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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VII.The Totality of the Kingdom, Paragraph 1. 4-30-14

VII. The Totality of the Kingdom, Paragraph 1

1 Whenever you deny a blessing to a brother you will feel deprived, because denial is as total as love. It is as impossible to deny part of the Sonship as it is to love it in part. Nor is it possible to love it totally at times. You cannot be totally committed sometimes. Denial has no power in itself, but you can give it the power of your mind, whose power is without limit. If you use it to deny reality, reality is gone for you. Reality cannot be partly appreciated. That is why denying any part of it means you have lost the awareness of all of it. Yet denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as well as negatively. Used negatively it will be destructive, because it will be used for attack. But in the service of the Holy Spirit, it can help you recognize part of reality, and thus appreciate all of it. Mind is too powerful to be subject to exclusion. You will never be able to exclude yourself from your thoughts.

There are three things that stand out to me in this paragraph. First there is the sentence, “You cannot be totally committed sometimes.” I think that this sentence is responsible, more than any other, for changing my attitude toward the work we do on this path. I realized at once that my commitment, my dedication, my devotion must be complete. A Course in Miracles is not something I can do when I am in the mood. Forgiveness is not something I do for some and not for others. I must be totally committed all the time or I am not committed at all.

When I divorced my last husband I realized that my commitment to forgiveness means that I cannot throw a relationship away and just start over with someone else. All relationships must be healed, and so I did that. I forgave him and I forgave myself. It took me thirteen years to know that this relationship was completely healed, but that doesn’t matter. Forgiveness is the right use of time.

I may not be quick to forgive, but I always forgive. I understand the purpose of relationships. I know what I am to do with them. If someone at work gets on my nerves, I ask for the Atonement in that situation. If a customer upsets me or a situation with the customer triggers fear in me, I know what to do with that. I ask for the Atonement in that situation and I accept the Atonement. There might be action to take for the story’s sake, but the purpose is forgiveness.

If I experience guilt, that is if I see myself as guilty or someone else as guilty, my purpose is to forgive this. There are no exceptions. No one stands guilty and outside God, and this is what I am teaching myself, and through teaching guiltlessness I am learning that guilt has never existed except in my mind. It is a belief that I made real for myself through the power of my belief.

As I learn to make no exceptions to forgiveness, I am being released from the belief in guilt. Every time I make an exception, every time I believe that some action or thought is unforgivable, whether in myself or someone else, I reinforce the belief in guilt. This is why I must be totally committed all the time. Otherwise I will spend my time dancing back and forth between belief and disbelief, getting nowhere.
Fear is another false belief that I have made very real for myself. My commitment is to back out of that belief. The Holy Spirit does this for me, but only with my permission. As I cling to some particular fear that feels more real to me than another, I keep fear itself in place. It doesn’t matter what form the fear takes. It could be a fear of heights, a fear of poverty, a fear of relationships; it is just fear appearing as a story in my life and so they are all the same, and the solution is the same.

I accept the Atonement in each seemingly different problem. Through accepting that the solution to each problem is the same regardless of the form it takes, I teach myself that there is only one problem. I also teach myself that there is a solution and that I can and will accept the solution. This lesson is not learned if I make exceptions, so I must be totally committed all the time.

I may come back to this paragraph tomorrow.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 13. 4-29-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 13

13 In this depressing state the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creator with God, and are therefore depriving yourself of joy. This is not God’s choice but yours. If your mind could be out of accord with God’s, you would be willing without meaning. Yet because God’s Will is unchangeable, no conflict of will is possible. This is the Holy Spirit’s perfectly consistent teaching. Creation, not separation, is your will because it is God’s, and nothing that opposes this means anything at all. Being a perfect accomplishment, the Sonship can only accomplish perfectly, extending the joy in which it was created, and identifying itself with both its Creator and its creations, knowing They are One.

