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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 8. 4-5-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 8
8 Your task is not to make reality. It is here without your making, but not without you. You who have tried to throw yourself away and valued God so little, hear me speak for Him and for yourself. You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him resembles it ever so faintly. You cannot even give a blessing in perfect gentleness. Would you know of One Who gives forever, and Who knows of nothing except giving?

Journal
My task is not to make reality and thank goodness for that. I have enough trouble simply accepting it. And why is that? Why cannot I accept that God loves me and I have nothing to fear? Why is it so hard to accept that this world is not real and that Reality waits for my return? I think the answer lies in this paragraph. I cannot imagine the kind of love that Jesus speaks of here.

I cannot imagine perfect love. When I try to imagine perfect love, I think of my children. I love them with love as perfect as I can achieve. And yet, I still judge them and project onto them. I have moments of anger and resentment with them. I have expectations of them and can be disappointed when those expectations are not met. I don’t stop loving them, but that could hardly be thought of as a perfect love.

The love I have for my children is the highest form of love I can imagine and even so, it is a flawed love. Jesus is right when he says that there is nothing on earth that will parallel God’s love for me and so how do I relate to that love? What happens is that I project onto God the love that I can imagine. I expect Him to be disappointed because I do not meet His expectations. I expect Him to judge me and to be angry with me because this is how I understand love. So I am afraid of Him at least as much as I love Him.

On a conscious level, I don’t think about this a lot, and I push the fear of God away by telling myself that I believe what I have learned from A Course in Miracles. But I must be afraid of God’s love; otherwise, I would be with Him now. How can I imagine One Who gives forever, and knows of nothing except giving? And yet, this love must be in my mind, because I am created like God.

So here is what I am doing. I am accepting my Brother’s word on this. There is a love that is perfect and unconditional, and that love is mine. God, the Creator of All That Is, is that Love. I have blocked that love with my ego but I am removing those blocks now, and this unimaginable love is flowing back into my mind. Well, the flow might be an exaggeration, but it is trickling in. My desire to know God is making this possible.

And as this trickle becomes stronger, I am experiencing the effects. I am happier and less fearful in my story. I don’t get worried and upset over each perceived danger. I think of God more often. My love has become less conditional. When I notice I am putting conditions on it, I ask the Holy Spirit to decide for me. My love for others is more gentle now, with less judgment and fewer expectations.

It seems that it was more effective to accept the Atonement for myself and allow this healing to express through me than it was to try to be better at loving. When I was trying to be a better person by correcting my behavior, I wasn’t making a lot of headway. But as I allow my mind to be healed, the expression of that healed mind is naturally closer to perfect love. As I begin to experience that something closer to a perfect expression, I become more open to the possibility of a God Who can love perfectly and I begin to believe that I have nothing to fear from this God.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 7. 4-4-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 7
7 Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you know Him. Therefore, you must be guiltless. Yet if you do not accept the necessary conditions for knowing Him, you have denied Him and do not recognize Him, though He is all around you. He cannot be known without His Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing Him. Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete, that knowledge is swept away from recognition in the very mind where God Himself has placed it. If you would but listen, and learn how impossible this is! Do not endow Him with attributes you understand. You made Him not, and anything you understand is not of Him.

Journal
Jesus is making it very clear that my function in the Atonement is to know my guiltlessness and to know my brother’s guiltlessness. I cannot know God until this is done. It is not that God is withholding Himself from me until I do what He wants. Rather, it is that guilt prevents me from recognizing God. When we don’t recognize God as He is, we have a tendency to create Him in our own image, and we then project our mistaken beliefs onto Him.

That is how we wound up with a scary God who believes in guilt and is a God of judgment and vengeance. We projected our own beliefs onto God and now are afraid of Him. But all of this is just in our mind. We did not create God and we do not understand Him. To undo this tangled mess we made, we must begin where the error started, right in our own mind. We must let go of the belief in guilt, and refuse to believe in it regardless of the form it takes. When we do that God will become known to us because it is His Will that this be done. God Himself placed the knowledge of Himself in our mind. He must want us to know Him.

The only thing that makes this seem difficult is that the ego points out situations in our story that seem to prove the need for guilt. We are shown pedophiles, murderers, rapists and all sorts of sinners. We experience unkindness and attacks almost daily even within our own homes and from people we love. We perpetrate these unkind acts and outright attacks ourselves, and on people we love. We do this sometimes deliberately and often thoughtlessly. Then we take this as proof that guilt must be real.

We have it backward, though. We accept the ego proposal that guilt is real and from that belief, we project situations that prove what we have decided to believe. So we do not believe in guilt because of what we see and experience in the world. We see and experience these situations because we believe in guilt. The solution is to disregard the evidence our senses show us because we know it is unreliable. Instead, we begin with the understanding that guilt is not real. It does not exist, and from there we can accept a different way of seeing what is happening.

