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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 4. 4-15-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 4

4 The ego cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego does not love you it is faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was begotten. Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to love because you are love. Love is your power, which the ego must deny. It must also deny everything this power gives you because it gives you everything. No one who has everything wants the ego. Its own maker, then, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only decision the ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it knew itself. And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.

Some paragraphs have several ideas that I can look at with Holy Spirit. This is one of them. It begins by telling me that the ego cannot afford to know anything. This is because Knowledge is total and the ego doesn’t believe in totality. I suppose this should not be news to me, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. The whole point for the ego is to allow the idea of separation to be experienced, so if it cannot know wholeness or totality, or it could not be ego. The bottom line is, ego is not where I would want to go to for knowledge because it does not know anything.

The ego begets as it was begotten is another idea that I am seeing more clearly this morning. The ego was produced by fear so it reproduces fear. If I am feeling fearful about something, it will do me no good to check in with ego for a solution even though I do this sometimes, at least briefly until I catch myself. The ego will not give me comfort or a real solution because it was not created in love. It will only give me fearful thoughts and solutions that lead to more fear.

All of my life I have been a problem-solver. If something is going wrong, I look at the options and choose the one most likely to fix the problem, then I get busy. This process always made me feel like I was in control. I still solve my problems in the same way, but there is a difference now. Here is an example. If I am concerned about income, in the past I would look for ways to decrease expenses or increase income, or perhaps the problem calls for a defensive strategy. Then I would get busy making it happen.

Now if I am concerned about finances, I look at my thoughts about lack and loss and I ask Holy Spirit to heal my mind and show me how to see this problem differently. The difference is that I no longer ask the ego for help. First, it doesn’t know anything, and second, it only begets fear because that is how it was begotten. None of its solutions will fix the problem. Using the ego will sometimes change the form of the problem, but no healing has transpired so the problem will reoccur and I will be left with more fear than ever.

Another idea from this paragraph is that the ego is against me always because it cannot afford to be for me. The ego is made from fear and I am created in Love. There is no common ground between the two. Fear cannot act in love and love has no use for fear. As my Self, as Love, I have no use for the ego. Love is whole and complete and safe. What use would I have for ego if I remembered who I was? My very being is a threat to ego’s existence. For its own preservation it must always strive to keep me from knowing my Self.

The last sentence is the one that grabs my attention the most. Jesus is telling us that we would reject the ego if we knew who we are. Then he says this: “And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.” The mind that made the ego will know itself as soon as it recognizes any part of the Sonship. I don’t know what to say about that.

I understand it intellectually, of course, but I don’t know how that feels. I have no experience of it, so I don’t really understand it. It is my goal to recognize some part of the Sonship for what it is. I don’t care where that happens. I don’t care if I see Christ in my mirror or in my precious child, or in the homeless person on the street. I just want to know my self and I understand that my self can be known through knowing any part of it.

PS: It is hard to understand and I probably didn’t do a good job explaining it. More simply; through the power that is ours as extensions of God, we made an ego. (Think of the ego manifesting itself as a body, a personality, the world you see around you.) Then the ego, in order to insure its existence, to hide the idea that it has no power,  and to protect itself from our rejection, tried to turn the tables on us. It said that it made us and that we are the ones who are bodies, weak and vulnerable, and, by the way, guilty and sinful.

But the truth is, we are part of God, powerful beyond measure, brilliant and gorgeous. We light up the universe. We are so vast that everything is in us. One of those things is a little mad idea that is the ego. It is like a splinter it is so small, but it cannot stand that thought so it has convinced us that it made us up and we are the splinter.

In reality it has no power over us and no power at all. All its power comes from us and when we stop desiring the ego it will simply cease to exist. I think of it like this. I can be having a very vivid and interesting day dream, but when I get tired of it I stop thinking it and it disappears as if it had never been there and really, it had not. This is what is going to happen to the ego. We are learning that it is just a dream, imagination run wild, and when we get tired of it we will stop thinking it. Poof. Its gone.

A Course in Miracles is helping us realize we are dreaming and helping us see that we don’t want to dream anymore.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 3. 4-14-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 3
3 The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems from the very power of the mind the ego denies. This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, which must result in extreme anxiety. That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. It is perfectly logical but clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to its existence for its existence. Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own existence, a state which it finds intolerable. Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. It does not perceive its existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you, and perceiving your being as non-existent. This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety.

