How I Feel About You Is My Choice Now
by Tom Baker
Lesson: Chapter 7, VII, The Totality of the Kingdom
and Lesson 63,
The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness.
Date: November 23, 2008
Over the past several weeks in class we have been discussing Lesson 136 which is a thorough explication of its title, Sickness is a defense against the truth. In the lesson Jesus states 1) that sickness is not an accident and 2) that sickness is a decision. That sickness would be our choice flies in the face of the ego's most convincing area of victimization, disease. It is ego dogma that we are made sick, we get sick unwillingly, and others make us sick out of their carelessness. Moving over into the area of feelings, we unconsciously claim victimization when we say that someone's behavior makes us sick, or that a job or a relationship is killing us. We often claim that we cannot help despising someone, or that my anger at you is caused by how you act. We routinely explain our life as something that has happened to us.
The most troubling theological question is, "Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?" Thus, "the will of God" is a term weighted with dread rather than joy. We even deny choice in simple things like eating. We say that the donut called our name. In a universe without choice we are helpless victims of circumstances, of forces beyond our control, and finally of God. The ego's system is tight and convincing. Yet there is a crack in the door where the divine light of truth pierces the darkness. That crack is choice. It is the one freedom that the ego cannot take away. While choice can be consciously exercised with sickness, it's hard to do or rather it's hard to want to do. It might be easier in respect to blessing others who seem to "make" us angry. Although they are probably the same door, the crack in the forgiving door seems a good deal wider than the crack in the healing door. Perhaps it is best to begin with blessing the brother or sister who makes me mad rather than trying to cure them of cancer or raise them from the dead.
"When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless him. His need is yours. You need the blessing you can offer him. There is no way for you to have it except by giving it. This is the law of God, and it has no exceptions. What you deny you lack, not because it is lacking, but because you have denied it in another and are therefore not aware of it in yourself. Every response you make is determined by what you think you are, and what you want to be is what you think you are. What you want to be, then, must determine every response you make." (Chap. 7, VII. The Totality of the Kingdom, p. 127).
If I want to be blessed then I must bless you. Not so I will actually be blessed but so I will be conscious of being blessed. The ego idea has conditioned our thinking to respond to insane behavior with attack and judgment. We then feel more open to attack and more vulnerable to judgment. To respond with insanity with more insanity is to become the lunatic we seek to cure. The purpose of blessing is not to control the other's behavior or responses but to clear our own minds of war. If I have a mind of peace I bring the choice of peace to the situation. If I have a mind of war I bring only my type of attack to the situation. By defending my type of attack I will attempt to gain the moral high ground and thereby win a victory of judgment rather than of blessing.
One of my first experiences of marriage counseling as a priest was with a couple, each of whom admitted that they wanted to kill the other but dared not for fear of eternal damnation. They came to me so that I might, as they put it, make them like each other again. I was 30 years old and only recently ordained so I had little or no experience with troubled couples to draw upon. Also their problem seemed to me to be so severe that they were beyond the help of even the finest professional. So instead of referring them to the parish psychologist I prayed and asked Jesus to give me some ideas.
Almost immediately the idea came to me to tell them each to pray out loud while the other listened intently with an open heart. I saw the image of an egg timer in my mind so I added that they had to each pray for five minutes and time it. I did not require them to pray for each other or even to pray in their own words but simply to pray aloud and to listen while the other prayed. They both dutifully agreed. I was to be amazed time and again at how people tried to do exactly as I told them. Such was my authority as a priest. They came back several days later holding hands. They excitedly told me how hearing the other pray changed their entire outlook toward their recently despised spouse. "He's like a little choir boy when he prays," the wife exclaimed. He beamed. "She's really an angel." Whether the change held I never knew since they were from a different parish and they never came back to me, but the transformation I saw on their return visit suggested that each had made a choice for peace rather than for war and the other's choice was itself an invitation to chose peace. The Course would add, to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, that each of them by praying invited themselves to be the blessing they sought for the other. Thus blessing offers a choice to both the blesser and the blessee.
"You do not need God's blessing because you have it forever, but you do need yours. The ego's picture of you is deprived, unloving and vulnerable. You cannot love this. Yet you can very easily escape this image by leaving it behind. You are not there and that is not you. Do not see this picture in anyone, or you have accepted it as you. All illusions about the Sonship are dispelled together as they were made together. Teach no one that he is what you would not want to be. You brother is the mirror in which you see the image of yourself as long as perception lasts. And perception will last until the Sonship knows itself as whole. You made perception and it must last as long as you want it." (T. p. 127).
The teacher of God has the world for a classroom and everyone for a student. It is a new but compelling notion that how I choose to see you is teaching you and me what we are. In chapter six Jesus in effect speaks from the cross the central lesson of the Course, "Teach only love for that is what you are." Here in chapter seven the scope of our teaching is expanded to include everyone we perceive, including ourselves. While the responsibility of such a teaching situation might at first seem daunting, the opportunity to change human consciousness for the good is an amazing promise. In Lesson 63 that promise is articulated with the prayer:
The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness. I am the means God has appointed for the salvation of the world.
Thus you and I, merely through our blessing the world in each person we meet and remember, bring about salvation. How simple. How wonderful!
As you can see I leapt forward this week to part VII. The Totality of the Kingdom. I will handle part VIII. The Unbelievable Belief next week.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2008