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Study of Text, Chapter 11: II: From Darkness to Light, P 2. 9-7-15

III. From Darkness to Light P 2

2 God’s Son is indeed in need of comfort, for he knows not what he does, believing his will is not his own. The Kingdom is his, and yet he wanders homeless. At home in God he is lonely, and amid all his brothers he is friendless. Would God let this be real, when He did not will to be alone Himself? And if your will is His it cannot be true of you, because it is not true of Him.

Journal
It is so important that I accept the truth that God’s Will is my will. This imagined will I have made to take the place of my true will is hurting me. It tells me that I am endangered and in need of defense. It tells me that I am alone and apart from all of creation. It tells me that I must find special people from whom I can take what I think I lack and somehow this is going to ensure my happiness.

No wonder I often feel alone and friendless, small and frail. I have a voice in my head that teaches me this is true, and sadly, I made this voice, and I keep it intact by listening to it. I call it my will and I value it in spite of the bad advice it continues to give me. I treat it as if it is what I am, and I defend it against God.

All along I have a true will, the will I share with God. It sits alongside the small personal will that I have been listening to. I can reclaim my true will by simply desiring to do so. Sometimes I think that I have done this, and I feel such joy and peace you wouldn’t believe. I cannot imagine why I ever wanted a separate will.

Then I return to my separate made-up self and again I am enthralled with the idea that I need it. I think I need to defend myself against a co-worker and I cannot use God’s Will to attack so I pick up my little self will again. Or I think that I need to look different, or I need more money, or I believe I am guilty, and God’s Will does not recognize any of this as true, so I turn to the little will. It brings me proof that I am right to be afraid and offers me lifetimes of advice that has never met a single one of these needs.

I am tired of wandering homeless. This prodigal daughter longs for her Father and the Will she shares with Him. This is why I am so grateful to my brother, Jesus, for bringing into action the solution to this dilemma. Thank you, Jesus, for the Atonement. Thank you for your devotion to the Atonement. I am grateful for the Holy Spirit, the Bridge that will allow me to cross from the illusory world to my true Home. The peace of God is everything I want.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: III. From Darkness to Light, P 1. 9-3-15

III. From Darkness to Light P 1

1 When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but you cannot. You do not know how, for if you did you could never have grown weary. Unless you hurt yourself you could never suffer in any way, for that is not God’s Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack and His peace surrounds you silently. God is very quiet, for there is no conflict in Him. Conflict is the root of all evil, for being blind it does not see whom it attacks. Yet it always attacks the Son of God, and the Son of God is you.

Journal
Right now I am feeling anxious because I have to talk to a customer about a mistake I made. I want to do it right this moment and I know the reason I am in such a hurry is that I feel guilty and afraid, and I want to make everything right. This is always the ego solution to everything I think is wrong. I hate how I feel, so the ego says I need to do something to make it right. I must find the right words to make up for my error and the sooner the better.

The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, is gently nudging me in another direction. The situation is not the problem. The problem is the ego interpretation of the situation. The ego says I am wrong and guilty and in trouble. The Holy Spirit says that the problem is that I believe I am this story and that I am endangered at every turn.

He says that the story of Myron making a mistake is the effect of the belief in my mind that I am separated from God and so am vulnerable. It is the effect of believing the thought that life is not fair and that guilt is an endless, awful burden that is mine to carry. So fixing the story isn’t going to help. I will still be left with these mistaken thoughts that will simply make more stories of disaster.

Other than the thoughts in my mind about the mistake I made and what I must do to correct it, nothing has happened in regard to this situation. I am hurting myself with each fear thought I entertain. I am moving myself further and further from the Light that is in my mind. The Holy Spirit will comfort me and guide me if I turn to Him. But to turn to Him, I must turn from the ego.

I cannot be at peace if I try to listen to both voices. They speak different languages, they turn in different directions. Trying to walk both paths at the same time keeps me in conflict and conflict is painful. I am suffering, but it is suffering I brought on myself. It will stop the moment I choose. I will choose God, Who has never led me astray and never failed me.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: II: The Invitation to Healing, P 7. 9-2-15

II. The Invitation to Healing, P 7

7 Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God? You will accept only whom you invite. You are free to determine who shall be your guest, and how long he shall remain with you. Yet this is not real freedom, for it still depends on how you see it. The Holy Spirit is there; although He cannot help you without your invitation. And the ego is nothing, whether you invite it in or not. Real freedom depends on welcoming reality, and of your guests only the Holy Spirit is real. Know, then, Who abides with you merely by recognizing what is there already, and do not be satisfied with imaginary comforters, for the Comforter of God is in you.

