Resurrection Is For Us – An Easter Message

From Markus Ray

Welcome to our Gifts of God Sunday Talk and Happy Easter everyone!

This is a very auspicious day for us who are students of Course in Miracles, and probably for a couple billion Christians around the world celebrating today this most holy day. It's the day of resurrection. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that. What does it entail, this resurrection?

It's kind of a miraculous event. We don't often think that you can come back from the dead, which is what Easter represents, when Jesus came back from the dead, resurrecting Himself into a new life.

And that's pretty far -fetched, you know, in our thinking. In our world, people die and they stay dead, right? And in this case, He died in a most painful and dramatic way, and He was buried, placed in a tomb. And then three days later, as the story goes, he resuscitated his whole system and resurrected. And not only that, he was able to roll away this huge heavy stone that was in front of the tomb, the door, and he was able to get out of that tomb without much ado.

So, there were supernatural elements at work in the resurrection. Something beyond our own thinking and maybe even at this stage in our evolution, something beyond our own accomplishment. I mean, do we think, do we ever think of the possibility of us resurrecting from the dead? And what would that entail? In fact, are we fully alive now? So maybe the resurrection is symbolic for us in a kind of awakening, or a kind of infusion of new energy that would make us more alive, more open, more wise, more loving, more our true self and less of our ego.

So, what would that action be like? What would that action of our own resurrection look like? Because I think we have to see things in terms of application. Like, it's not just enough to know a nice story that this man, Jesus, who was a very pure soul, and He had a very 2 open and loving heart for all kinds of people, and he was able to, you know, heal the sick, give sight to the blind, and even resurrect the dead before He did it himself, at least it's accounted whether it's true or not. I'm not sure that that really matters so much. It matters in the sense that we accept it or we reject it.

So, was it a true action when he raised Lazarus from the dead? Was it a true action when he raised Himself from the dead? Was it a true action when he made the blind man see, made the lame man walk, made the fishermen save themselves from the storm when he walked on water, or went out to still the storm of the sea? Now all these are miraculous stories that we can either accept or reject; and A Course in Miracles doesn't talk so much about them, but it does talk about this thing, forgiveness, and it emphasizes that.

And I think there's a direct relationship between forgiveness, accepting the Atonement, accepting who we are as God created us, and the resurrection.

Consider this. What if, what if Jesus was dying on the cross and He was blaming everybody for His woes and saying, "Oh, how evil, you know, Herod was, and how evil the Romans were, and how evil all the people that conspired against Him to get Him convicted of who knows what, and crucified. What if He would have been in a state of blame and projecting anger out at those attackers and accusers? I don't think He'd have been able to resurrect.

So, Resurrection is Resurrection into a state of being. You're rising in a state of being where you've left the ego behind totally; the ego being your false self, your fearful self, your self of anger, your self of blame, your self full of guilt. You know, He wasn't projecting guilt onto anyone else. He wasn't saying, "Oh, I'm such an innocent person and this system has sentenced me to death and therefore, they're really the guilty ones, not me." No, He wasn't doing any of that.

He was just letting all things be exactly as they are, just like the Course says. “Let all things be exactly as they are.” [Lesson #268] “I let forgiveness rest upon all things." [Lesson #342] Now, He doesn't say some things, He says all things. Even the, you know, the persons, the vainglorious persons in charge who handed down his sentence, the soldiers who were whipping him, the soldiers who were pounding nails in his hands. He didn't separate those characters out and say, "Well, they're not deserving of my forgiveness." No, He let forgiveness rest on everyone, everyone—whether they saw who He was, or didn't see who He was, or thought He was someone else, thought He was a threat, thought He was a rabble rouser, whatever they thought. It had no meaning. It had no meaning to Him. He only related to His true Self in connection with His Divine Source, and that was everything for Him, His relationship with the Divine Source. And He maintained that His entire life.

So therefore, He had no attack thoughts, He had no blame thoughts, He had no guilty thoughts. Neither was He guilty nor the people who condemned Him to death—where He didn't see them as guilty either. He just saw them as creations of the same God, the same Father, the same energy, the same love. All is created out of love and He saw that, and He saw the love in those people that were doing mean and painful and terrible things to Him, and He said, well you know, “Forgive them because they don't even know they're doing it. They're not even operating in the right mind.”

So, this relationship with forgiveness and resurrection is what I wanted to explore today because I think in our own life, that's very attainable, very attainable. It's not…it's not supernatural—in the sense that we can actually forgive everyone. It's an actual action we can take. We can put our foot down and say, “Okay, no matter what happens to me and my life, I'm never, never going to blame anyone, or anything outside of myself. And furthermore, I'm not even going to blame myself for having whatever thought, whatever frequency that may attract something to me that's painful, or something I don't want or something that's a problem. I'm not even going to blame myself for that.”

