We Don't Know What Anything is For

Sometimes life just ups and knocks us to the ground.  Most of us have this happen to at least once or twice in life.  One minute we're rocking along, moving forward and the next minute we have lost something or everything that is very dear to us.

I call this the "stripping away" because in it we lose much of what we thought we needed to be okay.  This can be a very painful experience to go through.  Ultimately, however, it becomes a growing experience.  It is through these stripping away times in our lives that we get to see who we really are.  They show us that we are so much more than the things we think we need.

"The seeming mysteries of life with their attendant experiences are, when rightly understood, blessings in disguise, for any experience that causes us to turn more firmly to the One Active Presence, "I AM," God in Action, has served us a wonderful purpose and blessing."--The "I AM" Discourses

A Course in Miracles tells us that we "don't know what anything is for".   When we are faced with circumstances that seem as if they are the annihilation of the self we have worked so hard to create, we must learn to forgive and accept what is happening to us.  We must trust and know that everything we are creating in our lives is for our greater good.  As the Course tells us, these events are not being done TO us, but they are FOR us.

Sometimes a "stripping away" of the old is necessary for the new to create itself.  Disease, divorce, debt, great disappointment and loss all serve a purpose.  Of course, when these things are happening to us, and we are in the midst of the gut-wrenching pain, it is hard to see the silver lining in these clouds.   But it is there and if we forgive and accept, we will ultimately come to know it.

Forgiveness opportunities come in both small and large packages.  The small are so much easier.  Like you, I vastly prefer the small.  However, as I look back on my life, I know that the large forgiveness opportunities are the ones which have led me to become the searcher I am today.  Life is often gently moving me forward in a better direction.  But sometimes I get lost and place too much importance on the wrong things.  This is when the "stripping away" comes in to show me what I have been unwilling to see.  I guess sometimes I just need that swift kick in the pants, the one that knocks me to the ground, writhing and gasping.  I know now that when I ultimately stand again, I will be standing taller and with the greater strength of Spirit coursing within me.

The fastest way to the other side of a "stripping away" is through forgiveness.  Sometimes it can take a great deal of time to recover, perhaps years, but it is always a choice to recover right now, through a total and complete act of forgiveness and acceptance.  For those of us who are unable yet to forgive in full, for whom forgiveness still feels like a bitter spoonful of medicine, we must do what we can and chip away at forgiveness, taking it sip by sip until eventually, we have accomplished it.  For there will be no recovery without it.

Sometimes we are given the task to learn that we can survive the things we think we can't.  If we apply acceptance to these moments in our lives, we can bounce back and not only survive, but thrive.  It is a choice we are given, we can elect to be "stripped away" permanently and become bitter and small, or we can forgive and grow into something even better than we were before this experience.  Happiness is attainable, but not without forgiveness.


By the way, I wrote about my most recent "stripping away" experience in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  It was a doozy.  If you want to learn what happened to me and how I grew through it, the story starts on page 83 in the chapter titled, "Life Sometimes Tears Us Down".

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Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want

This was my reading for this morning in A Course in Miracles.  It's words on forgiveness are so beautiful that I wanted to share them with you.  From Workbook lesson 122:

What could you want forgiveness cannot give?  Do you want peace?  Forgiveness offers it.  Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world?  Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always?  Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?

All this forgiveness offers you and more.  It sparkles on your eyes as you awake, and gives you joy with which to meet the day.  It soothes your forehead while you sleep, and rests upon your eyelids so you see no dreams of fear and evil, malice and attack.  And when you wake again, it offers you another day of happiness and peace.  All this forgiveness offers you, and more.  

Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world.  It lets you recognize the Son of God, and clears your memory of all dead thoughts so that remembrance of your Father can arise across the threshold of your mind.  What would you want forgiveness cannot give?  What gifts but these are worthy to be sought?  What fancied value, trivial effect or transient promise, never to be kept, can hold more hope than what forgiveness brings? 

Why would you seek an answer other than the answer that will answer everything?  Here is the perfect answer, given to imperfect questions, meaningless requests, halfhearted willingness to hear, and less than halfway diligence and partial trust.  Here is the answer!  Seek for it no more.  You will not find another one instead.  

