Some twenty years ago I committed to a thirty day stay at Endeavor Academy. It was an intense spiritual experience.  I had a mystical Light experience as I was waking up in the morning.  I am convinced that this experience was due to the continual immersion in the spiritual culture.  I am equally convinced that, even though I was totally immersed in this environment, my mind was immature for the experience.  I believe that is why I had a profound mystical experience before I had awakened to a new day, before I had a chance to dress myself with my personal identity.  The Holy Spirit was able to facilitate communion with God at a depth within me beyond illusion.  ACIM lesson 45 explains “Under all senseless thoughts and mad ideas with which you have cluttered up your mind are the thoughts which you thought with God in the beginning.”

My real thoughts, the  thoughts I think with God were available to me because the thoughts of the world were not cognitive in the early hours as I woke up.  My beliefs didn’t tell me what was possible with God.  I didn’t have to go past all the unreal thoughts that covered the truth in my mind and try and reach the eternal like the workbook lesson asked us to do because I was already in my Right Mind.

Lesson 45 is trying to take us to a state of mind where the thoughts we have are the same ones that are in God’s Mind. Today’s lesson tells us “As you are part of His Mind, so are your thoughts part of His Thoughts.

When we attempt to practice today’s lesson we attempt to leave the unreal and seek for the real because my real thoughts are in my mind and I would like to find the real thoughts that are there in my mind completely unchanged, exactly as they always were. “Here my mind is joined with the Mind of God. Here my thoughts are one with His.”

As Jacquelyn told us in lesson 44, awareness watching awareness is a means to awakening to reality. It conditions our minds so that we can realize aspects of reality which are our real thoughts.  The ones in Our Mind.

In order to get where Jesus wants us to go, in order to find reality, we need to be well practiced in our awareness watching awareness.  We need to “approach it as you would an altar dedicated in Heaven itself to God the Father and the Son of God.”

I believe I was able to avoid my sense of guilt and unworthiness because I wasn’t able to reject the Holy Spirit’s idea that God was within me.  I hadn’t become cognitive yet of the conditioned thoughts that because God is good, I must be guilty and therefore God could not be in me. I didn’t reason I must be separate from God.  I was innocent to these types of misperceptions as I awoke with God that morning.

To do this lesson, to reach your real thoughts we must go where they are: in our Holy Mind. We will not allow our judgements of ourselves to preclude us from doing what God would tell us is possible because this possibility rests on the foundation that my God Thoughts are the thoughts which I thought with God in the beginning. They are there in my mind now completely unchanged and they will always be in my mind, exactly as they always were.

As we learned in our first two days with Lesson 44, we are focused on the aspect of reality known as awareness. Because awareness is an aspect of reality, focusing on awareness is a means of awakening to reality.

As I reflected this morning on what I might share with you in regard to this, our third day with Lesson 44 and as many days furthering our practice of awareness watching awareness meditation, I came across the perfect message in an email from Father Richard Rohr. Father Rohr is a Franciscan Friar and writes extensively on what might be termed Christian Mysticism. Father Rohr and the teachers he quotes have, not surprisingly, come to the same conclusions about the nature of God/Awareness/Reality as have the Eastern Mystics. Through our dedication and devotion to our daily lessons and through our awareness watching awareness meditation, we are beginning to have a direct experience of this same Truth. I have reprinted Father Rohr’s email below for your contemplation.

Oneness
Friday, March 29, 2019

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love. —Meister Eckhart

Today we continue reflecting on what David Benner calls “spirit-centered awakening.” Again, he offers excellent insights:

The cosmic self reminds us that oneness with God is not intended to be a private experience. Because all people live and move and have their being in God (Acts 17:28), it is not just me and God that are one. Even beyond this, because everything that exists is held in the unity that is Christ (Colossians 1:15-17), everything that exists is one in Christ. The old joke about the mystic who walks up to the hotdog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything,” misses the point. I am already one with everything. All that is absent is awareness. This awareness is the gift of the cosmic self.

. . . This is not life in a psychotic fog of enmeshment. It does not involve a regressive return to a developmental state before differentiation of self from others. Instead, it involves transcendence through awareness that the apparent separateness of the one from the many is an illusion. Slowly we begin to see that both the one and the many are held together in the One—the Eternal Godhead. And as we come to know our self within this One, we also come to know our oneness with all that is held by the One. . . .

Awareness allows us to know this reality, and our cooperation with the Spirit allows this awareness to become transformational.

This knowing is often called enlightenment because it involves seeing what is [with the eyes of the heart]. . . . The eyes with which we see are the eyes of the One. . . .

To be one with everything is to have overcome the fundamental optical illusion of our separateness. We establish boundaries to try to reinforce individuality, but what we get is isolation and alienation. We think we have bodies instead of being our bodies, and the result is alienation from our bodies. We distinguish between our self and the natural world, and we end up exploiting the environment from which we feel estranged. We think we are separate from other people, and the result is a breach in our knowing of our underlying shared humanity. Boundaries disrupt the flow of participative energy between elements of creation that can be distinguished but that are intimately interrelated. Raimon Panikkar captures this well: “I am one with the source insofar as I too act as a source by making everything I have received flow again.” To realize that we are already one with everything is to have restored the flow of creation and allowed ourselves unqualified participation in the life of God. (Father Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation).