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Study of the Text 6-25-13

6-25-13
12 Of your ego you can do nothing to save yourself or others, but of your spirit you can do everything for the salvation of both. Humility is a lesson for the ego, not for the spirit. Spirit is beyond humility, because it recognizes its radiance and gladly sheds its light everywhere. The meek shall inherit the earth because their egos are humble, and this gives them truer perception. The Kingdom of Heaven is the spirit’s right, whose beauty and dignity are far beyond doubt, beyond perception, and stand forever as the mark of the Love of God for His creations, who are wholly worthy of Him and only of Him. Nothing else is sufficiently worthy to be a gift for a creation of God Himself.

I used to very quickly read these kinds of paragraphs where Jesus is describing my true self and then move on. They made me uncomfortable because I didn’t relate. I didn’t see where it was helping me. I was more interested in the paragraphs that talked about the ego. This was familiar territory. I wanted to read something that told me what to do about it. I was a fixer and I wanted some solid leads and good advice. I wanted to do, because doing made me feel like progress was being made.

Most of my life has been spent doing and making progress, at least according to the way the ego keeps score. I solved the problems the ego pointed out, and then the ego would point out more problems. I’ve been a busy girl, ticking off items on my list as I got to them, figured them out, and took care of them. The ones I couldn’t fix, I deep-sixed. So, in a way, I did something with that too, because it was out of sight, out of mind.

With all this busy work and illusion of progress, you would think I would be happy to read about my true self, about spirit. But reading that I am perfect just as I am left me uncomfortably confused. How could I be perfect when there was still so much to do? How could I be worthy when I still made so many mistakes, did so much wrong? There is just too much work to be done, but I will keep working diligently, forgiving, forgiving, forgiving, and one day I will receive my reward, or so I told myself. Not in so many words, but that was the underlying belief.

I’m all for doing the work. There is still work to be done. I still get confused about my identity. I still get enticed by ego thinking sometimes. But now I am not confused (or hardly ever confused) about my part. I watch my mind. I ask for the Atonement and I accept healing. I don’t figure anything out, and I don’t seek solutions within the ego mind. I ask and I receive. And my Self is being revealed to me.

Wow! You and I made that discovery together. As I wrote that last line, I felt a rush throughout my body. Heat, chill bumps, tears. I didn’t see that coming.

These days I love reading about spirit, about my true Self, about God’s Son. I may not always exhibit the traits I read about, but I can envision it, and as more and more ego is undone, I can see signs of what lies beneath, what has always been just beneath the thin façade of the ego self.

I am beyond humble. I recognize my radiance and I gladly shed my light everywhere I go.  My ego is meek and surrender is no longer seen as loss, so it is with profound relief that I allow myself to be taught. I see with a truer perception because of it. The Kingdom of Heaven is no longer a far off dream, but it is my right. God loves me and I am worthy of His love. I am hungry for more truth and I don’t feel the need to hide behind my sins anymore.

When I get up from this meditation, and begin my workday, maybe I will again relate with the ego self, become confused about what I am. Maybe I will start to believe the ego is what I am instead of something I have. But I don’t think I can ever fully believe that again. It will be different now. My experience has been that once we know something, we cannot unknow it. There is no way to get the toothpaste back into the tube. I wonder how this will change things? There is a world of difference between being the ego and being the Son of God in an experience of ego.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text 6-24-13

6-24-13
11 The ego has built a shabby and unsheltering home for you, because it cannot build otherwise. Do not try to make this impoverished house stand. Its weakness is your strength. Only God could make a home that is worthy of His creations, who have chosen to leave it empty by their own dispossession. Yet His home will stand forever, and is ready for you when you choose to enter it. Of this you can be wholly certain. God is as incapable of creating the perishable as the ego is of making the eternal.

There was a time that I was tempted to believe the ego’s home was salvageable. This was even after I discovered I had another choice, that there was something besides the body and the world and the idea of separation. I tried to make my ego bolder and braver, stronger and more attractive. I tried to make it smarter and wiser. I even tried to make it more spiritual.

The ego goes on with this program, like an abandoned clock that has not run down yet, but I can’t see any purpose in it, myself. Every so often, I see the frantic thoughts in my mind urging me to join a worthy cause to improve the world, or warning me that I must live up to expectations or I will be judged. Sometimes I fall into these traps and play that game for awhile, but I know too much to go back, and pretty quickly remember to ask for the Atonement.

