This morning's topic will be the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana which is in the
news.
And I doubt there is anyone who has not heard of it.
And I doubt further that there's anyone who has not heard of it who doesn't have a response...some
ego response of upset, annoyance, blame.
Blame is always high on the list.
Who is responsible for that?
And we recently received a letter here at the Foundation expressing concern for all
the innocent fish life that is obviously suffering as a result of this man-made disaster.
And I thought this would be a good jumping-off point to highlight probably the most difficult
part of living and practicing the Course's principle of forgiveness.
What sets forgiveness off from the ego's version of forgiveness that "The Song of Prayer" pamphlet
that Helen had taken down after the Course was published called forgiveness-to-destroy...what
separates out the Course's view of forgiveness from the ego's forgiveness-to-destroy is that
in Jesus' vision or the perception of the Holy Spirit or Christ's vision, forgiveness
is all-inclusive, just as God's love is all-inclusive because perfect Oneness cannot love anything
except itself which is perfectly One.
Heaven's reflection...using the earthly reflection of Heaven's love is forgiveness, which shares
the universality of this extension through us to embrace the whole world.
One cannot truly forgive if everyone is not participating in that forgiveness.
So when we see a catastrophe just as we are witnessing now in Louisiana which is now spreading
to other parts of the shoreline in the south, it's very hard not to look at this and not
feel sorry for the seemingly innocent victims.
And I say seemingly innocent victims because even though on the level of the world, people
are innocent to what happens outside of them, on the level of the mind, which is the only
reality there is within the illusion...on the level of the mind, nothing happens here
accidentally.
As we're told in the workbook that we simply review mentally what has already gone by,
and what we tend to review over and over and over again is our victim stories.
How we've been unfairly treated, how we've been abused, how we've been victimized and
it is not our fault; what near the end of the text is referred to as the face of innocence.
This is the face that is acted on.
The world acts on it and the world causes this face of innocence to suffer.
Well, this includes not only humans.
It would also include animal life, vegetable life...anything on the planet, since there's
no distinction among illusions between what's alive and what's not alive.
But that's the subject of another talk.
What is important as we find ourselves responding to this oil spill is to see in ourselves this
sure-fire tendency on the ego's part to blame, and to identify with one group...almost always
the victims...and to identify therefore against the other group.
If you have a victim, you must have a victimizer.
Some Christian writer many years ago wrote, "If there is a crucified, there must be a
crucifier."
If there is a victim, there must be a victimizer.
And all that does is institute or reinforce the dichotomy, the differentiation that is
the hallmark of the ego thought system.
Because in Heaven you have perfect Oneness.
You don't have what my wife often refers to as "twoness."
You have Oneness.
You don't have duality.
You have perfect undifferentiated unity.
That's the reality of the Godhead.
Well, once you have good guys and bad guys, victims and victimizers, you are dividing
the Sonship in half.
And then of course, the victims one day the next day become victimizers and the victimizers
in time will be victims and we'll just be going around and around this dualistic merry-go-round
whose goal is always death and the preservation of the ego thought system.
So the challenge and the classroom when we watch news reports on the oil spill and all
the effects of that oil spill is to recognize that this is another opportunity for me to
really learn and practice what the Course is teaching me.
Jesus wants me to look at this and not see blame.
One of the great, great works in spiritual literature of mankind is the "I Ching," a
compendium of brilliant Chinese wisdom, and one of the words, one of the phrases that
appears throughout the "I Ching" is "no blame, no blame."
And that's a line which should be very helpful as we sit in front of our computers, watch
the news or television sets or read the newspaper reports, magazines, is to read it and say
to Jesus or the Holy Spirit, please help me look at this the way you do, without blame.
Let me look at this where there are no good guys and bad guys.
Everyone is suffering.
Because whoever is responsible on the worldly level for the spill and a cover-up of the
spill, etc., etc., they, too, are victims.
They're victims of the same ego thought system that we are.
Perhaps they're motivated by greed and we're motivated by suffering, but it's still part
and parcel of the same ego thought system.
As Philo once said, "Be kind, for everyone you see is fighting a hard battle."
We're all fighting the same hard battle of the ego.
And some do it as victims, some do it as victimizers.
But we all do it.
And because we all do it, we are all the same.
And it's in that vision of universal sameness of God's separated Son that will help us awaken
from the dream one day to the universal Oneness of God's one Son.
But in order to attain that, we have to practice.
We have to do our daily work.
And that is to put in practice, again, that wonderful phrase of the "I Ching," no blame.
And then that includes not blaming ourselves when we do cast blame.
Because the challenge of this, once again, is to see that victims and victimizers are
cut from the same cloth.
Because we all have the same ego thought system of hate and guilt.
We all have the same Holy Spirit thought system of forgiveness and healing, and we all have
the same power to choose.
And so we want to ask our inner teacher's help that we make the right choice and see
the world as he does, a world of no blame, because that's the way that we will return
Home.