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Study of the Text,A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 5. 1-15-14

A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 5
5 The Holy Spirit, Who leads to God, translates communication into being, just as He ultimately translates perception into knowledge. You do not lose what you communicate. The ego uses the body for attack, for pleasure and for pride. The insanity of this perception makes it a fearful one indeed. The Holy Spirit sees the body only as a means of communication, and because communicating is sharing it becomes communion. Perhaps you think that fear as well as love can be communicated; and therefore can be shared. Yet this is not so real as it may appear. Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack always breaks communication, making it impossible. Egos do join together in temporary allegiance, but always for what each one can get separately. The Holy Spirit communicates only what each one can give to all. He never takes anything back, because He wants you to keep it. Therefore, His teaching begins with the lesson:
To have, give all to all.

I don’t need to be convinced that I misuse the body. I often misuse it. I want it to present to the world this strong willed person who is in charge of her life. That is why I spent so much of my life trying to mold it into what I perceived as a body that represented this image I wanted to project. I tried to keep it a certain shape and size.

I wanted my hair to look like the shampoo models and my skin to be smooth and flawless like the make-up models. I can’t tell you the time, money and effort spent toward this goal. Even if I could have achieved it, what would I have really achieved, anyway? That I am the maker of my self? That I am a better maker of self than others? Is that communication? Or is that separation?

I seem to be losing my desire to misuse my body. It is not a done deal, yet, but I feel differently about it now and I am looking forward to seeing how this unfolds. I am no longer obsessed with my weight, though I haven’t completely lost interest in it. I used to stand in front of the mirror and wonder what I could do with this body to make it more appealing, to attract people to me. Now I sometimes forget to look at all and at the end of the day realize I didn’t comb my hair. Looking for some balance here. Ha ha.

I am now a lot more interested in using the body for true communication and though I don’t understand this completely, I know I will because it is God’s Will and now it is my will, too. I spend some time each morning working in my journal and sharing what I get. I think maybe this is true communication because there is no ulterior motive. I don’t do it to look holy or to prove I am a better student or more spiritual than someone else. I do it because that is what I am supposed to do. I do it out of love.

I communicate during the day when I see past someone’s behavior to the Christ within. I communicate when I respond to attack, not with defense, but with compassion and understanding. I communicate when I express love to whoever is in front of me or in my thoughts, rather than to those special few who I designate as “loved ones.” I don’t do any of this perfectly, but I do it as consistently as I can, and when I notice that I am not doing it, I ask for and accept the Atonement for it.

How do I give all to all? I give love to everyone in every circumstance. Love will take whatever form is needed as long as I am allowing it to flow through me and I am not trying to direct it myself. This is my desire and my commitment. 

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 4   1-14-14

A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 4
4 To the Holy Spirit, there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is familiar enough to you by now, but it has not yet become believable. Therefore, you do not understand it and cannot use it. We have too much to accomplish on behalf of the Kingdom to let this crucial concept slip away. It is a real foundation stone of the thought system I teach and want you to teach. You cannot perform miracles without believing it, because it is a belief in perfect equality. Only one equal gift can be offered to the equal Sons of God, and that is full appreciation. Nothing more and nothing less. Without a range order of difficulty is meaningless, and there must be no range in what you offer to your brother.

The reason there is no order of difficulty in miracles is that the miracle is a correction in perception and perception is how I see things. So all that is happening is that I am learning to see what is really there. How could one corrected thought be harder than another? A thought is a thought even if a particular thought triggers more fear or guilt than another. It is still just a thought.

My experience has gone something like this. I have experienced sickness, asked that my mind be healed of the belief in death (sickness), and seen the effect of the wrong-minded thought disappear. That is, the sickness disappeared. I have seen this happen in very dramatic ways. The body was not healed; the mind was healed. But it is the sick mind that projects the sick body and so when the mind is healed, it projects a healed body.

The ego world is based on separation, and that includes the idea of levels and ranges. So to the ego mind, one type of sickness is different than another and one type would be harder to heal than another. This cannot be true, because everything is only an idea, and you can’t have a bigger or smaller idea. I can have an idea I am simply not willing to release, but that doesn’t make the idea bigger or harder.

