AGING MIRACULOUSLY PART THREE CLASS NOTES
Let us unburden ourselves of the emotional weight accumulated in Acts 1 and 2, opening our hearts to receive the blessings of a new and unimaginably glorious Act 3. We can’t fully let in the new until we have fully surrendered the old. We must release the past in order to reprogram the future.
The emotional key to surrendering the past is to forgive it. Forgiveness paves the way to miracles because it is the path to love.
According to A Course in Miracles, only love is real; the love you gave in the past is real and eternal, and the love anyone else gave to you is real and eternal. Fear, or lovelessness, does not emanate from the Mind of God and therefore does not actually exist. Any lovelessness in your past was an illusion, and need not enter into the present with you unless you bring it with you.
Let us release all lovelessness, that it might plague our lives no more.
FORGIVENESS: FREEING OURSELVES FROM THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST
Forgiveness is the release of thoughts of grievance and attack that otherwise act like poisons in our psychic bloodstream. It is the fundamental key to inner peace and the crux of miraculous aging.
Aging miraculously is about becoming lighter as we age. Light, in A Course in Miracles, is defined as “understanding.” Most of carry accumulated emotional weight as we age: the weight of past hurts, past regrets, and past grievances. According to the Course, we can have a grievance or a miracle – but we cannot have both.
Forgiveness as it is described in A Course in Miracles is not the old-fashioned sense that someone else was a jerk, but since you’re so spiritual now you will deign to forgive them. Rather, it’s our ability to penetrate to the deepest understanding of ourselves and others, that we might realize the unalterable innocence that lies within us all.
All of us are perfect, innocent children of God, but most of us most of the time do not necessarily act that way. That is as true of us as it is true of others. For the world in which we live is dominated by a thought system based on fear – and we were mentally trained to be part of that thought system from our earliest days on earth. It is the human condition that we have forgotten who we really are, and having forgotten who we are we have forgotten who we are to each other.
A fear-based thought system is predicated on the notion that we are our bodies; thus we are separate from each other; and thus when our bodies die our lives are over. In fact we are spirits and not bodies; on the level of spirit we are not separate but one; and the death of the physical body is just like taking off a suit of clothes. Life is one, and it lasts forever.
Enlightenment – or the unlearning of a thought system based on fear (ego) and the learning instead of a thought system based on love (Spirit) – is the key to aging miraculously because it is the key to being happy at all. Whether we are twenty or eighty, an over-attachment to the body is bound to produce misery. Most of us laugh inwardly at that thought, of course, because we feel we’d rather have the misery of a younger body than the misery of an older one. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we remember that our minds could be as vicious when we were young as they can be now. At any age, it is the condition of the mind more than the condition of the body that produces most joy or sorrow.
That is why your greatest power to age miraculously lies in your power to rethink your life, and everyone and everything in it. Forgiveness is a radical shift from a focus on the body to a focus on the spirit; from an emphasis on worldly guilt to an emphasis on spiritual innocence.
Why do we wish to see the spiritual innocence in someone rather than their worldly guilt? Because how we see others is how we will see ourselves. Since on the spiritual plane there is only one of us here, every blessing on another is a blessing on ourselves and every attack thought toward another is an attack upon ourselves. We forgive others in order to release ourselves. Nothing anyone ever did to us in the past is as damaging to us as our unwillingness to forgive them now.
WHAT IS THE ATONEMENT?
The cornerstone of the ego’s thought system is the idea that someone is guilty. The cornerstone of the Spirit’s thought system is the idea of their eternal innocence. Whether you’re thinking about yourself or about anyone else, thoughts of guilt lead to suffering and thoughts of forgiveness lead to peace.
For many of us, particularly as we age, the person we most need to forgive is ourselves. For years we might have carried around the thought that someone else betrayed us, but then in the last few years things have started to change. Our inner eyes begin to open. We can see more clearly the mistakes that we ourselves made, in situations some of which we will not have the chance to do over. We’ve started to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t simply that we had been abandoned, or fired, or whatever – that in fact, perhaps we hadn’t been such a wonderful spouse, or employee, or whatever. Anger at someone might begin to subside but our own shame, embarrassment, humiliation and self-hatred are only starting to gear up.
That is why forgiving ourselves is as important as forgiving others. And attacking ourselves is as blasphemous as attacking others. Whether they were the culprit or we were – and in most situations, it was at least a bit of both – the breach between the deeper truth of our being and the way we behaved is something that God views with mercy, not judgement. And He asks that we do too. Our task on earth is to learn to think like God thinks. With infinite compassion, and with infinite love.
HOW DO WE FORGIVE OURSELVES?
How do we forgive ourselves? This is particularly hard when we’ve reached an age where we feel we won’t be getting another chance at the relationship we blew or ignored for too long, or the career we sabotaged, or the financial opportunity we lost or whatever. None of those things are necessarily true, but there is no doubt the ego uses the passage of years to make our self-bludgeoning even more painful.
In truth, there is never an age past which God has run out of miracles for us. He is incapable of saying, “I’d love to help you, but you waited too long.”
In any situation in life where we feel we messed up because of loveless thought or behavior, it is true that we deflected miracles that occur naturally in the presence of love. But once again, A Course in Miracles says those miracles are held in trust for us until we are ready to receive them. The Atonement is God’s gift to us; a way to re-align our thinking with His mercy and thus release the miracles we had deflected before.
