You Can Say No

GARY: If you cannot say no to the requests of others, you have not yet overcome ego-centricity.

PURSAH: Yes, Gary, because if you can’t say no then you’re making it real. You’re saying this is a real person with a real problem that you really have to do something about. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t ever say yes and help people. What it means is that you don’t have to.

~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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You Have to Do It

A common mistake people make is they think if they know something intellectually, then they know it. But they don’t! It’s not enough to know something as a piece of information. You have to do it. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo 

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Getting Annoyed

GARY: You know most of the time, I’ve been getting better and better at practicing forgiveness. It’s like when I was a guitar player I’d keep finding better ways to play, just by doing it. It’s the same with forgiveness. The more you do it the better you get at it. But one thing that bothers me is that even though I’ve been doing it for a long time, once in a while forgiveness is still really hard. Some things still push my buttons. And I heard Ken say that even he got annoyed once in a while. Does that ever end?

ARTEN: The time comes when, yes, it does end. It did for Ken. It takes much dedication and practice, and you’ll have the frustration you just mentioned. You’ll wonder if you’ll ever get to the point when nothing bothers you. When that happens, remember you can’t always see the results of your forgiveness and the healing results, and you can’t judge what you can’t see. The Course says, “It is not the function of God’s teachers to evaluate the outcome of their gifts. It is merely their function to give them.”23 Have faith, and the time will come when peace is totally restored to your mind, no matter what appears to happen. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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Using Consciousness

In order to have consciousness you have to have something else to be conscious of. So it’s not the oneness of spirit. You think the world is outside of you and it’s real, period. The new age crowd thinks consciousness is very important and then they try to spiritualize it, but it’s not spirit. Real spirit is perfect oneness. However, you can learn how to train the mind and use consciousness to make your choices with the Holy Spirit instead of the ego. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other
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Reality of Eternity

When the process of undoing the ego is complete, because all of your forgiveness lessons are complete, and with no guilt left in the mind, the time comes when you lay the body aside for the final time, and you are awake and at home in God for the timeless reality of eternity.  ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

A Big Teaching

The Course is a very BIG teaching, not the little one portrayed by most of its teachers. The Holy Spirit is Guiding us to awaken, not to be a better individual, but to be ALL of it; nothing less than One with God. And that doesn’t happen overnight. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other  Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

Don't Expect Agreement

People don’t know they’re projecting. If they did they wouldn’t do it. So don’t expect people to agree with you. And if it’s really a dream, and if you understand it’s really a dream, then why would you have to have their agreement in it?   ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other

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Getting Shot in the Head

Say somebody gets shot in the head. Anybody who sees it or hears about it, especially those closest to the person, are horrified. But what they don’t understand is that the person goes immediately into an experience that is fantastic. As the Song of Prayer section of the Course says, “We call it death, but it is liberty.” ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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What the Holy Spirit Does

When we say the Holy Spirit plays an active role, we’re not kidding. Keep in mind, however, the Holy Spirit does not make things happen in the world. That would be making the world real. The Holy Spirit does not manipulate the level of form. But the Holy Spirit does guide you through your mind. Everything the Holy Spirit does and everything the Course teaches is always at the level of the mind. Anyone who remembers that will save themselves a lot of time, which is a major goal of the Course. In fact, you won’t find the time saving feature of the Course anyplace else. Forgiveness, done from a place of cause and not effect, really is a miracle. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

The Strain of Constant Judgment

When it comes to judgment or forgiveness, the Course teaches that judging is what makes people so tired. What they really are, spirit, can’t be tired. But, as J says, “You are not really capable of being tired, but you are very capable of wearying yourself. The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. It is curious that an ability so debilitating would be so deeply cherished.” ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

How Bad Do You Want It?

Being a life-long musician, I like the analogy of someone who wants to be a good piano player. You can learn a great deal about music appreciation and music theory, but there’s only one thing in the world that’s ever going to make you a good piano player, and that’s if you sit there every day at the piano and practice. Absent that, it will never happen. 

