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Gentle Healing Lesson 165.  9-29-19

I skipped this lesson so I am making up for it now.
LESSON 165

Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.

Journal
“The Thought of God created you. It left you not, nor have you ever been apart from it an instant. It belongs to you. By it you live. It is your Source of life, holding you one with it, and everything is one with you because it left you not. The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love. Eternity and everlasting life shine in your mind, because the Thought of God has left you not, and still abides with you.”

I know that the Thought of God is not just me thinking about God. It is the Creative Force that is Life. I could not have lost that or I would not live. It remains with me even in my dreams of separation. All the things that the Thought of God gives me, care, protection, happiness and love, are still there for me and if that is not my experience it is because I have turned away from them. My attention is on the ego’s gifts of pain, suffering and death. As I have released more and more of the ego beliefs, my experience is closer to my reality.

“Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow.”

It’s a good thing this is true. When I started asking for healing, I was not entirely certain I wanted it. I wanted to be free of the effects of choosing ego, but I sometimes still wanted to feel like a victim or unfairly treated. I often wanted to keep pointing at my brother as the guilty one so as to obscure my part. But that I asked, meant that I was answered. And, as I was able, I accepted the answer even if I had to do so a little at a time.

“Ask with desire.”

When I first began this journey, I asked out of desperation for a better life. It took a while before that asking changed to one of true desire. Now my heart longs for the memory of Self and the memory of the oneness of God. Now the answers come quicker and I embrace them faster and more completely.

“Now is all doubting past, the journey’s end made certain, and salvation given you. Now is Christ’s power in your mind, to heal as you were healed. For now you are among the saviors of the world.”

This isn’t 100% true for me 100% of the time, but it is truer for me than it ever has been, and true enough for me to know that the journey’s end is imminent. Abundance dwells in me and what deprivation is left in my mind is being undone even now as I write about this. It cannot cut me off from God’s sustaining Love.

“We count on God, and not upon ourselves, to give us certainty. And in His Name we practice as His Word directs we do. His sureness lies beyond our every doubt. His Love remains beyond our every fear. The Thought of Him is still beyond all dreams and in our minds, according to His Will.”

Regina’s Tips

Today’s workbook lesson encourages us to practice with hope, because hope counteracts doubt.

What if we replaced every thought of doubt with a thought of hope? For example, we could replace, “I do not want truth enough” with “I must want truth more than I think, because spirituality is an ongoing focus in my life.”

Which do you think benefits the purpose of awakening more: negative thoughts of doubt or positive thoughts of hope? Which do you think benefits the ego more?

Let’s do two things today:

1 – Pay particular attention to discover the thoughts of doubt that you listen to. Look at those thoughts with reason, meaning notice that those thoughts serve the ego and discourage spiritual aspiration. Look for reasonable thoughts of hope to replace them with, thoughts that encourage you instead of discouraging you.

2 – Continue to notice awareness-life-presence. Throughout the day, each time you remember, take a moment to notice that you are aware and you exist. Even when you are distracted from awareness-life-presence by doubt, you are still aware and you still exist. Doubt does not change the truth; it only denies it.

My Thoughts

One of my common doubt thoughts was that I do not practice well enough or long enough to realize truth. That is no longer true for me. I have noticed the Holy Spirit’s nudge from time to time to give more time to meditation. It feels more like a strong desire to meditate or just an awareness that I am not as happy when I don’t give time for meditation. It is not that same feeling of dread that I used to have when I thought I was slacking off and my laziness or inability to do this right was going to keep me in hell. I am grateful for these gentle reminders.

© 2019, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Gentle Healing Lesson 166, Manual for Teachers, Text.  9-26-19

LESSON 166
I am entrusted with the gifts of God.

God has given us everything. The reason we are not aware of His gifts is because we do not see that our will is one with His. We made a world of our own with a separate will. The world is not real and neither is separate will.  “…but every mind that looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in one God.”

While we believe in our own separate will and while we prefer it to our true will which is one with God’s Will, we will believe that accepting God’s gifts will be capitulation. It would be a denial of the little self. And so we suffer and think the suffering is a small price to pay to preserve the world we made.

We are so confused. We are afraid to give up the world we know for the world that is our Home but is no longer in our conscious memory. We think we want to be human because we have forgotten what it is like to be Divine Beings. But even in this amnesiac state in which we find ourselves, God goes with us. We are lost in our own senseless wandering mind, but not lost to God who knows us and loves us.

No matter how tragic the story and now much we seem to suffer, we remain as we were created, we remain eternal and perfect. We are literally choosing to replace reality with this imagined world. We defend against Heaven and refuse to see the evidence that proves we are not what God created.

Here is something I wrote a short time ago. I said that I must be closer to awakening, to accepting the truth. I say this because I utter the truth such as I am as God created me. I am an eternal and divine being. I am in God and of God right now. And this time when I remind myself of the truth, I feel a frisson of fear pass through me. It’s hard to put into words. Maybe like, how could that be? What would that be like? I feel a desire to remain small because I know smallness and I don’t know greatness. After the fear passes, I smile because I am not interested. I know that shudder of fear is the ego and I am not the ego.

That fear passed and I became ready for the Christ to help me perceive my Self and to know my Self. I laugh at the perception of myself as small and insignificant, as fearful and guilty. I now know that I am not this body image and this sad little story. I know what is not true about me and I am letting the memory of what is true come in its own time. I simply stay open and receptive and trusting.

“God’s Will does not oppose. It merely is. It is not God you have imprisoned in your plan to lose your Self. He does not know about a plan so alien to His Will. There was a need He did not understand, to which He gave an Answer. That is all. And you who have this Answer given you have need no more of anything but this.”

People often wonder how it is that God could not know of our plan to lose our Self and choose an alien will with which to do this. If we are in God, and God is in us, then how could He not know about our life here and our fears and guilt? I like to remember that God does not believe, God knows and what He knows is eternal and unchangeable. If God knew of the world then the world would be eternal and unchangeable. Not something to wish for, is it?

I don’t know God the Father, and so I cannot know the actual answer to that question of how it is that we can be part of God and yet He not be aware of the world we made. The closest I can come is to think of our experience here as a dream. I am in God and part of the mind is dreaming. God knows that the dream is interrupting our communication and thus interrupting our joy and peace,  and so He placed His Voice within us so that we could awaken when we were ready. His Voice is the answer to our suffering.

“The gifts you have are not for you alone.”

The Voice for God is bringing us back to an awakened state so that we can remember who we are. But as we receive this call to awaken, we must also share it. We must learn to give. We become the teachers of God who help our brothers awaken with us. And how do we do that?

“Teach them by showing them the happiness that comes to those who feel the touch of Christ, and recognize God’s gifts. Let sorrow not tempt you to be unfaithful to your trust”

This is my commitment and I live up to it as much as I am able. When I fall short of being the living proof of what Christ’s touch can offer everyone, I correct my course and continue to walk the path. He has shared His joy with me and now my job is to share it with the world. That is my mission.

Regina’s Tips
NTI teaches that the ego began with the wish for something different than what is. Because that is the basis of the ego, that is a key element of the ego thought system. If you pay attention to your mind, you will see that this idea shows up in one form or another multiple times each day.

Today we will shift our attention from unhappiness to happiness, from the wish for something different to appreciation for the magnificent treasure that is always present.

Each time you notice the wish for something different in your mind today, pause. Shift your attention to awareness-life-presence, and spend a few moments appreciating it. Be as vigilant in this practice as you can be. I say this, because the wish for something different is a strong habit; it could occur many times during the day without you noticing it.

For example, the wish for something different may show up as the wish for more time to get things done, or as the wish for fewer things to do. It may show up as the wish for less traffic or a shorter line at the grocery store. It may show up as the wish that someone around you were different than he/she is. It may show up as the wish that you were different or that your body was different. It may show up as the wish that the world was different than it is.

Pay attention today for the wish for something different in whatever way it shows up in your thoughts, and then shift attention to notice the treasure. Let yourself feel appreciation for awareness-life-presence. Follow that by slowly saying to yourself, “I am entrusted with the gifts of God.”

My Thoughts
My mind is focused today on choosing to remember and love through my highest Self and to see myself as God the Son. It is also focused on my responsibility to share what I am given through the way I live my life. It has taken me a minute to shift my mind to another way to do this. I can also focus my awareness on the mind that wants to think things should be different.

I see the value in changing my mind about that. Thinking things should be different in my life is a reflection of the original tiny mad idea in which I wanted reality to change. So in a sense, my wish for something to be different is the same as the original wish I had for things to be different. Every day is Groundhog Day, and though the form is different, the basis of the form is the same, let today be different than reality.

