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Study of Text, Chapter10: III. The End of Sickness, P 4. 6-23-15

IV. The End of Sickness P 4
4 God’s laws will keep your mind at peace because peace is His Will, and His laws are established to uphold it. His are the laws of freedom, but yours are the laws of bondage. Since freedom and bondage are irreconcilable, their laws cannot be understood together. The laws of God work only for your good, and there are no other laws beside His. Everything else is merely lawless and therefore chaotic. Yet God Himself has protected everything He created by His laws. Everything that is not under them does not exist. “Laws of chaos” is a meaningless term. Creation is perfectly lawful, and the chaotic is without meaning because it is without God. You have “given” your peace to the gods you made, but they are not there to take it from you, and you cannot give it to them.

Journal
This is what chaos looks like. As I was trying to fall asleep last night I started thinking about some advise I gave a co-worker earlier in the day. The more I thought about it, I realized I needed to recant what I had said. It was not good advice. I thought about calling her first thing in the morning before she acted on it. I thought about what I would say, how I would phrase it. I replayed the original event in my mind. In other words, I obsessed about it until it grew all out of proportion.

I finally pulled myself out of it and asked Holy Spirit to remind me to call in the morning, and to direct my words. For a moment I was at peace and then I started thinking about my upcoming stress test and I obsessed about that for awhile. And so on, for way too long. I wound up feeling like everything in my life was wrong and then it went downhill from there.

My mind was chaotic with nonsense thoughts. This is the law of the ego. It is the natural consequence of seeing each person, each thing and each circumstance as separate from each other and each requiring its own specific solution. It becomes a never ending job and an impossible job. There is no peace when I look at the world with the ego mind.

Peace came when I asked for help to see clearly. I thought of the co-worker and gave the uncertainty and regret to the Holy Spirit. I thought of the stress test and gave the fear that evoked to the Holy Spirit. I did this with each emotional response to the worries and fears and all the guilt that accompanied them. I asked for His judgment on each in place of my own judgment.

In each case, He reminded me that I am loved and guided through every problem life presents. His judgment of each circumstance was the same. God still loves me and this is not His Will. I am innocent and I am as perfect as the moment I was created. Each person in my worried mind is innocent and perfect. No matter what thorny problem I bring Him, His answer is the same.

I can choose to live under the chaotic laws of the ego, or I can choose to live under the laws of Peace. Always, it is up to me.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter10: III. The End of Sickness, P 3. 6-22-15

IV. The End of Sickness P 2
3 The Sonship cannot be perceived as partly sick, because to perceive it that way is not to perceive it at all. If the Sonship is one, it is one in all respects. Oneness cannot be divided. If you perceive other gods your mind is split, and you will not be able to limit the split, because it is the sign that you have removed part of your mind from God’s Will. This means it is out of control. To be out of control is to be out of reason, and then the mind does become unreasonable. By defining the mind wrongly, you perceive it as functioning wrongly.

Journal
Jesus says that the Sonship must be perceived as one and that means no part of it can be perceived as sick. The mind will work correctly only in its whole state, because wholeness is the only state of the mind in reality. I was thinking of my computer. If I open the computer up and remove a single part, the whole computer will cease to work as it is designed to, if it works at all.

How do I keep some part of the Sonship separate? I can see this happening when I hold a grievance against someone. The act of holding a grievance is an attack on the Sonship. It is the same as saying that this one is not part of the whole and now the Sonship is missing a vital part. The mind no longer works as it should.

While nothing has happened in reality, we all know how painful it is in our experience when we think we have separated. I think it is important that I be aware that I cannot single out anyone and see that one as guilty or I have, in my mind, destroyed Wholeness. Or to say it differently, I think I have destroyed God because He is no longer whole. It is a replay of the original error. We think we separated from God, and often wonder why we would have made that choice, and yet, each time we hold a grievance against even one person, we are doing it again.

