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Study of Text, Chapter 12: VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 7. 5-3-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 7
7 Yet it does not matter how much distance you have tried to interpose between your awareness and truth. God’s Son can be seen because his vision is shared. The Holy Spirit looks upon him, and sees nothing else in you. What is invisible to you is perfect in His sight, and encompasses all of it. He has remembered you because He forgot not the Father. You looked upon the unreal and found despair. Yet by seeking the unreal, what else could you find? The unreal world is a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God’s Being with Him could never be content without reality. What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible. For it is the function of love to unite all things unto itself, and to hold all things together by extending its wholeness.

Journal
My reality can never be lost to me because the Holy Spirit holds that vision. He looks at me and sees only God’s Son. I want that vision badly. I want to think of myself and know I am only God’s Son and nothing else. I want to look on everyone else and see only God’s Son. The reason I have this desire is that I am, in truth, Love.

I am an extension of Love and Love is all that I am. As Jesus tells us, the attraction of love for love is irresistible. It is my function, as love, to unite all things to itself and to hold all things together. Therefore, I long to know myself and everyone else as love, to know Oneness. This is why A Course in Miracles is so attractive to me, and why it is that when I picked it up I kept reading. I kept reading even as I wondered why it was that I believed every word in it. Certainly there was no logical (ego) reason to do so.

And even though I believed it then, and even though I practice it continuously now, it still feels like it is slow-going, and sometimes it feels impossible to me. When it starts to feel impossible it is because I have endowed the ego with power it does not have. My mind is conflicted as I choose to move toward God and at the same time refuse to relinquish some old belief that is not truth. Conflict causes suffering and so I can get discouraged.

One reason I get discouraged is that I seem to be fighting myself. It’s hard to see a winner in that scenario. Another reason I get discouraged is that the inner conflict is not always apparent. When I don’t acknowledge that my problem is myself, I think it is real. I think that the problem occurs in the world and that I absolutely must do something about it. The problem can take on frightening dimensions when this happens, and seem to overwhelm me.

Sometimes, even when I finally let it go, I still get ego thoughts that I can’t just pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Then I feel a twinge of fear in my gut and I have to decide if I want to follow it to inevitable misery or turn away from it. The ego fear thoughts can be compelling. It seems to make so much more sense that the problem is not just going to go away, that I must do something.

But no matter what is going on in my story, and no matter how often I get pulled into the drama of it, nowadays, I always hear the Voice that tells me that this is not real. It might seem like a faint whisper next to the frantic warnings of the ego, but it is there, and that Voice has its own attraction. It is the attraction of love for love.

That attraction is very compelling, not in the frantic way of the ego, but in the clarity and certainty of its message. God’s Voice calls to the divinity in me, that is me. I may have disowned that divinity, but I have not destroyed it. So I answer. I do this again and again and it gets easier and I answer more confidently and I accept the truth more quickly. This is how I wake up, maybe slowly, but gently and inevitably.

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

Study of Text, Chapter 12: VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 6. 5-2-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 6
6 Son of God, be not content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had deserted Him. Everything you made has never been, and is invisible because the Holy Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold, and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you have sought nothing. By making nothing real to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourself.

Journal

From the Daily Mail

The world you see around you is nothing but an illusion.
That’s according to cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman who claims we’re being tricked into believing our own reality.
He believes that what we are seeing around us is simply a façade that guides our way around a far more complex and hidden matrix.

Galileo once wrote: ‘I think that tastes, odors, colours, and so on reside in consciousness.

‘Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated.’

And Hoffman says, in some ways, he agrees with this statement.

‘Neuroscientists tell us that they are creating, in real time, all the shapes, objects, colours, and motions that we see,’ he said in a Ted Talk.

‘It feels like we’re just taking a snapshot of this room the way it is, but in fact, we’re constructing everything that we see.

‘We don’t construct the whole world at once. We construct what we need in the moment.’

This is exactly what we are doing. And what we see is actually in our minds. Through projection we give it the illusion of being “out there” but it goes nowhere because there is nowhere to go. We decide to see the impossible (separation) and so we do. But it seems we cannot believe in what we made, and at the same time see what is real.

Through the study and practice of A Course in Miracles, we are learning that this is what is happening, that we are through with the world we made up, and that we are ready to see what is real.

Jesus is telling us something very simple. He is saying that we see it because we value it. So in order to see reality, we only need to decide that the illusion of separation is not valuable to us, and we can let it go. Then what has always been there, but invisible to us because we wanted to see something else instead, will be made visible again.

Jesus has used the idea of a veil to help us understand. He said there is a thin veil between what we see and what is actually there. Have you ever peeked behind the veil? I have. I just haven’t made a permanent decision to recognize the veil is an illusion, too. I’m working on it though. I stay aware of the illusions I am most attached to and give my willingness to see through them to what is actually true.

