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Study of the Text II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 7 11-26-13

II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 7
7 The perfect equality of the Holy Spirit’s perception is the reflection of the perfect equality of God’s knowing. The ego’s perception has no counterpart in God, but the Holy Spirit remains the bridge between perception and knowledge. By enabling you to use perception in a way that reflects knowledge, you will ultimately remember it. The ego would prefer to believe that this memory is impossible, yet it is your perception the Holy Spirit guides. Your perception will end where it began. Everything meets in God, because everything was created by Him and in Him.

My perception is my way of seeing things. It is how I interpret what I see and hear and think. My perception was informed by influences from my childhood and it varies even now according to my mood and which book I have read lately. At its best, my perception will only be an opinion formed outside of knowledge. There is no perception in God. There is only Knowledge that does not change. God does not perceive, He knows.

It seems such a huge gap, this perceiving that I do and the absolute knowledge of God. The ego would have me believe that there is no way to bridge that gap, but there is a way. The Holy Spirit is the bridge between perception and knowledge. As I willingly offer the Holy Spirit my thoughts for reinterpretation, He corrects them so that they are closer to knowledge.

As I have done this my thinking, my perceptions, have shifted to something that more accurately reflects knowledge. While it is not knowledge it is so much closer to knowledge that an ancient memory has begun to stir within me. As this memory grows and comes more into focus, I begin to remember who I am.

I am meant to recover this memory and I am meant to do so now! This is the secret that ego would keep from me. It would have me work toward awakening as long as I keep it as a distant possibility. I can even think of it as an inevitability as long as it still seems far away. This is why, as I approach awakening, the ego points out my errors, dredging up long forgotten sins to show me how unworthy I am.

It distracts and discourages. But now I remember that the ego has no power over me. It is not my master, but only an idea in my mind, an idea I formulated and therefore one that I can choose against. The Holy Spirit has corrected my thinking about the ego and so I am closer to being in alignment with knowledge than before. I am not so easily fooled now, and can even laugh to realize that I was only being fooled by myself.

At one time I would have been greatly discouraged by the ego thoughts that arise in the mind. I would have thought that their presence meant I was failing to awaken, and that I was so far from awakening that it felt hopeless to me. Now I see the thoughts and realize that any reaction to them, any feeling of anxiety, indicates that I am experiencing the remnants of a belief I no longer want. I turn to the Holy Spirit for healing.

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Study of the Text II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 6 11-25-13

II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 6
6 How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there? You cannot be anywhere God did not put you, and God created you as part of Him. That is both where you are and what you are. It is completely unalterable. It is total inclusion. You cannot change it now or ever. It is forever true. It is not a belief, but a Fact. Anything that God created is as true as He is. Its truth lies only in its perfect inclusion in Him Who alone is perfect. To deny this is to deny yourself and Him, since it is impossible to accept one without the other.

I cannot imagine how Jesus could state the truth any more clearly than he has done so here. In the world there is only temporary happiness, or rather there are moments when we forget that we are not happy. There is no joy in the world. Our moments that seem the most joyful, falling in love, the birth of a child, seeing a grandchild for the first time, these moments are examples of what we call joy. And yet, they are tinged with fear. We fear falling out of love or losing the one we love. We fear for our children and grandchildren. There is no joy in the world that is pure.

The only way to find joy is to realize we are not in this world. We are where God put us and He put us with Him. In God we are purely joyful with nothing to tinge that joy. There is no loss or fear in God. And in God is where we are. It is not where we are going or where we hope to be one day. It is certainly not a place we get to by dying. Jesus is very clear about this. God created us like Him and in Him and that is unalterable.

Pretending to live in a strange world does not make it happen. We dream of life and death, but we only Live. To stop this absurd dream we need only to awaken to the simple fact that we cannot be what God created not. It is not possible to undo what God has done. We can, however, undo what we have done simply by desiring it to be undone.

