Commentary on ACIM Lesson 213

©2010 Rev. David Seacord

All things are lessons God would have be learn.

What is 'being free'? Here in the Course, we have been focusing on 'I am not this body. I am free...'. Let's look at that.

I know freedom has it's many levels. The one I assume we normally think of is 'freedom of self-expression'.... meaning, we assert that freedom is being able to do what we 'want to', how and when we 'want to'.

Most of us spend our lives holding up the banner of this kind of freedom. That is not bad or anything.... I enjoy having that kind of freedom... AND, I'd say that that is 'stopping short of the goal', if that is the ONLY way freedom is understood.

I suggest another level of freedom lies in the relinquishment of the 'I want to'. There are many times, conditions, and circumstances that arise in life.... the kind where 'life is life-ing you'.... that we/I have felt pinned down, when we said we 'could not escape' the situation, and where therefore 'we made do'. This is disempowering to our spiritual journey, if we see it that way. What empowers us is to recognize we are NEVER without choice. Yes, we could have escaped, BUT, we chose not to BECAUSE staying put and walking through 'the coals of fire' that we wanted to escape from was MORE PREFERABLE than the alternative, whatever it was.... So it is empowering to our being to acknowledge that.... that it was and is always our choice. AND, please tell the truth... did the experience truly damage you? Or, did you grow from it? Gangaji once said: "Just tell the truth.... Nothing bad has ever happened to you." I've heard other teachers say similar things too. Even when what had happened to them was (from an egoic point of view) terrible suffering.

At some point in our journey, we/I will get 'beyond question' that Good does not care if it has to lead us through Bad for us to get the message that we are free. That begins to look like 'self-sacrifice', doesn't it? It's not. Those interpreting what they see that way are still referencing themselves as a body. Jesus could not have demonstrated the powers and miracles that he did if he had thought he was a body. This also, by the way, is where the interpretations of his quote "I am the way, the truth, and the life" etc, go astray. Because when he said it, again, he knew he was not a body. Nobody else at the time was getting that, so what we have recorded and the interpretations descending from them spin it as if devotion to Jesus' body is where it is at. Which misses the point that what he was here to teach was the way to BECOME HIM (or at the least, become like him [as in 'identical in spirit]).

In the Matrix (the first one) the climax shows Neil trying to escape, to stay physically free. He failed and got killed. Love re-awoke him, and gave him a transformed sight. He saw the code, the secret behind the illusion.... this empowered true freedom in him, and what he did with it was to cease trying to escape. Escaping is always 'from a fear'. Freedom is always in seeing the fear is unreal, and having no power to harm. Neil ceased to battle his 'enemies', he ENTERED them.

That is what the purified, androgynous Christ Consciousness is doing in this world, through us, today. We are sent here to 'enter' the world. Because it is from Love, we are so doing by teaching BY BEING that "There is nothing to fear". That is true freedom.

Namaste,

David

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Lesson 213

I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.

(193) All things are lessons God would have me learn.

A lesson is a miracle which God offers to me, in place of
thoughts I made that hurt me. What I learn of Him becomes
the way I am set free. And so I choose to learn His lessons
and forget my own.

I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.