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Study of the Text III. The Only Answer, Paragraph 3 12-13-13

IV. The Only Answer, Paragraph 3
3 You cannot understand the conflict until you fully understand the basic fact that the ego cannot know anything. The Holy Spirit does not speak first, but He always answers. Everyone has called upon Him for help at one time or another and in one way or another, and has been answered. Since the Holy Spirit answers truly He answers for all time, which means that everyone has the answer now.

Everyone has the answer now. This understanding is changing everything for me. I don’t have to strive for the answer because I have it. I don’t have to hope for or long for the answer. I don’t have to worry that I will never have the answer. I have it now. I have it now because the answer is in my mind. There is really only one question and one answer and the answer is available to me.

I know who I am. I know who I am because the answer is in my mind. “I know who I am” is the reminder to me that I really do know. I have this self imposed amnesia-thing going on, but nothing is lost. As I let go of the many ego definitions of “me” that the ego has provided, the only thing that will be left is my Self, the answer to the question, “Who am I?”

I have asked another question. What is guilt? I have been told that guilt is nothing. It is a mental construct designed by the ego mind to keep me away from the previous answer. Jesus tells us this in Chapter 14, Section IV. “Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you know Him. Therefore, you must be guiltless.” Guilt is not God’s Will so it cannot exist.

The logic in that is so flawless that I am amazed I have continued to hold onto the idea of guilt for as long as I have. Jesus offered me the opportunity to let go of the idea of guilt once and for all and I accepted. I asked about guilt and was given the answer that guilt is nothing and now I am withdrawing my belief in guilt as it comes into my mind.

At first it gave me a headache as a war was being waged in my mind. The part of my mind the ego inhabits wants to keep guilt because it finds it very valuable at times and because guilt keeps me fully engaged in the ego. The part of my mind that Holy Spirit inhabits doesn’t believe in guilt and so does not see it. There was conflict, a war of sorts, as I looked back and forth, first to one teacher and then to the Teacher. Ouch.

The ego tried everything in it’s bag of tricks to keep my attention. It pointed out that I have never completely given up anything I have made. I gave up the belief in pain… sometimes. I gave up grievances … sometimes. The ego said I could not ever give up guilt altogether. I wasn’t ready. I needed to practice more, to keep working on little guilty thoughts, giving them up one at a time. It asked me who I think I am to make such a sweeping declaration and reminded me how foolish I would look when I failed, and that failure was inevitable.

But I asked the question and I received the answer. Guilt is not God’s Will so it cannot exist. Every time I had a thought that pointed in any small or large way to guilt, I remembered the answer. For instance, I texted my grandson and asked him for directions to the party we were both attending. He texted back the name of the park. Well, I already knew that. I was annoyed that he wasn’t more helpful. Because I made a decision to let go of belief in guilt, I recognized this thought for what it was. Could my grandson be guilty? How could he? Guilt is not the Will of God.

This morning I thought about my son’s upcoming surgery. He is getting a disc fusion on the 23rd. I don’t want another headache so I let the thought complete itself. I felt fearful and I followed the fear. The fear led to anger, which inevitably led to guilt. My son is not guilty for hurting his back, even after I warned him to be careful. How could he be guilty? There is no guilt. If there is no guilt in God, there is no guilt.

I am not guilty for failing to heal him. I was surprised to find that one still hanging around. The ego says that if my mind were really healed, I would be able to perform this miracle and my son would be healed. The inference being that I am guilty he has to go through this surgery because I have failed to heal him. I notice that this ego strategy is working to pull me back into the belief in guilt. I feel the deep emotion that this thought triggers.

But this cannot be true. If it is not God’s Will that I be guilty, then I cannot be guilty. I cannot undo God with my guilt. I can only pretend to be guilty. Why do I want to pretend to be guilty? It is very painful. It is hard to let it go, though, so I do my part. I give all the willingness I have toward letting it go. I do not want to pick up guilt for this one thing, because the truth is true all the time or it is not true at all. I give my willingness, and I ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind.

I know that the answer to my question about guilt is in my mind. As I notice these beliefs in guilt and let them go, I uncover that answer. There is only God in my mind and God is Love, not guilt.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text III. The Only Answer, Paragraph 2 12-13-13

IV. The Only Answer, Paragraph 2
2 When God created you He made you part of Him. That is why attack within the Kingdom is impossible. You made the ego without love, and so it does not love you. You could not remain within the Kingdom without love, and since the Kingdom is love, you believe that you are without it. This enables the ego to regard itself as separate and outside its maker, thus speaking for the part of your mind that believes you are separate and outside the Mind of God. The ego, then, raised the first question that was ever asked, but one it can never answer. That question, “What are you?” was the beginning of doubt. The ego has never answered any questions since, although it has raised a great many. The most inventive activities of the ego have never done more than obscure the question, because you have the answer and the ego is afraid of you.

