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Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 9. 1-4-16

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 9

9 Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss. If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed. Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. The means for removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it. Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied for its own existence. By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded. If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared.

Journal
I have been putting off doing this paragraph because I didn’t understand everything I read, so I asked Jesus to bring me understanding. I am going to look with Jesus at this sentence-by-sentence.

“Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss.”

I feel the loss of my identity and that means I feel the loss of Love, of God. The symptom of that loss is fear. I was thinking about this in a different way. What if I fell asleep tonight and when I woke up, I couldn’t remember who I was. I look around and don’t recognize anything. It’s like I am in a different world where nothing makes sense.

After a bit I acclimate to my surroundings, but there is still a profound sense of disconnect because I can’t remember where I came from or who I really am. I can’t remember how I came into existence or who brought me into existence. No matter how long I stay here, I will always feel uneasy because of what I don’t remember. And a little afraid, because I don’t actually remember what I did to get here. Maybe I am guilty of something and got kicked out of my real home.

“If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed.”

At first I am confused about the people around me. I don’t know my place in the structure of society and I seem to need to fight for my place in it. I learn that to win, the other guy has to lose and everyone becomes my enemy. Life is very fearful as I war with everyone for what I think I need. I fight for the best job, the most money, the perfect husband. What about the one’s who don’t get the best because I got it? Not my problem. I have become very self-centered; everything is about me and my personal needs.

Then one day I begin to wake up to something. I notice that someone I care about is very unhappy and I feel a need to help. I sense that this person feels the same loss I feel, and is as fearful as me. I notice this person is unhappy because they feel unloved and unsafe. I feel compassion because I know that feeling, and so I begin to try to supply the love they need. I have become less self-centered as I accept that we share a basic need. As my love relieves my dear one of his fear, I begin to understand fear, and that fear is a lack of love, and that love undoes fear.

“Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. The means for removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it.”

Through giving love and seeing fear subside in the one who receives it, I have taught myself something important about fear. It is relieved through love, therefore, fear must be a lack of love. And if I gave love, I must have love, and if I have love, fear must not exist in me.

“Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable.”

I’ve learned that this is true. I think I am angry and I discover that I am simply afraid and the fear takes the form of anger. It is the same thing with jealousy and blame. I am in this strange world where everyone is in competition for everything, for life itself. Is it any wonder that I feel fearful, and yet, in giving love I discovered that I have love in me. These two emotions are diametrically opposed. I cannot have both. What is going on?

“One is false, for it was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied for its own existence.”

Oh my goodness. What convoluted thinking goes on in this strange world! Fear is false; I can make it seem real through my creative nature, but it cannot be real because it is not part of creation. Fear is made out of denial, and the only other thing that exists is love. So fear is the effect of knowing love as real but denying it. I can deny love all day, but the very act of denying it establishes it as something real to be denied. Yikes!

“By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded.”

So, here is my way out of this conundrum. I used love to relieve fear and in so doing, I realized that fear was simply a lack of love. I also realized that fear can’t be real, because if it were real, I couldn’t relieve it. I saw that fear, being the denial of love, is actually the affirmation that love exists, otherwise there would be nothing to deny. I have proven love to myself. So what I know now is that I have love in me, and I see that fear is simply the denial of what I know is in me, so fear is non-existent. It is useless now because it has been exposed as unreal.

“If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared.”

Fear was always only concealing love. In order to become fully convinced that only love is real, I must practice this and raise love to predominance in my life. Each time I do this, I teach myself that love is what I am and that fear is nothing and of no use. I have feared all along that I don’t know what I am, but I was merely using fear to veil love. As I learn that I really do want to know my Self and to know my Creator and my real Life, I have no interest in veiling this from myself. Fear begins to naturally fall away.

I have seen this happen often, and the more often it happens, the less credence I give fear, of course. When I had a grievance against John at work, I got caught in the web of deceit that comes from the belief in fear. I felt competitive and so attack and defense was the extent of the relationship. I also knew that there is a better way, and I used this relationship to practice bringing love to predominance, as I asked the Holy Spirit to remove the dark thoughts from my mind.

With that veil lifted, I saw the light that I had concealed behind the fear of losing something to this man. I saw his light and it was brilliant. At the same time, I realized that the brilliant light I saw in him must also be in me, otherwise how could I have recognized it at all. I saw that the light was love. I lost interest in competing and so I lost interest in fear.

