Together, We Light the Way

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Study of the Text 8-2-13

IV. This Need Not Be Paragraph 2 Part 2
8-2-13
2 I have said that you cannot change your mind by changing your behavior, but I have also said, and many times, that you can change your mind. When your mood tells you that you have chosen wrongly, and this is so whenever you are not joyous, then know this need not be. In every case you have thought wrongly about some brother God created, and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass. Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have thought, and what you have not thought that God would have you think. Search sincerely for what you have done and left undone accordingly, and then change your mind to think with God’s. This may seem hard to do, but it is much easier than trying to think against it. Your mind is one with God’s. Denying this and thinking otherwise has held your ego together, but has literally split your mind. As a loving brother I am deeply concerned with your mind, and urge you to follow my example as you look at yourself and at your brother, and see in both the glorious creations of a glorious Father.

As Jesus has already told us, and will tell us many times in the Course, it is our mind that must be changed. He is really emphasizing this now, telling us that because he loves us he is deeply concerned with our mind. Another thing that he tells us all through the Course is that we must see both our self and our brother differently, and as one. We are all glorious creations!

Last night I spoke to a group of people who had a problem they wanted me to solve or to at least give them good advice on how to solve it. I felt very competent to do this and I knew that we both shared the same intent. As a sales person I used to think that my job was to convince people to buy my product and I measured success and failure against that scale. This is not true anymore. Now I know that my job is to be helpful in whatever way I can.

So when I got to the Board meeting I felt very happy to be there. They had a problem and they needed more information and I had information and wanted to help them solve their problem. It felt like joining. I understand that solving their problem will not help us wake up, but coming together with a shared intent, will. The answer to separation is joining and the form joining takes is irrelevant. 

When I left I felt good for both of us. I felt love for them and felt like I had been helpful. But the ego mind was all over the place. It kept replaying the meeting over and over and then it started critiquing it and making judgments. Soon it led to concerns and doubts and even fear. It all happened very quickly and while I saw it happening, I seemed helpless to stop it.

My joy and my peace were gone as soon as I started paying attention to the ego thinking. I brought my mind back to sanity over and over as I reminded myself that I had one purpose and that was to be helpful so I succeeded. I reminded myself that getting a sale is not my purpose and that waking up is. I asked myself what it is that I am thinking that God would not think, and what I was failing to think that God would think. I examined my thoughts carefully as I made this evaluation and it helped me to see more clearly.

These and other reminders helped but I had the thought that it should not be so hard to do this. I felt like I should be able to move out of this conflicted thinking more easily and with less suffering. It could not be God’s Will that I suffer in order to wake up, so I must be doing this with the ego. It was then that I had one of those remarkable moments when I was given a thought that clearly did not come from my own thinking mind. I was pointed to gratitude.

As soon as I accepted this direction gratitude welled up in me. I allowed myself to bathe in that feeling and to enjoy the gratitude. I encouraged the feeling of gratitude as I began thanking God for His help. As soon as I did this I noticed how good it felt and how peaceful I became. So every time the ego would try to distract me with more worry thoughts, I returned to gratitude. I fell asleep last night with a smile on my face.

It is up to me to change my mind, but I am never alone in this. I have help outside the closed system of ego thinking which will just run me in endless depressing circles if I let it. I decide that I don’t want to remain confused and I surrender to my Helper, and whatever I need to help me change my mind is provided. I don’t have to figure it out on my own or do something to deserve it. I just have to want it. I have to want to awaken more than I want anything else. 

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Study of the Text 8-1-13

IV. This Need Not Be Paragraph 2
8-1-13
2 I have said that you cannot change your mind by changing your behavior, but I have also said, and many times, that you can change your mind. When your mood tells you that you have chosen wrongly, and this is so whenever you are not joyous, then know this need not be. In every case you have thought wrongly about some brother God created, and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass. Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have thought, and what you have not thought that God would have you think. Search sincerely for what you have done and left undone accordingly, and then change your mind to think with God’s. This may seem hard to do, but it is much easier than trying to think against it. Your mind is one with God’s. Denying this and thinking otherwise has held your ego together, but has literally split your mind. As a loving brother I am deeply concerned with your mind, and urge you to follow my example as you look at yourself and at your brother, and see in both the glorious creations of a glorious Father.