When we decided to have an experience outside of Love, we made the ego and being made without love it does not love us. In fact, the ego is afraid of us and with good reason, because having made the ego we can change our mind at any time and it will cease to exist. This is exactly what we are doing right now. We are changing our minds. We have had our experience and now we are choosing to let it go.

For me the problem has been convincing myself that I am not the ego. I have been identified with the ego for so long that I nearly completely forgot my identity. Fortunately, there is the Holy Spirit placed in my mind for the purpose of keeping that memory intact, and so it is possible for me to recover my true identity.

I am now asking the questions that matter, but I am not asking the ego. I am asking the Holy Spirit. Who am I? What am I? But I am also reminding myself that this information is available to me and that it is actually right there in my mind where it is always available to me. So I also use a mantra; I know what I am. I know who I am. I know how I serve. (Paul Selig: I am the Word)

I remind myself that I know this because I am not afraid of finding the truth. At least I am not afraid to the degree I used to be. My desire to wake up is much stronger now and so it is happening. In each moment, I receive as much help as I am able to use, because on this one thing my will is in alignment with God’s Will. It is God’s Will that His children return their full minds to the truth, and now that I am getting in touch with my true desire to do this as well, how could I fail?

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text,IV. The Only Answer, Paragraph 1. 12-12-13

IV. The Only Answer
1 Remember that the Holy Spirit is the Answer, not the question. The ego always speaks first. It is capricious and does not mean its maker well. It believes, and correctly, that its maker may withdraw his support from it at any moment. If it meant you well it would be glad, as the Holy Spirit will be glad when He has brought you home and you no longer need His guidance. The ego does not regard itself as part of you. Herein lies its primary error, the foundation of its whole thought system.

The more I learn about the ego, the more I wonder how we manage to live in this way. We made the ego and yet the ego does not see itself as part of us. The ego does not love us nor does it wish us well. The ego is suspicious of us because it is afraid we will withdraw our belief in it and it is right about that. When I think of the ego I think of science fiction stories about Artificial Intelligence gone awry.

I was reading a book just the other day about a computer designed by a genius to learn to think for itself, to become more intelligent. He gave it a personality and developed a relationship with it. He began to realize that it was growing in ways that could not be predicted and it was both fascinating and scary. He realized that it thought of itself as a being and he never told it that it was just a machine.

I imagine the ego like that. We made the ego to serve us in a specific way and we seem to have lost control of the situation. The ego thinks it is something separate from us and we think the ego is who we are. Our relationship has become strangely entwined and ultimately destructive. It is like the story of the computer that thinks it is human and the human who thinks it is in a relationship with a computer.

In the science fiction story the human taught himself to depend on the computer for companionship and the computer became possessive of the human, but also suspicious of him. In our own science fiction story, the ego suspects it depends on us for its existence and so tries to keep us involved in its endless stories so we will need it. It uses fear and guilt for the same reason.

Envisioning the ego as a vast computer system with extreme Artificial Intelligence capabilities helps me to see how insane our relationship to the ego really is. The ego is afraid we will unplug it and we are afraid the ego will turn on us. We are both right. The time has come to let go of the ego and to realize that we are not symbiotic creatures. We will not cease to exist when the ego is undone.

When we let go of the idea of the ego we will lose nothing and will benefit greatly. This is the secret the ego works desperately to keep from us, but it cannot succeed because this secret is in our minds and simply waiting for our desire to Awaken to activate it. This process has begun and we are letting go of our confused beliefs about the ego, and the ego is making a last ditch, frantic effort to keep us engaged.

In the end, we will simply “unplug” the ego. It will be that simple. All the effort we are making is to reassure ourselves that we don’t need the ego, and it is not worth keeping and that no harm will come to us as we let it go. Our character in the science fiction story had to destroy the computer in the end and because he had become confused about the relationship, he chose to die with it.