The competiveness, the hate, the resentment, were all simply various forms of fear. The fear was covering up love and when I realized that I desired love, the fear simply fell away because it didn’t actually exist anyway. Because I gave him love, and he accepted it, his fear disappeared, too. This reinforced the lesson for us both. The lesson that we are learning is that we have a true identity and it is love. We experience fear only when we deny the love we are, and only because we are denying love.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 8. 1-1-16

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 8
8 By applying the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that His criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape. The Holy Spirit must still translate the fear into truth. If you were left with the fear, once you had recognized it, you would have taken a step away from reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it. That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a call for love. We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably associated. If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.

Journal
This is the perfect paragraph for me today. Something has been coming up for me to look at and now is the day I want to do so. Here is what has been going on.

For as long as I can remember, I suffered from depression. I am 66 years old now, and for a period of time from my teens until I began studying the Course I had moments of depression so intense that I was suicidal. There were days when I could only crawl into bed and pull the covers over me until these feelings began to pass. These bouts of intense depression seemed to just occur without reason. Anyone who has suffered depression probably recognizes these symptoms.

It was frightening because I had no warning. They would just come on. Even after I began to study the Course, I still got depressed a lot, just not so intensely, and I was no longer suicidal. However, I would still wake up in the morning and lay there waiting to see how I would feel. Would this be a good day? Or would it be day of sadness?

Eventually, though, through the practice of the Course, I began to understand that somehow and as a reaction to unconscious guilt, I was doing this to myself. Somewhere along the line I accepted enough healing that it all changed for me. I remember the moment I noticed, exactly where I was. I had just woken up and was laying in bed when I realized that I couldn’t remember when those old feelings last occurred. I couldn’t remember when I last wondered if today would be a day of depression.

Nothing like that has ever happened since. I do still have moments of depression, of feeling sad, of feeling doubtful and uncertain. Sometimes it is upsetting because of the meaning I give it. The difference is that I never stay there. I know that it is ego wanting to go back to those emotional responses to life, and I know I am not the ego and so I don’t have to do that.

I have even heard the ego say that death was the only option left, but I heard it. I heard it as if I was a third person watching and listening. I stood amazed at the lengths the ego mind will go to preserve itself. It tries that tactic from time to time and if I am really down, I feel the emotion of it, but I am never attracted to it. It is really a strange place to be when you have enough detachment to recognize that the thoughts in your mind are not yours, really, and can be meaningless if you don’t attach to them.

Which brings me to what has been going on lately. I began to notice that I will be doing very well during the day, watching my thoughts, accepting the Atonement, being peaceful and happy more than being attracted to the ego. But by the end of the day I would often times lose that detachment and start identifying with the ego reactions. I still had enough detachment to know what was going on and so it wasn’t awful the way depression used to be. I finally decided that enough was enough.

“For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape.”

I began to ask Holy Spirit for help with these emotional reactions. I asked that my mind be healed. It has been kind of rocky. I do well and then I fall back into the old way of thinking, and then start over. This is not an unfamiliar pattern for me, but it has gone on for longer than is normal. I seem to have become really attached to this ego personality trait of Myron’s, this desire to feel sad and sorry for herself.

When I read this morning’s paragraph, something clicked. I have chosen to see my brother asking for help more than I see him attacking me. I have done this over and over for a long time now. I have had a couple of circumstances that seemed very hard, but I was persistent in my practice and even those have fallen away. I traded resentment and defensiveness for love. As a result, I see that I have learned to see my own errors as a call for love, and nothing else.  I am not guilty, and because I am not guilty, I have nothing to fear.

This morning I woke up feeling down. There is no reason for this feeling, at least no reason the ego could point to, and I started to push it away and get on with day, but as I read today’s paragraph I felt strongly that this would be helpful in ending the ego feelings of sadness and depression. I am only asking for love, and through giving love instead of punishment, instead of blame and guilt, I know that this is what I can do for myself, too.

“Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego.”

Sometimes I write my way through these problems, but today, Spirit sent me away from my computer and into my sanctuary. I sat in my chair and waited. What came were tears, then wracking sobs. It was the recognition that I believed the ego reaction of depression meant something about me. It was also the release of that belief. It was just a call for love.

“Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it.”

I suddenly felt panicky because I couldn’t think what to do about this, how to think about it. I called out for help, and was reminded that it is not my job to heal myself, only to want healing. What a relief it was to remember that! Then what I heard in my mind is that I cannot keep depression if I want to wake up. I must give up the story of “Myron is depressed” if I want to remember who I am.

“If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.”