For myself, I am noticing those times when I am uncertain or confused about what I want. My desire to abandon my imaginative play must be unqualified. If I value anything in the illusion then I will keep the illusion. If I reserve the right to judge then I have chosen the illusion. If I reserve the right to see myself as less than or better than someone else, I have chosen the illusion. So I watch my mind for the things I still think I want, and I realize that I do not want them. They are sharp edged toys that hurt me and I don’t want to play with them anymore.

The other thing I do is to remind myself of Who I am and What I am. I do this often. I remember that my mind is healed and Whole now! This is not something I have to earn or a goal I seek. It is the truth right now! I am God’s child, His holy Son, His perfect creation. Everything else is just part of the illusion, nothing, the remnants of a dream I have awakened from. I have lost interest in fixing the dream. What is the point? And when old habits lure me back into the dream, I shake myself awake again. I will not deny myself, and I will not deny God.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 3,Part 2 11-21-13

II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 3 Part 2
3 Yet projection will always hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its only purpose is to keep the separation going. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel different from your brothers and separated from them. The ego justifies this on the grounds that it makes you seem “better” than they are, thus obscuring your equality with them still further. Projection and attack are inevitably related, because projection is always a means of justifying attack. Anger without projection is impossible. The ego uses projection only to destroy your perception of both yourself and your brothers. The process begins by excluding something that exists in you but which you do not want, and leads directly to excluding you from your brothers.

I am going to buy a new car, an activity I don’t look forward to. I feel at a disadvantage in this situation. I am not good at looking at all the aspects of a situation and pinpointing the ones that really matter. I am not good at thinking on my feet. I need time and solitude to sift through the facts and then allow the solution to rise to the surface. Being a sales person myself, you would think I would be able to handle the situation with another sales person better, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

As I was sitting here thinking about how to write about projection, my mind wandered to the dreaded car-buying project. I began to pay attention to my thoughts and saw a lot of projection going on. I was feeling judgmental and resentful of car salesmen. I was thinking of defense strategies.

I see that I feel I lack the skills to do this job well, and this makes me feel vulnerable and weak. I don’t like feeling this way so I projected onto some unknown sales person. I made the sales person the problem and then started planning my defenses against him. I noticed that I was beginning to feel angry and resentful of someone I have yet to meet. I start by thinking I have a problem, and end up making some man my enemy. Right from the comfort of my home. Jeez.

Looking at this I see that my first error was in losing my sense of purpose. Is it my purpose to get a good deal on a car? Or is it my purpose to awaken? How can I use this experience to help me and everyone else awaken? Certainly it is not going to help my cause to separate myself from my brother through projection. Awakening doesn’t occur through making separate, and placing blame.

Not only did my exercise in projection make me feel separate from this person I have not even met, it made him seem like an enemy and me feel like a helpless victim. Even more important, these projections reinforce the belief in separation and the belief that I need to defend myself in this way, that is, projection protects me. If I believe this, I am not going to be interested in letting this device go.

As I have become aware of how important it is that I let go of the whole idea of projection, I have become vigilant for projection thoughts in my mind. It seems that projection is pervasive in my thinking. This does not mean, however, that I cannot stop. It has become just as much a habit for me to stop when I notice that I am projecting. I stop and ask that the Holy Spirit heal my mind of this kind of thinking.

At first I did this because I knew I was hurting myself. Now I do it because I really want to experience unconditional and universal love. I want to remember what it feels like to know that I am one with everything and everyone. I want to remember my Father as I knew Him before I dabbled in the separation game.

These desires dwarf the belief I need to feel savvy on the car lot, and that I need to leave the winner. In fact, the very thought makes me laugh. I’m through making plans on my own. I remind myself this morning that it is all an illusion and why would I want to fix the illusion. I turn my attention back to the truth and the only thing that matters. I surrender the whole process to the Holy Spirit and invite Him to use this body as His channel in this situation as in any other.

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Study of the Text,II. the Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 3. 11-20-13

II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 3
3 Yet projection will always hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its only purpose is to keep the separation going. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel different from your brothers and separated from them. The ego justifies this on the grounds that it makes you seem “better” than they are, thus obscuring your equality with them still further. Projection and attack are inevitably related, because projection is always a means of justifying attack. Anger without projection is impossible. The ego uses projection only to destroy your perception of both yourself and your brothers. The process begins by excluding something that exists in you but which you do not want, and leads directly to excluding you from your brothers.

