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Study of the Text 4-22-13

4-22-13
3 The ego is the questioning aspect of the post-separation self, which was made rather than created. It is capable of asking questions but not of perceiving meaningful answers, because these would involve knowledge and cannot be perceived. The mind is therefore confused, because only One-mindedness can be without confusion. A separated or divided mind must be confused. It is necessarily uncertain about what it is. It has to be in conflict because it is out of accord with itself. This makes its aspects strangers to each other, and this is the essence of the fear-prone condition, in which attack is always possible. You have every reason to feel afraid as you perceive yourself. This is why you cannot escape from fear until you realize that you did not and could not create yourself. You can never make your misperceptions true, and your creation is beyond your own error. That is why you must eventually choose to heal the separation.

A part of the split mind sees itself as self-created and sovereign. It imagines itself to be separate from all else and self-determined. The right mind sees its true nature as part of a whole, and existing within and sharing the Will of God. There is no meeting ground between these two visions. Never will the right and wrong mind be in accord and so there is constant conflict. It is a wonder we are not all insane. But wait. Perhaps we are.

The mind, because it believes diametrically opposed views of itself, is confused and does not know who it is. This is frightening and an impossible position to be in and yet, here we are. There is no compromise we can make to ease the situation. We think we have options, that is, we think we can choose between being self-created and being the creation of God. But that is delusional. We don’t get to choose who or how we were created. We can only pretend to be something other than what we are, and when we do we feel confused and afraid.

Up until now we have tried to have both options be true. We see ourselves as separate from God and from each other. We see ourselves as the planners and the decision makers, the movers and the doers. We made a world with endless choices and convinced ourselves they mattered and that making a choice between one illusion or another illusion was important. 

We think that we can be a teacher of God even as we judge and condemn our brother. We think we can be happy even as we imagine ourselves to be sinners and deserving of punishment. Do you see how impossible it is to conciliate the two minds? We even made a God in our own image and gave ourselves the choice of whether or not to believe in Him. We have tried to have a God and still be the God we have. No wonder we are frightened and confused.

Our only true option is to back out of the alternate reality we made for ourselves. We do this by first recognizing it has no value. We start looking at the effects of the separation idea and as we do so we realize there is no reason to hold onto it. Then we make the only other choice there is and decide for God as our Creator. With this decision made, the Holy Spirit undoes what we have done, and we are left with a clear mind that allows the truth to be true.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 4-19-13

4-19-13
2 Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question.

“What am I?” is a good question, but only if I ask it of One Who knows. If I ask this question of the ego, I will not get a meaningful answer because the ego does not know. The ego is my attempt to be what I am not so how could it inform me of my true identity. All the therapy in the world will only take me in circles because I am asking the only thing in the Universe without the answer.

This is why we have to go outside the thinking mind to be healed. Through consciousness or the thinking mind I can only perceive. I can see things a certain way. I can see them differently. But I can never see them truly. Through the thinking mind I can never know. When I was a young adult it was very popular to leave what you knew in an attempt to “find yourself.” I wonder if that was an expression of the beginning of a general awakening.

I am beginning to find myself, and while I understand the desire to leave behind distractions and focus on that one thing, I also understand that it is not necessary to do so. Maybe it can even be counter-productive. It is in looking closely at what I project that I discover what I am to heal. Right here in the middle of this messy life I live is the best place to do this. If I went away to find myself, I guess I would, because I would just project more of the mess, and I could look at it there.

Finding myself is really what it is all about and it is what I am doing. I am in here someplace under all the false thinking. I am hiding out in this story of Myron, disguised by a body and masked as a personality. I am running around madly pretending to be in pain, to suffer and then, just to prove my point, to die. Even the best parts of the story, the most touching, the most exciting and fun parts, are tinged with fear and sorrow because I know they will not last.

I guess this experiment in being what I am not began as an interesting and fun adventure sometime eons ago, but I feel the draw to awaken from this dream. So I am looking for myself. (This makes me laugh when I think about it.) I look at the projection to see what needs to be excavated to get to the bottom of things. I accept responsibility for the projection, decide for something else, ask for healing and then accept the healing. Eventually, I will get to my Self.

An example from my daily life: I decided it is time to look at this issue of food and see it healed finally. Having fought the battle of the bulge all my adult life, I am tired of it. I don’t want to be fat. I don’t want to be skinny. I want to be free. I want to be free of the false thinking that keeps me at war with myself and the world as I see it. I want to be free of the disguise of one who is victim of an unacceptable body. Surely, as the Son of God this cannot be what I am.

