Willingness is the state of wanting to awaken to truth and being mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ready to do it. It is a call from awake consciousness and a direct link to awake consciousness. When we focus on our willingness, we are in direct communion with awake consciousness. By communing with awake consciousness, we merge with awake consciousness. Focusing on our willingness is the simple way to awaken.

When we focus on willingness, we are consumed with one purpose. When we focus on the mind, our attention is scattered among many purposes. These many purposes are called distractions, because they all have one thing in common: they distract our attention away from our call to awaken.

When we focus on the mind and become distracted by its thoughts, we get lost in points of experience. We experience emotions that are different from truth. Forgiveness is the process of removing attention from points of experience and returning our focus to truth.

Today’s reading teaches a process for forgiveness. It is a simple process that can be used over and over. It can be used each time we find ourselves lost or stuck in an experience that is different from truth. Here’s how the process works:

1. Recognize you are experiencing an emotion that is different from truth and this is an opportunity for forgiveness.

 

2. Put the story aside temporarily in order to quiet the mind. I do this by writing the main points about the story in a journal. Writing the main points on paper helps me empty the mind—to get the story outside of me—so I can relax into a quiet mind.

 

3. Once the mind is quiet, or relatively quieter than before, turn your attention to your willingness or to your spiritual aspiration. I do this by asking myself, “What do I truly want?”

 

4. Focus on your willingness. Let attention linger there. Notice what your willingness feels like. Relax into it. Let yourself go deeper into it by being with it—by communing with it.

 

5. When you feel deeply in touch with willingness, describe the obstacle that you are ready to transcend. For example:
    
   “I am experiencing worry and fear. I am worried that I will have to fight in order to get this project completed on time, and I don’t want to fight. I am worried that I will offend people as I do what I have to do. I am worried we will not complete the project on time. I am worried that if we do complete the project on time, they will put me in charge of the process permanently and that will just create new things to worry about.”

   At this step, it’s important to stay in touch with your willingness. Emotions may arise in the body as you recount the obstacle. Allow whatever arises to be there. Do not judge yourself or the emotional experience; do not attempt to manipulate it or change it. You are in a healing space now, and whatever arises is coming up for healing. Let it be, and stay with your willingness.

6. Once you are in the healing space, any number of experiences may occur. I cannot tell you exactly how healing will happen. Trust whatever happens. Don’t think it is supposed to look a certain way or be different than it is. If you find yourself seeing the obstacle more clearly, look at it. Your clarity regarding the obstacle is a part of the healing process. If you begin to see the situation differently, accept the new point-of-view. If your feelings begin to morph into other feelings, allow them to shift and change. If you begin to realize guidance, trust the guidance. If you feel to grab a pen and journal, do that. If there is a prompt to practice inquiry, follow that prompt.

 

7. Do not try to force forgiveness, and do not try to rush through the forgiveness process. Be willing to stay with the process until you feel intuitively that it is complete for now.

 

8. Optional: I like to conclude a forgiveness process with, “Thank you.”

I recommend printing this tip for future reference.

Note: The next tip will be available tomorrow morning after 3:50am ET at this link.

Willingness is the state of wanting to awaken to truth and being mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ready to do it, even if learning must occur in the process. Willingness is the birth (the beginning) of awakening.

Let’s look more carefully at what willingness is. Let’s begin with the First Principle of God, which is pure, absolute truth. Somehow a motion evolved in the First Principle of God, which created the Second Principle of God. There are stories that try to explain this motion. NTI Romans 2 says it was an idea asking, “What if nothing was as it is?” Kabbalah teaches that the First Principle wanted to create a vessel to receive its love. That vessel is the Second Principle. A Course in Miracles  simply calls it “a tiny mad idea.”

All stories are for the mind. They help it to imagine that it understands. I think we are more enlightened when we realize we do not understand, and we are perfectly okay with that. So, I think it is more truthful to say:

Somehow, a motion evolved in the First Principle of God, which created the Second Principle of God. The Second Principle of God is ‘I am’ consciousness, the first sense of self. For that reason, it is often called the Self. It is a subject without an object—the ability for ‘awareness of’ without anything to be aware of.

Therefore, the next motion that occurred was the creation of the Third Principle of God, which is a process through which objects can be created. Through the interaction of ‘I am’ consciousness with the creative principle, the Fourth Principle of God is created.

The Fourth Principle of God is consciousness appearing as something (many things) other than consciousness. In Kabbalah, there is a story about how the vessel (‘I am’ consciousness) exploded into many tiny pieces. That story points to the ego, which appears as many individual aspects of “I am,” each one seeing itself as separate and independent.

Willingness—the state of wanting to awaken to truth and being mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ready to do it—is the next motion in this process. It is a natural occurrence through which the “many” aspects of consciousness begin their return to one unity consciousness. From unity consciousness, an even stronger pull coming directly from the source calls ‘I am’ back into the First Principle of God.

If you examine this process carefully, you will see that willingness is not something that belongs to you, an individual. Willingness is a call coming from the nature of God. In that way, willingness is  God, and it calls to you, because it is your time to return to the realization of Self.

What about the billions of others who do not feel the call to awaken?

Willingness lives in them too, like a dormant alarm. The gravity of the return force will eventually activate the willingness in every aspect of consciousness.

When you realize that a return is happening—it is in motion—and all will be pulled into it in their time, you realize the nature of your own call to awaken as a powerful, natural force.

Today’s reading teaches us how to cooperate with this call—with the natural return action—instead of resisting it. It likens learning to cooperate to a dance. Sometimes we step in one direction, and sometimes we step in another direction, but through the total motion of the dance, we twirl and sway our way into unity consciousness.

Note: The next tip will be available tomorrow morning after 3:50am ET at this link.