Realizing God's Will Is Oneness

A Healing Journey

One mindedness can only mean one thing and that is to focus on our connection to God and His creation.  It is that simple.  No more and no less.  Of course, the ego tries to keep us distsracted from this meaning and purpose, and often does a good job of it.  Sometimes, when we go to unfamiliar surroundings, everyday distractions fall away and we can see more clearly.

Last week, my husband, Mike,  had to travel overseas for business reasons.  When this assignment first came up, I was given the opportunity to go along.  For awhile, I was undecided about whether I would tag along.  I was truly of split mind about whether to go or not, which quite surprised me.  There was a part of me that thought the trip would be quite interesting, and another part that just wanted quiet comfortable time at home.  At last, I felt compelled to make the journey, but with the idea of giving myself permission to have as much quiet time on the trip as I needed.

The trip was unlike any other I have ever had.  I did spend much time with others, but I also took a lot of time to quietly study ACIM.  I wanted to journal and took several with me so that I would have plenty of paper to write my thoughts and inspirations.  Well, during the eight days I was gone, I wrote only one page.  There just didn’t seem to be any concrete words to write, just nebulous feelings that I couldn’t put into words.  I just couldn’t understand what was happening.  But as I was in different surroundings, I couldn’t distract myself with the everyday as I would have done at home.  I just sat and asked for guidance, feeling so tired of being alone.  I wanted the Teacher to appear and never leave, knowing this would bring me the greatest joy.  I felt flat, uninspired, cut off, but saying to myself that, of course, this feeling was all ego and its not real but it is showing me a place in my mind that needs healing.  I sat with the somewhat disconnected feeling, telling myself that it was only illusion and that I didn’t have to feel differently.  I didn’t have to cover it up, fight it or resist it, because that would make it more “real.”  It just lay like a heavy lump.  I gave it all to Holy Spirit.

By the time we were to leave for home, I became aware that I felt abandoned by Holy Spirit.  I felt that I was truly aware of the ultimate ego projection story, that I am separate from God.  That God is not powerful enough or does not care enough to stop me from separating or to try to get me back, to save me from being lost.  That God just doesn’t love me as much.  This is all ego, ego, ego.  I know it is all illusion, but the fear and anxiety seemed so real.  The ego makes itself seem so strong, so big and powerful, but there are no answers there. I chose to remain with Holy Spirit, even though I couldn’t hear His Voice clearly because the ego voice was so loud.

Sometimes in our lives, ego resistance runs high.  It reared its ugly head in a major way for me and really showed me where I am out of sync with Truth.  I consoled myself with the thought that if the ego is screaming this loudly, maybe it is because I am making progress.  At least I hope this is so, because I felt like I was at the essence of ego projection uncovered of layers of less threatening dramas.  I felt like I was at the heart of my fear, and that it all came down to trust.  Jesus says that Holy Spirit shines the fears away, that they are dissolved not conquered.

I choose every day to be open to this process of having my fear shined away.  The ego illusion is unhappiness and I choose love and peace, even though I don’t always know how to get there.  I trust that Holy Spirit does and that I can be healed.  I trust that He loves me enough to heal me and that I am worthy of being healed.  Everyday I am focusing on trust.  I trust in God’s presence, His love, His power, His creation.  I am willing to walk though ego resistance.  I am willing to be viligant for God and His Kingdom in my mind today.

I believe in the power of peace and love.
I believe there is a place in my mind of total peace and joy.
I believe that I can achieve awareness of this.
I trust Holy Spirit to help me for I cannot do it alone.
I believe and trust that I can come to this today, that Holy Spirit can overcome ego today.

The trip turned out to be a remarkable one because it really put me in touch with my core abandonment issues, which gives me the opportunity to allow greater healing to take place.  Its not what I imagined the trip would be all about, but it seems that Holy Spirit had a greater plan in mind for me.  The ultimate fear can be so layered with every day matters that we cannot see and feel it for what it truly is.  I am grateful that I had the opportunity to slip out of the everyday and begin to truly face and heal the separation story closer to its source.  The ending of the overseas trip is the beginning of a new healing journey for me.  I couldn’t be more grateful for all this is now.

© 2004-2011, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

Peace Begins With Me

When I read the newspaper or see the news on television, so many questions come to mind.  I see people who believe in the idea of rapture, where only a few are saved and all the rest of humanity is doomed to everlasting hell.  I see people at war over religious, political, boundary, and economic beliefs.  I see fear and violence manifested in every form imaginable.  I take full responsibility for what I think I see, knowing it is all projected from the one ego mind.  The ego mind projects fear onto simple things and make them complex. 

When I take all of this to Holy Spirit with the question of what one person can do to make a difference, or even if one person can do anything, I hear this phrase over and over, “Peace begins with me.”  It is enough to see through the ego fear as the nothingness it is.  It is enough to place myself open to the mindset of seeing love and forgiveness all around me.  It is enough to be at peace with what is, trusting that all is well despite what it seems to look like to body eyes.  It is enough to feel compassion and to wait to act only as directed by Holy Spirit.

