A Conversation with Rosemarie LoSasso: Summer 2019

Rosemarie LoSasso worked closely with Kenneth and Gloria Wapnick for decades, editing his books and audios and teaching at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (www.facim.org) from its earliest days in the 1980s. She retired from the Foundation in the fall of 2018 when the Foundation relocated to Henderson, Nevada, but generously agreed to talk with me again recently about practicing the Course’s unique forgiveness in the classroom of our lives, a topic with which she is intimately acquainted. I hope you will find our conversation and her gentle, practical wisdom as helpful in your journey as I continue to. 

I thought it might be valuable to review the basic process of forgiveness that we, as Course students, are supposed to be practicing every day, every minute, really. Much of the time for me it’s become an automatic sense of looking with Jesus (our inner Teacher) at my reactions, unkind thoughts, and impulse to blame my negative experiences on someone or something external. But in terms of process it’s really to remind myself whenever I’m feeling anxious, fearful, or angry about something that I’m wrong about the cause. It’s not what the person said or did or the situation I’m in or the news I just got that’s affecting me. It’s really the result of a decision I made in my mind to make unconscious guilt over my unconscious belief in separation real. And then I remind myself that I could see peace instead of this. I must not want peace right now because in reality nothing outside my mind really has the power to take my peace away. I ask Jesus for help to see this differently but usually there’s not an immediate shift, there’s a delay before I’m really ready to let it go and return to peace. I guess I just wanted to hear what you had to say about that.

Yes, I think that’s essentially correct. Ken always talked about it as the three steps of forgiveness briefly identified in Lesson 23, and I think that’s what you were saying. The first step is to recognize that the cause of my being upset is not out there. It’s coming from me. “I’m never upset for the reason I think”–Lesson 5. The overall statement in the Course to keep in mind is that you forgive your brother for what he has not done, which is a stunner, of course. The Course’s process of forgiveness is not understandable outside its metaphysical framework. It doesn’t make any sense without understanding what the overall work of the Course is leading to, which is accepting the Atonement (the idea that the separation from God never happened) for yourself.

Somehow or other the forgiveness process has to be understood in that context. So, yeah, I think that’s basically what you’re saying: that nothing outside your mind can really take your peace away unless you allow it to. The origin of your being upset is always a decision you’re making in your mind and it’s coming from guilt and that has to be questioned. It’s recognizing that what’s really upsetting you is the guilt (unconscious) inside you and rather than deal with it there because it’s so overwhelming and frightening, you project it onto a situation or person and that appears to be the cause of your anger, your frustration, or any other feeling like that.

And that’s why there’s often a delay in experiencing a shift to seeing your brother sinless, right? Because as you’re talking, I recognize that deep investment that I have in being the less guilty one. Particularly in special relationships within which I feel very entrenched in my position and an almost frantic desire to defend it. 

Absolutely.

And that’s really because that guilt is always just kind of simmering around within about to boil over.

Yeah. I remember talking to a person who was not a Course student about this. She was asking about the Course’s view of forgiveness. After I explained it briefly, she thought it was ridiculous to think her anger was not coming from what the other person did, that it was just a projection. She thought that was just ridiculous and never brought it up again.

Yeah, I’ve had a conversation with someone like that, too, and you can see the person thinking “There’s no way I’m going to entertain that possibility ever.” And even those of us sincerely practicing this all the time know there are still lots of times when we don’t want to entertain that possibility either.

Sure. The reason for the delay in experiencing peace is that the unconscious guilt is so severe and intense that having someone else be responsible for our being so upset relieves us of that pain. If we really take seriously that this other person or situation is not responsible for our being upset, we would feel deeply, deeply threatened. To even consider that as a real possibility threatens us at a survival level. So we have to respect that. But the Course is teaching us that that’s the nature of the guilt. With guilt comes fear of punishment, a mortal fear that we’ll be annihilated. The ego leaves us only two choices: make someone else responsible or be destroyed. That’s the dynamic going on. So if there’s something that can save me from this dread that I deserve to be punished or destroyed, well, I will latch onto that; it feels like a lifesaver. When I stop blaming something outside me for what’s wrong with me, I get in touch with that deep-seated, intense fear that feels life-threatening.

