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Study of Manual for Teachers 7-28-12

7-28-12
6 This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear. For there the altar to the Son is set, and there his Father is remembered. Here are all illusions brought to truth and laid upon the altar. What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. Where is hope while sin is seen as outside? What remedy can guilt expect? But seen within your mind, guilt and forgiveness for an instant lie together, side by side, upon one altar. There at last are sickness and its single remedy joined in one healing brightness. God has come to claim His Own. Forgiveness is complete.

“This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear.” This sentence is so clear to me right now. Everything I see outside me is merely a reflection of a thought within the mind. Keeping it outside me is how I protect it from healing. Bringing it back within is how it is forgiven and healed.

Here is an example that occurred to me this morning. There is a belief in the mind that says sickness, suffering and death are real. When that belief is rejected in an effort to escape the guilt and fear it brings, it appears as form in the world. Sometimes it appears as sickness in the body.

When this has happened to me, the guilt and fear that I felt for holding those beliefs was greater than the suffering I seemed to experience from the sick body, thus making sickness the lesser of the evils. While I held that belief I was unwilling to forgive and accept healing, at least not as long as healing meant withdrawing my illusions and acknowledging the belief I was holding in my mind.

As I continued my practices and my willingness to heal became stronger than my fear, I began to withdraw my projections. It happened as I began to use the experience of pain as an opportunity to remember the truth. With each pain I reminded myself that pain cannot be real. God is all there is and God is not pain. I must be making this up. I continued to do this regardless of any seeming results in the world. I stopped looking at the story for proof that I am as God created me.  I was beginning to understand that the story will never tell me who I am, it will only tell me who I am not.

The more I did this the stronger my certainty became, and I watched as the truth unfolded before me. It didn’t need my help, only my permission. I didn’t have to do anything in the world to make this happen, and in fact, when I try to make the truth happen I am actually pushing the truth away in favor of another ego story.

I didn’t have to meditate on it. I didn’t have to stop taking medicine to prove my worthiness of the miracle, nor did I have to take medicine to make it happen. I need do nothing to make the truth true. All that is required of me is the desire for the truth. I reminded myself that I wanted the truth to be true and it showed itself to me.

Using the metaphor of the altar, I noticed the effects of the belief in pain, suffering and death as they appeared in my life. This specific appearance was pain. At first I tried to bring light to the darkness by asking for healing of the body. Then I realized my error and brought my dark thoughts about pain (the belief that pain is real and deserved) to the light.

I placed the false thought on the altar. The Holy Spirit placed forgiveness next to it so for a moment I could see them together. Then the light replaced the darkness and I understood that the pain could not be real and that I am innocent. That particular expression of the belief in pain no longer appeared in the body because I could not believe in it anymore. Apparent healing of the body is simply a natural consequence of healing in the mind.

My experience has been that sometimes it takes many experiences of bringing the dark thoughts to the altar for me to see this lesson as true in each case. It begins with a specific circumstance and perhaps this will be repeated with other specific circumstances, but with repetition the lesson becomes generalized. What seems to happen next is that when I have pain, regardless of where it originates or appears to manifest, my first thought is to bring it to the altar. Instead of feeling difficult and confusing it seems simple and natural, and impersonal.

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