I have done this one little idea at a time, but I think I am ready to let go some big chunks of the illusion. It feels hard sometimes because I become afraid. I’m not sure what it is I am afraid of; sometimes I think it is the fear itself. But I never stop giving it my attention and all the willingness I can.

I never make an exception. I might take awhile in letting go of an illusion, but I never refuse to try. There is no grievance, no false idea that I will refuse to confront. I will succeed, of course, because as Jesus says, I was redeemed the instant I thought I had deserted God.

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

Study of Text, Chapter 12, VIII.the Attraction of Love for Love, P 5. 4-28-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 5
5 You have but to ask for this memory, and you will remember. Yet the memory of God cannot shine in a mind that has obliterated it and wants to keep it so. For the memory of God can dawn only in a mind that chooses to remember, and that has relinquished the insane desire to control reality. You who cannot even control yourself should hardly aspire to control the universe. But look upon what you have made of it, and rejoice that it is not so.

Journal
First Jesus tells us that we can have the memory of God simply by asking for it. Then he explains why we don’t have it. We obliterated that memory and we want to keep things the way they are. We want to keep our separate-self story going. We want to be that self and tell ourselves that we made this world and we control it.

That is what this is all about. I am Myron for better and for worse. I even take some kind of perverse pleasure in the worst, vying with my brothers to be more screwed up than them. Don’t try to tell me how perfect I am, I will just argue for my shortcomings, all the while trying to keep the world in balance as I secretly imagine that I am at least better than you.

I behold my kingdom and I strive daily to maintain this kingdom, to keep it going, to keep the drama and the comedy and the tragedies alive and active. Just ask me and I will tell you how to fix your problems and how the politicians should be doing their jobs. I will tell you the best way to deal with morning sickness and why it is we have more cancer now than in the past.

It doesn’t deter me at all that my advice changes by the day and sometimes by the hour. It doesn’t shake my belief that I am in control to see the whole world going to hell in a handbasket. I have a problem? I judge the problem and then I find solutions. You have a problem? I’ll do the same thing for you. Are you spiritual? My spiritual ego has the words to make my advice sound spiritual.

Everyone is my enemy but forewarned is forearmed, and I have many defenses at my disposal. I have spent my life collecting these defenses and learning how to wield them to best advantage. A sharp word here, a pretended humbleness there. I learned how to run away, how to divorce myself from my problems, how to hide from them and how to put them away and pretend they don’t exist. I learned very well, too well, how to project them onto someone else in an effort to be rid of them. I have learned to pretend that they are then gone.

All the world is a projection of yesterday and all the days before it. All the problems as I perceive them are past problems I have projected onto today. All the solutions are past solutions formed to look like something new and projected onto today. We know this deep inside and justify it by saying things like we need to study history so we don’t repeat it. Then we repeat it.

I am going to stop doing all this. I am going to stop using the ego mind to judge each situation and then, based that judgment, deciding what the solution must be. I am practicing doing it differently. Now I am asking the Holy Spirit to judge the situation first, and based on that judgment, I am allowing His solution to show itself to me.

I have begun to believe that in my defenselessness my safety lies. I am learning that when I defend myself I increase my fear. When my fear is greater, my defenses seem every more important. I feel like I need to defend against all this fear, and the belief in this fear calls for new and ever more elaborate defenses. And on and on the endless cycle goes. But I have invited in a higher power to overturn the ego’s regime and I am learning to look at the fears without defense and let them be undone for me.

I am learning to notice when my mind is in the past and then resting it in God. This is a baby step toward freedom from the illusion of separation and control, but it seems to be necessary that I start here. I cannot surrender this insane belief I can control the world until I stop bringing the past into the present, thus insuring the future will remain equally insane. I want a new, fresh present moment, and I want to be aware of it. So I have to get my head out of my… past.

I am becoming convinced that the world I made is not worth saving, that it has no value at all. I am becoming convinced that the self I made is worthless as well. All of it is without meaning of any kind, and completely without value. I am slowly and gently letting it go. What will the world look like without fear and guilt projected onto it? What will I look like without Myron projected onto me? How will I live in the world while I remain here? Who will I be, and how will I feel if not like Myron?

I don’t know the answer to these questions but I want to find out.

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

Study of Text, Chapter 12, VIII.thew Attraction of Love for Love, P 4. 4-27-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 4

4 Because of your Father’s Love you can never forget Him, for no one can forget what God Himself placed in his memory. You can deny it, but you cannot lose it. A Voice will answer every question you ask, and a vision will correct the perception of everything you see. For what you have made invisible is the only truth, and what you have not heard is the only Answer. God would reunite you with yourself, and did not abandon you in your distress. You are waiting only for Him, and do not know it. Yet His memory shines in your mind and cannot be obliterated. It is no more past than future, being forever always.

