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July-September, 2014

Striking Spiritual Goal at Wakulla C.I.

by Rev. Jo Williams

Who knew I’d find such an incredible outpouring of wisdom and love in such an unlikely place! At least, unlikely as far as the average un-incarcerated person is concerned. Wakulla C.I. in Crawfordville, Florida has recently become, for me, a stairway to Heaven. Actually, more like an express elevator to my function on earth — to give and receive God’s Love.

For some reason I can’t explain, I’ve felt drawn for many years to do some sort of prison ministry. I completed the necessary requirements to volunteer in prisons in Florida in 2011, but the chaplain of the facility I wanted to serve rejected my proposed program as “inflammatory.” Based on A Course in Miracles, I wanted to teach that everyone, behind bars or outside of them, has the Kingdom of God within him and the God-given power to take dominion over his life.

Disappointed that my first attempt failed so abruptly, I asked Spirit for guidance on how I might still accomplish my goal. Shortly thereafter, I ran across an organization called Spirit Light Outreach (SLO) on the Internet. The purpose of the organization is to provide spiritual/inspirational materials to prisoners. One of the primary books SLO sends out is A Course in Miracles. Having been a student/facilitator of the Course for 20 years, lights and sirens went off for me. This definitely showed Spirit’s hand! No doubt in my mind. I immediately called the founder/director, Joe Wolfe and left him a message. Within the hour, Joe — a former inmate himself — called me back. Before I knew it, we were making plans for him to come and speak in my church in Tampa.

After meeting Joe in person two years ago, it became clear to me why I was so driven to reach out to my brothers and sisters behind bars. Joe “made flesh” the gnawing truth inside me: We are all the same! Here was this “gangsta” from Chicago suddenly sitting on my back porch like a giant teddy bear — the humility, Love and Light he exuded, unmistakable proof.

I thought about my brother Jimmy, now deceased. One night when he was a little boy, he accidentally knocked over a glass of tea at dinner, and our dad became furious. Dad snatched him up from the table and walloped his behind. It was the first time I recall thinking: “He didn’t mean to be bad. It was an accident, a mistake.” No one means to be bad. Yet we all fall short of the glory God created us to be. My brother, God bless him, had a lot of “accidents.” And no one ever told him that it was okay to make mistakes. So, one of the dearest, most loving beings I ever knew lived his entire life believing he was a screw up.

I recently shared a secret about my own seemingly perfect life for the first time ever, with an inmate in Amarillo. I once shoplifted some articles from a department store. I had the money to buy them, but I didn’t. I’m sure there were probably security cameras even way back then. But for some reason, I escaped the fate many shoplifters ultimately endure — time behind bars.

When I shared my secret with this inmate, he could not believe the fine Rev. Jo Williams had done such a thing. Instantly, the bond between us deepened. I was no longer a holier-than-thou untouchable. My cup had a crack in it, just like his. Just like everyone’s.

When Joe Wolfe emailed me his list of hundreds of inmates who wanted to correspond with someone about spirituality, specifically about A Course in Miracles (ACIM), I asked Spirit to guide me in selecting the first name. That name turned out to be WH at Wakulla C.I.

I wrote to W immediately, enclosing materials about ACIM and received an immediate and touchingly appreciative response. I sent W a copy of my book, Miracles: Take the Freeway and, less than a week later, received a letter brimming with questions about spirituality and the principles of ACIM. Hitting it off like a couple of long lost friends, our correspondence has been animated and regular ever since. As W began to share the amazing, transformative principles of the Course with friends at Wakulla, my P.O. box began to fill with letters. The letters, without exception, have been filled with probing, intelligent questions and comments — and deeply moving gratitude.

Besides W, one of the most intensely “hungry” and wise inmates I’ve encountered at Wakulla is HDW. Each week now, I receive at least two letters from D, usually written in the quiet hours of the early morning. Once wasting away in the lonely darkness of his cell, D lit up like the Big Apple Christmas tree. From my perspective, he literally soared from a man withdrawn in hopeless resignation to a role model and a leader. He got a job in one of the canteens there and uses his position there to learn the fine art of forgiveness and to dispense God’s Love and Light.

I started my letter-writing ministry thinking I would bring a little Light and sense of worth and hope into the darkness of a few steel and concrete cages designed to separate the holy Son of God from his brothers and sisters. Yet it was I who was the recipient of the outpouring of Love and Light unlike any I have before encountered.

