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Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 8. 1-18-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 8
8 The communication link that God Himself placed within you, joining your mind with His, cannot be broken. You may believe you want it broken, and this belief does interfere with the deep peace in which the sweet and constant communication God would share with you is known. Yet His channels of reaching out cannot be wholly closed and separated from Him. Peace will be yours because His peace still flows to you from Him Whose Will is peace. You have it now. The Holy Spirit will teach you how to use it, and by extending it, to learn that it is in you. God willed you Heaven, and will always will you nothing else. The Holy Spirit knows only of His Will. There is no chance that Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what He wills is as sure as He is.

Journal
What I understand from reading this paragraph is that God is communicating with us and that communication never ends. He placed a communication link within us, joining our mind to His and it cannot be broken. I am not aware of this constant communication, primarily because I choose not to listen. Not listening does not in anyway affect the communication, but it does cost me dearly.

Jesus says that it is God’s Will that His peace flow from Him to us. This reminds me that communication is not about words. In fact, words limit communication. It is not about explaining things or convincing us of something. I think the communication we get from God is the flow of love, the flow of peace and joy. I think that is the only form of communication with meaning.

My life has been a real roller coaster ride lately. I have experienced situations that leave me feeling angry and depressed and very discouraged. Then I have experienced that flow of love and joy and a peace that is beyond expression. Right now I feel the flow of love in me and through me. I would love to tell you what I did to make that shift, but the only thing I had any part in was my persistent desire to see differently. Anything that happened after that had nothing to do with Myron.

I think this joy and peace that I feel right now is at least a trickle if not a flow of the love that God communicates to us all the time. It makes me cry to think of it, to think of the love that God has for me, and to think of my continued refusal to fully open to it. I was explaining someone’s bad behavior to a mutual friend the other day. I talked about how hard it is for that person to receive our love because he doesn’t feel worthy of it. Getting something he thinks he does not deserve scares him and he fights against it.

Maybe I am doing the same thing. Maybe accepting the unconditional, unfailing love that flows to me from God feels like a theft, taking something I don’t deserve, and shouldn’t have. Maybe I can one day disregard this ego assessment, and trust that I belong to God and He knows me, and loves me, so I must be worthy. Maybe I will stop resisting and blocking the peace of God and simply accept my inheritance as His Creation. What I am doing with that love and that peace that I have accepted is to extend it to my brothers and sisters as best as I can, and that I do extend it further convinces me that I do have it.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 7. 1-18-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 7
7 Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit will restore your sanity because insanity is not the Will of God. If that suffices Him, it is enough for you. You will not keep what God would have removed, because it breaks communication with you with whom He would communicate. His Voice will be heard.

Journal
Wow! Could Jesus be any clearer? This awakening that we are moving toward, this is going to happen. We cannot fail and this is a hard fact. I know that it doesn’t always seem so. The mind seems to be in control of me sometimes, rather than the other way around. Life seems to be happening to me rather than by me. And it seems the harder I try the less I succeed. But as I continue to do the work regardless of appearances, things start to shift and I notice a forward motion once again. But honestly, I am very appreciative of this paragraph. I am printing this out and keeping it with me for those moments of discouragement.

This morning the daily lesson is another one of those times when Jesus is very clear. He tells us that we have no neutral thoughts and he makes it clear that our thoughts are making the world we see. Every thought contributes to the world, every one of them! I love the way Carol Howe expressed it in her video of the lesson. She said that unspeakable power is passing through the matrix of thoughts I am engaged in and the world as I experience it shows up. I can’t be careless about where I put my attention. I am quite literally making the world with these thoughts.

I mention this because it bears on todays Text passage. Why is it that we need this strong reminder of the inevitable return to God? It is because we have used the power of our thinking to make a world that implies the opposite. Our careless thoughts are making a world that seems to prove we are sinners, that we are helpless victims, that we are fools to hope for the peace of God. With what we think of as idle thoughts we have made a world where there is unkindness and even cruelty every day, everywhere. This is a world of lack and loss, of pain and sickness, of suffering of every kind. Who can hold out hope in the face of this?
And yet, Jesus tells us this in Lesson 16.

The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact. Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false. Those that are true create their own likeness. Those that are false make theirs.

So if my world seems impossibly cruel and if I seem to suffer even unto death, it can only be because I made it so. The same unspeakable power that made this mockery of “life” can create from love, joy and peace. What a different world I will see as I change my mind. What a different world I do see as I change my mind. I know this because I have experienced that change as I practice what Jesus tells me in his Course.

I think about my last year at work, and at the relationships that were healed. The world I made at that workplace was one of strife, and of constant conflict. I had reached the point of dreading to show up on Mondays. It stayed that way, and got worse because I chose to tell myself that my distress was caused by the workplace and the people in it. I had all the proof. All I had to do was look around and see the unpleasant people and the misery they caused.