Journal
The reason I cannot fail to return to reality is that the truth is in my mind where God placed it, and it cannot be obliterated. It is not God’s Will that it be unavailable to me. This feels very encouraging to me when I get caught up in the ego thinking and become confused. I can feel lost and helpless when this happens. But I know I can find my way back so I never feel hopeless. Sorry, Mulder. The truth is not out there; it is within.

I understand now that my every question and my every desire is answered. Sometimes I don’t recognize it as such, but that is because I become confused about the question. My desire is happiness and peace, and when I misjudge the situation, I might ask for something that will bring me distress. Here is an example.

I saw something that made me think that I had lost a customer. I was very upset and I kept thinking about what this would mean to me, the lost income, and the lost status. I thought about how unfair this was because I had done such a good job for this customer. I felt upset and discouraged. I did not feel like God’s precious child, loved and cherished and safe.

I felt this way because I had judged the situation. I saw something that made me think I probably lost a customer. Then I asked the ego to advise me as to what that meant. The ego’s judgment was that I was being unfairly treated, and that I was endangered by this customer. I was a victim to his unfairness. Because of my judgment of the situation, my question was, how do I defend myself? And of course, the ego has a lot of solutions that only make matters worse and that make me feel even more vulnerable.

Seeing this, I cancelled out that judgment. I said that I did not have a question after all, because I forgot what to decide. Then I decided differently. I chose to ask the Holy Spirit for His judgment instead. I made Him my adviser in this situation, rather than the ego. I completely surrendered the entire situation and all my thoughts about it to my Guide. The first thing that happened was that I felt peaceful about it.

Then I realized I needed to release the idea that I am unfairly treated and that I am a victim. What happened simply happened, and it is not bad or good. I don’t know what to do about it, if anything, but I am open in case there are directions for me to follow. I notice the ego trying to get my attention by offering me those I might blame, but in my surrender, I lost interest in defending myself. Without defense, my fear began to fall away.

My answer seems to be that I should do nothing. This is an answer that would have seemed woefully inadequate if I was still judging the situation with the ego. Now it seems to make perfect since. There is nothing for me to do right now and so I will not do anything. Will I save this account? I don’t know. When it is time to act, I will do so as guided.

I am content with that answer because I know something now that I was blind to when I was listening to ego. Keeping this person as a customer is not my goal. Being his savior is. I am his savior as I see him for the perfect divine self he is, and as I love him without expectations. As I accept my part as savior of the world, I am saved as well. I am at peace and it is a peace that cannot be disturbed by outward appearances.

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

Study of Text, Chapter 12: VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 3. 4-26-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 3

3 When you made visible what is not true, what is true became invisible to you. Yet it cannot be invisible in itself, for the Holy Spirit sees it with perfect clarity. It is invisible to you because you are looking at something else. Yet it is no more up to you to decide what is visible and what is invisible, than it is up to you to decide what reality is. What can be seen is what the Holy Spirit sees. The definition of reality is God’s, not yours. He created it, and He knows what it is. You who knew have forgotten, and unless He had given you a way to remember you would have condemned yourself to oblivion.

Journal
Holy moly, if God had not given us His Voice to remind us of the truth, we would be lost forever, we would have condemned ourselves to oblivion! As it is, we have hidden the truth from ourselves and think we have undone it. It is not up to us to decide on reality because we did not create it. Evidently, we can look away from it and see something else instead, and believe we have destroyed reality and made up our own, but reality is perfectly protected from our illusions.

The way we regain Heaven is to listen to the Voice for God. The Holy Spirit sees reality clearly and since the Holy Spirit is in our mind, we can learn to see it again as well. We are not lost because it is not God’s Will that His Son be lost. He has safeguarded us and kept our Self from harm. He has also given us the way to regain our memory and to return home.

This is why it is so important that we learn to hear the Holy Spirit. Jesus says that we can learn to hear only this Voice even here. This is why I sit with Spirit every morning and ask Him for His words, and why I ask all day long for His guidance. I don’t yet hear only His Voice, but I hear it more clearly as I make the decision for His Voice over and over again. He was given to us for us to hear Him, and to see with the same clarity as He sees.

There is no one who cannot learn to hear His Voice and all it takes is desire and practice. I hear His Voice as ideas and inspiration. I hear His Voice as thoughts that are not the thoughts I would think on my own. I hear His Voice when I step back and let Him answer, through me, a call for help. Sometimes, I hear His Voice through another as they say what it is I need to hear. I hear His Voice most clearly in the words that seem to write themselves on the page, and that is why I journal. But always, His Voice is available to me if only I am open to hear it.

The fact is that I must hear a voice. The choice I have is which voice I choose to listen to. I will choose an advisor and the advisor I choose will be either Holy Spirit or ego. I decide on nothing alone, because decision requires union. I am learning to choose to be in union with the Holy Spirit every time as I realize that not only do I not want to make decisions on my own, but that I cannot.

