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Spiritual Translation

The other day, a student reminded me of something I said that had stuck with him and been truly helpful.  Of course, I had forgotten all about it!  Here’s the blogpost he was referring to:

When I first started studying A Course in Miracles in 1997, I grappled with the new definition of “forgiveness”* that Jesus offers us. One day, the old English usage of “for to give” popped into my head.

For to give fear to Love
For to give guilt to Innocence
For to give pain to Peace

Then I remembered a lyric from the song, A Horse with No Name by America (not Neil Young 🙂 ):

In the desert you can remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain

This pop song, which I had mindlessly sung countless times when it was a hit in 1972, was suddenly offering me a spiritual solution to the riddle of forgiveness.

Didn’t Jesus spent forty days in the desert remembering his Name, that is, his true Identity? And once his true Identity was revealed, so was his Oneness with all his brothers and every living thing, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral. In fact, there ain’t no one for to give you no pain once you awaken to the Truth that we are all One.

The lyric from A Horse with No Name was biblical, mystical–an ancient nomadic sojourn of a twentieth century cowboy using an awkward yet mesmerizing grammatical construction, for to give, that spontaneously inspired me to translate everything.

For to give dreams to Reality
For to give illusions to Truth
For to give separation to Unity

One of the nicknames ACIM uses for the Holy Spirit is the Translator. Once the Holy Spirit became my Spiritual Psychotherapist and Guide, I embarked on a whole new level of translation! Up until then, as a psychotherapist, one potent tool in my healing kit was the idea of translating emotional language from its surface meaning down into the underlying messages.

Psychotherapy is an art, because it is customized to each person’s deep psychological needs and beliefs. I already loved the creativity involved in unraveling dysfunctional behavior through a process of emotional translation. How exciting to discover that A Course in Miracles offered a translation process that frees us from the ego entirely!

For to give my Amy-identity to the Holy Spirit, Who,
in turn, gives me Love and reveals my God-Identity.

This internal translation process kept working inside my head all day, every day, to this very day. And my inner conviction about the Course’s Message keeps growing.

For to give sleep to Awakening
For to give ignorance to Knowledge
For to give nightmares to Happy Dreams
For to give time to Eternity
For to give space to Infinity
For to give fragmentation to Wholeness
For to give death to Life

Homework
Make your own “for to give” list. Feel free to borrow from mine. Let me know if you come up with some good ones. And if this “technique” illuminates the ACIM forgiveness practice for you in a new way, please share. Email me at [email protected]

* Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. ~ACIM Workbook, 1. What Is Forgiveness?

“The Holy Spirit asks of you but this; bring to Him every secret you have locked away from Him. Open every door to Him, and bid Him enter the darkness and lighten it away. At your request He enters gladly. He brings the light to darkness if you make the darkness open to Him. But what you hide He cannot look upon. He sees for you, and unless you look with Him He cannot see. The vision of Christ is not for Him alone, but for Him with you. Bring, therefore, all your dark and secret thoughts to Him, and look upon them with Him. He holds the light, and you the darkness. They cannot coexist when both of You together look on them. His judgment must prevail, and He will give it to you as you join your perception to His.”  ~T-14.VII6:1-11

 

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How to Deal with Your Worst Moments, Especially When They Seem to Go On Forever

What makes a “worst moment”?  It boils down to pain.  Pain can be physical (sensation), emotional (loss, helplessness, despair), or psychological (fear).  Much more common than a “worst moment” is the dread of a worst moment.  I call this “futurizing.”

When pain is unbearable we pass out (literally black out, go unconscious) or check out (this ranges from not hearing people talking to us to having a psychotic break — losing touch with worldly reality).  This level of pain is rare, and this reaction is relatively rare.  When you relentlessly worry about and imagine upcoming pain, you’re futurizing.  You’re not living – you’re holding your breath, walking on eggshells, and dreading what the future will bring even though it is highly unlikely.

“The worst thing you’ll ever have to face in life is a thought, a sensation, a feeling, a sound, a smell, happening in THIS moment,” says spiritual teacher Jeff  Foster.

When you actually take a look at your pain, rather than avoid it or try to deaden it, pain breaks out into thoughts, sensations, feelings, sounds, smells, tastes, sights–anything the five senses have to offer.

Is your pain unbearable right now?  If it was, you couldn’t be reading this essay.

Moment by moment, pain, be it physical, emotional, or psychological, is not only bearable, but potentially the moment when your perception shifts and you realize what seemed to be “the worst” was actually the opening you had been waiting for.

Peace comes when you realize that you’ve been making yourself god by taking your fears seriously.  Fears that the pain you have now will never stop, fears that you’ll never meet someone and have a family, fears that you’ll never get a good job (or you’ll lose the job you have), fears that you won’t be able to pay the bills, fears that you’ll never realize your potential, fears that your health will fail and you won’t be able to take care of yourself and those you love, fears that you’ll be at the mercy of unkind people, or people who are incompetent, fears that you can’t overcome your addictions.  Fears, fears, fears.  It’s best to get well-acquainted with your own, so that you can stop futurizing and choose to enter the present moment.

This moment, now, is where peace is.

There’s an opening, a holy instant, where time dissolves into timelessness, and the “you” you thought you were melts away.  Here lies freedom.  And this moment is available right now.  Feel it?  There’s no time like the present to recognize what you really are.  Turn your attention to Truth.  You don’t have to know how.  You don’t have to do anything.  Just stop playing god, and instead, “… spend a quiet moment opening your mind to His correction, and His love”* now.

You may also find The Challenge of Physical Pain and Disability a useful read.

*A Course in Miracles, Workbook for Students, Lesson 126

Copyright © 2013 Amy Torres.  All rights reserved worldwide.

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