Accepting that the world and the body are not real, but simply the reflection of beliefs held in the mind has made it easier to accept that there is no order of difficulty in miracles. It is essential that I fully accept this premise if I am to perform miracles. The truth is whole and wholeness doesn’t vary. My fear of sickness and my fear of poverty and my fear of heights are all the same. They are exactly the same “size” and the solution to these problems are exactly the same.

In my ego mind the fear of heights and the fear of losing a child, for example, loom large and firmly rooted. I see them as giant sequoias with roots going so deep I cannot imagine getting to them. I see me with a little spade removing the dirt from around the roots but with little hope of taking down that giant tree. At the same time, I see a cold or the flu as weeds in my garden. Pull those suckers up and throw them away. I don’t get sick often and the sickness is mild and short lived generally because I can’t sustain a belief in them, and they can’t exist without my belief.

Of course, the truth is, those beliefs are all the same size and none of them is more deeply rooted than the other. I know this is true, and yet I have held onto certain beliefs even as I asked that they be healed, and doing this makes one seem harder to heal than another and encourages the idea that there is an order of difficulty in miracles.

My job here is to allow my mind to be healed, which then allows miracles to be performed through me. In this way I join Jesus in awakening the Sonship. I cannot do my part if I use my fear to perpetuate the belief in order of difficulty. If I offer miracles that are less than whole, then I am really offering magic and not miracles. When I am afraid this seems like an impossible task, but really, I just change my mind. I change my mind all the time so I know I can do it.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 3   1-13-14

A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 3

3 I have said that the Holy Spirit is the motivation for miracles. He always tells you that only the mind is real, because only the mind can be shared. The body is separate, and therefore cannot be part of you. To be of one mind is meaningful, but to be one body is meaningless. By the laws of mind, then, the body is meaningless.

It is obvious that when the Course says that we are One, it does not mean we share one body. It would clearly be a meaningless statement. I didn’t put it together like this, though, and realize that logically, it follows that the body is meaningless. But of course it is. I often say that the body is not real, and while that is true, it is hard for my thinking mind to make sense of that idea. The body feels very real and even Jesus says that we are not to deny that we think we have a body.

What is easier for my mind to grasp is that the body is meaningless, since what cannot be shared is meaningless. The ego “me” is meaningless for the same reason; it cannot be shared. Neither one can be who I am. This weekend I had a shaky moment when I felt this more deeply than I have before. I had the thought that I could not go back to living a meaningless life and that was followed by the understanding that what I really meant was that I could not stand the thought that I am meaningless. The question, of course, is who is the “I” that is meaningless.

I think what happened is that I brought into question the meaning of the ego, and the ego responded with fear. The ego does not want to be seen as meaningless because then why would I continue to be interested in it. I was upset because, in a moment of profound confusion, I identified completely with the ego and so it felt like I was saying that I am meaningless. Questioning the ego at this basic level will continue to elicit fear as long as I am vacillating between identities.  I appreciate this reminder from Jesus that the body cannot be part of me.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 2   1-10-14

A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 2

2 God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of what you think you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist. The Holy Spirit, as always, takes what you have made and translates it into a learning device. Again as always, He reinterprets what the ego uses as an argument for separation into a demonstration against it. If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this.

The body is not a creation of God and so it is not real. We made the body to prove separation. Obviously we do not share one body and so we can say, “I am separate from you and therefore separation is real.” As long as I believe I am the body, I am living proof that I made something unlike God. This is the way the ego establishes it’s self as our god and keeps us enthralled to it.

It is also the reason for the deep well of unconscious guilt that makes us afraid to face God whom we believe we dethroned when we made bodies and identified with them as self. But all this is undone with the simple realization that the body does not exist. It cannot exist because God did not create it. If it does not exist, we cannot be guilty for making it, which means we are, after all, still as God created us, and so innocent of any wrongdoing.

We made the body to prove separation, but as with anything we made, the Holy Spirit can reinterpret it and use it to demonstrate against separation. Here is how this works. I become sick and it seems that germs or environmental factors caused it. My brother is not sick and so I have use the body to prove that I am separate from him. I have also proven that the body is stronger than the mind because it can be affected by something outside the mind and the mind cannot do anything about it.

If we are ready to know the truth, we can ask the Holy Spirit for correction. We can ask Him to reinterpret what we made and undo what we have done. As the mind is healed of the belief in sickness, pain, suffering and death, the body (which is just a projection of the mind) begins to reflect the healed thoughts and so the mind proves to be stronger than the body. As the healed mind projects a healed body we begin to remember that mind is cause and body is simply an effect.