Oh, there is lots of good stuff in this paragraph! Jesus has already established that it is not the world that we need to change but out mind. This is emphasized when he says we cannot change our mind by changing our behavior. Here is an example I can think of. Even after I divorced my husband he was still very much a part of my life as my children’s father and because we worked together at the same company. So I still had to deal with him and many of the same issues I had hoped to escape through the divorce.

I soon realized that you can divorce a partner, but not the relationship and I did eventually do the work to heal that relationship. In doing so, I tried treating him like the child of God he is, but inevitably, my true feelings would surface and an argument or harsh words would be the result. What happened to change this situation is that through doing the vigilant work of mind watching and asking for the Atonement in this situation, I eventually began to really want that healing and so accepted the Atonement.

I changed my mind about that man and realized that he is the Son of God. Now I was not acting like he was God’s child, but I knew he was that holy one, and there were no more slip ups. I knew this had to be done because I was not happy when I was around him and when I thought of him or remembered situations from the past. I would become angry or sad, and often guilty. Jesus says to watch our mood and when it is not joyous then know this need not be.

Jesus says that if I am experiencing feelings that are not joyous then I need to search my mind for dark thoughts about my brother. My experience has been that this means I have found someone guilty, and I believe my judgment. Sometimes it is me and sometimes it is someone else. At first I didn’t always recognize the dark thoughts for what they were. This happened when my sister in law was sick and I was worried.

Worrying about my sister in law when she was sick, at first glance, seems like love, but I learned that it is not really love, but an attack. I believed in her sickness which means I was attacking her invulnerability. This is a different way to think and has taken some practice on my part just to be aware of what I am doing. Now I see that she believes in her sickness and I still believe in it sometimes, but I also know that we can change our mind. I work on keeping an eye on my thoughts so that I will know when I need to ask for help. I accept the Atonement for myself in this situation, and I ask for the Atonement on her behalf as well.

I think I will come back to this paragraph tomorrow and ask for more clarity. I feel very grateful for what Jesus has given us and for Holy Spirit’s help in understanding.

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Study of the Text 7-31-13

IV. This Need Not Be
7-31-13
1 If you cannot hear the Voice for God, it is because you do not choose to listen. That you do listen to the voice of your ego is demonstrated by your attitudes, your feelings and your behavior. Yet this is what you want. This is what you are fighting to keep, and what you are vigilant to save. Your mind is filled with schemes to save the face of your ego, and you do not seek the face of Christ. The glass in which the ego seeks to see its face is dark indeed. How can it maintain the trick of its existence except with mirrors? But where you look to find yourself is up to you.

Where do I look to find myself? There are only two places to look. I look to ego or I look to Spirit. How do I know where I have looked? My life shows me proof of where I looked. Everything in my life is a testament to the voice I listen to. Some days I am at peace with everything no matter what is going on. Some days I feel joy bubble up through me and into my world no matter what is happening around me. Those are the days (sometimes the moments) that I am listening to the Voice for God.

Other times I am afraid or angry, guilty and fearful. Some days I spend finding fault and someone to blame. Some days I seem to manufacture problems out of thin air where only moments before there was nothing to be concerned about. Sometimes I laugh at my problems and accept the Holy Spirit’s help without hesitation, but sometimes I cling to them and cherish them and share them with anyone who will listen. These are the times I am listening to the ego voice.

There are no other voices to hear, no other places to look to find myself. Just these two. So it is simple to know how I got to this place of happiness and peace, and just as simple to know how I got to the dark place of pain, suffering and death. When I am holding a grievance or making a judgment I don’t tell myself that I am choosing death, but that is what I am doing. There is no compromise in that. Every hateful thought is a choice for death. Every fearful and guilty thought is a choice for death.

We did not come here to learn about death. We already know about death. We came here to learn to live! We can’t live if we are continually choosing death. This experience we are having and that we call life is just a dream of life, not the real thing. I wonder if it even has anything at all in common with Life. The way out of this dream seems to be to back out of it the way we came into it.

Each time I notice a thought that stems from an ego belief, I become willing to be corrected. I accept the Atonement for that belief. See, I am stepping backwards, undoing the ego as I go. I am guided through this process by the Holy Spirit, the Voice for God. He directs my steps, strengthens and comforts me. He speaks to me all through the day. Am I listening? I can only hear one voice at a time. In each moment I choose the voice I would hear.

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Study of the Text 7-30-13

III. Love Without Conflict, Paragraph 10
7-30-13
10 The calm being of God’s Kingdom, which in your sane mind is perfectly conscious, is ruthlessly banished from the part of the mind the ego rules. The ego is desperate because it opposes literally invincible odds, whether you are asleep or awake. Consider how much vigilance you have been willing to exert to protect your ego, and how little to protect your right mind. Who but the insane would undertake to believe what is not true, and then protect this belief at the cost of truth?

I have learned to be very vigilant for ego thoughts and to ask for healing. And this is good. It has been very helpful in undoing the ego. It is what Jesus asks us to do. Sometimes, though, it starts to feel like I am fighting a formidable enemy, especially when I am letting go of some deeply held and cherished belief. Lately I have been letting go of the belief that overeating is a sin for which I must be punished by getting fat.

It took a lot of vigilant mind watching even to get to the place where I could admit that this is what I am doing. Jesus reminds us that the body is not the altar of truth. The problem is never actually in the body, and nor is the solution. The ego does not have the answer. I know this, but for this issue it seems that I have made an exception. Now I am ready to recognize what I have done and let it go. I am ready to stop protecting my ego and protect my right mind instead.

This switch in thinking is taking me longer than I ever would have thought. It feels frustrating at times, and even scary. I seem to be very invested in the belief that I need the body to reflect accurately my sinfulness or my sinlessness and that this is decided by my will power in resisting cake. Ok, there, I exposed the ego reasoning in all its silliness. With all my vigilance, I have still failed to banish this ridiculous notion from my mind, and thus the feeling that I am fighting a mighty enemy.

But, in my mind is the commitment to accept the Atonement in this situation and to be healed. This morning as I was again considering this problem, I asked Holy Spirit for help today to see it differently. I felt peace flow over me and I was reminded to surrender. I had the thought to open my arms wide as a reflection of my heart opening, to stand in total surrender to God’s Love and let it heal my mind.

Then I read today’s paragraph and I was so touched by the first few words; “The calm being of God…” which comforted me because they so closely echoed Holy Spirit’s message to me this morning. The calm being of God’s Kingdom is in my mind all of the time. It is there even when I fight to keep its awareness from my mind. It is there even when I am in a desperate struggle within myself. I am not fighting a strong enemy in the ego. I am fighting fiercely to ignore the truth. This is a battle I will lose and in losing it, I will win.

“Holy Spirit, I surrender my mind to You. I surrender my battle to You. I lay down my arms in trust that You love me and want only my good and that You know what that good is. I open my heart and I invite God’s Love to flow through me, healing me. Thank you.”

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Study of the Text 7-29-13

III. Love Without Conflict, Paragraph 9
7-29-13
9 In your own mind, though denied by the ego, is the declaration of your release. God has given you everything. This one fact means the ego does not exist, and this makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego’s language, “to have” and “to be” are different, but they are identical to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows that you both have everything and are everything. Any distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of “getting,” which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That is why we make no distinction between having the Kingdom of God and being the Kingdom of God.