It's just a function of life. It's a function of my subconscious mind operating, creating frequencies that attract certain things and maybe I don't always know ahead of time what I'm doing, and maybe I get some kind of a bill from the IRS that I hadn't counted on or whatever. One thing in my life that's not necessarily easy to take, it's challenging, right? So, I'm not even going to blame myself for that. I'm just going to take it in stride, do what needs to be done, and move on. So, this was what I was seeing. And Sondra came to me this morning and said, "You know, I think if we could just completely forgive everyone, we would be instantly healed of everything.” Like, it's that profound, this total forgiveness, this total being in a space of the mind that's empty. It's pristine, it's clear, it's not full of stuff, right? So, we want to get to that simple place in our mind where we have some silence, we have some stillness, we have some emptiness, and that emptiness restores us somehow, to sanity.

You know, somewhere in the Course it says, "We need to practice thinking with God's Thoughts." And part of the problem is we're thinking with the ego's thoughts, right? And that habit is kind of incessant. It's always going on. It's always going. It's always judging. It's always trying to find something wrong with something. It's trying to be satisfied, is trying to get or acquire something. We always seem to have a problem. You know, this kind of chatter, this kind of monkey mind, it's always going, making up something, and that distracts us. And we're distracted most of the time. So, what would happen when we bring that chatter to silence?

And now we're closer to thinking with God's thoughts, but then we also see God's Thoughts may not be words even. They might just be pure, empty spaces of bliss, you know, and maybe our senses are more tuned in, like, you might hear a car go by. You know, you might hear a car and you're in this still space, right, this kind of empty place and you hear outside a car go by or you hear the sound of the register in the winter when the heat is going. You hear the heat in the register coming out. So, it's a sound, but there's such a simplicity of that kind of hearing where you're totally present. Now that could be God's Thoughts. When you're seeing the beauty in something, and that could be God's Thought, whether it's words, whether it's like something that means this or means that. Let's just say you don't have any projection of meaning onto anything. Your own projection. So, then this beauty comes forth and you see it in everything. You see it in the color.

You know, I'm wearing this kind of plaid shirt today and its colors are so amazing together. You know, you see differently. You hear differently. Everything is heightened in this kind of a beauty. And to me, that is thinking with God's Thoughts. And I don't have my own thoughts. I don't even want my own thoughts. In fact, I don't even want any thoughts. It's like I'd just rather be in the emptiness. And then whatever I'm observing or feeling or seeing, I know that that's coming from some other place, some holy place, some heavenly place.

And then, of course, you can't have attack thoughts, you can't have grievances, so you do have to let go of all that. You have to let forgiveness rest upon all things. I let forgiveness rest upon all things, or thus forgiveness will be given me. All right. Well, what happens when you really do that? Like, you put your foot down and you say, “I am not gonna have any grievances towards anyone or anything, especially of myself. I'm gonna live in a harmonious way every day. I'm gonna treat myself well and treat others well in a gentle, kind way.”

And I'm going to be in this space, I was saying earlier, of equanimity. It's like you're in this sort of middle space where nothing throws you off, nothing upsets you, even if it's upsetting to most other people, you're not upset by it. Does it affect the reality of the universe? Probably not. And just observe it, stay in the middle. Oh, and then, oh, certain things may happen. Oh, that's a good thing. That happened. All right. Well, fine. But it's like, there's no difference between the thing you don't like and the thing you do like if you're in that middle space of equanimity. And I think that that's a result of when you let forgiveness rest upon all things.

And in that middle state of equanimity, you have to be in that if we're going to resurrect. If we're going to resurrect from what? Well, resurrect from the past. Resurrect from all 5 the patterns that we're used to in our life. Resurrect from all the stuff from our past that didn't work out. Resurrect from our fear of the future that things will work out. You know, we're being totally honest about where we are in this present moment with total forgiveness and equanimity, and we're in this stillness, we're in this silence, we're in this space of acceptance, and there's something very beautiful and pristine about that.

It's a kind of a heaven state. So, I wanted to read this one Lesson. Actually, there are four lessons. They're in the Section Two of the workbook where the lessons are only a halfpage and it's Lessons #303 to #306. And these are all about the Christ, right?

So, the first one says, "The Holy Christ is born in me today." So let me just pull this up. Lesson #303 "The Holy Christ is born in me today." It's so beautiful.

You know, I've often said these Lessons in Part Two of the Workbook are like pure poetry. First of all, they're all ten syllables long. Each Lesson is exactly ten syllables, except the last 20 Lessons which are 20, 30, and 40 syllables.

