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Study of Text, C 14: V. The Circle of Atonement, P 1. 4-11-17

V. The Circle of Atonement, P 1
1 The only part of your mind that has reality is the part that links you still with God. Would you have all of it transformed into a radiant message of God’s Love, to share with all the lonely ones who have denied Him? God makes this possible. Would you deny His yearning to be known? You yearn for Him, as He for you. This is forever changeless. Accept, then, the immutable. Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there. Listen to the Holy Spirit, and to God through Him. He speaks of you to you. There is no guilt in you, for God is blessed in His Son as the Son is blessed in Him.

Journal
I want very much to have my mind transformed into a radiant message of God’s Love. I want to share this with everyone. I do yearn for God and I am overwhelmed with joy at the thought that He yearns for me. Perhaps it is the nature of God to desire unbroken communication with Its creations.

I know it is possible, even certain, I will be transformed. I know it somewhere in me, like a spark of light that refuses to be snuffed out.  That certainty is why I keep working toward this, working to undo the blocks to the awareness of Love’s presence in my mind. I want to live in awareness of that Love. The only thing standing in my way is the value I still place in the world.

An interesting thing I have discovered is that if I let go of the need for something, I then can enjoy it fully without guilt or fear of loss. That was an amazing discovery because I had previously believed that I had to sacrifice the things I liked here if I wanted to be saved. As it turns out, this is not so. I either don’t miss them when I let them go, or I still have them but without the neediness.

I am right now deciding to release the value I have placed on my children being what I think they need to be for me. The closer I get to a full release the more I enjoy them and the less fear and guilt there is in our relationships. This is still a work in progress, but already it is making a huge difference in my life.

Sometimes it is a seemingly small thing, like a favorite distraction. I seem to place a lot of value on my end of the day entertainment. I watch two or three episodes of some show on Netflix. There is nothing wrong with that, but I noticed reluctance at the thought of asking Holy Spirit to decide for me if my time could be better spent. This means I value that entertainment. Would I stay in the illusion just so that I could discover how the town of Jericho deals with their challenges? Evidently.

So what do I do about these areas of my life that I have afforded value where there is none, and yet I resist releasing them? Here is what I have learned about this. I cannot force myself not to want something. Also, it doesn’t help to change my behavior if I have not changed my mind. That just creates conflict and that is not helpful. And guilt makes it worse.

What seems to work for me is to forgive myself for my stubbornness and simply keep asking the Holy Spirit to help me see differently. I’m not trying to talk the Holy Spirit into doing His job. He never fails to answer me. But He cannot force a change onto me. I have to truly want it. And this is why I keep returning to my desire for Awakening. No, I am not convincing Holy Spirit, I am convincing myself.

It feels like I am slowly moving more deeply into surrender. I will spend some days in surrender to the Holy Spirit, asking Him what He would have me do and say, and where He would have me go. I will ask Him to decide for me what to do, how I feel, what I want. I am practicing giving up my self-identity so that I can know my Identity. Then I will inwardly rebel and before you know it I feel that stress entering my day, and I realize that I am trying, once again, to decide on my own.

But I keep going back to surrender. I keep returning my awareness to my holy mind. I start asking again that the Holy Spirit decide for me by deciding for God, and that He do this in every instant of the day and of the night as I sleep. The ego mind is very stubborn about wanting to decide for me, but I am very certain that I want to Awaken.

I want to remember who I am. It’s helping a lot that I don’t go into guilt when I notice that I am listening to ego again. All this work to release the belief in guilt is starting to pay off. That is not complete yet, but it is definitely shifting. I am vigilant for the guilt thoughts and quick to remember that guilt is just ego and thus not real. Mostly, I resolve the situation pretty quickly.

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 10. 4-10-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 10
10 The guiltless and the guilty are totally incapable of understanding one another. Each perceives the other as like himself, making both unable to communicate, because each sees the other unlike the way he sees himself. God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in your mind, because only He shares the knowledge of what you are with God. And only the Holy Spirit can answer God for you, for only He knows what God is. Everything else that you have placed within your mind cannot exist, for what is not in communication with the Mind of God has never been. Communication with God is life. Nothing without it is at all.

Journal

Here are some thoughts that came to me as I read this. First, Jesus divided everyone into only two groups, those who think they are guilty and those who know they are guiltless. That feels significant to me. For awhile now I have had the feeling that guilt is the only effect of the separation. It seems like there are many other effects but I think they are just different forms that guilt takes.

For instance, some people are jealous. Jealousy seems to say that the other person is guilty of betrayal and it also says that the jealous one is guilty of not being good enough and of being a victim. I think that guilt is far more pervasive than normally realized. When I am afraid for someone I love, this, too, is an expression of guilt. They are guilty of making me afraid. They are guilty of not being enough and so being vulnerable. I am guilty of attacking them with my thoughts that they are guilty, weak and vulnerable.

