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Study of the Text II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 5, 10-8-13

II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 5
10-8-13
5 God does not guide, because He can share only perfect knowledge. Guidance is evaluative, because it implies there is a right way and also a wrong way, one to be chosen and the other to be avoided. By choosing one you give up the other. The choice for the Holy Spirit is the choice for God. God is not in you in a literal sense; you are part of Him. When you chose to leave Him He gave you a Voice to speak for Him, because He could no longer share His knowledge with you without hindrance. Direct communication was broken because you had made another voice.

I made a voice other than God’s and decided to believe everything it said as if it were my god now. That’s kind of scary when I think about it, and I suppose that little twinge of anxiety I feel when I write this is because I am touching on that deep well of unconscious guilt that resides deep in my mind. I think I replaced God and now He can’t even talk to me because I cut Him out of my awareness. It feels scary because I am afraid He is angry about this, but if He were angry He would not have given me a Guide, a Voice to speak for Him.

Direct communication with God has been cut off, not by Him, but by me. I chose to make another voice and I can choose for God instead. This is what I am doing as I practice A Course in Miracles. I am choosing to have the ego undone because the ego is the thing that hinders our communication. I do this by choosing the Holy Spirit over the ego and by doing this consistently until I no longer hear two voices.

There are times when I feel like this is an impossible task. I am encouraged to know that I am in God. How could I be separated from God when I live in Him? And yet, I am no longer in direct communication with my Creator, and I am no longer in peace. The only answer must be that I am not actually separate, but am dreaming of being separate. I am now tired of this dream and am ready to wake up. The Holy Spirit is guiding me out of the dream as I allow Him to undo the ego a belief at a time.

I used to have very low self esteem. Every time I would feel less-than I would ask for healing. I slowly let go of each mistaken thought as I allowed the Holy Spirit to replace that thought with a true one. I cannot hold two diametrically opposed beliefs at the same time. If I believe Holy Spirit then the ego belief is gone. It really is that simple, and yet it took years for me to accept that I cannot be less than someone else. It was not Holy Spirit doing a poor job of guiding me; it was me being balky at letting go of something I thought I needed, but in the end I did it.

Each ego belief that I allow to be undone by the Holy Spirit makes it easier to do the next. He and I are working on a core belief now. I asked Him to help me let go of the belief in guilt, and frankly its kicking my butt. But I know that, together, we will succeed and so it is easier to do than it would have been just a short time ago.  The guilty thoughts arise for me to look at with the Holy Spirit, one after another, and I can get temporarily confused and begin to believe them, forgetting the purpose of looking, at least momentarily.

But now even when that happens, even when I am confused, I am not afraid. This is because I have gone through this process often enough to trust it, and there has been enough mind healing that I am more familiar with the process. This is why the Holy Spirit works with us at a pace we can tolerate. If I had done this before I was ready it would not have worked. I would have run from the guilt thoughts, throwing them at others where I could, and furiously burying them as I have before. If there is one thing I have learned it is that I can trust Holy Spirit. If I am guided to look at something it is because I am ready and I can do it.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 4 10-7-13

II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 4
10-7-13
4 You are the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your mind and so you need a new light. The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let banish the idea of darkness. His is the glory before which dissociation falls away, and the Kingdom of Heaven breaks through into its own. Before the separation you did not need guidance. You knew as you will know again, but as you do not know now.

We are at the end of our journey, you and I. It may not seem so because of all the mistaken thoughts that are coming up for healing, but it is, never the less, true. In fact, our awareness of those thoughts is an integral part of that healing. We would not be doing this study, or certainly not sticking with it unless we were ready to wake up. The closer I get the more aware I become of the guilt and fear thoughts. I know that this is good, but Myron feels anxious about this, and since I am still fairly identified with her, I feel her anxiety.

I also feel eager for the next step and the next. This is good, but the two emotions together, anxiety and eagerness create a sense of conflict in the mind and that is not comfortable. I’m writing about it this morning because Byron Katie says all war belongs on paper and war is what it feels like. I am at war with myself, wanting to wake up, but afraid to leave my dream.

The ending of this story is not in doubt, however I might feel conflicted about it. Light always banishes darkness, and I have invited the Light to shine in my mind. I invite it every time I notice the dark thoughts that still have a place in my mind. Jesus is reminding me that the darkness is not a permanent condition and that I was not always asleep.

Before the separation I did not need a guide but since I dream of separation, I am grateful for the Helper in my mind. I intend to take full advantage of Him, being vigilant for the beliefs that He would shine away at my say-so. I am also comforted to know that my brother, Jesus, stands at the to correct any errors that I cannot correct. Thank you, Brother.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 10-4-13 II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 3

II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 3
10-4-13
3 The principle of Atonement and the separation began at the same time. When the ego was made, God placed in the mind the Call to joy. This Call is so strong that the ego always dissolves at Its sound. That is why you must choose to hear one of two voices within you. One you made yourself, and that one is not of God. But the other is given you by God, Who asks you only to listen to it. The Holy Spirit is in you in a very literal sense. His is the Voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be again. It is possible even in this world to hear only that Voice and no other. It takes effort and great willingness to learn. It is the final lesson that I learned, and God’s Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Sons.

