Competition

A meaningless world engenders fear because

I think I am in competition with God.

You may find it difficult to avoid resistance, in one form or another, to this concluding statement.

Whatever form such resistance may take, remind yourself that you are really afraid of such a thought because of the "vengeance" of the "enemy."

You are not expected to believe the statement at this point, and will probably dismiss it as preposterous.

Note carefully, however, any signs of overt or covert fear which it may arouse.

Decisions

You are not asked to make insane decisions, although you can think you are.

It must, however, be insane to believe that it is up to you to decide what God's creations are.

The Holy Spirit perceives the conflict exactly as it is.

Therefore, His second lesson is:

To have peace, teach peace to learn it.

Softly

Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence.

And from this dream the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son.

Dream of your brother's kindnesses instead of dwelling in your dreams on his mistakes.

Select his thoughtfulness to dream about instead of counting up the hurts he gave.

Forgive him his illusions, and give thanks to him for all the helpfulness he gave.

And do not brush aside his many gifts because he is not perfect in your dreams.

He represents his Father, Whom you see as offering both life and death to you.

What is the Peace of God?

 
No more than this; the simple understanding that His Will is wholly without opposite. 

There is no thought that contradicts His Will, yet can be true. 

The contrast between His Will and yours but seemed to be reality. 

In truth there was no conflict, for His Will is yours. 

Now is the mighty Will of God Himself His gift to you. 

He does not seek to keep it for Himself. 

Why would you seek to keep your tiny frail imaginings apart from Him? 

The Will of God is one and all there is. This is your heritage. 

The universe beyond the sun and stars, and all the thoughts of which you can conceive, belong to you. God's peace is the condition for His Will. 

Attain His peace, and you remember Him.

A tiny island

The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh and then projected outward. 

This produces what seems to be a wall of flesh around the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master.

And this unholy instant seems to be life; an instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water and set uncertainly upon oblivion.

Here does the Son of God stop briefly by, to offer his devotion to death's idols and then pass on. And here he is more dead than living.

Yet it is also here he makes his choice again between idolatry and love. 

Thomas Merton, 'No Man Is an Island'

The least of learning is done in the classrooms.

Thomas Merton

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

Thomas Merton

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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Easy

When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing.

There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer.

Only your own volition seems to make deciding hard.

The Holy Spirit will not delay in answering your every question what to do. He knows.

And He will tell you, and then do it for you.

You who are tired will find this is more restful than sleep. For you can bring your guilt into sleeping, but not into this.

As you perceive the holy companions who travel with you, you will realize that there is no journey, but only an awakening.

The Son of God, who sleepeth not, has kept faith with his Father for you.

There is no road to travel on, and no time to travel through.

For God waits not for His Son in time, being forever unwilling to be without him.

And so it has always been.

Let the holiness of God's Son shine away the cloud of guilt that darkens your mind, and by accepting his purity as yours, learn of him that it is yours.

Gifts

When the Atonement has been completed, all talents will be shared by all the Sons of God. God is not partial. 

All His children have His total Love, and all His gifts are freely given to everyone alike. 

"Except ye become as little children" means that unless you fully recognize your complete dependence on God, you cannot know the real power of the Son in his true relationship with the Father. 

The specialness of God's Sons does not stem from exclusion but from inclusion. 

All my brothers are special. If they believe they are deprived of anything, their perception becomes distorted. 

When this occurs the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its relationships.

Delay in Time

Both time and delay are meaningless in eternity.

I have said before that the Holy Spirit is God's Answer to the ego.

Everything of which the Holy Spirit reminds you is in direct opposition to the ego's notions, because true and false perceptions are themselves opposed.

The Holy Spirit has the task of undoing what the ego has made. 

He undoes it at the same level on which the ego operates, or the mind would be unable to understand the change.

Salvation

Salvation cannot seek to help God's Son be more unfair than he has sought to be.

If miracles, the Holy Spirit's gift, were given specially to an elect and special group, and kept apart from others as less deserving, then is He ally to specialness.

What He cannot perceive He bears no witness to.

And everyone is equally entitled to His gift of healing and deliverance and peace.

To give a problem to the Holy Spirit to solve for you means that you want it solved.

To keep it for yourself to solve without His help is to decide it should remain unsettled, unresolved, and lasting in its power of injustice and attack.

No one can be unjust to you, unless you have decided first to be unjust.

And then must problems rise to block your way, and peace be scattered by the winds of hate.

The New Beginning

Now becomes the focus of the curriculum.

The goal is clear, but now you need specific methods for attaining it.

The speed by which it can be reached depends on this one thing alone; your willingness to practice every step.

Each one will help a little, every time it is attempted.

And together will these steps lead you from dreams of judgment to forgiving dreams and out of pain and fear.

They are not new to you, but they are more ideas than rules of thought to you as yet.

So now we need to practice them awhile, until they are the rules by which you live.

We seek to make them habits now, so you will have them ready for whatever need.

prayers

The prayer for things of this world will bring experiences of this world.

If the prayer of the heart asks for this, this will be given because this will be received.

It is impossible that the prayer of the heart remain unanswered in the perception of the one who asks.

If he asks for the impossible, if he wants what does not exist or seeks for illusions in his heart, all this becomes his own.

The power of his decision offers it to him as he requests.

Herein lie hell and Heaven. The sleeping Son of God has but this power left to him. It is enough.