Spirituality is no different. Do we really believe we’re going to achieve the same level of spiritual advancement as people like J, Mary and Nadav without practicing? I’ve met many Course students who don’t think they have to practice. They think they can just skip to the end. It’s as though they honestly believe they can just say, “I am enlightened” and that makes it true. But it doesn’t. When the Course says salvation is undoing, it means it. The ego must be undone. The ego’s dream must be awakened from. And the Holy Spirit’s great teaching tool to undo the ego and awaken from the dream is forgiveness. No one will do the forgiveness work that’s necessary to achieve enlightenment unless they want it bad enough. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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You are Not That

Today, many spiritual students are taught to look at something in the world and say, “I am that.” But in fact you are not that. Anything you see out there in the universe is a symbol. It’s a projection; a hologram that’s symbolic of that which is buried in your own unconscious mind. Though some of it is symbolic of wholeness, most of it’s based on separation. Yes, it’s representative of what’s hidden in your mind, but it’s not you. You don’t want to identify with it, you want to forgive it, especially if it affects you in any kind of a negative way. It may seem noble to be one with the universe, until you remember there is no universe. What you want to be one with is God, which is all that truly exists. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other  Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

Seeing Through Appearances

The ego’s script in the future will be more of the same, except it will be bigger faster, and scarier. It has to be bigger. That’s what the ego craves. It has to seem more important than what’s come before so you’ll be tricked into believing in it. Without your belief, the ego is nothing! The difference between most people and people like Jesus and Buddha is that they weren’t taken in by appearances. They saw right through appearances, recognizing them as the hoax that they were. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

Getting Sucked In

When you’re young it’s like you’re seeing everything for the first time, and you really believe you are. The veil of forgetfulness is so thick that it makes everything new, and certain things hold your interest, and may even fascinate you. This is the ego’s trick to make it seem important and suck you in. Of course the script is written, as the Course that came later says, but you don’t know that at the time. You just think it’s real and amazing. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

The World is a Hallucination

Because of the way the mind works, people need to apply the idea of the universe being a dream to anything that is having any kind of a negative effect on them they may become aware of; every person, situation and event, including what’s going on with themselves. You may recall a very important couple of questions that J asks you in the Course: “What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you really understood you made it up?" ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

...And Nothing Else Is

The Course says, “The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true.” But a lot of students seem to have a big problem going all the way with that. I mean, I’ll say that according to the Course the absolute truth is this: God Is. And they don’t seem to have much of a problem with that. But then if you tell them, nothing else is, you can see the resistance on a lot of their faces. They can get the truth of God, but they can’t get that absolutely nothing about the world and their lives is real. Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

You'd Be Jealous

Once the body appears to stop and the mind keeps right on going, it’s one of the better experiences an ego mind can have. So while you’re grieving all through the funeral, and after, the loved one who has passed away is having such a fun time that you’d be jealous if you knew how much fun it was. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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It Takes Discipline

Many students in history have thought they could become enlightened simply by living in the presence of a Master; that somehow his or her enlightenment would rub off on them, like catching a virus or something. That would be nice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, whether 2600 years ago or today. The ego must be undone, and that takes discipline. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

It's Not Your First Rodeo

Because of the veil, the newness of experience will always be there from time to time, even when you get older. People always act like they’re the first people to ever have a baby, and they don’t realize that even if it’s their first baby, it’s not their first time having one. It’s only the forgetfulness that makes them block out the memory of all the other families they’ve had over thousands of dream lifetimes. So the ego wants you to think special relationships are vital, and those relationships start with the family, and continue to be introduced. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

Passing through the Eye of the Needle

It’s not easy to pass through the eye of the needle. All must be forgiven, and much of a human being’s repeated experiences are merely setting up the classroom to learn, through repeated opportunities, to completely forgive the ones they keep coming into contact with, again and again. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

Take Care of the Cause

You don’t have to change the dream world, just the way you’re looking at it. That’s the difference between being at cause and being at effect. Your job is to take care of the cause. If you do that the effect will take care of itself.  ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other 
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You Gotta Undo the Ego

You have to master each step of the ladder, including the beginnings of spirituality that go along with dualism, and this is done one step at a time. A lot of people don’t want to do the work that it takes to complete each step. They want to skip to the end. They think they can just say, “I’m enlightened,” and it’s done. It would be nice if it was that easy, but it’s not. You’ve got to undo the ego. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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Enlightenment is a Process

Remember one thing, everybody makes it real. As soon as people pray to a God that they imagine to be outside of themselves they’re making duality real. They’re perpetuating the idea of separation without even realizing it. That’s why enlightenment is a process. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

I Need Do Nothing

At one point A Course in Miracles says, “I need do nothing.” Many students misinterpret that to mean you’re not supposed to do anything, which is what the Course would call level confusion. The important part is that you need do nothing. You don’t have to. If you think you have to it involves bodily identification, so one must put the entire quote in context, and also bring in the Course’s essential time-saving aspect of forgiveness:

“When peace comes at last to those who wrestle with temptation and fight against the giving in to sin; when the light comes at last into the mind given to contemplation; or when the goal is finally achieved by anyone, it always comes with just one happy realization; ‘I need do nothing.’  Here is the ultimate release which everyone will one day find, in his own way, at his own time.”

