August 29, 2017

What is our true desire?  Is it not to be whole?  We want, more than anything else, to be whole, complete, content and happy.  We have set our desire, and allowed Spirit to guide us in that desire, for we know it is found within us where Spirit dwells.  We have opened ourselves to the light within us and we now are open to the idea that we share that light with each other.  That light is strong, yet it grows in strength as we join in Oneness.  We have glimpsed the holy instant, even carried it in our life.  We have experienced that instant when all that is not real drops away and we know, in this moment, that we are complete.  We look to our relationships and see them differently.  We begin to see the deep connection within them and we see our true holy Self reflected in each One.  We are the light workers that bring the light of truth to the world.  What a glorious mission this is.  What a holy purpose this is.

You who are now the bringer of salvation have the function of bringing light to darkness.  The darkness in you has been brought to light.  Carry it back to darkness, from the holy instant to which you brought it.  We are made whole in our desire to make whole.  Let not time worry you, for all the fear that you and another experience is really past.  Time has been readjusted to help us do, together, what your separate pasts would hinder.  You have gone past fear, for no two minds can join in the desire for love without love’s joining them.   T-18.III.7:1-7

Be willing to allow the light within to shine into our waking dream.  It illuminates our mind.  It shines away as much of the darkness we harbor as we will allow.  Allow Spirit to guide that light to the ideas and beliefs we hold so dear.  Have no fear that anything real will be taken away.  What is real will stand strong in the light and remain while anything not real will simply fade into nothingness.  Choose to leave the darkness behind.  Follow the light into the realm of Heaven.  We will find Heaven, even in this world, as we allow our mind to be guided by Spirit.  All we see and experience has another meaning that Spirit guides us toward.  We can see beyond the appearance of all we come across in this world to the real meaning beyond its appearance.    As we learn in lesson 61, We are the light of the world.  Let that light shine.

Heaven is joined with you in your advance to Heaven.  When such great lights have joined with you to give the little spark of your desire the power of Source, can you remain in darkness?  You and another are coming home together, after a long and meaningless journey that you undertook apart, and that led nowhere.  You have found another, and you will light each other’s way.  And from this light will the Great Rays extend back into darkness and forward unto Source, to shine away the past and so make room for Source’s eternal Presence, in which everything is radiant in the light.   T-18.III.8:3-7

The Great Rays are shining within you now.  Recognize them!  Allow these Great Rays to shine away the darkness you think you see around you.  The darkness is not real.  Once you allow yourself to look beyond what appears to be darkness, you will see the blessed light of your holy Self in Oneness with all of creation.  Yes, allow the Great Rays of light to shine into your waking dream of your relationships.  In that light is great peace and joy waiting in your eternity.  Awaken!

August 22, 2017

When we made the decision to create our own identity, separate from reality, we began creating our waking dream.  We blocked all input from Spirit which would have interpreted our experiences by relying on our own egoic interpretation of events and experiences in our lives.  We made all our interpretations based on input from our interpretations of our past and our interpretations of others’ interpretations based on our past.  As interpretation piles upon interpretation, our perceived “reality” strays further and further from the truth and plunges deeper into darkness, blocking the awareness of the light and truth within us.  We use judgement based on our own egoic thought system rather than the wisdom of Spirit to make decisions.  Sunday’s Weekly Thought was:

Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment.
M-10.4:5

Wisdom rises to our awareness as we look within to Spirit’s guidance and release our attachment to all judgement.  The light within us is there as well and rises with wisdom.

Yet, we have made a choice to allow truth to come into our awareness.  We have made the choice to allow truth to be the goal of our relationships.  We have chosen healing over insanity.  As we release our hold on the beliefs and ideas that support separation, we find a new freedom peeking through the chaos we seem to see around us and in our minds.  Our waking dreams we have made take on a bit of that light and begin to shift.  As our waking dreams shift, so do our relationships shift as they begin healing.  The healing power of light begins to shine away all that keeps us separate from the awareness of who we really are.  We may be afraid of this awakening as we begin to experience it, but allow yourself to trust the Higher Holy Spirit Self within you to guide you.  There is peace and unconditional love there to be held and valued.  The joining together with each other and Spirit brings us into communion with the One we have never left.

You who hold another’s hand also hold mine, for when you joined each other you were not alone.  Do you believe that I would leave you in the darkness that you agreed to leave with me?  In your relationship is this world’s light.  And fear must disappear before you now.  Be tempted not to snatch away the gift of faith you offered to another.  You will succeed only in frightening yourself.  The gift is given forever, for the One received it.  You cannot take it back.  You have accepted the One.  The holiness of your relationship is established in Heaven.  You do not understand what you accepted, but remember that your understanding is not necessary.  All that was necessary was merely the wish to understand.  That wish was the desire to be holy.  The Will of the One is granted you.  For you desire the only thing you ever had, or ever were.   T-18.III.4:1-14

Take the step out of the darkness of your waking dreams.  Allow light to enter your waking dream as you turn your mind to Spirit’s guidance.  The light shining within you – hidden but never out – rises to your awareness and brings you to Oneness with each other and the One.  As the light enters your waking dream, peace also rises to your mind simply replacing your feeling of chaos in this world.  This is reality, the real world and the awareness of who you really are.  Let your light shine in your waking dream and find the real reality within you.  Just open your eyes that you may see.