So today, I will pay special attention to the desire for things to be different. I started out feeling a little frazzled so I stopped to examine my thoughts. I saw that I felt like Monday’s are too full and that I would not have time to get everything done. So, I wanted that to be different. I let that thought go by deciding that today is perfect as it is and I will get done what I get done. Interestingly enough, everything is getting done that I had planned and I am at peace while it is all happening. It just took a simple change of mind.

Text
X. The Time of Rebirth, P 4
4 It is in your power to make this season holy, for it is in your power to make the time of Christ be now. It is possible to do this all at once because there is but one shift in perception that is necessary, for you made but one mistake. It seems like many, but it is all the same. For though the ego takes many forms, it is always the same idea. What is not love is always fear, and nothing else.

Journal
I know that Jesus is right when he says that it is in our power to make the time of Christ to be now. I also know that I couldn’t do that all at once, not that it wasn’t possible but that I couldn’t do it. From a new perspective, I see how simple it really is. I recognize now that when I felt guilty for some parental error it was no different than when I felt guilty for an angry word, or that I seemed never to learn. That guilt is no different than if I had been a dangerous pedophile or a murderer. In our world of differences, there seems to be many kinds of guilt and some seem worse and some seem to hold greater importance. But that is not true. Guilt is guilt no matter what form it takes.

This same idea holds true for any other form of fear. Fear of heights is no different than fear that I will be late for the show. No matter how different it feels to me, it is just fear. Anger is another form of fear and anger that it is raining on the day I wanted to walk outside is no different than anger that a marriage failed or someone stole from me. If it is not love, it is fear.

I make a choice for Christ each time I reject the belief in fear in whatever form it takes in the moment. That is what I did and it brought me to the place I am now. It is possible to skip all the little steps I took to get to this place, but I didn’t do it that way. From this present perspective this kind of makes me laugh at how much time it took me to recognize what was right in front of me all along.

How much less painful it would have been to simply accept that if it wasn’t love it was fear and then decide I wasn’t interested in the fear. If I refuse to accept fear the only thing left is love.

Manual for Teachers
Introduction P 3
M-in.3. The curriculum you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. 2 In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. 3 Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn. 4 To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. 5 It may coincide with it, or it may not. 6 It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. 7 Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. 8 Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self-doubt. 9 This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. 10 But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.

I see that I am always teaching what I think I am, what I believe about myself and what I believe about you in relation to me. What I say may not be congruent with what I believe, but that will do nothing to change what I believe. This self I teach, and through teaching, constantly reinforce, may not be real, but if it is what I teach it becomes very real to me.

Here is an example, as I understand this. For a long time, I believed that I was a victim of the world I see. Because this was the belief in my mind, this was the interpretation I gave everything that happened to me. For instance, I did not know how to mother my first two children and did not do it well. I felt deeply ashamed and guilty, and I told myself that this was not my fault.

This was the story I told myself. My mother was a poor role model, so I was a victim of my circumstances, and of her failure as a mother. I needed to reinforce this story if I was going to believe it and convince others it was true, so I found a therapist who told me the same story. And I collected friends who were willing to witness to my victimization.

To appear even more innocent (to myself and others) I added martyr to my image as I made excuses for my mom, “she was just doing the best she could” stories. But though my words seemed charitable, they had nothing to do with what I believed, so what I was really teaching was that I was a victim, and she was guilty of victimizing me, but I was a charitable person so I was going to “forgive” her. Of course, this is not true forgiveness but rather “forgiveness to destroy”.

All the time I thought I was protecting (or maybe hiding) this image of myself through projecting blame; I was teaching victimization and learning victimization. And so, many victim stories followed. I was building this image of myself as a helpless victim with layers and layers of stories of being victimized. I often said I did not want to be a victim, and as I learned some psychology, I used different words that sounded good, but those words were hollow because I believed I was a victim and so this is what I taught.

And of course, every victim needs a victimizer so I collected those as well, and reinforced through my relationships with them that they were victimizers. What a sad and self-defeating cycle this is, and yet it is the cycle we all live in one form or another until we choose differently through choosing a different teacher. Now that I have chosen a different Teacher, my life is different so I am teaching differently.

My life doesn’t teach victimization because I can’t imagine ever again believing in victimization. The idea feels absurd to me now. My teaching in this is congruent with my beliefs and actions and so that teaching is the same in a formal situation that it is in what my life teaches. I recently let go of the belief in guilt and because this is recent, guilt thoughts still show up sometimes and my actions and words are not as free of guilt as they will be soon.

It is like I have cleaned my house, but once in a while, I notice something out of place or cobwebs I had missed, dust bunnies under the couch. I simply clean them away and enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. It is like that with guilt thoughts for me. A simple cleaning up of any fragments of the old belief. So, I am not yet teaching innocence perfectly, but will be as this process continues. As I teach myself that I am no longer interested in guilt, I teach others the same thing, and as I teach them, I reinforce the lesson for me.

© 2019, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Gentle Healing Lesson 164, Manual for Teachers, Text.  9-25-19

Lesson 164
Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.

“What time but now can truth be recognized? The present is the only time there is. And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there; not in our sight, but in the eyes of Christ.”

I am one with God. Right now. Not at some later time, am I one with God. Not after I have done something to make this happen, or come to deserve this through effort on my part. The work and effort I put into this is merely to bring me to the point of acceptance. I am already and always have been one with God and so I am That in this present moment. Not through my eyes, but through the eyes of Christ I see this.

“Christ answers for you, echoing your Self, using your voice to give His glad consent; accepting your deliverance for you.”

Jesus says that Christ answers for me, echoing my Self. I am for a moment confused by this. How is Christ and Self different? I think I understand, though. Christ refers to the Sonship as a whole, the entirety of the Sonship. Self is that entirety but also is part of that entirety. So, I can say Self is Christ, but my Self is a part of Christ. The part that is most important, that really matters in this, is that my voice (my Self, evidently, and not my self) must give consent but the Christ will accept my deliverance for me. So my awakening is done by the Christ as my Self gives consent for it.

We will not judge today. We will receive but what is given us from judgment made beyond the world.

We do have a part in this. This part seems to be up to the ‘me’ that I most identify with. For a long time, this meant the self that appears to be residing in the world of time and space in this body. I don’t identify with this self nearly as much, hardly at all, but it is the self I am experiencing and to some degree still identify with.

So Myron practices non-judgment all the time. I am always aware of the tendency to judge both other people and myself, to judge situations, to have preferences because that is a judgment as well. When I notice this, I realize I am not interested in that anymore. I believe that I can stop judging people and myself. I believe that because I see how I have changed in that way. I just don’t have the desire to judge as often as I used to.

Maybe this personality I am using in this incarnation will always have preferences and maybe it will always have a tendency to judge. I don’t know. But I have seen that those judgmental thoughts and desires are lessened and that they don’t impact me the way they used to. I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate, but I will eat either or neither without caring very much.

Open the curtain in your practicing by merely letting go all things you think you want.

This is my constant practice. I let go all things I think I want. That brings up a question in my mind. What things do I still want? Those things obstruct what I could have instead, the remembrance of my oneness in God. I want my children to be safe. I want them to live happy lives. I want them to outlive me. The first thought is that there is nothing wrong with wanting this for them. It is the loving thing to do, and how could I want otherwise?

And yet, I have seen that wanting this for anyone is suffering. They have their script to play out and it is not likely to be any different than mine. It will look different, but it will still reflect the unhealed mind and so it will have its share of suffering and it will go where it goes. Wanting it to be different will not make it different and will only cause me suffering.

Knowing this has not completely alleviated the suffering I have experienced because to some degree I resist this knowing. But I am practicing acceptance. I think of something painful that could happen to one of my children and if I follow that thought I find myself in a story and all stories lead to suffering. However, if I have that thought and I am not interested in it, the thought falls away and I have just grown in willingness and understanding. And I can’t ignore the fact that what I want for them doesn’t change what they get so the whole exercise in wanting is a waste and helps no one.

Let not today slip by without the gifts it holds for you receiving your consent and your acceptance. We can change the world, if you acknowledge them. You may not see the value your acceptance gives the world. But this you surely want; you can exchange all suffering for joy this very day.

Text
X. The Time of Rebirth, P 3
3 We who are one cannot give separately. When you are willing to accept our relationship as real, guilt will hold no attraction for you. For in our union you will accept all of our brothers. The gift of union is the only gift that I was born to give. Give it to me, that you may have it. The time of Christ is the time appointed for the gift of freedom, offered to everyone. And by your acceptance of it, you offer it to everyone.

