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Study of the Text 2-28-13

2-28-13
8 I have emphasized that the miracle, or the expression of Atonement, is always a sign of respect from the worthy to the worthy. The recognition of this worth is re-established by the Atonement. It is obvious, then, that when you are afraid, you have placed yourself in a position where you need Atonement. You have done something loveless, having chosen without love. This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was offered. The need for the remedy inspired its establishment. As long as you recognize only the need for the remedy, you will remain fearful. However, as soon as you accept the remedy, you have abolished the fear. This is how true healing occurs.

That last sentence, this is how true healing occurs, really grabbed me. I went back and read the paragraph several times and asked Jesus to help me see what he wants me to see as I did so.
The first phrase I looked at said … the miracle, or the expression of Atonement…. This is a good reminder of what I have learned earlier in the text. The miracle is the experience I have when I accept the Atonement. It is a miracle because it is a true change in my thinking and is done outside the illusion. In other words, as Myron, I did not get to this change through my own thinking. I may have used my thinking mind to get to the place I was willing to be healed, but the healing was not my doing. 

Jesus then says that the miracle is always a sign of respect from the worthy to the worthy. There is a hotel I like to stay at, and the clerk has always been kind of taciturn. I respect her desire not to be chatty, but I have always spoken to her and been friendly. I noticed that even though she doesn’t appear especially friendly, she always remembers my name and goes out of her way to put me in a room she knows I will like.

Yesterday when I checked in, she told me that she was going to be on duty for twelve hours and maybe longer. That was the first personal information she had ever shared with me. Normally, she just did her job and did it well, but barely spoke at all. I sympathized with the long hours and started to walk away. Then she told me that she has children at home who need her and how it makes her feel to be away from them for such a long time.

She went on to tell me about her relationship with them. It was a very touching story and I was surprised by her desire to share like this. I listened until someone else came in and needed her attention.  As I walked to my room I thought about what a difficult situation she was in. She needed the job to take care of her kids, but the long hours were keeping her from being the mother she wanted to be. I prayed for a perfect resolution to her situation.

I prayed in confidence knowing that this woman was sent to me for this purpose.  I prayed knowing that the prayer would be answered. As God’s Son I am worthy of being heard, and as God’s Son she is worthy of the miracle. I was not praying for her from a belief that she needed someone more spiritual to pray for her. I absolutely know that this opportunity to offer a miracle is as much a blessing to me as it is to her.

I know that she does not stand below me, but beside me.  It was not pity that provoked the desire for a miracle, but respect. This situation was a blessing to me because it reminded me of our worth and of our relationship as equal parts of the Sonship. I received a miracle because I offered a miracle. The miracle occurs because of this joining.

We are also reminded in this paragraph that when we choose against love, we choose fear, and we need a miracle to re-establish our truth. In truth we cannot be without love and fear has no place in our holy minds, but we cannot remember that when we ask for something different. The first part of the correction process is always going to be a recognition that we did, indeed, ask for the problem.

Whatever is happening in my life in every moment occurs because of a choice I made. If the moment is not peaceful, joyful, and loving, it is because I chose without love. Before anything can be done to reverse this, I first have to acknowledge that I did it to myself. As long as I project the cause onto the world, I continue to choose without love and the problem remains in place, and I continue to live in fear.

It is not enough, however, to recognize the problem and to acknowledge that I but did it to myself.  This is a vital step, but it is not enough. Acknowledging the fear will not take me out of the fear. I must then be willing to accept the correction. The Holy Spirit will not take from me what I want to keep. You might wonder that I would want what causes me so much suffering. But here is an example of what happens.

Yesterday I thought about something I had done in the past that still triggers shame in me. This happened a couple of times before I thought to look at it. The shame is hard to bear and I didn’t want it. Up to the moment when the memory surfaced I was very happy and content. Then I thought about the past occurrence and immediately felt awful. In that moment I chose lovelessly and so I was in fear.