It works the same way within my own thinking. If I believe everything Jesus tells tells me, and I become willing to release all thoughts that are out of alignment with God’s Will, all except for one idea, one ego belief that I think I need to hold onto, then I will not know my own union with the Sonship. This is all or nothing. I am whole and a part of the Whole or I am separate. In no moment can I be as God created me and what I made of myself. To be as God created me, I must release all that I made to be different than God created.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter10: III. The End of Sickness, P 2. 6-19-15

IV. The End of Sickness
2 Reality can dawn only on an unclouded mind. It is always there to be accepted, but its acceptance depends on your willingness to have it. To know reality must involve the willingness to judge unreality for what it is. To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to let it go. Knowledge cannot dawn on a mind full of illusions, because truth and illusions are irreconcilable. Truth is whole, and cannot be known by part of a mind.

Journal
This is clear to me. I can understand, as a concept, most of what Jesus tells us in the Course, but I cannot truly accept it with a mind clouded with illusions. I cannot believe in wholeness and believe in separation at the same time. If one is true, the other is not. Jesus says that we must be willing to judge unreality for what it is if we want to know reality. We must be willing to overlook nothingness.

It makes perfect sense to me, but I also have trouble doing it sometimes. Yesterday I became very emotional. I had trouble understanding exactly why. I could think of reasons, and I knew something triggered it, but really, I wasn’t clear about what was going on. It didn’t help to try to distance myself from the emotional response. The harder I tried to do that, the more certain I became that there really was something wrong and that this wrongness was reality rather than the peace I had felt before.

What I did, finally, was to ask for help. I turned to the Helpers available to me and asked that my mind be cleared of this confusion. I asked with absolute sincerity and complete certainty that this is what I wanted. Searching for reasons and trying to find my own healing was just making everything worse. I had to turn away from the darkness completely and surrender my own agenda. I had to become fully willing to be healed and when that happened the clouds cleared and I regained clarity.

It was impossible for me to know that I am His Son and beloved of Him, to know that I am cared for and safe, and at the same time to believe that I am a weak and vulnerable body in constant danger and in need of defense. I cannot see the truth of what I am while I am trying to protect myself. I cannot see truth and illusions at the same time.

I still get caught up in the ego web of deception, but I also know that I have help and I am not alone in the process of awakening to the truth. Now that I can think clearly, all this is obvious to me. I choose what I would believe. I choose the ego and I suffer, or I choose to believe the truth and I am at peace.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 10: III. The End of Sickness, P 6. 6-17-15

IV. The End of Sickness
1 All magic is an attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable. All religion is the recognition that the irreconcilable cannot be reconciled. Sickness and perfection are irreconcilable. If God created you perfect, you are perfect. If you believe you can be sick, you have placed other gods before Him. God is not at war with the god of sickness you made, but you are. He is the symbol of deciding against God, and you are afraid of him because he cannot be reconciled with God’s Will. If you attack him, you will make him real to you. But if you refuse to worship him in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made.

Journal
God created me perfect so I am perfect. Sickness is not part of that perfection so I cannot be sick. My mind cannot be sick and so nothing through which I extend my awareness can be sick. This Myron character cannot be sick. Her body cannot be sick, nor can her mind or her emotional state be sick. Her relationships cannot be sick and her financial situation cannot reflect sickness.

So how is it that I seem to be experiencing the effects of a sick mind? How is it that I can appear less than the perfection in which I was created? If this is not possible, how am I doing it? Into the holy mind of God’s Son there came a thought of imperfection and he went to sleep and dreamed of this. I am dreaming what it would be like to be less than what I am or could ever be. And dreams do not change the dreamer. When the dreamer wakes up, the dream is gone and the dreamer is unaffected. As we wake up, we experience the happy dream, that is, we dream without the fear and guilt that cannot be real. Then God raises us up to Him and we dream no more.

It is important to realize that nothing has actually happened because if it had happened we would have to fix it. If it were actually happening, we would have done something that we must regret and then we would be guilty and then we would not be perfect. If we were not perfect we would have overcome God Who creates only perfectly and we would have reason to fear. But none of that is possible. We have done nothing to God and could never do anything to God.