This is so simple that I am astounded that it took me so long to work it out. For years I have been first learning what projection is, then learning to notice it when I projected. After that I had to understand that I don’t need projection and finally that I don’t want projection. The only reason I ever believed that I needed and wanted projection is that I thought it protected me.

At his workplace someone I know was very angry with another person. I saw so clearly what was happening. This person was angry because he was fearful. He was afraid of losing what he values in the world, and because he puts such a heavy emphasis on these things, he was fearful indeed. He cannot face his fear, and is not ready to do anything about fear itself, so he projects.

He sees others at fault and decides they are the reason he is endangered and this allows him to be angry instead of fearful, which is more comfortable for him. Now, in his mind, there is nothing for him to do. He sees himself as blameless. Sadly, though, he is also now helpless. It is all someone else’s fault and so there is little he can do to fix the problem.

Additionally, he has now made enemies out of his brothers. He makes a habit of this (as do most people) and so everyone becomes his enemy, if not now, then potentially. He has surrounded himself with enemies and so where can he feel safe? Who can he trust? His wife might stray. His children might betray his expectations for them. His employees might be disloyal and certainly, eventually will disappoint. There is no refuge in his life.

Understanding the cost of projection, I cannot imagine returning to projection as my defense against life. Now when I project I see it quickly and I see it for what it is, and I quickly withdraw my projections. I am not interested in finding someone to blame, but want only to know that my mind is healed and whole right now and everything else is just an illusion of my own making. This is the solution, the protection that I had been seeking and not finding through projection.

Is it hard to let go of my projection? It used to be very hard sometimes because I was so afraid to let go of the idea that I needed a scapegoat. I thought that someone else to blame would leave me blameless, but I was wrong about that. In fact, I am blameless regardless of what I do, and I don’t need someplace to put blame because there is no blame to displace.

It was hard at first because I was so afraid of my own culpability, so guilty in my mind that I was terrified to stand naked without my projections. I was sure that I would be punished and suffer for my guilt. I was afraid that God would see the darkness on my soul and would never forgive me, so I tried to throw it on someone else and make him look guilty instead.

This was my hidden agenda, buried deeply within my mind so that I could pretend I was but an innocent victim of the world. Looking at it now I can only laugh. That God would create an innocent victim is so ridiculous I had to be insane to have believed it, and really, I didn’t believe it. I refused to look at it, but in my heart I knew this couldn’t be true and my subterfuge simply increased my guilt and fear. What a relief it is to have finally let this go! 

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 2, 11-19-13

II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 2
2 What you project you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated. By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you attacked yourself out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe.

One of the ego’s most cherished “gifts” is judgment. While I listen to the ego I believe I not only can judge but that I should judge. The ego says it is not only my right but also my responsibility. Putting aside for the moment how unqualified the ego is to judge, let’s look at what happens once I judge.

I have been trying on the idea that my mind is healed and whole right now. Right now! That there is nothing else for me to do, and that, really, there never was anything for me to do. I am already what I seek, and that everything I have been judging against was just an illusion, and who needs to fix an illusion?  The ego has a lot of judgment about that. In fact, the ego is jumping up and down in judgment!

I’ve been studying the ego for over 30 years so I know the ego when I hear it. I know all its tricks and all its arguments. I know it so well that I am sick to death of it. But until the last couple of years, I have never seriously considered peeling it off of me. Now that I have decided that I am through with it and that I won’t let it lead me into death before I can do that, the ego is pulling out all the stops to keep me glued to its tired old stories.

The ego can only exist in the dark. If it is brought into the light it loses its glamour. It’s like a disco I used to work at that looked exciting and even beautiful at night with all the lights dimmed, and the globe in the center of the dance floor flashing on and off, confusing the eye. But when the place closed, all the customers were gone, and the lights came on, it was exposed for the shabby place it really was.

