How lovely does the world become!

How lovely does the world become in just that single instant when you see the truth about yourself reflected there.  Now you are sinless and behold your sinlessness.  Now you are holy and perceive it so.  And now the mind returns to its Creator, the joining of the Mother and the Daughter, the Unity of unities that stands behind all joining but beyond them all.  Goddess is not seen but only understood.  Her Daughter is not attacked but recognized.

(M:Clarification of Terms:3:8.)

For me, my world began to change when I not only saw the truth about myself, but when I began to accept and trust that truth, when I stopped doubting, when I stopped applying my own and the world’s judgment to what I knew to be true. That process began with accepting the fact of my sinlessness and my true value as a Holy Child of Goddess. Even today, I reinforce that lesson by repeating to myself:

Holy am I, eternal, free and whole, at peace forever in the Heart of Goddess.

(M:15:1:11; syntax changed to the first person.) With this knowledge came the awareness that I’m OK no matter what, that nothing I can do, nothing anyone else can do, can change my true nature as a Holy Child of Goddess. Although my lapses are many, increasingly my mind automatically counters negative thoughts about myself with the truth of my holiness. My ego doesn’t like encountering roadblocks no matter what path it tries to use to attack me, but I sure do!

The process of accepting my sinlessness allowed me to let go of the shame I have felt my entire life, the belief that I was irreparably flawed and that the things I have done that hurt myself and others could never be corrected and never, ever forgiven. Key to that process was the knowledge that only Love is real and that the only parts of my past that existed, then and now, are those expressions of Love that I gave and received. Everything else is merely a mistake to be corrected, a call for help to be answered, by remembering the truth of what is real and what is not, and of the eternal nature of all of us as Holy Children of Goddess.

It was this process of accepting my eternal nature that eventually led to the most profound transformation of my life: my acceptance of the truth that I had always known and never allowed myself to even consider, the truth that I am a woman, which led to my transition to living the rest of my life as Abby almost exactly 18 months ago. The Course teaches that everything we perceive is an illusion, that only our nature as Thoughts of Goddess is real because only that is eternal and unchanging. Since, as one early commenter here pointed out, Goddess is without gender, we too must be genderless. So, in a way, my decision to transition from masculine to feminine is a confirmation of illusion. However, living as a woman can be no more illusion than living as a man, and, if the world is truly meaningless as the Course teaches, then how can my transition from one to the other be of any importance to myself or others? These are thoughts that I fortunately have not spent much time dwelling on, because I know that “complexity is of the ego” (T:15:IV:6:2), that “[p]reoccupations with problems set up to be incapable of solutions are favorite ego devices for impeding learning progress” (T:4:V:6:6), and that we “should both learn and teach that theoretical issues but waste time, draining it way from its appointed purpose” (M:24:4:5). Instead, I have applied the simple test laid out in the Course to each choice I have made in this process: does it bring me peace and joy or fear and sadness? If the latter, then I have chosen wrongly; I have chosen fear over Love. If instead the choice brings peace and joy to my heart, then I know that I have chosen Love, which is all Goddess asks of us.

From the moment three years ago, sitting in the sweat lodge among my women friends that a voice within said, “I want breasts,” and I recognized the truth of that statement and the comfort that admitting it brought me, to the decision to start hormones a month later, to this very moment as I write this, every step along the way has brought me nothing but peace and joy. So, although I do not understand exactly how these decisions fit into the concepts of what is real and what is illusion taught in the Course¸ I know without doubt that this is the path the Holy Spirit has set out for me, and so, I do not question. I simply live the truth of who I know myself to be both in the world of illusion in which we seem to live and in the eternal realm of Spirit.