Saturday, July 14, 2018

“There is one life, and that I share with God.” Lesson 167 – a conversation with Susan Dugan and Bruce Rawles

Bruce Rawles - Susan DuganIn this videoSusan Dugan and Bruce Rawles converse about the ACIM‘s Workbook Lesson 167. 

We all think we live apart from God, in mortal “shelf life” bodies with the inevitably dismal outcome of annihilation, but that presupposes an identity that is constrained to a silly “seemingly separate self” which we rarely question. This video conversation includes how the ego’s thought system of sin, guilt, fear … and death permeates our “default” way of thinking and makes everything we experience an episode that is less than perfectly happy if not unbearably miserable. Fortunately, we can still behave in the world in a caring and compassionate way toward ourselves and others dealing with mortality when we keep in mind the “right-minded” sanity of our eternal guidance. Our Internal Kindness Mentor – which we all have – guides our thinking to wholeness and safety which vaporizes ego’s icy grip of death, it’s dirge of separation, and it’s bleak blindness by replacing these with the unassailable comfort of our real relationship with each other (beyond space and time) which reflects the relationship we have with our Creator, which can only appear threatened in mortal, illusory dreams. As we begin to generalize and include the unchanging Spirit of All in our Identity, we realize that being supremely happy is the truly inevitable outcome. By forgiving ourselves (and “others”) for illusions of our cartoon character comings and goings on in a cosmic comedy disguised as tragedy, we release our fixation on what appears via physical births and deaths – and the surreal “lives” between them, using the myriad of mortal musings as triggers to recall the Peace that was there before any finite threatening dreams that seemed to attack perfect joy… our Real Life. We need these reminders to complete our forgiveness curriculum and return home to the place in our mind we never truly left.

Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs of Lesson 167 from A Course in Miracles: “There is one life, and that I share with God.”

“There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares His Life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are one.

In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus deny you live.”

W-pI.167.1-2

Susan writes frequently and eloquently about A Course in Miracles in her very engaging blog, ForaysInForgiveness.

(This video was recorded on July 13, 2018.)

The post “There is one life, and that I share with God.” Lesson 167 – a conversation with Susan Dugan and Bruce Rawles appeared first on ACIM blog.



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