So this is what I am doing with the ego. I am turning on the lights. I am exposing it for what it is. In its desperation to keep me in the blame game the ego has been bringing out all the old guilt scenarios it can find in my mind, the ones I claimed to have forgiven and left behind. It is bringing them out in the hopes that some of them still have some charge.

Here is an example. I notice a memory of my daughter and I having an argument. She is a young woman and is in trouble. I have no idea how to help her or even if I can. This is all that is happening. My daughter is having a moment in her story and I am supposed to play a part. As I review this memory the ego gave me I feel compassion for my daughter and compassion for the clueless and frightened mother I was at that time.

This is not the reaction the ego was hoping for. The reaction it wants is shame and guilt. It wants to reinforce separation and the need for it. And this is exactly the reaction it got at the time this incident occurred. At that time the ego told me I must judge this situation and act appropriately according to the judgment, and not knowing any better, this is what I did.

This is how the ego wants it to work. As that young mother I had no idea how to help my daughter. When I looked at her I felt helpless and I hated that feeling. I thought helpless meant that I really was the worst mother ever. I thought of all the mistakes I had made as a mom and how that made me guilty for the problems she was having now. It was awful, excruciating, really, and I didn’t think I could stand it so I threw it out of me onto her, and then I wiped my memory of that act. There, it is all her fault. This is projection.

Then, nanoseconds later, I looked at my daughter and I saw that while I was very afraid for her she seemed very calm, even unconcerned. I judged her for this, deciding that she was so immature she didn’t even get how much trouble she was in. She was so selfish and self-centered that she didn’t care what she was doing to me or what it would cost me. I become very angry with her and said something harsh to wake her up to her behavior, to make her want to change. I was desperate, and then afterwards I was ashamed.

In my judgment I saw her as wrong and selfish. I made her separate from me. This act of making separate (because I believed I could really do that) caused me to feel guilty though I didn’t consciously understand that making separate always increases guilt. The increasing guilt caused my anger to escalate and my projection onto my daughter was escalated as well. I saw the whole thing as a selfish act by a self-centered girl.

My thoughts went like this. “She doesn’t care for me at all and only wants to use me to get her out of trouble again. I should just leave her to stew in her own juices.” In my desperation to avoid blame, I put the blame on her and that act made me feel even worse. In trying to defend myself, to keep myself safe, I attacked her and in attacking her, I attacked myself.

This is the ego’s idea of a gift. No thank you. I don’t want judgment, and without judgment there is no guilt, and without guilt there is no use for projection. So here I am looking at this memory and the ego is having a tantrum because I am thinking that nothing really happened here. My daughter was having a moment of drama in her story. I had my own moment.

It was just a story, an illusion, a dream. If it had happened at night, and I had awoken with the memory of it in my mind, I would not have tried to fix it. The story of my daughter in trouble and me not being all that helpful is a dream that is happening in the day. Why would I want to fix a dream? My daughter and I are innocent dreamers, healed and whole and perfect. Nothing to fix.

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Study of the Text II. The Alternative to Projection, Paragraph 1, 11-18-13

II. The Alternative to Projection
1 Any split in mind must involve a rejection of part of it, and this is the belief in separation. The wholeness of God, which is His peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind that recognizes the wholeness of God’s creation. By this recognition it knows its Creator. Exclusion and separation are synonymous, as are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and is dissociation, and that once it occurs projection becomes its main defense, or the device that keeps it going. The reason, however, may not be so obvious as you think.

Here is what I think when I read this paragraph. I began with a mind that knew only truth, only wholeness. There was Love and there was the extension of Love. This is all that was in the mind and so there was perfect peace. Then there was the thought of something else and the mind was split between Love and the idea of something not Love.

In order to explore the other idea, the thought of Love had to be dissociated. One cannot know unity and know separation in the same instant. To know separation and have that experience it was necessary to exclude oneness. The moment we remember oneness we lose the idea of separation. The idea of separation is not natural to us so we needed a device to sustain it and so we made projection.

Envisioning how we came to this place of a split mind and how we keep it going, it is easy to see how we reverse it. We undo the ego (separation thinking) by losing interest in separation and placing our mind on only the truth. We stop projecting and the thought system of separation must collapse. In A Course in Miracles, we learn what is going on and how to recognize it as it is happening. We learn that there is an alternative and that the alternative is preferable.