The fear is that I will never be free of this shame, and will continue to suffer for it forever, that it happened in the past and there is nothing to be done about it. This is not true, of course, but that is the underlying and often unacknowledged fear. There is unconscious fear as well, and it goes all the way back to the belief that God is really mad at me and I am forever condemned. Of course, in the moment, I wasn’t thinking about all that, and it was just about some bad behavior from my past.

I acknowledged that I was feeling shame and that it was because I had chosen against love. I chose to see myself as less than and this is not choosing love. For awhile this is where it stayed. I ran the scenario over and over in my mind and the ego picked it apart, first offering absolution in the form of projection, then jerking the rug from under me as it pointed out that making others guilty is a sin, too. That ego is very good at guilt.

Because of my study and practice this did not go on overly long. I was able to remember that the next part of the forgiveness process is to allow the mind to be healed. I resisted this, too, for awhile. Why would I resist healing? Isn’t that what I was asking for? Actually, at first I was not really asking for healing.

I was asking for the suffering to be relieved. I really didn’t have a lot of interest in letting the core belief in unworthiness be healed.  When I realized the problem, I became willing to accept the Atonement in this situation, and all the angst about the past simply dissolved away. But before that could happen, I had to be willing to let go of the problem, not just the effect which was suffering. Then I had to be willing to accept the Atonement. As soon as I did, everything about it changed, and I was in peace again. Just as Jesus promised in this paragraph, this is how true healing occurs.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 2-27-13

2-27-13
7 The first corrective step in undoing the error is to know first that the conflict is an expression of fear. Say to yourself that you must somehow have chosen not to love, or the fear could not have arisen. Then the whole process of correction becomes nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the Atonement as the remedy. These steps may be summarized in this way:

Know first that this is fear.
Fear arises from lack of love.
The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.
Perfect love is the Atonement.

In the past when I read this paragraph I recognized that it must be very important, but I just didn’t see why. It didn’t have any great meaning for me, or catch my imagination as many of the passages do. I didn’t get that “aha” moment when I read it. It was just words. I didn’t worry about it too much because there is so much in the Course that was helpful that I could just move on to something else.

But now that I am doing this work with the Text, I was faced with the task of writing about this paragraph and was flummoxed. Once again, I read it and couldn’t think of anything to say about it. So I asked the Holy Spirit to help me. I asked Him to show me the meaning that is intended and to give me words to share.

What happened next is that I felt overwhelming love and gratitude toward Jesus. I started thanking him for his words and everything he has done for us, and telling him how much I love him. There was so much love and gratitude in my heart that I cried. And when I read this paragraph again I felt it. My heart felt a deep longing to accept the Atonement.

That is what happened and how it felt. But I am still flummoxed, not because I don’t understand it or it lacks meaning for me, but because I don’t know how to say in some other way that it contains all meaning. It seems so perfect, just as it is. When I say to myself that, “I accept the Atonement for myself,” I cry again in gratitude and love.

How can I use this in my life today? Typically, there are many moments in the day when there is conflict in my mind. Many of them are so familiar that I hardly notice them. Some, I fail to see as conflict. Others, I push away. But I am learning that I want to notice these conflicted thoughts so that I can ask for healing, so that I can accept the Atonement.

The first step in this process, once I have noticed the conflict, is to realize it is fear. I have so many names for fear, and I think the reason for all these other names is so that I don’t have to admit to myself how fearful I am. I’m reading a novel about a woman who has to face a lot of fear in her life. She has to face down fear of love, fear of relationships, fear that takes the form of killers and all sorts of monsters. When she feels afraid it makes her less effective and so instead she turns the fear into anger. This makes her feel more powerful.

Maybe this is one of the reasons we find other words for our fear. We call it anger and channel the fear into something that feels less debilitating. It gives us a feeling of control, or at least makes us feel less vulnerable. Hatred is another word and emotion we use to express our fear differently. Instead of feeling afraid of being unloved, for example, we project (that is, throw out of us) the feeling onto someone or something else and say we hate it instead. We are just trying to cope with our fear.