I was reading in the Manual for Teachers this morning: “Heaven is here. There is nowhere else. Heaven is now. There is no other time.” So there is nothing for me to do to be what I am, nowhere to go. It is not in the future or the past. There is only now. But I don’t really know that. I still think I am something else. I still think that Heaven is someplace else. I know the words that refute that, and I believe they must be true, but if I really knew them I would experience life differently than I do.

On the other hand, my life does reflect my growing acceptance of the Atonement, and I have no doubt that I will soon be where I was before and will be again, that is, I will remember who I am. This is happening because I am learning to listen to that one Voice, the Voice for God, and my goal is to hear only that Voice. Right now I still hear the ego voice, but I deny its ability to affect me. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said that it takes effort and great willingness to learn to hear only this Voice, but it is worth every bit of it.

Because I ask for guilt and fear to be undone in my mind, I get to see a lot of it. This is necessary because for it to be undone I must look at it with the Holy Spirit. With so much of this happening right now I sometimes get discouraged. I see all this fear and guilt and think I haven’t made any progress at all. But while the well of guilt and fear is very deep in us, it is not endless. And I am capable of doing my part. I know this because Jesus said that what he asked us to do, we can do.

Something that helped me to feel more confident came from Chapter 14. It says: “You can learn to bless, and cannot give what you have not. If, then, you offer blessing, it must have come first to yourself. And you must also have accepted it as yours, for how else could you give it away? That is why miracles offer you the testimony that you are blessed.”

The reason this has helped me is that even when I am completely tangled up in my fear and guilt thoughts to such a degree that I have forgotten why I am looking at them, I can still teach the truth without any of that confusion. Because I give that truth I know that I have that truth and that I have accepted it, or I would not be able to give it. This helps me to remember why I am looking at all these thoughts of guilt and fear. I am looking so they can be healed. I am not guilty; I am only looking.

Sometimes it is really uncomfortable to look at the thoughts in my mind, but it is an essential part of the process that allows them to be purified. In doing this work, I am making the effort and giving my willingness to be healed, and thus I am waking up. I am remembering who I am as I accept the Atonement for these thoughts. I am learning to hear only that one Voice.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 2 10-3-13

II. The Voice for God, Paragraph 2
10-3-13
2 The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy. He is the Call to return with which God blessed the minds of His separated Sons. This is the vocation of the mind. The mind had no calling until the separation, because before that it had only being, and would not have understood the call to right thinking. The Holy Spirit is God’s Answer to the separation; the means by which the Atonement heals until the whole mind returns to creating.

We are not really here. We are dreaming of an impossible existence. It is not our entire mind that is dreaming, just a part of it. We continue to be just as we always have. We are with God. We create. We have creations who love us, just as we love our creator. But we are also, at the same time, dreaming of separation, and the part of the mind that dreams is fully involved in the dream and doesn’t remember that it is just a dream.

I am beginning to remember, just as you are. God placed the answer to the separation in our mind so that when the time came, when we were ready to awaken, we would have the means to do so. This answer is the Holy Spirit, the call to joy. As I get closer to awakening I long for that joy. There was a time when I thought the way out of here was death and in my confusion and depression I considered suicide, but I wasn’t sure that I was right and so I held off.

Now I understand that death is not an answer. It is just another part of the dream. But even my misguided longing to get out of this life made sense, just not the plan for doing it. I am ready to leave the story behind and return all of my mind to God. I am ready to return to true creation. Death is not the exit I thought it was, but there is an exit. As I turn my attention to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to heal my mind, I undo the world I made up. All that will be left is Reality.

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Study of the Text II. The Voice for God 10-2-13

II. The Voice for God
10-2-13
1 Healing is not creating; it is reparation. The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed. This alteration of the time sequence should be quite familiar, because it is very similar to the shift in the perception of time that the miracle introduces. The Holy Spirit is the motivation for miracle-mindedness; the decision to heal the separation by letting it go. Your will is still in you because God placed it in your mind, and although you can keep it asleep you cannot obliterate it. God Himself keeps your will alive by transmitting it from His Mind to yours as long as there is time. The miracle itself is a reflection of this union of will between Father and Son.

It is my will to awaken from the dream of separation and to return my full mind to God. This will has been asleep, out of my conscious awareness, for most of my life. This has happened because it is what I wanted to happen. While I can be oblivious to my will, I cannot destroy or lose or even change my will because God keeps it alive for me. I must have changed my mind about remembering my will because it is beginning to surface.