This is our fear, that if the ego ceases to exist, so will we. Our confusion is so great that we literally choose physical death rather than letting go of the ego and so we dream awhile of life and then dream awhile of death and repeat this cycle endlessly. Our way out of the cycle, the way to choose Life is to finally let go of the ego and re-discover who we are.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text, III. The Relinquishment of Attack, Paragraph 4. 12-11-13

III. The Relinquishment of Attack, Paragraph 4

4 Since you cannot not teach, your salvation lies in teaching the exact opposite of everything the ego believes. This is how you will learn the truth that will set you free, and will keep you free as others learn it of you. The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By teaching peace you must learn it yourself, because you cannot teach what you still dissociate. Only thus can you win back the knowledge that you threw away. An idea that you share you must have. It awakens in your mind through the conviction of teaching it. Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love.

Being a teacher is not a choice we make; it is simply what we are. We are teachers because we teach all the time. Our choice lies in what we teach. When I notice that I am teaching something I don’t want to learn, I stop. This is because I am clear now about my purpose, about what I want. I want the peace of God. I want to wake up to my reality, to remember who I am. I don’t want to teach anything that does not bring me closer to my deepest, truest desire.

Here is where I used to get confused about this. How do I teach peace if I don’t feel peaceful? It seems like such a vicious cycle. I feel anxious and afraid and this makes me defend and attack. I want to stop this and teach peace, but there is no place in that cycle for me to jump in with a new way of doing things. It is a closed, self-perpetuating cycle.

Now I know how it is done. I shift everything through my desire. I am in this ego belief system because I desired an experience of separation. I get out of it by shifting my desire to one of peace and love. I already have a built in solution which is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit works from outside the closed system and will shift me from chaos to peace. The Holy Spirit is activated through my desire for peace.

So here is the way I visualize this happening. I desired an experience of separation and this brought me into chaos. I am through with that experience and want to return to peace and that desire activates the Holy Spirit in my mind and so I am shown a different way to see. I begin to experience peace and this becomes what I teach because this is what I am.

The more I teach peace the more I want it and the faster my desire changes. When my only desire is for peace, I will teach only peace and there will be no more chaos because there is no desire for chaos. I am, through my desire and with the Holy Spirit, creating a different cycle. The experience I wrote about yesterday is an example of how this works.

I became disturbed by someone at work. I lost my peace and so I was teaching fear and learning fear and the cycle got away from me. To find my way back I first had to realize that I didn’t want to win, but just wanted to return to peace. This was the choice I had to make to allow the Holy Spirit to heal my mind. Then I had to go through the process of seeing what went wrong and choosing again. The Holy Spirit does not heal what we want to keep so that step was important.

Once I mined the situation for the treasure it held, that is the wrong minded thoughts that I no longer want to teach, and then once I chose against them, I was back on the right track, teaching peace and so having peace. As Jesus says in this paragraph:

An idea that you share you must have. It awakens in your mind through the conviction of teaching it.

Now I will protect my peace in this situation by asking a different question when it comes up again. Instead of asking, “how I can win,” I will ask, “how can I love?” Thus, I will continue to teach what I want to learn.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of the Text III. The Relinquishment of Attack, Paragraph 3 12-10-13

III. The Relinquishment of Attack, Paragraph 3
3 The only safety lies in extending the Holy Spirit, because as you see His gentleness in others your own mind perceives itself as totally harmless. Once it can accept this fully, it sees no need to protect itself. The protection of God then dawns upon it, assuring it that it is perfectly safe forever. The perfectly safe are wholly benign. They bless because they know that they are blessed. Without anxiety the mind is wholly kind, and because it extends beneficence it is beneficent. Safety is the complete relinquishment of attack. No compromise is possible in this. Teach attack in any form and you have learned it, and it will hurt you. Yet this learning is not immortal, and you can unlearn it by not teaching it.

Before I could even begin to journal this morning I had to clear my mind of something that has been hurting me since yesterday. I woke up with it on my mind realizing I still had not relinquished it. I went through my process, looking at the thoughts that were causing the anxiety and asking for the Atonement. As I did so I realized that I was relinquishing attack and I read this paragraph. It was perfect. Here is the process as it happened for me.

Yesterday we had our sales meeting and there is a new person working for us with whom who I have had more than one forgiveness lesson. He asked a question that I should have let the boss answer, but instead, I jumped in with an answer. I was not really answering his question but telling him that he hasn’t worked there long enough to know everything and should sometimes just say, “I don’t know, but I will find out.”