How do we do that? We can’t do it by ignoring our responsibility; only in taking one hundred per cent responsibility for our lives can we change them. Rather, we have to take a good hard look at our mistakes of the past in order to surrender them to God for healing. It says in A Course in Miracles that God will not take from us what we are unwilling to release to Him. That is a process that can indeed be painful, but it is necessary in order to get to the other side.
It is when we atone, make amends where appropriate, and humbly and sincerely ask God to change us so we can be a better person now, that miracles will flow unimpeded into your life once more.
This is from page 90 of the Text of A Course in Miracles:
“….realize that you must already have decided not to be wholly joyous if that is how you feel. Therefore, the first step in the undoing is to recognize that you actively decided wrongly, but can as actively decide otherwise. Be very firm with yourself in this, and keep yourself fully aware that the undoing process, which does not come from you, is nevertheless within you because God placed it there. Your part is merely to return your thinking to the point at which the error was made, and give it over to the Atonement in peace. Say this to yourself as sincerely as you can, remembering that the Holy Spirit will respond fully to your slightest invitation:
I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace.
I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.
I want to decide otherwise, because I want to be at peace.
I will not feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo all the
consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him.
I choose to let Him, by allowing Him to decide for God for me.”
Remember: time does not actually exist. The three dimensions are merely a construct of the mortal mind. In going to God, we enter the dimension of ultimate Reality, the quantum time beyond time and space. And there, YES we can indeed “go back” — and the Holy Spirit will undo the consequences of our mistakes.
In A Course in Miracles, it says that whatever miracles we deflected by our wrong decisions in the past are held in trust for us by the Holy Spirit until we are ready to receive them. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that lover will come back – or that job, or that money — but it means that the content they represented will indeed return in whatever form is appropriate.
So no matter what mistakes you made in the past, decide for God now. The Holy Instant interrupts the pattern of past mistakes and frees us to a future unlike it.
Once again, there is power in your writing these things down. Write a letter to God and tell Him all of it: how you hate yourself for this or that, how a particular situation fills you with shame to remember, or how you can never stop obsessing about your stupidity in some situation decades ago. Give all of it to Him.
Prayer of Atonement
Dear God,
I surrender to You the things
That I know I did wrong.
I look clearly at what I did that I know I should not have done,
And I look clearly at what I didn’t do that I know in my heart I should have done,
And I surrender to You my shame.
In those moments I sauntered ahead of You, dear God;
I did not let Your Spirit lead me.
In my arrogance I thought I knew better than You,
But in this moment I choose again.
I atone and I give thanks
for this chance to begin again.
Amen
FORGIVING OTHERS
The more time we’ve spent on earth, the more experiences we’ve had. And the more experiences we’ve had, the more some of them might not have been wonderful.
Many things can weigh us down with resentment. Love affairs, marriage, financial issues, and any number of other areas create accumulated layers of resentment. And those we choose not to forgive are going on with their lives – it’s we who go forward carrying the emotional burden of our unforgiveness.
Now, in order to claim a miraculous Act 3, it is time to forgive those who hurt you in the past.
Remember that forgiveness, from the perspective of A Course in Miracles, does not mean someone else was a total jerk but you’re spiritual so you forgive them now. It means that since only love is Real, you need not remain at the effect of lovelessness either in yourself or in others. You can “overlook” the lovelessness someone else displayed towards you, thus rising above it in your experience. You are released from the effects of a wound when you release the one who wounded you.
Dear God,
I carry in my heart
Such anger and resentment
Towards those who hurt me.
I was victimized
Or at least I feel that way,
And I wish to feel that way no longer.
I am willing to see this differently.
Please remove from my mind
my memories of pain,
and my attachment to wrongs
that were perpetrated against me.
Despite my resistance, dear God,
I pray You bless even those who wronged me.
For I wish to be free of this burden I carry.
Send Your Spirit into my mind,
As I surrender to You my thoughts about……
Give me new eyes with which to see him (or her).
Give me new ears with which to hear their side of the story.
Please dissolve this weight upon my heart,
That my past shall no longer taunt me.
I give mercy to those who hurt me
That I might feel Your mercy upon me.
I am willing to rise above, dear God.
Please show me how.
Amen
Since only love is real and nothing else exists (the cornerstone principle of A Course in Miracles), no lovelessness anyone has ever displayed towards you has created permanent effects. Any miracles that might have been withheld from you are held in trust, just waiting for your mercy and forgiveness to be released into your awareness now.
Forgive, not to free others but to free yourself. For only in releasing them will you be released.
Take this opportunity to write down all your grievances, resentments, and feelings of victimization. Do not allow them to fester within your psyche, but write them down in order to surrender them to God. Literally write, “Dear God, I give these thought to you.” Pray that He change your mind about them for you. Pray that the Holy Spirit show you the innocence beyond the veil of someone’s guilt, that you might be at the effect of that person’s lovelessness no more.
This allows the Holy Spirit to remove all effects of that lovelessness in your life, to divinely compensate for whatever you have lost, and to begin your life again. For we cannot be affected by something we do not believe in. This is what it means to be “reborn” – to enter into the present with nothing brought with you from the past.
Entering now into the second half of this course, it is time for us to start opening to the present and to the future with a renewed sense of hope. Surrendering the past is essential now. Forgive what you do not want, that you might receive what you really do.
All best wishes to you, and much love…
Marianne