The Holy Spirit is in my mind to help me with this. Because I want to awaken, the Holy Spirit looks with me at the ego beliefs which have been blocking the awareness of God’s Love, and transforms these beliefs. For instance, in order to sustain the belief that I am separate from God, I have had to project an image of a body and give it autonomy. I make it seem as if the body gets sick and suffers and needs magical help to recover. I give it medicines and exercise it and sometimes I have to take it to a doctor to save it.

The Holy Spirit is teaching me that this is insane. The body is only an image of a belief in my mind. It cannot cause anything, being an effect itself. It cannot get sick or suffer or die. When it does these things it is only because it was so directed by the mind. So when it seems I have pain in the body, I really have pain in the mind which I then project onto the body. In this way I convince myself that the pain is real and so is the body because it feels the pain. Because I seem to be feeling pain, I seem to prove that I am the body.

No matter how much care I take to preserve my “self” the body continues to age and to suffer sickness, eventually to die. This is perfectly ego, which always seeks only to fail in what it seeks. I am a part of God, but as ego I see myself as separate and different from ego. I become my own creator, as I see myself as a body. I am not a very good creator, but I am a jealous god. I would rather be sick and suffer than to give into the truth.

I use my pathetic creation to prove that God has no power over me. I can be sick and there is nothing He can do about it.  I prove I can stand outside and apart from God and that He can’t get to me. Better to be fat, unhealthy, in pain, even to die than to subject myself to God. No wonder I feel afraid of Him. I seem to have made God my enemy and my only defense against Him is the pathetically inadequate and weak body.

This is what the Holy Spirit is showing me. And He is showing me the insanity of it all. God is Love. God is Life. I could never be a body and I could never be sick or suffer. I certainly could never die. I can pretend to be outside of Life and Love, but I cannot actually do that. As I look at these thoughts in my mind and ask the Holy Spirit to heal them, and as I become willing to accept the Atonement for them, I begin to awaken to the truth. I can never have a separate will from God because I can never be separate from God.

The miracle is the change of mind that allows me to remember the truth that God and I are joined forever and nothing can come between us, not even my dreams of separation. Just as my beliefs of separation have been projected as if they were outside me, the happier dreams of union are being projected outward as well. They appear as literal miracles in my life.

I need to know something and there it is, in a book or a recording. I didn’t search for it as I didn’t even know what it looked like. I needed it and it was there. I was in pain and remembered that pain is not possible and the pain went away. I was in fear and remembered that fear is not part of God and asked for healing. The fear vanished as if it were smoke blown by the wind. My mind was darkened by a long held grievance, and in a moment of sanity I asked for healing and the grievance disappeared. I cannot even remember what it felt like to hold that grievance. It is a miracle.

I didn’t do any of these things from within the dreamy world of separation. I welcomed the miracle of a healed mind and the miracle was projected onto the world. I know it is a miracle when it comes from outside my ego mind, when I know that Myron could not have done it. The miracle in the world is a symbol of the healed mind that remembers, even if for just a moment, the union of Father and Son.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 7 10-1-13

I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 7
10-1-13
7 The Holy Spirit, the shared Inspiration of all the Sonship, induces a kind of perception in which many elements are like those in the Kingdom of Heaven itself:
First, its universality is perfectly clear, and no one who attains it could believe for one instant that sharing it involves anything but gain.
Second, it is incapable of attack and is therefore truly open. This means that although it does not engender knowledge, it does not obstruct it in any way.
Finally, it points the way beyond the healing that it brings, and leads the mind beyond its own integration toward the paths of creation. It is at this point that sufficient quantitative change occurs to produce a real qualitative shift.

The Holy Spirit corrects my perception so that it is as close to knowledge as we can get here, and my perception becomes universal. I notice that I am slowly letting go of the idea of specialness and am beginning to see everyone as the same. I remember being freaked out as I sat on the bridge waiting for a wreck to be cleared. This is an older bridge and is considered by many not to be safe. In the opposite lane traffic continued slowly and lots of big trucks went by making the bridge shake.

I was nervous about being stuck on this bridge and when the traffic started moving, I felt tense as I neared the top and then felt relief as I got closer to the bottom. Suddenly I had the thought, “What about all the people behind me? Would a failed bridge be disastrous only if I were on it, or more disastrous if I was on it?” It was one of the first moments of perceiving more universally, or rather of glimpsing a more universal way of perceiving.

It happened other times after that. For instance, I would hear a siren in the night and automatically take roll call for my children. Where were they? Could the siren be for them? And then feeling relief and then disinterest as I realized my kids were all safe at home. And one day when this was happening I had the thought that everyone is some mother’s child, and I understood that there was a way of perceiving that is not special. I still sometimes count my children when I hear a siren, but the Holy Spirit is beginning to make some headway with me as I let go of the idea of specialness.

