All posts by Dr. Robin Starbuck

About Dr. Robin Starbuck

Professor of English 1973 M.A., New York University 1989 Ph.D., New York University Linguistics

Can’t forgive what’s not real

Forgiveness

Papa said: “It is not possible for you to forgive others, only to desire to forgive others. By so desiring, I give you the gift of forgiveness and then you truly have forgiveness. It flows out from you, through you. In Truth, it is not yours to give. All things come of Me and are My free gift to all who will receive freely. Thus can these good gifts not be abused or manipulated by distorted desires.”

When Papa says that it is not possible for me to forgive others, only to desire to forgive, but that He had empowered Jesus in this, I interpret this as meaning that all the while the fragmented Sonship perceives sin as real, we are unable, of our limited, persona self, to truly forgive, but when we desire to forgive, we begin on the path back to wakefulness, remembrance of our true Being as His one Son, Christ. Then, like Jesus, we come to realize that there is no actual sin, only a dream of sin, so true forgiveness becomes possible for us.

Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and (thus) make them real (‘false’ forgiveness). It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God’s Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.

~ Seek ye First the Kingdom: One man’s journey with the living Jesus (Longhurst, Brian) [claudenoirjean]

Fear of healing

ACIM

The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept unequivocally that healing is necessary. What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can error be corrected by any device that can be seen physically. As long as you believe in what your physical sight tells you, your attempts at correction will be misdirected. The real vision is obscured, because you cannot endure to see your own defiled altar. But since the altar has been defiled, your state becomes doubly dangerous unless it is perceived. T-2.V.9. Healing is an ability that developed after the separation, before which it was unnecessary.
ACIM

Meaninglessness undoes ego

ACIM

Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego “challenge” each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space that meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own ideas there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own impotence and unreality. And on this alone it is correct.
ACIM

Meaninglessness <> indescribably happy

ACIM

INDESCRIBABLY HAPPY !!
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What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth. Beneath your words is written the Word of God. The truth upsets you now, but when your words have been erased, you will see His.
A Course in Miracles
ACIM

You’ll laugh anything ego throws GR

Gary Renard

To forgive means to give ahead of time. In other words, your attitude is that you’re ready to forgive, no matter what it is that comes up in your awareness. At first, that seems like a tall order. Yet I promise you the day will come when you’ll be capable of laughing at anything the ego throws at you — just like J[esus] could, and just like we did eventually.
Gary Renard
The Disappearance
of the Universe

Different forces in univ pull at you GR

Gary Renard

[… I]nstead of being a robot, you have a mind —and […] you can change it. It doesn’t matter if you have different forces of nature pulling at you, electromagnetic chi telling you what to do, gravity pulling you one way and dark energy pulling you the other way, and allowing the universe to expand at the same time —and a thousand other forces that all work together to cover up the mind during the dance of duality. No matter what appears to be happening, you can outmaneuver the ego simply by remembering there are really only two choices, then forgiving the contents of your own ego mind. You were being trained in the art of true forgiveness the second you started hearing these ideas —because from that moment on you were looking at the world differently. To emphasize an important point, you still believe you have a thousand different problems, but the Course knows you have only one problem —the seeming separation from God.
Gary Renard
The Disappearance
of the Universe

Less world successful = more spiritual success GR

Gary Renard

It should be pointed out that people who are not as successful in the world have a tendency to get more out of the Course than highly successful people . Some of the people who appear to have it made in the world, and who are relatively satisfied with their lot in life, are actually falling into a trap. The ego sucks them into thinking the world is a good place.
Gary Renard
The Disappearance
of the Universe

Only forgiveness can change world GR

Gary Renard

True forgiveness can change the world, for the world is merely a symbol of the collective or the one ego mind. To put it even more emphatically, forgiveness is the only thing that can really change the world, and that isn’t even the purpose of forgiveness! The real benefits of true forgiveness go to the forgiver.
Gary Renard
The Disappearance
of the Universe

Prayer must be directed within JSG

Joel Solomon Goldsmith

TO FURTHER CLARIFY: PRAYER
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To many, prayer means supplication and petition to a God in a place called heaven. That this prayer has resulted so universally in failure to attain its ends must prove that this is not prayer and that the God prayed to is not there listening. Human thought eventually realized the lack of an answer to such prayers and turned to a search for the true God and the right concept of prayer. This led to a revelation of truth as understood and practiced by Christ Jesus and many earlier revelators. Here we learn that “the kingdom of God is within you,” and therefore prayer must be directed within to that point in consciousness where the universal Life, God, becomes individualized as you or as me.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The Infinite Way

The “Old (mortal) man” didn’t die: never there JSG

Joel Solomon Goldsmith

There is that part of us which has never sinned, never been sick, was never born, and will never die, and the activity of God is to reveal that man. To our sense, that may remove sin, disease, or lack, but that is only to our limited sense. It does not really do it any more than light removes darkness. What light does is to reveal the absence of darkness, the nonentity of darkness, the nonexistence of darkness.

So it is that what we call a human being, “the natural man,” has an existence only in the universal mind which is separate and apart from God. The whole of the human experience is an imaginary experience, a dream-experience, taking place in the universal mind which does not have its seat in God.

The proof of that is that in the moment that you can still that mind and open the door for the Spirit of God to come in, that man is not there any more. That man of sin, disease, and death is just as absent as is the darkness when light touches it.

We say that the “old man” has “died” and the “new man” has been “reborn,” but where did the “old man” go?
He did not go any place: he was not there to begin with!
Joel Solomon Goldsmith
Beyond Words & Thoughts:
Toward the Experience