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Study of Text, C 15: V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 7. 1-26-18

V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 7
7 The ego’s use of relationships is so fragmented that it frequently goes even farther; one part of one aspect suits its purpose, while it prefers different parts of another aspect. Thus does it assemble reality to its own capricious liking, offering for your seeking a picture whose likeness does not exist. For there is nothing in Heaven or earth that it resembles, and so, however much you seek for its reality, you cannot find it because it is not real.

Journal
We began by acknowledging that our use of relationships is fragmented. I choose to love certain parts of the Sonship, and not to love others. One person suits my desires and others don’t. That is very clear to me. I love my child more than another person’s child. I love my sibling’s children perhaps less than I love mine, but more than I love a stranger’s children. I love one man more than I love another, one friend more than I love another friend. None of that is as true as it used to be more me, but still has elements of truth in it.

So, do I fragment my relationships even further? I love one thing about this child than I do other things about him or her. I love one aspect of my friend but really don’t love another thing about her. Maybe I even hate another thing about her. I wonder how we can call that love at all. We even have a name for this weird phenomenon; we call it the love/hate relationship. And we accept it as if it was natural.

Love is love all the time, in every circumstance, under every condition, or it is not love. It is not quantifiable. There is no “more” love or “less” love. There is only love. If I can qualify or quantify my love, then it is not actually love; it is something else. And since there is nothing outside love, then what I am calling love is actually nothing. Love exists and it cannot be altered and still be love.

Gravity is a force which tries to pull two objects toward each other. Anything which has mass also has a gravitational pull. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull is. Earth’s gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what causes objects to fall. Suppose I found a way to add something else to this natural force, or to take something away from its true nature. Then it wouldn’t be gravity anymore. It would be something else and I would have to find another name for it. Love is immutable and yet we add and take away and still insist it is love.

What if I agree that gravity is the same all the time but I also decide it will be in operation only on those particular objects of my choosing. When I stand on my scale to see what I weigh, gravity is going to be less than when I walk across my floor. Now I have a special relationship with gravity as it applies to my scale. This is silly, and it doesn’t work that way. But this is what we try to do with relationships, and then we wonder why they don’t work.

What if I absolutely loved my friend? I loved her exactly the same whether she was being kind or hateful, funny or ridiculous, serious or lighthearted. I loved her regardless of how she felt about me. I loved her if she stole from me or gave to me most generously. What if I love your friend in the same way that I love my friend? What if I love the store clerk exactly as much as I love my children, no differently, not more nor less. We would then know what love really is, knowledge we have lost in our quest to redefine it for our own purposes.

Can you imagine what relationships would be like in this case? They would be as dependable as gravity. They would be as sublime as the love of a mother for her newborn child. Every relationship would bring utter joy to us and if we left the presence of one person and came into the presence of another, no matter who they were, we would feel the same transcendent love. If we left everyone and were alone we would still feel that bliss because the love did not leave. It is what we are so we cannot be away from it; we can only deny it. We deny love when we redefine it as our special relationships. We lose the joy of relationship when we make them special.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Manual for Teachers: II.The Shift in Perception, P 4. 1-24-18

II. The Shift in Perception, P 4
4 With this idea is pain forever gone. But with this idea goes also all confusion about creation. Does not this follow of necessity? Place cause and effect in their true sequence in one respect, and the learning will generalize and transform the world. The transfer value of one true idea has no end or limit. The final outcome of this lesson is the remembrance of God. What do guilt and sickness, pain, disaster and all suffering mean now? Having no purpose, they are gone. And with them also go all the effects they seemed to cause. Cause and effect but replicate creation. Seen in their proper perspective, without distortion and without fear, they re-establish Heaven.

Journal

I find the idea of pain and sickness as a function of the mind to be easy to understand. I believe what I read here. The body is not the source of what seems to be happening to it. It is the mind that creates and the mind that produces form, all form, including pain and sickness. When I feel pain, I remind myself that the pain did not originate in the body, but in my mind. Even further, it is not in my body at all but in my mind being projected onto the idea of a body.

If pain and sickness occur as a function of the mind, then it is the mind that is cause and the body experience as effect. And if this is true for pain and sickness and the body, then it is true for every form within the world, and this means that the mind is the cause of the world altogether. The mind is the cause of all of it, and the forms we see with our eyes are the effect of what the mind caused. What this means is that we have been wasting our time trying to heal and fix the effect. It is the cause that must be adjusted if we want a different effect.