Because Jesus knew the body was nothing, just a thought in the mind, he was able to “heal” many and just as easily brought bodies back from the dead and “resurrected” his own body. He showed us that it is the mind that causes everything we see. If we see suffering and death, the mind must be sick and in need of healing (forgiveness), rather than the body. The body must simply follow along because, without the mind it is nothing and doesn’t even exist.

This is good news because while we cannot be one body, we absolutely can be, and are, one mind.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text,A. To Have, Give All to All, Paragraph 1. 1-9-14

A. To Have, Give All to All
1 When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever. Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing. Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did. Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. Like any other impossible solution the ego attempts, it will not work.

I really didn’t fully understand this until recently when I started reading excerpts from a new book by Nouk Sanchez, The End of Death, and attended her workshop. I don’t know why I didn’t really get it because Jesus is very clear. He says that death is not real, doesn’t help, certainly doesn’t wake us up. He says that death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. It is an ego attempt to solve a problem and he emphasizes that it will not work.

Back in the bad old days I used to suffer from depression and I held tightly to the idea of suicide as my way out when I couldn’t take it anymore. Obviously I never got that desperate but I got close. My mind was a huge knot of conflicted thinking, and I didn’t know what to do about it so I thought that dying would solve the problem without solving it. Then later I understood from doing the Course that suicide wouldn’t help anyway because death would not alleviate my problems and I would still have to face them.

Then as my mind was healed more and more, the depression fell away and I no longer looked for a way out. Without the suffering of depression driving my thoughts, I realized I was afraid of the death of the body and went through a period of healing until that was no longer an issue either. At that point I thought I had solved the whole death issue. I could die without fear, but could also stay here and do my work.

What I was left with was a desire to be here as long as I needed to complete my part in the Atonement and then the body would die and if I still had more to do I would come back in another body-story to work some more. But if I finished with my part and didn’t need to return, which was my plan, I would die and then I would work from the other side to help others.

The one thing all my plans had in common was death as a resolution, a solution to my pain and suffering. I don’t know how I overlooked the obvious for so long. Clearly, death is not a solution. Life is the solution. Now my focus is on awakening, not at death or after death, but now. I am still doing the same thing as far as being vigilant for ego thoughts and allowing my mind to be healed, but now I have withdrawn this false value in death as some kind of solution.

Another thought from this paragraph that caught my attention is that just as death is nothing, the body is nothing. The body doesn’t live, nor does it die. The belief that it does is just part of the illusion. When I am strongly identified with the ego and thus the body, I think that this story of Myron is my life. I think I am living it. This cannot be so, because as Jesus says, “it cannot contain you who are life.”

Sometimes in my writing I say that I am in this body, but that is not actually true. I cannot be in the body because that would require that I literally be separated, split off in some way from my vast and holy Self. I can imagine this, but I cannot be this. So once again I see that I am not what I seem; I am so much more. The body is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else. The life the body lives is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else. The death of the body is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V. The Lessons of the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 4. 1-8-14

V. The Lessons of the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 4

4 The Holy Spirit never itemizes errors because He does not frighten children, and those who lack wisdom are children. Yet He always answers their call, and His dependability makes them more certain. Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they are frightened because they do not recognize the difference. The Holy Spirit makes no distinction among dreams. He merely shines them away. His light is always the call to awaken, whatever you have been dreaming. Nothing lasting lies in dreams, and the Holy Spirit, shining with the Light from God Himself, speaks only for what lasts forever.

I value knowing the Holy Spirit doesn’t itemize errors because knowing this, when I hear that voice telling me all I have done wrong I know it is not Holy Spirit so it must be ego. I value knowing that the Holy Spirit always answers. If I don’t hear His answer it must be because I am listening to the ego instead.

Every once in a while I will fall into complete confusion. This always happens when I allow fear to take over my mind. When Toby was in the hospital is an example. I was so afraid for him that my mind was stunned. I knew I was thinking wrong, but for a while fear kept me from seeing clearly. I couldn’t discern truth from fantasy.