The ego has shown us “proof” of guilt because we asked it to. Now let’s ask the Holy Spirit to decide for us what these situations mean. When you think that something you are experiencing proves guilt is real and warranted, say this: “Holy Spirit, decide for me what this means.” Open your mind and heart to a different answer than you are accustomed to. Your innocence will be revealed to you because you are ready to acknowledge it. This will come in a way that is as undeniable as it is nearly impossible to describe. In this certain knowledge of your innocence, you will know your brother’s innocence as well. This is possible because God would give you a function you could not fulfill.

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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 6. 4-3-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 6
6 When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. Only your own volition seems to make deciding hard. The Holy Spirit will not delay in answering your every question what to do. He knows. And He will tell you, and then do it for you. You who are tired will find this is more restful than sleep. For you can bring your guilt into sleeping, but not into this.

Journal
I have been practicing asking the Holy Spirit to decide for me in everything. My practice has not been perfect, but then, if it were perfect, I wouldn’t need the practice. Some days I turn to Spirit when I am confused or upset, and this is helpful. Some days I give the whole day to Him. I can really see the difference in my life when I surrender the day to Holy Spirit. I feel peaceful and at ease and I am energetic all the way to the end of the day. In fact, I don’t feel tired at all, just as Jesus suggests in this paragraph.

There are times, though, when I seem to refuse His help. Crazy, right? I know. But for some reason, it still happens. Sometimes it is subtle, in that I just don’t let myself think about it. I just make decisions by myself (which means, I make them with ego.) I seem to think that I have enough information at my disposal to decide without help.

Other times, I am driven by fear or guilt and act to relieve these feelings. The other day when I was experiencing fear, I asked Holy Spirit to decide for me before I acted. But then my fear drove me to act without waiting for guidance. Unsurprisingly, it was a mistake. If I had just waited the situation would have resolved itself and I would not have had the chance to make it worse. Instead, I acted in response to my fear and I brought guilt into the situation. Well, it wasn’t the first time, but maybe it is the last time.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 5. 3-31-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 5
5 Before you make any decisions for yourself, remember that you have decided against your function in Heaven, and then consider carefully whether you want to make decisions here. Your function here is only to decide against deciding what you want, in recognition that you do not know. How, then, can you decide what you should do? Leave all decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He knows it. So will He teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt instead of love. Give up this frantic and insane attempt that cheats you of the joy of living with your God and Father, and of waking gladly to His Love and Holiness that join together as the truth in you, making you one with Him.

Journal
Because we chose an experience of separation our tendency is going to be to move toward fear and guilt. This is because they are the natural outcomes of separation. Therefore, if we want to return our minds to love then we need to stop making decisions from a place of fear and guilt. This would seem to be circular thinking since we are in fear and guilt so how do we stop making decisions that keep us in fear and guilt?

Our salvation from this closed cycle of thinking is the Holy Spirit, which was placed in our mind for that purpose. The Holy Spirit is the Love in our mind from which we can make decisions that take us out of fear and guilt. It seems that first, we must become aware of what is happening and why we keep falling back into fear and guilt and then learn that there is another option. A Course in Miracles is an excellent way to learn this. It does a thorough job of highlighting the ego for us and also it presents the way out of the ego.

Once we get to that place on our path Home, we then must overcome the belief that no longer making these decisions on our own is a loss. We have treasured this ability to make decisions and tend not to want to relinquish this right. This something else the Course helps us with. We learn that we make no decisions on my own anyway, that we are always making them either with the ego or the Holy Spirit. With practice, we discover that the decisions made with ego are often unfortunate and that the decisions made with Holy Spirit lead us to joy and peace. From there we must form a new habit of consistently asking the Holy Spirit to decide for us.

From choosing the Holy Spirit as my decision maker, I have seen that I make terrible decisions without Him. I often choose to act from fear and guilt and then the situation in question just deteriorates from there. Recently while trying to be helpful to someone I love, I made things worse for both me and for him. I did this because I was trying to be helpful in my own way. I was in fear and guilt so fear and guilt were all I had to offer. At the time my thoughts seemed to make sense to me, and even to be obviously right. I was wrong… again.

But I saw my error and instead of keeping the feeling of being guilty, and instead of trying to get rid of it by projecting onto the other person, I asked the Holy Spirit to decide for me how I feel, and what I should do. This is always, without exception, the choice that will work. It is the choice that will bring me happiness and peace and will bring me back to God. I truly don’t know what I want or what will make me happy, but the Holy Spirit does know this, so why not let Him decide for me?

