Who are we really talking to?
          Did you ever notice that you are never actually talking to anybody? And that when someone seems to be talking to you, ha!  look and listen again. It only looks and sounds that way? You see, nobody is actually talking to anybody else. We just think we are having conversations. We are always building a cutout figure in front of whoever is standing there and coloring it with all our past issues. And, by the way, the person in front of us is building a cutout in of us and coloring it in, also. So who is talking to whom?  Well, NOBODY!
          This whole concept smacked me in the face recently when I was with a lovely group of ladies and suddenly our conversation exploded into faultfinding and outright in your face attacks. YUK! I blame myself for my own part in the unpleasantness. Happily we are all trying hard to be loving, and slowly forgiveness is ruling the day. However, in the short term, between bouts of beating myself up for not being the saint I love to think I am, I reviewed how each of us was responding to something that wasn’t actually being said or done at the time. We each, myself included, reacted to and attacked something that wasn’t there. We were all focused on our cut out figures, carefully colored with our underlying issues held onto since childhood and beyond; issues that we have been jealously hoarding and using once more to justify attacking another. A Course in Miracles calls these explosive and hidden, psychological landmines, ‘dark cornerstones’.
          And so I had to once again remind myself what the Course has taught me -  whomever stands in front of me I color with the one unforgiving thought I have held since time began. It doesn’t matter who it is, or what they are doing or saying – what I see coloring that person is the one grievance, the one sense of guilt, and that one need to project anger onto another, that I have felt I needed to do, and have being doing since time immemorial.
          So next time you think your hard day is because of your spouse, the person you work for or with, the government, foreign powers, or perhaps just a misalignment of the stars. Step back and rip up those cut out figures you just placed in front of you, and join me in letting the Holy Spirit show us the truth:
 “We are One, we are whole, we are our Father’s Son, guiltless and forever loved.”