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January-March, 2020

Kindness Created Me Kind

by Rev. Myron Jones, Ordained Ministerial Counselor

I strove to be a kind person, to treat others kindly, to dream of my brother’s kindnesses instead of dwelling in my dream on his mistakes. Sometimes it felt like a struggle, many battles fought and some won but the effort endless. And yet, I knew it must be possible because in Lesson 67, I am told that Love created me like Itself and that Kindness created me kind, and I know that what God creates remains as He created it.

God created me kind so how is it that I felt a need to struggle to express what I am? I was not actually struggling to be kind, but was struggling to overcome the ego tendency toward judgment and defensiveness. As, over the years, my mind has healed and become clear, kind is simply what I am. Jesus expresses this transformation perfectly in Text, Chapter 5.

“How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance.” (T-5.IV.8)

I’ve been thinking about this transformation and my part in it. The transformation itself is not for me to do; it is the Holy Spirit that heals. My part, however, was essential. I had to desire the healing. You would think this would be easy and certainly it turned out to be easy, but at first it felt difficult indeed. The difficulty was that I wanted two things and the two things were in opposition to each other. I wanted both separation and Wholeness. The problem is obvious, right?

It didn’t always seem so obvious to me, though, because I was confused. I was confused about my very nature. I thought I was both body and spirit, both human and divine. Everything became simple and easy once that basic misunderstanding was cleared up. I am not a body and I am not human. These identifications are an illusion, something we made up in order to have an experience and not what we are.

We decide what we want to experience, we choose images to represent these desires and the stage is set. We come onto the stage fully involved in the play and with no memory of how we got here. I have a favorite movie, Inception. In this movie there is a dream within a dream within a dream, much as happens here in our very own dream of separation.

In the movie one character points out to another that when we dream, we find ourselves in the middle of it with no memory of how we got there. Again, this is much the same thing we experience in the dream of a world filled with separate bodies. We are here without a memory of how that happened. We are clever at disguising this problem through pro-creation so that we can go on believing in the stories we live, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is only an elaborate dream.

Once I figured it out, I could see clearly that the world is just a manifestation of the beliefs in our mind. What a clever thing we have done! Now we can look at these beliefs, and interact with the beliefs. We feel the effects of that interaction and decide if we want to keep the belief or let it go to the Holy Spirit who will purify it for us. We cannot change our reality, but we can dream for as long as we want to, or as long as we can withstand the pain and suffering. No matter how long we delay the process, eventually, we will return to our true state as the Divine Beings we are.

It’s a gentle transformation sometimes taking many years, many lifetimes. But what we actually are cannot be undone; we are as God created us and nothing that we do within this illusion can change that. Actually, it is the belief that we did change our nature that is the problem. When we accept that this is all fun and games, we have no problem accepting our nature as kindness and that kindness moves through us and is extended naturally and without any effort on our part.

When we take the world seriously, and believe that we have succeeded in separating ourselves from God, we think we have separated from our true nature as well. Now, instead of naturally extending Love, it feels like moving through quicksand to do this. We belong to God and to think we have undone this is frightening and creates an overwhelming sense of guilt in our minds.

Our cockeyed solution to this guilt is to fling it out of ourselves and onto the others who share the stage with us. It doesn’t work because it is also our nature that thoughts do not leave their source so all we accomplish is more guilt for trying to hurt others. It is easy to see now why we have to struggle to be kind. How can we be kind to the ones who we need to be the scapegoats for our guilt?

Once I began to understand what was going on and how really awful this dream is, I became determined to awaken from it. I began to watch my thoughts like a hawk. I knew that it was my thoughts that gave form to everything in the dream. As Jesus tells us in Lesson 15: 

“My thoughts are images that I have made.

It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your ‘seeing’ was made. This is the function you have given your body’s eyes. It is not seeing. It is image making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions.” (W-pI.15.1)

And, “There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level.”(T-2.VI.9:13-14)

These thoughts of mine are making up everything in the dream so if I want to undo the dream, I must change my thoughts. This is what I have done. I noticed that I was projecting guilt onto my brothers and sisters and I dedicated myself to changing my mind. There is no way I can be kind if I think I am guilty. I can act as if I am kind and sometimes, I will seem like a kind person. But the guilt will out me. Where once I was kind, soon I will be cruel.

I won’t be able to help myself if I believe in guilt. I will judge and I will attack and I will feel justified in doing so. The only solution is to give up the belief in guilt. It is not actually hard, though it might feel hard at first. Each situation will feel like it is different and special and this is what I had to overcome. I forgave each separate instance in which guilt showed up and did this for a long time.

Finally, I saw the pattern and realized that while guilt shows up in different forms, the belief that guilt is real is the only thing that needs to be undone. Then it went a lot faster. I accepted that I am not the character I play in this story of Myron, and that I am the unaffected Self that cannot be changed.

Since I know that I am an extension of God, and since I cannot conceive of God as suffering from guilt, I knew that guilt could not be real and therefore I could not be guilty. Without suffering from the belief in guilt myself, I had no desire to see anyone else as guilty. Now I can be truly kind because there is nothing interfering with my true Self. Here is something from the Course that brings me joy to read.

“Today I am redeemed, and born anew into a world of mercy and of care; of loving kindness and the peace of God.” (W-pII.306.1:4)

© 2019, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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