August 15, 2017

Would we will ourselves to wake from the dream?  Yes!  To waken from the dream is our deepest desire, whether or not we realize it.  We constantly choose a world of dreams that seems to bring us guilt, grudges, blame and fear.  What does this accomplish?  What does this bring to our relationships?  It makes our relationships “special”, meaning that we use our relationships to perpetuate the idea of separation – the unhappy dream.  When I have trouble understanding that the world is an illusion, I think of the world I see as temporal – or temporary.  I think of the illusory world as a world that will not last.  A world that I will transform when I allow my perception of the world to change.  And then I choose that change in how I perceive the world to be guided by Spirit rather than my egoic thought system.  I can choose to be guided by Spirit to the happy dream – a healing of the dream.

Your special relationship will be a means for undoing guilt in everyone blessed through your holy relationship.  It will be a happy dream, and one which you will share with all who come within your sight.  Through it, the blessing the Holy Spirit has laid upon it will be extended.  Think not that Spirit has forgotten anyone in the purpose It has given you.  And think not that Spirit has forgotten you to whom It gave the gift.  Spirit uses everyone who calls on Spirit as means for the salvation of everyone.  And Spirit will waken everyone through you who offered your relationship to Spirit.  If you but recognized Spirit’s gratitude!  Or mine through Spirit’s!  For we are joined as in one purpose, being of one mind with Spirit.   T-18.II.7:1-9

The divine purpose of our relationships is to demonstrate Oneness – Unity – in this world.  Our divine nature is Oneness.  Our divine nature is holiness in Oneness.  There is no other real nature attributable to who we really are.  Only by believing we are something less can we block our awareness of our divinity.  Let not the waking dream close your eyes to the truth about you and all the world.  Allow Spirit to guide your waking dreams from unhappy to happy.  Allow Spirit to guide your sight with holy sight.  All that we are seeking is within us.  Spirit dwells within us as our Higher Holy Spirit Self.  Trust your inner guidance.  Trust the peace and love as it rises within you.  What do you really want – the unhappy dream or the happy dream?

Yet Heaven is sure.  This is no dream.  Its coming means that you have chosen truth, and it has come because you have been willing to let your special relationship meet its conditions.  In your relationship the Holy Spirit has gently laid the real world; the world of happy dreams, from which awaking is so easy and so natural.  For as your sleeping and your waking dreams represent the same wishes in your mind, so do the real world and the truth of Heaven join in the Will of the One.  The dream of waking is easily transferred to its reality.  For this dream reflects your will joined with the Will of the One.  And what this Will would have accomplished has never not been done.   T-18.II.9:1-8

Be willing to understand the basis of the dream.  Have faith that Spirit will guide you in that understanding.  As we waken, little by little, we will find ourselves at Heaven’s threshold.  We need do no more than step across Heaven’s threshold.  And, for a time, we will have a foot in each world, seeing ourselves and our sisters and brothers free of all limitations and spreading the happy dream throughout the world.  We will bring the awareness of our Oneness – our Unity – to this temporal world.  Wake up and dream!

August 8, 2017

The Course teaches us that we live our life in this world in a dreamlike state while we are spiritually asleep.  While we believe we are separate from each other and God, we are asleep to our spiritual awareness.  We all understand that the dreams we experience while we are sleeping are not real.  They may seem very real while we are dreaming, but we know they are simply a dream when we awake.  The contents of our dreams often contain distorted perceptions of the events and experiences in our daily lives.  Sometimes they ae nightmares that cause us great fear when we awake.  Our parents always comforted us when our dreams scared us and assured us that they were just dreams and not real.  We learned not to be afraid of our sleeping dreams.

The perceptions of our waking lives could be considered a waking dream perceived when we are spiritually asleep.  They contain distorted perceptions of the real world.  Sometimes they are good dreams and sometimes they cause fear, anger, anxiety or guilt.  Like our sleeping dreams, we are experiencing a distorted perception of our spiritual reality which we have chosen to see through the lens of separation.  The lens of separation is the egoic thought system we made to make an identity separate from each other and God.  Not only do we perceive our experiences through a lens of distortion, but we even perceive ourselves through a lens of distortion.  There appears to be much chaos in our waking dream from this distorted perception.  We think there is something or someone outside of us to arrack or defend against.  It appears there is no peace or love to be found as we search for just that.

Our mind arranges everything in our sleeping dreams, and we accept that on awakening from those dreams.  Yet, we have not been willing to see our waking dreams similarly.  We insist that our waking dreams are reality, even though they are not.  We allow our egoic thought system to arrange everything in our perception.  We dictate who and what people are and everything they do in this waking dream.  This has become such a habit that we don’t realize it can be awakened from.  Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which we literally scream, “I want it thus!”  And thus, it seems to be to us.  And yet the dream cannot escape its origin.  So, this dream becomes reality for us for a time in our minds.