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

Study of Text, Chapter 12: VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 2. 4-25-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 2

2 God’s Son is as safe as his Father, for the Son knows his Father’s protection and cannot fear. His Father’s Love holds him in perfect peace, and needing nothing, he asks for nothing. Yet he is far from you whose Self he is, for you chose to attack him and he disappeared from your sight into his Father. He did not change, but you did. For a split mind and all its works were not created by the Father, and could not live in the knowledge of Him.

Journal
So I booted myself out of Heaven, separated myself from God and from my Self, and so lost my awareness of what I am and where I am. I see myself as a body in a world of form with lots of problems and many solutions that never actually solve anything. And to make matters more confusing, I don’t remember doing this and on top of that, I believe in what I made. There is a belief that I am not fully aware of, but that affects me, and that belief is that I did something monumentally wrong and I am guilty.

What a mess! But there is a solution that does work. There is an answer to all of this and it is in the mind that made the problem as it appears to me. The solution is in the mind right next to the perceived problem. I can choose the answer as easily as I chose the problem and I will. The question is, when will I make that choice? I can take time, and in fact I can take all the time I can stand. But all this time I suffer, and sometimes, terribly.

I feel the draw toward awakening. I am tired of suffering and the desire not to suffer is the first step toward the door that leads out of the dream state of separation. I feel the draw of Love and that is a giant step forward. I have the key in my hand. I have been throwing off the encumbrances that seem to hold me back. I do this through forgiveness. I forgive and forgive and forgive. As I begin to lighten this load of false beliefs through forgiveness, I feel more confident that I can let this tiny mad idea go and return to Reality.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, Chapter 12: VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 1. 4-23-16

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love
1 Do you really believe that you can kill the Son of God? The Father has hidden His Son safely within Himself, and kept him far away from your destructive thoughts, but you know neither the Father nor the Son because of them. You attack the real world every day and every hour and minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot see it. If you seek love in order to attack it, you will never find it. For if love is sharing, how can you find it except through itself? Offer it and it will come to you, because it is drawn to itself. But offer attack and love will remain hidden, for it can live only in peace.

Journal
How is it that I attack the real world every day, every hour, every minute? First I realize that the real world is love and love is sharing. Then I realize what is opposite to that. Attack in any form is not love and not sharing, and though attack does not destroy reality, it keeps reality from my awareness. I cannot lose God and Self, but I can be unaware of God and Self and it is as if I have lost it.

I am eternal and perfect and joy and peace. I do not have these things; I am these things. I am divine in my nature. I am one with all things, I am part of God, I am safe, I am complete. I have chosen against my true nature to the point that I have lost any memory of what I am and live as if I am something completely opposite of that, and so I suffer. But I am beginning to awaken from this dream of separation.

I began this awakening process as I learned to recognize attack and decide against it. It is odd I had to learn to recognize something so far from my true nature, but I had become so accustomed to living in fear, and so my life as I experienced it seemed natural and necessary. I felt I had to defend myself and one defends only through attack.

Here is what I discovered. When I am angry that is an attack. It is an attack on my true nature which is love. It doesn’t matter what triggered the attack thoughts and feelings. Blame, cause, and justification are completely irrelevant. Only that I am angry and anger keeps me in hell, matters.

I can choose to release anger and ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the belief it has any value to me at all. I can do this in spite of circumstances. I simply desire to be free and if the desire to be free is greater than the desire to build my defenses by feeding my anger, then it is done. It requires only trust in Jesus, in God.

As Jesus tells us, we don’t have to believe what he says or even understand it. We only need to trust enough to do it. I can muster that much trust. After all, what do I have to lose? When I am free of anger, I am free of what kept me from love. Letting anger go, I become aware of love, and love naturally shares itself. It flows from me to everyone. As it does so it is reinforced in my own mind. As I give, I receive.

This is as true of guilt, whether directed inward or outward. It is as true of depression, jealousy, spite, fear, lack, and loss. These all seem different, with different causes and different effects, but they are all the same. They are the same because they are not love and are attack. They attack reality. They attack the Son. They attack the Father. And each one, as it appears in its special form, can be denied as easily. True denial is very powerful because it is a return to reality.

It requires only that we be vigilant for what is an attack on God, and that we be willing to receive healing. Our part is simple and not hard to do. It may feel hard as we resist it, but if we stay persistent we receive much support and our continued success will motivate us further. Jesus said that we can do anything he asks of us.

When my resistance is strong, I find it helpful to remind myself of this.
In the beginning, I was deeply discouraged by my level of resistance, but then I came to understand that it is not that I am lazy or that this is too much for me, but only that I did not believe I was worthy of this level of effort or this lofty goal, much less its conclusion.

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