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 3. 3-29-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 4
4 You need not understand creation to do what must be done before that knowledge would be meaningful to you. God breaks no barriers; neither did He make them. When you release them they are gone. God will not fail, nor ever has in anything. Decide that God is right and you are wrong about yourself. He created you out of Himself, but still within Him. He knows what you are. Remember that there is no second to Him. There cannot, therefore, be anyone without His Holiness, nor anyone unworthy of His perfect Love. Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deceit undone. Fail not yourself, but instead offer to God and you His blameless Son. For this small gift of appreciation for His Love, God will Himself exchange your gift for His.

Journal
How wonderful that I don’t have to understand creation. Creation is what it is without my understanding. Not only that, but it is meaningful to me whether I understand it or not. To experience that meaning, I need only accept my function. I need only love and be loved, and this I do as I accept the Atonement for myself. It might look like I have to do a lot to achieve this, but really whileI have found this to be true, I have at the same time, found that it is not true.

I have had to look at my thoughts and their effects with the Holy Spirit. This felt like hard work because at first, I resisted it. I didn’t want to look at my thoughts. I didn’t want to take responsibility for their effects. This is the reason it felt like hard work. But slowly, as I surrendered to the process, I discovered that it wasn’t hard at all. I just did it. I laid the false thoughts on the altar and walked away from them. Now when it feels hard, it is because I lay them on the altar and then I stand there keeping an eye on them. ~smile~

How could this be hard? As I lay my beliefs aside, I am simply discovering what always lay beneath them. I am still as God created me. He knows what I am and He has not changed His mind about me. He created me love, and it is love that I am in spite of my foolish belief I could be something else. This is all that salvation is; I am still as God created me. I have not changed creation. I have made a loveless place in my mind and believe I dwell there. But as I insist on love even in this dark place, I dispel the darkness.

This is God’s plan for my salvation, and I desire only His plan. I have tried my plan and it has never worked. I thought that I could find a perfect relationship, a better job, a healthier, prettier body, or a sanctuary in this dangerous place and then I would be saved. And not one of those plans has ever been my salvation. They have all fallen apart and left me without hope, at least I was without hope until I found A Course in Miracles. Through A Course in Miracles, I finally understood that I was in competition with God for the plan for salvation that would work. No wonder it all felt so hopeless.

Ha! You win, God! I give up. I don’t know how to save myself. Thank you for Your Holy Spirit; thank you for placing It in my mind right next to my problem. Thank you, Jesus, for completing the Atonement so that all I have to do is accept it. Thank you for hanging here with me, and helping me as I choose again. Thank you for standing at the end, ready to undo what we are not able to undo ourselves. This very little You ask of me, that I simply lay aside my own plan and accept Yours, this I am willing to do.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 3. 3-29-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 3
3 When you have let all that obscured the truth in your most holy mind be undone for you, and therefore stand in grace before your Father, He will give Himself to you as He has always done. Giving Himself is all He knows, and so it is all knowledge. For what He knows not cannot be, and therefore cannot be given. Ask not to be forgiven, for this has already been accomplished. Ask, rather, to learn how to forgive, and to restore what always was to your unforgiving mind. Atonement becomes real and visible to those who use it. On earth this is your only function, and you must learn that it is all you want to learn. You will feel guilty till you learn this. For in the end, whatever form it takes, your guilt arises from your failure to fulfill your function in God’s Mind with all of yours. Can you escape this guilt by failing to fulfill your function here?

Journal
When I have let all that obscured the truth in my most holy mind be undone for me…
This is my daily practice. It now occurs almost without effort. I don’t wake up in the morning and think, today I will let my mind be healed. I don’t try to be mindful of my thoughts. I don’t even make a conscious decision to release a thought for healing when I notice it. And yet, it all happens. I think because I have been vigilant for my thoughts and their release and because I convinced myself that this is what I want, now I choose it naturally. There are still times of resistance, but past success has motivated me to push through those.

God will give Himself to me, is giving Himself to me, will always give Himself to me, because that is all He knows. This lets me know that when I fail to know God, to feel Him in me and to feel myself in Him, it is because I have blocked that knowledge with unforgiveness. I have made a world of my own through projecting from my ego mind and have chosen to believe in it instead of God. This is just a choice and I can always make a different choice, and God is the only other choice. Thus, I continue my practice.

Ask not to be forgiven, for this has already been accomplished. Ask, rather, to learn how to forgive …
Asking for forgiveness seems natural and necessary when we believe in our guilt, but it is not necessary. God has not condemned us so He sees no reason to forgive. It is only our own mind that condemns and this is why we must learn to forgive. Rather than praying, “Father, forgive me,” I say, “Holy Spirit, please help me to forgive myself.” I like to be specific when I can and often use the prayer I learned through The End of Death, by Nouk Sanchez. “Holy Spirit, please help me to forgive myself for using ______(name the situation, or _______(name the person, to attack myself. Forgiveness is how I restore the awareness of God to my holy mind.