Journal

I suppose that I must have accepted my relationship with Jesus as real since I talk to him all the time and ask him for help and advice when that is needed. I take what he says in the Course very seriously and I strived to meet the goals he has placed before me until I had done so. It sometimes felt difficult but in retrospect, I would always understand it was only my resistance that made it feel hard. And I saw that it was never a sacrifice. He is a good friend, a good elder brother.

Now I look for him everywhere and in everyone, not the human form he took, of course, but the Christ he is. If I don’t see the Christ in someone, I know that I have blinded myself with ego thoughts and judgments, so I ask for correction and I ask for Christ’s Vision. It is a gift that is readily given to me as soon as I truly want it. That is why I ask for correction first. If I keep the judgment, I will not truly want to see differently. I cannot judge and see with Christ’s Vision. I cannot be in union with someone I judge. I cannot be free until I am in union with all. With a mind free of dark thoughts I will naturally seek union and naturally offer it to everyone.

Manual for Teachers
Introduction P 2
M-in.2. To teach is to demonstrate. 2 There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. 3 From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. 4 The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. 5 The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. 6 You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. 7 Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. 8 It is a method of conversion. 9 This is not done by words alone. 10 Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. 11 No more than that, but also never less.

Jesus begins by telling us that to teach is to demonstrate. I can teach kindness and love and union all day long but if I then live a selfish, fearful life in isolation, I have demonstrated the opposite of my words. This demonstration is more powerful than anything I simply say or write. I cannot demonstrate the characteristics that are in alignment with my true nature simply by believing I should. I have to release the belief that I must defend and attack, judge and hold grievances. As I do this, I am learning to be a teacher of God rather than a teacher of ego.

Jesus emphasizes that we teach and we do so all the time. We cannot avoid teaching because our words, actions and even thoughts are teaching whether we want them to or not. Jesus says we can use the Course to learn to teach what we want to learn. I want to learn love and peace and joy. I want that to be my life, and therefore, that is what I teach as much as I can. If I see myself drawn to a grievance or a desire to defend, I feel it as if it was a sickness and I reject it as quickly as I can because I have learned to be free and I can’t give that up.

10 Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. 11 No more than that, but also never less. This passage intrigues me. My actions and words will reveal what I am rather than what I want people to think I am. I get that because I have experienced it with other people. I have seen Course teachers say one thing but then in unguarded moments they showed me that they didn’t live what they teach. I have done the same thing, I am sure. Sometimes we believe something to be true but we don’t yet know it and so it isn’t really ours yet. The Course teaches us how to achieve purification so that what we believe becomes what we know and then we will be consistent in what we teach.

The second part of that sentence says that we teach others what they are to us. Without even realizing it, I used to teach the people in my life that they were of use to me. I used them as a source of entertainment when I was bored. Sometimes, I used them to vent my frustrations. I used them to convince me I was loveable and then I used them to prove I was unlovable. It was the same with worthiness. I used others to prove whatever it was I chose to believe about myself. I used them to receive the darkness I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge as mine, projecting my stuff onto them and pretending that it had nothing to do with me. There is no way to avoid doing these things until the mind is healed. Thank God, for A Course in Miracles.

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Gentle Healing Lesson 163, Manual for Teachers, Text.  9-24-19

Gentle Healing Lesson 163
There is no death. The Son of God is free.

“Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.”

“For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible.”

God is Life and God is all there is. There is nothing outside God and therefore death can only be an illusion. Temporary forms such as the body die, but what is of God cannot die even if it thought it wanted to. I was surprised when I learned that death takes many forms, but really, I shouldn’t have been. Anything that is not part of God, that is, part of Life, must be death. There is no opposite to God and God cannot be undone by an idea of an opposite so my belief in these ideas is a belief in nothing.

We experience these many forms of death leading to the inevitable “final” death of the body because we believe in death. I am pretty sure I don’t believe in death. I don’t seem to be afraid of the idea of dying to this world, not even a temporary death. But I still believe in sadness and anger and those other forms of death so I do believe in death. However, my desire for them is fading very quickly now as I look at these thoughts and beliefs without flinching and gladly drop them.

Regina’s Tips

Today’s lesson says, “Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible.” Yet, you can watch a flower come into being, live a short time and then wither and die.

What is this lesson talking about?

Today’s lesson is looking beyond form, which is temporary, to the spirit of all living things, which is eternal. Life itself, which is God and is all things, has no beginning and no end. For life, death is impossible. You can see that if you look beyond specifics.

For example, one flower may blossom and then wither and die, but if you look around, can you find life elsewhere once the flower dies? Is there life in the tree? In the insect? In you? Did life die when the flower died?

We all experience the death of loved ones in our lifetimes. This is a very sad event when it occurs. Yet, has life died when the loved one died? Or can we still find life living?

Temporary form comes and goes. That is the law of impermanence. But life lives. That is all it can do. That is its nature.

Awakening is the realization that you (and other living things) are not the temporary form. You are life itself.

My Thoughts

Regina refers to God as Life and since we are in God and part of God, we are Life as well. Temporary forms come and go but Life continues unaffected by the temporary. What I like about her perspective of God as Life is that it is helping to shift my thinking from the personal. It can be hard to remember that there is no personal, that we are One in God and of God. Reflecting on the continuousness of life-presence of which I, too, am a part, I begin to perceive myself in a more impersonal way.

Text
T-15.X. The Time of Rebirth, P 2
2 The holy instant is truly the time of Christ. For in this liberating instant no guilt is laid upon the Son of God, and his unlimited power is thus restored to him. What other gift can you offer me, when only this I choose to offer you? And to see me is to see me in everyone, and offer everyone the gift you offer me. I am as incapable of receiving sacrifice as God is, and every sacrifice you ask of yourself you ask of me. Learn now that sacrifice of any kind is nothing but a limitation imposed on giving. And by this limitation you have limited acceptance of the gift I offer you.

Journal

How do we regain our power as Sons of God? We do this by giving up guilt. We have to give up projecting it onto ourselves and onto others. Considering how destructive guilt is you would think this would be an easy choice. And yet, we cling to guilt as if it is our savior. I can remember being unwilling to give up making someone guilty because I thought I needed to remember not to trust them. This seemed like a way to defend myself from that person.

I also remember thinking that I had actually hurt others and that it wasn’t fair that I should be free of guilt while they remained damaged by my actions or words. It took me 70 years to finally see the insanity in my thinking and finally let go of the belief in guilt. The ego doesn’t give up and it still tries to entice me back to guilt but I am not interested anymore.

The moments that are free of guilt are holy instants and are the time of Christ. Jesus sees us free of guilt. That is his gift to us. He knows who we are and he is never confused about that. It is my deepest desire to know this for everyone as thoroughly as does Jesus, to never even for an instant, be distracted by the image they have projected.

We project onto the world our beliefs in the form of images that play out these beliefs. In this way, we can see the effects of those beliefs and make a decision to keep the belief or to release it. Either way is fine, we are never guilty for our choices but we do suffer as a result of keeping the ego beliefs. No worry, though. There is only so much pain we can tolerate and so eventually we will choose again. Why not avoid the pain and do it now?

Never be fooled by what the body’s eyes show you. Ask for Christ’s Vision so you can see that love is the only thing that is actually there. Giving up guilt is not a sacrifice no matter how stridently the ego argues that it is. You are never asked to sacrifice and to believe that guilt is a sacrifice is to limit the acceptance of Christ’s gifts to you.

Manual for Teachers
1 The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world. The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is regarded as a special activity, in which one engages only a relatively small proportion of one’s time. The course, on the other hand, emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher and learner are the same. It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day, and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.

We all teach all the time. We teach with our words, with our actions, with our thoughts. We teach to learn, and though we seekers study and study, it is really only through our practice (which is our teaching) that we learn. So, what we do every day, what thoughts we entertain are very important. They are teaching us what we are, or they are teaching us what we are not.

Because to teach is to learn, the teacher and student roles are fluid. Actually, when I teach, I learn, every time. This means that teacher and learner don’t actually switch roles but that they are the same. Because of the courses I offer and my writing, I am very fortunate. Not only do I teach through my life, but I teach in a more formal way and so I am offered so many opportunities to learn. I am very grateful for that.

Jesus says something very interesting in that last sentence. He says that teaching continues into sleeping thoughts as well. In another place in the Course he stresses that we should give our sleep to the Holy Spirit and in another place he says that we can tell who we gave our sleep to by how we feel when we wake up.

I have had a couple of interesting dreams in which I woke up with a fragment of the dream in my mind. In one, I was walking with someone who was teaching me. In another, I was clearly teaching someone. Neither of those dreams felt like dreams. I wonder how often this happens and I simply don’t have a waking memory of it.

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Gentle Healing Lesson 162, Manual for Teachers, Text.  9-17-19

LESSON 162
I am as God created me.

