Miracles News

Tweet

January-March, 2014

The One About Trust

by Rev. Stephan Mead, O.M.C.

The book, A Course in Miracles, promises me a life of eternal happiness and peace if I am willing to “trust.” This promise, as I understand it, can manifest right now because eternal happiness and peace is my natural, created state as — I am one with all Love.

What is life like living in perfect peace and eternal happiness? Truthfully, I can only guess. If trust is a condition to experience Life as Life really is, then at best, I only know about trust as an intellectual concept.

Meditating on the concept of trust has been a fascinating experience. First, do I even know what trust is? Is it possible to exist and “not trust?” What proof, personal to me, is available to have those questions answered? In a rather rare moment of sanity, it occurred to me that I have never lacked the ability to trust. Trust is actually part of my consciousness. Every thought I have has a foundation of trust, so obviously the problem isn’t one of lack.

Since I cannot describe my life as living in perfect peace and the ability to trust is not the issue, what is wrong with me?

MISPLACEMENT! Trusting what isn’t trustworthy is the only explanation of why I am not experiencing perfect happiness all the time.

Can I trust what Jesus tells me is true? Do I really think I am so special, unique and separate from everyone else that, like a judge, evidence must be considered and weighed carefully before I decide whether to trust that the truth is true? Apparently that must be exactly what I think.

Do I trust that God keeps His promises? Do I trust that my ego keeps its promises? Perhaps those are the questions I should meditate on. How much longer will I rely on my ego to judge where my trust is to be placed?

Ronald Reagan, in a famous quote as the cold war was coming to an end, said “trust-but – verify.” My ego loved that quote, so I loved it too. Upon quiet reflection, another way of interpreting Mr. Reagan’s caution is “trust but don’t trust.” This doesn’t make any sense at all. No wonder my ego loved it. No wonder I loved it. Is it possible I am trying to meet the conditions for peace by “trusting but not trusting?” Am I really that insane?

What if I really, really trusted God in all things? What if I placed no trust in my ego at all? Would I worry about my relationship with Nancy? Would I worry about my financial condition? Would I worry about my health? Would I worry about anything at all? Is worry just another name for doubt? The Course tells me, “…doubt and trust cannot coexist.” (M-7.4:6)

So, what if I really, really did trust God? Perhaps the results would be material for a future article, “The One About Sanity!”

Rev. Stephan Mead, O.M.C., is a Pathways of Light minister living in Seattle, Washington.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this copyright notice and website address are included.

Tell a Friend

Printable Page

---

Tweet

January-March, 2014

A Common and Unrecognized Trap — Personal Ego Does Not Exist

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

If you have forgiven yourself for unknowingly using someone, yourself or a situation, to attack yourself and you have already accepted Spirit’s Atonement (correction of your perception), then it is important to let it go, to trust that it has been healed, regardless of continuing appearances at the form level.

If you still feel a loss of peace, then the ego has made another judgment. Do not believe it. Once you have allowed a Holy Instant where you genuinely surrendered your judgment and accepted Atonement, then it is done. To doubt that it has been healed is really self-doubt. However, this healing is brought about by Holy Spirit and not by your mistaken identity, so any doubt that arises is from the ego and is not real. Trust is called for now. Love without trust is impossible. Doubt and Love cannot co-exist. Choose one and the other must fall away.

Atonement is accepting the healing of our perception, the one cause of all suffering. It is not our role to take responsibility for what is being atoned for. Once it is given to Spirit, forgiveness takes place and it is not the ego’s responsibility to retain it. To hold onto concern, guilt, or doubt is allowing the ego to perpetuate guilt and suffering. And it acts as a block to receiving and witnessing the certainty and consistency of God’s healing through the miracle. Our responsibility is to offer whatever upsets us over to Spirit to reinterpret on our behalf. And to trust implicitly that God’s perfect healing is done.

“If the sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself, and I assure you that it is, then the responsibility for [what] is atoned for cannot be yours. ...If you accept the remedy for disordered thought, a remedy whose efficacy is beyond doubt, how can its symptoms remain?” (T-5.V.7:8,12)

You are not responsible for the problem. The ego is. You are responsible for choosing to perceive through the ego. There is no problem apart from your erroneous perception of it. Yet the ego is an impersonal suggestion of sin/evil and is not real. No one has a personal ego. It is not an entity but a thought system. The ego is an impersonal projection and you are not responsible for causing the ego, nor for fixing the ego’s illusory problems. You are not capable of accomplishing either. You are however, responsible for releasing your mistaken perception and for accepting the miracle instead. This is forgiveness, the Atonement.