And behind all of this is the unconscious guilt, the guilt that sourced all other forms of guilt, the guilt that occurred when we believed that we had separated ourselves from our Creator. The error we often make is that we think we have to stop doing things that make us feel guilty. A Course in Miracles is helping all of us to realize that the belief in guilt is the problem we must solve. Just this morning, a friend of mine told me about an experience she had which triggered guilt. She said that Holy Spirit let her know that only the ego cares what she does. It is our beliefs that need our attention.

Then Jesus tells us that the guilty and the guiltless cannot communicate. They don’t understand each other. I can see that this is true. When someone is telling me that they feel guilty for the jealousy in their heart and all the pain it has caused others, I don’t see their guilt. I cannot join them in their fear and regret. I cannot understand it. I see in them what I see in myself. I don’t see the belief in jealousy in me so I don’t understand it in them. Sure, I understand on an intellectual basis but not in an experiential way. I cannot share the feelings with them, and communication is sharing, so we are not communicating.

Then Jesus gets to the point he is making in this paragraph. The reason we need the Holy Spirit is that God and we cannot communicate. We believe we are unlike God and so we cannot “relate” to God. And God cannot relate to what we think we are. God has no belief in, or experience of, our guilt, our fear, our suffering. What God knows is what He created, and we don’t know the Self He created. There is no basis for sharing and so no communication.

Without this communication, there would be no life. By seeing ourselves different from God we cut off the communication that gives life. So what God did was to place in our mind His Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows what we think we are and He knows what we actually are. So God communicates to His Holy Spirit in us and the Holy Spirit faithfully communicates to us what He is given.

And God knows us because He created us and so we must be lovable, in spite of our belief in guilt. The only explanation is that guilt is not true. When we accept that one true thing, we will wake up and know God. Without the unnecessary and untrue burden of guilt, we will be able to communicate with God directly. In the meantime, we continue to live only because God communicates to us through the Holy Spirit. How God must love us!

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 9. 4-6-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 9
9 The children of Heaven live in the light of the blessing of their Father, because they know that they are sinless. The Atonement was established as the means of restoring guiltlessness to minds that have denied it, and thus denied Heaven to itself. Atonement teaches you the true condition of the Son of God. It does not teach you what you are, or what your Father is. The Holy Spirit, who remembers this for you, merely teaches you how to remove the blocks that stand between you and what you know. His memory is yours. If you remember what you have made, you are remembering nothing. Remembrance of reality is in Him, and therefore in you.

Journal
Thank you, Jesus, for reminding me over and over that I have only one choice to make; I can have awareness of my true self or I can live in my ego. And most welcome is the reminder that salvation exists in my mind. It is always available to me as a thought I think with God. That is the Atonement. This Thought of Salvation, this thought that is in both my mind and God’s Mind. An easy way to think of it is that salvation is the same as the Atonement and that it is the restoration of guiltlessness to our minds.

Our part right now is to remove the blocks that stand between us and what we know. So we are not learning what we are, just remembering. The Holy Spirit knows who we are and He will teach us to remove the blocks to that knowledge. I have spoken before about someone I care about who has some challenges right now. I heard from him yesterday and it seems these challenges are reaching a critical point.

My first thought was to speak from my fear and give him some grave warnings. I wanted to scare him or guilt him into acting in his best interest. I felt justified in taking this action because of the immediate danger. But, I have chosen this path to salvation and was determined to stay on it. My job is to notice when I am listening to the ego and to change my mind. I turned to Holy Spirit and asked Him what I should say and do.

When I spoke to this loved one, I reminded him that I was on his side. I reminded him of the choices he could make and offered to be there for him. I didn’t act like he didn’t have a problem, but I was gentle and patient with him. We spoke several times. It seems to be working out. This morning he called to let me know he is still alive, if suffering.

This sounds smooth and simple and easy when I write about it. But that was not how it felt. I had to let the Holy Spirit guide me to remove some of those blocks before I could respond in a loving way. One block was that he was guilty and lord knows he offered plenty of proof for that one. But the Holy Spirit reminded me that this “proof” is illegitimate. The only proof that is true is that he is innocent.

Another block was the belief that I couldn’t keep doing this, that it is not my job to rescue him. How many times can I just forgive and go on? The Holy Spirit helped me to see that forgiveness is the only answer and it is the answer every time. Love is the only response and is always the appropriate response. He helped me to see that my upset over this was really just my fear that I would say or do the wrong thing, and that as long as I kept listening to Him, the Holy Spirit would guide me to the right thing.