It does feel catastrophic and the best part for the ego is when something horrible happens to me and it feels life-threatening but the other person did it. It’s like there’s the punishment I had coming but now they’re really the ones who deserve it, I’m just taking the fall.

Right. You can see it all over the place in the world when people justify their hatred or they pursue vengeance or they viciously ridicule someone. They (we!) seize that and hold onto it and feel justified in their rage, sadness, despair, and injury and feel that none of it is their fault. It’s all the fault of those bad people out there. You can see that all over the place, how justified people feel about their grievances and how they won’t let them go. There’s a fierce need to hold onto them because, again, in terms of what the Course has taught us, we have declared allegiance to the ego’s strategy of how to get out of internal agony, and that is to blame other people, situations, the world, God, whatever. We now unconsciously believe it’s our way out of that pain and thus have this intense need to find an “evil-doer.” We also have the experience where we don’t at the moment have a grievance, so we have to come up with one then.

Well, you can always turn on the TV.

Yes, exactly.

And as you’re talking, too, I’m thinking how on a collective level we tune into our own echo chambers to reinforce our righteousness about whatever side of the issues we’re on. In this country we’re split ideologically right down the middle and completely opposite in our viewpoints of what the problem is and who the bad guys are. And should we tune into the “other station,” so to speak, then all that usually does is enrage us further by “proving” the hatefulness of what we think they’re doing and already feel so justifiably (in our minds) angry about. There’s no way out in the world except vertically out of the dream, back to the mind.

Yeah. And you can bring in another point that the purpose of our practicing the Course is to shift from a state of mindlessness to mindfulness. Continually seeing and insisting on the cause of our internal problems as “out there” is keeping us mindless because the cause is always physical, external, and we never get in touch with the dynamics in our own mind that necessitate our being victimized. What this other person did is so clear; there are so many witnesses and so we are justified in feeling victimized. The distress and suffering are therefore coming from the outside, not from a self-accusation in our own minds that demands punishment.

When we’ve identified with the ego we’ve denied that there’s anything like a mind that is making a decision in the present moment to continue the belief that guilt is real and that the only way to release the resulting pain and anguish is to look outside ourselves for someone or something to blame. So in that sense we’re secretly glad to have the upset. As you said, all you have to do is turn on the TV to come up with something to be angry, resentful, or frightened about. So there’s a fierce need to project, but the guilt within, rather than being relieved, is reinforced. And in the part of our mind that’s identified with guilt and separation we’re delighted that we could find something to blame. “I’m not responsible!” We’re constantly scanning for something that we can project the guilt onto, so it’s like, great here’s a good one. But it makes us even more unsettled inside because we know what we’re doing but we’re constantly slamming the door shut on that, pretending we are innocent victims. The self-deception, the lie eats away at us. So if we are to survive, we have to keep finding people and situations to blame.

In the section in the text called “The Two Worlds,” Jesus tells us that’s exactly why the world and the body were made to hide the guilt that we never want to look at. So there are endless situations, events, and people doing things that satisfy that need. The world was made to keep the guilt hidden, and therefore we need there to be awful things going on. It’s so hard to own that!

Yeah. That kind of leads into the next question about how we have our collective world and our personal world and it doesn’t really matter the target as long as we can project our guilt onto something external. I wanted to ask you about a specific situation in my personal life that might be a good example of how we have trouble letting our feelings of unfair treatment go. I’ve continued to feel worried, discouraged, and frightened over the situation of our home continuing not to sell. We’re in a financial situation where we really need to sell it so it feels very pressured and worrisome. This situation has been going on for more than a year so it’s been a long-term forgiveness classroom in that sense and it’s something that feels very much outside my personal self’s control.

I notice as I practice forgiveness in this classroom how I’m clinging to making this such a condition of my inner peace. The first thing in the morning when I wake up I try immediately to set my intention for the day to learn and practice true forgiveness, look at everything and everyone with Jesus, and give everything the purpose of healing my mind but before I can do that my first thought is always what’s going to happen with the house today? Maybe today will be the day that something better happens. 

