Together, We Light the Way

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Lesson 210

I choose the joy of God instead of pain.

I was able to see this in my mind before I even began my lesson this morning. I was sitting at the computer thinking how much I have enjoyed my weekend and being home and I felt a sense of dread at having to leave next week to get back on the road with my job. Immediately I brought that thought to the Holy Spirit within and was gently reminded that I was not unhappy to be leaving and was not happy because I was home.

It is very easy to fall back into the habit of thinking that the world influences my feelings. I am grateful for the reminder that only my thoughts influence me because I don’t live in the world, but rather the world lives in me. Total responsibility is the beginning of the path out of pain and into joy. It feels heavy only when I am reluctant to accept it. Once I remember that responsibility is my way out, I am eager to accept it and to get on with it.

I have been doing this for a long time and am very happy with the changes that I have allowed in my mind. I am more vigilant today than I ever have been because I have practiced vigilance every day. At first it felt like a burden, but success is a wonderful motivator and now I am simply grateful to do it. It is hard for me to believe that such a simple thing as noticing the thoughts unlike what God would think and then being willing to have them changed is all that I need do. But apparently this is true. My life used to be a painful experience with brief moments of happiness. I had learned to exist on distraction and to call it happiness. This is no state for the Son of God to be in.

As I do this work I find that I experience success and feel so good I can hardly believe it. This is my motivation to continue when it seems difficult. Then I will be back in the muck of ego thinking and be in pain. This was always hard for me to accept. I felt like there was something wrong with me and that if every time I was lifted up I simply fell back down that I would never get any place. This weekend a friend talked about the path as hills and valleys. She said that this is a necessary part of the journey.

When we do the work we wind up on the mountain top, but that doesn’t mean we are through. We then have to go back down to do more work, to allow more stuff to surface and be healed. This was really a helpful analogy for me. I went back and looked at some of the encouraging thoughts I received from my Higher Self, and realized this is what I was being told. I was worried because it seemed that I had fallen and actually I had simply surrendered to the process and was doing exactly what I was supposed to.

Holy Spirit, more and more I am beginning to realize that once I put my foot on the path home, everything in my life became exactly perfect for that purpose. I suppose it always was, but before my path was not purposeful and so I failed to recognize the perfection. I am grateful for it all.

© 2007, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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My Current Understanding

Every so often I write down what I think about God and who I am and how it all works. It is interesting to see how it changes as I grow. It has also taught me that I don’t know anything. There used to be many times when I thought I had it all figured out. I just knew I was right. I laugh at that now. I’m sharing a version of like as Myron sees it and would love to hear about life as you see it.

God created His only Son who created His Son who created His Son, and on and on because extension of Its Self is what God does. He creates by extending Himself forever and so what He creates is exactly like Him. That is what extension is. It pushes Itself out in Love because It is Love and nothing else, and the Love returns to It and It is loved.

God is Love and nothing else. God is whole and complete. God is all that there is. So Love is all there is. Because there is only One and more of One, and nothing else, there is perfect undisturbed peace.

So everything is just rocking along when God’s Son had a creative thought. (Because the nature of God is creative and He creates through His thoughts, then all His thoughts are creative.) This thought was something like, “I wonder what it would be like to not be whole, to be something else.” This thought was discarded as impossible and everything went on in perfect peace as always.

However, the creative power of the mind of God’s Son, even in that small blip of time, made and considered a world of separation. In that bit of time, small as it was, the incredible mind of the Son figured out a way to make all of what we know as life, figured out judgment which had not existed before and how it could be used as a foundation on which to build this illusory world, worked out separation and time to separate events and to make separation seem real. It then had to decide… laugh this off or play in it awhile.

The Son forgot to laugh at it and played instead. He chose to consider this mad idea and realized that to make it work, he would have to forget that he made it up. Otherwise he would not get the full effect. To experience it, he needed to believe in it. So he did. His loving Father who would not conceive of limiting His Son, and so simply placed in the Mind a thought of Himself, a Correction of the Mind, so that when His Son was through with the game He could always find His way back.

And so we are. We had fun with separation and all its effects. We experienced lots of dramas, comedies, adventures, and tragedies. So what is all the guilt about? Well in the forgetting we set it up, we thought that we had destroyed God. God is whole and complete and here we have these entire worlds and billions of separate entities and so we made God what He is not. We destroyed Him. This is the horrible guilt that underlies everything we do. It is the source of every fear we have.