I started out looking for my skinny self through the ego and of course this just led me in circles. I talked to therapists, read books, followed diet gurus, took magical formulas guaranteed or your money back to give me back the body of my youth. (The body that I didn’t appreciate when I had it because it was never good enough, and could never be good enough.) Even when I found success I couldn’t sustain it, and I just wound up feeling like a failure and feeling guilty.

Now I feel like I am ready to actually make a change. I have experienced enough mind healing to know that I could not find freedom because I was not looking for freedom. I couldn’t find myself because I was not looking for my Self. I could not find anything real or true because I was asking that which had no answers, only more questions.

What I am doing now is asking that my mind be healed of all wrong minded thoughts about food, size, the body and its health. I want to end the war with my body and food. I understand that what I do to make this body appear different is not what is really affecting it. Those pills, that food, all of it is just a projection of a thought from my mind. The body itself is a projection. So I am only projecting a thought onto a thought. It is too funny for words, really, all this effort to control a thought form by moving it more or adjusting its intake of food or giving it magic pills. It’s just a thought form. Changing it requires a change in thought.

It has been a very interesting experience so far. I am absolutely amazed at how resistant my mind is to accepting a new way of thinking about the body and food. I look at food and automatically I think in terms of calories and carbs and how damaging this will be to my plan for a thin body. I have to remind myself a thousand times a day that there is a new sheriff in town and she is no longer policing these things.

While that gets frustrating after awhile, and very tiring, it is also a good thing. I have many, many opportunities during the day to remember to ask for healing. I want to use this body issue to bring me closer to true perception. I want to use it to fully surrender my imagined separate will, and to accept that God’s Will is my will. I want to use these many opportunities, not to rearrange my thought form of a body, making it thinner for example, but I want to use the opportunities to remember I am not a body.

This is an example of how I am using the world I made to discover my true Self. I look at my projections and realize they cannot be truth. Then I ask for another way to see them and accept the healing offered me. It sounds simple and easy when I write it down, but doing it is kind of messy and there is a lot of wavering, going back to the way it was and then remembering I want something new. My experience has been that eventually I make a final choice and it is for God. Then I wonder why I made it so hard.

And when this is done and I am at peace with the body and food, I don’t have to go anywhere to find another project to help me see differently. My world, wherever I am, is filled with my projections and they will show me what needs to be healed. Eventually, I will generalize the lessons I am learning and all the other millions of forms wrong minded thinking takes will just fall away because in knowing the truth about the ones I took to the Holy Spirit, I will know the truth about them all.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 4-18-13

IV. Error and the Ego
1 The abilities you now possess are only shadows of your real strength. All of your present functions are divided and open to question and doubt. This is because you are not certain how you will use them, and are therefore incapable of knowledge. You are also incapable of knowledge because you can still perceive lovelessly. Perception did not exist until the separation introduced degrees, aspects and intervals. Spirit has no levels, and all conflict arises from the concept of levels. Only the Levels of the Trinity are capable of Unity. The levels created by the separation cannot but conflict. This is because they are meaningless to each other.

I can really relate to what Jesus is saying in this paragraph. At those moments when my will is undivided I feel certain and have no doubts. I cannot imagine feeling any other way or believing differently. It is all so clear. At those moments I am joyful in a way that never happens otherwise, and joyful for no apparent reason. Nothing that is happening is the cause of this joy and so nothing that is happening can affect it. I feel like Wonder Woman of the spiritual world. Ego? What ego? I fear no ego. I laugh at the idea of ego.

In this state of certainty no matter what the body’s eyes show me I see with true Vision. I see the person in front of me through the eyes of love. I want to enfold that one before me in unquestioning love. Because in those moments there is no conflicting thought in my mind to project, I see nothing but love everywhere I look. What might have triggered fear in me at another time now only leaves me curious.

I cannot yet sustain this state. The reason is because I still choose between the two voices, and if I am choosing sometimes I choose ego. I remain unconvinced that I want only my true will, the will I share with God. As long as my will remains divided, the world I see remains divided and I experience the effects of separation. I see levels because where there is division there are degrees, aspects and intervals. And choices. And uncertainty and doubt. And fear.

I have already described what it feels like when I choose with God. The sense of certainty is Heaven. When I choose with ego I am filled with doubts, uncertainty, and fear. I look on the whole world as my enemy. I am in competition with everyone. I wonder what I should do in each circumstance and separation makes it impossible to choose with any degree of confidence. It all shifts and changes so inconsistently that I cannot possibly outguess it each time.

