II. The Decision to Forget
- Unless you first know something, you cannot dissociate it. Knowledge must precede dissociation, so that dissociation is nothing more than a decision to forget. What has been forgotten then appears to be fearful, but only because the dissociation is an attack on truth. You are fearful because you have forgotten. And you have replaced your knowledge by an awareness of dreams because you are afraid of your dissociation, not of what you have dissociated. When what you have dissociated is accepted, it ceases to be fearful.
- Yet to give up the dissociation of reality brings more than merely lack of fear. In this decision lie joy and peace and the glory of creation. Offer the Holy Spirit only your willingness to remember, for He retains the knowledge of God and of yourself for you, waiting for your acceptance. Give up gladly everything that would stand in the way of your remembering, for God is in your memory. His Voice will tell you that you are part of Him when you are willing to remember Him and know your own reality again. Let nothing in this world delay your remembering of Him, for in this remembrance is the knowledge of yourself.
- To remember is merely to restore to your mind what is already there. You do not make what you remember; you merely accept again what is already there but was rejected. The ability to accept truth in this world is the perceptual counterpart of creating in the Kingdom. God will do His part if you will do yours, and His return in exchange for yours is the exchange of knowledge for perception. Nothing is beyond His Will for you. But signify your will to remember Him and behold! He will give you everything but for the asking.
- When you attack, you are denying yourself. You are specifically teaching yourself that you are not what you are. Your denial of reality precludes the acceptance of God’s gift, because you have accepted something else in its place. If you understand that this is always an attack on truth, and truth is God, you will realize why it is always fearful. If you further recognize that you are part of God, you will understand why it is that you always attack yourself first.
- All attack is self-attack. It cannot be anything else. Arising from your own decision not to be what you are, it is an attack on your identification. Attack is thus the way in which your identification is lost, because when you attack, you must have forgotten what you are. And if your reality is God’s when you attack you are not remembering Him. This is not because He is gone, but because you are actively choosing not to remember Him.
- If you realized the complete havoc this makes of your peace of mind you could not make such an insane decision. You make it only because you still believe it can get you something you want. It follows, then, that you want something other than peace of mind, but you have not considered what it must be. Yet the logical outcome of your decision is perfectly clear if you will only look at it. By deciding against your reality, you have made yourself vigilant against God and His Kingdom. And it is this vigilance that makes you afraid to remember Him.[1]
As long as we think of ourselves as different from God, as underlings, as grovelers, as miserable sinners, we are forgetting what we really are. Jesus calls this an attack on truth. We have forgotten our Sonship, we have accepted our status as that of flesh and blood, bone and gristle. We are not afraid of God, we are afraid of being separate from Him, we are afraid of what we have made of ourselves, we are afraid of our humanity, our vulnerability, our false identity, and for very good reason.
Giving up the separation from God does not only free us of fear – accepting our Sonship gives us joy and peace and the grandeur of God and of all Creation. Jesus tells us to offer our willingness to remember our Brotherhood with Christ, our Sonship with God, our true place in His Kingdom, for it is only in the high mind of Holy Spirit that the knowledge of God and of our real Selves is retained.
We will not find our Selves in the flesh, in the world, or in anything or anyone the world offers us. God is in our memory. The Voice for God tells us, reminds us of our part in God’s Kingdom when we are willing. God does not come after us, chase us down, kidnap us and drag us back to His Kingdom. He does not send a posse out to get us, imprison us, or hang us from a tree. Please do not blame God for the hardships, the suffering, the crimes against humanity that happen in the world. Do not confuse the world with His Kingdom. When we try to find God in our humanity, in this world, in the topsy-turvy events that unfold in time, we are choosing unreality over reality and we will make ourselves depressed, disheartened, and diseased.
We do not have to make up stories about God. We do not have to wonder and worry and fret about what it is like over on the other side. When we remember our mind is restored to what already exists. Perhaps in our innocence we chose to believe in lies instead of truth. Perhaps in our innocence we preferred fiction to truth. Perhaps in our innocence we believed that opposites and opposition would be more titillating than certainty, surety, and safety. Whatever we did to end up in this realm instead of God’s Kingdom does not matter. The only thing that matters is that now we know better. We want to come Home. Our lies and fiction, our world of opposites and opposition makes us sick and fill our minds with shame and sorrow.
Jesus tells us that as we do our part, God does His part. We give Him our perceptions of separation; He gives us the knowledge of Sonship. There is nothing He Will withhold from us. Will with Holy Spirit to remember God and see that everything is ours but for the asking!
But here’s the deal. Jesus is very clear – there can be no attack of any kind. While peace is certainly not a condition of this world, peace is the condition of God’s Kingdom. Whenever we attack another person, whether it is in our mind, our words, our deeds – we are teaching ourselves of our unreality. We are saying I am not a Son of God. I am only a human; I am going to concern myself with the affairs of a human being. I will make my humanity and this world my God and my Kingdom. When we deny reality in this way we deny the acceptance of God’s Gift. We have taken what we have made of ourselves instead of what God created. We accept the myths, the fables, the untruth about ourselves and God instead of our reality in Him.
No matter who or what we attack, all attack is an attack upon ourselves. I may think that I am attacking you or you may think you are attacking me, but we are attacking ourselves as well as each other. We lose our memory of God; we lose our memory of what we are. We think that arguing with others, cutting them off, snubbing them, or teaching them a good lesson is the way to go, but this denies the conditions of God’s Kingdom.
If we had even an inkling of the havoc that this makes of our minds, we would never choose to attack anybody for any reason. The only reason that we continue to hold thoughts of discord, disagreement, and destruction toward God’s Creation is because we still believe it can get us what we want. When I say mean things about you and bring up mistakes that you made in the past, I believe that if I talk trash about you and talk about your sins, I can forget about my own. For some reason I am willing to exchange my peace of mind for something else. What is the perfectly logical outcome of the attack I have made on you? I not only trashed you, but I have lost my memory of God’s Kingdom. Instead of being for peace, for brotherhood, for oneness – the very conditions of God’s Kingdom, I have stepped outside of reality and into the insanity of that which has no substance, no sustenance, no sanity. Because I chose to be vigilant against instead of for God’s Kingdom, I fear God instead of love Him.
In our prayers and personal devotion today, ask Holy Spirit to show you the ways in which you are choosing to forget God by believing that there is still something worthwhile in attack thoughts, words, and deeds. Ask Holy Spirit to teach you how to be vigilant for God and His Kingdom. Being vigilant for God and His Kingdom, means that we are devoted to our brothers even as we are devoted to God and to ourselves. We hold our brothers as dear to us as God. When we see our brothers going down a wrong path, we do not seek for them to be punished, we seek for them to be corrected, to be forgiven, to be freed from paths that lead to prolonging their stint in time. We do not sic God on our enemies, we ask Holy Spirit to forgive them and to bless them and put their feet on the path to God. Review Lesson 112 and remind yourself frequently throughout the day who you are in God, because light and joy and peace abide in you. You are as God created you.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 10 The idols of sickness. I The decision to forget. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
For daily 2021 Workbook lessons visit www.i-choose-love.com courtesy of Linda R.
Audio credit: www.eckiefriar.com
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