Jesus has taught me through contrast that I want to leave this shabby home and now when I spend time believing in the ego plan for salvation the discomfort of being there convinces me to seek Jesus’ plan of Atonement instead. When I act from fear, when I defend myself against perceived attack, I suffer and I have lost my taste for suffering.

I have always suffered when this happened, but it wasn’t until I practiced the Course that I even realized I was suffering. Now that I have experienced peace, I have little tolerance for suffering. And now that I understand what interrupts that peace, I am quicker to seek relief. I had a recent experience in which I seemed to be a victim to someone’s carelessness. First I tried to solve the problem with ego. Ego has this new, nicer, kinder façade to keep in place so it offered helpful sounding words, and reasonable sounding solutions. But the ego always has an agenda. It is always trying to win at someone’s expense.

Briefly I was convinced that I was doing some good and that everything would work out. The person involved would learn a valuable lesson and I would control the outcome to my satisfaction. The ego had me there for a while, and I was playing its game. But I tell you, the ego may confuse me with its logic, but it can’t fake peace. I felt the wrongness of it, and I was suffering. Because suffering is no longer my desire, I was given the solution.

I was doing a Pathways of Light course with two other people when the answer jumped off the page at me. We were studying from The Song of Prayer and this is what I read: “The poisonous thought that he is your enemy, your evil counterpart, your nemesis, must be relinquished before you can be saved from guilt.” Ouch! No wonder I was not at peace. I was teaching guilt and learning guilt. Suddenly I knew exactly what to do and exactly the right words to use. After that everything fell gently into place. I knew that this answer was the right answer because it felt exactly right. It felt peaceful at every step.

My first response came from the ego and it was an effort to make the ego home safe. There is nothing I can do to make the ego world safe. I don’t want to even try to do this. Working from within the ego thought system to make it something it can never be is not going to work. It never has and it never will. I do have a home, though, that is safe without my effort. It is God’s Will that I return to my home because it is God’s Will that I not suffer and that I be happy. I have seen the ego will and I reject it. “God, please show me Your Will, now, that I might choose again.”

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text 6-21-13

6-21-13
10 The ego is afraid of the spirit’s joy, because once you have experienced it you will withdraw all protection from the ego, and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now because fear is a witness to the separation, and your ego rejoices when you witness to it. Leave it behind! Do not listen to it and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, Who is as incapable of deception as is the spirit He created. Release yourself and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourself to others, and do not accept such a picture of them yourself.

Jesus says that once we experience spirit’s joy we will lose all interest in the ego, and our investment in fear. Certainly this seems to be true for people who have done this; Byron Katie, Jan Frazier, Eckhart Tolle, and others. I can’t know exactly how it feels to them, but judging from their writing and their interviews this seems to be true.

Jesus also says that the reason our investment in fear is so great now is because it is a witness to separation and the ego really likes that. The ego is always pushing for fear. Because fear is always its first choice, I see that I must be vigilant for making another choice. The more I simply accept fear as real and unavoidable, the more fear I will experience. By accepting fear I am teaching myself (and everyone else) that fear is real.

This morning before I began my meditation, I checked my bank account. I check it every day, but usually I do this after my meditation. Once I did that I started to turn to this work, but I had the thought to check my credit card account. I used to check it daily but got out of the habit. I started to ignore that prompt, thinking I needed to get to my writing, but I have formed the habit of paying attention to those little taps on the shoulder.

What I discovered is that there have been several charges to my card that I didn’t make. My first (ego) reaction was fear. Then I set that feeling aside. Perhaps I would not be held responsible for the charges since I didn’t make them. I searched carefully for three months and found all the charges. They were to a particular company. The first charge was legitimate and the rest were not.

I noticed the fear kept coming up. I guess setting it aside is not the same as letting it go. I also noticed anger. The first charge was one I (reluctantly) made for a young woman I know. I didn’t feel comfortable using my card on a website I wasn’t familiar with, but let myself get talked into it. Now I felt fear that expressed itself as anger and then moved into resentment. I was very quickly back to feeling like a victim. I’ve noticed that fear, guilt and victimhood seem to be part of my classroom here, and while I have made great progress in undoing them, there is still belief that must be let go.