Then we start to back out of the separation idea a step at a time, but that can be accelerated the moment we decide that we want nothing else but the truth. The actual change in mind is that simple, we choose again. All of the work involved is to bring us to the place where we want nothing but God. This explanation may be too simplistic, and it may not be exactly the way it happened, but it is a helpful explanation that I was led to.

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Study of the Text II. The Message of the Crucifixion, Paragraph 19, 11-15-13

I. The Message of the Crucifixion, Paragraph 19
19 Remember that the Holy Spirit is the communication link between God the Father and His separated Sons. If you will listen to His Voice you will know that you cannot either hurt or be hurt, and that many need your blessing to help them hear this for themselves. When you perceive only this need in them, and do not respond to any other, you will have learned of me and will be as eager to share your learning as I am.

When I read these paragraphs my mind immediately looks for an example of what he is telling me. Finding real life examples helps me to understand. Here is the one that came to mind. Several years ago I was invited to join a closed group to share my thoughts. Immediately, my writing was attacked by one person in particular. This happened both times I shared.

My first reaction was a thrill of fear. What if I am all wrong and this person found me out? I had always suspected that and it brought up guilt that I was a bad Course student and was misquoting the Voice for God. This happened at a time when I was just beginning to gain confidence in my ability to hear that Voice.

After the fear passed, I thought about it and decided that it would not be helpful for me to stay in the group. I had no desire to cause upset and since I was the only person who wrote from my own experience and from the Voice I hear, maybe this was not the place to do so. But when I politely bowed out, I was asked to stay.

Two things happened because I stayed. First, I learned to look at my self-doubt with the Holy Spirit and allow it to be healed. The second thing is that I learned to see that the person who attacked me, did so out of their own self-doubt and fear. If I defended myself against this person I would be teaching us both that the attack was real and had real affects, and that sometimes attack is justified. This is a lesson I wanted neither to teach nor to learn.

I continued to write what I was given and to allow comments to be made without reaction on my part. My gift to this person was to teach defenselessness. The gift to myself was to learn that I am not in need of defense. Life is more peaceful since I realized that nothing is personal. It is very rare for me these days to feel even an urge to defend my writing or my teaching. When someone challenges it, I recognize it for the opportunity to teach defenselessness that it is.

Now here is an example that happened recently. Because it was not connected to my spiritual work, I was temporarily thrown off guard and didn’t see it as clearly as I did the new group incident. There is someone at work who challenges my work skills. I have been doing this job for 20 years and he has been doing it for one, so at first glance the challenge is ridiculous. But, never the less, I found myself reacting both in my mind and occasionally out loud.

Each time it has happened, I have talked to the Holy Spirit about how I feel and showed Him my thoughts about the situation and about this man. I saw that I was feeling like I was the old one being discarded so this young energetic man could take my place. There was no proof of this and highly unlikely, but there it was, the fearful thought that was driving my behavior.

I asked that my mind be healed and I accepted that healing. I was vigilant for thoughts that indicate I had not accepted the Atonement for this. I remembered that this is all an illusion and does not need to be fixed. I remembered my purpose, which has nothing to do with securing my position at work, and everything to do with teaching defenselessness.  I accepted the Atonement.

Now I see his fear of not succeeding and I understand this fear. I see that he thought of me as an obstacle to overcome and as a barrier to his happiness. What can I do about this? My guidance is to be gentle and defenseless. Here is what it looks like. I read his report and saw that he didn’t know something important about this customer. I told him what he needed to know. He responded with sarcasm.

I asked the Holy Spirit how I should respond. I then assured him that I wasn’t criticizing him and that I was sharing this information only because I value his work and have confidence in him. (That was not my first thought, by the way, and I am glad that I chose to ask Spirit before I responded.) Since that time my mind has cleared of any desire to defend against this young man. I recognize that my defenses were a result of my fear and not anything to do with him. I let my mind be healed and that was all I needed to do. Now I am teaching with the Holy Spirit instead of the ego.

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