Journal
There is only one kind of healing, the healing of the mind. From a healed mind, a healed world is reflected. The only way to heal the mind is to invite the Holy Spirit to look with us on what is not healed and to undo what we see there. In joining with the Holy Spirit, we join with God, and we know our Oneness.

This is our function, our only function and the only way we are going to Awaken and achieve peace. The Holy Spirit waits with us as we make this decision. As we call to Him, He steps forward and lights our way. When we look to the ego for comfort and guidance, the Holy Spirit steps back. He must do this because He cannot override our will.

What we discover is that the ego is not a comfort and guides us deeper into nowhere. Eventually we must return to our true Guide because no one will choose darkness forever. The way this has unfolded in my life and probably in most lives, is that I don’t make this choice only once, but over and over. Each time I make the choice for God, the ego gets smaller and less substantial in my mind, and the choice for God is easier to make.

Let us not be satisfied with imaginary comforters, for the Comforter of God is in us.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: II: The Invitation to Healing, P 6. 9-1-15

II. The Invitation to Healing, P 6
6 You will never rest until you know your function and fulfil it, for only in this can your will and your Father’s be wholly joined. To have Him is to be like Him, and He has given Himself to you. You who have God must be as God, for His function became yours with His gift. Invite this knowledge back into your mind, and let nothing that obscures it enter. The Guest Whom God sent you will teach you how to do this, if you but recognize the little spark and are willing to let it grow. Your willingness need not be perfect, because His is. If you will merely offer Him a little place, He will lighten it so much that you will gladly let it be increased. And by this increase, you will begin to remember creation.

Journal
I am as God is, and this is my nature in truth, though not so much in the illusion. Here I seem to be something else altogether, something weak and fragile, guilty and afraid. But as I give my attention to that spark in my mind, the light grows and I see more clearly. My Guest knows what I am and knows how to awaken me to this glorious truth. All I have to do is invite His help and make Him welcome through my attention to Him.

Thank you, God, that my willingness does not have to be perfect. His willingness is perfect and it will increase mine. Here is the sentence that encourages me greatly this day.

Invite this knowledge back into your mind, and let nothing that obscures it enter.

I invite the knowledge of what my function is, and who I am. I invite healing of all that is not God, and I invite the Holy Spirit to use this vessel for His work. I make this invitation real and useful as I let nothing that obscures it enter my mind. I do this every day, all through the day, as I stay vigilant for obscuring thoughts and beliefs and readily give them to the Holy Spirit that they be purified.

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: II: The Invitation to Healing, P 5. 9-1-15

II. The Invitation to Healing, P 5
5 The Holy Spirit cannot speak to an unwelcoming host, because He will not be heard. The Eternal Guest remains, but His Voice grows faint in alien company. He needs your protection, only because your care is a sign that you want Him. Think like Him ever so slightly, and the little spark becomes a blazing light that fills your mind so that He becomes your only Guest. Whenever you ask the ego to enter, you lessen His welcome. He will remain, but you have allied yourself against Him. Whatever journey you choose to take, He will go with you, waiting. You can safely trust His patience, for He cannot leave a part of God. Yet you need far more than patience.

Journal
The Holy Spirit is always with me and always will be because He cannot abandon a part of God. What He needs from me in order to help me is my welcome. I must want His help. Otherwise all He can do is wait patiently for me to realize I do want that help. But as Jesus says, I need more than His patience. I need His active participation in my Awakening.

I do welcome the Holy Spirit, and I open my mind and heart to Him. I ask for His help, His guidance, His healing. But I must protect His place in my mind through continuing to desire His help. It is still too easy for me to turn to the ego for answers, so I must be vigilant in noticing whom I ask for help. When I look to the ego for guidance, I have lessened the Holy Spirit’s welcome and so, while He remains with me, He cannot help me.

I want to Awaken and the Holy Spirit will help me to do this, and it will occur much more easily if I do not block His help. This is not hard; it just requires practice and dedication to my purpose. I have gotten pretty good at catching the mind’s tendency to return to judgment and to lose itself in illusions. I have gotten pretty good at changing my mind. Now I continue my practice until I have mastered this decision. 

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: II: The Invitation to Healing, P 4 8-31-15

II. The Invitation to Healing, P 4
4 Healing is a sign that you want to make whole. And this willingness opens your ears to the Voice of the Holy Spirit, Whose message is wholeness. He will enable you to go far beyond the healing you would undertake, for beside your small willingness to make whole He will lay His Own complete Will and make yours whole. What can the Son of God not accomplish with the Fatherhood of God in Him? And yet the invitation must come from you, for you have surely learned that whom you invite as your guest will abide with you.