“These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. For they come from God.”

I am absolutely convinced that this is the only thing we need to know in order to awaken. If this is completely and without exception accepted into the mind, awakening would be inevitable. What is there to forgive when you know who you are and who your brother is? What is there to defend and who would we as divine beings attack if we knew we were part of one Whole and that Whole was God Itself? Everything we are learning from studying and practicing the Course is leading to this one thing, remembering that we are as we were created, nothing more and nothing less.

I think this is beginning to sink in for me. I have had a couple of occasions to recognize a shift. For instance, I have noticed that I am enjoying watching shows and reading books where there are couples loving each other. I was a little surprised to see this in myself. It is not something that interests me much, but now I am feeling happy when I see this on the screen or read about it. Maybe that means a lot of old stuff from past relationships in this life and maybe others have been truly and finally released.

So, the other night I am watching this show where a couple falls in love and they are feeling so close to each other and so happy an I began to feel lonely. The feeling I had was that this part of my life was probably over. I have been celibate for nearly 20 years now and have not even had a date in all that time. I haven’t been interested and am not interested now, but here I was grieving the loss of something I don’t even want. I guess that’s why it is we keep returning to this world, we like some of it and want to try again.

I went with the feelings that were coming up and sat there crying for a little while just letting the sadness and regret wash over me. Then I asked the Holy Spirit to help me see this differently. I know the solution to any problem I have is not going to be found in the world. I want the real solution. Suddenly, a thought dropped into my mind. “I am not this 70 year old woman sitting alone in her living room feeling lonely.”

It was an absolute revelation! I mean, sure, I understand this concept and even believe it, but receiving it like that I knew it. I just laughed out loud. Of course, I am not that. I am watching and participating in a virtual reality show, but I am the one who is aware of the woman sitting in the chair. I am not a human being, woman or otherwise. I am not alone. I could never be lonely. I am as God created me. I have been floating on a cloud of peaceful happiness ever since. I wonder what happens next.

Regina’s Tips

Yesterday we focused on self-inquiry by looking at our anger. Today we will focus on Self-inquiry.

The single thought that has the power the Course speaks of is not the intellectual idea, ‘I am as God created me.’ It is the realization ‘I am as God created me.’

Pause and ask yourself, “Do I exist now?” And then relax and notice that you do. Ask, “Am I aware now?” And then relax and notice that you are.

When you have a few minutes for a little deeper practice, sit quietly and notice how much awareness can be aware of at once. Notice that it is aware of sounds ahead of you, behind you and to each side simultaneously. Notice it is aware of sensations in the body. It is aware of thoughts in the mind. Notice it is aware of both the outer world (sights & sounds) and the inner world (sensations and thoughts) simultaneously. And as you notice this, notice you are awareness. You are that which is aware of the outer and inner world. Stay a few moments more, resting as awareness.

My thoughts

Regina’s writings about awareness watching awareness has been helpful to me in my practice. Probably, the most important thing I have done in a long time is to sit in silence even for short periods of time waiting to know my Self. Maybe that is what she means. Anyway, it is paying off.

Text
T-6.1.19 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 someone is attacking me, there might be a temptation to defend myself. But to defend is to attack. Let’s say that I post something on Facebook and someone else strongly disagree, and maybe their comment stings. The only way to defend myself is to make him wrong and no matter how I cloak my words in silken tones, I am attacking and attack is cruel.

What if, on the other hand, I realize that this person thinks it’s important to be right about this and to be proven wrong would be to teach him he is guilty of being wrong. If I argue my point it must be because I think I am hurt by his post. This is not something I want to teach anyone and not something I want to teach myself. What would be my alternative? Why not just let it be?

In the past, I would have felt compelled to say something or do something. Now, I don’t do that. If it is a question, I will answer it. But if it is a straightforward statement, I allow it to be what it is. I cannot be hurt by someone’s opinion, only by my thoughts about their opinion. I watch my feelings and my thoughts to see if I feel hurt or defensive, and if I do, I ask the HS for correction.

Manual for Teachers

M-20.5:7 7 Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real.

We accept God’s Will when we accept God’s peace. God’s peace comes when we remember that there is no world.

I do believe now that there is no world. I know this is true because the world is not eternal and therefore it does not exist. I don’t deny that we made a world and that we experience the world, but not being real, none of what we experience is real either and that’s good news. As my mind continues to heal to new levels of understanding, I see the impossible world differently and thus my experience of it is different. As more and more of us awaken, we will begin to see the world literally transform into a world based on God’s laws rather than ours. Ultimately, we will lose interest in the world even in its perfect reflection and God will lift us up into Him. The world will cease to exist, just as it has never existed.

How does this new perception help me now? I used to believe the world was an illusion, but now I know it is so nothing that happens here has the same impact on me. This allows me to remain calm and peaceful even while the story unfolds in unexpected and undesirable ways. I might have an emotional response to what is happening, but I also know that everything is fine.

If someone is acting from their ego in such a way as to impact my life, I know that this one is just playing out their script and that in a very short time we will be in the next dimension sharing thoughts on what we learned from it and sharing love for each other so I can’t really hold onto a grievance against them. It seems silly to do so now.

Another thing that has changed with this new perception is that there are not many big deals. I used to be a bit frantic about trips, worrying about what to bring, what time to leave the house so I didn’t miss my flight, and worrying about forgetting something important. I feel the old stuff trying to get a hook into me, but that’s not possible anymore. I remind myself that everything will be fine and the thoughts fade away.

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Gentle Healing Lesson 161, Manual for Teachers, Text.  9-9-19

LESSON 161
Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.

“Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. But part of it is now unnatural. It does not look on everything as one.”

Do you ever wonder what you would perceive if your mind was closer to its natural state? Well, here it is. You would see that everything is one. I don’t see this yet, but as my mind has healed, I am closer to seeing this way. I feel the oneness far more than I used to. I am aware of a sense of separation, but then I feel a shift. I feel love and then a realization that this one is not separate from me. It wavers and it can be affected by my ego thoughts, but once realized, it can never be entirely lost.

“The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.”

This sentence is key to understanding and to changing my mind. Whatever I see, however I see it, it is showing me what I want. From there, I can decide if my desire fulfilled is bringing me peace and happiness. If not, then I can make a different choice.

If I have trouble letting go of the belief that is being manifest as this experience, I can ask for another way of seeing and my Inner Guide will help. To see differently, I must desire a different interpretation, be willing to be wrong about the present interpretation, be open and receptive to something I do not currently believe. Doing this frequently has taught me to trust a guide not of my little self which has led me astray too often.

Reality is whole but in order to have this experience, we made specifics and so that is what we must use in our practicing. This is why it is important to start with the situation, the person, the thought when we ask for a different way to see. What happens is that we learn something often enough and the mind begins to grasp that this learning applies to everything.

My experience was that I forgave (undid) many thoughts and then I saw that those thoughts came from a limited number of beliefs, so I began to forgive the beliefs. Now, something else is happening. I am beginning to accept that all those beliefs are the same belief, that is not my Self, and so this is what I am forgiving. I am not my beliefs, I am the Self that I was created.

“One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth.”

I find it helpful to think of the Sonship as holographic, which is just a way to visualize what Jesus tells us in this sentence. It’s funny to me now that for years I have read this expressed in many ways all through the Course and really didn’t get the full implications. As Jesus says, “not understood nor understandable.” It’s funny to me now because once understood it seems so clear. How could I have been confused before? I didn’t get smarter, my IQ higher, I simply became willing to know this.

I still pretend we are separate somehow and not whole, and this is most apparent when I get caught in the story of victimhood and feeling unfairly treated. Seeing separation is the only way to support these feelings. I love that I can snap out of it now, and am delighted that it is easier to do so, and that I want to do so more quickly than before. This is what practice of the Course accomplishes. Eventually, it will lead me to awakening completely.

“It seems to be the body that we feel limits our freedom, makes us suffer, and at last puts out our life. Yet bodies are but symbols for a concrete form of fear.”

Oh, yes! I went through a protracted period of projecting my guilt onto the body. The body was my symbol of all that was wrong. This led to feeling guilty for having chosen to experience the body as myself. After a while, I realized what I was doing. The body is a neutral event. It is the effect of a decision. It is not anything of itself so how could simply experiencing a body be the cause of anything. Now, I no longer feel guilty about having a body, but I still project guilt onto the body in a variety of ways. Now that I understand what I am doing, I can stop.

Jesus tells us that if we think we are the body we will experience everything the body does. So if I identify with the body as myself, when the body experiences pain, so will I. When the body attacks or is attacked, I will feel that attack as personal and will suffer the effects of believing I am a victim or a victimizer. Because the body is a separation device, if I believe I am the body, then I will believe that I am separate. Bodies die and so if I am a body, I will believe that I die.