Because I see the world fragmented into separate parts I cannot choose with love because love is whole. I am always defending myself and so I look without love at my attackers. Does this seem extreme? Even those I love beyond reason, I see as different from me and so my love of that one is limited. I compete with that one and defend against that one even as I seek to defend her. I use justifications to further divide the relationship. If she behaves this way, I am justified in attacking her. But if she behaves in that way, I will offer her my love.

It is all too confusing and too impossible. There is nothing to depend on, no solid footing in this world of separation. There are too many choices and with each added division there is more conflict. It is like being at war every day, no, every minute of every day. Everyone is my enemy at some time, even my most beloved ones, and I never know when they will become enemy. Maybe they will make me mad; maybe I will make them mad. How do we live like this?

When I have sunk deeply into the ego mind, I forget how easy it is to choose differently. Late yesterday, I followed an ego thought into the maze and got lost there for awhile. Fortunately, I have left indicators behind from other forays into the jungle of the ego mind, signs to help me remember the way out, breadcrumbs, if you will. 

The signs say, “Help is always available.” “You are not alone.” “You are loved, and you are loving.” “Ask Holy Spirit to help you” “You are as God created you.” “In your defenselessness your safety lies.” With each loveless thought, there is a sign to direct me to my right mind. The ego mind has its own depressing signs. They say things like, “You are trapped here with no way out.” “You are guilty.” “You are so guilty no one could love you, certainly not God.” “This is your refuge from God.” “Stay with me and you will win. You will be king of your mountain.” “There are just too many choices. Just give up.”

They are all lies, of course. It can cause temporary confusion in my mind, but the allure is gone now so eventually I always come out of it. You would think that the contrast between unquestioned love and the hateful, confusing option of ego would be enough to settle the issue for good. But the thing is, I don’t stay in either place too long, but in some muddled middle ground where I look first to God then to ego then back to God. It is not pleasant, but not exactly hell either. Sort of like purgatory, I think. Just shy of so bad I am driven to God.

I know, right? Insane. But the good news is that each time I sit in certainty, each time I feel that love (which I know is but a shadow of the real thing) I am more reluctant to return to egoland. It is beginning to lose its gloss. How many times can I choose between love and fear and still keep believing that I want fear more than I want love?

So I continue to notice the signs I have chosen ego again, and then I make a better choice. I ask the Holy Spirit to correct me and to purify my mind. Each time I do this I bring myself closer to full acceptance and to the day that I am done with choices. The ego is wrong. It is not impossible, not even hard. It is simple and I am learning to be patient with myself as I choose again and again until there is nothing to choose between.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 4-17-13

4-17-13
7 If you attack error in another, you will hurt yourself. You cannot know your brother when you attack him. Attack is always made upon a stranger. You are making him a stranger by misperceiving him, and so you cannot know him. It is because you have made him a stranger that you are afraid of him. Perceive him correctly so that you can know him. There are no strangers in God’s creation. To create as He created you can create only what you know, and therefore accept as yours. God knows His children with perfect certainty. He created them by knowing them. He recognizes them perfectly. When they do not recognize each other, they do not recognize Him.

Sometimes I deny a brother in a very obvious way. I read in the paper about someone abusing a child and I cannot understand this kind of cruel behavior. I find that person guilty. Now I do not know him, and because I do not know him I do not know myself who is one with him, nor do I know God because He is Creator of us both. Now that I have misperceived my brother and no longer know him for who he is, I am afraid of him and of myself and God, too.

When I see this brother as cruel and vicious and an abuser, I see those things in myself as well. Perhaps they did not show up in the same way, but I can find cruelty in me. It was cruel of me to judge and attack my brother. I can find viciousness. I feel hatred and want vengeance the moment I judge and condemn this person in my mind. I can find the abuser in me in many little ways. Perhaps I hate this person for showing me the hidden ugliness in my mind.

All of this came about as a result of misperceiving my brother and seeing him through the filter of my confused and frightened mind. I misperceived him and so no longer know him. Not knowing him I am afraid of him. In my fear I condemn him and feel vindicated in attacking him. It could be a single brother I have gone to war with, or it could be an entire nation, such as happened with 9-11. All forms of rejection and attack occur when we fail to recognize our brother.

When my brother lashes out it is because he has forgotten who he is and is afraid. He has misperceived us and thinks we are the enemy he must destroy to remain safe. He is afraid of us and afraid of himself and afraid of God. He is not really attacking us; he is attacking the fear in his mind which he has projected outward.

While my mind is clear I can see my brother as the Holy Son of God that he is and the lashing out as some shadowy aspect of a story. But I am still dealing with perception which is slippery and hard to hold onto. The closer the tragedy gets to me personally, the harder it is to recognize my confused brother, and I forget who he really is. If the six year old child killed at the Boston Marathon was my precious little grandchild would I be able to hold to my healed perception, or would I see the shadowy story as the truth and the idea of the one Son of God as a shadowy and unlikely concept?