As we are waking up we are remembering the truth and since this is a shared dream, it is helpful to remember it together, and to share our moments of enlightenment. This sharing is part of the awakening. We share and the sharing helps us to remember our oneness. Today we are sharing the thought that sickness is not possible and therefore we do not have to worship this idol, nor do we have to defeat it.

When I first began to see that sickness was a defense against God, and that in sickness I was worshipping a false god of my own making, I felt relief, but I also felt fear and guilt. Would God condemn me for my foolishness? If I wanted to make this idol in place of God then how would I undo it? How do I fight my own will?

The first question is being answered for me. I cannot actually affect God and I have not actually sinned. Another thing I have been told his that God is Love. Because I remember so little about love, it has taken awhile for me to understand how important that statement is. Now that I finally see that love as the world knows it is not real love, but is more akin to neediness, I am ready to accept a new definition of love.

Love in reality is pure. It is perfect. It has no opposite. It has no conditions. It is not loss. It never hurts, and if something hurts, it is not love. It is never anything but love. God is Love and is nothing else. God can only love. I have never loved purely as does God and so this is hard to imagine, but I accept it as true. I look forward to the day when I remember this love. I am beginning to realize that I have nothing to fear from God.

The next really important thing I am beginning to understand and accept is that there is only God. There is nothing else, nothing outside of God. This means I am in God, even as I sleep and dream of something else. So nothing imperfect can exist because where would it exist? Sickness will come to an end because it does not exist. It will come to an end for me when I stop dreaming it, and I will stop dreaming it because I am perfect. I am not fighting my own will, because it is my will to know myself as perfect. I am in God therefore I share His Will for perfection.

What does this mean for me right now? What do I do about these dreams of sickness? I have been seeing a doctor because I have dreamed of sickness and that sickness was projected as a sick body. This means I have made an idol of sickness. I have tried to defend myself against these awakening thoughts which will bring me inevitably to God. I am not guilty for this, it is just what we do in our fear.

I am using this story of sickness to undo my belief in sickness. I take the body to the doctor but I do not worship the doctor as my savior. I am grateful to him as my brother who is doing his part in the awakening through service. I do not worship at the altar of fear. I am not hovering over the body, looking for signs of danger. I am not praying for the body. And if any thoughts of fear come into my mind, I relinquish them to the Holy Spirit.

This is the way I do my part to free the Sonship of the idol we have made of sickness. Having a sick body is just the outward appearance of the desire to defend against God. It is nothing to fear or feel guilty about. How the sickness itself is handled is not important. What is important is that I notice my thoughts and feelings about the sickness and that I be willing to have my mind healed. I invite the Holy Spirit to undo what we have done.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter10: III. The God of Sickness, P 11 6-16-15

III. The God of Sickness, P 11
11 Only at the altar of God will you find peace. And this altar is in you because God put it there. His Voice still calls you to return, and He will be heard when you place no other gods before Him. You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would have to do so if you give him up for yourself. For if you see the god of sickness anywhere, you have accepted him. And if you accept him you will bow down and worship him, because he was made as God’s replacement. He is the belief that you can choose which god is real. Although it is clear this has nothing to do with reality, it is equally clear that it has everything to do with reality as you perceive it.

Journal
Even though sickness is not real, because we believe it is real, it is our experience and so we suffer from that belief. As Jesus says in another place in the Course, “What you believe is true for you.” (I hope I am quoting that exactly right, but it is the essence of what he said, for sure.)

An important thing he is telling us here is that if we see sickness in anyone else, we will believe in it and so we will also experience sickness as if it is real. This doesn’t mean that I will not see that someone thinks they are sick and that their sickness is real. It means that I will not join them in their belief.

I have times when I support the belief in sickness in myself, but never completely. I might feel sick. I might notice the ego trying to interest me in sickness with its obsession with the body and how it feels. But I also know that this is not really a body thing. Sickness appears as if it is in the body, but it is really in my mind. It is more like it appears on the body in the same way a movie appears on the screen.