The difference now is that I don’t hold as tightly to the belief and for not as long. I feel the reaction, but I also watch the reaction with a bit of detachment. I asked for help seeing this. I was reminded that I am never a victim of the world I see. The world is a projection of my beliefs, and through my beliefs I decide on everything that is in my life. This situation is really my story so why am I blaming someone else. If I continued to blame this other person, all my energy would be directed toward keeping my victim story alive and none toward healing these beliefs.

I was also reminded that the fear I feel is not a real thing. It is just a feeling and the only meaning it has is what I give it. As I remember that it is just a feeling I stop fighting it and being afraid of it and it just moves through me. In doing this I am allowing myself to be taught that fear is not real. The credit card problem and the money loss are important only in the illusion. I will take care of it because that is what we do here. But my real goal is to stop believing in fear, and I am also doing that. This morning I took another important step toward leaving fear behind. 

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text 6-20-13

6-20-13
9 God is not the author of fear. You are. You have chosen to create unlike Him, and have therefore made fear for yourself. You are not at peace because you are not fulfilling your function. God gave you a very lofty function that you are not meeting. Your ego has chosen to be afraid instead of meeting it. When you awaken you will not be able to understand this, because it is literally incredible. Do not believe the incredible now. Any attempt to increase its believableness is merely to postpone the inevitable. The word “inevitable” is fearful to the ego, but joyous to the spirit. God is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He can avoid you.

It is very good news, indeed, that God is not the author of fear. We made fear in place of the peace that is ours when we are awake. Just consider for a moment that fear is a choice, and more incredibly, it is a choice for something that is not even real. To stop experiencing fear I only need to stop believing in fear. While I sit here in this meditation it all makes perfect sense and I can envision life without fear. In fact, if I doubt the possibility I only have to remember the story of Jan Frazier who experienced fear falling away.

Jan suffered great fear all her life. I relate to her because guilt and fear (inseparable buddies) have been close friends to me all my life as well. In her book, When Fear Falls Away, A Sudden Awakening, she questions if fear is inevitable. She considers, just for a moment that there might be another way. When she wakes up the next day she discovers that fear is gone, never to return. Imagine! Imagine what it would be like to never worry about your children’s safety or health; to never worry about money or your own health, or to be afraid of the dentist or heights or driving in the rain, or bad weather. Imagine your worst fears and your little every day fears. Pay attention to the worries and anxious moments today just to get a real feel for how much of your life is colored by fear.

Are you afraid to speak in public? Are you afraid to die? Are you afraid, instead, to live? Are you afraid you will not have enough time to get everything done? Do you worry your garden won’t grow or the insects will eat away at your tomatoes? Fear shows up different ways. Are you angry about something? Anger is just another expression of fear.

Are you angry at the driver who pulled out in front of you, at the clerk who was rude or slow or just indifferent? Are you angry at a child who behaves badly or a partner who is careless of your feelings? All these are fear just showing up in a way that you prefer over the feeling of being afraid. Take the pulse of fear in your day. Is it beating the rhythm of your life?

Now think on this. You made that up. Everything that happened is a projection of your belief in fear. Every response of fear is a choice to continue to believe in fear. Do you see the endless, awful cycle? The only way to end that cycle is to choose not to believe in fear. Thus far, I have not had a sudden awakening from fear and so I am using my slower, but tried and true method of letting go of the belief in fear. When a fear story shows up, I remember that I am the author of that story and I have a choice; I can accept my fearful response as inevitable, or I can ask to see it differently.

I use different approaches to this. I used to be really phobic about dentists and would put off going and use Xanax to calm myself when I had to go. A few years ago I realized that not everyone is afraid of the dentist and so it must be possible for me to not be afraid, too. I stopped making up stories about why I was afraid and instead became open to a healing. I started watching my thoughts about the dentist and asking that my mind be healed. When I sat in the dentist’s chair, I rested my mind in God. I asked Jesus to hold my hand. I did whatever I felt I needed to do to keep my mind open to healing.

Now I have no fear of the dentist. I don’t freeze up at the thought of going for a visit. I don’t feel my gut clench when I walk into the office and smell that medicinal odor that is typical of dental offices. A while back I went for what I thought was just a checkup only to be surprised by the dentist saying he needed to do some work on a tooth and that it might be uncomfortable. I was also surprised that I was calm about it.