What I have learned from my brothers at Wakulla is that the Christ Light in us cannot be extinguished. It may dim, but it instantly resurrects and flourishes where two join their hearts and minds in the giving and receiving of God’s Love. What I learned is that, as ACIM tells us, we are not bodies but eternal spirits, perfect and whole. Through letter writing, I learned that bodies are not needed or required to join, to heal, and to share the love and abundance that is our joint heritage — the Kingdom of God within us all.

To all my friends at Wakulla C.I. — and to Joe Wolfe, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you have given me and all you have taught me.

Rev. Jo Williams is a teacher of A Course in Miracles living in Tampa Bay, Florida. If you would like to help Joe Wolfe with his prison ministry, contact him at Spirit Light Outreach, PO Box 1174, North Riverside, IL 60546. Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  Joe Wolfe’s latest book, In Warm Blood can be purchased from Amazon.com.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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April-June, 2014

Healing Through Spirituality

by Rev. Cathey Jo Tomilenko, O.M.C.

Many years ago I was in a car accident, which changed my life drastically. I lost my teaching job of 27 years, a marriage, and over the years I have had at least 30 surgeries. I have actually lost count. It was a hit and run. A lady ran a red light and hit me at 55 mph. Little did I know at the time how important it was that the healing of my mind and thoughts were determinedly necessary for my physical healing.

Before I learned about how important our thoughts are, or even knew that the Holy Spirit was always guiding and working in and through me at all times, I spent several years living in anger. I was mad at the lady who hit me, the doctors who kept telling me I would spend the rest of my life in a wheel chair, my husband at the time who took advantage and stole my money from me by forging my name on the medical and disability checks. Even with all this anger inside, something was telling me that what the doctors predicted didn’t have to be. I didn’t know what it was at the time that kept giving me this message.

It wasn’t until five years later, when my sister and brother-in-law took me to a new thought church called Unity Church of Today. The first time I walked in I felt a certain peace and some kind of happy spirit not only in the church but with the people. After a year of taking Unity classes, I was introduced to A Course In Miracles. At first, like most of us, I didn’t understand anything I was reading. In fact, I was so confused I put the book on the shelf and didn’t touch it again for a year. As I continued learning about how important spiritual principles are in one’s life, that God is always present in our lives and that I am the beloved of God, I found my life changing. I was becoming more at peace. Forgiveness became a major part of my life. The more I forgave, the more at peace I was. I was especially learning to forgive myself for being so angry and living in blame.

I finally picked up the book again and went to A Course In Miracles class. I seemed to be more open to the teachings. Little did I know at the time that I would be led to Pathways of Light Ministry and be facilitating a class myself. God has the plan for our lives, not us, contrary to what we think.

As I grew to understand the teachings of A Course In Miracles, I spend more time in meditation, in peace, doing the forgiveness exercises in the Workbook. As a result, my body began to heal in a different and better way. As the surgeries continued, I was able to put my body at ease, talk to it and tell it what was going to happen. I would tell my organs to support me and blood not to go to the surgical site. My body didn’t have to experience a lot of pain and it could begin to heal as soon as the surgery was over.

I also told my mind that the I AM would be in the presence of God and the Holy Spirit would be protecting not only me but working through the team of surgeons and physicians. If I got a little nervous, I would immediately go within to the Holy Spirit for peace and guidance. What a difference it makes when your thoughts are at peace and you are putting your trust in the Holy Spirit. This trust and knowing that I am always being guided by the Holy Spirit are now embedded in my life.

I now have a team of physicians that support me in using spiritual principles as well as western medicine in my physical challenges. They pray with me, do visualization with me and know that I believe my healing goes way beyond just the physical. I now know that I Am a wonderful creation of a loving God, and that the Holy Spirit is very much a part of my healing. When my mind is at peace and I trust, my body is at peace and can heal more quickly and easily.

Each week, when I facilitate A Course In Miracles, I thank God that my ministerial teacher, Cheryl Goodrich, lead me to Pathways of Light. I might be the facilitator of A Course In Miracles, but each week I am still learning, forgiving and healing my mind, which ultimately supports the healing of my body. I live a very grateful life.

I am especially grateful for A Course In Miracles. My life is a miracle. I should have died in that car accident and a couple of times in surgery, but I didn’t. I am standing and walking at times with some limitations, but I am not in the wheel chair that was predicted. I have a big sign on my fridge that says, “God has a plan for my life. That’s all I need to know.” God is my Source and the Holy Spirit is my Guide. I still have much more healing of my mind to do. I am open and willing to allow the Holy Spirit’s guidance within to continue taking me on this wonderful Journey called life.