It does not work. Manipulating fear in our minds to make it look like something else does not heal the fear. Fighting what we fear does not work. Hating what we fear does not work. Only love heals fear. This is what Jesus is telling me in this paragraph. He is encouraging me to stop trying to pretend that fear is something else. Then he wants me to withdraw my projections, bring them back into my self, and let them be healed.

If I feel any emotion that is not love, it is fear. If I am fearful it is because somehow I did not love. Jesus is not asking me to figure out how this happened, or what I did or said or felt that was not love. He does not seem to care about the form the error has taken. He is not asking that I know how to feel love instead of the conflict. He is asking only that I recognize that I have failed to love and that I be willing to have this error corrected. He is not asking me to do, but to accept.

The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love, and Jesus does not ask me to understand perfect love, only to be willing to accept it. It is not possible to understand perfect love with the thinking mind, but I can be willing to accept it. Letting go of the need to understand is part of the acceptance. When I think that the truth needs my understanding, it is an expression of my need to assert my own separate will, and this in itself will create fear because it feels like I am opposing God.

All I need to know is that perfect love is the Atonement. Each time today that I notice I am in conflict, I will realize that this is fear and that fear occurs because I have somehow failed to love. This is just an error, and it is an error I no longer believe I need. If fear is lack of love, then the solution is perfect love (which is the Atonement). I accept the Atonement for myself.

Thank you, God, that your solution is not as convoluted as my errors. ~smile~

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 2-26-13

2-26-13
6 It is possible to reach a state in which you bring your mind under my guidance without conscious effort, but this implies a willingness that you have not developed as yet. The Holy Spirit cannot ask more than you are willing to do. The strength to do comes from your undivided decision. There is no strain in doing God’s Will as soon as you recognize that it is also your own. The lesson here is quite simple, but particularly apt to be overlooked. I will therefore repeat it, urging you to listen. Only your mind can produce fear. It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants, producing inevitable strain because wanting and doing are discordant. This can be corrected only by accepting a unified goal.

When I have been in fear (which for most of my life was a familiar feeling) it has felt very real and very much outside my control. It seemed to be caused by something outside me, and it seemed that unless I could control the thing that caused the fear then I was in danger. If I was afraid of heights then I must stay on flat ground.

If I was afraid of relationships then I must avoid them or at least put up a wall between me and the other person so that I would not get too close. If I was afraid of poverty, then I must find a good job and work very hard and impress my boss so he would value me and I would never be fired.

There is a problem with all this careful planning of life. It seems that it is impossible to control life and just as I get a handle on one issue, another blows up in my face. In seemed that avoiding heights would be easy since I live in a really flat state, but then I get the best job I had ever had, and it turns out to be constructing a very high building. I wind up many feet above the ground walking on rebar so I see all the way down between feet. And I make too much money to quit. This is so typical of the ego world, desire and fear colliding and leaving me with no “safe” choice.

All of life is like this, protecting and defending only to be undone by my very efforts, and the sense of failure just intensifying the fear. There are too many goals and they often contradict each other. It feels like nothing ever gets done, that I run around in the same fruitless circle all my life, constantly trying to build my walls and control the uncontrollable. The best I could achieve was temporary success and even then there was the fear that inevitably my house of cards would come tumbling down.

One of the most important things I have learned as a student of the Course is that I have one goal, one purpose in life. My goal is to return my mind to God. I begin by acknowledging my oneness with my brother and this leads me accepting my place in the Son of God. My short cut to saying all this is, “My goal is to awaken.” I want to stop dreaming and start living. I want to awaken from this dream of separation.

Having one unified goal, it becomes simple to make decisions. Do I want to earn more money? Is that my goal? Or do I want to wake up? It does not mean I cannot earn more money and wake up, but it does mean that I cannot have two goals and expect to be at peace. I cannot have two goals and still have a unified goal.

Making more money will not wake me up, so my goal remains that I want to awaken. I leave the care and support of the body to the Holy Spirit Who knows what to do with it, and I give my mind to Him to heal. I still do things with and for the body, but it is just what must be done and what I do with it is not my purpose.

