Forgiveness — the Only Way

We are “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world” (see Ephesians 1:4).

Cause and effect are one in what Paul says here in this seemingly incredible statement. It hits our dualistic, separately contrived world like a ton of bricks. God’s bricks. As Richard Rohr says, reality is that subject joins with subject, there is no object.

Our world, however, by choice is based on our decision to separate from our Source, and disappear into the dual consciousness of ego, a thought system that grows upon itself like a cancer, splitting off and splitting off again and again. There is nothing unlike our unity in God’s Oneness, no such opposite thought system separate from God. What is one cannot not exist in The Oneness of God’s Mind where we exist.   “God is or He isn’t,” as Bill Wilson tells us in his non-dual statement in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous.   So when we think we exist as separated from God (actually we don’t think much about it at all), we can’t exist. Our egos do the magic: we believe there is existence apart from God, and in our mind so it seems to be, albeit with one unsurmountable problem: being a causeless thought it can only seem to be and  it is only love that can be extended into reality.

All ideas, like all thoughts, do not leave their source — coming under the same immutable, changeless laws of God’s love for His children, truly extended to be extended eternally and endlessly.   Love does not need to go anywhere to be extended. For Existence has always been and forever will be everywhere. While fear, all that the ego can make of itself, for that is what it is, goes nowhere. “Nothing” cannot extend itself, 0+0=0.

However, the Holy Spirit, in Her ceaseless labor in the field of God’s perfect love for us, reminds us we are trying to think apart from God and we are always set on the path of truth, whether or not we know it at the moment or not.  We might sense a kind of tug, one of thousands upon us, revealing that  something isn’t quite right minded here and we begin momentarily at least thinking in truth.  Yet, for most of us, denial sets in and we turn to the defense of the ego and using that defense, think again in fear, and again apart from God.   Our ego says if you listen to anything but it, you are in danger.  Its message is they’ll be unwanted consequence, pain and suffering, so instead of listening to the Voice of Salvation, we make up a false God, or distortion of God’s Law,  to “protect” us, to go with our false self, and live happily ever after in a made up chaotic kingdom full of sin, guilt and then we die, the ultimate unreality for the ego, bones crumbling into dust. Can this be what God created? Can this be His love for His Son?

Richard Rohr so correctly says, if we had just gone in the other direction, toward “being chosen in Christ (Self) before the foundation of the world.”, which is not the direction Adam took, nor I ten minutes ago, where would we be? However, we are exactly where we are supposed to be, Bill Wilson teaches, to help recovering drunks stay planted in the moment, now, for that is the only place, with God, where he/she finds the defense from the next drink — hoping it will never come. God is always in the now. However, God is in everything. There are no wrong places to be, just better choices. And we can always be where we want to be, for the love of God. The one power left to us in a dualistic thought system is choice, i.e., decision making. Choosing not to make 10 fighter jets in 10 countries in the world and diverting these savings to joint cancer research would provide enough money and resources to cure cancer forever. Isn’t cancer then our choice like all suffering in this world?,
Alas, again thanks to the Loving Voice for God, the Holy Spirit, we can’t stand the guilt of wrong choices. If you separate from God you will feel guilty and guilt leads to the ego’s direct path to its art of the grievance. While love holds no grievances, we do. Grievances are insane, as is guilt. But, both, we think gives us an out: while judgement, self-righteousness, condemnation are like super glue, binding quickly and securely, there is always the ego’s masterpiece, blame, which is its “proof” there’s something out there to threaten us. There’s something that will release the bond. This is one of the egos’s most special weapons. While covering its design for self destruction, it deflects our real fear that God will find us and punish us once and for all for, actually, what we did not do, separate.

Which is of course what Adam did and here is where he blames his lovely wife.  We can in fact teach only one thing in this world. It is not knowledge, for that is of God and we have made the choice of not being of God — impossible but thinkable. We can only teach Love, if we think of teaching being communication, which it clearly must be. Although it must be just as Jesus taught us, through the reflection of love, forgiveness. That is our only way to God. It is interesting it is in the final analysis, through the Christ in one another we get there on “a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed.” (Jesus’ words in A Course in Miracles)