“The Holy Christ is born in me today.” Perfect iambic pentameter that Shakespeare wrote in. It's probably even more perfect than Shakespeare actually. But as far as the English language, that it has mastered, the English language has come in A Course in Miracles to this poetic perfection. And it's so beautiful.

“The Holy Christ is born in me today.” Now, we think of that as maybe being Christmas, but I think that it's really more related to Easter because the Christ is resurrecting and He's giving Himself to Humanity, and we are resurrecting with Him. In fact, He is trying to show us that we can leave our old self behind, which is our ego, right? And that ego can come to an end, or come to a "death." And then what comes after that? When we're willing to let go of the ego and let forgiveness rest upon all things, then we can be born into the awareness of the Christ consciousness. And that's the resurrection. So, this lesson, "The Holy Christ is born in me today," is really more of a statement of Easter. It's like the resurrection of the Christ within myself. It's like the birth of the Christ within myself. It's like Christ and I become one, so to speak.

“We stand together, Christ and I, in peace and certainty of purpose. And in Him is His Creator as He is in me.” This is Lesson #354. That's a later lesson. “We stand together, Christ and I, in peace and certainty of purpose. And in Him is His Creator as He is in me.” So that means while the Christ is in me, the Creator is in the Christ. Therefore, the Creator must be in me too. And then when I see that, “The Holy Christ is born in me today.” It's so beautiful, this poetry.

“Watch with me, angels. Watch with me today.” Now, what scripture ever gives that kind of an invocation? You're actually invoking the angels to watch with you today. This event, this miraculous event of the resurrection:

“Watch with me, angels, watch with me today. Let all God's holy thoughts surround me and be still with me while heaven's Son is born.” Lesson #303

So, the resurrection is a kind of a new birth. It's a new freedom. It's a new life. It's a life that leavesthe old life behind. It's like the old life led us to death—the ego led us to death, and now we're seeing through the Christ before we even die, right? We're seeing before death gets the better of us, and we're letting it go. But, we're letting the ego go. That's a kind of a death, and now we're being born in this new vibration We're resurrecting into this new vibration. Heaven's Son is born!

Well, that's us. Resurrection is for us! Who else is it for? The Son. It's you, Monique. It's you, Donna. It's you, Rasa. It's anyone. It's you, Sue. Anyone who wants to meld with that part of their mind that joins with the Christ, this can happen.

Now, a lot of us were very wary of this sort of "born again" phrase because a lot of fundamentalists used it and they were still in this kind of hellfire and damnation, asking "are you born again?" and "did you let Christ cleanse you of your sins?" (All ready to condemn us if we didn’t.) You know, all this kind of heavy stuff. So, the phraseology "born again" was something that we rejected. We did not want that kind of a blind belief in this kind of evilness of ourself that had to be somehow purged, and Christ had to sacrifice Himself for us. We didn't want any part of that. And thank God the Course comes along. It redefines all those terms. There is no hellfire and damnation. There is no condemnation. There's only an acceptance of who we are already, in our own original innocence.

So, in this, when we see that, when we rise up and we give up grievances and we give up attack thoughts and we let forgiveness rest upon all things, and now we can step through that gate, that Heaven's gate, into this new awareness of our identity as God's Son.

“Let all God's holy thoughts surround me and be still with me while Heaven's Son is born. Let earthly sounds be quiet and the sights to which I am accustomed disappear. Let Christ be welcomed where he is at home.”

That would be us. We are the home. We are the host. We are the receptacle to receive this consciousness, let's say, that's already in us, but it was so asleep, we didn't know we had it, right? So now it's awakening. This Christ consciousness is awakening in us. It's being born in us. It's being resurrected in us. We were dead, and now we're living. We were stuck in the past, and now we're in the present. So, this is happening instantaneously as our awareness and our attention goes to it. It's happening now.

It's happening right now, this lesson, "The Holy Christ is born in me today." Well, what's today? That's now. It's being born in me today.

“…and let him hear the sounds He understands and see but sights that show His Father's love. Let Him no longer be a stranger here, for He is born again in me today.”

So, we're allowing this consciousness to be resurrected in us, to be born again in us, it's something maybe we had long ago. But we forgot. We fell into asleep. We forgot who we were as God created us. And we needed this Christ to come and wake us up. And now He's here and He's waking us up. And He gives us some directions, "Okay, don't have any attack thoughts, give up your grievances, let forgiveness rest upon all things, accept the Atonement for yourself." You know, “Even though I made a mistake, I still love and accept myself.” That's like the affirmation of the Atonement. And we're doing that. We're cleaning house, so to speak. We're cleaning our minds. We're cleaning our hearts. We're cleaning our being. We're letting go. We're leaving the past behind. We're forgiving everyone and everything, and even ourselves. We don't hold a grievance towards anybody because we see anybody is us. If we hold grievances towards anybody we're also holding grievances towards our own self, because there's no separation.