If ever I find myself feeling less than content, I know I have forgiveness work to do.  I search my mind for the source of my unforgiveness.  Who am I feeling annoyed with?  Is there anyone or any thing that is bringing this particular form of fear into my life?

Even if it is only a vague feeling of discomfort, I know it must be forgiven.  I may not understand what it is that is making me feel uncomfortable, but I go ahead and apply one of my forgiveness processes to it anyway.

Then I think.  I look into my past and I look deep into my heart.  What is it about this situation that is unsettling me?  What false beliefs do I hold in my unconsciousness that are causing me to experience fear or anger or hurt or frustration?  How can I tie the feelings I am experiencing this day to experiences in my past?

What do I believe about the world and about myself?  Deep down in the dark recesses of my mind, do I secretly believe that I am not worthy of happiness, love and safety?  Do I believe there is not enough good for the rest of the world and me too?  Do I believe I am unloveable?  Do I believe I am guilty and deserve to be punished?  Beliefs like these and many others silently run our lives, causing us to behave eradically and often in ways that harm ourselves and others.

Looking deep at our beliefs, tracking them down to their source, remembering which events in our lives originally created these beliefs and forgiving, forgiving, forgiving is the way to happiness.  I try to forgive every aspect I can dig up.  I forgive the people and events causing me discomfort today, the people and events from its source in my past, the false belief I have embedded in my unconscious mind and any other experiences or thoughts I can discover in my consciousness that relate to this topic.

Doing this kind of mind cleaning and purifying does take commitment, but it pays off in spades.  As we forgive the world around us, slowly but steadily our trust and comfort in our world begins to build.

Forgive and be forgiven.  As you give you will receive.  --Also from Workbook Lesson 122

Peace flows into our minds and we become happy.

If you are unsure how to begin to forgive on this level, my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness" explains how you can successfully use forgiveness to create happiness in your life.

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How to Forgive a Bully

Last night in my A Course in Miracles study group, a friend mentioned to me that one of her friends is currently reading my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  She is only partly though it, but she is coming to understand how important forgiveness is.  However, as many of us do, she has something big in her past that needs to be forgiven, and the idea of letting it go not only confuses but upsets her.  She was raped.  She said to my friend, "Why do I have to forgive someone who RAPED me??!!"

In addition, I've been thinking a lot lately about people around the world who are right now dealing with powerful bullies, dictators and political enemies that need to be forgiven.

I admit that this is a difficult kind of forgiveness.  It takes a little more soul searching and growth to forgive on this level than just forgiving the guy that stole your parking spot at the grocery store.

What's a bully, really?  Bullies are people who experience a great deal more fear than you and I do.  That's why they act out in ways that we would never ever consider.

Remember that everything that any of us do here is either an act of love or it is a call out for love.  That's it.  In every moment, we are either in a state of love or in a state of fear.

Where most of us drift back and forth between love and fear throughout each day, bullies have indulged their fearful sides.  More, or practically all, of their daily thoughts (both consciously and sub-consciously) relate to fear.  As they allow their fear to grow, their behavior becomes more and more aggressive.  The fear is the cause and their aggressive behavior is the effect.

Whenever we act out our fear, we create guilt in our minds (again this can be conscious or sub-conscious).  This means that the more a bully behaves like a bully, the more their guilt increases, which in turn, leads to even more fear.  After all, if we believe we are guilty, we also believe we should be punished.  The increased fear leads to ever more vicious and harmful behavior patterns.

A bully can be someone you know whom is merely unpleasant to be around, but he can also be threatening, combative or violent.  He/she can be a dictator, a rapist, a spouse batterer or even a verbal abuser.

Before you begin to approach forgiving a bully, it helps to do a little self-introspection.  Even though you may spend a great deal more of your time in love thinking than the bully you are forgiving, it's important to remember that we all have many fear thoughts each and every day.  When we judge a bully for indulging in fear, aren't we really judging him for something we often do ourselves?

