My ‘Start Your Day with Spirit’ Prayer & Meditation Practice

May 20, 2022

ACIM Lesson 268- Let All Things Be Exactly as They Are: But What if Everything Sucks?

June 3, 2022

Forgiving the Unforgivable | Aftermath of the Uvalde Texas School Shooting

This week we in the US are collectively experiencing the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas school massacre.

My heart is with all of our brothers whose lives have been impacted by this event, as well as those who have been touched by the other 200+ mass shootings that occurred in America in the first 145 days of 2022.

My heart is with the brothers who are living through the Russian-Ukraine war, the escalating acts of terrorism, and the increasing deaths by homicide.

My heart is with all who have been affected by all the ways in which we are seeing brothers attacking brothers in the world.

My heart is also with those whom we perceive to be the perpetrators.

I’m pretty sure this is not a popular position to take. It falls into the category of “forgiving the unforgivable”.

How can anybody even think of forgiving somebody who shot and killed innocent children and their teachers?

Yes, there is a huge ego temptation to focus responsibility and blame solely on the particular guilty brothers, characterizing them as evil, murderous, vengeful evil-doers deserving of our outrage, damnation, and vilification.

And I am not here to tell anyone not to feel the emotions they have, or pretend they aren’t having them. My years spent as a therapist witnessing the effects of grief and of trauma have taught me that healing is a process.

But it is not only a process. At some point, it is a decision.

A Course in Miracles teaches that in giving in to the temptation to hold others in guilt, as much “sense” as it may make in the ego mind’s framework, we not only completely deny the problem so that it can’t be solved – but we actually perpetuate it by continuing to do what caused it in the first place.

Believing in guilt.

“Not guilty by reason of insanity” is a term used by the US judicial system to describe people who are not in their right minds during the commitment of a crime.

But all acts of violence are acts of insanity. No one in their right mind attacks another. A sane mind does not project guilt and act it out.

We don’t really see it like that though, do we?

We think some attacks and some acts of violence – like the thoughts of judgment and condemnation we have about others – are sane because they are justified.

We think we are different, separate from those who commit horrific crimes against humanity – but this in itself is insanity. It is in our insistence that we are different and separate from any brother that we continue to see our internal violence and hatred mirrored back to us by the world.

As long as we continue to believe that the guilt exists outside of ourselves and in our brothers, we will keep experiencing tragedy after tragedy like those we have so recently seen.

What we are witnessing in these events, as A Course in Miracles teaches us, is the projection of our unconscious guilt onto the world – specifically, onto our brothers.

That is what we keep not wanting to look at and address – and yet doing so is the only way we’re going to return to our right minds and see peace instead of this.

We are a collective mind, which means that the private thoughts we think we are keeping in our “bubble” are not private. There is no bubble.

If we’re harboring attack thoughts – aka any thought that is not of love – they become part of the one mind that we all share. We’re either polluting that mind with the darkness of fear and guilt or dissolving the darkness with the light of love and forgiveness.

When an act of insanity occurs in the world, rather than focus on the guilt of the perpetrator, we must take the responsibility for our own attack thoughts, our own insanity of criticism, judgment, resentment, and guilt.

We experience the results of whatever we’re contributing to the one mind.

What restores us to sanity is our remembrance of who we really are – which requires as a prerequisite that we first remember who our brothers are.

If we are to see our own innocence, we have to see the innocence in every single brother, and there is no one who is not our brother.

What causes us to be insane is our forgetting this – becoming unconscious to our collective Divinity as an extension of the heart of God. That is the Truth of us, of all of us.

We have believed the ego’s bullshit that we are guilty, and we’ve projected it outward onto God’s beloved one Son, who is really us, because by definition there is no way Oneness can be separate.

We will not heal violence, war, killing, and all of the other ways our unconscious guilt is played out in the world by making others guilty. We will heal it by knowing they are innocent, and as we can’t be separate, we are innocent too.

The way to remember our brother’s and thus our own innocence is given to us by A Course in Miracles as the instrument of the miracle – a shift in perception from fear to love.

It is the practice of true forgiveness, in which we acknowledge that we have made up a world of fear – aka guilt, attack, hatred, murder, revenge.

We take ownership for continuing to believe in the reality of this dream and seeing the effects of it.

We make a decision to ask to see the person / situation / concern differently and we ask Spirit to help us.

We release all to be healed by Love.

We remember that nothing is unforgivable.

In practicing true forgiveness around everything and everyone we are holding in guilt and condemnation, no matter what we believe them to be guilty of, we undo more and more of our ego mind. This is actually what the Course refers to as developing right-minded thinking, resulting in the healing of our perceptions of the world, and ultimately, our sanity.

From this perception of love arises our experience of the nightmare morphing to the happy dream. The laying down of weapons. People, situations, and circumstances transforming to those reflecting peace, love, joy, gratitude, joining, certainty, and Truth.

As Jesus teaches us in A Course in Miracles,

“When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat of fear comes over it, remember it is always for one reason; the ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death…”