The Executioner's Song of Prayer

I'm a Course Fundamentalist at my core. That doesn't mean I make it my purpose in life to convert everyone to my way of thinking. It simply means that I try not to interpret the Course in ways that make it work better for me, or to more conveniently excuse behaviors, or make it more politically correct. It is my goal to stick to the Course's fundamental principles, and to its original meaning.

There are a lot of "denominations" out there, reinterpreting Jesus' explicit words from the Course to mitigate the way they want to see things. Fine...they can believe what they want, but it's really not A Course in Miracles that they are now practicing. It's not my job to judge or correct them, but it does bring me back to my own center when I see an interpretation that isn't consistent with the Course. I can then take the opportunity for myself to make sure I'm "on Course," or to ask for help in making corrections when I'm not (which is most often the case).

There is an interesting comment on one of my previous postings that came in recently. I appreciate all comments, but I also reserve the right to apply Course thought to them as a learning example for myself. Anyway, this comment is about the Law of Attraction and my musings about the movie, The Secret, from several months ago. The poster, Patricia, wonders if the issue of child abuse, specifically sexual abuse and incest, might not be more related to the karma of past lives than the current application of The Law of Attraction.

First, let me say that it doesn't matter either way, if what we're really talking about is the thought system of A Course in Miracles (and we are). Anything that happens in our world, including child abuse, war, winning the lotto jackpot, falling in love, seeing a beautiful sunset, watching whales in Maui...all the seemingly good, and all the seemingly evil...is still part of the world. And that world does not exist.

I'm a big fan of Ken Wapnick's prolific works on A Course in Miracles. I got to spend yesterday in a workshop with him here in Denver, and it was wonderful to feel his energy in person and not just off the written page. He covered a lot of the basic principles of ACIM, a very important one being, "an idea leaves not its source." If the collective "we" are an idea, or creation, of God, it's impossible that we could leave our Source.

Let's review the Course's logic:

Where Love exists, fear cannot.
Only Love exists.

Now, because our world is all about fear, by the basic logic above, Love cannot be here. And if Love isn't here, our world cannot exist except as an idea created in our collective mind. So where is Love? Based on the Course, Love is the only thing that is real; it is God, which, since there is nothing else, is All That Is. Because we're ideas/creations of God, and because "Ideas leave not their Source," we also are That Which is All. There is a grandiose hope in each one of us that we are separate individuals who can be loved by God, but we aren't separate. We can only be One with God, and we are loved (in fact, that's all we are), but not as individuals.

I think the tendency of most people, even Course students, is to get this backwards. We think that the world is real and Love is just an idea in it. The Truth is, Love is the Reality, and our world is just the 'tiny, mad idea.' There is plenty of material to make this case more fully. All of Ken Wapnick's books and the Course itself spend lots of time reviewing this much more effectively than I will be able to in a short blog post.

So, the profound point that I'm building up to (that was written with great humor intended) is that no matter what our experiences have been here within the world we think is so real, we will believe that those experiences really are real if we continue to follow the Ego as our teacher. If we can follow the Holy Spirit, and allow our experiences "in the world" to become our classroom in order to learn how to forgive them (which means realizing none of it is real), then our experiences in the world can be made to serve us and our blossoming awareness that we have always been at home in God.

There's no denying that, on the level of form, any kind of sexual abuse...or any other horror we perpetuate on each other...is a terrible experience to endure. When we hold onto the experience from the Ego's perspective, we remain a victim by seeing the events as "real" and not as an "idea that left not its source" of separation and fear within the thought system of the Ego. Our job in this journey of awakening to the Reality of God is to give up our attachment to, and identification with, the victim, and be willing to see that we were mistaken about what we thought was real.

As far as retribution for the "sins" we visited upon others in one or more past lives, which some call the Law of Karma, it's all part of the same Ego based system. Part of me believes in past lives, but not in the way I used to. The time/space continuum doesn't really exist--it's just how we differentiate this "now" from the "now" five minutes or five hundred years ago. Let's say for discussion's sake, though, that we do live a series of many, many lives before we reach enlightenment. It isn't all that helpful in my mind to think of myself as having to pay now for something I did five lifetimes ago...especially if all of those lifetimes were lived in a world that doesn't really exist anyway. Of course, it's brilliant on the Ego's part to devise the concept of Karma that we're discussing here. As long as we have something to feel guilty about, and think we deserve punishment for, the Ego is safe. Because along with that guilt comes the assurance of at least one more lifetime to "make things right." One more lifetime that the Ego gets to survive as a separate entity.

I think it's much more helpful to view a past life where I was an executioner in the Inquisition as symbolic of the guilt I still have in my unconscious, and then ask the Holy Spirit to help me forgive myself (again, meaning to remember it wasn't real to begin with--it never happened in God's Reality). Anytime I can bring unconscious guilt or shame to the light, whether from three years ago in this life, or six hundred years ago in another, it can serve me in getting me closer to that awareness of the Ever Presence of God.

The Truth is, I could forgive all of my perceived guilt in a flash of awareness and be done with the cycle of Karma and past and future lives in an instant. There is an old Patsy Cline song I listened to as a kid called, "Stop the World and Let Me Off..." It sounds as simple as pulling the string on a bus, and waiting for it to pull over. It really is as simple as choosing a different thought system, but it's never that easy. If it were, we'd all be at the bus stop that lets us off at God.