“Hate is specific. There must be a thing to be attacked.”

The body is that specific thing that can be hated and feared and attacked in defense of another body. When I see my brother as a body, I see him as fear’s symbol. This sets up the awful cycle of guilt/fear/attack/defend. And around and around it goes. The way out is to realize the body is as meaningless as any of our thoughts. We give it all the meaning it has for us. We could stop using it as a symbol of fear and as proof of guilt. We could give it to the Holy Spirit for His use instead.

“This do the body’s eyes behold in one whom Heaven cherishes, the angels love and God created perfect. This is his reality. And in Christ’s vision is his loveliness reflected in a form so holy and so beautiful that you could scarce refrain from kneeling at his feet. Yet you will take his hand instead, for you are like him in the sight that sees him thus. Attack on him is enemy to you, for you will not perceive that in his hands is your salvation. Ask him but for this, and he will give it to you. Ask him not to symbolize your fear. Would you request that love destroy itself? Or would you have it revealed to you and set you free?”

How do I do this? How do I see past my brother’s body? The most certain and permanent solution is to remember my Self as who I am and then I will remember who my brother is. Jesus admonishes us to not let our sight be arrested at the body. In other words, don’t look at his body, his personality, his behavior and think that is who he is. That is just a mask, a separation experience and has nothing to do with his reality. Insist on knowing this one as the Holy Spirit knows him. This is what today’s practice involves. It gives us a very specific way to practice this.

Regina’s Tips

This is another tip that I recommend you read in its entirety. But here is the part I am using because it is such a clear example of how to do this lesson and get the most out of it.

So today we will focus on anger.

Depending on your personality, you may experience anger in one way or another. Some people allow themselves to experience outright fury and hatred. Others repress that, so that anger might be experienced as mere annoyance. The first practice of the day will help you tune into your anger, regardless of how you experience it. You are asked to “Select one brother.” Let that one be one that you feel some grievance with, and this will give you a chance to look at your anger.

The lesson asks you to “See his face, his hands and feet, his clothing.” Etcetera. I ask you to go a little further. Look at what angers you about him/her. Let your mind temporarily dwell on those characteristics, but as you do, keep one eye turned inward so that it is looking at your thoughts and noticing they are your thoughts. Let me demonstrate:

I am thinking of Cassie. She is big in size. Tall and over-weight. She smiles all of the time, like she’s happy to be better than everyone else, happy to know more than others know. She talks all of the time as if she’s right about everything. She never listens. Whenever I try to speak, she cuts me off after half a sentence. She thinks she knows what I was going to say, and then she goes on to tell me how I’m wrong. She doesn’t ever listen to me. She’s wrong about everything because she never listens to anyone else. She only knows her point of view, which is extremely narrow-minded. I really don’t like being around her at all.

Okay, now looking back at what I wrote: I see that I focused on her as a body, “tall and over-weight.” From there, I went directly into her smile, and I interpreted its meaning. I decided she smiles because she thinks she is better than everyone else. I see that I believe this. I see that I think I know what she is thinking. I see that I believe I am right. I see that when I look at her in this way, I think I am better than her. I notice that I feel annoyed by how much she talks. That is my anger. I’m also angry that she never listens to me. I must be afraid of something there. What am I afraid of?

Why am I angry at Cassie? Because she talks all of the time as if she is right about everything, and she never listens to me even when I know more than she does.

Why does that bother me? Because I think she should listen to me.

Why does it anger me (scare me) that she doesn’t listen to me? I’m afraid that I am not as valuable or as important as I would like to appear. Maybe I am meaningless, not needed.

Through the process of looking at anger with one person, we can uncover fear thinking that we are identified with. For example, “I’m afraid that I am not as valuable or as important as I would like to appear. Maybe I am meaningless, not needed.”

The lesson asks us to say to this one, “Give me your blessing, holy Son of God. I would behold you with the eyes of Christ, and see my perfect sinlessness in you.”

I ask you to go a little further. Ask yourself, “What is really upsetting me? Is it him/her or is it the thinking that I have just uncovered in my own mind?”

I recommend journaling to look at your thoughts in the way I just demonstrated. I think it is easier to see thoughts clearly when they are written down.

Manual for Teachers
Judgment by Me Is Impossible. When I make the world real, I am battling with God’s Idea of Who I AM and where I am.

Every time I attempt to judge, I am at war with God. The Creator created me and when I judge what and who I am, I am, in essence, creating myself. I am saying that I am no longer as God created me, but have made of myself something I prefer. It is pure insanity. I can only be as God created me.

So, if I identify with the body and the body is sick, this is my way of saying I am something that can be sick. I am something that can die. This cannot be true because God does not create unlike Itself and God does not have a body that can be sick and God is not insane and therefore could not choose sickness, and God is eternal and cannot know death.

I cannot have something that God does not have. This is why Jesus tells us in the Course that sickness is a defense against the truth. My feeble attempts to prove I am a creature of my own design by making the body sick is one of the ways I battle God for supremacy. Or I might use the sick body as a way of punishing myself before God can do it to me. I judge myself guilty and then I take God’s prerogative as my own and punish myself. I think I am my own savior.

If I judge someone else, I am again at war with God, in the same way, I did when I judged myself. If I judge what I should do and where and when I again am at war with God. I have a choice, I can decide for myself with the ego-mind, or I can decide with the Holy Spirit. The first pits me against the Truth, the latter aligns my mind with Truth.

Text
T-8.7:16

There are two sentences in paragraph 16 that feel really meaningful to me this morning. “One is that freedom from illusions lies only in not believing them.” I love this for its simplicity. Yes, it can feel difficult not to believe in what seems so real, but then that is the purpose of the illusion, to feel real. So, when I experience the effects of believing in the illusion, I pay attention to what I had been thinking, and then I ask the Holy Spirit to remove those thoughts from my mind.

Here is an example. I felt harassed one day. There seemed to be too much work for one day and I felt overwhelmed. These are illusions. They affected me because I believed them. I could easily have questioned them, but I didn’t. Normally, when I feel like I have too much to do, I ask that Holy Spirit decide for me what to do and what to let go. I remind myself that it is just a thought in my mind that I have more to do than I can do. For some reason, that day I didn’t question my thoughts and so I suffered until I changed my mind about that.

“The second sentence that stands out to me says, “Do not arrest your thought in this world, and you will open your mind to creation in God.”

When I accepted the idea that I was harassed and overwhelmed and did not question that thought, it was because I had arrested my thought in this world. I looked at the world (my busy day) and decided the work I had to do was my problem. When I finally realized what I was doing, and I asked for correction, the barriers that seemed to hold me hostage to my suffering fell away. I was in immediate peace and I was given ideas that corrected some of the errors I made while confused.

What I have discovered is that I can always choose to not believe the illusion. It used to feel hard and I had to talk myself into letting go. Sometimes I would have to ask for help over and over, not because I had to talk the Holy Spirit into helping me, but because I had to talk myself into accepting the help. Having practiced this for a long time, now it is easy for me to do it.

I can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, free my mind from the belief in illusions and the process is very simple. I notice I am not happy and I ask that my mind be healed, then I allow the aberrant thought to be removed from my mind. I remind myself that I am not this body or this story. I am spirit. I am the Thought of God, created by Him, like Him. This silly moment cannot be reality. Then I allow my mind to fly free of this world.

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A Review of the Rules for Decision 9-5-19

Chapter 30: THE NEW BEGINNING
Introduction Part 1 Review
1 The new beginning now becomes the focus of the curriculum. The goal is clear, but now you need specific methods for attaining it. The speed by which it can be reached depends on this one thing alone; your willingness to practice every step. Each one will help a little, every time it is attempted. And together will these steps lead you from dreams of judgment to forgiving dreams and out of pain and fear. They are not new to you, but they are more ideas than rules of thought to you as yet. So now we need to practice them awhile until they are the rules by which you live. We seek to make them habits now, so you will have them ready for whatever need.

What stands out to me in this paragraph is this sentence: “The speed by which it can be reached depends on this one thing alone; your willingness to practice every step.” I noticed that when I first started this practice, it worked so well, and I was really happy to have found it. Then after awhile, it stopped working for me and I was confused about that.

I was so excited to have this new understanding that I made a typical mistake. I thought my understanding was enough. I ignored this very important sentence and my practice was careless.  So, I started over and this time I paid attention to the fact that I needed to practice. Understanding is not enough; practice is essential. Not only did I need to practice, but I needed to practice every step.