Journal

I have absolutely learned that if I invite the ego as guest, it does abide with me, and it brings all sorts of bad advice with it. Yesterday was miserable in a way, but wonderful in another way. Here is what happened.

First, I got an ear infection and went to the doctor for magic. When I asked why this showed up, (I haven’t needed antibiotics in a very long time) I had the thought that lately I have been very resistant to hearing what is going on in my classroom. There has been a lot of conflict, and while I have watched my mind and asked for healing, I have also wished that I did not have to be there, hearing that. That is not a very helpful prayer because nothing is healed. I was listening to the ego, which often suggests I run, and failing to listen to the Voice for God.

I decided that I would look very closely at what is going on and how I am responding to the situation. I gave my small willingness to see this differently. I did this in two ways, one by feeling what I felt without aborting that feeling when it got uncomfortable, and the other was to use Lesson 325 to get to the source of what was happening. Here is how it unfolded.

I thought about my boss giving me another job to do just as I was walking out. I noticed I felt discouraged and I noticed I wanted to see others wrong for this. I asked that my mind be healed of the belief that I am unfairly treated. But this morning my willingness to have only the thoughts I think with God in my mind was great. So I did not push it away as a done deal when I asked for healing. I thought about the extra job and let my feeling flow freely. I wanted to just sit down and cry. I wanted to run away. Ok, that needed more work!

So I asked Jesus what I should do now. He told me to use Lesson 325 to see how this situation occurred in my life. I know that this is my story and I write the script, but that concept gets lost when I let the ego run things. I could see why this would be helpful at this time. So here is the part of the Lesson I used.

LESSON 325

All things I think I see reflect ideas.

1 This is salvation’s keynote: What I see reflects a process in my mind, which starts with my idea of what I want. From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires, judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find. These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real and guarded as one’s own. From insane wishes comes an insane world. From judgment comes a world condemned. And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth, with mercy for the holy Son of God, to offer him a kindly home where he can rest a while before he journeys on, and help his brothers walk ahead with him, and find the way to Heaven and to God.

So what I did was take the idea that I am overburdened at work, and that work has become a place I try to avoid because of the level of conflict, and using this lesson I traced down how this happened. One thing I know right from the start, even if I avoid the knowledge sometimes, is that there is nothing in my world that I do not want. See Lesson 152, The Power of Decision.

So now I am only looking to see how this situation wound up in my script. What was I trying to do?

What I see reflects a process in my mind
No matter who seems to be causing the conflict, how far I try to distance myself from that one, no matter who seems to be doing things to me, what I see is a reflection of a process going on in my mind. The ball is back in my court!

which starts with my idea of what I want.
This is so important! I think it should have been capitalized, italicized, quote makes around it, an exclamation point behind it. Whatever is going on in my world is something I want! It seems crazy and ridiculous, but Jesus is someone I can trust and certainly I cannot trust the ego. So I am going with this. I remind myself that he started this paragraph by telling me that this is the keynote to salvation.

So I had an idea of what I wanted and using a process in my mind, I got that idea into the world. How did I do this?

From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires
Wait! The thing I see and experience in the world is the image I made up. Let’s back up and see what it is I desired. Well, it is helpful that I have the image to look at. I am in a situation where there is a lot of conflict and I seem to be pulled into it on a regular basis. I also seem to have more to do than I am willing to do. So, what is it that is really desired? From what did I source this image of conflict and work?

I was able to get to it by using some of the ideas that Jesus has taught me to look out for. I tried out one of them by saying it out loud. “I am being unfairly treated.” I felt a lump form in my throat. It is unfair to ask the oldest person there, who has been the busiest person, to do more. So I think that the desire I wanted to picture is that I am unfairly treated.

I made up an image of what this might look like. I could be overburdened at work. That would make a good image of someone being unfairly treated. It would come from someone I don’t want to see in a bad light, someone I would regret adding to his own considerable burden, so I would feel more trapped than ever in this image of being unfairly treated. Not only was I given too much work, but unfairly enough, I was left without recourse. Good job so far, in making an image that gave me just what I wanted.

The second thing I was looking at is the conflict itself. This one was harder for me because I was in real denial about what I wanted from this image. I had that little willingness, though, and Jesus had my back, and the Holy Spirit was adding His Will to mine. So I thought about the situation and let myself feel the rage and the guilt and then I looked at what I hoped to gain from this.