Think back and review your life.  Haven't there been moments when you yourself behaved as a bully, even just a little tiny bit?  Did you ever bully your little brother or sister?  Were you ever part of a "popular" crowd in school that excluded or made fun of less popular kids?  Have you ever bossed your spouse around?  Your children?  Your employees?  Are you ever just the teensy-est little bit bossy?  Do you like to get your way?  Have you ever behaved selfishly?

The scale of your actions may be much smaller, but again, bully thinking is bully thinking.  When you are thinking and acting as a bully, you are out of alignment with love.

We all have things in our past we're not proud of.  Looking back we might see that at the time that we were behaving badly, we had our rationalizations.  We did what we thought was in our best interest at the time.  Yes, our little mis-behaviors are nothing compared to rape in terms of their effects.  But at the causal level they are the same.  They come from fear based thought.  And all fear based thought is the same.  It is simply non-loving.

One more thing you might try before you attempt to forgive a bully is empathy.  It's actually extremely sad that your bully feels so very alone and afraid that he believes his only option is to behave this way.  What caused all that fear?  What was his childhood like?  He must have experienced terrible rejection.  On a deep down level he must believe in his worthlessness or he wouldn't be so desperately trying to prove his value to himself through abusive acts.  Take a moment and think about his pain.  Think about how he suffers each day from fear, loneliness, guilt and self-hatred.

You certainly don't have to condone his actions, but can you find a little love somewhere in your heart to offer this poor tortured creature?  Just the smallest scrap of sympathy?  This is very important because when you are able to see another side of this situation you are taking your first step toward flipping the switch in your mind from fear to love.  You are releasing your own fear, and as you do this, you release your own guilt and pain.  This is how you find your peace.




If you feel you need help forgiving a bully I have three guided meditations that will teach you a process for forgiveness.  To forgive a bully that is harming you in your present, try Forgive Someone NOW.  To forgive someone from your past try Forgive Your Past NOW.

Forgive Someone You Love

I really believe that our biggest "forgiveness opportunities", as we A Course in Miracles Students like to call them, come from the people we know best.  The people that we are in relationship with can be our greatest source of joy...and they can also be our greatest source of annoyance or outright hurt.  Spouses, significant others, children, siblings, best friends or anyone else that we spend a great deal of time with, are often the people we find ourselves needing to forgive over and over.

I am going to give some tips on forgiving the people that we "love" the most, but first, I think it's important that we all give a good hard look at the reasons why we need to forgive our loved ones so often.  Remember that when we find that we need to forgive someone, it is because we have first judged them in some way.  We all need to ask ourselves some hard questions:

Are we too critical of our families, friends and loved ones?
Do we look at these relationships in terms of what we can get from them versus what we can give?
Do we have expectations for these people?
Are we accepting who they truly are or do we want them to be something else?
Are we looking at these people to be the source of our good in this world? 

No person is responsible for our happiness.  True happiness is something that comes from inside ourselves.  It comes when we know that we are loved and cherished by Spirit and are therefore able to love and cherish ourselves.  If we go looking for happiness elsewhere, we will never really find it.  Yes, we may find something that looks and smells a little bit like happiness for awhile, but it will always be fleeting.

Only the happiness we get from inside is the permanent kind that grows and deepens and sustains.  Forgiveness is the process through which we earn that happiness.  As we forgive others by offering them love, we begin to realize that we are worthy of that love, too.  It's a universal law, "You get what you give."  Happiness never comes from others, rather it comes when we give love to others.  Forgiveness is one of the ways we do this.

So first, let's all give a long hard look at each of our most challenging personal relationships and be honest with ourselves about how much of the discomfort we feel from those relationships is of our own doing.  This is not something that we will spend a quick few minutes on, but something that we will be studying and watching for the next few months as we really observe our own feelings and behaviors.

In the meantime, when we do find that someone we love is annoying us or hurting our feelings in any way, let's practice a little forgiveness.  My favorite forgiveness process for this situation is available in an audio format that you can download for $2.99, Forgive Someone NOW.