It is hard for me to grasp that I have everything because I am everything. First, I believe that I lack some things. In this story of Myron I lack the ability to carry a tune. I lack physical beauty. I lack the ability to remember things even as well as I used to and my memory was never all that good even when I was young. Speaking of youth, I lack that, too. I lack the ability to comprehend math easily. I’m not as smart as some people and not as rich. I am not even as good of a Course student as some others.

This list seems to prove that I have not been given everything and that I lack many things. What I am learning to accept is that none of the above is true. That person is an illusion, just a projection of a cluster of beliefs, none of which is true. Myron is just a picture of what I believe about myself, not the truth of it. In actuality I am everything. I am all there is. There is nothing for me to gain because I am that. I am abundance and beauty and perfection. I will not go to Heaven, or gain Heaven; I am Heaven.

Because the ego mind does not want to cease to exist it seeks desperately to convince me that it is preposterous to believe I am as God created me, and that I am like God, in God, a part of God. It tries to convince me that it created me and so I am like ego, when actually I made the ego. I want to believe the ego because I just don’t feel worthy of God and I fear Him. So instead of identifying with God, I identify with ego and believe in lack and loss.

The ego’s fear of not existing is the reason it has so many laws. It says that the body needs a certain amount of sleep and if it doesn’t get it then I will be tired and listless and if it this goes on too long, there will be dire consequences. Studies have been done and articles written. Sleep deficit, the researchers say is a real thing and dangerous to the health.  Sleep deprivation is used as torture. 

I bought it, because I believed in every law we made up to defend against the truth and establish the ego as real. My whole life revolved around the conflict of getting enough sleep and still having time to commune with the Holy Spirit before work. But finally I questioned that law. In the Course Jesus says that time is not real and so I decided that his word was more likely to be true than the ego’s law. I began to sleep as much as I slept and to trust that it was enough and to give time to the Holy Spirit and trust that it was adequate.

Guess what! So far so good! I am fine with however much sleep I get. Eight hours is fine. Six hours is equally fine. I forget all day long that I should be tired when I don’t have enough sleep and so I am not tired. I watch in amazement as time stretches like an elastic band to accommodate my writing. I will write and write and then look at the clock and only a couple of minutes have passed. I laugh out loud at the miracle.

This has happened so often that you would think I never worry about sleep or time anymore, but it is an old and long honored law of the ego and I seem reluctant to release it completely from my mind. Now, however, I see the thought in my mind and dismiss it most of the time, or at least, eventually.

It is very important, these little morning miracles, because they are teaching me that I made up the laws and I can dismiss them because they are not real laws like the laws of God. As I learn not to believe in and live by the ego’s laws, I become willing to believe in the Laws of God. For instance, I start to believe that He created me like Himself and that cannot change.

Another thing that has changed is the way I pray. I don’t pray for specifics. When my bank account started going down at an alarming rate this month, I didn’t pray for more money. Instead I prayed for my mind to be healed of a belief in lack and loss. Praying for more money would have implied that I am less than whole and this is not what I want to teach myself anymore. I am ready to know that I have everything, and accepting this as true will reveal that there is no such thing as lack and loss. I have everything. I am everything. Where is there room for the concept of lack and loss in that picture?

I can hide from my reality but I can’t change it, and pretending to be ego, while painful, is not a permanent condition. Ego is not real and I am. Ego will disappear when I no longer believe in it and I am eternal. Right now, I am slowly letting go of the idea of ego and learning to accept my reality. I could just change my mind and be done with the ego, but there is still fear in my mind, so I take it a step at a time.

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Study of the Text 7-26-13

III. Love Without Conflict, Paragraph 8
7-26-13
8 Watch carefully and see what it is you are really asking for. Be very honest with yourself in this, for we must hide nothing from each other. If you will really try to do this, you have taken the first step toward preparing your mind for the Holy One to enter. We will prepare for this together, for once He has come, you will be ready to help me to make other minds ready for Him. How long will you deny Him His Kingdom?

