Welcome 14

P. 53-54

Here is the distinction: We already know who we are. No one would deny that we are Divine children of God, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience,—yadda, yadda, yadda. BUT the knowing has not completely taken hold. We “Kinda, Sorta” believe it, and because that is were we perceive ourselves to be, then we “kinda, sorta” get some results.

I believe that every moment of practice, be it consciously exclaiming “Welcome;“ consciously claiming, “I know who I am; I know what I am; I know how I serve:” or bringing to mind a meaningful prayer or mantra, eg. “The Light of God surrounds us…:” “I love you; I am so sorry; please forgive me; Thank you,” not only raises our vibration and all that is around us, but ALSO allows the truth of who we are to take root more and more deeply within our conscious and unconscious. (Like having a perpetual tune you can’t get out of your head.)

We all realize we have the power of the divine within us, but how often do we use it; how often are w even aware of it. ACIM suggests that we are always creating; we are either creating from default (through our unconscious minds) which means all of our fears, worries, doubts, and another forms of negativity that we are holding onto are essentially in charge of our creative activity OR we are creating from our conscious awareness —-that awareness of the Truth of who we are.

“What was I thinking,” you might ask yourself after creating a mess—major or minor. The answer is, as Marian Williamson says, “You were not thinking.” You were on auto-pilot—reacting to external stimuli with preprogramed thoughts and behaviors.

And so that puts us right up against the question, “Why would we do that; what is our resistance to Truth?” To answer that we will examine again the seemingly classic conflict between ego and Spirit.

For most of us, we grew up identifying with the ego or personality side of our nature. Ego and personality was the primary definition of self, and most of us simply took that for granted. Even though there was spiritual teaching in our lives, it became primarily compartmentalized. It was expressed  as a series of thoughts and ideas and maybe even beliefs, to a limited extent, but it was sort of a separate part of our lives, possibly reserved for Sundays. Unfortunately, what passed for spiritual teaching was often imbued with sensations of guilt, fear and shame. Please know we do not say the guilt, fear or shame are actually part of spirit, but it is a way that many of you erroneously learned.

There usually comes a time, often triggered by difficult life experiences, that we called into question our identity and definition of self in terms of ego or personality. We are challenged to know ourselves on a deeper level. It is then that spiritual teachings enter our lives, but we also realize that much of what we have learned under the heading “spirit” does not coincide with the yearnings of our soul.

So we are called more deeply as we are at this time, to open ourselves to a new way of knowing and a new way of knowing ourselves as well. As we have all experienced, the ego does not go down without a fight. Our ego or personality self has been king or queen of the hill for too long to allow that power or that identity to quickly disintegrate. It is, however, unnecessary and even counter-productive to get into a fight with our ego or personality cells. That just gives it more power.

What we are doing here is increasing our awareness of the Truth of who we are and to allowing that to take precedence in and our thoughts and actions.  Fear, which is a primary emotion of the ego, will continually attempt to get in the way of our acknowledgment of who we truly are. Fear can take many forms. Most often it is subtly expressed by a sense of unworthiness or “not enoughness” or an inability to embrace ourselves we are we are. Embracing ourselves where we are is another way of saying accepting unconditional love.

As we have mentioned before, it is extremely important to be aware that what we call “where we are” is simply our perception of where we are, and our perception, by its very nature, is limited. So to release the struggle of our inner natures, we even embrace our imperfect perception of ourselves, knowing that it isn't perfect, but that also in the midst of our aligning with our divine selves, that perfection is embraced beyond our limited knowing.

I’d like to include this next paragraph from the book. It will be our starting point next week.

As always—DEEP GRATITUDE

“Now, the kingdom of God, we would say, is the manifestation of God as you, as out-pictured through you, through each of you, in your beneficence, in your kindness, in your love, in your willingness to serve. But the frightening thing about this for all of you is that you do not want it. You believe that it is a negative, that you will lose your self-worth that you have attained through structures that have been erected to give you an appearance of dominion when you, in fact, have been enslaved by them.”

Peace.

WELCOME 13

P. 51-53

“We are all of the same stuff, you know. We are all of Christ consciousness. We are simply in different levels of our awareness of this. As you move into consciousness, you realign all things, you co-resonate with all things in a new way. And our vibration, as we would teach you, is here to shepherd you. You may align to us at any moment simply by saying, “Welcome.” If you wish to practice it now, you may. In your mind, say the word “welcome” and allow our frequency to be in attendance to you in a way that you may know.”