His words do not matter. Only the Word of God has any meaning, because it symbolizes that which has no human symbols at all.

The Holy Spirit alone understands what this Word stands for.

And this, too, is enough.

Jesus said: (from Osho "The Mustard Seed"

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR A MAN TO MOUNT TWO HORSES

 AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR A SERVANT TO SERVE TWO MASTERS,

OTHERWISE HE WILL HONOR THE ONE AND OFFEND THE OTHER.

Everybody is already mounted on two horses,  – not only two but many.

That’s how anguish is created, that’s why you are constantly in anxiety.

Anxiety shows that somehow you are mounted on two horses. How can you be at ease?

Impossible, because the two horses are moving in two directions, and you cannot move anywhere.

With one horse movement is possible, you can reach somewhere.

With two horses movement is impossible, they will negate each other and you will not reach anywhere.

And this is the anxiety –that you are not reaching anywhere.

Deep down this is the anguish: that life is slipping out of your hands, time is becoming less and less, death is coming near and you are not reaching anywhere.

It is as if you have become a stagnant pool, just getting dryer and dryer and dying.

There is no goal, no fulfillment.

But why is it happening? – because you have been trying to do the impossible.

Creation

The creative power of God and His creations is limitless, but they are not in reciprocal relationship.

You communicate fully with God, as He does with you.

This is an ongoing process in which you share, and because you share it, you are inspired to create like God.

Yet in creation you are not in a reciprocal relation to God, since He created you but you did not create Him.

I have already told you that only in this respect your creative power differs from His.

Even in this world there is a parallel. Parents give birth to children, but children do not give birth to parents.

They do, however, give birth to their children, and thus give birth as their parents do.

Everything

Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply being.

The ego is thus against communication, except insofar as it is utilized to establish separateness rather than to abolish it.

The communication system of the ego is based on its own thought system, as is everything else it dictates.

Its communication is controlled by its need to protect itself, and it will disrupt communication when it experiences threat.

This disruption is a reaction to a specific person or persons.

The specificity of the ego's thinking, then, results in spurious generalization which is really not abstract at all. It merely responds in certain specific ways to everything it perceives as related.

Listening

Listening to one Voice implies the decision to share It in order to hear It yourself.

The Mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God, because God's Wholeness is the wholeness of His Son.

You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness.

Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself.

This is the meaning of "turning the other cheek."

Teaching is done in many ways, above all by example. Teaching should be healing, because it is the sharing of ideas and the recognition that to share ideas is to strengthen them. 

I cannot forget my need to teach what I have learned, which arose in me because I learned it. I call upon you to teach what you have learned, because by so doing you can depend on it.

Judgment

The choice to judge rather than to know is the cause of the loss of peace.

Judgment is the process on which perception but not knowledge rests.

I have discussed this before in terms of the selectivity of perception, pointing out that evaluation is its obvious prerequisite.

Judgment always involves rejection. It never emphasizes only the positive aspects of what is judged, whether in you or in others.

What has been perceived and rejected, or judged and found wanting, remains in your mind because it has been perceived.

One of the illusions from which you suffer is the belief that what you judged against has no effect.

This cannot be true unless you also believe that what you judged against does not exist.

You evidently do not believe this, or you would not have judged against it.

In the end it does not matter whether your judgment is right or wrong.

Either way you are placing your belief in the unreal.

This cannot be avoided in any type of judgment, because it implies the belief that reality is yours to select from.

Healing

The beautiful relationship you have with all your brothers is a part of you because it is a part of God Himself.

Are you not sick, if you deny yourself your wholeness and your health, the Source of help, the Call to healing and the Call to heal?

Your savior waits for healing, and the world waits with him.

Nor are you apart from it. For healing will be one or not at all, its oneness being where the healing is.

What could correct for separation but its opposite?
There is no middle ground in any aspect of salvation.

You accept it wholly or accept it not. What is unseparated must be joined.

And what is joined cannot be separate.

Pleasure

What is the real meaning of sacrifice? It is the cost of believing in illusions. 

It is the price that must be paid for the denial of truth. 

There is no pleasure of the world that does not demand this, for otherwise the pleasure would be seen as pain, and no one asks for pain if he recognizes it. 

It is the idea of sacrifice that makes him blind. 

He does not see what he is asking for. 

And so he seeks it in a thousand ways and in a thousand places, each time believing it is there, and each time disappointed in the end. "Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise.

The idea of lack

You who want peace can find it only by complete forgiveness.

No learning is acquired by anyone unless he wants to learn it and believes in some way that he needs it.

While lack does not exist in the creation of God, it is very apparent in what you have made. It is, in fact, the essential difference between them.

Lack implies that you would be better off in a state somehow different from the one you are in.

Until the "separation," which is the meaning of the "fall," nothing was lacking.

There were no needs at all. Needs arise only when you deprive yourself.

You act according to the particular order of needs you establish.

This, in turn, depends on your perception of what you are.

Curriculum

This course has come from him because his words have reached you in a language you can love and understand.

Are other teachers possible, to lead the way to those who speak in different tongues and appeal to different symbols?

Certainly there are. Would God leave anyone without a very present help in time of trouble; a savior who can symbolize Himself?

Yet do we need a many-faceted curriculum, not because of content differences, but because symbols must shift and change to suit the need. Jesus has come to answer yours.

In him you find God's Answer. Do you, then, teach with him, for he is with you; he is always here.