This is a choice I make, just like peace is a choice I make. There can be no compromise in this. I either decide to retain my sense of identity as a depressed person or I let it go. I choose to know myself or I choose to remain stuck in the dream of Myron. I had fallen for the old ego trick of thinking that because I had let go of part of the idea, that I had done everything. In holding onto even a little depression, I was still attacking myself and this morning, I remembered that fear is a call for love. It is a call to remember I am the love I had been denying, but to know that love there can be no compromise where I am love and something else.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 7. 12-31-15

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 7

7 Your interpretations of your brother’s needs are your interpretation of yours. By giving help you are asking for it, and if you perceive but one need in yourself you will be healed. For you will recognize God’s Answer as you want It to be, and if you want It in truth, It will be truly yours. Every appeal you answer in the Name of Christ brings the remembrance of your Father closer to your awareness. For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for help as what it is, so God can answer you.

Journal
“Your interpretations of your brother’s needs are your interpretation of yours.”  One of the things I have noticed is that when someone tells me about their problem, what I hear is my own problem, and if I answer them, I tend to speak of what I think I need. For instance, When someone talks to me about a relationship problem with their child, my mind automatically references my problem relationship with a child of mine. As they speak, that reference is refined to a specific child of mine, and a specific problem. So if I answer this person based on my ego judgments, I will give him and myself an ego answer, thus being no help at all.

However, if I go immediately to the Holy Spirit to ask what He would have me say, I answer both my student and myself with a true answer. Even if this is a case where my input is not needed by the other person, my heart answers the call for help and so I answer my own heart’s call for help.

How this works out depends on what it is I really want. What is my goal in that moment? Am I interested in defending my false gods, or am I interested in remembering God? I will get what I ask for, so I practice choosing God in every circumstance. When I notice that I failed to do so, I forgive it and move on to the next opportunity. Simply being aware of the voice I choose to hear is very helpful. My willingness to be aware is a step forward.

Not every question sounds like a question. Sometimes a call for help feels like an attack. Sometimes it feels like the other person is schooling me. Sometimes it feels like the other person is running away from the answer. Often times it feels like guilt and fear. But, What I am learning through my practice is that everyone’s deepest heart desire is to know God. So I can always hear that call and I can always answer that call, and in the answering, I receive the answer I long for. This is worth my practice, my time and my effort.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 6. 12-29-15

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 6

6 Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this. How simple, then, is God’s plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one Teacher of reality, Who understands what it is. He does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not change. Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true. He gives them to you because they are for you. Do not attempt to “help” a brother in your way, for you cannot help yourself. But hear his call for the Help of God, and you will recognize your own need for the Father.

Journal
This is so simple that I am amazed at how long it took me to see the simplicity of it. I don’t understand anything and I don’t know what anything is for. I have no way to judge so I should not judge. My brother is always loving me or calling for love, and if I think something else is happening it is because I have asked the ego for an interpretation, and the ego is the part of me that doesn’t know anything.

I am confused because I listen to two diametrically opposed voices and try to believe both of them. But I can change this. I can learn to listen to only the Voice for God. Even in this world I can do that. As I listen to the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of my brother’s words and actions, I learn that he only wants love however he may be confused about that. I give him the love he asks for by remembering who he is. At the same time, the memory of who I am becomes stronger in my mind. Perfect.

The Holy Spirit’s interpretation is always the same because reality is always the same. The ego mind sees fear and guilt, attack and defense, pain and suffering. The Holy Spirit sees only the Son of God, perfect, free, joyful and peaceful. He sees only innocence regardless of what seems to be happening in the illusion. He sees the truth because He looks right through the illusion to the only thing that is real. I cannot do this with the ego mind. This is why I must learn to listen only to the Voice for God.

After Jesus helped me to use yesterday’s paragraph to work out my confusion with a particular situation, I was freed from my distorted vision of this brother of mine. I saw him as he is, not as his story. This freed me of my confusion about my own story and left me feeling peaceful and happy. I no longer had a need to change anything, and my mind was clear.

Later that day I had an occasion to talk to this person. We had a nice conversation that led effortlessly into talking about his troubled relationship. The words that needed to be said came easily and were well accepted, because I was no longer trying to help him in my way. In fact, I was now so clear that my way was insane that it would never have occurred to me to do that. I didn’t plan this conversation, or even know I was going to have it. I just allowed the words to come when they did.

Will this be helpful to him? I’m sure it will because it came from a source outside my ego mind. Will I see a difference, will the relationship change in form? I don’t know and it is none of my business. I did the part I was to do. I saw that my mind needed to be healed and I accepted the Atonement for myself. That was my function.

