Giving away our Power
Owning our mistakes is the first step.
One of the often overused phrases is the idea of giving your power away. And, like happens many a time, it is often misinterpreted, as if it were about pride, or “strength,” but it is not. It is about knowing who we are in truth - soft strength. Throughout my life, the song from kindergarten is in my mind, a circle dance: “Children of one father, give each other a hand.”
The truth is, that if we remember, but truly remember, as in knowing full well, with every fiber of our being, that we are God’s children, nobody and nothing could ever insult us or enslave us. And this concept is the core of what Jesus teaches, and in modern form that comes through in A Course in Miracles. This was the core concept of MLK expressed in the above quote.
If I am white, I would ignore any accusation of being black and vice versa. If I know that my body is just a rental costume, but it is not who and what I am, then people could call me black, yellow, purple or white, tall or short, and it would not make any difference, for inside the costume, I would still know who I am. The ego stamps its foot, saying I am NOT as God created me, but in the Course, Jesus insists on teaching me that:
³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me. (ACIM, W-rVI.in.3:3-5)
This is why the teaching of forgiveness in the Course is so central, for it is about exactly that, taking back your power, but not in the confrontational sense of ego-competition, but in the spiritual sense of remembering who you are in truth. The Oneness of Spirit is not denied by the experience of duality in this world of time and space where observer and observed seem different. This is the reason why the Course says:
Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. ²Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. ³In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. ⁴Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. ⁵It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM, T-27.VIII.6:1-5)
Into eternity, where all IS one. It never ceased to be. Just because we fell asleep and into this nightmare dream which now seems to be our reality, this world of duality is by definition a substitute, a pseudo reality. It is the matrix, which rests on the one mistake of us choosing to be something, someone specific, instead of our reality of being part of everything, a child of God, resting in the power of God. The ego in us insists on giving away our power, and blaming everyone else for doing it.
That original “tiny, mad idea,” IS the separation thought, and the foundation on which the separate identity of the ego rests. It is a profound thought of hate, which we then promptly project outward, first on God, making him out to be the creator of this world of duality, instead of our true Creator in the Oneness of Spirit. And after that first moment, we fall into the endless replication of that first faulty choice, which manifests in the world as the Hegelian dialectic of problems we see in the world, and which we propose to fix, and its resolution always again evolves into yet another problem, because the causes we see in the world are a chain of causation that is designed to cover up that first faulty choice, which sets the whole thing up in the first place, but which we do not want to look at. In this world outside of us, we then experience a thousand slights that seemingly justify us being angry at someone or something outside of us.
Forgiveness is the cure, but properly understood, the condition for forgiveness is the realization that the slight we see outside is just a projection of our own faulty choice, and regardless of what our brothers may or may not have done, this is the first cause, so we are forgiving ourselves for projecting outside what is wrong inside, and therefore never dealing with it. Forgiveness for one incident at a time, is the HS Green Stamp program (remember, we used to have the H&S Green Stamp program, but this one is a lot better). And when our book is full, that is called Accepting the Atonement for ourselves, i.e. the realization that nothing ever happened. In the Gospel that moment is symbolized by the Baptism in the River Jordan (the stream of time-bound experience), and the Heavens opening, so we hear the voice for God saying: “Thou art My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” In other words, that is the moment when we wash off the worldly experience that literally means nothing, and come back to the realization that indeed nothing happened and we are still God’s Son.
To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. ²All the rest must be forgotten. ³Forgiveness is a selective remembering, based not on your selection. ⁴For the shadow figures you would make immortal are “enemies” of reality. ⁵Be willing to forgive the Son of God for what he did not do. ⁶The shadow figures are the witnesses you bring with you to demonstrate he did what he did not. ⁷Because you bring them, you will hear them. ⁸And you who keep them by your own selection do not understand how they came into your mind, and what their purpose is. ⁹They represent the evil that you think was done to you. ¹⁰You bring them with you only that you may return evil for evil, hoping that their witness will enable you to think guiltily of another and not harm yourself. ¹¹They speak so clearly for the separation that no one not obsessed with keeping separation could hear them. ¹²They offer you the “reasons” why you should enter into unholy alliances to support the ego’s goals, and make your relationships the witness to its power. (ACIM, T-17.III.1:1-12)
We seem to be in a time of crisis and I am deeply moved by the people who have the courage to speak up like Andrew Bridgen in the UK, and Christine Anderson in Germany and in her role in the EU. Still rolling back one mistake is not the solution, we should not dwell on it, but if we give it to the Holy Spirit, we may begin to see it differently. Seeing the enemy outside, be it as a virus, a big pharma executive, or Bill Gates, accomplishes nothing unless and until we get to the one reason why I always see bastards in the world outside.
But the world does serve a purpose, for it is the projection screen where we get to see the results of the wrong choices we made, and which we are unconscious of. This is the reason for the Jesus Logion that “to those outside the Kingdom, it all comes in parables.” The world outside is merely the projection of our unconscious mind, but, being what it is, it affords us the luxury of recognizing our problem in the form of parables. We lose it when we attack the figures in the dream, that is when we choose duality over non-duality, and once again we give our power away. Nuremberg trials, and hanging the bastards, did not solve anything, neither did the French revolution, the Haitian revolution, or the American revolution. What matters is doing the next step and following the we walk the thread of Ariadne back all the way out of the labyrinth that is the ego thought system.
Having said that, the process starts with simply recognizing how much trouble we are in, and for that, opportunities abound at the moment, just don’t stop there, but follow the trail back to the origin so you take back the projection. That is true forgiveness.