There are all these constantly changing scenarios related to this, buyers interested, considering, changing their minds, making offers, backing out, up and down, new hopes and hopes dashed. It’s just such a stressful roller coaster that seems to be making all our other challenges worse. I know I’ve rooted onto this, as if my salvation depends on this house selling and then moving which I think will somehow release us from this limbo and help us financially.

This experience has allowed me to get more deeply in touch with how unconsciously attracted to punishment I really am. There’s this deep belief that I’ve somehow always had devastating punishment coming so it must be because of the deep guilt the Course is talking about. I certainly have made many mistakes and am a very flawed human but there’s nothing in my life that I’ve done that really warrants how badly punished I actually believe I deserve to be. It must be that I’m holding onto that guilty self. I don’t know how much sense I’m making but could you maybe speak to what’s really going on here.

Well, it’s actually quite clear, what you’re saying. You already recognize the feeling that you deserve to be punished in a really gruesome, awful way and that it would never be severe enough to satisfy what you think you deserve.  It’s no longer unconscious, though. You realize that it’s there and that it really has nothing to do with what’s going on in your life, your family, the world, or the seemingly awful situation of not being able to sell your house with the resulting financial instability. By the way, it’s quite normal to feel anxious about possible financial ruin. You shouldn’t judge yourself for that. However, those two levels are not really connected. That’s the hard part to accept. As you said, there’s nothing that you’ve actually done that would warrant that kind of punishment; and so that feeling would still be there even if the house were sold in the next five minutes. The house selling would not relieve that expectation of deserved punishment for very long. The expectation precedes the situation or the circumstances; it is not caused by them. The dynamics of denial and projection account for that misperception.  Once your house is sold some other negative circumstances will creep into another area of your life and the thought that you are being punished and deserve to be is right back in your awareness because you have not dealt with it at the true causal level. You have just projected that belief onto the situation in your life. It’s actually a perfect situation from the ego’s point of view! Couldn’t be better!

That goes back once again to the feeling of guilt deep within your mind that you’ve done something horrible. And of course what you think you’ve done is attacked God, attacked Love, and in a sense told God you have no need of Him. You can live your own way, go out on your own and make things happen and create a life you want that doesn’t depend on Him. Attacking God, attacking Love, is regarded as the most sinful thing that could ever be done, pronounces the ego, and the guilt, which Ken described as the psychological experience of sin, is enormous, beyond any experience on the human level.

The problem is what do we do now, because we can’t go back to the mind? If we do, the ego warns us, God is going to exact some sort of awful punishment. So there’s this fear and the need to escape from that anguish in the mind. The Course tells us it was only a “tiny, mad idea” that we forgot to laugh at, and how ridiculous it was to believe that we could depart from the everything of eternity and make a life on our own. That mistaken idea should only be met with laughter. But laughter doesn’t seem like an option to us now because that truth is buried in the mind and it’s the ongoing threat of punishment here that we’re preoccupied with: how to escape the anguish? The ego’s strategy is always to project that threat. It convinces us that we have left our mind with all its pain and now are safe in a new identity in a world. The trouble is that it is full of endless threats. So now we have to devote all of our attention to dealing with these threats constantly coming at us. But that underlying feeling that we deserve to be punished never goes away, nor does the guilt spawning that fear.

Ken called this a “maladaptive solution to a nonexistent problem.” The ego’s solution to the anguish of the guilt in our mind and the fear of God’s punishment is to take on a different identity as an individual person in a world where the threats are all around us all the time. Well, that was kind of a dumb solution to the problem of how to escape the anguish in the mind because we never feel safe or comfortable here. We still sense threats coming from all directions, and somewhere inside we still believe we deserve these things. So what we can do about it is to remember where that thought that I deserve to be punished is really coming from. As you said, you haven’t done anything to match the depth of that fear that you deserve to be punished.

The Course tells us that we need to recognize that fearful thought is coming from the ego and that there’s a loving Presence in our mind that knows it’s totally false. So that’s how to approach it: to see that you believe in a thought that’s false. It’s a mistake and nothing more than that. Early in the text when Jesus is talking about the crucifixion (“Atonement without Sacrifice”), he asks us to recognize how often we begin to feel as if we’re being crucified ourselves and to remember at that time the example he gave. He did not perceive himself as being persecuted at all. He’s not asking us to be crucified the way he was but rather to recognize in far less extreme circumstances that that’s what we think is going on and that we could see it all very differently. He did not perceive himself as persecuted and neither do we have to. We can all recognize within any given day how often we feel that we’re being crucified. Jesus asks us to remember him and share his perception whenever that happens.

