Thursday’s class was a second one on how much our minds influence our world. In it, I presented a process in several parts. I’m writing this up for an article for the Circle website, but here’s the short version:
How did I manifest this challenge in my life?
1. My ego manifested it as a witness, a witness that love is dead. We can visualize the challenge as a big headstone in front of us, on which is written “Here is a witness love is dead.” (To connect with your particular challenge, you might want to change the wording to “peace is dead” or “joy is dead.” But the sentiment is basically the same.)
2. The Holy Spirit took what the ego intended as a witness against love, and made sure it showed up as the perfect lesson for our homecoming. The lesson is to overlook the witness, to refuse to listen to the witness. In our image of the witness being a headstone, we need to add in the idea that on the other side of the headstone is the shining reality of love, blocked from view by the headstone.
Our lesson is to overlook the headstone, to refuse to listen to this witness’ testimony, to look past it to the reality of love. That is another way of talking about forgiveness. That is forgiveness. Through doing that, we accomplish two things.
First, we undo our mistaken belief that love is dead, the very belief that put the headstone there in the first place. This means we are undoing our past mistakes. Second, we affirm the reality of love, even in the face of testimony to the contrary.
That’s really the whole point of our experience here—to present us with opportunities to overlook the witnesses against love, to see past them to the reality of love, and so to undo our past choices that said that love is dead, and to strengthen our belief in the reality of love, no matter how loud the witnesses against it seem to be. When we can see past any witness that says love is dead, no matter how seemingly loud and big, then we will have achieved complete forgiveness, and our learning will be over.
To get back to this particular challenge, when you refuse to listen to this witness against love, when you look past the headstone to the reality of love behind it, that will unleash the power of love. And that power may indeed do miraculous things. It may well shine away the challenge that has been in front of you.
But as the Course says in a number of different ways, this part is not your business. You just look past the headstone to the reality of love, and then you let love itself (or more technically, the Holy Spirit) take care of how that manifests in form. We see this in the Course’s emphasis that the healer merely looks past the sick body and sick mind, and then lets that result in whatever physical healing that it will. We see it in the Course’s idea that you merely accept your function as your only purpose, and the Holy Spirit will remove all the physical obstacles that stand in the way of that function. We see it in the Course’s emphasis that we don’t pray for external things, that we simply place all concerns about externals into God’s Hands, and let Him do what’s best with them.
So: don’t listen to the headstone (which would be following the ego’s reason for manifesting it). Look past it to the love behind it (which follows the Holy Spirit’s reason for it being there). Then let the power of love do in the world of form whatever it will do.
Once something does happen on the outside, once the challenge is removed or lessened, what do we tell ourselves about that? Do we say that it was our choice unleashing the Holy Spirit to act? Or do we say that the challenge just happened to go away, as challenges often do? It’s just the usual course of things that challenges come and challenges go.
My belief is that we need to be able to tell a convincing story of why this challenge in particular was removed not by the ordinary course of things, but by our choices setting in motion the Holy Spirit. The story should combine things happening on the inside of us with the things that happened on the outside. To the extent this story makes a good case for the removal of the challenge being a miraculous thing, rather than the natural course of events, then to that same extent we should consider the miraculous explanation to be more probable. To the extent the case is weak or inconclusive, to that same extent we should be agnostic about the whole thing.
OK, that’s not as brief as I planned, and I still am going to write up a longer version as an article for the website.
Any thoughts? Comments? Questions?
If you enjoyed this article, you might like Part 1!
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