The only time I feel afraid about money is when I forget my single purpose and take on another purpose. The work on my new house is almost finished and in looking at the bill for this work, I felt panicked. It was much higher than I ever expected. I started going through my bank accounts and listing all my other bills and obligations and the more I did it the more fearful I became.

I started out with the goal of seeing how to fit the cost of the remodeling and repairing the house into my budget. Then there was the goal of planning for future work on it and so I needed to save for that. Then I remembered that I am going to have to buy a new car in one or two years at most and maybe any day now, since my present car has so many miles on it. So I have to save for that, too.

Then the ego reminded me of all the possible problems that require a monetary solution that could come up in the future, health problems for example. Even with careful planning I cannot foresee what might be required to remain solvent. No wonder I felt fearful. My goal had become to control the uncontrollable.

And in that goal I had many other goals, some of them conflicting with the others. The idea of restricting my spending to the degree that would be necessary to meet some of these goals was disheartening. I was very conflicted as I wanted to meet one goal but didn’t want to give up another goal to do so. I don’t understand how I used to live like this all the time. It is awful.

Fortunately, I remembered that I have only one purpose here. It is not to remain financially solvent; it is to awaken. The ego screams at me to be sensible. It says I cannot just go all metaphysical on this, and that I need a concrete plan and contingencies. But I have had years of practice watching my mind for ego thoughts and bringing them to the Holy Spirit for healing. I know what to do with these thoughts, and I know that my one unified goal is to awaken from this dream.

I asked the Holy Spirit what He would have me do now, and I followed His guidance in trust. Will I wind up losing this home I just bought because I spent too much money on the repairs? I don’t know. That is not my business. My one unified purpose is to wake up and I do that by using everything in my life as a classroom and by making the Holy Spirit my only Teacher. I am at peace because I have one goal. I am doing what I am guided to do as I listen to that one Teacher, and my mind remains unconflicted so there is no fear in doing so.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 2-25-13

2-25-13
5 Fear is always a sign of strain, arising whenever what you want conflicts with what you do. This situation arises in two ways: First, you can choose to do conflicting things, either simultaneously or successively. This produces conflicted behavior, which is intolerable to you because the part of the mind that wants to do something else is outraged. Second, you can behave as you think you should, but without entirely wanting to do so. This produces consistent behavior, but entails great strain. In both cases, the mind and the behavior are out of accord, resulting in a situation in which you are doing what you do not wholly want to do. This arouses a sense of coercion that usually produces rage, and projection is likely to follow. Whenever there is fear, it is because you have not made up your mind. Your mind is therefore split, and your behavior inevitably becomes erratic. Correcting at the behavioral level can shift the error from the first to the second type, but will not obliterate the fear.

This explanation of fear arising from a split mind is very helpful to me. I can easily see how this happens in my life. The sentence that sums it up for me is this.

Whenever there is fear, it is because you have not made up your mind.

Jesus says that one way this can occur is when I decide to do two things, either at the same time or one after the other. Here is an example of how I have done this. A long time ago I decided that insomnia is a maddening condition resulting in suffering, and therefore it should be avoided at whatever costs. Recently, through guidance from Holy Spirit, I decided that to use insomnia as a classroom for teaching myself that the body is not creative and so insomnia is in my mind, not my body.

Both thoughts were in my mind. There was the thought that I should always arrange my schedule to be in bed by a certain time, and if that didn’t work, I should always have Ambien on hand to assure a good night’s sleep. There was also the thought that the body is not creative and so insomnia is a projection of a separation belief, and so the solution is to allow that belief to be healed in my mind.

These two decisions led to two different behaviors. Sometimes I would choose to believe that the body or the environment was the cause of my problem getting to sleep or staying asleep. When this happened I would want to take a pill. Other times I would choose to believe that this was a great time to practice the truth, that insomnia is a projection from the mind and pills are magical solutions, not real solutions. Then I would not take the pill, or delay taking it as I gave my willingness to allow the mind to be healed of the belief that the body is creative.

Because I held both decisions in my mind at the same time, my behavior reflected this conflict; sometimes I would act on one decision and sometimes on the other. No matter which I chose, I felt conflicted and this triggered fear because no matter what I did, I did not altogether want to do it. Jesus says that the part of the mind that wants to do something else is outraged.