Jesus did an excellent job of explaining something unexplainable, but to understand it better, I am going to put it in my own words. First I am going to remind myself that the ego is not a person or entity of any kind. It is a way of thinking, a thought system that produces effects. The effects are like the thought system so all effects are separate, vulnerable, weak, defensive, and mortal.
This thought system was made through the power that is ours as creations of a powerful God. It was made as a way to deny God and exist outside God. So for the ego to continue to exist it must depend on the power that it is trying to deny. This causes extreme anxiety within the thought system. I can understand this. In fact, I wonder how we tolerate it.

The ego has a plan for dealing with this impossible situation. It simply denies it. It refuses to see what is happening. And rather than perceiving it’s self as threatened, it projects onto us and sees us as non-existent. So the ego is a thought system made up by us, but in order for this to work, the ego must see us as made up instead of it as made up. Is this really what I believe in? Apparently. It makes logical sense in a way, but as Jesus says, it is insane thinking.

It reminds me of an ex-husband who was a paranoid schizophrenic. His brain didn’t work right and showed him things that didn’t exist. His defense was to project the insanity onto the world and so instead of seeing himself as insane, he saw everyone else as insane. It seemed to him that all these insane people were out to get him because they kept saying there was something wrong with him.
This seems a lot like what the ego is doing, and I see it played out all the time. It is usually subtler than it was in Charlie’s case, or maybe that is because most people are in agreement with its insanity so it looks normal to us. When I become upset about something my first response is often to blame it on someone else.

For instance, when I saw that I made less money this year than last year, I felt fearful and I blamed the new pay structure at work, and of course, my boss who implemented it. Then I saw what I was doing, recognized it for the typical insane logic of ego, and asked for correction. If I make less money it is a reflection of my belief in loss, and everything that occurs to give me what I believe in is my responsibility.
But the ego has a rule that says always project what is intolerable to it onto us, and so perceive us as weak instead of it. And when we identify with ego, we do the same thing. We project what we find intolerable onto others. It’s a good plan for ego. It defends itself and at the same time, it keeps the separation idea in place through keeping attack and defense in place. I cannot afford to be one with my brother if I need him as a place onto which to project my fears.

If I continue to side with the ego, to believe I am protecting myself through projection, to believe I am weak and vulnerable and to ensure I never learn differently by believing that I need to hide from God, I am virtually guaranteeing I will never know my safety. The way out of this dilemma is to ignore apparent threats and the defenses ego would have me use against them, and accept that I am saved from my insanity.
I am asked to come out of hiding, to stand before God stripped of my defenses, and trust that I am loved, that I am not what I made of myself when I made the ego, and that nothing ever really happened anyway.
At first glance that seems kind of iffy and pretty scary. But actually, if I take the first step and disregard appearances, everything else follows logically and easily.

What I am learning through doing this is that I am not the ego. I can only dream of being endangered. I am sane. I am safe. I am strong. I am loved. I am in God and part of Him. Nothing can touch me where I am. The ego can project and project and nothing happens unless I agree with ego and believe ego, then although nothing happens I will believe that something is happening and will suffer for my belief.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text, VI, From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 2. 4-10-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 2
2 The mind that accepts attack cannot love. That is because it believes it can destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. If it does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter confusion. Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose is part of its power. If you do not believe you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief.

Jesus has told us that what we believe is true for us. When we don’t believe in our power we feel powerless. This kind of thinking drives us to a dead end. The power of our mind allowed us to drive there as we used it to make up a story of powerlessness, and the power of our mind allowed us to believe we are stuck there because our story of powerlessness left us no way out.

Fortunately, through our power we can manipulate the story in any way we like, even to the point of feeling powerless, but since the power is in us but not of us, we cannot destroy the power or be without the power. So we seem stuck, but we are not. What we are doing now is choosing to rediscover our power.

We start by allowing ourselves to remember that we are imagining the world we see, then we allow our mind to be awakened from the imagined world into reality. The power that made the illusion will undo the illusion through the Holy Spirit. Our true and holy Self will emerge in our minds and we will remember who we are. What a moment that will be!

