LESSON 166
I am entrusted with the gifts of God.
God has given us everything. The reason we are not aware of His gifts is because we do not see that our will is one with His. We made a world of our own with a separate will. The world is not real and neither is separate will. “…but every mind that looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in one God.”
While we believe in our own separate will and while we prefer it to our true will which is one with God’s Will, we will believe that accepting God’s gifts will be capitulation. It would be a denial of the little self. And so we suffer and think the suffering is a small price to pay to preserve the world we made.
We are so confused. We are afraid to give up the world we know for the world that is our Home but is no longer in our conscious memory. We think we want to be human because we have forgotten what it is like to be Divine Beings. But even in this amnesiac state in which we find ourselves, God goes with us. We are lost in our own senseless wandering mind, but not lost to God who knows us and loves us.
No matter how tragic the story and now much we seem to suffer, we remain as we were created, we remain eternal and perfect. We are literally choosing to replace reality with this imagined world. We defend against Heaven and refuse to see the evidence that proves we are not what God created.
Here is something I wrote a short time ago. I said that I must be closer to awakening, to accepting the truth. I say this because I utter the truth such as I am as God created me. I am an eternal and divine being. I am in God and of God right now. And this time when I remind myself of the truth, I feel a frisson of fear pass through me. It’s hard to put into words. Maybe like, how could that be? What would that be like? I feel a desire to remain small because I know smallness and I don’t know greatness. After the fear passes, I smile because I am not interested. I know that shudder of fear is the ego and I am not the ego.
That fear passed and I became ready for the Christ to help me perceive my Self and to know my Self. I laugh at the perception of myself as small and insignificant, as fearful and guilty. I now know that I am not this body image and this sad little story. I know what is not true about me and I am letting the memory of what is true come in its own time. I simply stay open and receptive and trusting.
“God’s Will does not oppose. It merely is. It is not God you have imprisoned in your plan to lose your Self. He does not know about a plan so alien to His Will. There was a need He did not understand, to which He gave an Answer. That is all. And you who have this Answer given you have need no more of anything but this.”
People often wonder how it is that God could not know of our plan to lose our Self and choose an alien will with which to do this. If we are in God, and God is in us, then how could He not know about our life here and our fears and guilt? I like to remember that God does not believe, God knows and what He knows is eternal and unchangeable. If God knew of the world then the world would be eternal and unchangeable. Not something to wish for, is it?
I don’t know God the Father, and so I cannot know the actual answer to that question of how it is that we can be part of God and yet He not be aware of the world we made. The closest I can come is to think of our experience here as a dream. I am in God and part of the mind is dreaming. God knows that the dream is interrupting our communication and thus interrupting our joy and peace, and so He placed His Voice within us so that we could awaken when we were ready. His Voice is the answer to our suffering.
“The gifts you have are not for you alone.”
The Voice for God is bringing us back to an awakened state so that we can remember who we are. But as we receive this call to awaken, we must also share it. We must learn to give. We become the teachers of God who help our brothers awaken with us. And how do we do that?
“Teach them by showing them the happiness that comes to those who feel the touch of Christ, and recognize God’s gifts. Let sorrow not tempt you to be unfaithful to your trust”
This is my commitment and I live up to it as much as I am able. When I fall short of being the living proof of what Christ’s touch can offer everyone, I correct my course and continue to walk the path. He has shared His joy with me and now my job is to share it with the world. That is my mission.
Regina’s Tips
NTI teaches that the ego began with the wish for something different than what is. Because that is the basis of the ego, that is a key element of the ego thought system. If you pay attention to your mind, you will see that this idea shows up in one form or another multiple times each day.
Today we will shift our attention from unhappiness to happiness, from the wish for something different to appreciation for the magnificent treasure that is always present.
Each time you notice the wish for something different in your mind today, pause. Shift your attention to awareness-life-presence, and spend a few moments appreciating it. Be as vigilant in this practice as you can be. I say this, because the wish for something different is a strong habit; it could occur many times during the day without you noticing it.
For example, the wish for something different may show up as the wish for more time to get things done, or as the wish for fewer things to do. It may show up as the wish for less traffic or a shorter line at the grocery store. It may show up as the wish that someone around you were different than he/she is. It may show up as the wish that you were different or that your body was different. It may show up as the wish that the world was different than it is.
Pay attention today for the wish for something different in whatever way it shows up in your thoughts, and then shift attention to notice the treasure. Let yourself feel appreciation for awareness-life-presence. Follow that by slowly saying to yourself, “I am entrusted with the gifts of God.”
My Thoughts
My mind is focused today on choosing to remember and love through my highest Self and to see myself as God the Son. It is also focused on my responsibility to share what I am given through the way I live my life. It has taken me a minute to shift my mind to another way to do this. I can also focus my awareness on the mind that wants to think things should be different.
I see the value in changing my mind about that. Thinking things should be different in my life is a reflection of the original tiny mad idea in which I wanted reality to change. So in a sense, my wish for something to be different is the same as the original wish I had for things to be different. Every day is Groundhog Day, and though the form is different, the basis of the form is the same, let today be different than reality.