Our sadness, our guilt, fear, anger, all the emotions we experience, seems to be in reaction to something that is happening in our lives. The truth is that our “lives” are the projection of our beliefs. The belief comes first, then the story that seems to explain the belief. So when I am sad it is not because I feel lonely that no one is visiting me or calling me. I believe that I can be alone and I quickly make a story of being alone which explains the feeling to me. Then the ego says, “Oh, that’s why I am sad.” In this way I keep myself from knowing that I am sad because I am not fulfilling my function as co-creator with God.

The next time I feel sad, I am going to remind myself that there is no story to explain that sadness. There is only one reason I am sad. I long to be my Self. I miss God and I miss my real Life. All the sad stories in the illusion are just reflections of that one thing. I want to return to my place as co-creator with God. I will remind myself that I am making up all these stories. The truth is very simple. There is God, there is His creation, the Sonship, and there are my creations, and They are One. All of this other stuff that seems to exist is just part of a dream of separation and will disappear as soon as I am through with it.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 12. 4-28-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 12

12 Allowing insanity to enter your mind means that you have not judged sanity as wholly desirable. If you want something else you will make something else, but because it is something else, it will attack your thought system and divide your allegiance. You cannot create in this divided state, and you must be vigilant against this divided state because only peace can be extended. Your divided mind is blocking the extension of the Kingdom, and its extension is your joy. If you do not extend the Kingdom, you are not thinking with your Creator and creating as He created.

I want to be one with my Creator. I want to create as He creates. I want to think as He thinks. I want to be joyful as He is joyful. I want to be peaceful as He is peaceful. I can have all of this, but only from a state of mind that is conducive to this and the only state of mind from which this is possible is one of wholeness.

I can have something else because of the power of my mind. It cannot be real, but I can have it and it will appear real for me. But if I do have it, it will keep me from having what I truly want. Wanting something else disrupts the oneness of mind from which all things God are extended and so through my desire for something different, I have deprived myself of everything worth having.

The solution to this quandary is in my mind. The Holy Spirit will correct all my errors and return my mind to Wholeness if I want Him to do so. Just as I had to want something else for it to be manifested, I must want wholeness for me to become aware that I have it, that I am it. If I say I want wholeness but am unwilling to meet its conditions, then I don’t really want it.

An example of this process in action would look like this. I am annoyed with a man at work. I have projected onto him and judged my projections. This decision has strengthened my belief in, and need for, separation. I cannot know wholeness because I think I need separation and my desire for it made it seem real to me. I keep this in place through what I decide is justified anger.

I notice that my decisions in this matter cost me my peace and I decide I want peace more than I want judgment and anger. I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my thinking and heal my mind. Suddenly I see what happened, what it was in myself that needed healing and that I chose to project rather than to face.

In withdrawing my projections from this man and allowing them to be healed, I have brought my mind into alignment with truth. I am able to experience unity with this brother of mine rather than separation. I am reminded of wholeness and my desire for a permanent state of wholeness increases. I continue this process and with each choice for wholeness, I become more willing for wholeness, and more certain that sanity is wholly desired.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 11. 4-25-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 11

11 Perceived without your part in it, God’s creation is seen as weak, and those who see themselves as weakened do attack. The attack must be blind, however, because there is nothing to attack. Therefore they make up images, perceive them as unworthy and attack them for their unworthiness. That is all the world of the ego is. Nothing. It has no meaning. It does not exist. Do not try to understand it because, if you do, you are believing that it can be understood and is therefore capable of being appreciated and loved. That would justify its existence, which cannot be justified. You cannot make the meaningless meaningful. This can only be an insane attempt.

Oh man! This brings a lot of clarity to what we see as the world. In an attempt to experience separation from God, we perceived ourselves as no longer whole since we thought we were no longer part of God. Simply being separate rather than whole made it seem as if we were weak, and feeling weak we felt defensive and so felt the need to attack.

But what could we attack? Now we had to “make up images, perceive them as unworthy and attack them for their unworthiness.” Voila, separate bodies! How perfect is that? We have these bodies that are weak and vulnerable, and will ultimately die and decay. These bodies interact in painful and cruel ways.

Even in good intentions they hurt each other. They have twisted the idea of love until it barely resembles itself. Because they were made out of fear, they are fearful. How else to see these images except as unworthy. All made up. All serving the purpose of giving us something to defend against because we made ourselves feel weak.