The ego is not an entity, it is a thought system that we either choose to believe, or reject. It’s an impersonal stream of thought based on guilt and fear. As an analogy for the ego, think of a non-stop looping movie that streams continuously. It doesn’t belong to anyone yet it just streams and projects over and over.

In our Creation by God as his one Child, the Holy Self, we knew that we were “one” and that our Identity was indestructible because it was (and still is) Love without opposite. We knew that we were an expression of God’s eternal and Loving Will as no less than the Kingdom of Heaven itself. This remains the Truth of who we are now but we have temporarily forgotten, getting lost in the ego’s looping movie of birth and death.

On top of this, and within the ego’s amnesia, we have each taken this impersonal and fear-filled movie and made it personal. As if it’s my life, my body, my partner, my family and so on. Even in the idea of my birth and my death we seize a fragment of the ego’s impersonal movie and make it our very own. And when we grasp so tightly, we unknowingly abdicate our Power in God, forfeiting it entirely in favor of submitting ourselves to the ego’s illusory laws of suffering, separation and death.

In one of our popular teleclasses, one participant whom I will call Penny (not her real name) had us all riveted as she courageously shared a recent and traumatic incident, one that appeared extremely difficult to forgive within the ego’s hierarchy of illusions. She witnessed an animal being beaten to death. This horrifying act has got to be among the top ten monstrosities of the ego. We could all sense the shock waves of this story as they washed through us. Penny was still feeling traumatized two weeks later and was having great difficulty in seeing this from her Right-Mind with Holy Spirit.

Penny felt an overwhelming guilt for believing that she was personally responsible for having projected this terribly disturbing scene. Because she had witnessed it, she mistakenly believed that this abuse had been manifested by her personally; by her own personal ego. But there is no personal ego! Whatever we decide to make personal, the ego will hijack to increase our guilt and suffering. As revealed earlier, the ego is an impersonal thought system that is streaming all the time. Penny did not play a part in the cause of the incident just because she had witnessed it. Let me explain using this example.

If I am triggered by something, then it’s not me personally that is triggered. It is the particular filter that I choose to look through, which is fear as the wrong-mind. Only fear can appear to be personal. If I am triggered then I am choosing to see via the ego thought system. I view the event through its lens of guilt and fear. The event itself is always neutral. No matter how shocking, how unfair, it always remains neutral.

In God’s Truth, there is never any suffering. Therefore it is always my interpretation of the event that either reinforces my guilt or frees me from it. If I perceive suffering then I do not perceive with God. But in order to invoke real healing through the miracle then I must, if only for an instant, be willing to join with Spirit in my Right-Mind. If I feel triggered, then I am in the wrong-mind. At this point I must remember to look past the ego’s appearances and step myself through the forgiveness/Atonement process.

As I forgive by accepting Atonement, my world will heal because it exists only in my mind. Both the ego’s movie and the Holy Spirit’s movie exist in my mind simultaneously and I will witness the world that I presently value. And as I learn to look past disturbing appearances with Spirit, the Real World or happy dream is revealed to me. However I will not be able to see and truly embody the glory of the Real World until I decide to undo the ego’s filter as the wrong-mind.

This impersonal ego movie will throw all kinds of horrendous phenomena at us, hoping that we will continue to engage in its endless guilt, fear and death cycle. And this is where we must learn to choose again. Everything that occurs is neutral. Our only responsibility is to maintain awareness of our triggers, the times that we feel threat, and to exchange these for the Atonement, for true forgiveness and the miracle.

The reason I bring Penny’s story in here is because it represents clearly just how, as Course students, we can fall into a common ego trap that causes much confusion and suffering. We inadvertently withdraw our projected guilt from outside, from others and the world as Penny had, and then instead of wholeheartedly giving it to Spirit, we project that same guilt onto ourselves. Guilt is guilt whether we see it outside or within. It’s all the same as an attack on our Holy Self. If we encounter judgment, self judgment or guilt, then it is an immediate sign that we are rejecting God’s Love. Remember? Judgment and guilt are our greatest blocks to the awareness of Love’s presence. When they show up, we need to ask Spirit to heal our perception.

The Atonement is the undoing of fear. It is accomplished in any “now” moment that we choose to wholeheartedly surrender our anguished perception to Spirit’s Love to be healed. But we must accept the Atonement for it to be effective. This is trust. Otherwise the ego hijacks the issue again in an attempt to convince us that nothing was healed, especially when it seems that appearances still prevail, e.g., abuse, pain, sickness, scarcity, etc.

