Suffering

“One of the more horrible examples of inverted or upside-down thinking (and history is full of horrible examples of this) was the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution.’ I shed many tears over this, but it is by no means the only time I said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-1.43.8:1-2)

In this passage from the complete edition of A Course in Miracles, Jesus tells us personally what type of reaction he has had and continues to have over the terrible deeds of humankind and the suffering these deeds have wrought for ordinary people. He specifically refers to unspeakable crimes against Jewish people during World War II. Jesus responds with an appeal to the Father, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

His reaction is to be our own when we consider awful occurrences of human against human in this world. Jesus says that he has repeated his prayer with many incidents. We must do the same.

In this world, we cannot ever understand the “why” of suffering that innocent human beings undergo. Pat Rodegast’s Emmanuel says this. Perhaps an incomplete answer would be that it is enough for us to recognize in our own suffering that, when it is passed, we comprehend more; we may never understand, but we can realize that through it all, God was with us, and we have grown. I do not mean to say that the end justifies the means. We simply can’t with our little minds wrap around the awful things that people go through. It is a mystery.

But God does not “cause” our suffering. And it is never right, Jesus tells us in A Course of Love, to blame the victim. Jesus indicates that we are to have compassion, not heartlessness. Love is the healer of suffering, the end in sight. Jesus indicates this also elsewhere in A Course of Love. In “The Way of the Heart” (from The Way of Mastery), Jesus even affirms, “There is no suffering.” Of course we can’t know fully what he means.

If we believe that God is living through us, then He is experiencing right along with us. His Presence makes all the difference when we are confronted with eternal questions that seem to have no answer. Especially when that eternal question is the “why” of suffering.

Embrace the New Time

“You have felt this time coming. You have realized that your learning has reached an end point. The excitement of new learning is not lasting because it is not new. You have begun to see that all messages of the truth say the same thing but in different ways. There seems to be nothing new to be said, nothing to move you beyond this point that you have reached in your under¬standing of the truth. All the learning that you have done seems to leave you ready to change and able to change in certain ways that make life easier or more peaceful, but certainly not able to realize the transformation that your learning has seemed to promise.

“Do not accept this lack of fulfillment of a promise that has surely been made! Rejoice that the new time is here and be ready to embrace it as it embraces you!” (ACOL, T4:9.5 – 9.6)

Jesus is full of reassurances and promises in the quotation for today. He knows that we have reached an end point in our learning, an end point in our seeking. We have sought long and hard in the learned wisdom of the ages, and our habit of seeking has a tendency to stay with us. But we are to turn aside from this habit, not in resistance (which would make the habit stronger), but just in a gentle shift away from it. We are in a new time now. We are in the time of Christ. And that makes all things better.

Why did we seek so long and hard? We were dissatisfied with what we had been taught, and we thought we needed to strike out on our own. We especially sought channeled works, as these seemed to be evidence of a life on the Other Side, and evidence of greater knowledge on the part of those channeling.

Whether or not there was greater knowledge is debatable, but surely we can believe that there is in the case of Jesus’s channeled writings. Many of us believe that A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love, and The Way of Mastery are his latest pronouncements to us. Many read my blog who don’t believe that Jesus is the channeler, but they still believe that the understanding in the quotations is genuine. All of this does not matter, but Jesus has indicated that we will get so much more out of what we are reading if we believe that he is the source, that we accept him as the one leading us out of the abyss.

Turn to our inner Self today. That is the source of guidance, the part of us that is part of God. Try to believe, even for a moment, that this turning inward will solve all our problems. New ones may crop up, but these too will be solved when we take an inward glance.

Be willing today to take that inward glance.

Prayer

I turn to You in five minutes of sitting quietly. And this sets me on the right track for my day. Sometimes I want to return to another five minutes, or I want to extend the five minutes to the more normal twenty. It does not matter. Whatever works to lead me back to You is what I want to do.

Help me to have peace in my world today. May I seek You whenever and wherever that peace is threatened. Thank You for always, always and only, being here for me.

Amen.

Sitting as the Christ Self in a Holy Instant

“This moment without awareness of the body was beautifully described in A Course in Miracles as the Holy Instant. You may not think observation of your body is a good way to achieve this, but as you observe you learn to hold yourself apart from what you see. A reminder is needed here, however, a reminder to not observe with your mind, but with your heart.” (ACOL, C:8.19)

In The Way of Mastery, another work which many believe was channeled by Jesus, we hear that we are to sit for five minutes a day imagining ourselves as a “Christed” being. We are, obviously, sitting in our bodies when we do this. And the similarities to today’s passage from A Course of Love are striking.

When we observe the body in a holy instant, we are not thinking as an egoic being. We have left the ego behind at such times. We are thinking as the inner Christ Self, the One joined to God in the center of our being. And this “center of our being” is often called in ACOL the heart. ACOL makes much of the heart, because in so doing Jesus has by-passed the confused mind, the mind that has been entrapped by the ego for eons. Now we are free of a burden that has hampered our rise to God Himself. That burden is the ego, and as we turn aside from it, we are making a new beginning.

In A Course in Miracles, much was made of the holy instant. It was a moment free of time as well as free of the body, for we were caught in the reality of a heaven on earth—if only for that moment of the holy instant. Now we are encouraged, in The Way of Mastery, to sit with our bodies in observation, and in so doing, we see our bodies as apart from us. We don’t see the physical as the inevitable thing that is going to drag us downward. We observe our bodies, and then we let go—into a higher elevation, the one prompted by our heart.

Let the musings of our heart direct us today. Let go of anything and everything that would hinder the approach of a holy instant, a holy instant spent apart from the body because we are simply observing its illusion. The physical is, after all, an illusion, though it seems very real to us. And when we see the physical as an illusion, we don’t take it very seriously. We live, for the moment, sitting as a Christed being.