So today, I will pay special attention to the desire for things to be different. I started out feeling a little frazzled so I stopped to examine my thoughts. I saw that I felt like Monday’s are too full and that I would not have time to get everything done. So, I wanted that to be different. I let that thought go by deciding that today is perfect as it is and I will get done what I get done. Interestingly enough, everything is getting done that I had planned and I am at peace while it is all happening. It just took a simple change of mind.
Text
X. The Time of Rebirth, P 4
4 It is in your power to make this season holy, for it is in your power to make the time of Christ be now. It is possible to do this all at once because there is but one shift in perception that is necessary, for you made but one mistake. It seems like many, but it is all the same. For though the ego takes many forms, it is always the same idea. What is not love is always fear, and nothing else.
Journal
I know that Jesus is right when he says that it is in our power to make the time of Christ to be now. I also know that I couldn’t do that all at once, not that it wasn’t possible but that I couldn’t do it. From a new perspective, I see how simple it really is. I recognize now that when I felt guilty for some parental error it was no different than when I felt guilty for an angry word, or that I seemed never to learn. That guilt is no different than if I had been a dangerous pedophile or a murderer. In our world of differences, there seems to be many kinds of guilt and some seem worse and some seem to hold greater importance. But that is not true. Guilt is guilt no matter what form it takes.
This same idea holds true for any other form of fear. Fear of heights is no different than fear that I will be late for the show. No matter how different it feels to me, it is just fear. Anger is another form of fear and anger that it is raining on the day I wanted to walk outside is no different than anger that a marriage failed or someone stole from me. If it is not love, it is fear.
I make a choice for Christ each time I reject the belief in fear in whatever form it takes in the moment. That is what I did and it brought me to the place I am now. It is possible to skip all the little steps I took to get to this place, but I didn’t do it that way. From this present perspective this kind of makes me laugh at how much time it took me to recognize what was right in front of me all along.
How much less painful it would have been to simply accept that if it wasn’t love it was fear and then decide I wasn’t interested in the fear. If I refuse to accept fear the only thing left is love.
Manual for Teachers
Introduction P 3
M-in.3. The curriculum you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. 2 In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. 3 Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn. 4 To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. 5 It may coincide with it, or it may not. 6 It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. 7 Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. 8 Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self-doubt. 9 This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. 10 But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.
I see that I am always teaching what I think I am, what I believe about myself and what I believe about you in relation to me. What I say may not be congruent with what I believe, but that will do nothing to change what I believe. This self I teach, and through teaching, constantly reinforce, may not be real, but if it is what I teach it becomes very real to me.
Here is an example, as I understand this. For a long time, I believed that I was a victim of the world I see. Because this was the belief in my mind, this was the interpretation I gave everything that happened to me. For instance, I did not know how to mother my first two children and did not do it well. I felt deeply ashamed and guilty, and I told myself that this was not my fault.
This was the story I told myself. My mother was a poor role model, so I was a victim of my circumstances, and of her failure as a mother. I needed to reinforce this story if I was going to believe it and convince others it was true, so I found a therapist who told me the same story. And I collected friends who were willing to witness to my victimization.
To appear even more innocent (to myself and others) I added martyr to my image as I made excuses for my mom, “she was just doing the best she could” stories. But though my words seemed charitable, they had nothing to do with what I believed, so what I was really teaching was that I was a victim, and she was guilty of victimizing me, but I was a charitable person so I was going to “forgive” her. Of course, this is not true forgiveness but rather “forgiveness to destroy”.
All the time I thought I was protecting (or maybe hiding) this image of myself through projecting blame; I was teaching victimization and learning victimization. And so, many victim stories followed. I was building this image of myself as a helpless victim with layers and layers of stories of being victimized. I often said I did not want to be a victim, and as I learned some psychology, I used different words that sounded good, but those words were hollow because I believed I was a victim and so this is what I taught.
And of course, every victim needs a victimizer so I collected those as well, and reinforced through my relationships with them that they were victimizers. What a sad and self-defeating cycle this is, and yet it is the cycle we all live in one form or another until we choose differently through choosing a different teacher. Now that I have chosen a different Teacher, my life is different so I am teaching differently.
My life doesn’t teach victimization because I can’t imagine ever again believing in victimization. The idea feels absurd to me now. My teaching in this is congruent with my beliefs and actions and so that teaching is the same in a formal situation that it is in what my life teaches. I recently let go of the belief in guilt and because this is recent, guilt thoughts still show up sometimes and my actions and words are not as free of guilt as they will be soon.
It is like I have cleaned my house, but once in a while, I notice something out of place or cobwebs I had missed, dust bunnies under the couch. I simply clean them away and enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. It is like that with guilt thoughts for me. A simple cleaning up of any fragments of the old belief. So, I am not yet teaching innocence perfectly, but will be as this process continues. As I teach myself that I am no longer interested in guilt, I teach others the same thing, and as I teach them, I reinforce the lesson for me.
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