Rev. Cathey Jo Tomilenko is a Pathways of Light minister living in Bloomfield, Michigan, USA

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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April-June, 2014

Jesus’ Deeper Message: A Holographic Revelation

by Rev. Nouk Sanchez, O.M.C.

Jesus was the first to complete his full return to God. He was the first to recognize and overcome the entire dream of separation by undoing its nucleus of death. In the illusion of time He was our pioneer, the one who demolished the veil of death and fulfilled God’s Will completely. Until Jesus triumphantly overcame death through His own resurrection, we all, the one collectively sleeping mind, dwelt in darkness.

Through His resurrection He overcame all ego laws and gifted us with the Atonement, which is the undoing of fear. The Atonement is an immediate tool for correcting fear in our perception. Use of it will eventually undo our unconscious devotion to death, allowing us to follow Him out of the ego dream. Jesus is the Atonement. In His completion of God’s perfect Will, He accomplished our healing too. It is already done. All we need do is accept it.

You were in darkness until God’s Will was done completely by any part of the Sonship. When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all. How else could it be perfectly accomplished?

My mission was simply to unite the will of the Sonship with the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father’s Will myself. This is the awareness I came to give you… (T-8.IV.3:1-5)

The extraordinary holographic message of A Course in Miracles is gradually recognized and integrated as a way of living and thus, of being. What is meant by the term, “holographic message”? The ego’s severely limited frame of reference is focused upon one goal of separation from the one Love we are. Miracles are holographic in the sense that they heal in all dimensions of time, collapsing fragments of the ego’s thought system in every now moment that we invoke and thereby accept them.

Miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement. Atonement works all the time and in all the dimensions of time. (T-1.I.25)

However, the miracle entails a sudden shift from horizontal to vertical perception. This introduces an interval from which the giver and receiver both emerge farther along in time than they would otherwise have been. The miracle thus has the unique property of abolishing time to the extent that it renders the interval of time it spans unnecessary. (T-1.II.6:3-5)

The deeper calling beckons us to live out from the one power within; this calling is only accepted once we willingly join with Spirit to exhume and relinquish our unconscious fears, guilt and false humility. To relinquish is to forgive. As our trust in Love increases, fear falls away, and that’s when we genuinely withdraw our dependence on the world’s opinion to tell us who we are and what reality is.

What we see out in the world is what the ego mind sends our senses to go fetch: Only what it projects is verified by our senses, to invite us to react to it. When we withdraw our trust in the physical senses, however, we learn to rely on inner vision and guidance to show us what Reality is.

In these holographic teachings, Jesus exposes death for what it is — the most epic of all unconscious myths since the beginning of time. He urges us to see through its many disguises and overcome death in all its sinister forms, just as He did. Death is universally believed to be life’s only certain outcome. It is deemed a natural and legitimate part of life, the one outcome we all expect. The ego’s survival depends on the belief that physical death is non-negotiable, inevitable and inescapable. It deems us victims of its own laws of time, deprivation, disease, decay and death. In other words, it insists we are prey to a power other than God’s all-encompassing Love. But how could a power other than God’s Love possibly exist unless we, through our free will, choose to value it?

This is not a teaching of the body’s immortality. Death, like all imagined powers other than God’s Love, does not exist unless we desire it in our experience. In Jesus’ physical resurrection He overcame the concept of death in all its forms, and He did it for all of us. He calls us to use this ego dream as a means to reverse the ego thought system, and reclaim our true inheritance as expressions of God’s Love. Death is not part of Life. If it were, fear would be part of Love and the ego would be part of God.

The ego mind made the body for the purpose of using it to attack our self and the world, expressly to teach and prolong separation and suffering within the illusion of time. As we undo the ego, the purpose of the body and world are reversed. It becomes understood they are solely teaching devices for Love and forgiveness.

As the mind returns to sanity, it withdraws its belief in ego laws and strengthens its recognition that the body is under no laws but God’s. What a relief! Finally we can quit taking false responsibility for our bodies and those of our loved ones, and learn to trust in Love for our wellbeing instead. Our increased trust in the Holy Self takes over, and miracles flow. Jesus reminds us to relinquish everything that does not matter (including the body), and allow Him to guide everything that does matter:

“My control can take over everything that does not matter, while my guidance can direct everything that does, if you so choose.” (T-2.VI.1:3)

“I will substitute for your ego if you wish… I can be entrusted with your body and your ego only because this enables you not to be concerned with them, and lets me teach you their unimportance.” (T-4.I.13:1,4)

Through Jesus’ guidance we come to recognize it is not the body that sustains us, but the Mind and Love of God. As our trust is withdrawn from the ego thought system, we discover biological ego laws that previously appeared to govern the body are eclipsed by God’s law of unopposed Life.