As we were learning together Sunday morning I had a thought or a vision related to a teacher of mine in college. He was an exceptionally brilliant man, but as a teacher he had the ability to step away from any sense of superiority. He had a way of allowing us to sense that we were all learning together. Even though he was in the particular role of teacher and we were in the role of students, there seemed to be no judgment or comparison. A perception of separateness or hierarchy simply did not exist. I have a sense that our work together with the Guides reflects this same sort of equality.

I notice that this cannot be explained in a logical or linear way, and yet the truth of it is still here. As we have encountered many times before, the knowing that we speak of is beyond our rational minds and intellect.

The only limitation in our learning and our knowing is our ability to allow.

“Now we are authorized to do this by you as you allow it and align to it. We take nothing from you, and what we do with you is support you in your own achievement as the one who chooses herself to be on this journey to her own recognition, to his own recognition of his divine worth. You are aligned now to the extent that you are allowed to.

Now, what does it mean, “to the extent that you are allowed to”? We take you through a process here of alignment and removal of obstacles and obstructions that you have created or inherited in order to know yourself through limitation. As we attend to these, you lift your vibration to the extent that you allow yourself to lift, and we shift you as you allow us to shift you. Now we work with you each, the readers of this text, in frequency to support this, but you must say “welcome.”

Simply put, and I hope this is not an oversimplification, “How well do we listen to our inner voice?”

So much of the work that we are doing is the cultivation of our awareness of our own intuitive knowing. We are not creating something new; we are listening to what has already been there or has always been there.

What I'm going to suggest next might feel a bit like heresy. Please know it comes from my own limited sense of awareness of what is. The energy or the beings or the vibrations that we are calling the Guides, in essence is our own intuitive voice, our connection to divine wisdom. It is much easier for us, at least in the beginning, to give this power over to another being or group of beings wiser or more knowledgeable than ourselves. Ultimately, however, we are opening ourselves to the awareness that our intuitive knowing, or our inner voice is literally our connection to the divine.

The distinction we need to make is that in our language we use terms such as “my inner voice” and this is where we can create an error in our thinking or in our awareness. The inner voice does not belong to me as a personality; the inner voice is the inner voice of all sentient beings. It is the divine connection within all beings. The paradox arises when we also realize that he inner voice or God speaking to us or through us comes through this instrument of our being in a unique way. So that your expression of divine truth might be different from my expression of divine truth and yet ultimately it is One and the same.

I know I am stretching here and this is going a little bit far out, but I'll do it anyway. I believe Jesus came to a point in his life, in his realization of the Christ, as the Christ consciousness, when he became a pure instrument of divine wisdom so that all beings could here and listen and learn in the same way. He became such a pure vessel of the Father that the words and actions and vibration that came from him expressed only One truth because there is only One truth: God is Love.

“Now we will explain what we did when we asked you to claim, “I am Word.” If you are new to our teaching, you may not know that the frequency we attend to we claim as the Word, which is the energy of the Creator in action. The aspect of you that is already this is awakened through this choice to self-identify as the frequency.

When you claim, “I am Word through my body,” you bring the physical being that you are in accordance to that frequency of the Word. When you claim “I am Word through my vibration,” you align your energy field to the frequency of the Word. When you claim, “I am Word through my knowing of myself as Word,” you realign your true self, the identity that you hold, in recognition of your worth as the aspect of the Creator that can be realized in form. And our definition of the Christ, and the one that we offer here, is that the Christ is the aspect of the Creator that can be realized in material form as you.”

The above section is a summary of the first book and all that we have covered in the second one. There us a piece that I would like to add or emphasize here for a moment. We use the mantra “I am word through my… Word I am Word.” It is suggested in the first book that even we find ourselves stumbling or attached or angry or fearful that we can use this same expression to raise the vibration of our human experience to a higher level, to one that lives in spirit.

The example I shared on Sunday was that I found myself becoming both angry and obsessed with a person in my life, and even though I was angry and upset,  I recalled the prayer that was passed onto me, a prayer that expressed Unity and release from anger and fear.. I didn't want to say it. Part of me was enjoying or getting some vicarious pleasure out of being right and I did not want to let go of that.

