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Study of Text, Chapter 13: IV.The Function of Time, P 2. 7-18-16

IV. The Function of Time P 2

2 Yet neither oblivion nor hell is as unacceptable to you as Heaven. Your definition of Heaven is hell and oblivion, and the real Heaven is the greatest threat you think you could experience. For hell and oblivion are ideas that you made up, and you are bent on demonstrating their reality to establish yours. If their reality is questioned, you believe that yours is. For you believe that attack is your reality, and that your destruction is the final proof that you were right.

Journal
Good grief. What am I supposed to say to this? I think that attack is my salvation so that means I think attack is Heaven. That war is Heaven. It doesn’t seem so, but if I examine my life, I see that this has always been true. Even now I will sometimes have trouble letting go of a grievance. I obviously think that I need to defend myself and it would be hell to be left facing this one without defense.

What Jesus is showing me is that I feel this way when I focus on the story. The story is designed to prove that attack and defense are justified. So when I look at the story I am going to believe in the necessity of attack. But if I look away from the story, and focus instead on what it represents, I will gain the clarity I need to make a different choice.

When I was feeling defensive at work, I kept looking at my fellow employee and seeing her actions and her words which were clearly an attack on me. From that perspective I could not see any alternative except to defend myself. When I would ask for another way to see it, I would hear that I was to just love her and according to my understanding of the situation, that made no sense at all. It did not solve my problem as I saw it, so I just kept defending myself.

When I let go of my interpretation of the problem, what I could suddenly see is that I was keeping myself in hell with my thoughts. I was miserable, and I kept blaming her for my misery. But when I stopped thinking about the story of Myron and her co-worker and started thinking about forgiveness, all I could see was that we were two Sons of God dreaming of destruction and I had a chance to wake us up. It would be insane not to take that opportunity.

I think of her now and wonder what she looks like in reality. What does pure Love and pure Godness look like? I want only to love her and help her. I wonder if I could experience myself dissolve into her and return to oneness if I could let go of my hold on the dream long enough to imagine that. Could I let go of the world of form to return to whatever we are in essence? At least in my imagination? Could I at least taste that memory for just a moment, or just an instant?

What was the story about? We were attacking each other about something or another? I can’t remember and who cares? It’s ridiculous anyway.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 13: IV.The Function of Time, P 1. 7-15-16

IV. The Function of Time P 1

1 And now the reason why you are afraid of this course should be apparent. For this is a course on love, because it is about you. You have been told that your function in this world is healing, and your function in Heaven is creating. The ego teaches that your function on earth is destruction, and you have no function at all in Heaven. It would thus destroy you here and bury you here, leaving you no inheritance except the dust out of which it thinks you were made. As long as it is reasonably satisfied with you, as its reasoning goes, it offers you oblivion. When it becomes overtly savage, it offers you hell.

Journal
It is like when we decided on the tiny mad idea, we made an agreement that we would not see the truth anymore. We would not, in any way, acknowledge the love that we are. We would live in a world that was in opposition truth. To do this we needed a to section off part of the mind and use that part to sleep and to dream. This part of the mind made an ego, a voice that would keep us in the dream, that would direct the dream for us. Its job is to keep the truth at bay so as to extend the dream.

The ego is a way to have this experience and it follows the directives we gave it. It has no power of its own, only what we allow it. To have the dream we had to “forget” the truth and in the course of exploring duality, we have become thoroughly lost in it. But God gave us a failsafe, a way out of the dream when we were done with it. This Voice is the voice of truth and is our Guide and our Helper.

We have taken advantage of this because we are ready to awaken. In fact, it has already been done through our brother, Jesus. Now we are simply accepting the awakening as we are ready to do so. This book, A Course in Miracles, is one of the tools provided by Jesus to help us make that decision. It is a powerful tool. It is about love, which we have forsaken in order to experience duality. But we cannot lose it because it is what we are.

So this book is for us because it is about us. That is why it helps us wake up. It is like an amnesiac looking at photo albums and reading about his life until a memory sparks. This book helps us to see why we don’t want to stay in the dream. Then it helps us to remember that we don’t have to, that we are glorious Beings and that we have a Home.

We are afraid of this course and of waking up only because we are still listening to the ego, which is following its orders to keep the dream going. But we were never meant to stay in the dream forever. We have played the game well, and now it is time to leave it behind and to go home. It is time to turn away from the ego and toward the Voice for God so that It can lead us out of our dream and into Love. It is time to break the agreement, wake up and to wake up our fellow dreamers.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 12. 7-136-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 12

12 To “single out” is to “make alone,” and thus make lonely. God did not do this to you. Could He set you apart, knowing that your peace lies in His Oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for suffering is not of His creation. Having given you creation, He could not take it from you. He could but answer your insane request with a sane answer that would abide with you in your insanity. And this He did. No one who hears His answer but will give up insanity. For His answer is the reference point beyond illusions, from which you can look back on them and see them as insane. But seek this place and you will find it, for Love is in you and will lead you there.

Journal
We see ourselves as separate and alone, each in our own little bodies. This is a state that induces pain and suffering and ultimately death. Then we blamed God and said He kicked us out of paradise for disobedience. Maybe the first attempt to use projection to make the other guy guilty. From that story we made up about God, we taught ourselves guilt and fear of God.