I didn’t feel the rage because I was putting a lid on it and calling it frustration. But frustration is anger pretending to be something more socially acceptable, so I have to cop to anger. And since anger is just rage with a veil pulled over it, I guess I may as well say it. I was enraged. And since all emotion is either fear or love and this was not love, the rage was an expression of fear.

When I was trying to believe both ideas at the same time I was torn between the two, acting on first one then the other. The conflicted behavior was intolerable and caused outrage in whichever part of the mind didn’t get its way. And when I chose to not take the Ambien, and to work with the mistaken thought, this was a strain because I didn’t entirely want to do it. Because I didn’t wholly want this practice I felt coerced and this was intolerable as well. Either way, I was in fear because I had not made up my mind.

It was an uncomfortable period of time as I continued the practice in spite of the fear. That in between place, where I know the Holy Spirit is right and at the same time I also believe I am right, is always uncomfortable. Persistence in the face of resistance has always helped me stick with it until I push through to the other side.

This did not mean that I forced my behavior, which would have produced more consistency in my behavior, but would not have reduced the fear. I was simply consistent in noticing the thoughts and asking for correction regardless of the decision I went with. As my practice proved to me that the body is not creative, I naturally began to drop my desire to act as if I was the victim of outside forces. This brought a lightness and joy to my practice because I was much less conflicted.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 2-22-13

2-22-13
4 The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate. At that level you can help it. You are much too tolerant of mind wandering, and are passively condoning your mind’s miscreations. The particular result does not matter, but the fundamental error does. The correction is always the same. Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine. If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear.

This paragraph has been very important to me. At first it scared me to death. The first sentence was the scary part for me because Jesus was so clearly telling me that I couldn’t ask him to take my fear away and I felt so helpless against my fear. I felt like fear was the driving force in my life and I didn’t know what to do about it. Now here was my savior telling me to take care of it myself.

But eventually, I got over my upset enough to really read the rest of the paragraph and I saw that he was telling me how to do this. No, he was not going to wave a magic wand over my fear and make it go away. However, he would help me when it came to the conditions that brought the fear about.

He also let me in on the secret to doing this. He said, “You are much too tolerant of mind wandering, and are passively condoning your mind’s miscreations.” In this sentence he let me know that I needed to watch my mind for thoughts that were miscreating the world I see. Once I understood this and accepted it, I began to change the world I see a thought at a time. When I found Dan Joseph’s book, Inner Healing, I started using his little three step process for mind watching and I got really good at it.

I paid attention to my thoughts and when they were not the thoughts I think with God, I asked that my mind be healed. In noticing how much this changed my life, I came to understand how I was projecting fearful stories from a mind that was steeped in fear. The stories themselves don’t really matter (although, from Myron’s point of view they seem to matter a lot) but the belief that caused the stories does matter, and so I learned to use the effect (the story) to signal an untrue belief that needed to be healed.

Remembering that there is only love or fear, I treat every thought that is not love as if it is fear. It really is fear. When I am angry it is because I feel threatened in some way and I am afraid. If I were jealous it would be because I was afraid of losing something or someone. When I am grieving it is because I am afraid I have lost someone important to me. If I feel shamed it is because I am afraid I have lost esteem. If I feel guilty it is because I am afraid I did something wrong. If it is not love, it is always about fear whatever name we give it.

Last night I came home after being on the road working this week. I was excited to get there because I wanted to see if the contractor was through with my house as he anticipated. When I got home he had made some progress, but not nearly what he led me to expect. I looked around at the unpacked boxes, the layer of sheetrock dust on everything. I walked across the gritty floors and checked out the closet and bathroom he is putting in for me.

The tiles are in and the walls painted, but there is a hole where the toilet will someday sit, or so I am told. The tub is there but the plumbing is not. And so it went. I felt let down, frustrated, then angry. I argued with myself over these feeling for awhile then I just gave in and cried. I felt silly crying over such a temporary and relatively unimportant problem, but there it was. I felt like crying so I did.