I recalled some of our teaching, and said to myself, “Word I am Word through my anger, Word I am Word.” Now to the intellect this will sound ridiculous because it will seem that I am affirming my anger or even giving it more energy. The truth is when I put it in the context of “The Word” that I am raising the vibration of whatever is going on with me past the perception of anger to something higher. For example, my anger and my self-righteousness, as I sat with it for a while, was a reflection of my fear related to my lack of control over another human being. So when I put my anger in the context of “The Word” I became aware that it was my fear that was creating the anger, and I became much more willing to release it, to let it go and to hold this other human being in the light, to  hold him in love, to be able to see beyond this personality self.

I think I will close with one and say to you and all of the healing beings who are present “Welcome.”

WELCOME 12

WELCOME 12

P. 49-51

We began this morning by asking the ultimate question, “What is the meaning of life?”

I recall the wonderful movie from the late 90's called “ Oh God" with George Burns and John Denver. You could view this as a cute little movie, but it is filled with some marvelous one-liners that can keep you thinking. When God is asked the question “What is the meaning of life?” he replied: “Man and women, persons, their existence means exactly and precisely, not more, not one tiny bit less, just what they think it means and what I think, doesn't count at all.”

In other words, as one of my teachers likes to say, “You are the meaning maker of your life.” And I would like to add that much of the meaning we give our lives comes from our perception.

Here's one of the tricky parts- perception always comes from our limited sense of awareness, but we don't always realize that. Often we will take our perception is being the absolute truth. One of the many things we are learning here is to be aware that our perception of ourselves, of others, of God, and life —our perceptions which comes from our limited self, and so the perceptions are also going to be limited. This is why we make reference to “illusion.” We are not using that in a judgmental sense, but simply reinforcing the sense that our perception never gives us a complete picture or a complete understanding of what is going on.

For example, let us just take the idea of your perception of yourself, specifically your perception of yourself and where you are on your spiritual path. We do this all the time, especially when we are working with material from books such as these. We perceive ourselves to be at a particular place or juncture in our spirituality. In fact, most of the time, if not all of the time, we perceive ourselves as being in a place or a space that is just not quite where we need to be. We always seem, in our perception,  to be a little bit short of the mark. An old Jackson Browne song laments, “I’ve been up and down this highway, far as my eyes can see, no matter how fast I run I can never get away from me. No matter how hard I try, I’m always a day away from where I want to be.” That is a marvelous description of letting my limited perception define who I am.

What we do not realize is that our perception of ourselves is coming from our ego or our personality self which, by its very nature, lives in limitation. Our limited perception of ourselves is actually coming from an aspect of self that lives in limitation.

I am sure all of us have been confronted with this conundrum until we finally reach a point where, again after struggle upon struggle, after many attempts to grasp and understand, we let go and simply allow ourselves to be embraced in the truth of who we are. “I know who I am; I know what I am; I know how I serve; I am here; I am here; I am here.” I am a divine child God, unconditionally loved. Although my ego or personality self might object to this truth or demand some sort of additional verification, by this time on our path, no matter how we might be feeling, no matter how we might be perceiving our life experience, there is a space within us that lives beyond all possible doubt. There is a space within us that is aligned with and resonates with the truth of the divine self that we are. We can even live with our limited perception, especially when we know it is not the truth.

I am not denying the power of our limited perception to keep us in a limited space or a limited sense of self-awareness, but because of the work we have done, it is literally impossible to completely hold onto that illusion. There are chinks in the armor of my fear, of my separateness, of my protectiveness. There are spaces through which the light shines through despite all the energetic work of my ego and personality self in its attempts to hold onto my sense of limitation and separateness. Even if it is simply a tiny pinprick of light that is coming through the mask we have created, we can choose to begin to identify with the light that is shining through and as we do more will come to us.

I am reminded of that wonderful quote from Peace Pilgrim that says: “Live up to the light you have, and more will be given you.”

Don’t allow yourself to be limited by your perception, including your feelings—you are not what you feel or how you feel. Most feelings are quite complex and beyond the understanding of the thinking mind. Feelings are a composite of thoughts, beliefs, and life experiences, much of which remain in the unconscious. (It’s not our purpose to explore this in detail, just be aware, as important as feelings are, along with our need to process them—they do nat define who you are.) 

Close to the ending of our group was a meditation created from p. 50-51. I would encourage everyone to read over that section, even out loud, and just let it sink in.