To my ego mind, this is never enough.  Surely, it says, some action is needed in the face of poverty, violence, ignorance, and all the other seeming evils of the world.  Yes, it is projected by the unconscious mind, but something needs to be done to fix it, and soon, or the world will be out of control.  My ego mind always thinks that situations and events need fixing, and especially fixed in the way my ego thinks best.  I have long ago given up confidence in my ego to fix anything.  The unhealed cannot heal the unhealed.  No, I must let go of sadness and confusion about what the world needs, and listen only to the Voice for God.

Peace in the world all begins with me.  It is my responsibility to choose to listen to the Voice for God, the Voice for Peace, instead of the voices for fear, hatred, and separation.  The only way to find peace is through peace, and the only way I can achieve that is to connect with my True Self.  When I can connect with the Peace that I was created to be with God, I can then extend that to everyone and everything I think I see.  Holy Spirit says this is enough to manage.  I can only take responsibility for where I find myself.  I can only let go of the fear that I seem to project.  I cannot make everyone else do the same in this day.  I need not find myself in guilt for wanting to choose peace when others envision achieving peace through violence.  I know that I cannot find Peace by making fear “real” in this way.

And so, Peace begins with me.  I can choose to see the call for love all around me and respond with love, and only love.  Even if that love is from a worldly distance, love is still responding.  I trust that Holy Spirit is steadily guiding the extension of love to the world for its healing in some fashion.  I certainly know that the answers of Holy Spirit are much better than any solutions I could come up with in my ego mind.  When I am accepting the peace that I am and the peace that others are, and my mind is quiet and open, then I can listen to Holy Spirit’s voice in my ear about whether any further action might be needed.  When I align myself with Peace, I can be a voice for peace in the world.  But perhaps even more important, when I align myself with Peace, I can be a part of the healing of the unconscious split-mind which projects fear.  When I try to remember to acknowledge that we, none of us, are separate from God,  I can perhaps be doing more for the healing of worldly concerns than I ever thought possible, because love has the power to heal every seeming separation from love.  When I acknowledge that there is nothing other than love, I can trust that love is the sure end because it was the sure beginning.

When I am at peace with myself, I can be at peace with others, no matter what their beliefs are or what actions they are taking.  When I am at peace with myself, I can listen to Holy Spirit.  When I am in judgment or fear, I cannot hear Holy Spirit’s voice because I am choosing to focus on seeming chaos and confusion.  When I choose to see with the eyes of peace, Holy Spirit always helps me find that inner core of strength where I can know that all is well for it cannot be anything else.  Sometimes I must ask over and over for help to get to inner peace, but it is always there.  When I get to that place of inner peace, simple answers come and there is no confusion.  There is no confusion in love, love is always sure. 

Today I find myself focusing on what it means to be peaceful in the world where I find myself.  It is a walk of trust with Holy Spirit.  It is accepting a voice that guides me to simple thoughts and simple choices.  It is a voice that guides me to be gentle and loving to myself and others whom I meet.  Perhaps another day I may be guided from peace to be more and do more, but today I am guided to be loving and accepting of where I am and whoever crosses my path.  This seems so easily do-able that I cannot complain.  I need not rush anywhere to “do” something to “fix” the world.  I can cheerfully leave this in the capable hands of Holy Spirit.  Today I can trust Holy Spirit to do His work as I do mine, which is only love and forgiveness.

© 2004-2011, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

Recapturing My Treasure

When I was a little girl, I lived in Morgantown, West Virginia with my family.  My father’s parents owned a little farm outside of town that I visited often.  I remember wandering over the cow pastures for hours on end.  I was a curious child and loved to explore.  The only fear I knew was of insects and other crawly creatures.  My grandmother had a large vegtable garden and every morning in the summer she would go out to pick bugs and worms off her vegtables and put them in a little can of kerosene that she carried.  She was a true organic gardner before there was such a term.  In order to keep me from wandering off while she was busy gardening, she would put me on a kitchen stool with an umbrella to shade me in the middle of the garden, knowing that I would not get down because I would have to walk through the buggy garden.  There I sat stupified by my fear and in awe of my grandmother’s courage as I saw it.  Naturally, we talked about my unfounded fear and my grandmother did her best to help me see things differently.  I can only say that she was not terribly successful regarding “curing” me.  Still, I didn’t see this fear as being me,  it was just something that was there, but partly outside of me.

When I was five years old in 1950, I came to know powerful fear.  I was to start school and had to take the city bus across town to get there.  My mother could not take me every day because she had to care for younger brothers and sisters, plus in those days my parents had no second car.  My mother taught me to use the bus system and even at those tender years, they exhibited great confidence in my ability to handle the circumstances quite well.  I expressed my great fear but to no avail, my mother went with me the first few days but then I was on my own.  Of course, I did my “duty” the best I could, and eventually I was emboldened to wander even farther than I ever previously did, whether in town or on the farm.  However this fear was different for it seemed that even though I overcame it in one sense because I had to fight it and move forward, it didn’t seem separate from me.