So it’s never about the actual event or situation, in this case your house not selling, that seems to be causing your distress. It’s about your perception of the situation. And the Course tells us that there are only two ways of perceiving the seemingly objective event. One is that you are being crucified and you deserve to have your home not sell and to suffer serious financial consequences of that failure. You can choose to perceive or interpret the facts as you are deserving of this, that you don’t deserve to be happy or to have things go right in your life or to have the good life you see other people having. That’s one way to perceive or interpret the situation. But there’s another way of perceiving it and that is that you could be peaceful regardless of whether or not your house sells. That feeling that you are being unfairly treated by the world and really deserve to be, the belief that you are being crucified, is coming from a belief in your mind that has nothing to do with the world or your body. It has to do with the mistaken belief that you attacked God and you sure as hell deserve to be crucified for that. You are inherently evil, as Lesson 93 says: “You think you are the home of evil, darkness, and sin.”  We all have to believe that if we listen to the ego.

And so the way to go about dealing with it is exactly what you’re doing, which is to keep the two things separate. The feeling of being punished because your house won’t sell is a false connection. One has nothing to do with the other, just as being peaceful is not dependent on anything external, such as your house selling. It cannot be given or taken away by anything in the world.

Right. That’s a helpful way of thinking about it, that one thing has nothing to do with the other. Still, it does seem that the ego attempts to keep me from looking at that lack of connection and taking it back to the mind by ranting 24/7 about all the things that I must have done wrong or should have done that might have prevented this even though some of them are clearly not true and don’t even make any sense. And then, too, when I’m identified with the ego, I use comparing myself to other people’s lives as a way to further convince me that I’ve failed. Because I have people in my life whose lives seem to be ostensibly working, really well in some cases, and the ego keeps arguing that they must have done something right to earn that while I really messed everything up. And then I feel even more isolated as the crucified one only, unlike Jesus, I really deserve it.

I had the image while you were talking of the witches who were burned and the women who were executed during the reformation in England and the Spanish inquisition as another metaphor for how this feels. But the point is I find myself circling back again and again to that belief in punishment; that I suffer, therefore I really am. I really exist. It’s the price of existence apart from God. But this resistance to letting go of that guilt and fear that is generating that belief that I deserve punishment is part of what we go through on the journey, right? The Course talks about, and Ken talked about, how our fear increases as we move along on the journey and a lot of the internal experience of the ego just never shutting up, that’s part of the process. I have times when I have amazing shifts of feeling relieved of the conflict¡ªespecially in my special relationships¡ªwhere I see we’re really the same and no one’s guilty, including myself. But I also still have lots of times where I feel seemingly caught in this internal struggle. So I guess the question is just that resistance and fear are just part of the journey, right?

Yes, that’s the nature of the dream of separation. I do think that it’s normal in this journey to have these shifts from one extreme to the other because of the depth of our fear. We can’t just look at the ego thought system and let the whole thing go because of our fear that we will then disappear into the heart of God and then there would be nothing left of our personal self. We get to the brink of letting everything of the ego thought system go and then we just don’t do it. When we are experiencing that fear, we need to have some protection, so we go back to whatever protection worked for us, which is usually some sort of projection, something in the world going wrong or really well, something in the body going wrong or really well, something in a relationship going wrong or really well. It doesn’t matter, because our identity has become linked to the body and the external circumstances that define the body’s “life.”