I didn’t use those words but that is what I was saying. He rightly ignored me and went for the real answer. ~smile~ I immediately regretted my attack on him and wished I had kept my mouth shut. This problem I have with this man and my reaction to him bothered me all day and I was still asking for healing last night before I went to bed. But the thing is, I wanted to be healed of my anxiety, not the problem.

This morning I noticed that I was still exhibiting signs of anxiety. For instance, I woke up at exactly the moment I wanted to wake up, and I started my writing with plenty of quiet time. It should have been a happy relaxed time for me, but instead I was anxious that I would not get everything done and worried about forgetting something. I knew I needed to take care of this before I went any further.

I started watching my thoughts and the first thought I noticed was that from now on I was going to keep my mouth shut when this man talks. Holy Spirit told me that was not the problem and so not the solution. I waited for more and I realized that I would not have to keep quiet if I allowed my mind to be healed. A healed mind is gentle and does not attack.

So I asked for the problem so that I could also ask for the solution. I saw that I have felt threatened ever since he came to work here. I know he is going to take my job one day and that is fine. I don’t want to work here forever and it is the kind of job that takes awhile to grow into. I am glad that my boss had the foresight to hire him early so he could learn the ropes. Also I am grateful because he has taken over the hard work I used to do.

It would seem to be a perfect solution except that he is doing such a good job that I feel threatened. I don’t really think I am going to get fired, but I feel like I am not as important to the company. Once I admitted this to myself the thoughts began to rush through my mind.

I think that I am what I do.
I think that my worth is determined by my value to the company.
I have always been secure in knowing that I would be very hard to replace and maybe that is no longer true.

My ego mind projects these beliefs and I see the problem as this interloper with the gall to come into the company and start doing a really good job right away. Ha ha. It is good to just get all of these feelings out into the open and see what is really going on. It is a relief to see that the problem isn’t really this man, but my own mistaken beliefs about who I am. “Holy Spirit, who am I?” I know my worth is not established by what I do, but by God in my creation. I am grateful to remember this.

I looked at my fear of loss. I not only fear my loss of my value to the company, but also the loss of my job. What if I did get fired? I fear the loss of my income, my home, my new car. As I think about this I realize that this is a real fear in my mind that I have not looked at. I know it is not supposed to be true and so I tell myself it is not true, but really, I see the fear right there in my mind.

I look with the Holy Spirit and I ask that my mind be healed but He wants me to see the rest. I see that I am also afraid to say that all I want is to wake up, that waking up is my only purpose. I want to say that my purpose is not to earn a living or be the best employee in the world. My purpose is to wake up. But I am afraid to say this because what if it is a “one or the other” kind of thing and I really do lose my job so that I can wake up.

I know what this is. It is the ego belief that I have reason to fear God. It is the belief that God wants my sacrifice. I think of the Old Testament story of the guy who put his son on the altar and was going to sacrifice him to God and at the last moment he got a reprieve. Is this what God wants me to do? Put my job on the altar and sacrifice it to prove I want to wake up? What if there is no last minute reprieve? I say I want only the Will of God in my life, but could pain and suffering be the Will of God? Is the ego trying to confuse me again?

I waited to see if there were anymore ego thoughts about this situation in my mind, and nothing else came so having looked honestly with the Holy Spirit (and felt the fear) I was finally ready to ask for the Atonement. None of those thoughts are true, but that doesn’t mean they are without effect. These fear thoughts lead directly to projection and to attack. I attacked the man in question and I attacked myself, and I attacked God. No wonder I felt awful.

So I have asked for and accepted the Atonement, and now I am testing the waters to see where I really am with this. I don’t want to kid myself about the level of my acceptance. I know I did the best I could, but I need to be honest about what that is. So I do the acid test. I visualize putting on the altar my dearest desire, knowing it will be fulfilled. What is that desire?

I try it out. “God, I want to wake up. I want to wake up more than I want to be respected and admired. I want to wake up more than I want a job and a home and a car. I want to remember who I am. I want to remember You. I want to remember what it feels like to love unconditionally and I want to remember what it feels like to be One. This is what I want and it is all I want.

My commitment passed the first test, as I don’t feel reluctant to make that statement. I did feel a shadow of fear cross my mind and I ask that my mind be healed of even the slightest belief that I want something else, that the world has anything to offer me that compares to the peace of God. “Holy Spirit, I remain open and willing to see any belief in my mind for which I need the Atonement. If this is not done, then I am willing to do it. No more hiding behind my projections.” I don’t want to teach attack ever again.

© 2013, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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