I had gone through such a display of emotion and had so many different feelings about it, disappointment, frustration, anger, and then guilt for having this petty and “unspiritual” reaction that I felt confused. I would like to have asked the Holy Spirit to wave that magic wand and make it all go away, just heal my mind of everything so I felt like myself again. But that’s not how it works. We are free and this means that no one can give us what we don’t want or undo what we did without our permission.

Just saying, “Hey, make me feel better,” is not the same thing as looking at my thoughts with the Holy Spirit, and deciding that they are not true and not thoughts I want anymore. So I asked Holy Spirit to help me see the thoughts that were untrue. Suddenly the fog lifted and my mind cleared. He showed me what I was thinking that was not true, by giving me the true thoughts.

I remembered that this was not done to me. Always, I but do this to myself. Everything that seems to be just happening is actually the projection of the thought forms in my own mind. I am not a victim.  These are not slow and lazy contractors. They are my brothers. They are the Son of God. Everything is in Divine order and there is nothing to fear. I think I want my house to be finished, clean and in order, but really what I want is the peace of God. And just like that, faster than a speeding bullet, faster even than the mind can think, I recognized my mistaken thoughts and wanted to be healed, and everything changed.

This would have been a very different story if I had not done the practice that makes mind watching second nature for me. I have stopped being tolerant of mind wandering because I know that watching my thoughts is my way out of hell. I watch for the misthoughts and I sincerely ask for healing. I want the peace of God more than I want whatever thing the ego thinks I need to be happy, so although I temporarily forget this, I always come back to it.

Lately, these sentences have been important to me. “Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine. If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear.” For a long time now I have asked, “What would you have me go, say or do?” But now I have made it more specific at times. For instance, I got some extra money and I wondered if I should use it to pay off a debt, or save it for unexpected expenses on the house. I asked Spirit for guidance, but not before I tried to decide on my own and then I was confused about which answer came from Him.

So I made a decision about what to do with it, then I asked Jesus if my choice was in accord with his. I waited a bit, just letting my mind rest in the certainty that I would be answered, and then followed through on my plan. I knew that if it was not a good idea, that I would feel it, because I wanted to be in accord with Jesus more than I wanted to make plans on my own or be in charge of this little kingdom of mine.

Does it really matter that I use the money one way and not another? Not really. This is all an illusion, so how could my decision matter? But it does matter that I learn to set the ego aside and that I realize that I don’t want a will separate from God, and to finally see that I do not have a will separate from God.

I learn this by practicing it and then the result teaches me that God’s Will for me is happiness. As Jesus says, “The particular result does not matter, but the fundamental error does.” He said that before I do anything, I should check with him. So every time I remember to do so, I follow his instructions, and the results of doing so motivates me to remember more often.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 2-21-13

2-21-13
3 It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of misthought can result in healing. When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly. That is why you feel responsible for it. You must change your mind, not your behavior, and this is a matter of willingness. You must change your mind, not your behavior Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible. Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.

Well, I just have to laugh out loud as I read this. I find myself in an awkward situation which I am not at liberty to discuss except in very general terms. I know a secret and it seemed to me that knowing this secret was causing me a lot of anxiety. If I did nothing with the secret I felt like I was betraying a confidence. If I acted on the secret, I felt like I was betraying someone else.

After feeling this anxiety for a couple of days, and not being able to come up with a solution, I finally got around to asking for help. Last night I asked Holy Spirit what I should do about this situation. This morning I got my answer this morning when he sent me to this paragraph (and the paragraphs we did yesterday) but I failed to connect the two, so he sent me to an article by Nouk Sanchez, which explained the answer more fully so I couldn’t miss the connection. (This is where I had to laugh out loud because I had completely missed the connection between my problem and what we have been studying.)
The answer, now that I have opened my eyes to it, is obvious. Jesus said, “It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of misthought can result in healing.” He said, “You must change your mind, not your behavior.” What I have been doing is this. I felt like I stuck in a situation where no matter what I did I had to betray someone. I kept looking at the situation to find a solution. I even asked Holy Spirit to look at the situation and come up with something because I couldn’t.