Yesterday’s lesson offered this prayer: God still is Love and this is not His Will. That was very simple and easy to remember, but I wrote it on the palm of my hand anyway. I had been having some confusion about my place in the Kingdom and so the prayer was right on time. I was also listening to a book called Divergence. It is a Young Adult book about a sixteen year old girl finding her place in the world.

In the part I was listening to yesterday, she was going through a training technique to help her learn to be in control of her fear. She sits in a chair and receives an injection that causes her to hallucinate something that symbolizes her greatest fears. In the first one she is attacked by a flock of crows. It is very real to her and she feels the terror of being helpless as they peck away at her body, even getting into her body through her mouth.

At first she flails away at them, screaming in terror, but she starts to calm herself by remembering it is just a simulation. She begins to hear the voice of her instructor reminding her of the truth. She is still in the illusion but she is remembering it is an illusion. She gets calm enough to use breathing to calm herself even more, and finally she lies down and surrenders to the experience. She finds herself back in the chair and the birds are gone. It was awful and the fear stays with her but at least she is out of the simulated experience until the next time she will have to face a fear.

I thought about what a good metaphor this is for us. We are imagining a life with lots of fears and they seem so real to us. We have the power to let go of the fear and see that it is all just an illusion, but often our fear is too great for us to do so. When we are ready we begin to listen to our Instructor as He reassures us that it is all just a dream, an illusion.

He encourages us to relax and to listen to His Voice and not the voice of our fears. We probably all go through an experience similar to Trices’ and learn to use tools to help us when we are afraid, breathing techniques, mantras, remembering the words from the Course. We learn to surrender to the experience and let the fear fall away.

In her second time in the chair, Trice gets another injection and has another horrific experience. This time she is in a glass box that slowly fills with water. She is drowning and cannot get out. As before, she reacts in panic and terror, but she remembers pretty quickly that it is a simulation and not real through listening to the Voice of her instructor.

It feels so real, though, that it is hard to hold onto the idea that it is not real. Then Trice does something that she shouldn’t be able to do. She breaks to glass. She got hold of her fear enough to think and to act instead of react. She changed the simulation. This is our next step, too. First we learn that the world we see is an illusion, then we learn to listen to the Voice of our Instructor even when we are afraid. We learn to stop fighting the illusion and just let it be.

Finally, we begin to glimpse our true power and this is the first step to manipulating the illusion. Trice lost her fear of the simulations once she saw through them. Breaking that box showed her she was not powerless and so the fear no longer controlled her. We are learning that we are not powerless. Dreaming about fear cannot make fear real. We are learning to manipulate the dream and this proves to us that we are not powerless and that if a scary situation can be manipulated it cannot be real, and we cannot be a victim to it.

We are powerful beings who deliberately chose to look at fear. This whole world we see is a simulation, a very realistic hallucination with lots of scary stuff. But it is scary only as long as we believe in it. We are only in danger as long as we believe we are in danger, but the story of danger continues for as long as we continue to believe it.

When we start to doubt the authenticity of the story, we begin to wake up. We can then manipulate it as did Jesus when he healed the sick and resurrected the dead. There was nothing special in what Jesus did; he simply stopped believing in the story. If you don’t believe in sickness and death, changing the simulation is simple. We can do this, too.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text, VI.From Vigilance to Peace. Paragraph 1. 4-9-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 1
1 Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented. It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. If it is not relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. Fear and love make or create, depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they will return to the mind of the thinker and they will affect his total perception. That includes his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. He will not appreciate any of them if he regards them fearfully. He will appreciate all of them if he regards them with love.

The idea that stands out to me is that attack is never discrete, and so it must be relinquished entirely. If I believe in attack, if I believe in guilt and fear, then this will show up in my life. If I forgave everyone except one person or one situation, I would still experience attack. I would experience myself attacking and myself being attacked. I would see attack all around me.

The world I see is a projection from my mind, so it is made from the beliefs in my mind. The only way to be free of attack is to forgive attack completely and for all time. If I don’t relinquish attack then I will believe that my brothers are attacking me. I was posting from my Manual for Teachers journal this morning and in this entry I was talking about an experience with my daughter.

She had said something that seemed unloving to me. I experienced her words as an attack. When I asked Holy Spirit to look with me, He showed me that they were an expression of her own fear. That example showed me that as long as I hold onto attack I will see attack. If I see her words as an attack I will defend myself, even if only in my mind. But if I don’t believe in attack, I will see her words as a call for love and respond with love.