This audio takes 13 minutes to listen to, but it will teach you a process that takes less than a minute to complete once you get a little practice with it.  This is also forgiveness process #1, Seeing the Higher Truth, as outlined in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  This is by far the process that I use the most frequently.  In fact, I use it almost every day for just about every thing that hurts or annoys me in my present

And here's a little advanced forgiveness experiment I recommend.  The next time someone that you "love" is upsetting you try "flipping the switch" right then and there.  

Go right from fear to love.  See if you can just stop the ego rampage in your mind.  Just let go of all those critical thoughts, those needy thoughts, those "I have to be right" thoughts, those "I need you to complete me" thoughts.  Just drop them.  Just do it.  And then turn up the love.  Direct feelings of deep love toward your loved one.  Let them amplify until they engulf the two of you.  Just keep intensifying the love.

One fascinating by-product of forgiveness is that it actually changes the world around us.  If you practice forgiving the people you love every time they press your buttons, you will find that over time your buttons get pressed less frequently, until eventually, almost never.  Do the people we love actually become less annoying with forgiveness or are we less likely to be annoyed?  Who knows?  I believe that both actually happen, but try it and see for yourself.  One thing I know for sure is that your world will change.    

This morning I was listening to a lecture with Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson.  Cheryl Richardson mentioned that a former therapist had asked her an important question during couples' counselling.  The question was, "Do you want to keep redecorating hell or do you want to fix this?"  This is exactly the issue we face when we allow ourselves to stay in a state of annoyance, hurt or victim-hood with the people in our lives.  We can allow our egos to take over, amplifying fear and keeping us in hell, or we can connect to Spirit and switch to love.  One of those choices leads to happiness!

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Forgive the Shooter

Yesterday I drove to the nearest large town, Reno, an hour away, to run some errands.  My 24 year old daughter lives in Reno where she works at Renown, Reno's largest hospital.

Anyway, we met for coffee and then she ran off to get ready for a big formal wedding that she and her girlfriends have been anticipating for months.  One of her two roommates was to be the Maid of Honor at the wedding.

My daughter had something weighing heavy on her heart which she wanted to discuss with me and I woke up this morning realizing that I, too, now had a forgiveness burden which needed to be released.  I thought I'd share the story with you since this sort of thing seems to be happening everywhere these days and it is bringing fear and anger into our everyday lives.

My daughter had just been to a funeral two days before.  Here's why...

A week or so before Christmas, I was out of town on business when I received a phone call from my daughter telling me not to be alarmed if I heard the day's news.  There was a shooting going down at Renown but my daughter was not on duty.  She didn't know much about it but she was safe at home.

As it turned out, the shooting happened in the Urology department and two doctors and a patient were shot before the shooter turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.  One doctor appears to have survived, although things are still critical and the patient will survive, too.  However, a male doctor was killed.  His last act before being shot was to lock the patient he was conferring with in his office, hoping she would be safe, and go out into the hallway to see if there was anything he could do to help the situation.

This male doctor, Charles Gholdoian, was the husband of one of the OB/GYN surgeons that my daughter works for. My daughter tells me that he was a lovely and generous man, his wife is a wonderful woman and skilled surgeon and that they were very much in love as a couple.  The whole thing is a terrible tragedy.  And, by the way, the other surviving doctor is a woman who was shot with buckshot through the right hand and arm.  She will never be a surgeon again.

Okay those are the terrible tragic facts.  The truth is that these days, we hear stories like this all the time.  What are we to do with these stories?  How are we to see these shooters and the terrible crimes they commit?

Here's the tough assignment.  We need to forgive these shooters and their actions.  The reason that we need to forgive them is that we need to forgive everything...EVERYTHING.  It is our job to forgive this entire crazy insane world and every crazy insane thing that happens here.  That means that ultimately, we have to forgive drug lords, Osama Bin Laden, Hitler and these shooters, too.