Dreams show you that you have the power to make a world as you would have it be, and that because you want it you see it.  And while you see it you do not doubt that it is real.  Yet here is a world, clearly within your mind, that seems to be outside.  You do not respond to it as though you made it, nor do you realize that the emotions the dream produces must come from you.  It is the figures in the dream and what they do that seem to make the dream.  You do not realize that you are making them act out for you, for if you did the guilt would not be theirs, and the illusion of satisfaction would be gone.  In dreams these features are not obscure.  You seem to waken, and the dream is gone.  Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has not gone with it.  Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with you.  And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams.  All your time is spent in dreaming.  Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all.  Their content is the same.  They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it.  In your waking dreams, the special relationship has a special place.  It is the means by which you try to make your sleeping dreams come true.  From this, you do not waken.  The special relationship is your determination to keep your hold on unreality, and to prevent yourself from waking.  And while you see more value in sleeping than in waking, you will not let go of it.  T-18.II.5:1-20

The special relationships we are so firmly attached to keep us unaware of reality.  The answer is to release our attachment to the “specialness” of our relationships, and allow Spirit to heal and transform them.  Our special relationships are dreams, too, for they are a distorted perception of holy relationships.  Holy relationships, which acknowledge our Oneness with each other, are real.  They embody reality, where love and peace abide.  They abide within us, for we have never been separated.  Separation is impossible in reality.  Look within and see that the basis of the dream is our own misperception, our own spiritual unawareness.  Awaken from the waking dream.  Look within to the reality of Heaven within and release all that which doesn’t fit.  The basis of the dream is not real.

August 1, 2017

Truth is within us.  Truth has never left us.  The solution to all that appears wrong is within us.  All that is real and true is and has always been within us for it is inherent in our creation.  Anything less is a result of our mistaken idea that we are somehow separate from truth and reality.  The idea that we are separate from each other, God, Spirit and all of creation is a mistaken idea that our egoic thought system made to give us an identity based in our past rather than the reality of who we really are in the present moment.  When we project our past on the present, we block our awareness of the present and thus think we are our past.  The past is done, it is over.  We need not remain attached to it and allow it to block our awareness of our divine nature.

The world sometimes seems insane.  It seems to control us rather than we control it.  When we project our perceptions of the past on the world, we see our projections rather than reality.  Our free will gives us the option to see projection or reality.  What we see depends solely on what we align our thought system with.  We have become so accustomed to aligning our thought system with the idea of separation and identifying with our past that we don’t see that anything else is possible.  Something better is possible.  It simply takes a willingness to believe that something else is possible to begin to awaken to that something better.  And, that something better is within us rather than outside us where we have been searching for so long.

Let them all go, dancing in the wind, dipping and turning till they disappear from sight, far, far outside of you.  And turn you to the stately calm within, where in holy stillness dwells the living One you never left, and Who never left you.  The Holy Spirit takes you gently by the hand, and retraces with you your mad journey outside yourself, leading you gently back to the truth and safety within.  Spirit brings all your insane projections and the wild substitutions that you have placed outside you to the truth.  Thus Spirit reverses the course of insanity and restores you to reason.   T-18.I.8:1-5

Our relationships are where we restore the awareness of wholeness, truth and reality to our minds.  The process of this restoration is healing.  We need not do the healing alone, but allow the Spirit within us to guide us in this healing.  This healing is not so much an act of changing the one we are in relationship with, but seeing them as they truly are, a Holy Child of God.  This one need not change at all, but we allow our perception of them to be changed by Spirit to truth, seeing them as the divine being they are created.  The world we see will change as Spirit teaches us to let go of our attachment to projecting our past on the present.  The result is truly miraculous as Heaven is restored to all the One Holy Child as we join with each other in Oneness.  The universe within us stands with us, together with our brothers and sisters.  And Heaven looks with love on what is joined in it, along with its Creator.

You have been called, together with your sisters and brothers, to the most holy function this world contains.  It is the only one that has no limits, and reaches out to every broken fragment of the Oneship with healing and uniting comfort.  This is offered you, in your holy relationship.  Accept it here, and you will give as you have accepted.  The peace of God is given you with the glowing purpose in which you join with each other.  The holy light that brought you and them together must extend, as you accepted it.   T-18. I.13:1-6

Make the choice today to no longer align with a substitute reality based in your past. Release your past and allow Spirit to guide you in the holy purpose of your relationships to their healing.  Allow your mind to be in the present and align with Spirit’s guidance.  Allow your relationships to align with their divine function.  Allow yourself to align with Oneness and rediscover the awareness of all you really are.  Peace is rediscovered in this shift and Heaven rises in your awareness, having always been within you.  Look within and discover all you have been seeking has always been within you.