~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   

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The Real You

The real you is something that has nothing to do with this world, or the body. The real you is something that is immortal, invulnerable, constant and unchanging, inseparable and whole, something that can’t be touched by anything in this world; something that can’t be threatened in any way. 

When the Course starts off by saying, “Nothing real can be threatened,” that’s what it’s talking about. It means the real you. When it goes on to say, “Nothing unreal exists,” it’s talking about anything else, anything that is not this immortal, changeless, invulnerable self. That’s why the Course is a purely non-dualistic spiritual thought system. It’s saying that of the two worlds, the unseen world of God and the falsely seen world of man, only the world of God is true, and nothing else is true. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

How Jesus Got in Touch with His Divinity

It’s possible to carry on a normal conversation with someone and still acknowledge in your mind what they really are, which is perfectly One with God, and where they really are, which is the perfect oneness of Heaven. And if you think about people that way often enough and long enough, eventually you can’t help but experience that’s what you really are and where you really are. That’s the way the mind works. That’s how Jesus got in touch with his own Divinity. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

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Monitor Your Feelings

You’ve heard many times in the various teachings that you should monitor your thoughts. You should watch your thoughts closely for conflict, negativity, judgment and condemnation. That’s true, but what most teachers don’t realize is that it’s just as important to monitor your feelings. Why? The truth is you’re more likely to act out of your feelings than anything!

Of course most people don’t realize that those feelings came about as the result of thoughts, often repetitious, that they’d been having over a long period of time. The thoughts come first, and they make the feelings. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other
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Get the Hell Out of Here

The Course is really not the same as anything else, is it? I mean, almost everything I’ve ever seen is meant to try to make you feel better in the dream. And you talk about devolving the Course into dualism, even well-known Course teachers, who don’t really teach the Course, have their students tapping different parts of their bodies and making noises. Yeah, that might help their students feel better, but how is that going to undo the ego? And without undoing the ego, they’re stuck here. Now maybe they want to stick around here for a while. That’s fine if that’s what they want. They can wake up later. As for me, I know what I want. I want to forgive everything as fast as possible and get the hell out of here. ~ Gary R Renard, The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

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A Good Course Student

When the Course talks about a teacher of God becoming perfect, it’s talking about forgiveness, not behavior. Don’t think you’ve got to have a lifetime where you do everything perfectly, where you make no mistakes. You won’t. But your forgiveness can become so accomplished that you’ll be able to forgive anything and everything, without exception, including yourself when you don’t always do the Course right. As Ken Wapnick said, “A good Course student is a bad Course student who forgives himself.” Then the day will come when you forgive everything, including yourself. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo
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The Ego's Goal is Murder

The ego’s goal is always murder. Why? Because if you can be hurt or destroyed, it means that you’re a body, and if you’re a body the whole ego thought system of separation is true. Then, even when you’re seemingly born again into a different body, you still think that body is you! It’s a gloomy cycle that can only be ended by undoing, not by re-doing. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each OtherFacebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo

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The Math of Non-Dualism

One of the most common new age beliefs is that God created the dualistic universe so He could experience Himself. The insanity of that idea is almost never questioned. It’s like saying that in order to enjoy, appreciate, and experience the orgasmic joy of sex you have to shoot yourself in the stomach so you’ll have a dualistic experience to compare it to. But God is not insane. The truth is a constant state, and as both the Course and the Bible have said, God is still perfect love. This dream world is the opposite of perfect, but the reality of God gives us a perfect home to go home to. To go home to that real world, however, one has to wake up from this one. There are not two real worlds. The math of non-dualism is very simple. It always comes out to one. ~ The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other    Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo   Facebook.com/DWMJF/photo