When I read the Course’s statement that my body is a learning device, not a lesson, I try to retrace the steps of my life to determine where I first remember feeling really caught by fear that changed me. I always come back to this time when I was very young and these formative experiences.  Sometimes in our earliest life events we can see how ego mind intrudes on our innocence and grips us with an iron hand of fear.  Our body is no longer a learning device to explore the world around us, no longer simply a tool to learn from experiences.  Ego is not satisfied with anything less than mind numbing fear and hard lessons of body discomfort.  Ego crushes our body with fear so that we cannot separate from it easily.  We now mistakenly think the fear is us.  We embody fear.

When I review those simple days of long ago,  I remember the carefree attitude of my early youth.  I remember feeling so connected to something good as I wandered about the countryside.  I had no worries or gripping fears.  I simply was.  I learned from where I was and what I was doing.  It was all good.  As I grew older I became attached to fears and everything became a lesson to do well, an endless series of questions about doing or being anything good enough.  I forgot that my life, my body, is a learning device, and that learning is a good in itself.  Everything is good enough to learn from because it is simply there for our learning.

Today, more and more, I try to recapture that attitude of being a carefree learner, free to wander the journey of life with all its seeming fears and travails, as well as delights, with the same same sense of ease and peace.  More and more I try not to “make” things hard for myself, not to “make” lessons that seem insurmountable and overwhelming.  Each instance is an opportunity to learn from, nothing more.  Each instance is a chance to see love at work in my life, not fear.  I wish I could say that I never felt fear anymore, but that is not true.  But, now when I feel fear I can see it more outside of myself as I used to do long ago.  It is not me but it is there to learn from.  It has only been in the past five years, since really digging into ACIM work, that I have been able to give up fighting my fears and to more peacefully learn from them what they have to teach.  As I do this they dissolve more and more.  I no longer need to physically wander to feel free.  I can be free in my mind.  My grandmother, I am sure, is so proud.

© 2004-2011, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

Feeling Part of the One Mind

Today in meditation I felt as if I were a bubble among an ocean of bubbles, all extending endlessly.  All bubbles were a part of God.  God surrounded us, yet was within us.  We recognized God in each other and we were comforted.  We were safe and secure, leaving all to God.  Only God knew of the total extension of Himself.  We were merely part of the Extension and we were supremely happy in this.  The part of ourself that projected ego images was infinitesimally small, so insignificant as to be nothing, and all that came from it was nothing.  We kept extending in joy and happiness, part of God’s Will, with no will of our own to do anything else.  We were content, and yet energized with Life itself.

I was surprised at how comfortable it was being in the mass of bubbles.  No one was squeezed.  There was no chaos, no confllict, no tension, no crowding.  There was only total joy in recognizing God all around us.  God energized the whole and everything of God was available to all. 

The Extension was endless, but there was no concern for time or boundaries.  We were not aware of any.  We left the Extension to God’s care.  We were simply happy to be a part of it, continually thankful that we were.  There was great peace in this.  There was nothing else.  We were swept along in the flow of God’s Love.  We formed the One Extension.  We were of One Mind in this, and all of the same purpose, to be God’s Will, God’s Love.  We were content to go wherever that took us for we moved in waves of energy.  We were living energy.  It was sort of a pinkish red colored light that sometimes seemed like ribbons of light.

We were content to be what we were because it was of God.  There was no thought to be anything different because we didn’t know what that would be for us and we wanted only to be part of God.  That was our only thought, that we were a part of God.  There was a great satisfaction in this.  There was a great peace in being surrounded by the same thought and purpose with no worry or concern that something other than Love could impact us.  We knew only Love and there was no fear.  We knew only God’s Love and its constancy.  We were totally fulfilled.  Ther were no beginnings and endings, only Love.  There was no thought that Love could not be present, for that was unthinkable.  We had only the thoughts of God in our awareness.  We wanted nothing other than this.

As I sit with these feelings, I feel comforted with awareness that Life in the One Mind can be truly blissful.  I can begin to look around me for the comfort of God’s Love because it makes no difference where I think I find myself.  It is there, it is always there.  Everywhere I am surrounded by the same thought and the same purpose, God’s Love and God’s Will.  I only think I can’t experience it, but I can.  I can choose to accept reality and deny false images of separation and conflict.  I can choose to flow with God’s Will, since I am anyway, instead of making images that oppose reality.  I can choose to watch my ego mind with objectivity and gently remind myself that its all illusion that I see in the physical world.  I can choose to be in the reality of Love.  Today, I can now see better the value of this choice because it brings me closer to the joy and peace of reality, and I am grateful.  Amen.

© 2004-2011, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

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