Let me forget my brother's past today.
This is the thought that leads the way to You, and brings me to my goal. I cannot come to You without my brother. And to know my Source, I first must recognize what You created one with me. My brother's is the hand that leads me on the way to You. His sins are in the past along with mine, and I am saved because the past is gone. Let me not cherish it within my heart, or I will lose the way to walk to You. My brother is my savior. Let me not attack the savior You have given me. But let me honor him who bears Your name, and so remember that It is my own.
Forgive me, then, today. And you will know you have forgiven me if you behold your brother in the light of holiness. He cannot be less holy than can I, and you can not be holier than he.
Miracles I'm noticing:
How simple it is to exist in the now if we can get rid of the past. I see there is a new TV show called Samantha Who? and I think the premise is that this girl has a head injury which causes her to have amnesia, so she has to kind of rebuild her life without a past. In some ways that would make things a whole lot easier.
Have you ever had an argument with someone which causes you to want to hold a grudge, and then forgotten why you were arguing in the first place? It seems funny that we would hold on to those grudges.
It is no coincidence that right now as I am typing this, Christina Applegate is on Good Morning America telling about this new show (I swear this is not planned!). She just said that people who suffer from amnesia know what pizza is, for example, but they don't know what it tastes like. It's a matter of opinion. So Samantha has to learn about what her opinions are and discover who she is. Every day we are brand new. Our skin sheds every day. The show is about what you would do if you could start over right now in this moment.
It brings up an interesting question. If we we are today the sum total of the choices we've made and the experiences we've had up to now, everything we have been has created who we are. How much of that experience do we carry around as baggage? How difficult (or how easy) is it to try to recreate ourselves when others in our lives have long memories about things we may have said or things we may have done that we'd like to forget?
All it means is that we have an opportunity to communicate truthfully and address those questions and situations as they come up. If we are committed to new pathways and new ways of seeing and being, we simply (really, it is simple) need to change our minds and stick to our new mind.
Today's lesson is about forgetting our brother's past. This would definitely help everyone who wants to make a new start because often it's we who keep others stuck in their old ways because of our long memories. Let's work together to hold space for others in our lives wherever they are - and support them in their efforts to be and do whatever they want, not what we want.
That's my goal for today - and that's the miracle!
Conversations With God
The Four Agreements
A Course in Miracles
The Disappearance of the Universe
A Return to Love
4 comments:
Hi Jodee.
About that past.
In pondering how much of the baggage from our past we carry around - and of the effort required to recreate ourselves when others hold long memories of us - some thoughts come to mind. And what about others stuck in old ways because of OUR long memories?
I would say we probably carry around pretty much all the bags, and the ones among us who appear to have lost a few may tend to be regarded with suspicion.
But in fact, The Course tells us that this oh-so-essential baggage (the past) is actually party to one of the “ego laws” whose function is to create our sense of time; as of the past flowing into (and so determining) the future; and thereby being a necessary component in the creation of the illusory world we know.
This is from Chapter 13, Section 9:
“…linking the future to the past as is the ego’s law. Fidelity to this law lets no light in, for it demands fidelity to darkness and forbids awakening.”
And so:
“Between the future and the past the laws of God must intervene, if you would free yourself.” (or others).
There is a major clue here, I believe, as to what may have been the mechanism (at least, in part) of perception employed by Jesus when performing healing.
Chapter 13, Section 6, seems to support this idea:
“You would anticipate the future on the basis of your past experience, and plan for it accordingly. Yet by doing so you are aligning past and future, and not allowing the miracle, which could intervene between them, to free you to be born again.”
And finally, Chapter 13, Section 8:
“All healing is release from the past. That is why the Holy Spirit is the only Healer. He teaches that the past does not exist, a fact which belongs to the sphere of knowledge, and which therefore no one in the world can know.”
These all seem to be pointing to a developmental ability that serious students of The Course should be seeking:
Being able to look directly at a present situation - the “sum total” of the past, as you point out - and deliberately divorce that “past authority,” the ego so counts on for continuity, by assigning a new (born again) present condition of our choosing.
To an onlooker it would appear as if cause and effect, aka the laws of nature, have been violated (a miracle!). But in actuality, only a new “cause” has been mentally inserted, via “now,” into the ego’s so-called continuity of time.
Could we not also, then, do this for ourselves as well as for others? After all, our own past - that we THINK is being held to us by others - is actually our judgment of THEM.
Here’s a closing quote from Chapter 10, Section 5:
“You may believe that you judge your brothers by the messages they give you, but you have judged them by the message you give to them.”
Dennis
Dennis:
Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful comments here. I love how insightful you are and how much I learn from you!
I am learning that it is always only me - there is no other since we are all one. Everything from the past and everything I notice from and about other people is simply a mirror for me. Judgment of anything or anyone is certainly the work of the ego (as Wayne Dyer says EGO is Edging God Out) and the ego is rooted in the past.
My company is all about helping organizations come to that point in their corporate life when they can see "there must be a better way," as we know the writers of this course figured out for themselves in their working relationship as professors of medical psychology. My business partner and I call that transformation - giving up the effects of the past in order to re-create the future by changing our minds today.
Thank you again, Dennis! It's great to know there are so many people dedicated to this information! Together we are changing the world by changing the way we see the world!
And thank YOU, Jodee, for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully.
Dennis
My pleasure, Dennis! :)
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