Another issue I ran into is that it seemed to work like magic sometimes, and sometimes not. I was confused by that as well. When I started over, I paid close attention to what is written here and I noticed this sentence as well. “Each one will help a little, every time it is attempted.” This process is going to work, but it might be slow at first while I build a new habit.

Habits take time and when you are undoing one habit and replacing it with another, you need to be patient. Another thing I had not noticed about this sentence is that it says I will be helped a little every time it is attempted. I noticed that it helps me whether I succeed or just try. That is encouraging.

We need to practice them now. We need to make them rules we live by. They need to become habits so that we use them automatically. This is why I created a group on Facebook, and why I work with groups and individuals on this process. I use this as a way to govern my own practice as well as to provide a place where others can do so as well. We all work better if we work together.

Part 2 Review
I. Rules for Decision
“1 Decisions are continuous. You do not always know when you are making them. But with a little practice with the ones you recognize, a set begins to form which sees you through the rest. It is not wise to let yourself become preoccupied with every step you take. The proper set, adopted consciously each time you wake, will put you well ahead. And if you find resistance strong and dedication weak, you are not ready. Do not fight yourself. But think about the kind of day you want, and tell yourself there is a way in which this very day can happen just like that. Then try again to have the day you want.”

Jesus starts off by telling us that decisions are continuous. I looked at the word continuous and it says that it is unbroken or uninterrupted. We are always making decisions. I never realized that before. Jesus wants us to pay attention to our decisions so we can learn to make them with the Holy Spirit instead of the ego.

He does tell us, though, not to obsess about them. Just use the ones we notice to do our practice. If we try to catch every single one, we will make ourselves crazy and likely quit before our practice has a chance to help us. I have always noticed a number of decisions that I can use every day without making any effort to do so, other than my willingness to work on whatever the Holy Spirit brings to my attention.

Another important point that Jesus makes early on is this. “And if you find resistance strong and dedication weak, you are not ready. Do not fight yourself.” He emphasizes that we are not to fight ourselves. For this to work, we must be gentle and patient. It will not help if we push too hard, as we will only resist.

He does not mean that we should give up at the first sign of resistance. He just means that we should step back, take a deep breath, and start over. He wants us to remember the kind of day we planned for ourselves (something we will soon talk about) and realize that we can have that day. Then, he says, try again.

Part 3 Review

“2 (1) The outlook starts with this:
Today I will make no decisions by myself.”
This is the statement that begins all my days. I tend to modify in my mind to state that I will make no decisions with ego, which is what Jesus means when he says that we make them by ourselves. We can’t actually make a decision by ourselves as all decisions must be made in union, as he explains later. For now, suffice it to say that “by myself” means with ego mind.

“This means that you are choosing not to be the judge of what to do. But it must also mean you will not judge the situations where you will be called upon to make response. For if you judge them, you have set the rules for how you should react to them. And then another answer cannot but produce confusion and uncertainty and fear.”

Understanding this particular paragraph has caused the most significant shift in my understanding and in my practice. Jesus tells us that we are not to be the judge of what we do. That was no surprise for me. I know that I want to ask the Holy Spirit what to do. Jesus says that a healed mind does not make plans. He often tells us that we don’t know what anything means, nor do we know what it is for. He tells us that we cannot judge. So I was good to go with that part.

Then, Jesus surprised me. He said that it also means I will not judge the situations where I will be called on to make response. So what he is saying to me is that I should not only avoid deciding what to do in a situation, but I should not even have decided what the situation itself means. I had to work with that idea for awhile to really take it in.

Here is an example. What if my daughter didn’t remember my birthday? If I make no judgment about the situation, then the only thing that happened is that she didn’t call me on my birthday. If, instead, I decided that she should have called me, that her not calling me must that she does not honor me, and further, that I need her to honor me.

Now I have a situation that I must respond to, and I have decided what it means. Do you think this interpretation of the situation will influence my response? Yeah, me, too. Now I have called into place certain rules that will inform my reactions. It seems I have a rule that says daughters must honor their mothers, especially on birthdays.

So when I ask, how should I respond to this insult, the ego will have many answers for me, none of them loving. It might occur to me to be angry, to make her feel guilty, to give her the cold shoulder, or even to feel guilty myself. After all, what kind of mother was I that she would not call me on my birthday? I must have done a poor job parenting her.

All this time, the Holy Spirit will have another suggestion for me, one that does not involve pain and guilt, but will it make any sense to me? His answer won’t seem to have anything to do with my daughter’s cruelty. It won’t make sense in the face of my desire to know how to change my daughter’s mind about me.

Part 4 Review
“3 This is your major problem now. You still make up your mind, and then decide to ask what you should do. And what you hear may not resolve the problem as you saw it first. This leads to fear, because it contradicts what you perceive and so you feel attacked. And therefore angry. There are rules by which this will not happen. But it does occur at first, while you are learning how to hear.”

Here is another example of how this happens. My son has a back injury that causes him a lot of pain. He gets shots regularly and has had surgery. There were times when I was with him during these procedures and it was very painful for me to watch. One time, in particular, I felt that he suffered unnecessarily because of the carelessness of the nurse. I was very angry.

I carried that grievance for a good while. I knew this was not good and that there was another way to see it. When I would try to hear Holy Spirit, I would just feel irritated. I felt abandoned because I wasn’t hearing anything that felt helpful. This is what Jesus means when he says that when we hear something that does not answer the problem as we perceive it we become fearful and then angry.

I have had peace long enough that I miss it when it is gone. So I did eventually follow the rules for decision and letting go all that the ego previously decided, I was able to accept a new way of seeing, this time with the Holy Spirit.

Next, Jesus is going to give us a helpful procedure to form the habit of making all decisions with the Holy Spirit.

Part 5 Review
4 (2) Throughout the day, at any time you think of it and have a quiet moment for reflection, tell yourself again the kind of day you want; the feelings you would have, the things you want to happen to you, and the things you would experience, and say:
If I make no decisions by myself, this is the day that will be given me.

These two procedures, practiced well, will serve to let you be directed without fear, for opposition will not first arise and then become a problem in itself.

Want a happy day? Jesus is giving us a way that we can have it. We start by making a commitment to make no decision on our own. Then we choose the kind of day we want to have and remind ourselves that if we do not make any decisions by ourselves this is the day that will be given us. You notice that Jesus is very specific in his instructions and he is asking us to be specific in our plans. Decide the kind of day you want and then as long as you make all your decisions with the Holy Spirit, this is the day you will have.

So, I am going to follow his instructions as closely as I can, and if I falter in that plan, he has a way for us to restore our day.

Today, I will make no decisions by myself.

Feelings: celebratory
Things I want to happen: enjoy my birthday, prepare for hurricane that is predicted to hit us tomorrow. Give over any concerns about that as quickly as they come up.
Experience: feeling calm and joyful.

If I make no decisions on my own, this is the day I will be given.

Part 6 Review
5 But there will still be times when you have judged already. Now the answer will provoke attack, unless you quickly straighten out your mind to want an answer that will work. Be certain this has happened if you feel yourself unwilling to sit by and ask to have the answer given you. This means you have decided by yourself, and cannot see the question. Now you need a quick restorative before you ask again.

Jesus starts by telling us that even though we could have the day we choose if we make no decisions on our own, he also tells us that there will be times when we have judged already. I love how Jesus knows what we are going to do. Often in the Course, he acknowledges that we are going to have problems implementing his instructions.

This has always made me feel better about my lapses. Evidently. they are normal and expected. This is why the Course is not just one page long. We need to hear the same things in different ways. And that is why there are 365 lessons. We need to practice a lot.

Then he tells us, “Now the answer will provoke attack unless you quickly straighten out your mind to want an answer that will work.” Apparently, when we judge, we will attack. Thinking about this, I see it must be true. The very act of judgment is an attack, and attack is followed by guilt and our reaction will be further attack, thus setting up an unfortunate cycle of judgment, attack, and guilt.

I thought of an example of this. I used to work with someone who was very reactive. I thought she shouldn’t be like that and so that was the judgment. From that point on, when she would react to something, I would have this judgment in my mind and would, at the least, have unkind thoughts about her.

Sometimes I would say something unkind or defend myself or others. I was making her guilty and feeling guilty for doing so. It was a constant cycle of judgment and attack until I forgave the situation. The person remained reactive but I didn’t judge it and the cycle was broken. The Rules for Decision is very helpful in breaking the cycle.

It took awhile for all of this to work out. First, I had to want to return to peace. Then I had to accept that it was me that needed to change, not her. I had to want to straighten out my mind to something that would work. It wasn’t so easy for me to do this because I let it get away from me and it built up until it felt like a big deal to me. But sometimes, if I catch a situation right away and change my mind quickly, I don’t have to move into this cycle at all.

