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Study of the Text I.The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 4 9-26-13

I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 4
9-26-13
4 The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity that has a symbolic function. He is referred to as the Healer, the Comforter and the Guide. He is also described as something “separate,” apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, “If I go I will send you another Comforter and He will abide with you.” His symbolic function makes the Holy Spirit difficult to understand, because symbolism is open to different interpretations. As a man and also one of God’s creations, my right thinking, which came from the Holy Spirit or the Universal Inspiration, taught me first and foremost that this Inspiration is for all. I could not have It myself without knowing this. The word “know” is proper in this context, because the Holy Spirit is so close to knowledge that He calls it forth; or better, allows it to come. I have spoken before of the higher or “true” perception, which is so near to truth that God Himself can flow across the little gap. Knowledge is always ready to flow everywhere, but it cannot oppose. Therefore you can obstruct it, although you can never lose it.

I’ve always tried to understand what the Holy Spirit is but find it easier to understand what the Holy Spirit is for. The Holy Spirit’s function is to bring us the truth, to help us undo the mistaken idea of separation so that knowledge can flow unimpeded throughout the Mind. Knowledge is meant for us but to receive knowledge we must not oppose it. The ego opposes knowledge because knowledge would undo it, so we need the Holy Spirit to correct our thinking and heal our mind.

This process of asking for and receiving help from the Holy Spirit is simple. First we learn to recognize the ego in our mind, and realize we don’t want it. Then we ask the Holy Spirit to heal our mind, or correct our thinking, or purify our thoughts. Or we ask for the Atonement. I use whatever words come to me in that moment. Sometimes I just say, “Help” or, “God.” The words don’t matter; it is the prayer of our heart that He hears.

Jesus said that he understood he could not have the Holy Spirit’s help unless he understood that It is for everyone. This is so essential, this understanding of Its universal nature. Everything in the Course revolves around the fact that I must forgive myself and everyone else. I cannot leave unforgiven a single person or a single circumstance. I cannot make anything special or separate. I must join with my brother wherever he appears and under whatever circumstances. No one can be condemned because the Holy Spirit is in everyone, guiding, comforting and healing. I go to God in union with my brother or not at all.

Understanding this it makes no sense at all to cling to my judgments. Whether I judge the murderer I read about in the paper or the clerk at the store, I close myself to the knowledge it is the Holy Spirit’s function to bring forward. I close myself to God. In doing so I suffer, and I but do it to myself.

“Today, Holy Spirit, bring to me the one You would have me forgive. Help me to remember what it is I truly desire. When I am tempted to see the behaviors and hear the confused words of my brother, reveal to me his innocence so that I may know mine as well. Please help me to experience the joy that comes when we place nothing between us, nothing to prevent union.” 

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text I.The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 3 9-25-13

I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 3
9-25-13
3 This is the invitation to the Holy Spirit. I have said already that I can reach up and bring the Holy Spirit down to you, but I can bring Him to you only at your own invitation. The Holy Spirit is in your right mind, as He was in mine. The Bible says, “May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus,” and uses this as a blessing. It is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ thinking.

The Holy Spirit is in my mind. This is very literal. He is never absent to me in any circumstance. I can always have His guidance and if I think I do not, it is because I don’t like what He has to say and am pretending to myself I don’t hear it. In some way, Jesus is responsible for our awareness of the Holy Spirit. His life and his acceptance of the truth is what makes it possible for us to hear the Holy Spirit, too.

While the Holy Spirit is always there in our right mind, and speaks to us all through the day, we do not always listen. Listening is our choice, just as not listening is our choice. The Holy Spirit’s guidance and comfort cannot be forced on us. Jesus was the first of us to hear the Voice and to accept it and because he did so, it is available to us. Jesus says that the Biblical passage, “May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus,” is a blessing of miracle mindedness. I think of it as a prayer, and maybe that is the same thing.

I want to let go of the ego thinking mind and become open to guidance outside the wrong mind. I want to be a follower of Christ until I remember I am part of Christ. I want to be miracle-ready so that I can perform whatever miracles I am guided to. I want to wake up from this illusion of separation and the Holy Spirit is my ticket Home. So this is my prayer, said with great sincerity and with all the willingness I have, “May the mind that was in you, Jesus, also be in my awareness, and may I always choose to hear it.” 

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 2 9-24-13

I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 2
9-24-13
2 Let us start our process of reawakening with just a few simple concepts:
Thoughts increase by being given away.
The more who believe in them the stronger they become.
Everything is an idea.
How, then, can giving and losing be associated?