Here is a link to the audio version:

http://christintraining.com/class_22_meditation.mp3

“The lives that you have lived up until now were created by you to bring you to this juncture, where you will know yourself in a new way. We ask you this: Who in this reading would like to know herself, would like to know himself as an aspect of the Creator? If you would like to do this with us now, we would like to align you to our vibration through the act of welcome. If you would sit for a moment and be still in your body and feel the energy field that you hold around you, if you would do this with us, we would like to gift you with an experience of welcome.

We would like you now to align every cell in your being, every conscious receiver in your being that you have, to align to the frequency of welcome. We are inviting you right now to say welcome with every aspect of you. And what are you welcoming, you may ask? You are welcoming that aspect of you that is the Creator in manifestation. You will say this with us now if you would:

I am Word through my body, Word I am Word. “And in this moment we invite you to welcome us, your teachers, the Christ consciousness, all the aspects of you that are seeking to be brought into manifestation in alignment with your true self. And we would like you to say yes. Say yes, now if you would, and welcome us as you, as the aspect of you that you are aligning to.”

Peace—Thank you all!

WELCOME 11

WELCOME 11

P. 48-49

We need to be vigilant in this chaotic time which seems to revel in a sense of separateness and exclusivity. I found myself the other day rejoicing in the discomfort of another. As soon as I realized what I was doing, I knew there was something wrong with this picture. If nothing else, I was living in a frame of reference of low vibration and inadvertently pulling others into the vortex.

It is the old but continually viable understanding that “I can love you and still object to your behavior.” One of the many aspects that is interesting here is that the part of me that does not perceive you as a child of God also cannot perceive anyone, including myself, as a child of God.

Meister Eckhardt once said, “The eye I with which I see God is the same eye with wish I see myself.” In other words if I see God as judgmental and punishing, I will most likely see myself as deserving of punishment. If I see God as conditionally loving, then I will see myself is a being who must somehow earn love, as a being who is not worthy of love.

I am not sure how this fits into the context of our work, but I was moved to share this experience with our class on Sunday morning. Saturday I was asked to perform the funeral service, the graveside service, for a young man who committed suicide. I was somewhat familiar with his family and circumstances. According to his parents even at an early age he struggled with depression along with anxiety and compulsion. He was in and out of therapy, on this medication or that, and finally from his own perception, the pain was just too great to bear anymore. 

Those of us who have dealt with depression and/or the helplessness and hopelessness that accompanies addictions can recognize that razor’s edge of keeping alive or letting life go. The lesson that was taught to me here, as I allowed the proper words and expressions to flow to me and through me, went something like this, “You are letting go of your old outdated image of (name) as a person weighed down with darkness, depression, and hopelessness to a vision of who and where he is in this moment, a shining light resting in the peacefulness of God finally touching in this other lifetime what are he could not reach here on earth.

I was blessed to become aware again the the power of perception and how much of a choice it truly is. I can choose to see you as an imperfect personality self or I can also see you as a child of God. I do not know how do you perceive yourself nor can I know that. Am I willing to let go of my limited perception of who you are?

Not only does our perception cloud who we think we are or who we think others are, but also clouds the perception my history. I think of my history as being a linear string of facts describing my past and leading up to today. But even in the histories of nations and the world, we are influenced by judgments, prejudice, my desire to be right and sometimes the desire to paint ourselves in the best possible light. You have heard it expressed “the winners write history.” And that is true. As an example, for people my age, especially men, we live in the mythology as children as we played cowboys and Indians that Cowboys were good and the Indians were bad And even in our history there was not much good to say about those conquered races. It is only now that we are broadening our concepts, our conceptual horizons. By the way, I think this is a real plus as a race. We are able to look more deeply and honestly at ourselves and even begin to take responsibility for the injustices we might have produced.

Many of us have had the experience when sharing family memories with siblings, realizing that we are speaking of the same event but each one of us holds it quite a bit differently than the other. In fact, it might seem that we are speaking or remembering a totally different event! But we are talking about the same event, but with different perceptions and sometimes even different outcomes.

What all of this is pointing to is that although there are facts in your life, what you consider to be your history is more of a string of interpretations then actual physical events. Thus we introduce the concept of illusion, not as something being bad or wrong but simply something that has no real basis in reality except in your in your mind.

We have a suggested homework assignment: One is to go back and to examine an incident or experience in your life and without judgment or pushing too hard asking yourself “How can I perceive this differently?”

Another suggestion would be to dwell on this wonderful one-liner from Crosby, Stills and Nash, “Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now.”