The saving grace for me was that I knew what was happening. I knew I was thinking with the ego, so I was able to eventually pull my attention away from fantasy and allow myself to be guided to truth. But that experience reminded me of what it is like to be lost in my fantasies. It also reminded me that the Holy Spirit always listens and always answers, but it is completely up to me to decide to hear Him.

The experience I had at that time seemed very big to me, very important. It seemed different than my normal, everyday moments of temporary confusion such as when someone at the office triggers an ego response from me and for a moment I think they are the enemy. But they are not different. They are exactly the same.  The Holy Spirit doesn’t see a big error or a small error, he simply sees error which he corrects, and we accept according to our willingness.

Categorizing and sizing my mistakes is an error I still make. Some just feel bigger or more important to me, even though I understand that this could not be true. My thoughts are true or they are not. That makes sense to me, but it doesn’t yet always feel that way. The Holy Spirit doesn’t suffer from that confusion. He knows that an error is simply a lack of love and that the solution is always love. One problem, one solution. Simple. No matter how it seems to me in my story, the Holy Spirit has but one goal, and that is to awaken me.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text V. The Lessons of the Holy Spirit. Paragraph 3   1-7-14

V. The Lessons of the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 3
3 A wise teacher teaches through approach, not avoidance. He does not emphasize what you must avoid to escape from harm, but what you need to learn to have joy. Consider the fear and confusion a child would experience if he were told, “Do not do this because it will hurt you and make you unsafe; but if you do that instead, you will escape from harm and be safe, and then you will not be afraid.” It is surely better to use only three words: “Do only that!” This simple statement is perfectly clear, easily understood and very easily remembered.

My mind is finally becoming simple. I would never have believed that this was a good thing, but really it is. My thinking processes are simplified. My prayers are simplified. It is the ego that chooses complexity and it is only when I am especially identified with the ego that I become mired in that complexity.

Here is an example. My son is recovering from back surgery and is supposed to be very careful not to jar his spine until the fusion is strong. Yesterday his dog jumped on him and he flinched. He was afraid he had damaged the surgery, but as the pain resided he felt like it would be OK.

When I heard about this I felt fearful for him. I had a lot of thoughts about what he should be doing and what he should avoid, and this was painful because I couldn’t do anything about them. If I were with him I would probably have driven him nuts and caused him to be more afraid. As I watched these thoughts about how he could protect himself, I had the thought that I wish I could put him back in the womb. This woke me up to what I was doing and I tried to stop the flow of ego defenses.

It was hard for me to stop the ego fear thoughts once they got going. I flailed around for another way to think, another way to see this. I tried to focus on the positive, or not to think at all. I knew my thinking was screwy, but now that I was in the fear thoughts, I became confused about how to extricate myself.

But my true desire is to have a healed mind and though it is not yet my only desire it is my strongest desire, and it was answered.  One thought emerged from the jumble of thoughts. I don’t know how to achieve peace right now but I want peace. Then I remembered a very simple prayer. I said, “Here I am, God. I rest in Your certainty.” I remembered Lisa Natoli’s advice to be still and just let God be God. I stood there in my desire to be healed and let peace flow through me.

It was so simple as I stopped trying to figure it all out. The ego always has a plan for whatever I want to do, and that plan will be complex, because the complexity hides the ego’s ultimate goal. Above all, the ego plan will be designed to ultimately fail. The ego is designed to seek but not find because it is the design that insures the ego continues to exist. God’s plan always works. I had to go back to resting in God a few times, but then it was done.

Here is another example. When I began to understand that to enter the Kingdom I had to let go of the idea that my brother was guilty, I often became confused. I was looking at his behavior and seeing guilt, knowing that I had to forgive what I saw and see him as innocent. What a mess my mind was as I tried to do that! The ego took me round and round as I tried various ways to see him without guilt.

Then, as my desire to see innocence grew greater than my desire to place blame, the whole thing simplified. I suddenly realized that my brother is innocent. He is never guilty no matter what I show myself with my eyes. He starts out innocent and he remains innocent. If I see something else, I must be confused.

It was complicated before because I started out with the belief that my brother was guilty. Then the ego presented me with an array of solutions, none of which worked because the original premise was faulty. But I stayed stuck in the ego thinking for a long time because, first, I wanted someone to be guilty, and then, because the ego plans were so byzantine that I couldn’t extricate myself. What saved me was simplicity itself. There was nothing to solve because there was no problem.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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