Thoughts increase by being given away. I feel very strongly about watching my thoughts and noticing the ones I am giving away. When someone says something negative today, complaining about the weather, expressing fear of political changes, worrying about their job, or any of the many other ways we express the belief in lack and loss, the belief in pain suffering and death, what will I say in return? I have heard myself join right in with my own complaints, my own fears, and I don’t want to do that anymore.

I don’t want to ever do that again, and the way to stop doing it is to notice when I do and ask that my mind be healed of these beliefs. In the past, I have tried swallowing the words and that is not the solution. My beliefs will find a way to surface in spite of my efforts to hide them. And whether I actually voice wrong minded beliefs or not, they still affect the Sonship. I choose healing today. I don’t want to be the complainer or the fear monger. I want to have a grateful heart and a thankful mind. I want to increase love, not fear.

Everything is an idea. We have already talked about that, but it is good to look at it again because it is a different way to think. Before ACIM, I didn’t think of a couch as an idea. I thought of an idea as potential. It was the first step in making something. A Course in Miracles has turned my understanding upside down. I don’t have a clear understanding of the way things are, but I understand enough to know how ignorant I was before.

Jesus doesn’t say that everything starts with an idea. He says everything is an idea. The ego begins with a thought and then looks for a way to make something that represents that thought. I wonder how many patents there are for things we have made. I think that making things is a distortion of creation. It is a way of convincing us that our mind is powerless.

We are smart enough to think of ways to make things happen within a very limited scope, but there is too much fear to accept our true power. As egos we accept that we are clever, but our fear is that to think we are powerful is to invite the wrath of God. Playing small is the way we hope to convince God that we are not worth His concern, to allow him to forget that we, in a long ago moment of madness, usurped His power and became our own creators. So we pretend that if we want a new and better mouse trap we have to invent one. Its all part of the game we play, the game of being human.

We have done such a good job of hiding out in the world, pretending to be small and insignificant that we have truly forgotten who we are. We have forgotten our Divinity and all that means. Jesus remembered and he is helping us, as we are ready, to remember. He says that we can start with a couple of simple concepts. Thoughts increase by being given away and everything is a thought. Give freely what you want to see increased, what you want to grow stronger in your mind. Give freely because the more you give it the more you have it. Give freely because there is no loss in giving, only increase.

Today I am going to give what I want; I am going to give love and kindness. I am going to ask that every other thought in my mind be healed. I will ask for healing of the need to be right, the need to be first or greater, the need to hide or be smaller. I will ask that my mind be healed of the belief in pain, suffering, and death in whatever forms they may take. I will give (believe in, think about, express) only what I want to retain and what I want to increase.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit 9-23-13

I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit
9-23-13
1 Healing is a thought by which two minds perceive their oneness and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and lets God go out into them and through them. Only the healed mind can experience revelation with lasting effect, because revelation is an experience of pure joy. If you do not choose to be wholly joyous, your mind cannot have what it does not choose to be. Remember that spirit knows no difference between having and being. The higher mind thinks according to the laws spirit obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God. To spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all. Having everything, spirit holds everything by giving it, and thus creates as the Father created. While this kind of thinking is totally alien to having things, even to the lower mind it is quite comprehensible in connection with ideas. If you share a physical possession, you do divide its ownership. If you share an idea, however, you do not lessen it. All of it is still yours although all of it has been given away. Further, if the one to whom you give it accepts it as his, he reinforces it in your mind and thus increases it. If you can accept the concept that the world is one of ideas, the whole belief in the false association the ego makes between giving and losing is gone.

I see two ideas in this paragraph that speak to me. First is the recurring idea that it is in joining that we wake up. Jesus tells us later in the Text that we cannot enter God’s presence if we attack His Son, not the brother standing next to us, or ourselves. He tells us in another place that every encounter with a brother has the potential to be holy. He says that separation is the problem and joining is the solution. Over and over he tells us that our happiness, our peace and our return to God is dependent on joining with our brother and in making no exceptions to this. No one is to be left out. No one is to stand outside forgiveness in our minds.

In this paragraph Jesus is telling us that joining is the same as healing and that joining is the way we allow God to flow between us, and joining is the way we experience joy. He is also saying that joining is the way we experience lasting revelation since joining equals joy and revelation is an experience of pure joy. This really makes me want to be aware of those times when I am judging someone so that I can choose again. Judgment separates and so takes me to the other end of the spectrum from where I want to be.

The other thing I want to consider is the relationship between giving and receiving. Jesus points out that we think giving and receiving are different because we think in terms of form. When someone needs money if I have it I will give it. Here is how I used to do it. I would see how much they need and then look into my bank account to see how much of that I can afford to give. This is the way we generally give.