Our return to Love involves un-learning and reversing the body’s purpose. While under the ego’s reign, the body is believed to be our source of life. It is also erroneously idealized as both our identity and goal, an end in itself. We haven’t yet seen its purpose as purely a vehicle through which we un-learn our dependence on the ego, body and world.

Through the ego, the body assumes an identity of its own, an image we mistakenly invest with the power to change, wither, sicken and die. In short, we give the body false authority over our mind, in order to prove the illusion of attack is real. We give it emotional and biological intelligence so it appears to overrule our mind.

The ego set this up as a powerfully effective distraction, to prevent us from awakening to our Holy Self. Until we join God’s Will in undoing our unconscious devotion to death in all its forms, we will continue to believe, manifest and demonstrate the body is more powerful than the mind of our Holy Self.

Jesus explains the body cannot create either sickness or health. Physical illness represents a belief in magic, which is the temptation to believe effects can be at cause. Yet all cause exists in the mind. Pain and illness seek to demonstrate that something other than the Will of God is real. There is no will but God’s, and everything other than this is magic. Physical illness is not part of God’s Will, therefore it is magic.

We mistakenly believe matter, including the body, holds a creative ability the mind cannot control. This compulsive ego belief that the body can develop symptoms of sickness or health independently of the mind, necessarily excludes trust in God’s Will as our primary devotion.

The body cannot create, and the belief that it can, a fundamental error, produces all physical symptoms. Physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion that made magic rests on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter which the mind cannot control. (T-2.IV.2:6-8)

As we awaken, we learn the body is not who we are. It is not a purpose or goal in itself. The body is solely a means, a learning device to help us remember our true purpose. As the mind is healed, our secret devotion to suffering and death is undone. The body is returned to its proper role and is no longer used to demonstrate the illusion that it holds power and dominion over the mind.

The body is eventually restored to its rightful place in our perception as an effect only, never a cause. At this point we will know without doubt the body is simply not real. As an effect, it has no ability to create, cause, attack, get well, get sick or die. When this level of mastery is attained, as Jesus’ demonstrated, we will witness to our self and the sleeping world that the healed mind, not the body, is the supreme and only cause.

Then and only then will the body have served its divine purpose of demonstrating the reversal of the world’s thinking. Having done so, it may no longer be required as a vehicle. This, I believe, heralds the Real World yet to come fully into our awareness. As our fear of God’s Love is undone and trust in God as Self is restored, the Real World will expand in our perception.

“Only the mind can create because spirit has already been created, and the body is a learning device for the mind. Learning devices are not lessons in themselves. Their purpose is merely to facilitate learning. The worst a faulty use of a learning device can do is to fail to facilitate learning. It has no power in itself to introduce actual learning errors. The body, if properly understood, shares the invulnerability of the Atonement to two-edged application.” (T-2.IV.3:1-6)

The healed mind will lay the body aside in perfect health, peace and joy, once its mission is complete. But until the body’s unreality and creative inability to cause change is known and demonstrated in our experience — until we fully realize and demonstrate it has no ability to get well, get sick or die — we have not yet claimed the sovereign power of the fully healed mind.

Until we accept into our experience the Truth that all power lies in God, we will continue to believe, accept and testify to the body’s reality. And we will do this no matter how strongly we intellectually espouse the body’s unreality.

While we choose to remain victims of the body, we believe and validate the body’s reality. And we will not know a fully healed mind until we realize, accept and demonstrate that the body cannot be victimized. Until we are ready to exhume, examine and release our false dependence on ego laws, we will be afraid of the power of our mind, and of our Holy Self. Thus we will choose the seemingly easier route of remaining as the body’s victim, and death will appear to claim it.

While death remains at the center of our unconscious dream, the most cherished idol on our inner altar, Life will not be experienced. As long as death eclipses God’s Love in our awareness, life as we know it will reflect fear instead of Love, guilt instead of innocence, suffering instead of joy, and deprivation rather than infinite supply. This choice for pain is not necessary, yet as the world’s most cherished idol, death beats God’s Love, hands down.

Jesus tells us very clearly that death and God’s Love cannot both be real. Death and God’s Love are mutually exclusive and wholly irreconcilable. They cannot coexist. Yet through the ego, we try to manage both simultaneous beliefs. This is insanity.

