ARCIM

Daily Lesson 195 ~
July 14

Love is the Way I walk with gratitude.

Gratitude is a difficult lesson to learn for those who do not understand the Purpose of the world. At most they may feel “grateful” if they perceive themselves as better off than others, and try to be content because another seems to suffer more than they. How small and disparaging are such thoughts! For who has cause for thanks while others have less cause? And who could suffer less because they perceive that another suffers more?

It is senseless to offer thanks through comparison of suffering. But it is equally senseless to fail to offer true gratitude to One Who offers you the certain Means whereby all pain is healed, and suffering replaced with Laughter and with Happiness. Your gratitude is due to It alone Who makes all cause of sorrow disappear throughout the world. Nor could those even partly sensible refuse to take the Steps that It directs, and follow in the Way It sets before them to release themselves from a prison that they thought contained no door to the Deliverance they now perceive.

Your brother or sister can only become “adversary” in your mind when you perceive in them a thief of your contentment, who takes your joy from you and leaves you nothing but a dark despair so bitter and relentless that it seems there is no hope remaining. For opponents such as this is vengeance in guise of justice all there is to wish for. If all else fails, at least they can be brought down to lie in death with them they cheated, as useless as their victim, as little left within their grasping fingers as in the one they hurt.

Thankfully your mind is becoming free from such madness. You do not offer the Divine gratitude because your brother or sister is less free than you, nor could you sanely be resentful if they seem freer. Love makes no comparisons. And gratitude can only be sincere if it is joined to Love. We offer thanks to our Creator that in us all things will find their Freedom. It will never be that some are freed while others still are bound, for who can bargain in the Name of Love?

Therefore give thanks in Love and with sincerity. And let your gratitude make room for all who will release themselves from the world of illusions with you. Include the sick, the weak, the needy and afraid, and those who mourn a seeming loss or feel apparent pain, who suffer cold or hunger, or who walk the way of hatred and the path of death. All these sisters and brothers go with you. Let us not compare ourselves with them, for thus we split them off in our awareness from the Unity we share with them, as they must share with us.

We thank our Creator for one thing alone: that we are separate from no created thing, and therefore One with the Divine. And we rejoice that no exceptions ever can be made that would reduce our Wholeness, nor impair or change our Function to complete the One Who is Itself Completion. We give thanks for every being, for otherwise we offer thanks for nothing, and we fail to recognize the Gifts of the Divine to us.

Then let our sisters and brothers lean their tired heads against our shoulders as they rest a while. We offer thanks for them. For if we can hold them in the Peace that we would find, the Way is becoming clear at last to us. An ancient Door is opening freely again. A long-forgotten Song resonates in our memory, and gathers clarity as we are willing once again to hear.

Walk, then, with gratitude the Way of Love. For division and hatred are forgotten when we lay comparisons aside. What more remains as obstacles to Peace? The fear of the Divine is now undone at last, and we forgive without comparing. Thus we cannot choose to see beyond some things and yet retain others still locked away in judgment as flaws or sins. When your forgiveness is complete you will have total Gratitude, for you will see in Love that everything has the right to Love, even as your holy Self.

Today we learn to think of Gratitude in place of fear in all its forms. We have been given Everything. If we refuse to recognize this, we are not therefore entitled to our bitterness, and to a self-perception that regards us in a place of merciless pursuit, where we are badgered ceaselessly and pushed about without a thought or care for us or for our future. Gratitude becomes the single Thought we substitute for these senseless perceptions. The Divine cares for us and calls us Its Children. Can there be more than this?

Our gratitude will pave the way to our Creator, and shorten our learning time by more than you could ever dream of. Gratitude goes hand in hand with Love, and where one is the other must be found. For Gratitude is just an Aspect of the Love that is the Source of all Creation.

The Divine gives thanks to you, Its Child, for being what you are: Its Own Completion and the Source of Love, along with It. Your gratitude to It is One with Its to you. For Love can walk no road except the Way of Gratitude, and thus we go who walk the Way to the Divine.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 18: The Reality of the Holy Relationship

 

3. Shadow Figures from the Past and the Unholy Relationship

To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All the rest of the past must be let go and forgotten. Forgiveness is a selective remembering, based not on your selection. For the shadow figures of resentment, grievances, grudges and feelings of being offended from the past that you would make perpetual are “adversaries” of Reality. Be willing to forgive the Children of the Divine for what they did not do. The shadow figures from the past are the witnesses you bring with you into the present to demonstrate that your sisters and brothers did what they could never have done in reality. Because you brought them, you will listen to them until you decide not to. And you who kept them by your own selection do not understand how they came into your mind, and what their purpose is.

Your shadow figures represent the harm and evil that you think was done to you. You bring them with you only that you may “return” harm for harm – retribution in the present for the hurt you believe was done to you in the past – hoping that their witness will enable you to think of another as guilty and not harm yourself. They speak so clearly for the separation that no one not obsessed with keeping separation could hear them otherwise. They offer you the “reasons” you should enter into unholy relationships, which support the ego’s goals and make your alliances the witnesses to its “power.” It is these shadow figures that would make the ego aspect of your mind holy in your sight, and teach you that what you do to keep it safe is really love.

The shadow figures always speak for reprisal and thus vengeance, and all relationships into which they enter are thus totally without meaning. Without exception, these relationships have as their purpose the exclusion of the truth about the other and yourself. That is why you perceive in both what is not there, and make of both the prisoners of resentment. And why whatever reminds you of your past hurts, no matter how distorted the associations by which you arrive at the remembrance may be, attracts you, and why this attraction seems to you to go by the name of love. And, finally, why all such relationships become the attempt at union through the body, for only bodies can be perceived as means for retribution.