Now that we have chosen to wake up, God’s Correction is reminding us that God is love and that we cannot change that no matter how many dreams we have. We are allowing the message of the Holy Spirit to come to awareness in our holy mind through our dream characters. We are indeed waking up. The characters of this little group are among the first to do so on such a large scale I think, and it is very encouraging. Each character in the dream will wake up when the Mind is ready for it to do so.

In the meantime, back at the ranch, everything continues as it has been and always will be. Eternity is not disturbed by our little foray into time. God is not mad at our dream, and only honors whatever His Son chooses to create. Our dreams of guilt and fear are meaningless to God Who knows only love and perfection. We dream God is angry with us and God continues whole perfect and only pure Love. How could anger, disappointment, and punishment arise from pure Love. It is laughable.

As the Holy Spirit uses what we made in the ego to undo the ego, we begin to awaken and as we do so, we remember to laugh at this tiny mad idea. We remember not to take it seriously; not to be upset when we judge, not to berate ourselves when we lose our temper, and not to blame our brothers for these things. We release the need to project. We once again become aware that we are the observer rather than a victim of our own story.

When we accept the full truth of who we are, we live awhile in our lovely creation without the guilt of thinking we sinned. We will be able to enjoy and revel in our creative powers because without guilt there will be no projections of anger, fear, frustration, hatred and the like. Once all of the aspects of the Mind have awoken to this lovely truth, the Mind will be purified and God will reach down to His Son and pull him up, as is so poetically expressed in the Course.

There was never anything wrong with the Son expressing His creativity by making up this story. It was not a sin and God is not angry. The error was in taking it seriously and believing we had destroyed our Creator by changing His creation which is in itself impossible. And even if that is what we intended, it is hardly a sin, but only a mistake. It is easily undone as we choose the Holy Spirit as our Guide rather than continuing to listen to the ego.

This is my present vision of who we are and how we got here. It changes a bit as I go along and I am sure it will change again. I do not know anything. Knowledge is of the Kingdom and my awareness is not on the Kingdom while I see myself as a body hurtling through space-neither of which exists! What an absurd but interesting story I have written. But the truth is in my mind and I am learning to want it. In not knowing, I empty my mind and make a place for the truth to come into my awareness.

© 2007, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Some Thought on Relationships

It can be very hard for some of us to let go of the need to fix. I understand this, because it has been a problem for me. What I always ask myself is this; what is my purpose? My salvation, accepting the Atonement for myself is my only purpose. As it happens, doing this for myself, I am doing it for all. I cannot save anyone else. I don’t need to save anyone else. To suggest that someone else needs my efforts on their behalf is to attack them. It is an attack on their invulnerability. If someone thinks they cannot live without me, I understand their pain because being in denial of their Divinity is painful. But I would never think I can restore them to their sanity. To think that someone needs me is to think that I need someone. I don’t want to teach that lie to them or to me.

A special relationship is one in which a trade is made. The two people agree to meet each others needs. When one or the other outgrows their need, or discovers the other person is no longer meeting that need, the relationship usually ends. If one or both of the couple feel that something is missing at that time, they can be sure that it wasn’t a loving relationship, but rather an exchange of needs. I don’t want to teach anyone that they are needy and that I am the one who can supply that need and make them feel whole because that isn’t true. And what I teach them I teach myself.

I always want to do the most loving and helpful thing at all times. This is good as long as I don’t become confused about what is the most helpful thing; what is loving. If I love someone I want them to be strong. I want them to know they are perfect and whole and without needs of any kind. I do not want them to think they are in any way needy. I do not want them to see me as special or different from them. I want all of my special relationships to be transformed by the Holy Spirit into holy relationships. This can be done at any time and under any circumstances. I don’t have to be with the person anymore. They don’t even have to be still in the body for it to happen. In fact healing takes place across all sorts of ego boundaries like time and space.

All that is required of me is to notice the thoughts and beliefs that indicate a special relationship, and to be willing to see it differently. This is the most loving thing I can do for myself, the other person and the Sonship as a whole. More importantly, it is the only loving thing I can do, and everything else is not loving regardless of how I have learned to see it.

© 2007, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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