Then when I decided that enough was enough and that there had to be a better way, I surrendered my thoughts to the Holy Spirit and I allowed Him to purify them. The relationships began to heal and the situation changed completely. By the time I left I was in perfect peace with that company, and in love with the people who worked there. They treated me with respect and kindness.

What changed was me. I had been joining with the ego in how I chose to think and therefore what I saw was a reflection of separation. It was stressful and it was suffering. When I changed my mind, I joined with the Holy Spirit and my thinking changed. My new thoughts were more in line with the thoughts of God. They were infused with kindness and love. When that happened, the world I experienced changed. I was a kind and loving world. It was a perfect example of what Lesson 16 is telling us.

There was a time when I used the workplace to prove that I might never return to God, that I was hopelessly entangled with a world over which I had no control. But Jesus is right, God wills I be in Heaven, and nothing can keep me from it, or it from me. Eventually I am going to reach my limit of endurance. I am going to decide that I want out of my darkly wild and imaginative world. And right now what I feel is a longing so intense that it makes me cry to think of it. I long for God. What I know is that I made the world that seems to separate me from God and the same power that made the world will undo this insane thing I have done. I watch my thoughts now with a vigilance born, not of desperation, but of certainty. Thank you for that, Jesus.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 6. 1-13-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 6
6 You will not remember change and shift in Heaven. You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid and what to seek. When you have learned this, you will find the answer that makes the need for any differences disappear. Truth comes of its own will unto its own. When you have learned that you belong to truth, it will flow lightly over you without a difference of any kind. For you will need no contrast to help you realize that this is what you want, and only this. Fear not the Holy Spirit will fail in what your Father has given Him to do. The Will of God can fail in nothing.

Journal

We will not experience contrast in Heaven. Funny, but I noticed a thought of resistance to this. It was something like, “Will I miss choices? Will I miss the feelings that occur with contrast and differences?” Then I thought about standing in Walmart looking at the many different toothpastes and trying to choose the one I want. I narrowed it down to a single brand name, but even then there were a lot of choices.

Each different tube promised to do something specific for me. I wondered which one I needed the most, enamel protection, whitening, repair and strengthen, help with my bad breath, deep cleaning and on and on. So to make a choice, I read the ingredients on each one and discovered they were all pretty much the same. I also realized that when I was younger I took great pride in finding the “right” everything. It made me feel successful and in charge. Now it just makes me tired.

So what is the toothpaste example all about? Well, this is how it feels to me here in the world now. This is why I won’t miss the contrasts, the differences. First, they are all the same really, new packaging, new ways of saying the same thing, but really, all the same.  I have a worry, a fear, a guilty feeling, and the ego offers me an array of choices. Which one do I need today? I was a bad mom and now I need to make up for it. I may not have enough money so I must find a way to earn more. I don’t know what will happen with our country now that things have changed so much, and can’t find a package with a solution for that. Ha ha.

The thing is, the ego offers the same solution with different words and promises and in the end, nothing does much except to make the problems look different, if even that. The Holy Spirit, however, shows me that all the problems are the same, that the package they come in is irrelevant. He offers me a solution that works for them all. No worrying a fretting over which to choose, just accept His solution and move on.

If I don’t choose the Holy Spirit’s easy solution, I focus on the problem in its current form. I ponder one ego solution and then another. Eventually, I discover what became obvious to me at the toothpaste isle, all the solutions, while sounding good, have the same ingredients. I don’t know how important the toothpaste ingredients are. After all, people used to clean their teeth with baking soda and peroxide and that seemed to work. But what I discover through the school of hard knocks that the ego puts me through is that its solutions are pretty ineffective.

I have tried one ego solution after another and really, what has it accomplished? The best I can say for it is that the contrast between the ego solution and the Holy Spirit’s solution has helped me choose the Holy Spirit more and more often. I used to revel in making those choices for the same reason I thought it was a reflection on my self worth that I would, through careful study, choose the best toothpaste. Now I am just bored with the whole thing, choosing the right toothpaste, and choosing the right solution to life’s problems.

Sometimes I get very discouraged because I seem to go back to listening to ego even though I thought I had learned my lesson. I start to doubt that this is going to work. But Jesus keeps me on track. He reminds me over and over that I cannot fail because God’s Will is my will and God cannot fail, so I cannot fail. I suspect I have unseen help, angels and masters who stand behind me, before me and around me, uplifting and supporting as the need may be. This complete thought reversal the Course has given me, and the Holy Spirit is accomplishing in me, would be more than I could do alone.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 5. 1-11-17

XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 5

5 You whose mind is darkened by doubt and guilt, remember this: God gave the Holy Spirit to you, and gave Him the mission to remove all doubt and every trace of guilt that His dear Son has laid upon himself. It is impossible that this mission fail. Nothing can prevent what God would have accomplished from accomplishment. Whatever your reactions to the Holy Spirit’s Voice may be, whatever voice you choose to listen to, whatever strange thoughts may occur to you, God’s Will is done. You will find the peace in which He established you, because He does not change His Mind. He is invariable as the peace in which you dwell, and of which the Holy Spirit reminds you.