I completely accept that I must hide nothing from Jesus. I trust that he will not hide anything from me, but I notice that, in spite of my true desire to be completely open and frank with Jesus, I hide things from him through hiding them from myself. I do this when I look outward for the cause of my problem. I am pretending that there could be something in my life that I do not want. I still do that, but I am committed to preparing my mind for the Holy One to enter, so I am vigilant for that old behavior and willing to see differently.

Several things are happening in my story right now. One of my brothers has Melanoma and is going to have surgery Wednesday to remove it and discover if it has spread. My sister in law is very sick and seems to have given up hope. My brother, her husband, is facing some hard choices and is experiencing a lot of stress. I have had some financial setbacks. I am feeling the frustration of wanting to change my mind about an old problem, and yet holding onto it with equal determination. It’s like being in a fight with myself.

These seem like different problems with different solutions when looked at with the ego mind, but really there is always only one problem and one solution. It seems like some are more important; but actually, all are equal in their meaninglessness, because each is representative of an untrue thought. Nothing is more untrue than anything else; they are only either true or not true.

I am watching my mind vigilantly to stay aware of what I am asking for in each situation. I am striving to be as honest with myself as I can so that I can share with Jesus what is on my mind and receive his support and help. Yesterday as I was communicating with my brother about his upcoming surgery I thought I was fine on that count. But I noticed later when I let my spiritual guard down that I was full of judgment about his beliefs.

I thought I was asking for a miracle of mind healing for us both, but really, all along I was asking that I be seen as the spiritually superior of the two of us. I was asking for separation. This is why I must be vigilant. It’s ok, and I am not guilty. I am just doing what I need to do to prepare my mind, and I am willing to see what needs to be seen, and willing to accept healing for what needs to be healed.

My sister in law has been blessed so many ways and she seems to be determined to deny herself the benefits of these blessings. She is deliberately, though maybe unconsciously, choosing death over life. I thought that, once again, I was choosing the Atonement in her behalf, only to realize as I watched my mind that I was often choosing to see her guilt. When I asked for clarity on this I realized that she is doing what I do and she is doing it in such an obvious way that I cannot help but recognize it. When I felt anger at her behavior I was really feeling anger that she keeps showing me my guilt. Then I try to push the guilt on her so that I don’t have to see it on me.

Every time I think of her doing this, I see the guilt in my mind projected onto her and it seems I want to keep it there. I thought I was asking for her healing and discovered I was asking that she be the guilty one instead of me. But again, I want my mind healed more than I want to hide from my guilt, so I look at this with Jesus as honestly as I can. I see that the Peace of God cannot extend past my judgments and if it cannot extend, I cannot feel it. Wow! Thanks, Jesus, for that surprise insight! I give my judgment to the Holy Spirit so that it can be healed. I want the peace to flow unimpeded through me to her and to all of us.

Money has been flowing out of my bank account at an alarming rate this month. I must be asking for something I don’t want. I know I am asking for it because it is in my life, and while I don’t want the consequences, evidently I want the situation or it would not be there. Money is nothing. It is meaningless until I give it meaning. Evidently I have recently used money to prove that I am vulnerable to lack and loss. This cannot be true because it is not the Will of God. I change my mind about that. I choose again. I choose only what God wills for me.

This is the way I prepare my mind for the Holy One to enter. I do this diligently because that is my purpose. I choose not to allow the ego to rule my kingdom. The ego is in my mind, but so is Holy Spirit. I choose the Voice for God, and when I choose ego instead, I change my mind. Everything else is done for me.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 7-25-13

III. Love Without Conflict, Paragraph 7, Part 2
7-25-13
7 It has never really entered your mind to give up every idea you ever had that opposes knowledge. You retain thousands of little scraps of fear that prevent the Holy One from entering. Light cannot penetrate through the walls you make to block it, and it is forever unwilling to destroy what you have made. No one can see through a wall, but I can step around it. Watch your mind for the scraps of fear, or you will be unable to ask me to do so. I can help you only as our Father created us. I will love you and honour you and maintain complete respect for what you have made, but I will not uphold it unless it is true. I will never forsake you any more than God will, but I must wait as long as you choose to forsake yourself. Because I wait in love and not in impatience, you will surely ask me truly. I will come in response to a single unequivocal call.