In your case you became aware that you must have gotten terribly afraid of feeling so peaceful, seeing everybody as the same and no one guilty, because you found yourself right back in anxiety over the threat of financial disaster. But you were aware that the feeling of dread served a purpose. If you’re afraid of one reality and the fear is so intense that you can’t deal with it at all, you shift into a different reality to protect yourself against the fear of annihilation. You are no longer aware that that shift was a decision motivated by the fear of identifying totally with Love. It just seems as if you’re now protected from the “horrible” thing you thought might happen if you returned your mind to Love. The practice of the Course involves making that connection between our suffering on the level of our individual identity in the world and the urgent need to escape from what seemed to us the infinitely worse suffering in our mind.  To protect yourself from that “awful” fate of returning to the eternal Love of your true Self, you have to go into another reality or identity, so to speak, where you are preserved as Susan with all her limitations and troubles. This is the only option we have once we have chosen the ego thought system. Unfortunately and very painfully, we then see rather quickly that we are not comfortable that way either, but at least we exist!

The Course offers an indirect learning process because we’re too afraid of direct learning wherein you say “God is” and then you cease to speak, wherein you just make the decision to let go of all these false beliefs and then you are at home in God, Whom you’ve never left. The Course’s process is gentle. We learn to be fully present in our daily lives, fulfilling our roles and obligations while at the same time learning that we can be peaceful no matter what is going on. We are learning that we have a split mind and that everything we do, all of our interactions can have a right-minded or a wrong-minded purpose. That is always our choice, and we are never judged when we choose the wrong-minded purpose. We learn to become more aware of that by noticing what kind of experience we are having. If I’m upset, angry, anxious, or fearful, then I can conclude I gave the situation or interaction the ego’s wrong-minded purpose. Or, if I am more peaceful, then I can conclude that I gave the situation or interaction the Holy Spirit’s right-minded purpose.

We gradually learn that the world “is the outside picture of an inward condition.” No matter what we are doing or dealing with financially, physically, emotionally, etc., we can identify with the teaching that comes from that loving Presence in our mind, whereby we gradually learn the metaphysical teaching of the Course, which is that there is nothing outside the mind. We are learning that in our daily life by choosing not to give whatever is happening in our lives the power to take our peace away. That’s indirect learning. So when you’re feeling upset, you more quickly get to that point where you realize this is the effect of a decision you’re making in the present instant to be separate from God and it is not caused by something outside you.

So progress is getting to that awareness more quickly and accepting that we all have a split mind because of the fear of being one Self united with our Creator (Lesson 95). If that were acceptable to us we wouldn’t be here. But because it’s not acceptable to be one Self united with our Creator, we have to be some other self that’s always trying to survive in a world that constantly mistreats it. So in the example you used earlier where you looked around and saw other people’s lives working and wishing that were true for you too, you need to see that that perception reflected a decision to be separate: there are all those other people and there’s me. That’s why there is a world, so there could be people who seem to have more and people who seem to have less. That allows you to wish you could be in that life where you didn’t have all these problems. What you’re doing is seeing yourself as separate from those people. That thrills the ego part of you because it’s affirming that separation is real and you’re real. That’s how you know you’re real: you wish you had this, or you wish you didn’t have to deal with that.

Well, and those people we compare ourselves to, their lives may look good in the world but they are not usually at all interested in or concerned with awakening from the dream. And honestly, I don’t think I would have looked for and found the Course if my life had been working really well.

I think that’s true for most of us. Even though we may be reasonably comfortable in the world there’s something that’s not working. As so many people have lamented, “Is this all there is?” They may have reached a financial or career goal or whatever only to be disappointed to find that life is not really just about that. And while we think we may not have come to the Course if everything were fine, that may not be true either.

Right. I just mean that the people I’m talking about don’t seem to be at all interested in anything spiritual, really.

Yes, but how do you know where they are on their atonement path?

That’s true; I don’t.

And you don’t know what their secret lives are about. They don’t seem to have the angst or anxiety that most of us have, but there’s the power of denial and other things that they rely on in their lives for relief if they get a little uncomfortable.

Yes, a lot of it relies on wonderful vacations and all kinds of pleasurable distractions.

I remember when I was a teenager there was a celebrity who had a desire for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that was made at a specific place in another state. So he got on his private jet with some buddies and flew there just to have that special peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I remember wondering what it would feel like to have that much money.

Yes. I had a friend in college who came from a very wealthy family and she’d drop in while I was in the middle of working at a Greek restaurant in Boston and ask me if I wanted to fly with her to this really great restaurant in Chicago for lunch. And I was like, no thanks; I have to finish my shift.