So, you see, when you get to that point then you're much more careful about putting out attack thoughts, because it's all self-attack. All anger is self-attack, even though we're trying to project it and get rid of it. Guess what? It always boomerangs back around and hits us too. So why would we do that? Why would we continue being self-destructive? If we see that's what we're doing—it's a form of self-destruction to be angry, to have grievances, to have attack thoughts, to have judgments. So gradually, gradually we're giving all that up, and to the extent we give that up, all those things I just mentioned, attack thoughts, grievances, anger, guilt, frustration—we give all those negative emotions up—then we rise, we resurrect into a new consciousness, into a new DNA almost. A new DNA.

And these Lessons, you know, I often say in mantra breathing, the Lessons of A Course in Miracles are mantras too. They're high vibrational thoughts, they're God's thoughts, that take us to a new awareness in our mind so we can make contact with this other 8 consciousness, right? So, they are mantras. “The Holy Christ is born in me today.” That's a powerful mantra. It has a vibration, just like, “Om Namah Shivay,” or, “Jai Ma.” Those are mantras. These are mantras.

“Your Son is welcome Father. He has come to save me from the evil self I made.”

Now, when it says “evil self,” don't get all guilty about that. It's just evil—evil is like the opposite of living. It's like that which makes you die, right? That's which leads to selfdestruction. It would call that evil. It would call that an illusion. It would call it a misdirection, misthought, misperception. That's all it is. Don't get all hung up on this word evil, that you're bad. No, you just made a mistake. You made a mistake in who you thought you were, and you had all these other thoughts of guilt, and attack, and frustration, and insecurity—and now that we're gonna let all that go.

“He has come to save me from this self I made up.” He is the Self,” capital Self, “that You have given me. He is but what I really am in truth.”

Okay, that's a powerful line! The Christ “is but what I really am in truth.” So,see, it's saying there is this Christ, and He comes and He awakens us. Well, what is it? He's awakening you and me. He's awakening the fact that you are like Him. “He is but what I really am in truth.”

My Identity is the Christ, and He's coming to wake that up in me—that I am that! He's not something separate, right. He's not up on a pedestal. He's not hanging on a cross that we have to worship. He's not somebody unattainable. No, He's somebody inside us Who is us! Who he is us! He is the real us! That's how He can be born in us because he's already there.

“He is but what I really am in truth. He is the Son you love above all things. He is myself as You created me.”

He is my Self as You, God, created me.

“It is not Christ that can be crucified. Safe in your arms let me receive Your Son.”

Which means, let me receive my True Identity, and in that acceptance of my True Identity, I'm resurrected. But now, my True Identity doesn't have attack thoughts. You can't say, “Well, I accepted my true identity,” and then tomorrow go yell at your kid, or complain to your boss that he's not doing the right thing. No, it's like you've got to see everyone is you. 9 And they're caught in the same conundrums where we were caught in. But we don't engage in those things. We see the pitfalls and we sidestep them.

You know, there's this wonderful thing that Tara Singh always told us about problems. And he said, "Well, you know, in reality there are no real problems in life. They're only projected.” The mind projects problems, right? But in life itself, there are no problems. Well, then he tells this little story: someone went to Buddha and said, “How do you solve a problem?” to Buddha; and Buddha said, “Oh, I never get into one.”

How do you solve the problem? “Well, I never get into one!” So, can we be that swift in our thinking that we never take on anything that is going to cause conflict or opposition or something problematic? Now, of course, there are things that we all have to handle in life, you know. We have to buy our plane ticket, we’ve got to do this, or we’ve got to do that, and sometimes something comes up—"Oh yeah, I got the time wrong,” or whatever, and we correct it. But it's just a simple correction. We make the correction in the moment and we move on, and we don't make it a problem. So yeah, sometimes we make a mistake and we correct it. What's the big deal?

And that's what Christ would do. He would just say, "Well, it's not a problem, it's just, you know, I overlooked this or I overlooked that, and I went this way and I should have gone that way." Well, you change course and you go that way. Simple, solved. So, solutions are always there. So, this is what I wanted to talk about today, that resurrection is something accessible to us.

It's a day of resurrection. It's our day of resurrection. Every day is a day of resurrection.