The actual idea of illness is in the mind, therefore, the only thing that needs to be healed is the mind that believes it could be sick. I am the Son of God, and I exist in God. I can only be what God is and God is not sick. Sickness is the thought of death, which is the thought of separation from God. Since I am a Thought of God, and thoughts do not leave their source, I cannot be anyplace except God.

God is Life, not death, so death cannot be in God, therefore death cannot be in me. Now I replace the word death with the word sickness, and I can do this because they are the same thing, and I see that I cannot have sickness in me. If I think I do, if I have an experience of sickness, I must be dreaming of something that cannot happen.

When it feels like in is happening, it is a painful dream and I want to stop dreaming it. I can stop dreaming it because I already have. We dreamt of separation and then we stopped thinking it. We are simply reliving the dream. Since Awakening has already occurred, I cannot fail to become aware of the truth at some point.

This is what I am doing now as I study and practice the Course. I am remembering the difference between dreaming of death and knowing Life. Part of that process is to see only the truth behind every illusion. When I see that someone is dreaming of sickness, the way I heal that one is to know this is not possible, no matter how dramatic the dream.

When I cannot do this, I release my fear and my false beliefs to the Holy Spirit so my mind can be healed. I do no one, myself or my brother, any good if I am an unhealed healer. To reinforce this I am re-reading today’s lesson. In Lesson 167, we are told there is no death, and we are told why this is true.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter10: III. The God of Sickness, P 9 6-15-15

III. The God of Sickness, P 10
10 If God has but one Son, there is but one God. You share reality with Him, because reality is not divided. To accept other gods before Him is to place other images before yourself. You do not realize how much you listen to your gods, and how vigilant you are on their behalf. Yet they exist only because you honor them. Place honor where it is due, and peace will be yours. It is your inheritance from your real Father. You cannot make your Father, and the father you made did not make you. Honor is not due to illusions, for to honor them is to honor nothing. Yet fear is not due them either, for nothing cannot be fearful. You have chosen to fear love because of its perfect harmlessness, and because of this fear you have been willing to give up your own perfect helpfulness and your own perfect Help.

Journal
The blocks to Love’s awareness are the idols that I worship. To remove the blocks, I must stop worshipping the illusion in all its forms. I worship them when I believe in them. I worship fear sometimes. I get caught up in a fear thought and I keep it going as I obsess over it. This is my worship of an idol.

It can be a little thing or a big thing. I doesn’t really matter because they are all the same. Either my thoughts are true or they are false, real or unreal. I often use the body to foster fear. I get sick, or it does something strange, or I hurt it and feel pain. Suddenly I am back at the altar I erected to fear for the body. I bow down to it and tremble before it. At some point I notice what I am doing and I laugh and get up, dusting myself off as I do.

As more and more I recognize these points of choice, these moments when I see I am worshipping an idol and realize I have a choice. I can keep giving the idol my attention, or I can shift my awareness to the truth that remains forever in my mind. Points of choice. Jesus has told us that choice is the only freedom we have allowed ourselves in this dream. I take full advantage of it.

A lot has happened in my story over the past week or so. I started feeling like everything was out of control. It was a scary feeling and I worshipped at that altar for awhile. Yesterday, I began to come to my senses and asked that my mind be healed. I became willing to understand anything that I need to understand, and I became open to knowing whatever I needed to know about this.

I saw how I became weaker and weaker in my own eyes as I continued to obsess on the story. I felt like I couldn’t do anything and I had no power. This was the ego talking but I had allowed my awareness to fixate on self as body and so was strongly identified with it. I recognized this point of choice eventually, and I chose to fix my mind on God instead, and in so doing, got in touch with my available power.

Through the power that is God and therefore is me as well, I made different choices and the past dissolved from my mind, and with it the sense that I was weak and powerless. My life is always a clear reflection of what I want and what I worship. I set aside my god of despair with a gentle laugh and walked away from it. My life is now reflecting a different choice.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

There is No Death

To the ego my death is the ultimate proof that it is real and God is not. It is the triumph over Life, and proof of its existence. Every negative feeling and thought is a small death, so every thought of judgment, anger, fear or guilt is proof that ego lives and God doesn’t. That I believe in death does not make it true. The body can only seem to die, but how could it since it has never lived?

