AUGUST: Does Salvation Mean Born Again?
Does Salvation
mean
Born again?
“The two most important days in your life are the day when you were born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain
Hello dear friends,
I do hope that even among challenge and changing times you are truly enjoying your summer as together in our silence we now take a few moments to remember from where our joy comes. As we know, joy always comes from within. It’s an inside job. I’ve written in my book about my joyous response to my visions when I was 22, as I was shown mine and everyone’s innocence. My response to the truth came to me in only one form. Laughter! Joy! That is what we are. That is what we are remembering. But how many of us totally believe that in this illusory and insane dream? How did it come to this?
I often think of the famous quote from the 1930’s comedians, Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel as Ollie often said to Stan, “Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.” Oliver was dumping his guilt onto Stanley. Ah, guilt. We all have it. Institutionalized religions have identified guilt’s source as “original sin.” According to them, we are born with it. We are born sinners and victims of sin and we must repent. We must be born again.
But A Course in Miracles, a modern spiritual teaching, tells us that we but briefly misunderstood who we are when we thought we could be separate from God. We made a mistake— All that is needed for our salvation is unconditional forgiveness for a world that never was. No guilt! It’s the guilt that keeps us bound in the ego’s world of victimization. Without guilt, the ego could not be. Can you imagine a world without guilt?
In our subconscious mind, regardless of its seeming source—we all have guilt. To be awake to our innocence, we must recognize that guilt before we can let it go. Guilt is what makes us feel less than, unworthy, not enough. Unidentified, submerged guilt makes us do crazy things. Why? Because, when we don’t own it—we project it!
When we repress or deny the guilty content of the unconscious it makes it way out into the world, as in our behavior our slips of the tongue our culture our religion, etc. When our reaction to a situation is to repress something that seems unacceptable to us, we inevitably project it onto others. By pushing what is in our mind down—it’s not gone. There’s nothing left to do but act it out, and it can be very extreme—including torture, war, killing innocent people, destroying countries, etc.
We can see this in history, especially Christian history, when we find otherwise well-meaning Christians who believe that they were saved because they accepted the love of their savior, and then who use the love of Jesus as an excuse for waging war—in an ironic oxymoron of all . . . they waged crusades they call “Holy wars.” Just as in this century our leaders attack and control by self-righteously projecting guilt, shame and wrong-doing on others. They are trying to control them instead of going to the source of their own burden of guilt.
“When you look within and see me, it is because you have decided to manifest the truth. And as you manifest it you will see it both without and within. You will see it without because you saw it first within . . .” ACIM T-12.VII.12:1
Guilt is part of the package that comes with the dream. The core message of the Course is that to know love is to let go of guilt. Only love is real. So, to be born again is to consciously get in touch with our own submerged negative feelings, and to forgive ourself and anyone involved, thus releasing any guilt we carry that is associated with those past incidents—and the most important part, keeping in mind that we are all innocent. Everyone is fighting their own battle. Be kind.
I remember in my childhood with indelible clarity how my evangelistic father seemed to take on super power as he chastised me for being a sinner. Telling me I should repent. Twice as a preteen I walked down that long isle in the Baptist Church to confess my sins to the pastor (although I didn’t really know what I’d done wrong.) But nothing got better by seeing myself as a sinner. Real change came when in the kaleidoscopic light it was revealed to me who I really was. As I saw the oneness of myself with everyone joined in our innocence, and realized we are all just trying to find our way back home, I was overcome with everlasting joy that never dies.
Well known psychologists such as Freud and Yung have emphasized the need to recognize the content of what we have repressed . . . abuse, abandonment, hateful rejection and disregard, etc., simply through the process of conscious remembering, and then the conscious decision of letting go and forgiving—the memories of the past no longer exist, and more importantly no longer control our thinking.
“According to the Course, all healing resides in letting go of the past. My father was dead. His body was no longer part of my dream. Now, I was the miserable one. My own judgment assaulted me. He’d been dead over fifteen years. Yet, here I was, holding onto my hate as if he still walked the earth. I kept the game in play. I needed to give up the hope that the past would ever be any different. The past was gone.” TGIC p. 347
Letting go can be a time of challenge. As ACIM teacher/author, Jon Mundy has said, “Release of the past is like throwing up. It’s miserable while it’s happening but you have to release the poisons to be free of them.” I recently heard Barrack Obama say when referring to prejudice, “You gotta’ surface that stuff. Sunlight is the disinfectant—you gotta’ talk about it.”
Being born again is to realize that even though we seem to have been born into a body which is doomed to death, the truth is that we are not a body, and only guilt for mistaking who we are keeps us bound in the insane illusion of separation. In forgiveness, comes love, and the natural expression of letting go of guilt. The Course refers to the last judgement which can only be done by God. And His judgment is that His Son is only innocence.
You’ve probably heard the Buddhist adage that says to not forgive is like drinking poison and then to expecting the other person to die. 😊 To forgive and truly let go of yours and others seeming guilt is to be free, and to be born again. Hallelujah!
So, until next time,
When you find yourself staring into the headlights of fear, I hope you can stop . . . allow yourself to laugh at your temporary insanity . . . and say, as I often do, THANK GOD I’M CRAZY! 😊
***** SEE ONLY LOVE FOR THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE *****
Thank God I’m Crazy available in paperback and e-book on:
Thank God I’m Crazy includes pictures of places which took place in Grace’s life, as seen in her visions. Grace Avalon, teacher and intuitive counselor, has taught A Course in Miracles for nine years. She gives presentations, seminars and workshops for anyone whose known abuse, thought they were crazy, or wants to live a joyful life.
*** Gary Renard, (International bestselling author of Disappearance of the Universe, and international speaker) says, “Grace Avalon’s courage to share her secret visions that led her out of deep abuse to heal through forgiveness brings a whole new level of understanding to the principles of love found in A Corse in Miracles.”
*** Marianne Williamson, (NY Times bestselling author, teacher, and internationally renowned speaker) , has said, “Grace Avalon inspires all of us to trust the wisdom of our hearts. Here is spirituality in practice.”