My error, of course, is that I was trying to find a way to manipulate the solution. I wanted to trade one illusion for another, hopefully better one. This is not my true desire, and I went to it because I still get confused about that. However, because I sincerely wanted help, and because there is a part of my mind that is not confused about what I want, I was directed to that help.

My problem only seems to be that I am faced with a choice of who to betray. The reality is that I am being given an opportunity to ask the Holy Spirit to heal the belief in betrayal. As Nouk points out in her article, the belief in betrayal is an attack. It is an attack on others and an attack on myself. If I allow my mind to be healed of the belief in betrayal, I will never again feel betrayed, nor will I betray others.

The ego, of course, is very suspicious of this as an answer. It says that this is not going to help the situation and I still don’t know what to do. What I do know, however, is that cause and effect are together in my mind. Change the cause and the effect must also be changed. While everything shifts, I must trust. I have asked for a miracle for all involved.

A prayer once said, is answered, and it is a mistake to think it needs to be repeated. I trust that everything is perfect just as it is and that my part is complete. I asked for healing and I accepted healing. The details are not my business. Even if I never understand the perfection, never see why the outcome was perfect, I trust that it is. And if there is something for me to do or say, I will be told of it and will recognize it when I hear it. I know this is true because it is my Heart’s desire. It is what I really want.

There is something that is helpful to my understanding and that I need to reinforce in my own mind. The thought came first, then the situation. In other words, there was a thought or belief in betrayal. That belief was then projected outward as a situation in which betrayal was portrayed. I think that it happened in the way it did, where I was flummoxed as to how to avoid betrayal, because I am ready to allow the belief in betrayal to be healed.

Experiencing it this way shined a light on the belief.  I was faced with a problem that I could not solve in form, so I had to look more deeply and ask Holy Spirit what He wanted me to do with it. In this way I was inviting Him into my mind to heal it and He was able to help me see that I was looking at the situation rather than the cause of the situation. That Holy Spirit is very clever at getting around my ego.

Nouk’s entire article was extremely helpful in getting me on track, but this is one paragraph that helped me to look at the problem differently.

Self Love is God’s Love made manifest. And Self Love is embodied through forgiveness, by accepting that no one is guilty. I finally see that through the ego I have used others, pain, sickness or scarcity to self-attack. I recognize that I cannot be attacked unless I first (unconsciously betray or abandon) attack myself. In order to perceive attack, I must have already abandoned my Holy Self. And now I need a miracle to restore awareness of my real Identity along with its incorruptible nature. This is what accepting Atonement is for.

When I read this, I realized that I was experiencing the idea of betrayal in my life because I had unconsciously betrayed myself. I asked for a miracle to restore me to my true identity which cannot be betrayed because of its Divine nature. You can read Nouk’s article at http://undoing-the-ego.org/noukblog/?p=379. It is an excerpt from a new book she is writing called, The End of Death. Nouk is very generous in sharing the book as she writes it in a series of articles. I’m really excited for it to be published.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text 2-20-13

VI. Fear and Conflict
1 Being afraid seems to be involuntary; something beyond your own control. Yet I have said already that only constructive acts should be involuntary. My control can take over everything that does not matter, while my guidance can direct everything that does, if you so choose. Fear cannot be controlled by me, but it can be self-controlled. Fear prevents me from giving you my control. The presence of fear shows that you have raised body thoughts to the level of the mind. This removes them from my control, and makes you feel personally responsible for them. This is an obvious confusion of levels.

Well, Jesus is absolutely right that it does seem like fear is involuntary. I am afraid of heights, and when I am confronted by what I fear, it seems like I have no control over that fear. It feels like it is being up high that causes the fear and my only relief is to get back on flat ground. Jesus says that I am wrong about this. He says that I can control fear and he says that it is important that I do so.

When I try to control the situation, the effect of the projection, I am suffering from level confusion. The problem for me is not heights, and I won’t solve the problem by staying on flat ground. If I stay at this level, I have made myself responsible for correcting my problem. You would think this would be easy enough.