Yeah, people use money in strange ways, at least to me.

But it’s always just another way of trying to keep ourselves mindless, right?

Yes, it would seem so. But we really can’t judge by the form alone.

Thank you. I did want to ask you some more about the Course’s emphasis on healing our mind about and through our special relationships. In a long-term special relationship of mine I’ve been more and more aware of the part of me that really does want to be unfairly treated and victimized in this relationship. There’s an investment I’ve made there, a kind of contract. I believe that I want more than anything to feel free from the turmoil of taking everything personally in this relationship but I’m not there yet. I’ve had many shifts over the years and especially in the last couple years where I really do see this person as innocent and with gentleness and affection and really feel that same need we share to feel forgiven and go home.  So there are times when I don’t even react to some sort of ego attack and times when I can tell on some level that they must be making that decision, too.

But then when they’re acting out in really dramatic ways or their life and decisions seem to spill over into directly affecting me I can still slip so easily into feeling really angry and victimized. I guess there’s nothing really to do but what I’m doing. I’m experiencing deep healing in this long-term special relationship classroom that I gave the purpose quite some time ago of healing my mind and I’m aware that there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to completely forgive this person for that same reason. If I let it all go, I graduate¡ªgame over! I don’t feel ready for that. I don’t want to let Susan, the student, go, and this is a convenient way to feel victimized.  So I guess we just have to accept that’s where we are, keep working with it, and have faith that we’ll let go when we’re ready and not take the curriculum or the process too seriously.

Yeah, I think the last thing you said about not taking it too seriously is the key. Recognizing that, yes, I still have an ego, and that was the ego in action. So what! You can still be kind and resist the temptation to regard yourself as being unfairly treated, while being aware that you are not ready to let your ego go totally.

Right. It’s just that sometimes I can’t believe how angry I can still get at this person, how internally homicidal it feels.

Yeah, sure, that’s the set up. But as you said, you seem to be aware of having made an agreement with this person, that this is how your mind will be healed. And so sometimes when you get close to complete healing, the fear of the implications of that comes up and something they do ticks you off and you feel homicidal. So it’s about remembering not to take that reaction too seriously, because you have consciously accepted your purpose of having your mind healed of the thought of separation through this relationship. A big part of that process is accepting that you still have a split mind, that you’re not at the top of the ladder yet, but not taking it so seriously that you go back into the whole victimization thing again. That’s just what egos do, but Love is always stronger, and Love never changes. You don’t have to be afraid of the murderous rage and so you come back from that. The ego never changes; it’s always one-hundred-percent murderous and vicious, and so when we choose it, we get the whole package. What changes is the amount of time we stay there, but the ego doesn’t change.

Over the years you’ve noticed the progress. You have seen this person as sinless and as just a reflection of your mind. You’re joined on the level of ego, too. It’s the same ego in you that this person has; maybe the form of it is a little different but the content isn’t. Within the illusion you both are split-off parts of a larger self, but that gets complicated so let’s not go into that here. But I don’t think it’s a problem that you go back and forth. I think that’s the way we have chosen to do this. We let go as much as we can and then we reach a point where we don’t want to go any further because we’re scared; we think, what if I never got angry again for the rest of my life and what if I could accept whatever is going on and not have it take the peace of God away from me, not give power to whatever this person does or says ever again? Sometimes that sounds wonderful but when you get there a part of you says no way, I’m not staying here. It comes back to the fear, who will I be without anger, guilt, fear, feeling unfairly treated?

Yes. But it does still seem to blindside me at times. The ego is so sneaky and clever. Something comes up just seemingly out of nowhere and the ego just seems to rear up and shout: “this is the last straw!” I remember talking to Ken about my anger arising in this relationship much earlier on in my experience with the Course, telling him I had been someone who, like a lot of women, had trouble expressing anger even though I certainly felt it internally. Ken said something about how it could be a very healing thing to see that you could survive your own anger and I think it has been. We’ll have these combustible moments but they pass pretty quickly and there’s not the hanging onto it there was at one time, we just go back to the classroom. So in a way, if you think of it in terms of the Course’s metaphysics, it’s important for us to know that we survived our anger at God over the belief that we could create a separate self and world that he would notice, does that make sense?