Through the study of Manual for Teachers I have been given clarity about death. What I understand now (and this is something I feel to my core) is that Jesus meant what he said; there is no death. How can death exist if God does? It is not possible. God is Life, God is Love, and it is not possible that God could have an opposite.

The belief in an opposite of God is the ego at its essence and the ego is not real. It is the belief in the ego that we are here to undo. I will not be distracted by the imagined effects that we think of as our world and our life. The truth lies just beneath that, and the truth is, death has never occurred.

It’s funny because for such a long time I just could not grasp that death is not real. I would say that, yes, some part of me lived, but some part of me died with the body. I would try to hold onto the idea that there is no death, but I lived in dread of it in spite of my professed beliefs. Now that has all changed. I see that there is no death and I wonder how I didn’t see it before.

I think that I understand the reason it was so hard to accept that death is not real. It is because so many of us believe in death and cherish death as an escape, and the mind is so firmly rooted in this idea of death. This is why it is hard to pull away from the belief. But once accepted, it seems so apparent that I laugh that I ever believed in it.

Death of the story is the only thing that is happening and I am not my story. I just continue on and pick up another story or the same story and watch that until the belief in death pulls me back into its embrace. So not even the story dies, really, just this viewing of the story. The after life is not a solution, it is just more illusion, a way station where we make a choice for another story. We do not die, we simply change form, and if we have not made a clear choice for life, we fall back into another dream story.

There is no salvation in death. It is here, watching our story and making our choices that we have the chance to choose life. Each time we choose anger or fear or guilt, sadness or grief, sickness or suffering of any kind, we have chosen death. We do this over and over until we seek escape through what we hope is the final choice for death, and end the story through sickness or an accident or old age. But we accomplish nothing because death is nothing, and does nothing.

The solution to this endless cycle of choosing between forms of death is simple. Here is an example. I spent the week working very hard to catch up at work. I was working outside and the heat was oppressive. It had been very stressful the last few days and the hard work in the first days of a long hot summer to come, just wore me out. I woke up this morning feeling depressed at the thought of the months to come with more of the same.

But, though I felt these emotions, I also have practiced A Course in Miracles for a long time. I have accepted many of the principles, including the understanding of death. I recognized my emotions as the belief in death and I knew this was not what I want to believe anymore. I accepted responsibility for my story. I asked myself a question that has become so familiar to me as to be a mantra that I live by.

The question I asked myself was this. “Myron, whose story is this? Who writes the script?” Lesson 152 assures me that I am fully responsible for my world and that it represents my every wish. With that thought came a certain peace. I did it; I can undo it. The ego mind pulled me back into the story of my victimhood and for a moment I felt hopeless before the inevitable.

I wanted to beg for release, ask for a miracle. But I understand that this kind of death thinking is not the solution. I was saying that I am a victim of a cruel world and I need help getting out of this situation. The world is not the cause, and the story is not the cause. They are the effect. The solution does not lie in fixing the effect. I had to step away from my enthrallment with the story. With this thought, I had some small clarity.

I surrendered my desire to fix the story. I surrendered my desire to be a victim and to be saved from my own choices. I told the Holy Spirit that I don’t know how to un-believe what I have believed, but I know that I am wrong, that I am making a sick world with my sick thoughts and I want to be healed. I surrendered to His healing power. The ego kept trying to pull me back into the story, insisting something had to change. But I had reached the tipping point and it was over for the ego, at least in this situation.

This is the way I choose life. I choose life over death one dark thought at a time. I do this as long as I need to until I finally accept life and never look back. While all this was going on it felt deadly serious. Once I accepted the Atonement in that situation, it all fell away so completely that I was left vaguely confused about what the fuss had been about. It feels good to be at peace again.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.