I also see how I will never be able to relinquish my fear of God if I believe in attack. Attack is never discreet. “It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it.” My belief in attack will cause me to see God as a threat, just as I saw my sweet daughter as a threat. If I don’t relinquish attack, the whole world will be my enemy and I will never be safe. I will spend my life trying to defend myself against perceived threats. I will never be at peace. If peace and happiness are my goal, I must relinquish attack entirely.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text, Chapter 7: V.Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 11. 4-8-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 11
11 Come therefore unto me, and learn of the truth in you. The mind we share is shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly they will be healed. Let your mind shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make them aware of the light in them. This light will shine back upon you and on the whole Sonship, because this is your proper gift to God. He will accept it and give it to the Sonship, because it is acceptable to Him and therefore to His Sons. This is true communion with the Holy Spirit, Who sees the altar of God in everyone, and by bringing it to your appreciation, He calls upon you to love God and His creation. You can appreciate the Sonship only as one. This is part of the law of creation, and therefore governs all thought.

It’s all very simple. How do we wake up? How do we remember who we are? How do we return our minds to God? We let go of the judgments we hold about everyone and everything. Just let that piece of fiction go. There’s nothing to it, anyway. Instead look where the Holy Spirit directs us. He sees only the altar of God in everyone. Imagine that! Imagine that everywhere you look, you see only God! It’s easy, because that is all there is to see.

Imagine the beauty of it! Everywhere you look you see perfection, holiness, and love. You feel lovable, and loved and loneliness is a fading memory, never to be experienced again. How could you be lonely when you share the same mind with all brothers and sisters, with an entire Sonship, and that mind is in God? You can never be misunderstood because communication is perfectly clear and flawless, with no gap between you to distort or disrupt communication. Look all around and you will see only us, our one glorious Self, living in perfect harmony, safe and happy.

As I consider this vision of Heaven which is mine for the taking, I consider also the alternative which I still sometimes choose. Yesterday at work, I was preparing a plan for a customer and it was my first time to do this particular plan. I was worried about getting it right and so was uneasy. In the middle of this I was interrupted and given another task. I felt anger rush through me and snapped at my boss. That hasn’t happened in so long that I was shocked by my reaction, as probably was my boss.

I took care of the extra job and as I did so, sanity slowly returned. I watched myself react and feel resentment, and project blame, and all the ego stuff we do when we think we are separate from each other and have different agendas which conflict. Someone will win, and someone must lose. Jeez, in the snap of a finger, I’m back in hell, just like that. Would I be so willing to relinquish the Kingdom just to keep my little piece of hell safe from interlopers? If I think of my brother as an interruption in my day, then I guess the answer was yes, at least in that moment of insanity.

As I was writing this, I had a vision of my mother slipping quietly into my room to comfort me. I had a really bad sunburn and was in pain. Pain to a little child is very scary and I wanted her there with me, reassuring me and making me feel better, but she couldn’t stay. My dad thought she was babying me and told her not to make a big deal of it. She had to leave me.

As I thought of this moment, I felt a surge of rage, the same rage that had been silently eating away at me for all these years. The rage was directed at my father for not caring about me, and at my mom for giving into his demands, and this rage was like wild fire in dry brush. It spread over the terrain of my life touching all the men with whom I had been in relationship. All were burned with the same fire, because that pain had never been looked at or forgiven. I had no idea that grievance was lurking in my mind and had caused so much damage.

The ego wants to fan that fire, and to feel sorry and sad and unloved because of it. But Spirit is showing it to me so that I can let it go into His hands and be healed. My dad had an agenda. He thought it was his job to toughen up his kids so they could face life. My mom thought her job was to comfort and protect her children from pain. I thought my job was to find someone to make me feel safe and cared for. But really, we all had the same agenda. We all wanted to be love, and to be loved. We just didn’t know how.

Because there is no time and because there is only one mind and we are all in it, and because space and even death are illusions, I am being given the opportunity to heal this old wound right now this morning with all of you as witnesses. I can hold onto the resentment and unfairness of it all, and feel vindicated in my anger, or I can relinquish that illusion and embrace our oneness.

Holy Spirit, I have no use for the ego. It is not me. Please show me God’s Altar in my dad, my mom and myself. I want only to awaken to the love that we are. Show me the place where we are one.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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