Jesus then warns us not to try to understand the world we made, not to appreciate or love it, because we don’t want to justify it. It is meaningless, and we cannot make it meaningful. That’s why we are still here, we keep trying to find meaning where there is none. We keep trying to justify our existence as egos.

We are not that. We are not bodies. We are not weak and vulnerable. We are not fearful and guilty. We are not hateful and we have no need to defend ourselves, and nothing to defend against. We are simply confused. However, if we continue trying to understand and improve the illusion, this insane world we imagined, we will continue to think that this is exactly what we are.

We could have reason to love and appreciate the world, or to hate the world, only if the world were meaningful and it is not. This is why I don’t pray for a better, more loveable world, but rather I pray that I awake from the dream of the world. I dream that I live in this hellish expression of confusion and fear, then I dream that I die from it. Then I pop back in and dream that this time I will have a better “life” and then I dream I die. It is an endless cycle of nothing happening.

If I did not believe in it this whole thing would be funny, but as Jesus tells us in the Course, what I believe in is real for me, so it is more tragic than funny. But thank God, it is never real. I can wake up from the dream of life and the dream of death. Thank God, I am still as I was created, and my real life has not ceased because part of my mind is involved in this insane dream.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 10. 4-24-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 10

10 You can be perceived with meaning only by the Holy Spirit because your being is the knowledge of God. Any belief you accept apart from this will obscure God’s Voice in you, and will therefore obscure God to you. Unless you perceive His creation truly you cannot know the Creator, since God and His creation are not separate. The oneness of the Creator and the creation is your wholeness, your sanity and your limitless power. This limitless power is God’s gift to you, because it is what you are. If you dissociate your mind from it you are perceiving the most powerful force in the universe as if it were weak, because you do not believe you are part of it.

God created me like Himself, with limitless power. Limitless power! I had to read this paragraph over and over. I just wasn’t understanding it and of course that means I just didn’t believe it because it is not hard to understand. I was created one with God and that oneness is my wholeness, my sanity, my limitless power. The reason I had trouble with this paragraph is that I have dissociated myself from this truth.

This means that I am pretending to be separate from God and from my power. I am pretending that this is even possible. I am pretending that it is possible to perceive the most powerful force in the universe as if it is weak. It is the only way I could have this separation experience. Now that I am waking up from this nightmare, I am beginning to remember some things about my Self.

Right now my experience includes pain, both physical and emotional. This pain seems to prove that I have no power, and yet Jesus says that I have limitless power. He has made it clear that I return to my natural state by letting go of what I taught myself in order to experience separation. I do this by becoming aware of my thought errors and agreeing to have them corrected.

It seems very simple but as I sit here in pain, it seems impossible. I would be discouraged except that I have done this before. It always seems hard when I sit on the fence, teetering toward ego, then toward spirit, putting off the inevitable decision. I will, in the end, choose God because of who I am, because perception is not knowledge and because I am known.

The Holy Spirit provides all the help I need to make the decision to fall into God. I have the Course. I have teachers and guides and angels. I have mighty companions. I have books and prayers and processes. I have experienced success in the past and these successes have built one on another until I am almost convinced that I am what I am.

So I sit here in pain and I know the pain is not real. The pain in my body is not real and the pain in my heart is not real. It can’t be real because it is not part of God and I am in God no matter what my crazy dream tells me. How can I absolutely know this and still experience the opposite? It is because I still see value in pain.

This morning I was guided to listen to a guided meditation by Nouk Sanchez. It reminded me that there is no pain or sickness or loss that is greater than the power of God. This gift was just another way that the Holy Spirit is helping me to remember the truth and to remind me that I want the truth. My desire for an experience other than reality is the only cause of my pain, and the decision to choose otherwise is the only cure.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 9. 4-23-14

9 Your mind is dividing its allegiance between two kingdoms, and you are totally committed to neither. Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question except by you, when you are thinking insanely. What you are is not established by your perception, and is not influenced by it at all. Perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact. They are problems of understanding, since their presence implies a belief that what you are is up to you to decide. The ego believes this totally, being fully committed to it. It is not true. The ego therefore is totally committed to untruth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to the knowledge of God.