That slipperiness is the difference between perception and knowledge. I think (perceive) and the thinking changes with the circumstances. With knowledge the truth is true always and nothing changes it. Right now I deal with perception and I try to remain vigilant for perception that is wrong so that I can allow the Holy Spirit to heal that perception for me.

I am not guilty when the truth slips away from me, because by definition perception changes, but through my vigilance I choose the truth over and over until I learn that the truth is all I want. I use it all for practice. I use the more subtle everyday rejections, such as when I make my fellow driver a stranger to me, or my angry boss a stranger, or maybe even my child becomes a stranger to me when I see the error as real.

The “big” stuff makes good practice because it is easy to catch, but also because it can seem so real. Having so many people agreeing that it is real, and agreeing that this perpetrator is a stranger to the rest of us makes it feel real. I am used to going along with the crowd and it is easy to fall back into that as if reality is determined by the number of people who believe it, or how showy the insult.

Right now, I work with perception. Everything is grist for the mill. I watch my thoughts. I give my willingness to be healed. I accept the Atonement in this situation, too. Slowly my thinking shifts as my perception is corrected. When my perception is made true and stabilizes, God will grace me with Knowledge.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 4-16-13

4-16-13
6 Right perception is necessary before God can communicate directly to His altars, which He established in His Sons. There He can communicate His certainty, and His knowledge will bring peace without question. God is not a stranger to His Sons, and His Sons are not strangers to each other. Knowledge preceded both perception and time, and will ultimately replace them. That is the real meaning of “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” and “Before Abraham was I am.” Perception can and must be stabilized, but knowledge is stable. “Fear God and keep His commandments” becomes “Know God and accept His certainty.”

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to be free of the belief that food makes me fat. I fully understand the concept that it is guilt that makes me fat. It is the belief in my mind that fat is caused by food, and it happens when I am guilty for eating something I have decided should be on my no-no list. I understand this and I believe it is true. This is working with the thinking mind and is, for me, the first step out of that particular hell.

The second step is deciding it is time to let this go. I made a commitment to allow my mind to be healed. I recognized that I am imprisoned by this belief. It is like a box I can’t get out of and I keep bumping into the sides and hurting myself. It feels like my whole life revolves around what I eat. I am either afraid of my food choices, confused about what I should eat or what it means, or feeling guilty about what I eat. I am tired of this and ready for a final solution.

So having made that decision I am now vigilant for thoughts that keep me imprisoned in this story of being victim to food, to this body, to my own choices. When I notice them I ask for the miracle. I ask that my mind be healed of these beliefs and I accept the Atonement in this situation. This is the way I allow my perception to be corrected.

I am absolutely amazed at how persistent these beliefs are. For instance, I often during the day assess what I have eaten to see if I have taken in too many calories or carbs. When I notice that I am doing this I gently remind myself that food is not the problem. Again, I ask for healing. I wonder if I resist because I would rather be not very good at controlling my world than to admit that I made all this up and it is meaningless.

I did this with time and it feels so good to be free of the idea that time is real and it is my job to work within those fixed boundaries. I am doing this with pain. I am allowing my mind to be healed of the belief in pain, sickness and death. I say this as I sit here with a cold or sinus infection or something.

I just told someone on Sunday that I haven’t had a cold in so many years I barely remember what it is like. It seems like every time I say something like this, I reassess what I want to believe. But I am not suffering. I have symptoms. I have sinus drainage and so a sore throat. I have a little fever and some achiness. This is what it feels like.

Suffering, on the other hand is when I think it should not be happening and I am at war with it. There is nothing to fight against. I know that I made this up. Pain and sickness and suffering are not possible because they are not in God. I open my heart to Love and ask that my mind be healed of the belief in pain and sickness that I still cling to.

I look at different beliefs that I have always accepted as “just the way it is” and ask that I remember the truth instead. I made these rules and laws, projected situations that seemed to prove the rules and concluded they have validity because, well… there they are. Now I am undoing all this as I ask that the Holy Spirit come into my mind and undo what I have done.