The Atonement is the miracle of true forgiveness. It is the miraculous remedy for the ego and its seeming effects. Only one devotion can be placed upon our inner Altar at any one time. Either the problem as we perceive it, or the divine Solution as the Atonement. While worry, anxiety, doubt, and resentment, etc., still remain as idols on our inner Altar, they obstruct true Healing.

“Forgiveness that is learned of me does not use fear to undo fear. Nor does it make real the unreal and then destroy it. Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind, or you will also believe that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven. What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit the effects of error are nonexistent. By steadily and consistently cancelling out all its effects, everywhere and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and proves it.” (T-9.IV.5)

Remember this — we cannot forgive what we still believe is real.

“The ego’s plan is to have you see error clearly first, and then overlook it. Yet how can you overlook what you have made real? By seeing it clearly, you have made it real and [cannot] overlook it.” (T-9.IV.4)

“Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son, as proof of His eternal Love. And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing power from the Mind which saw the truth in it, and failed to be deceived by what was falsely added. All the threads of fantasy are gone. And what remains is unified into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere.” (W-pI.151.14)

Nouk 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. Her latest book, The End of Death will be announced in her Newsletter. You can sign up for the Newsletter here: http://www.undoing-the-ego.org/newsletter.html

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this copyright notice and website address are included.

Tell a Friend

Printable Page

---

Tweet

January-March, 2014

Radio Stations

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

I have two ‘radio stations’ I listen to.

One of them is mostly turned on.
I hear it going all the time
and I am so used to it,
that I hardly notice its
continual ‘announcements.’

The other station I need to choose
consciously, by first turning off the
first one and listen to the stillness.

As I rest in this stillness,
willing to tune in to this other one,
I can hear the still small
Voice of Spirit speak.

It requires vigilance to do so
frequently throughout the day.

As I get good at this tuning in
to the higher frequency,
the new station becomes First to me,
the one I love to hear the most
and in fact, in the end,
the Only one I truly desire.

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 web site. Web: http://www.trueimage.name

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this copyright notice and website address are included.

Tell a Friend

Printable Page

---

Tweet

January-March, 2014

The Focus of Pathways of Light — An Ongoing Healing Journey

by Revs. Robert & Mary Stoelting

We have been inspired to share about how we have worked with Spirit for the last 40 years and where Spirit has led us. Our experience has been that Spirit works with us in the moment. Spirit has never given us a five year plan. Yet we always receive what we need when we need it.

We have observed that Holy Spirit’s one goal over all these years has been to help us all realize that, in this “world,” we are dreaming a dream and its content is not true. We are not separate bodies with separate minds. In truth we are one Mind, the same Spirit of Love that our Creator is. That is why A Course in Miracles tells us in the Introduction, “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” 

This one goal of waking up from the dream and realizing our one true Identity is why Pathways of Light (POL) has provided materials that focus on listening to the highest Source of Love that resides deep within our minds, waiting to help us realize that this world we think we “live” in is simply a dream, an illusion. Our true reality is always that we are Spirit, and the physical world we are dreaming we live in is not where we are or what we are. The Course calls accepting this transformed way of thinking a miracle. Being willing to let go of the idea that we are a separate body is the means to receive the miracle or change of mind that comes from our one true Self.

As we continued listening to Holy Spirit, we were guided to teach what we need to learn. We were guided to join with others for the purpose of healing our minds. This led to receiving and sharing different avenues for awakening over the years, including Listen & Receive 30-Day Home Study Program, ACIM Text Made Simple, ACIM Daily Lesson Insights (which came from the sharing of POL staff, ministers and students), Minister Training courses, ACIM Practitioner courses, or posting the Daily Inspiration we receive from Spirit each morning.

Over these many years Holy Spirit also led us to provide additional avenues for Pathways of Light ministers to teach what they need to learn by giving them the opportunity to share with others about their experiences of letting Holy Spirit heal their minds. They can do this through writing Miracles News articles (in print and online) and/or writing an ongoing Ministers Healing Journal that they post on the Pathways of Light website. They also can participate in the Saturday and Sunday ACIM teleconference groups or facilitate their own group in their area or through teleconference. To wake up to what is real, we need constant reinforcement and as we join with our brothers for mind healing, we remember that we don’t go home alone.