We say we believe in God yet we also believe in, and therefore see, death daily — whether reported in the media or in our own personal life. If we’re absolutely honest, when we connect with God and with death in daily experience, which one of these beliefs is more firmly held to be true for us?

Jesus is adamant that only one, either death or God, is real and therefore true. While we maintain both as real, we keep ourselves in terrible turmoil, confusion and fear. Unconsciously, we will believe that death comes from God, which fuels our unconscious fear of God as the fear of Love itself.

Disease is another idol we believe is a natural, legitimate part of life. Like our belief in death, this is extreme delusion. We refuse to realize we made disease and death in an effort to convince ourselves of our own powerlessness and helplessness, separate from our Creator. Yet by choosing to remain asleep, helpless and powerless over the ego’s laws, we effectively reject God’s Love as our Holy Self.

You see in death escape from what you made. But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies. Life has no opposite, for it is God. Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life. Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real. (M-20.5:2-7)

You made the god of sickness, and by making him you made yourself able to hear him. Yet you did not create him, because he is not the Will of the Father. He is therefore not eternal and will be unmade for you the instant you signify your willingness to accept only the eternal. (T-10.III.9:4-6)

Jesus, as the one awakened Christ within us all, released A Course in Miracles into the world as a major wake-up call. In it, He asks us to recognize we made all suffering as a means to attack our self and to separate from God’s Love, thereby keeping our self asleep.

He gives us the principles through which we can take back our power, to un-make all we made to keep our self dreaming a dream of suffering and death. And he emphatically tells us to do this by using the body, in order to transcend the body.

The body is the means by which God’s Son returns to sanity. Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill. (W-pll.5.4)

Many of us have unknowingly misunderstood Jesus’ teachings about the body. For many years I was among those who were confused in this area. The popular Course quote, “I am not a body, I am free,” became widely employed by so many of us as an unintentional spiritual bypass, as yet another excuse for ego denial of the true cause of all suffering. This is the opposite of Jesus’ intent.

Jesus titled his teaching tool A Course in MIRACLES. Yes, miracles. All good Course students know that everything we seem to see, including miracles, originate from one place only: The mind — the level of cause. As such, many miracles that occur are not seen with the body’s eyes, because they are purely perceptual shifts. They might not be physically recognized, and may not have observable effects.

However, within the deeper message of the Course, Jesus boldly proclaims we can and will be the instruments through which many miracles materialize in form. And these tangible physical miracles will manifest as a direct result of accepting the Atonement for our self, allowing the full correction of error in our mind.

Rev. Nouk Sanchez is co-author of best seller, Take Me to Truth and Founder of the ‘Take Me to Truth Foundation,’ which is based on the teachings of A Course in Miracles. The End of Death is now available at: http://www.pathwaysoflight.org/polshop/The-End-of-Death.html. Newsletter: http://www.undoing-the-ego.org/newsletter.html.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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April-June, 2014

Only God’s Plan for Salvation Will Work

by Rev. Veronika Birken, O.M.C.

Reading the title, doesn’t it make you curious what this plan could be?

The lesson offers three questions to use in order to find out. This morning I had the golden opportunity to do just that. My former husband and I were having breakfast together, talking about a planned camping trip. Soon we were getting entangled in our opposite ways of doing things. I noticed the energy and asked that we sit down and just breathe for ten minutes, which we did.

I asked the first question:

1. What would You have Us do? (Meaning my Higher Self and Me as One US.)

‘To let go of the need to control.’

I instantly breathed out any need to control this situation or anything or anyone.

2. Where would You have Us go?

More quiet breathing. Then tears and inner pain were released. I have had many similar experiences with my husband before. Now I could feel the pain of it and release it. Answer to ‘Where would You have Us go:’

‘Within to heal what is in need of healing.’

3. What would You have Us say and to whom?

I saw how the other worked from caution and I worked from enthusiasm. Exactly opposing ways. But now I saw that they were two halves of the same coin, namely they worked both from fear. Caution is the fear of not feeling safe, enthusiasm which wants to quickly push ahead, is the fear of losing out.

Afterwards I shared what had come to me and we decided to drop the whole idea for the time being, not because we had given up but because we were now open to another way.

Rev. Veronika Birken is a Pathways of Light minister who lives in Merimbula, New South Wales, AU. Read her inspiring Healing Journal articles on the Pathways website. Web: http://www.trueimage.name

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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