Yes, and I think that’s very important. If you’ve been one of those people who couldn’t allow yourself to be angry and then you do allow yourself to be angry, you realize there’s no big deal about that. You can see it’s really nothing. It ceases to be a problem, as long as you don’t go to the other extreme of indulging it because it “feel so good” to let it out.

Nothing really ever comes “out of the blue.” We just are not aware of the decision we made. As the beginning of Lesson 136 explains, we become afraid of truth and immediately need a defense. In the same instant, we believe we have succeeded in defending ourselves against the threat and then the choice gets buried. It happens so quickly that we are no longer aware of what just happened. “Defenses,” the lesson states, “are never unintentional.”

Yeah, it’s almost like the guilt over it passes really quickly; it doesn’t have the power I thought it did and then the silliness of it seems pretty apparent.

Exactly. I was thinking during some of what you’ve been saying of the Course’s statement “nothing so blinding as perception of form.” When we’re comparing ourselves to others based on our observations of other people’s lives in the world, we are focusing only on form and forgetting about the content in the mind. That fits right into the ego’s strategy of making separation real. Hopefully you can apply that same awareness to the feeling that you deserve to be punished compared to others who must not deserve to be because their lives are working out so well. Hopefully, in time, when you experience that need to be punished, you will be able to say, well isn’t that silly. It’s wonderful when you arrive at that point where you can fully accept that there’s no truth to your belief that you deserve to be punished. It’s only a mistaken belief, another of the ego’s lies, nothing more. As Lesson 93 states, “Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God.”

That idea of “nothing so blinding as perception of form” makes me smile, too, because when I am right-minded in my attitude toward what is happening or not happening with the house selling I sometimes feel like the ego is following me around with a list of all the things that are wrong in my life. Reminding me of all these things that need fixing or replacing, these needs I have that can’t be met and I don’t know when or if anything will change. It’s like an adolescent kid bugging me all the time to get their own way, like when my daughter was thirteen and literally followed me around the house with nonstop demands and arguments trying to wear me down. But you can also answer the ego back with yeah but, right now, there’s nothing wrong. When I’m right-minded it doesn’t affect me but then I become afraid and just seize on an item from the ego’s list of unmet needs and problems and I’m off and running again.

Yeah, that’s just the way the ego works. I like that image very much of the ego just following you around and reminding you of everything that’s wrong.

The ego just never shuts up, does it?

No, it doesn’t. That’s that “raucous shrieking” the Course talks about. It helps to remember though that “your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate it” (T-4.VI.1:7). The only life that the ego has is the life you give it, so if you give power to something on that list, all these things you need and don’t have, what you’re really saying is you need these things in order to be peaceful and you can’t be peaceful if you don’t have them. You need them to feel good about yourself. But when you notice that you are doing that, you have to stop and say yeah, I do need to fix or replace these appliances or tires but the peace of God in me doesn’t depend on my being able to do that.

That’s a huge lesson and really, really difficult to learn, that absolutely nothing has the power to take that peace away unless we give it the power. It makes no sense outside the Course’s metaphysics that states there is no world outside the mind; it’s only our thoughts that can hurt us. That’s why it’s so important to keep the Course’s metaphysics close at hand.

When I’m stuck or intensely involved with one of my problems I try to remember one of the lessons in the workbook like Lesson 300: “Only an instant does this world endure” or the line in the text, “this world was over long ago.” A line I also love from the Manual for Teachers, 14. HOW WILL THE WORLD END? “it will merely cease to seem to be.”

Those kinds of statements kind of jolt me and help me to take things less seriously. They give me some perspective on my problems. You can use these lines to go into massive denial about your experience in the world, but they can also remind you that there’s another way to look at what’s going on right now, which can reduce the intensity of the anxiety or the feeling of hopelessness or whatever it is you’re feeling. It helps you remember that no matter how bad things get in the world they aren’t what they appear to be. That’s a huge step forward because it can help you take these things less seriously. The problems are still there but the way you go about dealing with them changes. Doing that with the love of Jesus next to you changes everything. That’s the whole nature of forgiveness, too. It brings the problem back to where the problem really is: a choice of the mind and so you see the problem is not really the truth. I often think back to Lesson 2: “I have given everything I see . . . all the meaning that it has for me.” All of this gives us a chance of getting back to our minds where the peace of God resides undisturbed by the layers and layers of defenses we have made but can undo through our choosing the right Teacher.