Of course, forgiving on this level is what I would call advanced forgiveness.  It's not something that is easy to do until you have developed an advanced forgiveness habit and in order to do that you need to be able to think about the world differently. This changed thinking usually takes some years to develop and it's not something I can explain easily in a few paragraphs here.  However, I am going to briefly touch on some of the concepts involved in this level of forgiveness so that you can start thinking about them.  If you find that you hear my words but you don't feel the truth in them yet, that's okay.  If you are on a pathway of forgiveness, you will understand them completely, eventually.

First of all, it is important to separate the act from the person.  We can learn to forgive the person without condoning the acts he or she committed.  When we forgive, it does not mean that we feel any differently about what the person did.  For example, in the case of this shooting, this was a terrible criminal act that has irrevocably and horribly changed the lives of innocent people.  Forgiving the shooter does not diminish in any way the horror of the act he committed. Also, if the shooter had survived he would definitely belong in jail.  Forgiving him does not change that fact.

We all need to realize that part of living in this crazy insane world is that we all act a little crazy and insane at different points in our lives.  Every one of us has been a little mean, selfish, judgmental, or critical somewhere, someplace or sometime.  Every one of us has been a little bossy or at least a tiny bit of a bully at some point in their lifetime.  It may have been just a little teeny bit, but that doesn't matter.  We've all participated.

And, we've all been a victim, even if it is just a little bit.  Perhaps we've been a victim of illness, gossip, check fraud, theft, etc.  There is no-one here that has never been victimized in some way.  We all participate in some form in bullying and victimization.

Also, we all experience loneliness, guilt, sadness, anger, hurt, rejection, worthlessness and fear.  There is no one alive on this planet that does not experience each of these feelings at least occasionally.

Remember also that there is only one mind.  I am a part of that mind.  You are a part of that mind.  The human condition includes all these behaviors and emotions.  It is who we are and we created it collectively as one mind.  We are all just experiencing it from different perspectives.

Now, you probably don't indulge the feelings of victimization, hurt, sadness, anger and rejection to quite the same level that this shooter did.  If you did, you'd be a shooter, too.  Keep in mind, however, that it is all on a spectrum.  If you've felt these feelings, and of course you have, then you are participating in the same thinking that led to this shooting.  We all do, all the time.

This thinking comes out of our ultimate decision to be separate from God.  It is ego thinking.  When we are thinking with the Holy Spirit, we do not think like this.

There are no levels in separation.  We're either with God, or we're not.  Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, there's no real difference between our feelings of fear and the way they play out in our minds and the shooters feelings of fear and the way they played out in his mind.  Yes, he allowed his feelings to amplify to the point where he lost control of himself.  However, his state of separation was the same as our state.  We are all choosing separation most of the time.

Think about this shooter's life a little bit.  He was described as a loner, lonely, alone.  What things might have happened in his past to cause him to live like this.  What brought him to this state?  What sorts of rejection did he experience in his lifetime?  Who abused him emotionally or physically to bring him to this?  Was he ever offered love?  Was it modeled in his family?  Was it modeled at his school during his childhood?   Was he loved and appreciated in his working life?  In what way did this crazy insane world contribute to the amplification of his wounds and fears?  Did anybody ever truly extend a helping hand of love to him...ever?  Was he offered a way out?

Importantly, we can offer that hand of love to him now.  Even though he is dead and in a different place.  Remember, there is no time or space and all minds are joined.  When we forgive him now, we are offering him healing, wherever he is and whenever he is.  And our act of forgiveness is working to heal the world.  We are healing the collective Mind with our forgiveness.

See him in his true light.  He is a Son of God.  He is loved and cherished by God.  God created him exactly in his own image.  God forgives everything.  God only knows goodness.  God only knows love.  God knows that the shooter's truth is actually love.  In heaven, our true state, we are all only love.  We are pure joy.  We are perfect peace.   There is only beauty.  He is God's beloved only son.  Forgive him.  Release him.  Bless him with love.

And in this act you are blessing and releasing us all.  You are raising us all to heaven and knowing our truth as brothers and sisters in God's love.

And,  this includes you.  You are a Son of God, too.  Your act of forgiveness shows you your true self.  It is your own personal act of salvation.

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