In this way my perceptions are brought closer to truth and stabilized so that I am not always having to go back and do it again simply because the form of the untrue thought looks a little different. When my perception is completely stabilized then God will be able to communicate His knowledge directly to me. He will reveal the truth and I will no longer simply believe, but I will know, never to waver in that knowing, never to question the truth again. I knew before and I will know again.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 4-15-13

4-15-13
5 The Bible tells you to know yourself, or to be certain. Certainty is always of God. When you love someone you have perceived him as he is, and this makes it possible for you to know him. Until you first perceive him as he is you cannot know him. While you ask questions about him you are clearly implying that you do not know God. Certainty does not require action. When you say you are acting on the basis of knowledge, you are really confusing knowledge with perception. Knowledge provides the strength for creative thinking, but not for right doing. Perception, miracles and doing are closely related. Knowledge is the result of revelation and induces only thought. Even in its most spiritualized form perception involves the body. Knowledge comes from the altar within and is timeless because it is certain. To perceive the truth is not the same as to know it.

Jesus says that we receive knowledge as a result of revelation. Revelation is information revealed. This means that we don’t get to knowledge on our own. We don’t get there through logic or judgment or reasoning or any kind of learning. We receive knowledge. It is revealed to us. It comes from the altar within. It is certain and unchanging because it is of God. It is timeless.

To love means to know. While I question God, that is to doubt or to not understand, I do not love Him. The same is true for myself and for anyone else. When I have been given knowledge and accepted that knowledge I am certain and there is nothing to ask, to wonder, to do.

Perception, miracles and doing are closely related. I am still at the stage of having my perception corrected so that it becomes true perception, that is, very close to knowledge. I do this through miracles, as miracles are a change of mind. I realize that my perception must not be true because it is not like what I would think with God, and so I ask for a miracle. I ask that my mind be changed. This is done and I am closer to truth.

The final step, from true perception to knowledge, is taken by God. He reveals Himself and then we know. There is nothing else to ponder. There is nothing to do. When we know God we know our selves and we know our brother.  I imagine (perceive) what this must be like, and though I cannot know for sure if I am right, I think it must be wonderful.

How blessed to know that God is Love and nothing else, to never doubt this and to know exactly what that means. How blessed to know that my brothers are Love and never a threat to me. How blessed to know my friend is Love and to never become confused about that, to never believe in her confusion.

How blessed to look at my son and see perfection, to never become confused by the suffering the body’s eyes show me. How blessed to never again forget that I am not living this life but observing my mind playing with ideas. It makes me cry to think that this unwavering certainty could be mine, and it makes me cry to realize that it is not mine yet.

Right now my perception wavers, sometime seeing truly and other times seeing with the ego. But I do the work and accept the Atonement as I am able. I get closer to true perception every day and I “know” enough now to trust that all will be revealed when I am ready to receive it. With knowledge all doubt and uncertainty will be gone and never again will I be confused. I will know that I am as God created me. I will know that there is only Love.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 4-12-13

4-12
4 True vision is the natural perception of spiritual sight, but it is still a correction rather than a fact. Spiritual sight is symbolic, and therefore not a device for knowing. It is, however, a means of right perception, which brings it into the proper domain of the miracle. A “vision of God” would be a miracle rather than a revelation. The fact that perception is involved at all removes the experience from the realm of knowledge. That is why visions, however holy, do not last.

This paragraph explains why it is that I can have the most remarkable spiritual experiences, so vivid and real that I cannot doubt them, and so extraordinary that I cannot imagine losing them, and yet I do. They begin to fade and I cannot recover the feeling. Sometimes I have to go back and read what I wrote about them to even remember they happened.

I am happy for them anyway because I am encouraged that something is happening. They are like little gifts that foreshadow the real thing. It is like I am being reassured that I am on the right path. Some of these experiences have been… I don’t even have words to describe them… amazing certainly doesn’t cover it, so out of my experience of the world as I know it, but more than that.

I have felt Love, or as much of it as I can stand, and while I can’t bring that feeling back up, I will never forget it happened. So now I know that Love is real, and it is not what I have been feeling here in the illusion. And Jesus is telling me that this experience, as powerful as it was, was not the real thing. It is still in the realm of perception and there is something more.

As we are learning the difference between perception and knowledge, I have to laugh at all the time I think I knew something. Sometimes I was so certain that I knew something that I was willing to argue the point, and even when I did not open my mouth, my mind was busy building defenses against the other person’s point of view. I was deluded.

Perception is shifting and changing and uncertain. Perception would need defense, but then why defend something that is shifting, changing and uncertain? What would be the point? Instead of thinking that the other person is wrong, I am learning to ask the Holy Spirit to show me the truth in their words. Instead of defending what I think I know, I am learning to ask for ever more clarity, truer and truer perceptions.

In so doing, I am no longer interested in bending others to my way of thinking. In fact, I find this funny even to think about. On those rare moments when I forget and think I know something or that someone else needs to see things my way, I forgive it and then have a good laugh at myself.

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