That seems like a wonderful way to sum up our discussion today about practicing forgiveness, Rosemarie. Thank you so much for taking the time with me again. I know other Course students will find your wisdom and experience as helpful as I do as they apply the Course’s profound, mind-healing teaching in their daily lives.

Announcements:

For the latest updates from the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, click here: https://facim.org/announcements/2019-07/

Find Susan’s latest interview with Jeffrey Seibert from the Foundation for A Course in Miracles here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/talking-with-jeffrey-seibert-spring-2019/

Here’s a new video talk with Susan and Bruce Rawles on acim workbook lesson 166: “I am entrusted with the gifts of God.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUd3cJ4gpEA&feature=youtu.be

Find Susan’s latest audio talks here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/audios/ and latest video talks here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/videos/

For information on one-on-one acim mentoring sessions with Susan, focused on and devoted to applying the Course’s unique, mind-healing forgiveness in daily life (no matter how challenging it may seem! :)) click here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/personal-coaching/

Find out about Susan’s A Course in Miracles books on learning to live a truly forgiving life, one day and classroom at a time, (and occasionally even smile!) here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/my-books/

Devoted to the work of our beloved Teacher Ken Wapnick, the Center for A Course in Miracles in the San Francisco Bay Area is now also offering mind-healing acim classes in Temecula, California. https://centerforacourseinmiracles.org/welcome

The School for A Course in Miracles (SFACIM) in Denver, Colorado, continues to offer ACIM students a variety of transforming Ken Wapnick-inspired ACIM classes.

Many thanks to Bruce Rawles for his generosity and hard work to keep this site going! You can find out more about his wonderful web design and maintenance services on Foray’s home page and here: https://www.acimblog.com/acim-related-websites-design-and-maintenance-using-wordpress/. Bruce designed this website for me and continues to maintain it. I highly recommend him! Bruce also continues to share wonderful work from acim teachers and students including the enduring legacy and continuing work of The Foundation for A Course in Miracles on his blog

Announcements:

For the latest updates from the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, click here: https://facim.org/announcements/2019-07/

Find Susan’s latest interview with Jeffrey Seibert from the Foundation for A Course in Miracles here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/talking-with-jeffrey-seibert-spring-2019/

Here’s a new video talk with Susan and Bruce Rawles on acim workbook lesson 166: “I am entrusted with the gifts of God.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUd3cJ4gpEA&feature=youtu.be

Find Susan’s latest audio talks here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/audios/ and latest video talks here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/videos/

For information on one-on-one acim mentoring sessions with Susan, focused on and devoted to applying the Course’s unique, mind-healing forgiveness in daily life (no matter how challenging it may seem! :)) click here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/personal-coaching/

Find out about Susan’s A Course in Miracles books on learning to live a truly forgiving life, one day and classroom at a time, (and occasionally even smile!) here: https://www.foraysinforgiveness.com/my-books/

Devoted to the work of our beloved Teacher Ken Wapnick, the Center for A Course in Miracles in the San Francisco Bay Area is now also offering mind-healing acim classes in Temecula, California. https://centerforacourseinmiracles.org/welcome

The School for A Course in Miracles (SFACIM) in Denver, Colorado, continues to offer ACIM students a variety of transforming Ken Wapnick-inspired ACIM classes.

Many thanks to Bruce Rawles for his generosity and hard work to keep this site going! You can find out more about his wonderful web design and maintenance services on Foray’s home page and here: https://www.acimblog.com/acim-related-websites-design-and-maintenance-using-wordpress/. Bruce designed this website for me and continues to maintain it. I highly recommend him!  Bruce continues to share the work of acim teachers and students, including the enduring, comprehensive legacy and ongoing work of The Foundation for A Course in Miracles, and to demonstrate true kindness through his very helpful blog: https://www.acimblog.com/

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