I began by caring most for “me” this body of Myron. My care expanded to include my family, then a husband, and when children came along, my care centered on them above all others. What has happened as my mind heals is that my care is less discriminating. I find that when someone I have not met comes into my awareness I can care as deeply for that person as for someone I feel close to. This is not complete for me, but as my perception is corrected my care grows to encompass all and it is beginning to feel strange to think of anyone as more special than another.

There is enough of a healing of the mind for me to understand that love cannot be diluted through giving it. I cannot give love away in the sense of not having it, as would happen if I gave away a thing. My care does not lose value because it extends to everyone in my awareness. I don’t love my children less because I love your children.

I think that in the past I must have been thinking that there is only so much safety and love to go around and so if there was danger I had to put all my hopes and wishes toward the few people who mattered to me and to do less would leave them vulnerable to attack. For that reason I couldn’t afford to care about someone else’s child, or at least not about everyone’s child. This seems so weird to me now that I wonder if that was really the way I thought, but I think it was. 

Is my perception now truly open and incapable attack? No, but it is closer to that. I am still capable of attack. I attack myself when I feel guilty and attack others when I assign guilt. I cannot be open if I am defensive. I am so much more open than I used to be and I attack less and when I do, I see my error and ask for correction. I look forward to the day when I am truly incapable of attack.

I can now imagine that happening and that is exciting for me. I notice that now when I have an attack thought I remember that I cannot attack my brother and enter into the presence of God. This motivates me to allow my perception to be further corrected. Letting go of the belief that I must attack and defend is the way the blocks to Loves presence are removed.

As I allow my mind to be healed in many little ways, I begin to experience a different life. I am happier and more peaceful. At first it was slow going as I became convinced that it was ok to give up the old way of thinking and then I realized it was more than ok, it was actually to my advantage. Eventually what has happened is that I care less about what is to “my” advantage and instead I began thinking in terms of the Sonship. Is this going to advance us or hinder us, will it help awaken the Sonship or add to Its illusion. When that happened I realized I had made a significant shift in my perception.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text I.The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 6 9-30-13

I. The Invitation to the Holy Spirit, Paragraph 6
9-30-13
6 God honored even the miscreations of His children because they had made them. But He also blessed His children with a way of thinking that could raise their perceptions so high they could reach almost back to Him. The Holy Spirit is the Mind of the Atonement. He represents a state of mind close enough to One-mindedness that transfer to it is at last possible. Perception is not knowledge, but it can be transferred to knowledge, or cross over into it. It might even be more helpful here to use the literal meaning of transferred or “carried over,” since the last step is taken by God.

In order to help us accept the Atonement, Jesus spends a lot of the Course describing the ego. He explains it in detail, what it is, how we recognize it, the behavior that we can expect when we identify with the ego. He then contrasts this with life lived from a healed mind. The goal is to help us see that we don’t want to continue to live through the ego and that we do want to let it go.

While in this phase I began to think of the ego as something bad and something I really needed to dump. Over time my attitude changed. I began to look at the ego differently. Instead of seeing it as a terrible mistake I made and desperately needed to undo, I saw it as an idea gone askew. I had a thought, the thought played out and then I stopped thinking it. Except for the part of the mind that is still reviewing the thought, and this is where my awareness seems to be right now.

Because of my nature as the Son of God, the thought I had, while impossible, played out in all its detail as if it were really happening, and it seemed very realistic, like a finely crafted movie. It is a testimony to my power as God’s Son that this could happen. The error, the place it all went wrong, is that I began to take it seriously. I felt guilt and fear that I had actually done something wrong and I hid myself from my Father within my miscreation. The idea itself, the unfolding of that idea was not a sin. It was not inherently evil or wrong. In fact, Jesus says that God honored my miscreation simply because it was mine.

The shift for me is that I am letting go of the shame that was the original error. I am learning to honor my own miscreation. I don’t want to continue identifying with it as if it is myself, but I see that it is important that I understand I am not guilty for it. It is actually quite a remarkable feat. I have made something impossible and made it so well that I got lost in it.

God would never limit me in anyway because limitation is not part of His nature. But in His love for me, He placed in my mind a way out of this miscreation. He brought into being the Holy Spirit, the memory of God and His Voice that speaks to me all through the day.  It is His function to direct me out of the illusion and back to my real life when I was ready.

So the Holy Spirit is helping me to see the ego thinking in my mind, recognize it as something I am no longer interested in and allow it to be undone for me, not because it is a sin, but because I am through with it. The only way to have my illusion was to substitute perception for knowledge, so now the Holy Spirit is inspiring my perceptions so that they are very near knowledge, near enough that Knowledge Itself can flow into my mind. Perception will be transferred into knowledge, or as Jesus refers to it, God will take the final step and lift me up to Him.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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