Then with a clear mind, I was able to be a channel for healing. There is nothing left for me in this particular story. To judge it by appearances would be to fall into error again. To think I know what it means would be to listen to another voice. My part is over. I feel only appreciation for my brother and for this opportunity to choose salvation.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 5. 12-28-15

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 5

5 It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be. If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it. To fail to recognize a call for help is to refuse help. Would you maintain that you do not need it? Yet this is what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother’s appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be helped. Deny him your help and you will not recognize God’s Answer to you. The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting motivation, but you do need His.

Journal
I love this paragraph! I am going to write about something in my life and use this paragraph to see differently. A couple I know very well are having marital problems. When I first witnessed an argument between them, I was certain I understood the problem. The man was drinking too heavily and was being an ass. There! That was simple to figure out.

“It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand.”

Ok, maybe I could be wrong, here. I am judging the situation according to what I think I know using the ego mind to do the reasoning. My judgment is based on my past experiences, and really, just on my interpretation of those experiences. In truth, I don’t really understand anything. I don’t understand what anything is for so how can I make a true judgment, and without the true judgment, how can I give good advice.

“No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be.”

So, I have these pasts experiences that came from living with alcoholics. I obviously still have resentment and anger about these experiences and the people involved; otherwise my judgment would not have been so quick and so harsh. As they say, I have a horse in this race. I have a personal investment because I want the truth to be that this guy is a jerk when he drinks and he should just stop. Clearly, I am not a reliable witness.

“If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it.”

My original judgment of this situation and the man involved had nothing to do with help. Sure, I could tell myself that I was helping her, or even that I was helping him. It would be a great help to him to understand his problem and get help for it before he destroyed the relationship. I mean I know this, right? And maybe he does need to do this.

What I did not see is that his behavior is a call for love. To perceive the call for help as what it is, I would have to forgive him for exposing my fear and dread around my own personal past hurts. I would have to see that I have failed to forgive and this unforgiveness would have to be looked at and resolved.

I would have to let some people off the hook, including him. In holding him to my judgment, I am failing to give the help he needs, and at the same time I am failing to receive the help I need. I need to forgive in order to know I am forgiven. I need to respond with love to know I am loved.

“To fail to recognize a call for help is to refuse help. Would you maintain that you do not need it?”

When this first happened, I did not see a call for help. I saw my past being superimposed on this situation. I saw a guilty person who needed to straighten up and do right. The thing is, I had to deliberately see this as a matter of guilt rather than a lack of love in order to refuse to help. If I had been willing to see the true purpose of the situation, I would have immediately chosen to respond to the call for love. Obviously, I was still treasuring my judgments and didn’t want to relinquish them.

“Would you maintain that you do not need it? Yet this is what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother’s appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be helped. Deny him your help and you will not recognize God’s Answer to you.”

I see that I do need God’s help, and I accept that it is only in giving help that I know I have been helped. It is the elegant solution to our only problem. We treat our brothers the way we would want to be treated and in so doing we begin to recognize that we are one mind, that we are one with our brothers. In other words, through giving what we would receive, we undo the separation idea in our mind.

This brother of mine, is deceived in his understanding of what he is. He needs my forgiveness, that is, he needs me to give him the love he thinks he lacks, so that he can remember his true self. In so doing, I experience my true self, the self that loves rather than judges. As I allow God’s Answer to my brother rather than the ego’s answer, I become aware of God’s Answer to me, and so I begin to remember who I am. The separation idea undone!

“The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting motivation, but you do need His.”

Even while I lied to myself about my judgment of this man, and tried to convince myself that he was guilty and so deserved my judgment, I knew this could not be right. So I didn’t say what I felt, and for that I am grateful. While I was judging him and arguing for my judgment, I was, in essence, trying to convince the Holy Spirit of my interpretation. As it turns out, He doesn’t need my help. Big surprise there. Anyway, I see that I certainly needed His help, and my willingness to be helped eventually opened me to receive the help.

Am I supposed to do anything in this situation? If so, what? Well the first thing and most important thing I can do is to know that this man is perfect and whole and absolute joyful love, regardless of the story he is living. His reality has nothing to do with his behavior and this is what he needs me to know for him, while he is still confused about his identity.  My absolute certainty in him will help him to see himself differently.

As I know it is true for him, I begin to accept that it is true for me. I am not guilty of judging him anymore than he was guilty of my judgment. As for anything I am to say or do, that is up to the Holy Spirit. I remain open and ready with a mind that is clear of ego judgment. If He needs me to do something in this situation, the Holy Spirit will channel through me what needs to be said.

© 2015, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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