Happy Sunday!

“Jonah (the Jewish prophet) thought he had the exclusive cachet of truth and thus could despise those to whom he was preaching. He wanted them to be wrong so that he could be right, yet in his anger at Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire, he failed to appreciate God’s desire to offer forgiveness and grace even to Jonah’s enemies.” ~ CAC.org Daily Meditation, 7-6-2025

As has been a typical occurrence over the many years that I have been blogging, Father Richard Rohr, through the CAC, provided me, in my morning email, with a message that fits right in with where my thoughts are and what it is I am trying to resolve within my mind. In this message I see Jonah’s divided mind as he preaches of God to Nineveh, sees results, and then is angry that Israel is not the special ones to God.

Today I knew I wanted to write a post. Last evening I thought about it and had the idea of writing about levels of perception of the mind as taught of in the Text of ACIM. Levels have been a great new insight for me in my 2025 studies. From this, I now notice levels to my consciousness between when I hold myself in my open-heart level and when I fall back into ego behaviors.

Mind’s Levels

I was first introduced into the idea of levels in the first chapter of ACIM, in Miracle Principles 26 and 28 (CE version). My understanding has expanded as we have gone through the Text teaching of our having a divided mind (ego or true Self) as well as learning of God’s Will for us. (I’m currently up to chapter 14.)

God’s Will for me is Love, grace, mercy, and peace. I rely on the parable of the ‘Prodigal Son’ to remind me of God’s Will. In my mind it is like, ‘Oh yeah, the son went out and did whatever he chose to do (free will), meanwhile the father’s love and perception of his son never wavered.’

God holds the perception of our true Selves: eternally innocent, guiltless, beloved, and holy.

Asking.

My trust in God has grown these past months (as I wrote of here). The Course continually reminds us to ask for help from the Holy Spirit as She is there to translate God’s Will into our minds. So, I have tried this a few times in conversations with others and find it to be so helpful. Instead of my mind thinking of solutions to fix someone else, dropping the ones that don’t serve me, I let words flow from the spontaneous ideas or images that come to mind. I trust that these are what HS wanted to be offered by me in that moment. I feel peace in the doing, sometimes I don’t even remember all I said. This tells me that indeed I was open to spirit and gave what was needed.

I am practicing holding my consciousness in connection with the field of the Holy Spirit, higher Self, Love, Christ consciousness. The lower level is the behavior I have used all of my adult life until recently. It was the ego mind focused on my identity in this world. My thoughts and words would reflect my need to protect myself as well as to feel special in this world.

Holding Paradox.

In one of my spiritual communities there is a problem that is causing division in the community. When I heard of the situation my initial feeling was excitement; this was odd so it got my attention.

I feel there is an opportunity for the expansion of the loving community. Others are hurting. Many are into the blame and shame stage. Peoples’ integrity are being questioned. The integrity of the organization is questioned as becoming a reflection of the flaws of our society. From a worldly level it would look like I am supposed to choose a side, promote it and defend it. I will hold a space for all possibilities.

So far, my feelings have not wavered as that initial moment of excitement says to me that the Holy Spirit is at work in this.

Humans talk of change being hard, growing pains, birthing pains. God’s Will is not easy to bear mostly because of our protests and procrastination. We resist the flow of Love that is coming toward us. Our ego mind’s thinking that we can hold back the river of God’s intent. This is where the troubled feelings come from — from our disturbing the waters not from what anyone else, including God, is doing to us.

Trusting God.

This reflection is affirming for me that trust in God is foundational to living in the open-hearted space of what various traditions called by many names: loving-kindness, Self-realization, Christ consciousness, Heaven on Earth, holiness, wisdom.

These days, because of the awareness of levels, it seems an easy step to return to my level of trust in God’s Will. Was it an easy change I could have taken all along? What if I had known about levels of perception of the mind back in 2012?

I came across a fabulous quote this morning in John O’Donohue’s book ‘Anam Cara’, page 79. He offers a quote from Meister Eckhart:

“If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter inch long, though many miles deep.”

This quote says to me that our perception of the horizontal does not serve our understanding of ourselves or All That Is. All we see are the world’s stuff surrounding us and time counted in days of our lives. It is the vertical that moves us … the depth that we go into ourselves as well as the reaching up in acknowledgement of our desire to know God. Levels!.