It was both simple and easy and at the same time, it was nerve jangling. I had a bowl of jelly beans for supper. LOL. I guess jelly beans are better than having a Valium for supper, but being at ease with these upsets would be even better. What I know is that each time I choose Holy Spirit over ego this becomes easier. And looking back at it, I see that it was much easier than the time before. I was upset but the upset was short-lived, and I went to Spirit before I spoke. Last time I let my fear drive me to speak first and ask (Holy Spirit) questions later. Not a good plan.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 8. 4-5-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 8
8 Your task is not to make reality. It is here without your making, but not without you. You who have tried to throw yourself away and valued God so little, hear me speak for Him and for yourself. You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him resembles it ever so faintly. You cannot even give a blessing in perfect gentleness. Would you know of One Who gives forever, and Who knows of nothing except giving?

Journal
My task is not to make reality and thank goodness for that. I have enough trouble simply accepting it. And why is that? Why cannot I accept that God loves me and I have nothing to fear? Why is it so hard to accept that this world is not real and that Reality waits for my return? I think the answer lies in this paragraph. I cannot imagine the kind of love that Jesus speaks of here.

I cannot imagine perfect love. When I try to imagine perfect love, I think of my children. I love them with love as perfect as I can achieve. And yet, I still judge them and project onto them. I have moments of anger and resentment with them. I have expectations of them and can be disappointed when those expectations are not met. I don’t stop loving them, but that could hardly be thought of as a perfect love.

The love I have for my children is the highest form of love I can imagine and even so, it is a flawed love. Jesus is right when he says that there is nothing on earth that will parallel God’s love for me and so how do I relate to that love? What happens is that I project onto God the love that I can imagine. I expect Him to be disappointed because I do not meet His expectations. I expect Him to judge me and to be angry with me because this is how I understand love. So I am afraid of Him at least as much as I love Him.

On a conscious level, I don’t think about this a lot, and I push the fear of God away by telling myself that I believe what I have learned from A Course in Miracles. But I must be afraid of God’s love; otherwise, I would be with Him now. How can I imagine One Who gives forever, and knows of nothing except giving? And yet, this love must be in my mind, because I am created like God.

So here is what I am doing. I am accepting my Brother’s word on this. There is a love that is perfect and unconditional, and that love is mine. God, the Creator of All That Is, is that Love. I have blocked that love with my ego but I am removing those blocks now, and this unimaginable love is flowing back into my mind. Well, the flow might be an exaggeration, but it is trickling in. My desire to know God is making this possible.

And as this trickle becomes stronger, I am experiencing the effects. I am happier and less fearful in my story. I don’t get worried and upset over each perceived danger. I think of God more often. My love has become less conditional. When I notice I am putting conditions on it, I ask the Holy Spirit to decide for me. My love for others is more gentle now, with less judgment and fewer expectations.

It seems that it was more effective to accept the Atonement for myself and allow this healing to express through me than it was to try to be better at loving. When I was trying to be a better person by correcting my behavior, I wasn’t making a lot of headway. But as I allow my mind to be healed, the expression of that healed mind is naturally closer to perfect love. As I begin to experience that something closer to a perfect expression, I become more open to the possibility of a God Who can love perfectly and I begin to believe that I have nothing to fear from this God.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 7. 4-4-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 7
7 Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you know Him. Therefore, you must be guiltless. Yet if you do not accept the necessary conditions for knowing Him, you have denied Him and do not recognize Him, though He is all around you. He cannot be known without His Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing Him. Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete, that knowledge is swept away from recognition in the very mind where God Himself has placed it. If you would but listen, and learn how impossible this is! Do not endow Him with attributes you understand. You made Him not, and anything you understand is not of Him.

Journal
Jesus is making it very clear that my function in the Atonement is to know my guiltlessness and to know my brother’s guiltlessness. I cannot know God until this is done. It is not that God is withholding Himself from me until I do what He wants. Rather, it is that guilt prevents me from recognizing God. When we don’t recognize God as He is, we have a tendency to create Him in our own image, and we then project our mistaken beliefs onto Him.

That is how we wound up with a scary God who believes in guilt and is a God of judgment and vengeance. We projected our own beliefs onto God and now are afraid of Him. But all of this is just in our mind. We did not create God and we do not understand Him. To undo this tangled mess we made, we must begin where the error started, right in our own mind. We must let go of the belief in guilt, and refuse to believe in it regardless of the form it takes. When we do that God will become known to us because it is His Will that this be done. God Himself placed the knowledge of Himself in our mind. He must want us to know Him.

The only thing that makes this seem difficult is that the ego points out situations in our story that seem to prove the need for guilt. We are shown pedophiles, murderers, rapists and all sorts of sinners. We experience unkindness and attacks almost daily even within our own homes and from people we love. We perpetrate these unkind acts and outright attacks ourselves, and on people we love. We do this sometimes deliberately and often thoughtlessly. Then we take this as proof that guilt must be real.