I am continuing to look at this paragraph because there were a few things I wanted to allow myself to contemplate. I sat with this idea: Light cannot penetrate through the walls you make to block it, and it is forever unwilling to destroy what you have made. I don’t think my ego mind really grasps this idea.

What I seem to understand is that I put up a wall between myself and my Self. This wall consists of separation beliefs, and the foundation on which it is built is guilt. It prevents me from knowing the truth and yet, as Jesus tells me in the Course, the truth is in my mind. So I see the wall as splitting my mind. This wall can be undone for me if it is my desire to have it undone.

The way it happens is that I notice a thought I have learned is not true, I ask that the thought be corrected, and it is done for me. I envision this as a stone being removed from the wall. Now I have more light and I begin to know more of what is behind the wall, and so I am motivated to be even more vigilant for dark thoughts. In this way, the wall comes down and without the wall of false beliefs, there is only light and I see clearly.

Since doing a lot of this work, I am less identified with the dark side than I used to be, and more identified with my awakening self. But I get confused about how to see this and how to talk about it. The Course uses capitalization to help me differentiate between that which is Real and that which is not. For example, I have a self (ego/body/personality) and a Self. The Self represents my ultimate true undivided One with God, Self. I think.

But the Course also talks about spirit. It says I am not ego, but spirit and I notice that it is not capitalized. I see it is not ego, but it is evidently not Self either. Something in between? Maybe like we can be awake in the dream, in which case we experience the real world, and we can be awake from the dream in which case we are out of the dream altogether. So maybe spirit indicates a state that is like the real world; not my ultimate condition, but not asleep in ego either.

I don’t guess it really matters what words we give it, and I don’t sit around worrying that I can’t understand. After all, who doesn’t understand? It can only be the ego mind. But it occurred to me as I read that sentence because I am not sure exactly what is meant by the term, light.

Light cannot penetrate through the walls you make to block it, and it is forever unwilling to destroy what you have made.

Whatever the word light is intended to indicate here, I read this and I felt very loved. I think that Jesus is telling me that I am treasured, and that I am powerful. Dare I say it, that I am like my creator. I think he is telling me that nothing in the Universe can overcome my desire even when that desire is not in my best interest. Not even when I have made something unreal. I made it and so it stands for as long as that is what I want. This is a Self that is so different from the self I have made that I have trouble grasping this. Truly, I must ask myself, who am I?

Then Jesus says:

I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you have made, but I will not uphold it unless it is true.

Honestly, I am crying as I read this. Jesus loves me, just like the song says. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Course tells me so. (giggle) He loves me and he respects me and he honors me. Again, I must ask myself, who am I? I am not this ego self that I made and I never was. I never will be. When I read this paragraph I can hardly believe that I live such a small life and that at any moment I actually believe in it.

No matter how small I pretend to be, I am safe. I will never be forsaken. I am so treasured, so loved that no matter what stories I tell myself, I am still exactly as I was created. What a brother Jesus is! He found the way out for all of us and now he dedicates himself to bringing us with him. He is infinitely patient and he is only loving. He never loses sight of the truth no matter what crazy stories we make up.

He is the proof that I am not the self I made.  He is also the model for how I will live. The next time I feel like shaking some sense into someone I am going to remember the model Jesus has given me. I will love my brother and honor him and maintain complete respect for what he has made. I will not support the wrong minded thinking of my brother, but neither will I judge him or try to change him. I will know the truth and will hold that truth and wait patiently for him to find that truth himself. My knowing will make it easier for him to do that. My impatience would not.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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