I was shown that when the two people involved asked for my input, I felt admired and respected. I felt special. God will not make me special, so I made an image of Myron being very special. The old problem of Authorship. Who’s my daddy? Is it the ego? Or is it God? I wanted specialness more than I wanted God. No wonder I didn’t want to see that. So that is why this whole story got into my world. It is was just another image of specialness.

judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find.
Well, I obviously judged both these desires as valuable since I gave up my peace to have them. I also sought them out. First I used a process in my mind to give them an image that would convince me they were true, and then I made myself available to them, so that I could have the experience.

These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real and guarded as one’s own.
Though I pretend I have no such power, of course I do. I projected these images outward so I could have a real experience of being unfairly treated and of being special. I looked at the images, called them real, and guarded them. I have been in this experience for too long, and the reason is that I was guarding the process from my own mind. I was reinforcing this amnesia by making others the guilty party and me this helpless victim.

From insane wishes comes an insane world. From judgment comes a world condemned.
This is all that has happened. I have been living in an insane world, pretending to be its victim, pretending I had nothing to do with it, and all the time it came from my insane wishes. Then I judged everyone and everything and so I have made an image of an insane world and condemned it with my judgment.

And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth, with mercy for the holy Son of God, to offer him a kindly home where he can rest a while before he journeys on, and help his brothers walk ahead with him, and find the way to Heaven and to God.

Thank God I have an answer to what I have done. A way to undo it. I can forgive myself and forgive what I have made. I can see the process that made it, take responsibility for it, and allow the Holy Spirit to lay His Own complete Will next to my small willingness to be healed, and so to make mine whole.

 

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Study of Text, Chapter 11: II: The Invitation to Healing, P 3. 8-29-15

II. The Invitation to Healing, P 3
3 And denial is as total as love. You cannot deny part of yourself, because the rest will seem to be separate and therefore without meaning. And being without meaning to you, you will not understand it. To deny meaning is to fail to understand. You can heal only yourself, for only God’s Son needs healing. You need it because you do not understand yourself, and therefore know not what you do. Having forgotten your will, you do not know what you really want.

Journal
The reason Awakening requires that we not compromise in accepting the Atonement is that denial is as total as love. If I leave anything out, any person, any situation, any thought within my mind; if I deny the Holy Spirit anything, I will not awaken.  Is there some part of my mind, even one single thought that I want to keep separate from the Holy Spirit’s healing transformation? Then I have not accepted the Atonement and I will remain in the dream. Is there one person among the billions that stands outside my willingness to forgive? Then I have not accepted the Atonement.

Sometimes it can be subtle. I was watching a show in which the family (brothers and sisters and their families) was very close, outwardly loving, visiting each other frequently, praying together, sharing deeply. I felt sad because I don’t have that, my family does not interact in that way. In that moment of sadness, I was in denial of God, and needed healing. I was choosing to let ego interpret the situation.
The truth is that regardless of appearances, we cannot be separate, and a story of separation is just a story. I saw the error in my mind, and I chose the peace of God over the sad story the ego offered me. It is always a choice, the meaning we give these thoughts.

Physical illness seems like something outside our choice, and yet sickness is a defense against God, and therefore, on some level, we have made a choice for it. When I am sick or in pain, I remind myself it was a choice and I choose the peace of God instead. Always, regardless of what seems to be happening, it is a choice between ego and God.

The illness or the broken relationship, or other effects of separation thinking may already be in play. It is still not too late to make another choice. If I see myself as a victim to these circumstances, and if I project the blame for them, I have chosen ego again. If I accept responsibility for all that occurs, and offer my mind to be healed of the thoughts that sourced the effects, I have chosen for God.

I am totally responsible for everything that happens in the world because there is only one mind and I am part of that mind. When I read the paper and see that someone has killed or robbed and I think that person is guilty, I have made a mistake. I am that person who killed and robbed. That is me over
there acting out the belief that I am separate from God, and damned for it. Seeing the criminal as someone separate from me is denying our oneness and refusing to accept the Atonement.

Making fun of Donald Trump’s hair or behavior, judging something I read on Facebook, speaking unkindly about someone, worrying about the weather, my finances, my relationships, all of these are ways to keep my self separate from my other selves. As I began to realize what I was doing, I began to make a different choice, to choose God instead, one thought at a time.

It would seem an impossible task and simply too overwhelming to be done, but each choice to not deny love, helped me to see that there really is only one thought appearing as many. Now my mind is quieter than before, and all ego thoughts are beginning to blend together into one thought of separation.

While it does still require my vigilance and my unquestioning commitment, it doesn’t feel like an impossible task anymore. As I allow the mind to be healed and the separation idea to be undone, I am beginning to know what I want. The stronger this feeling becomes the easier it is to make the choice for God.

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