As my mind heals and I get a grip on the metaphysics of the Course, I begin to understand that everything is just an idea. The money in my bank account is just an idea in my mind that has been projected outward so I can see what it looks like and experience it in a different way. The money, the bank, my body, everything is just an idea. If that understanding were complete, then how would that change the way I give?

You can’t really give away an idea in the way you give away your money. If I give you my money it isn’t there anymore. But if I give you an idea I still have the idea. If you accept the idea that I give as true, that idea is stronger in my mind as well. So in giving the idea to you I not only didn’t lose the idea, I actually gained in the giving. Now let me relate that to giving away money. If I understand that money is just a projection of an idea, then I could give away money with impunity, knowing that I can’t give away the source of the money. The source of the money, the idea, remains in my mind where it continues to be projected.

So lets say I believe that everything is an idea because it says so in the Course. But I am still afraid to put it to the test because what if there is a catch someplace. What if I have to do something to make this my experience, and I don’t know what that is? What if I believe it, yet doubt it? That is a familiar experience for me. Nearly everything I have learned from the Course started out as a possibility, not a certainty. I practiced what I learned until it became a certainty.

So here I am in that in between place. I believe everything is an idea except when I don’t. What do I do about giving? And how do I get all the way from the belief in loss to the thought that getting is meaningless and giving is all? Someone needs money. I open my checkbook to see how much money I can afford to give. I write a check for what seems right to me. I really want a healed mind and so as I do this, I ask Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the belief in lack and loss.

I do this until one day I realize that I didn’t check my bank account first. I just asked Spirit what he would have me do, and if I feel the prompt to give, I ask how much. I have shifted a bit through the desire and willingness to heal. There is more belief in my mind that giving is not loss because everything is an idea and you cannot diminish an idea through giving it away.

If the guidance were to give all that I have, I would get the chance to see how much I believe this. But what I have noticed in my practice is that Holy Spirit never asks me to step into a place that I am not ready to go. I am where I am through a gentle step by step process. I can absolutely trust Holy Spirit. Through this practice and my willingness to be healed I am learning that Jesus is right, as I can accept the concept that the world is one of ideas, the whole belief in the false association the ego makes between giving and losing goes away.

A last thought: I was looking at my desk and thinking, that cup is not real. It is a thought, an idea. If I were to give it away, I could think it again and it would appear. But this would not be the ego mind doing this because the ego does not create, it can only make. The ego could replace the cup by buying another or if it was feeling creative and had the equipment it could form one from clay and bake it in a kiln. But spirit through Myron, without the obstruction of doubt and fear, could simply replace the idea of a cup with a thought of another cup. It would seem like a miracle if a cup appeared, but the miracle would be the mind healed of doubt and fear. Never the less, the cup would appear.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text Healing and Wholeness, Introduction Paragraph 3 9-20-13

Chapter 5 Introduction, Paragraph 3
9-20-13
3 You are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude. You need not know them individually, or they you. The light is so strong that it radiates throughout the Sonship and returns thanks to the Father for radiating His joy upon it. Only God’s holy children are worthy channels of His beautiful joy, because only they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for a child of God to love his neighbor except as himself. That is why the healer’s prayer is:
Let me know this brother as I know myself.

Every thought we have and that we believe is doing one of two things. It is adding to the ego, or it is undoing the ego. Those thoughts I think with God are undoing the ego and since there is only one ego, it is undone in all of us. I am so grateful to everyone for doing their part, and we are all doing our part whether it looks like it or not, whether we know it or not.

Even in my BC days (Before the Course) I was doing my part. I was learning what it is that I don’t want. I was showing others what they didn’t want. I was setting up the lessons that would bring me to this very place in my spiritual life. It looked like I was screwing everything up, but that was just how I perceived it. I’m sure that from some else’s story it seemed I was sometimes the bad guy. But every part I have played has been essential to my development and theirs as well.

Now that the light is growing in me, I am helpful in different ways. That light shines throughout the Sonship. To be a real pain in someone’s side I had to be in their life, but to influence the Sonship, I only had to believe my thoughts. Now I believe the thoughts I think with God a lot more than I believe the ego thoughts in my mind and so now I am influencing the Sonship in a different way.

I love sharing through my words, written and spoken, when they are inspired, because it allows the flow of God through me to you, and this flow continues until I impede it with my untrue thoughts. I can be feeling sad or discouraged or angry, but when it is time for me to journal or to teach, all that goes away. I feel energized and positive. I feel love flowing through me and there is nothing better than that. But if I never wrote another word or said another word, the work of undoing the ego in the Sonship would go on, because when my mind is healed so is yours. And visa versa. Thank you.