Closing with a sharing from one of our classmates with a pertinent selection from ACIM second edition:

Chapter 13, Section VII. Attainment of the Real World - Paragraph 9 Sentence 4:

"Knowledge needs no correction. Yet the dreams of love lead unto knowledge.  In them you see nothing fearful and because of this they are welcome that you offer knowledge.  Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but your welcome of what always was. Therefore the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost.”

Peace.

WELCOME 10

Let’s not forget the wisdom that is called to us in the beginning this chapter—“Welcome” is a command and manifestation, calling to us the loving presence of the beings who are leading and teaching  us all along this path of transformation. Not only are we calling them into our consciousness, but we are also reminding ourselves that we are not alone.

It is so often that we get caught up in our personality selves and play games such as “Ain't it awful; nobody understands me; this will never end; I can't let go of fear, blame, anger.” I become so lost in my individuality that I forget—I am not alone in all this.

As I sat with our work this week I became aware that all of these hurdles that we are working with such as blame, judgment, non-forgiveness are all forms of separateness thinking. They all come from a sense of identifying with this limited personality self.

Separateness can be disguised in many ways—blames, shame, guilt, fear—

but the effect is the same—when we are in those states of mind, we are buying into the idea that we are different—separate— buying into that superficial veneer of who we are—again the ego or personality self becomes our truth.

I do not wish to deny the discomfort or challenge of attempting to transform the limited perception of our personalities into that of a deeper divine reality, but it is just as this we are being called to work on.

“So how do you move beyond blame? How do you learn a new way of being? How do you decide something different in a new way when what you have known, when what you have been taught, is to blame somebody else for what occurs in your life? You decide that you can. “I know who I am, what I am, how I serve” will bring you, once again, into alignment with your true nature. When you know who you are, you know that you are the one accountable to all of your choices, and that includes how you respond to anything and everything that has occurred historically that you would decide has created your problems.”

Here is another lesson with regards to our personality self and our divine nature. We do not deny blame for or fear but we understand that those forms of separateness come from a limited perception of the self. By claiming the truths of who we are, we align ourselves with a higher reality. We also do not suppose that even though our consciousness dwells in a higher reality that those lower reality vibrations will simply disappear. They are still present for us to choose or occupy if we decide.

We spent a good amount of time and energy exploring the idea of someone, including ourselves, “doing the best we could do.’ This gets a little tricky because I am never going to be able to apply this notion of someone “doing the best they can” unless I am also willing to apply it to myself. It is only when I embrace that “I am doing the best I can” that I can be open and willing to accept about another.

(To the personality self, “doing the best I can” does not fit. There is always going to be judgment and comparison).

We have been taught that there is something wrong with us if we make a mistake. If we were to step back for a moment and be gently honest with ourselves, we would begin to realize that what we are calling a mistake is really a piece of information that comes into our awareness that we did not have before. So often we realize that an action we might have taken even though we might have deliberated on it for a while turned out to be the “wrong” one. We would never have followed through with that particular action if we already knew the consequences. Even the best of us in the best of circumstances have weighed and deliberated over certain actions and, as best we could, have predicted the outcome that we expected. If we had known the outcome would be different or difficult or not what we expected we would have taken a different course of action.

Now doing the best we can do is not an encouragement to be irresponsible. If I made a mess, even though I did not intend to, cleaning up that mess is my responsibility. Now here is another tricky piece because being responsible requires a higher form of awareness. There are many who might not have this level of awareness and so the mess that might be made through a faulty decision might blamed on someone or something else.

It does not seem fair, at least to my personality self, that there might be messes produced by someone else and yet it is still my responsibility to clean it up. I am reminded of that great one-liner from Spiderman “With great power comes great responsibility.” What we are doing here is replacing the word “power” with the concept of awareness. “With great awareness comes great responsibility.”

There will be times when we wish that we weren't so aware, when we would have loved to pretend that the mess is either not there or somebody else's problem. I am not speaking of codependency here; there are certainly going to be times when we need to allow the other person, whether they are aware of it or not, to be responsible for their actions. On the other hand, however, if their actions are messing up other peoples lives, I might have some responsibility here.

Please do not start playing the “what-if” game. These are not intellectual concepts we are talking about; they are reflections of our openness to our heart’s wisdom. There are no rules or regulations here. I want to be aware of where and how my heart leads me.

I continually come back to the challenge of deeply believing in the transformational power Love and to recognize that truly loving is the most meaningful thing I can do for myself for others.

I will close with the question:

Can you hold the light for those who cannot hold it for themselves/???