There is not a single mountain in Louisiana, and not even a real hill. But then I notice I can’t always stay here. Trying to control the situation becomes very complicated when someone invites me to attend a workshop and it is in a mountainous area, I have to save myself by not going. If someone asks me to give a workshop in such an area, I have to save myself by saying no.

What I have noticed is that the more I try to control the fear by controlling the situation, the more fearful I become. It seems like my fear of heights is exacerbated the more I do this, and I also become fearful of my failure to control the fear. It is like a snowball rolling downhill and just getting bigger and bigger as it goes. I have taken control of the fear through my desire to control on the level of form, and now am on my own.

My fear and my desire to control has prevented the Holy Spirit from helping me. Feeling like I am on my own is frightening all itself, because it emphasizes the real problem, which is I think I am separated from God. Now I am further frightened because I am peeking at some of that unconscious guilt about the separation. Do you see how the snowball picks up more and more fear as it builds momentum?

2 I do not foster level confusion, but you must choose to correct it. You would not excuse insane behavior on your part by saying you could not help it. Why should you condone insane thinking? There is a confusion here that you would do well to look at clearly. You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think. You cannot separate yourself from the truth by “giving” autonomy to behavior. This is controlled by me automatically as soon as you place what you think under my guidance. Whenever you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you have allowed your mind to miscreate and have not allowed me to guide it.

The solution to fear is to recognize the level confusion and to let go of trying to control the situation. As I realize that it is my thinking that needs correction and not my behavior, I am on the right road. I cannot hand Jesus my fear and ask him to make it go away. I cannot control the situation and learn to avoid my fear. But as I realize that it is my mind that needs to be healed, I give my thoughts and beliefs to the Holy Spirit, and now I am moving toward a solution.

It seems so simple when I say it like this. And in truth it is simple, but it becomes complicated in my mind as I practice it. I say to Holy Spirit that I want to be healed of my fear of heights, but then I remember how terrified I was when I had my little adventure driving up Cripple Creek with Regina, and tell Him that I don’t ever want to do this again. Now I am back to level confusion again as I want to control the fear through controlling the situation. Sigh.

I don’t know how anyone else does this, but my process is to notice my thoughts and my emotional reaction to those thoughts and the situations. When I see that I am afraid, I ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind. When I notice level confusion, I ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind. I do this as often as there is fear in my mind. I realize that it is not actually fear of heights that is the problem, but the belief in fear.

Jesus tells us that there is nothing to fear. This is the real lesson that I am learning. Mountains are just a symbol of my belief that there really is something to fear. Avoiding mountains is not going to heal my mind of the belief in fear. As I let go of trying to control fear at the level of form, trying to let go of fear through manipulating the symbol, I turn to Jesus for help.

I understand that the problem is in my mind, and this is something I can get help with. In fact, it is not my job to heal my mind; it is only my job to recognize the need for healing and to desire the healing. The reason I continue to ask for healing over and over is not because the Holy Spirit is failing to hear me, or failing to answer my call. It is because I am convincing myself that I really do want healing.

I ask that the Holy Spirit heal my mind, and the ego voice says that I am crazy, that I am going to wind up back on a mountain and it reminds me of the awful fear I felt. I listen to that voice and I become too afraid to turn it over to Holy Spirit, so I take it back. Then, later when I notice the fear in my mind, I ask Holy Spirit to heal it. You would think this was an endless cycle and nothing was happening, but that is not true.

Each time I ask, I am answered. It is like a layer of fear is being peeled away and then another layer and when it is all gone, there will be nothing left but joy and peace. I don’t think this is literal but it is the way it feels to me. I think that the moment I asked for healing, it was done, but I was not ready to accept it right away. That was the peeling away part.

When it comes to heights my thinking has been insane. I take responsibility for my thinking and I make a clear choice to place what I think under your guidance, Jesus. I ask that you guide me now. If I become afraid again, I know you will wait for me to return my mind to you. Thank you for your infinite patience.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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