That bodies are central to all unholy relationships is evident. Your own experience has taught you this. But what you may not realize are all the reasons that contribute to making a relationship unholy. For unholiness seeks to reinforce itself by gathering to itself what it perceives as like itself, just as Holiness does. In the unholy relationship, it is not even exclusively the body of the other with which union is attempted, but the bodies of those who are not there. Even the body of your brother or sister, already a severely limited perception of them, is not the central focus as it is, or in its entirety. The parts of the body that can be used for fantasies are focused on, and separated off, as being the only parts the ego values.

Every step taken in the making, the maintaining, and the breaking off of an unholy relationship is a move toward further fragmentation and unreality. The shadow figures enter more and more into each unholy relationship, and the actual brother or sister in whom they seem to be decreases in importance. Time is indeed unkind to the unholy relationship. For time is cruel in the ego’s hands, just as it is kind when used for Gentleness.

The attraction of an unholy relationship begins to fade and to be questioned almost at once. Even at the beginning of the relationship, doubt must enter in, because the relationship’s purpose is impossible to achieve. The only such relationships that retain the fantasies that center on them are the ones that have merely been dreamed of, but have not been entered into at all. This is because where no “reality” has entered, there is nothing to intrude upon the dream of happiness.

But consider what this means. The more reality that enters into the unholy relationship, the less satisfying it becomes. And the more of the relationship that fantasies can encompass, the greater the satisfaction seems to be. The “ideal” of the unholy relationship thus becomes one in which the reality of the other does not enter at all to “spoil” the dream. And the less the other really brings to the relationship to ruin the fantasy, the “better” it becomes. Thus, the attempt at union becomes a way of excluding even the one with whom the union was sought. For it was formed to get the actual other person out of it, and join with fantasies in uninterrupted “bliss.”

How can the Holy Spirit bring Its Interpretation of the body as a means of communication toward awakening into relationships whose only purpose is separation from Reality? What forgiveness is enables Spirit to do so. If all but loving thoughts have been let go and forgotten, what remains is eternal, and the forgiven past, transformed, becomes like the holy present. No longer does the past conflict with now. This continuity extends the present into the Eternal by increasing its encompassing of Reality and its value in your perception of it. In these loving thoughts from the past is the Spark of Beauty hidden in the misery of the unholy relationship, in which the unloving from the past has been remembered. Yet this Beauty is always there to come alive as the relationship is given to Spirit, Who gives it Life and Beauty. That is why Atonement focuses on the past, which is the source of separation and therefore where separation must be undone. For separation must be corrected where it was made.

The ego also seeks to “resolve” its problems, though not at their source, but where they were not made. And thus it seeks to guarantee that there will be no resolution. The Holy Spirit wills only to make Its Resolutions complete and perfect. And so It seeks and finds the source of problems where it is, and there undoes it. And with each step in Spirit’s Undoing of problems is the separation more and more undone, and true Union brought closer.

Spirit is not at all confused by any of the ego’s “reasons” for perpetuating the separation. All It perceives in separation is that it must be undone. Let Spirit uncover the hidden Spark of Beauty in your relationships, and show this to you. Its Loveliness will so attract you that you will be unwilling ever to lose the sight of It again. And you will let this Spark transform the relationship so you can see the Spark more and more. For you will want It more and more, and you will become increasingly unwilling to let It be hidden from you. And you will learn to seek for and establish the Conditions in which this Beauty can be seen. All this you will do gladly as you let Spirit hold the Spark before you to light your Way, and make It clear to you.

The Divine Family is One. And whom the Divine has joined as One the ego cannot break apart. The separated ones have made their relationships unreal, and therefore unholy, by perceiving them where they are not and as they are not. Yet the Spark of Holiness must be eternally safe in every relationship, however hidden It may seem to be. For the Creator of the One Relationship has left no Part of It without Itself. This Divine Aspect is the only part of all relationships that the Holy Spirit sees, because It knows that only this is true.

Give the past to Spirit, Who can change your mind about it for you. But first be sure you fully realize what you have made the past to represent, and why. The past has become your present justification for entering into a continuing, unholy alliance with the ego against the present. For the present is forgiveness in truth. Therefore, the relationships that the unholy alliance with the ego dictates are not perceived or felt as now. In these relationships the frame of reference to which the present is referred for meaning is an illusion of the past, in which those elements that fit the purpose of the unholy alliance are retained and all the rest let go. And what is thus let go is all the truth the past could ever offer to the present as witnesses for its reality, while what is kept merely witnesses to the “reality” of dreams.

It is always your choice whether you will join with Truth or illusion. But remember that to choose one is to let the other go. You will attempt to endow with beauty and reality the one you choose, because the choice depends on which you value more. The Spark of Beauty or the veil of misery, the Real World or the world of guilt and fear, Truth or illusion, Freedom or imprisonment: the choice is all the same. For you can never choose except between the Divine and the ego in your mind. Thought systems are either true or false, and all their attributes come simply from what they are. Only the Thoughts of the Divine are true. And all that follows from Them comes from what They are, and is as true as is the holy Source from which it comes.

My holy sisters and brothers, I would enter into all your relationships, and step between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be real to you, and let me bring Reality to your perception of your sisters and brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourself through them. They were created to create with you. This is the Truth that I would interpose between you and your goal of senselessness. Be not separate from me, and let not the holy Purpose of Atonement be lost to you in dreams of fantasy, reprisal, and misery. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished have excluded me. Let me enter, in the Name of the Divine, and bring you Peace, that you may offer Peace to the world.