready to accept the Atonement and release my hold on ego-self, and even on my higher Self when the time comes.

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