We have it backward, though. We accept the ego proposal that guilt is real and from that belief, we project situations that prove what we have decided to believe. So we do not believe in guilt because of what we see and experience in the world. We see and experience these situations because we believe in guilt. The solution is to disregard the evidence our senses show us because we know it is unreliable. Instead, we begin with the understanding that guilt is not real. It does not exist, and from there we can accept a different way of seeing what is happening.

The ego has shown us “proof” of guilt because we asked it to. Now let’s ask the Holy Spirit to decide for us what these situations mean. When you think that something you are experiencing proves guilt is real and warranted, say this: “Holy Spirit, decide for me what this means.” Open your mind and heart to a different answer than you are accustomed to. Your innocence will be revealed to you because you are ready to acknowledge it. This will come in a way that is as undeniable as it is nearly impossible to describe. In this certain knowledge of your innocence, you will know your brother’s innocence as well. This is possible because God would give you a function you could not fulfill.

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 6. 4-3-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 6
6 When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. Only your own volition seems to make deciding hard. The Holy Spirit will not delay in answering your every question what to do. He knows. And He will tell you, and then do it for you. You who are tired will find this is more restful than sleep. For you can bring your guilt into sleeping, but not into this.

Journal
I have been practicing asking the Holy Spirit to decide for me in everything. My practice has not been perfect, but then, if it were perfect, I wouldn’t need the practice. Some days I turn to Spirit when I am confused or upset, and this is helpful. Some days I give the whole day to Him. I can really see the difference in my life when I surrender the day to Holy Spirit. I feel peaceful and at ease and I am energetic all the way to the end of the day. In fact, I don’t feel tired at all, just as Jesus suggests in this paragraph.

There are times, though, when I seem to refuse His help. Crazy, right? I know. But for some reason, it still happens. Sometimes it is subtle, in that I just don’t let myself think about it. I just make decisions by myself (which means, I make them with ego.) I seem to think that I have enough information at my disposal to decide without help.

Other times, I am driven by fear or guilt and act to relieve these feelings. The other day when I was experiencing fear, I asked Holy Spirit to decide for me before I acted. But then my fear drove me to act without waiting for guidance. Unsurprisingly, it was a mistake. If I had just waited the situation would have resolved itself and I would not have had the chance to make it worse. Instead, I acted in response to my fear and I brought guilt into the situation. Well, it wasn’t the first time, but maybe it is the last time.

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 5. 3-31-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 5
5 Before you make any decisions for yourself, remember that you have decided against your function in Heaven, and then consider carefully whether you want to make decisions here. Your function here is only to decide against deciding what you want, in recognition that you do not know. How, then, can you decide what you should do? Leave all decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He knows it. So will He teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt instead of love. Give up this frantic and insane attempt that cheats you of the joy of living with your God and Father, and of waking gladly to His Love and Holiness that join together as the truth in you, making you one with Him.

Journal
Because we chose an experience of separation our tendency is going to be to move toward fear and guilt. This is because they are the natural outcomes of separation. Therefore, if we want to return our minds to love then we need to stop making decisions from a place of fear and guilt. This would seem to be circular thinking since we are in fear and guilt so how do we stop making decisions that keep us in fear and guilt?

Our salvation from this closed cycle of thinking is the Holy Spirit, which was placed in our mind for that purpose. The Holy Spirit is the Love in our mind from which we can make decisions that take us out of fear and guilt. It seems that first, we must become aware of what is happening and why we keep falling back into fear and guilt and then learn that there is another option. A Course in Miracles is an excellent way to learn this. It does a thorough job of highlighting the ego for us and also it presents the way out of the ego.

Once we get to that place on our path Home, we then must overcome the belief that no longer making these decisions on our own is a loss. We have treasured this ability to make decisions and tend not to want to relinquish this right. This something else the Course helps us with. We learn that we make no decisions on my own anyway, that we are always making them either with the ego or the Holy Spirit. With practice, we discover that the decisions made with ego are often unfortunate and that the decisions made with Holy Spirit lead us to joy and peace. From there we must form a new habit of consistently asking the Holy Spirit to decide for us.

From choosing the Holy Spirit as my decision maker, I have seen that I make terrible decisions without Him. I often choose to act from fear and guilt and then the situation in question just deteriorates from there. Recently while trying to be helpful to someone I love, I made things worse for both me and for him. I did this because I was trying to be helpful in my own way. I was in fear and guilt so fear and guilt were all I had to offer. At the time my thoughts seemed to make sense to me, and even to be obviously right. I was wrong… again.

But I saw my error and instead of keeping the feeling of being guilty, and instead of trying to get rid of it by projecting onto the other person, I asked the Holy Spirit to decide for me how I feel, and what I should do. This is always, without exception, the choice that will work. It is the choice that will bring me happiness and peace and will bring me back to God. I truly don’t know what I want or what will make me happy, but the Holy Spirit does know this, so why not let Him decide for me?

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