Pathways ministers sharing through these many avenues have experienced many beautiful healing connections with others on their spiritual journey as well as opportunities to join with others with the Accessing Inner Wisdom Counseling. In addition, the Spiritual Awakening and Healing Inner Child eight-week program materials were developed to give ministers more ways to offer a bridge for inner healing to people who are new to spiritual awakening. 

Training the ministers to offer Accessing Inner Wisdom Counseling and facilitate many of the courses they have taken are additional avenues for ministers to teach what they need to learn and strengthen their awakening. The ACIM Practitioner 24-course program was also developed to provide ongoing mind healing training for POL ministers and others, using A Course in Miracles as our focus for study. This is done through joining with others by phone, in groups or by teleconference to reinforce awakening to the truth.

Also we were led to develop custom promotional materials for POL ministers. These include brochures explaining all the minister’s services, programs and courses available, the Accessing Inner Wisdom Counseling brochure, and a wedding brochure, which also talks about the Relationship Enhancement Counseling service the minister may provide. POL also developed personalized business cards and laminated bookmarks for ministers to distribute in their area or mail to people who might be interested. Pathways also prepares personalized fliers for ministers to use to promote the eight-week Spiritual Awakening and Healing Inner Child programs. From the central POL office, ministers services fliers are included with every catalog and order mailed to locations near each minister. 

Over the last 16 years, Pathways of Light has also built a website that attracts over a million visitors every year, helping people find POL ministers who are perfect to join with them for healing. The Pathways of Light website promotes the workshops, ACIM groups, and eight-week Spiritual Awakening and Healing Inner Child programs offered by POL ministers. People who come to the Pathways of Light website can find the ACIM groups and the events pages through links on the front page and in the right column of thousands of pages on the Pathways of Light website. In addition people can find the profiles of ministers in every state and country to see the services they offer and email the ministers directly with their inquiries.

The support services offered by ministers for Help with Inner Guidance, Chronic and Critical Illness Support, and Prayer Support also give ministers avenues to teach what they need to learn. This has led to further connections with participants in the Listen and Receive teleconference program, eight-week programs in groups or one-on-one, and also to help people connect with their inner Guidance through the Accessing Inner Wisdom Counseling.

To promote ministers, we provide links to ministers’ personal websites on the POL website links page. (Note: If you are a POL minister and have a new website or your website has changed, please let the office know and we will update the links.) Because of many inquiries from people interested, we are  working on ways to make it easier for ministers to facilitate the eight-week programs one-on-one. We are in the process of expanding courses 1101 and 1102 to train ministers to provide Spiritual Awakening and Healing Inner Child eight-week programs through teleconference or one-on-one, by phone or in person. This additional option makes it easier for many more people to participate in these gentle, healing programs. As soon as this additional training is ready, we will make it available to all Pathways of Light ministers. 

In the past year we have added a section on the website just for POL ministers that provides easy access to all updated materials and additional resources to help ministers expand their ministries and order supplies not available to the public. As new training materials are developed, it is added to the Support for Ministers section. The link to this section is located on the POL website home page, at the bottom the right hand column. It is also under the Minister Services tab on every page of the website. This section will also have links to purchase ministerial supplies online rather than having to call, fax or mail orders to the POL office.

Our focus has always been to put peace first, which is important to help us stay connected with Holy Spirit’s plan. We know that Holy Spirit is our Guide and we follow the best we can. We are not perfect at it and we have had many lessons along the way, but we keep practicing. We simply focus on our forgiveness lessons for the day, which means letting go of our belief in separate bodies with separate minds. 

We welcome your feedback by emailing us or making an appointment to talk if you have questions or thoughts about POL you would like to discuss. The goal of Pathways of Light has always been to provide the means to help us all wake up from the dream. Only Holy Spirit knows how to do that and our job is to open up to receive Holy Spirit’s peace, where we are reminded that in truth we rest in God, no matter what stories the ego’s dream of separate identities makes up.

Revs. Robert and Mary Stoelting are co-founders of Pathways of Light. They reside in Ormond Beach, Florida. Website: PathwaysOfLight.org

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this copyright notice and website address are included.

Tell a Friend

Printable Page

---

Back to main page of Miracles News.

Has this page been helpful to you?
Your contribution to support this site is greatly appreciated. To make a tax deductible contribution with a credit/debit card, click here.
Click here to donate from your PayPal account.
Or send a check to Pathways of Light, 12530 Lions Chase Court, Huntley, IL 60142.