Journal
Well this is kind of funny. This morning I hesitated to write. My mind was dark with doubt and guilt and I didn’t feel worthy to go to Spirit for words. I prepared everything to write and I just sat here talking to Jesus about it, and asked for comfort and clarity. The feeling I kept receiving was that I should just trust the process, to just do the work. So I looked at today’s paragraph and had to cry and then laugh. No wonder He was nudging me to just do the work. The work, this morning, is perfect for what ails me. It is the answer to the question I was asking.

Recently I started having a problem with a tooth and there was a lot of pain. I had a very strong nudge to use this as a healing opportunity. I read this from the Manual for Teachers:

Healing must occur in exact proportion to which the valuelessness of sickness is recognized. One need but say, “There is no gain at all to me in this” and he is healed. But to say this, one first must recognize certain facts. First, it is obvious that decisions are of the mind, not of the body. If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it. The resistance to recognizing this is enormous, because the existence of the world as you perceive it depends on the body being the decision-maker. Terms like “instincts,” “reflexes” and the like represent attempts to endow the body with non-mental motivators. Actually, such terms merely state or describe the problem. They do not answer it.

The acceptance of sickness as a decision of the mind, for a purpose for which it would use the body, is the basis of healing. And this is so for healing in all forms. A patient decides that this is so, and he recovers. If he decides against recovery, he will not be healed. Who is the physician? Only the mind of the patient himself. The outcome is what he decides that it is. Special agents seem to be ministering to him, yet they but give form to his own choice. He chooses them in order to bring tangible form to his desires. And it is this they do, and nothing else. They are not actually needed at all. The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, “I have no use for this.” There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once.

So I started working with this idea, that the tooth was not the problem, but rather my mind, my thoughts, my decisions. I felt so strongly that I was guided to do this that I was very excited about it, and very confident. What a promise Jesus makes us! He tells us that, “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.”

And he makes it sound so easy. I decided for the tooth problem and now I change my mind and I choose health instead. I worked with this idea for a couple of painful weeks, and I was very disappointed that in the end, I had to give in and let the dentist begin the process of taking an impression of the tooth so a partial can be made and soon it will be removed. The promise began to seem like a taunt, or like proof of my unworthiness and my failure. And thus I had sat here this morning feeling bad about myself.

Then I read this paragraph and am reminded that I cannot fail. It is not possible that I fail. God’s Will is done. I will find the peace in which He established me because He does not change His Mind. I asked Jesus if I was wrong about working on the idea of healing the mind of the belief in sickness and if I was wrong to expect the sickness to respond to the mind that is healed. Maybe I was just listening to the ego being grandiose to think I was ready for this.

Jesus: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you started the practice?

Me: The dentist told me that the problem began with the tooth being damaged at some point. I remembered something he probably didn’t remember. When I first started seeing him he was a new dentist. He was working on or near that tooth and something went wrong. He had to do a lot of unexpected work and afterwards he told me that if it ever got sensitive I should tell him. When I thought about that, I felt resentful that this was all his fault.

I see that this was an attempt to make the problem come first and then the decision about what it means and how I feel about it. Really, it is the thought that comes first and then the situation is projected as an event in my life. So I still have the belief in being unfairly treated and being a victim and from that belief, I projected a story that represents that belief.

The thought came first, then the event. I also see that in an attempt to keep the blame from attaching to me, I used the dentist to be the guilty one. I saw myself doing that part, making the dentist guilty. When I saw that I knew it was wrong and so I tried to forgive him. I reminded myself that he was a new dentist and was doing the best he could. I reminded myself that I make many mistakes and I would not condemn myself so I won’t condemn him.

Pretty words, and they make sense when seen in the light of what I read in the Course, but the error was in making the offense real and then trying to forgive it. That cannot work. In truth my meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world that I am then trying to forgive. How can I forgive what I believe really happened?

Trying to do so is me experiencing level confusion. Yes in the world he might have made an error, but the world comes from my mind, so I received only what I asked for and there is no one to blame and no one to forgive.  I wonder how it is that I could have such a clear understanding of how we make the world and then find scapegoats to take the blame, and still do it. And I did it so quickly and with such finesse that I didn’t even realize what I had done until now.

My next thought was, understanding the concepts so well, why is it that I still chose to play the game, and to pretend I had nothing to do with it? When I asked Him this, Holy Spirit told me to read further in this section of the Manual for Teachers. (How is Healing Accomplished?) This is what I read:

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.