Atonement becomes real and visible to those who use it.
Atonement is forgiveness in the sense it is undoing. It is the realization that nothing actually happened that needs forgiveness. It is the release of the blocks to Love’s Presence in our mind. The only way it becomes real to us is to use it. An example of this is when I have held a grievance against someone and when I finally let that grievance go, I have felt light and free. Then the Atonement is a felt experience for me. Having accepted the Atonement for this grievance I now have a loving relationship rather than a contentious one, and this is an example of the Atonement made visible.

On earth this is your only function, and you must learn that it is all you want to learn.
As the Lesson says, My only function is to accept the Atonement for myself. In accepting it for myself, I accept it for all, and all will experience this acceptance to whatever degree they are able at the time. It is not my responsibility to make the Atonement possible because that was done automatically when the need arose. I don’t have to do anything to set the Atonement in motion because Jesus did this and so that is done. I only need to accept it. The only part of accepting that is hard for me is to make this my only function. I keep getting distracted by the functions the ego would give me. I am learning, though, that while there are things I must do here, none of them is my function and I can perform my function as I do these things.

You will feel guilty till you learn this.
This is the way I free myself from guilt. I learn that the Atonement is my only function and I dedicate myself to that, and I will never feel guilty again. I will never feel the need to see anyone else as guilty if I do not see myself as guilty. There was a time I could not imagine seeing myself as innocent. It was frightening to even think I was not guilty as if that thought would call me to God’s vengeful attention. And I certainly couldn’t imagine others as being guilt free. I didn’t want to be the only guilty one, the only one God would punish. It seemed so very necessary that certain others were guilty and punished for their sins. I can hardly remember what that felt like anymore, only that I thought it.

Now I know this is insane thinking. Yes, I still do it sometimes, but I know that it is not right. I know that there is another way. I know that I can find that way as I forgive and accept the Atonement. I even believe that Jesus is telling us the truth that if we look within that we will see only perfect innocence. Well, I guess that I believe in the concept, but not quite yet in the actual occurrence of such a thing. Otherwise, I would have done it. But each time I forgive, I am more certain than before, and I am closer to accepting that there is only innocence.

Right now, I look without and I see the projections of a confused mind and I think that confusion is a sin. This is why I hesitate to look within. I am afraid I will see that the darkness is there and therefore I am truly condemned. But I don’t entirely believe this anymore. Accepting the Atonement for this situation and that thought and doing this over and over has loosened the ego’s hold on this mind. It is getting harder and harder to find guilt in my mind. I am dedicated to my function now and I would fulfill it. It is not hard. I’ve been doing it all along, but now I accept it as my only function.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 2. 3-28-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 2
2 You who belong to the First Cause, created by Him like unto Himself and part of Him, are more than merely guiltless. The state of guiltlessness is only the condition in which what is not there has been removed from the disordered mind that thought it was. This state, and only this, must you attain, with God beside you. For until you do, you will still think that you are separate from Him. You can perhaps feel His Presence next to you, but cannot know that you are one with Him. This cannot be taught. Learning applies only to the condition in which it happens of itself.

Journal
Jesus says that we cannot learn through teaching that we are one with God. I can understand that. I read that we are one with God, and because of the source of that statement, I believe it. But believing it must be true because Jesus says it is true, is not the same thing as knowing it is true. It is not the same thing as feeling it. The way Jesus explains it makes sense; it is logical. But realizing this does not give me the felt experience of being in God if that is even the way to express it. So I can’t learn this. I can have it, though. I can have it because when the conditions are right, it will happen of itself.

My part to prepare for this, to make the conditions right, is to let myself be taught that I am guiltless, and so is everyone. That is plenty for me to do. At times, it seems so hard as to be impossible, and yet Jesus says he would never ask us to do what we could not do. It would seem to be easy when you think of it. God created me innocent and so that is what I must be. But then I get caught up in my story and the story seems to prove my guilt. With guilt comes fear and then helplessness and finally hopelessness. It is like trying to extricate myself from quicksand. The harder I fight it the deeper I sink into it.

I am not alone in this situation, and that is my salvation. God is with me through His Holy Spirit in my mind. I am helped and guided and healed as I give my attention to Him. I turn from the ego thoughts in my mind, and toward the Holy Spirit and He responds to even this slight desire for His help. As my call for help becomes stronger, I more quickly get out of the sticky mess guilt has me in. When that happens it feels like freedom! This is so simple you would think I was done with it by now.

All I have to do is accept the truth that guilt is not real and that we are innocent. There, it is done! Except that I still feel guilty and I still think I see guilt in others. When I witness a situation that seems to prove guilt, I have to let myself be backed out of it. I ask for help and then I begin to remember that the situation occurred not as proof that guilt is real, but as a result of the belief in my mind that guilt is real. The belief came first, then the situation.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.