Part of my mind believes I am this body/personality. It gives its allegiance to the idea that I am Myron and that I live in this body and in this world, and I will die here. This part of my mind believes that it is up to me to decide what I am and that I can make my decision true simply by deciding on it. I don’t know anything; I perceive and I think that my perceptions are meaningful.

Part of my mind knows who and what I am. I am God’s Son, free and whole and perfect, and I exit in Him and as part of Him. I don’t think; I know. I am not influenced in any way by the part of the mind that is insane. No matter what I think, I simply am as I was created and nothing I think or do can alter that in any way. I am a creator but I am not my own creator.

As long as I try to hold onto both ideas I will be in conflict. If I want peace, and I do, I must let go of one identity and become totally dedicated to the other. It is not possible to be totally committed to a lie, and why would I want to anyway. I have already made my decision to return my whole mind to God, and now it is just a matter of commitment and vigilance.

I watch my mind for the dark thoughts that take me deeper into the illusion and realize they are meaningless and that I am not interested in them. This is not hard to do and when it seems hard it is only because I have placed value where there is none and I change my mind. I don’t have to do anything to be my Self, I just stop trying to be something else.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 8. 4-22-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 8

8 I have repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that you have done this. If the mind cannot attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically to the belief that you must be a body. By not seeing you as you are, it can see itself as it wants to be. Aware of its weakness the ego wants your allegiance, but not as you really are. The ego therefore wants to engage your mind in its own delusional system, because otherwise the light of your understanding would dispel it. It wants no part of truth, because the ego itself is not true. If truth is total, the untrue cannot exist. Commitment to either must be total; they cannot coexist in your mind without splitting it. If they cannot coexist in peace, and if you want peace, you must give up the idea of conflict entirely and for all time. This requires vigilance only as long as you do not recognize what is true. While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share truth, your need for vigilance is apparent.

The error I make is in confusing myself with the ego. I am not the ego. That is the truth and that makes all the difference in the world. The ego really does believe it can attack God, and it tries to convince me that I am the one attacking God. When I identify with the ego, I believe I have done this and so the guilt I feel is immense, so immense that I hide from it instead of bringing it into the Light for healing. As I have allowed more and more healing of my mind, I have withdrawn my allegiance from the ego.

I see that I cannot keep dividing my allegiance between ego and Truth. This has split my mind and put me in a perpetual state of conflict, which has become intolerable. I have made a decision to choose God once and for all. For the time being this requires vigilance on my part to be aware of the tendency to choose conflict over peace.

I never stay with conflict when I am aware that I am doing it. If I see that I am angry with someone, anyone, for any reason, I choose to forgive. I forgive the person, the situation, and myself. I cannot have this conflict and be at peace, and I choose peace every time. I might have to talk myself into making this choice but even that is not necessary most of the time.

My vigilance must be strongest for the conflict that is not as obvious. Sometimes I notice that I feel anxious and don’t know why. This is conflict that I am hiding from myself. I become willing to see it, and my willingness exposes the problem. Then I can confront my conflicted thoughts and ask for and accept the Atonement for them.

Yesterday I noticed that I was feeling little twinges of anger at one person then another. I felt impatient with them. This is unusual enough for me to take notice and ask Spirit for clarity. Suddenly I felt grief stricken and cried. I realized that what was really happening is that I was trying to avoid feeling upset about my sister-in-law being close to death.

It was like I had two thoughts in my mind; “Brinda is going to die” and “I am not going to think about Brinda dying.” There was a little battle going on in my mind, and in trying to be unaware of this inner war, I was projecting the upset onto other people. But I am very vigilant for conflict, and my truest desire is to be free of conflict, so I let Holy Spirit show me the problem and I accepted healing. I let myself feel the grief rather than shielding myself from it.

I want peace and so I am determined to give up the idea of conflict entirely and for all time.

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