Once again the Holy Spirit is helping me to realize that understanding a concept and putting it into practice are two different things. The understanding is helpful, but until I try to use it I have no idea if I really accept it. And why is it that I would not readily accept healing? It seems to make no sense. In, The Perceived Purpose of Sickness, Jesus explains it in this way:

And what, in this insane conviction, does healing stand for? It symbolizes the defeat of God’s Son and the triumph of his Father over him. It represents the ultimate defiance in a direct form which the Son of God is forced to recognize. It stands for all that he would hide from himself to protect his “life.” If he is healed, he is responsible for his thoughts. And if he is responsible for his thoughts, he will be killed to prove to him how weak and pitiful he is. But if he chooses death himself, his weakness is his strength. Now has he given himself what God would give to him, and thus entirely usurped the throne of his Creator.

It is discouraging to me that this could still be true for me. I want to love God and feel His love for me. I cannot do this if I still believe I have something to fear from Him or that I am still in competition with Him. It feels like there is still this long rocky road ahead of me that I must traverse. It makes me tired to think of it. But looking back on all this with you, Jesus, I do understand now why it was important for me to do this work with the tooth.

Jesus: This understanding of the process, and what occurred in your mind came easily to you once you made the decision to look at it. You understood that you simply made a series of decisions with the ego rather than with the Holy Spirit. That easy and quick understanding would not have happened even a short time ago. The work you have done with the Rules for Decision has made it possible for you to see more clearly and more quickly how the ego mind would mislead you.

It was not reading about the Rules for Decision that helped you get to this place of clarity. It was practicing them that brought you here. The same thing is true of healing. Practice is required of you. Perhaps the next time you work with this idea you will decide to save yourself some suffering by simply watching the process with detachment rather than with judgment. Doing so this time would have brought you to the same conclusion but without the guilt there would have been less anxiety and less upset.

Remember that all healing is just a change of mind and you are changing your mind. This is not necessarily an extended process. The road ahead needs be neither rocky nor long. How hard is it to change your mind? How long does it take to change your mind? You get to decide that, but you are not deciding on your own. And you have much help now as you decide more and more often with the Holy Spirit. It is His function to help you and He will not fail in His function.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 4. 1-9-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 4
4 Nothing in this world can give this peace, for nothing in this world is wholly shared. Perfect perception can merely show you what is capable of being wholly shared. It can also show you the results of sharing, while you still remember the results of not sharing. The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference for you, allowing Him to demonstrate which must be true. He has perfect faith in your final judgment, because He knows that He will make it for you. To doubt this would be to doubt that His mission will be fulfilled. How is this possible, when His mission is of God?

Journal

I am not going to find perfect peace in time where I seem to exist at the moment. But I can come close if I choose to let the Holy Spirit lead me. If I will bring Him my un-peaceful thoughts He will show me how to see them differently and the contrast will teach me what brings peace and what doesn’t. Jesus is using the word sharing in describing this. What can be shared brings peace, what cannot be shared brings suffering.

I didn’t understand what Jesus meant by this at first. The world sharing seemed to come out of left field. What has sharing got to do with peace? But suddenly I had the thought that this has to do with Oneness. We are one and we cannot experience the peace of God until we accept our unity. This is what sharing is about. All must be shared with all. If it cannot be shared, it is not of God and therefore is not real.

That which cannot be shared must be abandoned and this will be done because this is God’s Will. What is it that I cannot share? I can’t share hate. I can hate the same one that my friend hates, but we cannot share the hate. I hate for my reasons and she hates for hers. I feel hate in my way and she feels it in her way. Hate is a perception and it shifts and changes as perceptions do.

How can we share what we cannot even pin down? We have a strong need to join and so we tend to gather around ideas, but if those ideas are not real, we wind up standing in the same place, but still unable to join in that place. For instance, if I hate Trump and you hate Trump, we can come together in our hate. We can talk about what we hate about him, we can talk about our fears about him, but we cannot share in our hate, we cannot become one in our hate.

Love, on the other hand, is real, and because it is real, it can be shared. We can come together to put our hate on the altar and allow it to be transformed. Then we will share the love that is there. We will be joined in a real way; we will love as one. In love there is no fear. In love there is a sense of what we really are and of our oneness with our Creator, and so there is the deep and abiding peace that Jesus speaks of in this paragraph.

The other point Jesus is making is that this is done through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will lead us to perfect perception. Perfect perception will show us what we are capable of sharing. It will show us the results of sharing while we still remember not sharing and this contrast will show us what must be true. This will lead us to the only choice we would want to make, the choice to allow the Holy Spirit to judge for us. We will not fail in this because the Holy Spirit will not fail in His mission. He will not fail in His mission because it is of God.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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