None of this is true. God did not create suffering and He has not condemned us for thinking separation thoughts. We have certainly condemned ourselves, though. We asked him for pain and suffering and He could not give it to us. How could Love give hate? Not possible. But neither could he deny our desire for the experience of it. He had given us creation and would not take that back. So we made for ourselves what Love did not have and so could not give us.

God loves us, though, and did not leave us without help. He answered our insane question with sanity. That answer is in us, and as Jesus tells us, it is a reference point. We can stand in love and look back on what we made. The comparison lets us know what is real and what is not. This is what we are doing right now. We are learning to disregard the outer illusion, to go within and find the love that God placed there.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 11. 7-11-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 11

11 In peace he needed nothing and asked for nothing. In war he demanded everything and found nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, except by departing in peace and returning to the Father? If the Son did not wish to remain in peace, he could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place of darkness where it can believe it is where it is not. God did not allow this to happen. Yet you demanded that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so.

Journal
In our desire for specialness and thus separation, we declared war on peace. How could we be at peace in this state? In asking for the impossible our mind now believed in something other than peace. There would always be a for and against, a good and a bad. There would always be competition and chaos. And so love returned to the Father and waited.

So here we are. In the world of darkness that we made, but that God did not allow. We demanded it and so we believe in it and because we believe in it we cannot undo it without help. God’s love for us would not leave us in our conundrum so He created the Holy Spirit to guide us home when we are ready. We will be guided to the truth of ourselves and the truth of God. He will guide us to where we never left and are now.

This is the journey of no distance because we made nothing and therefore went nowhere. We are simply being awakened from a dream of being somewhere other than God. I often pray the simple prayer that Cate suggested for me. “God, wake me up.” It is the only thing we need to do, but to desire this awakening we must leave behind all that we made here that is in opposition to Reality.

So I pray to be awakened and then I spend my day noticing any thought or feeling that I must release. I ask the Holy Spirit to do this for me, and He gladly responds to the degree I allow. It seems to be taking a long time for me to change my mind completely, but then what is time except another illusion I made.

I did Lesson 173 today and in this lesson Jesus tells us that all things are lessons God would have us learn, because He wants us to be happy and not to suffer. And if we believe we are separate from Him we will suffer. In this lesson Jesus also gives us a shortcut that will undo much all at once. He says that,

“These are words which give you power over all events that seem to have been given power over you. You see them rightly when you hold these words in full awareness, and do not forget these words apply to everything you see or any brother looks upon amiss.”

So today I will say these words: “I will forgive and this will disappear.” The problem I see will disappear, and eventually, the world I see will disappear. Saying these words, forgiving what has been done, will make every problem the same and is, at the same time, the solution to every problem.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 10. 7-6-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 10

10 You who prefer separation to sanity cannot obtain it in your right mind. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an unloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give. And the peace of God’s Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him.

Journal
Jesus says that if I prefer separation to sanity I cannot obtain this in my right mind. I must use the ego mind to do this. I have a feeling there is a deeper meaning to this statement than I am aware of, but I do understand that this is why we have a split in our mind. In order to experience separation we had to find a way to make that happen. We could not do it unless we left our mind in some way, because we could not believe such an insane idea.

Regina Dawn Akers gave me a way to understand this, and so I have a helpful visual. We made a room in our mind that we could enter and be separate from our Self. Once in this room we shut the door on reality (on our right mind) and so we are able to imagine an experience that could not happen, and convince ourselves that it is happening.

Then Jesus tells us that we were at peace until we asked for special favor, which of course He could not give us. Here is how I understand this. We had this tiny mad idea. It was the idea that there could be something separate, that there could be a you and a me, and that we could be apart from each other and different. Now that we are imagining ourselves as separate from each other, we often project this idea of asking special favor in a direct way, and because we believe we are separate, we believe this is possible.

For instance, when I hear a siren, there is a secret prayer in my heart that I don’t know anyone it is coming for. In other words, I am praying that my family is safe, and this is happening to a different family. Or I see sports teams praying for victory over their opponents, or stars praising God for making them more successful than their competitor.

All these are examples of asking for special favor. We could not have this thought in our right mind because we could no more believe in the possibility that love could have favorites or degrees, than could God. Looking at this it is easy to see why Jesus said that we were at peace before…. How could we be at peace with the idea of separation? There can be no peace in this idea.

This idea of separation, of special favor, was alien to God and of course being not God, could not be granted. So we pretended it had. We made that little room, we went into it and we closed the door on reality. Now we could pretend that God was giving special favor. We traded peace for a belief in specialness. We traded love for specialness.

Just as we had to give up sanity for this experience, we had to give up God as He is. Instead, we made up an illusory god that could participate in our fantasy. This was a scary god, one who might grant favors and might not. One who might choose us or might choose another, and there seemed no sure way to gain his favor or even to predict it. We made up a god who we imagined wanted our sacrifice in exchange for his strange unpredictable love. No wonder we are afraid of this god.

But worse yet, because in our minds we betrayed our true God and our true Self, we feel like we have reason to fear Him as well. This is another totally foreign concept to God, but it is hard for us to let it go because in our little room betrayal is possible and even expected.  We fear what we made and our peace has been shattered. Now we are trying to backtrack, to find out way back to that door, and to leave this insane and awful room. We are learning that we have nothing to fear and that our peace is whole and complete just as it always has been, in spite of our dreams.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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