What would be the outcome of placing cause and effect in their true order? Here is what has changed thus far within my story of the body and the world around me. When I get sick, I never look for a cause outside my mind. The idea of one might come into my mind briefly, but I know that is just an old habit and meaningless to me. I think the most persistent of these ideas is that the size and shape and weight of my body are caused by outside forces like what I eat and how much exercise I get. I still go back and forth on that even though I know the truth.

I still get sick sometimes but because I know the cause, I immediately turn to the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the beliefs that produced this form. As Jesus told us, all thought produces form at some level. If my thought is of the lower level, that is untrue thoughts, I will see it as form in the body and other places in this world. Even the truest perception will not produce form on a higher level, I think, but just make for a happier dream.

If the thought is of the higher level, that is, true thoughts or thoughts I think with God, then I assume I will see it as a higher form, at another level. There is a place in the Course where Jesus tells us that there is a real world beneath this illusion we have made. So maybe that is how higher thoughts produce a higher form. Who knows what that is like? Maybe a world of light and color, of pure love, beautiful beyond our imagining. But I digress.

The point that Jesus is making here in this paragraph is that all we see is caused by our mind. If we are willing to accept this, and if we are willing to allow the mind to be purified of ego thinking, then all we see will change. Pain and sickness, poverty, cruelty, suffering and death, all will be gone because the sick mind that caused these things will have been healed. From a healed mind comes a healed world. It is the only way that this can work. Cause is first, effect follows. The final outcome of this lesson is the remembrance of God.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 15: V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 6. 1-23-18

V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 6
6 Any relationship you would substitute for another has not been offered to the Holy Spirit for His use. There is no substitute for love. If you would attempt to substitute one aspect of love for another, you have placed less value on one and more on the other. You have not only separated them, but you have also judged against both. Yet you have judged against yourself first, or you would never have imagined that you needed your brothers as they were not. Unless you had seen yourself as without love, you could not have judged them so like you in lack.

Journal
When we are lost in our neediness, we don’t love and appreciate our friends and lovers, we use them. We feel lonely and so call a friend to keep us company. If the friend doesn’t show up for us we feel abandoned and so reject that one. Thinking she isn’t a good friend, we look for someone to take her place. We feel attacked by someone and we look to our friends to take our side, and if they don’t do this for us, we look for new friends who better suit our purpose.

We choose our mates to provide for us what we think we need, a faithful lover, a good listener, someone who puts us first, someone who believes in us. Maybe we are looking for a good provider or a good parent for our children. Maybe we just want someone who will see in us what we fail to see in ourselves. And at the same time, they are looking for certain attributes in us and when two find this perfect match, they say they are in love. They stay in love until one or the other fails to provide what they thought they needed. When the bargain is broken the other feels betrayed and begins his or her search again.

What if we fulfill our own needs? We can do this through A Course in Miracles. We can learn that we are sufficient and eventually learn that we have no needs because we were created perfect and this has not changed. We can learn that we can’t be abandoned or betrayed. All of this can be learned through the relationship if we give it to the Holy Spirit for His use instead of throwing it away and looking for the relationship that provides for us what we are unwilling to give ourselves.

Sometimes circumstances are such that a relationship must end, at least in form. But all relationships must be healed, and they can be healed whether the partners are together or apart because the relationship is the mind. However, judging against the partner or friend and so trading one for another in the hope that another is the special one that is going to fulfill imagined needs is not the solution.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Manual for Teachers: II.The Shift in Perception, P 3. 1-19-18

II. The Shift in Perception, P 3
3 What is the single requisite for this shift in perception? It is simply this; the recognition that sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body. What does this recognition “cost”? It costs the whole world you see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it is. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea.

Journal
It is very clear by now that sickness is not caused by the body nor anything in the world; it is caused by the mind. As Jesus says, it has nothing to do with the body. This alone is a complete reversal of the thinking of the mind. It seems to fly in the face of reason because we experience sickness as if it is about the body. But it only flies in the face of ego thinking which made the body and the world as a place to project our guilt.

Guilt is the cause of sickness. Did you catch that? “Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one.” If we would be willing to give up guilt, the very idea of guilt, once and for all, then this would be reflected as a perfectly healthy body. For us to do this we would have to accept that the body is insignificant. This is very hard to swallow if you still believe that you are your body. For some people who have a very high regard for their body, it will be very hard indeed.

The greater cost of accepting this shift in perception is that it would mean that we would have to accept that we are fully responsible for the world. We would have to give up using the world as a scapegoat for what goes wrong in our lives. We could never again say that we got sick because we were exposed to sickness or that we have a disease because it was in our DNA.

But more than that, we would not be able to blame anything or anyone for whatever is happening in the world. All begins in the mind and is then projected outward and we are all part of that mind. I am usually pretty clear on this, but I have been conflicted about it lately, not in concept, but in practice.