My most consistent prayer these days is to see the Christ in my brother no matter what the circumstances may be. The only way to know and love God is to know and love my brothers, all of them, not just the ones who reflect my “good” self, but the ones who reflect my confusion as well. If I don’t know and love and appreciate all of God’s creation, I cannot know and love the Creator.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text Healing and Wholeness Introduction, Paragraph 2   9-19-13

Chapter 5 Introduction, Paragraph 2
9-19-13
2 To be wholehearted you must be happy. If fear and love cannot coexist, and if it is impossible to be wholly fearful and remain alive, the only possible whole state is that of love. There is no difference between love and joy. Therefore, the only possible whole state is the wholly joyous. To heal or to make joyous is therefore the same as to integrate and to make one. That is why it makes no difference to what part or by what part of the Sonship the healing is offered. Every part benefits, and benefits equally.

Oh boy, I love this! First, lack of joy is a marker, a way I can tell if there is mind healing work to be done. My goal always is to return my mind to wholeness and joy is the only completely whole state so it is a good indicator as to what needs to be done next. Or rather the lack of joy is that indicator, and joy is the indicator that I have been doing my healing work, that I have chosen love over fear.

The second thing I enjoyed reading in this paragraph is that it does not matter what part of the Sonship heals or is healed. It is for all, everyone benefits. I knew that but I like seeing it here, reminding me and reassuring me. I am so very grateful every time I hear one of my brothers doing their own work because I know that means I am being lifted up right along with them.

It also means that if I see someone else acting out of their ego, I can heal that belief in my own mind and it is done for both of us. Or as Jesus says, I can accept the Atonement on behalf of my brother. In this way I am completely responsible for everything. If it is in my awareness it is there for me to heal it.  If my friend becomes angry when she sees a homeless person asking for money, maybe my ego wants to judge her for her lack of compassion.

However, the other choice is to recognize the lack of compassion in my own mind and to ask that my mind be healed. There. It is done. As it turns out I didn’t need to school my friend, I just needed to accept the Atonement for myself for this to be healed. As I continue to accept total responsibility and to heal whatever is in my awareness without regard to “ownership” I begin to fully integrate the fact that there is no separation, that we are, indeed, all one, and that all healing benefits all equally.

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Study of the Text Chapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS Introduction 9-18-13

Chapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS
Introduction
1 To heal is to make happy. I have told you to think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many you have refused. This is the same as telling you that you have refused to heal yourself. The light that belongs to you is the light of joy. Radiance is not associated with sorrow. Joy calls forth an integrated willingness to share it, and promotes the mind’s natural impulse to respond as one. Those who attempt to heal without being wholly joyous themselves call forth different kinds of responses at the same time, and thus deprive others of the joy of responding wholeheartedly.

Yikes, I’m feeling the pressure! ~smile~ My job is to be wholly joyous and to fall short of that goal means I am not the healer I might be otherwise. If I am not joyous it means I have failed to accept healing for myself, and if I am not wholly joyous then when I attempt healing of others the results will vary. I will not be asking for only healing, but for something else as well.

This makes sense. I have noticed that when I pray for someone who is suffering from a confusion that is mine as well, then my prayer lacks conviction. For instance, if someone is asking me to support them as they attempt to release their fear of losing their job, and I suffer from the same fear, my prayer will not be pure. I think of it this way. All thought is prayer. We are praying continuously, praying without ceasing.

So, because I want to support my friend as she heals her mind, my thoughts are like this. My friend has nothing to worry about. God is her Source, not the job she thinks she needs. God loves her and wants only her happiness. She is safe in God. It is never God’s Will that she suffer. But, because I still carry a fear of lack and loss, her fear triggers mine, and so I also have thoughts that reflect my own fears.

Maybe it will trigger a memory of a customer that is not happy with his service and my fear that he will look elsewhere before we can fix his problem. I am thus praying that fear and loss not be true, and at the same time praying that it is true. I am holding two opposing thoughts in my mind and thus two opposing prayers, and a conflicted mind is neither effective nor happy. This is why when I pray for someone it usually takes the form of asking that my mind be healed of the untrue belief my friend is holding. In this way I will be praying the most effective prayer I can at this time.

I can also attest to the fact that the more my mind is healed the happier I am. I become less than happy as I allow the ego mind to run me. I am really focused right now on healing my relationships. I understand that the way Home is through my brother, and that any grievance that stands between me and my brother also stands between me and Heaven.

Because I know this is true, I want all relationships in my life to be healed and so this is what is coming up for me. I am seeing all the places that they are not healed. Seeing the issues can be very uncomfortable and this discomfort is not joyous. However, seeing the issues is only the first step. As I recognize them and decide against them, they are healed and my joy increases. Doing this consistently has taught me that a healed mind is synonymous with joy.

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