It is easy to know that I am slipping into the cycle. The clue is that I am not waiting patiently for guidance, but deciding for myself what to do. I had this experience yesterday. I had been looking at the devastation of Harvey in Texas for a few days. So when they said that it would be coming my way, I started preparing.  There is nothing wrong with preparation, but I let my imagination take over instead of asking what I should do.

I decided that I should get sandbags to put in front of my doors in case the flood waters got that high. The back door has come close to flooding into the house before because there is a dip right there, but I have never gotten water near the front of my house. Still, I kept thinking about those pictures from Houston. I bet lots of those people had never experienced flooding in their homes either.

I wasn’t feeling a compelling desire to do this. In other words, I wasn’t experiencing any guidance toward it. I felt perfectly safe as I was. But the ego mind kept harping about this so I decided to get the sand bags. I didn’t need them at all. This morning, I was talking to Holy Spirit about it. I told Him that I did ask if I should get the bags, and He reminded me that I asked after I was already on my way and that I had made up my mind by that time.

I wasn’t completely out of my right mind, though. The Holy Spirit reminded me of what I did right. Probably the reason I jumped up and went in search of sandbags is that they were running out of them everywhere they would normally be available. So I felt a sense of urgency and that is when I stopped listening to guidance and started making decisions on my own.

On the way there, I noticed that things were not going smoothly and that is when I did the quick restorative that we will talk about tomorrow. At that point, I stopped looking for ways to find the bags and just asked Holy Spirit to guide me. I went straight to the place that not only had sand available but had volunteers helping. All I had to do was to drive up, open my trunk and let them put the bags in. It was completely done with 10 minutes of the correction in my thinking.

Part 7 Review
6 (3) Remember once again the day you want, and recognize that something has occurred that is not part of it. Then realize that you have asked a question by yourself, and must have set an answer in your terms. Then say:

I have no question. I forgot what to decide.

This cancels out the terms that you have set, and lets the answer show you what the question must have really been.

There are times during the day when I forget that I want the Holy Spirit be my advisor, times when I ask the ego what something means. When this happens, I feel upset, perhaps angry or fearful, maybe guilty or I may see someone else as guilty. It may be that I feel an unspecific sense of anxiety or dread or just the sense that things are not right.

If I began my day by deciding what I want to experience, what I want to do, and how I want to feel, then, when something happens that is out of accord with my plans, I know what has happened. I have made a decision with the ego and having judged something, I have already decided what the question is and how it should be answered. Now I need a quick restorative to get my day back on track.

What I need is a way to wipe out my previous decision and to start over. This is what Jesus gives me here in this paragraph. I can first decide that I have no question. I have asked the ego what something means, and this has set me on a crooked path that will not bring me to peace. So I cancel the question. In my mind, I see myself erasing the blackboard of my question. Do they still have blackboards in school? Ha ha. I guess someone younger could see himself hitting the delete button.

This next phrase was a mystery to me for awhile. It says, “and lets the answer show you what the question must have really been.” Here is how I came to understand this. When I was frantically searching for sandbags, I was doing so because I had asked what I should do to prepare for the hurricane. The ego said I needed to sandbag my doors to prevent flooding in my house.

Driving around in the rain chasing sand bags was not my idea of what my day was supposed to look like. Later, when I realized what had happened to throw my day off, I did a restorative and canceling out my previous questions, realizing that I forgot to decide for the Holy Spirit as my partner, my mind cleared. As I returned to peace, I realized that the real question had been, “Am I safe?” Peace was the answer that showed me what the question must have been.

There will be times when we will believe our mistaken thoughts and the quick restorative may not be enough to restore us to sanity. Jesus has another process to help us with this.

Part 8 Review
7 Try to observe this rule without delay, despite your opposition. For you have already gotten angry. And your fear of being answered in a different way from what your version of the question asks will gain momentum, until you believe the day you want is one in which you get your answer to your question. And you will not get it, for it would destroy the day by robbing you of what you really want. This can be very hard to realize, when once you have decided by yourself the rules that promise you a happy day. Yet this decision still can be undone, by simple methods that you can accept.

So far, we have learned that it is helpful to decide ahead of time what kind of day we want to have. If we make no decisions by ourselves (with ego) this is the day we will have. Secondly, we have learned that even when we forget our decision and ask the ego for help, we can quickly restore the day through canceling out our question, and instead asking Holy Spirit for advice.

Now, Jesus is helping us to see why it is important that we do the quick restorative right away. He starts by pointing out that we have already gotten angry. I am not always aware of my anger. Sometimes it shows up as the very mildest of irritation, just a quick physical sensation that I stomp out before I even notice it. I learned a long time ago that anger is dangerous and that I should crush it before anyone gets hurt. It is now a hard habit to break, this denial. Sometimes, the anger is directed inward and I call it something else, like sadness or guilt.

But what is really happening in my mind is this. Suppose I planned to have a peaceful, happy day and then something happens. Maybe while I was visiting my daughter she objected to something I said. And now I feel agitated, and I see-saw between feeling afraid I damaged the relationship and being angry that she was so quick to judge me. Then I start thinking about other times when she was hard to get along with and the story grows all out of proportion.

So that was what happened that seemed to destroy my plans for a happy, peaceful day. Here is what actually happened. My daughter said something. Without even thinking about doing so, I asked the ego what her words meant. The ego gave me a story of guilt that applied equally to us both. This story begged the question, what to do about it. But nothing the ego said helps restore my day and so I ask the Holy Spirit what to do about my unreasonable daughter and the Holy Spirit’s answer doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my problem as I see it, and this is where the anger comes in.

Now, I am afraid of the Holy Spirit’s answer, because it doesn’t seem to solve my problem. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem relevant. And so I go back to ego for solutions and this is where the whole thing gains momentum. Now I am engrossed in the story of my unreasonable daughter, or maybe in the story of me as not a good mother, maybe even not a good person. I come up with story after story that supports my perception of what is happening now. At this point, I can’t find my way out of the ego version of things. This is the situation that I can avoid if I do my restorative quickly.

But, Jesus knows that I am not always going to take the easy way out. If I have let the momentum of the story carry me away, I need a deeper process for undoing my thoughts and untangling from my ego. Let’s take a close look at that process.

Part 9 Review
8 (4) If you are so unwilling to receive you cannot even let your question go, you can begin to change your mind with this:

At least I can decide I do not like what I feel now.

This much is obvious, and paves the way for the next easy step.

9 (5) Having decided that you do not like the way you feel, what could be easier than to continue with:

And so I hope I have been wrong.

This works against the sense of opposition, and reminds you that help is not being thrust upon you but is something that you want and that you need, because you do not like the way you feel. This tiny opening will be enough to let you go ahead with just a few more steps you need to let yourself be helped.

The first two steps are easy and bring me a sense of relief. Obviously, I don’t like how I feel or I would not be questioning myself. And the next natural thought is the hope I have been wrong. Or maybe it was not normal in the past. Maybe it would have been more typical for me to think that I hope the other person is wrong. Ha ha. Nowadays though, I just want peace and happiness and the fastest way to get that is to hope I have been wrong, because this is something I can work with, as opposed to trying to influence someone else.

Jesus is introducing correction slowly and gently. He does not want us to feel pushed, because that would induce the desire to defend. All we are being asked to do at this point is to open to the possibility of being helped.

10 Now you have reached the turning point, because it has occurred to you that you will gain if what you have decided is not so. Until this point is reached, you will believe your happiness depends on being right. But this much reason have you now attained; you would be better off if you were wrong.

And, indeed, this is a turning point that we have been eased into. It may not have been apparent that we were holding onto the idea that being right was of the utmost importance, we could even say that we believed that being right was our salvation. If only I am right then I will be happy is another way of saying that if only I am right, I will be saved.

How many times have I found myself in the middle of some ridiculous argument about something completely unimportant in order to defend my idea just because I think I need to be right? The only cost to me is peace of mind, happiness, remembering who I am, remembering God, joy, eternal life. Some price for being right!

11 (6) This tiny grain of wisdom will suffice to take you further. You are not coerced, but merely hope to get a thing you want. And you can say in perfect honesty:

I want another way to look at this.

Now you have changed your mind about the day, and have remembered what you really want. Its purpose has no longer been obscured by the insane belief you want it for the goal of being right when you are wrong. Thus is the readiness for asking brought to your awareness, for you cannot be in conflict when you ask for what you want, and see that it is this for which you ask.

Oh yes! Now we are cooking! I do want another way to see. There is always another way to see even if it is not apparent to me what that could be. To know what that other way is, I only have to decide that I am no longer interested in being right when I am wrong. And I can assure you that if you are not happy with how you feel, you are wrong in the way you perceive the moment.