President Trump has said something I find intolerable, and truly, I want to distance myself from him. I want to think that his sentiments and the effects of his thoughts have nothing to do with me. But his thoughts came from the same mind that is mine. He came from the same mind we all share, as did I. I have been agitated and it seems like Donald Trump is the cause of my agitation.

This cannot ever again be true for me because I know that the world does not rule my mind. I pretend it does for awhile, but I know better now. I look at the world and see what I want to see. I see what is in my mind and only that. Is guilt in my mind? Evidently, it is because I have been certain that Trump is guilty. Is fear in my mind? Must be, because I fear for the people affected by Trump’s vision of our country.

I am seeing a world of guilt and fear and the political arena is just a form my fear and guilt are taking at this moment. What do some other people see when they look at this situation? They see a savior and a defender of the lifestyle they treasure and are afraid of losing. They see a hero willing to defend them from fearful outside forces. In other words, we look at the world and see two very different things happening.

Their fear and guilt take them in one direction, and my fear and guilt take me in another. But, neither vision is the truth. We are all just looking at what we choose to see and nothing else. We cannot see what is there because we have superimposed our wishes on the world and cannot see past them.

I am reminded of what Jesus says about unforgiveness in the workbook under, 1. What is Forgiveness? An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. And if I have judged a Son of God as guilty, it is not true and needs to be raised to doubt.  What if I were to forgive what my fear and guilt have shown me and to forgive the idea of guilt and fear? What would the world look like then? What would Donald Trump look like then?

Even as I write this and know in my heart that it is true, that the world I see comes only from my mind and nowhere else, and that I can live in perfect peace if I am willing to change my mind, I find myself resistant. I find myself clinging to my ego’s interpretation of this situation and I want Trump to be wrong and the cause of my distress. I want to argue for my point of view and to believe that his thoughts and actions have nothing to do with me.

But I also want to be free. I owe it to us, to the Sonship, to do my part in undoing the ego. After all, I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing or my thoughts. I affect all of humanity with my decision to see with ego or to see with God. Here is what Jesus say that I can do about this.

Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 15: V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 5. 1-18-18

V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 5
5 The Holy Spirit knows no one is special. Yet He also perceives that you have made special relationships, which He would purify and not let you destroy. However unholy the reason you made them may be, He can translate them into holiness by removing as much fear as you will let Him. You can place any relationship under His care and be sure that it will not result in pain, if you offer Him your willingness to have it serve no need but His. All the guilt in it arises from your use of it. All the love from His. Do not, then, be afraid to let go your imagined needs, which would destroy the relationship. Your only need is His.

Journal
There are a lot of little nuggets in this paragraph. The main point, of course, is that if left to our own devices we tend to destroy our relationships. However, if we will give them to the Holy Spirit, they will be transformed for us. But I noticed some important ideas in here that I want to look at.

The first thing I noticed is that the Holy Spirit knows that no one is special and at the same time, He perceives that we have made special relationships. I had to smile as I thought about this. It is like when my kids were little. Sometimes they would be afraid of something that was not really fearful. I knew there was nothing to be afraid of, but I still understood they believed in the fear, and so I responded lovingly and made them feel safe again.

We don’t know what to do with our relationships. We completely misunderstand them. We think that we need our child or partner, and this need becomes the driving force in the relationship. If the need is not met, the relationship is destroyed. The destruction is always the perception of a loss of love, sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent. A relationship given to the Holy Spirit is safe from this loss.

How does the Holy Spirit do this? He removes the fear from them. If we let Him. If we put our relationships under His care and let them serve His purpose, they will never result in pain. Here, Jesus says that all the guilt arises from our use of them. And this is another point he emphasizes; the fear he talks about comes from guilt.

We give our relationships the purpose of getting something we think we need and so we feel guilty. In another section, Jesus will explain this more thoroughly, but basically, we think we are taking from someone else what we don’t have and are offering something in return that is of lesser value. So we feel like we have cheated the other. (My words, not his.) This is the source of the guilt and guilt always causes fear.

The only thing holding us back from taking the Holy Spirit up on this incredible offer is the fear that we will not get our needs met. We really believe we need something from these others and we are afraid to let go of this idea. The solution is in the last two sentences of this paragraph. It says: Do not, then, be afraid to let go your imagined needs, which would destroy the relationship. Your only need is His.

We don’t have to be afraid to let go of our needs because they are imagined. They are like the monsters under the bed that children were so afraid of. They are no more real than that. The Holy Spirit knows what we really need and will supply it as long as we still believe in needs. When we turn our relationships over to the Holy Spirit, the only thing we give up is fear and guilt, and what we gain is love.

 

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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