The important thing about my dentist story is that it proves to me that fear is not real. If fear were real then there would be nothing I could do about it. I could mask it with tranquilizers, and I could use the force of my will to push through it, but if it were real, then I could not stop it from being there. I did the same thing for flying, and it worked the same way.

Where I have the biggest problem are the little every day anxieties. I overslept and got a late start and now I worry I will not finish this writing in time to make my first appointment of the morning. Then I remind myself that I asked Jesus to manipulate time for me as he offered to do. I used to worry so much about the time thing that it ruled my life. Now it is a thought that I use to undo the belief in time just as I am undoing the belief in fear.

When I worry about my son being sick or being in excruciating pain, when I worry it will never end, it is harder for me to not believe in fear. My fear seems like a mountain looming over me, threatening to crush me with its solid mass. How could it not be real when it feels so real? It is hard for me to believe that I am making it up, and yet, I surely am. I tell you about my son being in pain and you are not afraid. You may sympathize with my fear but you are not afraid. If it were real and so unavoidable, everyone would feel it.

It would be like me saying that there is a mountain in front of me so I can’t go any further, but my friend saying that there is no mountain in front of her so she will continue her journey. If the mountain is real, it is there for both of us. If it is not there for both of us it is not real. If even one person does not see my mountain of fear then I know it is not real and I can make a choice to see only what it is real, not by force of will but by a decision for healing.

Fear is a choice and it is a choice for nothing because it is not real. But it is a nothing that brings great suffering and that keeps me from my true Self, and from joy and peace. I will continue to ask for the Atonement and to accept the healing it brings until transfer of learning is complete and fear is gone. It seems like it will take more than this lifetime, but transfer of learning can fool you. One moment you have a million little fears and then suddenly there is no fear. That is because the million little fears are just an illusion. There is actually only the one belief and when it is gone all its little manifestations go with it. I am willing, God. Please help my unwillingness.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text 6-19-13

6-19-13
8 The ego tries to exploit all situations into forms of praise for itself in order to overcome its doubts. It will remain doubtful as long as you believe in its existence. You who made it cannot trust it, because in your right mind you realize it is not real. The only sane solution is not to try to change reality, which is indeed a fearful attempt, but to accept it as it is. You are part of reality, which stands unchanged beyond the reach of your ego but within easy reach of spirit. When you are afraid, be still and know that God is real, and you are His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. Do not let your ego dispute this, because the ego cannot know what is as far beyond its reach as you are.

The bad news is the ego is doubtful and afraid and nothing is going to change this. I have spent my life trying to make a stronger, better ego self with more education, more income, buying more stuff, developing a better personality, etc. I cannot shore up the ego so there is no reason to try, which means I have been wasting my time. I now have a nicer ego, a more spiritual ego, a kinder ego, but it compares itself to others and finds itself wanting in every department. It is still doubtful and fearful. 

The good news is I am not my ego. What I am is established in God and is beyond doubt and has nothing to fear. What I am cannot be affected by ego doubts and fears or anything the ego does or says or thinks. What I am is like God in every way. This means I am not my personality. I am not my body. I am not any of the traits I have spent my life trying to develop to stave off the doubts and uncertainties that plague the ego. I am simply and only the Son of God.

I forget who I am on a regular basis. This memory of Self is far too new to consistently stand against the ego self I have identified with for so long. What do I do when I feel doubtful and uncertain, when guilt overcomes me and I become afraid? Jesus tells me that when I am afraid, I should be still and know that God is real, and I am His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased.

I have used many prayers or affirmations to turn my mind back toward truth. I have reminded myself that the truth is true. I have asked that the Holy Spirit heal my mind. I have accepted the Atonement. I have reminded myself that I am still as God created me. I have remembered that God goes with me wherever I go. Yesterday I often remembered that what is not God’s Will is not real and can have no effect on me. I prayed that God would show me His Will for me.

However I choose to break the ego’s hold on my mind, the goal is to return to the peaceful certainty of my true Self. I rest in God. In that rest there will be no words, but my mind remembers that I am His Son and He loves me. In trust, I surrender all to Him. I am at peace, and doubt, uncertainty and fear cannot find me. Sometimes it is only for a brief respite, but it is enough to remind me that this is my natural state and that it is what I want. When it is all that I want, it is all that I will have.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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