12 (7) This final step is but acknowledgement of lack of opposition to be helped. It is a statement of an open mind, not certain yet, but willing to be shown:

Perhaps there is another way to look at this. What can I lose by asking?

Thus you now can ask a question that makes sense, and so the answer will make sense as well. Nor will you fight against it, for you see that it is you who will be helped by it.

The only reasons that I have ever resisted this help when it is offered to me, is that I mistakenly think that I can do this myself, or that God is going to demand sacrifice of some sort, that He is going to want me to do something I don’t want to do, or that will be painful to me. When that thought occurs, I remember this from the Course. “Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you.” Lesson 135.

With a new perception of the situation, I will be able to ask a question that makes sense and thus the answer will make sense, too. And I won’t fight against the answer because I am being helped by it.

Here is an example from last year.

I love how gentle Jesus is as we go through these steps. He is well aware that this is going to be hard for us sometimes. He is also aware that if we feel like this is being forced on us we are going to resist. We will feel cornered as our mind is conflicted. If we do something because we are supposed to as opposed to doing it because we want to, the conflict is exacerbated.  So he takes it a step at a time letting us come to our own conclusion that we are getting what helps us and what we actually want.

One night when I was upset upon awakening in the night, I was worried about my suicidal friend. What if he gets worse, what if this happens again, what if he never finds his way to happiness, were some of the questions in my mind. I looked at this bookcase and saw his dusty copy of A Course in Miracles. He is so sure that God doesn’t exist now and this is his problem. He is God and denying this truth is causing so much confusion and distress in his mind. It is depressing him to the point that he sees no way out. And he doesn’t understand the problem. How is he to overcome this? The more I thought about it the more upset I became.

So I started my restorative. I accepted that I was completely wrong in how I saw this and I admitted that I have no question. My question began as something like this: What is going on with my friend and what is going to happen to him. Then I acknowledged the problem when I said: I forgot what to decide. Obviously I forgot to decide with Holy Spirit what it meant, and so by default I decided with ego. And therein lay the problem. Ego decided it was a disaster and getting worse by the moment. Jeez.

I wanted to let the previous assessment go and start over, but it was hard because I had fallen too deeply into the rabbit hole. I kept going back to the question, “What is going to happen to my friend, only now since I had been listening to ego, I was sure it was going to be very bad. I was having trouble letting my question go, so I began with the next step.

At least I can decide I do not like what I feel now.

I sat with that a few minutes as I let the fear and upset flow over me. Recognizing the impact my thoughts were having on me, I could definitely say that I don’t like what I feel now. So I went to the next obvious step.

And so I hope I have been wrong.

Again I sat with it. I did not yet believe I was wrong. My mind was filled with so many ego thoughts that I was too afraid to let my fear go. Fear is such a liar. It says that it is protecting me, and that I dare not take my eyes from it or I will suffer. But, I was sure that I could hope I was wrong. So that is what I did.

It seems like I haven’t done much yet. But what has happened is that I have bypassed my opposition to a change of mind. I have opened my mind to the possibility of something new. That little crack is enough to let the light in. Knowing that I am not coerced into anything, but actually want a solution that will work, I can say in all honesty:

I want another way to look at this.

Ok, now I feel like I am getting someplace! I have changed my mind about the day I want, and have returned to my initial decision to have a happy day. I want another way to look at this. I really do. I don’t like how I feel, and I want to feel happy instead. I don’t yet understand how there could be a new way to see, but I am considering that it is probably in my best interests to open to that possibility.
And so I continue to the last step.

Perhaps there is another way to look at this. What can I lose by asking?

Yes! I don’t know what the answer is and I don’t even need to be certain that there is another way. The fact that I am willing to open my mind to a new question is enough. As he says, what can I lose by asking? Right up to the end, Jesus is being gentle with us. He is letting us decide with no pressure and no coercion.

When I got to this part, I stopped hearing the ego objections that had popped up with each step. The ego kept trying to drag me back into the story of “My friend and his Problems.” But now, I had a new question. It was, “Is my friend safe?” The answer was yes. I can stop worrying about Him. God has this. I then had the question, “Is there something I can do to be truly helpful?” The answer is to love him without condition. I can to that.

Part 10 Review
“13 It must be clear that it is easier to have a happy day if you prevent unhappiness from entering at all. But this takes practice in the rules that will protect you from the ravages of fear. When this has been achieved, the sorry dream of judgment has forever been undone. But meanwhile, you have need for practicing the rules for its undoing. Let us, then, consider once again the very first of the decisions which are offered here.”

I’m feeling gratitude for the help Jesus is offering us in this section. Sure it would be easier to just not make decisions by myself, and let my day be happy just as I planned. But he knows we are not always going to do this. He knows that we need practice. And he makes it very clear why we are doing this work. When we practice long enough to make this response automatic, we will have undone the sorry dream of judgment, and we will have protected ourselves from the ravages of fear. Oh, thank you for that!

“14 We said you can begin a happy day with the determination not to make decisions by yourself. This seems to be a real decision in itself. And yet, you cannot make decisions by yourself. The only question really is with what you choose to make them. That is really all. The first rule, then, is not coercion, but a simple statement of a simple fact. You will not make decisions by yourself whatever you decide. For they are made with idols or with God. And you ask help of anti-Christ or Christ, and which you choose will join with you and tell you what to do.”

This paragraph alone changed everything about the way I viewed decision-making. Any time I make a decision I am choosing to join with ego or Holy Spirit. I cannot actually make a decision alone. There are only the two choices, ask the Holy Spirit what to do, or ask the ego what to do. There is no third option where I do this all by myself.

The ego must hate this. My first visceral reaction when I read that the one I join with will tell me what to do was resistance. Heck no, I’m not giving up my right to decide what to do. After all, this is the ego’s prized gift to me. I get to make all my own rules and decide what I want to do and think and say.

The second reaction was my 6 year old voice saying, “You can’t tell me what to do.” Ha ha. Well, I would say that I haven’t been making good decisions on my own so far, so maybe I should listen to someone else. But that is not what has been happening. I have been making bad decisions, not because I am making them on my own, but because I have been making them with ego. I have never been on my own. I am not giving up anything; I am simply choosing a better partner.

Part 11 Review

“15 Your day is not at random. It is set by what you choose to live it with, and how the friend whose counsel you have sought perceives your happiness. You always ask advice before you can decide on anything. Let this be understood, and you can see there cannot be coercion here, nor grounds for opposition that you may be free. There is no freedom from what must occur. And if you think there is, you must be wrong.”

Your day is not at random because you set the course of it through choosing the adviser to your decisions. And how could you think that somehow you are the victim to circumstances and trapped in those circumstances when it was your decisions that brought you into them. You can make different choices and you can be free if you choose, but if you keep asking the ego for help, then what will happen will happen, and you will not be free from the consequences of your choice.

“16 The second rule as well is but a fact. For you and your adviser must agree on what you want before it can occur. It is but this agreement that permits all things to happen. Nothing can be caused without some form of union, be it with a dream of judgment or the Voice for God. Decisions cause results because they are not made in isolation. They are made by you and your adviser, for yourself and for the world as well. The day you want you offer to the world, for it will be what you have asked for, and will reinforce the rule of your adviser in the world. Whose kingdom is the world for you today? What kind of day will you decide to have?”

And here is the reason we must decide with either the Holy Spirit or the ego and cannot decide alone. Nothing can be caused without some form of union. The only question is what I will decide with, the Holy Spirit or the ego, and which I choose will determine the course my day takes. It is easy to know which adviser I chose. All I have to do is pay attention to what is happening in my life and notice my feelings as the day goes on. Am I having the day I decided on? If not, I can choose the better adviser. I do this for myself, but also for the world. I have a kingdom I must rule and that kingdom is my mind, and I rule it with either the ego or the Holy Spirit; it is my choice.

“17 It needs but two who would have happiness this day to promise it to all the world. It needs but two to understand that they cannot decide alone, to guarantee the joy they asked for will be wholly shared. For they have understood the basic law that makes decision powerful, and gives it all effects that it will ever have. It needs but two. These two are joined before there can be a decision. Let this be the one reminder that you keep in mind, and you will have the day you want, and give it to the world by having it yourself. Your judgment has been lifted from the world by your decision for a happy day. And as you have received, so must you give.”

“It needs but two who would have happiness this day to promise it to all the world.” Two of us recognize that we cannot decide alone. Two of us choose to be happy and choose the Holy Spirit to be our adviser on our decisions to guarantee the joy we ask for will be wholly shared. Two of us understand the basic law that makes decision powerful and gives it all effects that it will have. If we remember this one thing, we will have the day we want, and by giving it to ourselves we give it to the world.

 

 

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