“The past is over. It can touch me not,” it says, right? Lesson #289. Well, what's the past? The past is five seconds ago. The past is yesterday. All the yesterdays that have accumulated with all of our discontent. Oh that day didn't go so well. That day didn't go so well. We accumulate all that discontent, and then we find ourselves living in the present in a state of discontent. Because we haven't let go of what happened yesterday. So, every day. Om Namah Shivay! Let it go.

Om Namah Shivay! It's done. It's water under the bridge and let it go, and don't hold any grievances. You did the best you could with what you had at the moment, operating in what you felt was the right thing to do. And maybe later, oh, okay, it was something you had to correct and do differently. No problem.

So, it's a good day here in Washington. I've been getting up early. You know, in India they place great emphasis on your spiritual practice, and actually, they say the best time of the 10 day to do whatever practice you're going to do it in the morning before sunrise. So that's why when we're at the ashram, we're at Babaji's ashram, we all get up at like four a.m., take our bath, sit in the temple, and around five a.m. they put this sandalwood paste on your forehead. They call it chandan, and they give you a, you know, a cum cum dot on your third eye; and it's a very cooling very clearing kind of a feeling. You notice that all through the day it has a calming effect. You wear it until the afternoon, and then when you take your afternoon bath, you wash it off, right, but all through the day you have this chundan, and you notice that you're much more present, you're much more aware of your surroundings, you're much more peaceful.

It's a wonderful practice and also getting up early, getting up early every day, get up early, 4 a.m. and then you get in a rhythm, after 10 days of that, you get in this rhythm. And this is the first time, I think, where I felt when we got home from India it wasn't difficult to keep the rhythm going. In fact, I wanted to do it so much. I almost couldn't wait to get up to do my spiritual practice, whatever that is. Everybody will find their own, whatever that is. And Babaji gave us this mantra, “Om Namah Shivay,” and He said that when you recite that mantra, it helps to clear the mind, it helps to bring the mind to silence, to emptiness, to this state where it's open to receive God's Thoughts, right?

But you first have to let go of grievances, let go of concerns, let go of fears, let go of, “Oh, what am I going to do tomorrow?” And is this going to work? And is that, you know, all that chatter? So, the Om Namah Shivay mantra, when you repeat it on a mala a lot of times, it tends to erase what's on your mind, right? It's like you’ve got this blackboard and it's got all these things on it and the Om Namah Shivay just comes and erases it all.

And so that's been a very pleasurable, satisfying, calming practice that I've been doing lately. And anybody can do it, and you don't even have to be, quote-unquote, “Hindu” to believe it works. You try it for yourself. Does it really work? I mean does this Om Namah Shivay really have a vibration that affects my auric field, that affects my DNA, that affects my inner workings? And after a while you do feel better, as you recite it, right? And I'm sure you could do the same with A Course in Miracles Lesson. “I am as God created me.” Lesson #94. Just get a mala and just say, “I am as God created me. I am as God created me.” Say it with conviction. Say it 1,080 times in a day and then see how you feel. I guarantee you'll feel better, you'll feel clearer, you'll feel more present. You'll be more able to keep that equanimity of that calmness in your mind no matter what's going on outside you. I guarantee that that thought will put you in a peaceful state.

And who can say that it's not resurrection? We're resurrecting into a new awareness.

This is Easter. That's what it represents. And we can all have that every day. Every day we can resurrect into a new awareness. Whatever was yesterday is gone. It's not relevant to today. And we can be new in the present moment. And I think that's where we can respond and be a light, and be a help, and be a friend.

You know, we had a lady on our mantra breathing yesterday and she was saying, “Oh, you know, my family's so busy on Easter and there's no space; and they don't even have the time for me to come over,” and she was feeling kind of left out of the whole process, right. So, we called her this morning. We said, “Hey, you already have a family, and we are it! And happy Easter!” And we talked, for she's in Denmark, right. We talked for I don't know, 30 minutes or so, and she had some friends coming over today, and we just had a very good chat. And it was it was so beautiful, you know, to feel connected to somebody to be a friend to somebody, in a time where maybe they just need a little bit of—you know, uplifting words. And that was it.

And it was like, wow, that's what Easter's all about, is this connection. And I think that's what the Gifts of God is about, that we develop a connection amongst ourselves while we're looking at these truths, and they are truths. They're profound truths being spoken, written, given to us, and let's take them in and see if we can apply them in our life and make them our own truth, not just an idea, but an actuality. We can resurrect like the Christ resurrects, and the more we forgive. The more we're aware we are rising up, and the resurrection becomes very real to us, and then we can say it's our truth.

“The holy Christ is born in me today.”

“The holy Christ is born in me today.”

That's it.

Om Namah Shivay.

God bless you.