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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: V.Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 11. 4-8-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 11
11 Come therefore unto me, and learn of the truth in you. The mind we share is shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly they will be healed. Let your mind shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make them aware of the light in them. This light will shine back upon you and on the whole Sonship, because this is your proper gift to God. He will accept it and give it to the Sonship, because it is acceptable to Him and therefore to His Sons. This is true communion with the Holy Spirit, Who sees the altar of God in everyone, and by bringing it to your appreciation, He calls upon you to love God and His creation. You can appreciate the Sonship only as one. This is part of the law of creation, and therefore governs all thought.

It’s all very simple. How do we wake up? How do we remember who we are? How do we return our minds to God? We let go of the judgments we hold about everyone and everything. Just let that piece of fiction go. There’s nothing to it, anyway. Instead look where the Holy Spirit directs us. He sees only the altar of God in everyone. Imagine that! Imagine that everywhere you look, you see only God! It’s easy, because that is all there is to see.

Imagine the beauty of it! Everywhere you look you see perfection, holiness, and love. You feel lovable, and loved and loneliness is a fading memory, never to be experienced again. How could you be lonely when you share the same mind with all brothers and sisters, with an entire Sonship, and that mind is in God? You can never be misunderstood because communication is perfectly clear and flawless, with no gap between you to distort or disrupt communication. Look all around and you will see only us, our one glorious Self, living in perfect harmony, safe and happy.

As I consider this vision of Heaven which is mine for the taking, I consider also the alternative which I still sometimes choose. Yesterday at work, I was preparing a plan for a customer and it was my first time to do this particular plan. I was worried about getting it right and so was uneasy. In the middle of this I was interrupted and given another task. I felt anger rush through me and snapped at my boss. That hasn’t happened in so long that I was shocked by my reaction, as probably was my boss.

I took care of the extra job and as I did so, sanity slowly returned. I watched myself react and feel resentment, and project blame, and all the ego stuff we do when we think we are separate from each other and have different agendas which conflict. Someone will win, and someone must lose. Jeez, in the snap of a finger, I’m back in hell, just like that. Would I be so willing to relinquish the Kingdom just to keep my little piece of hell safe from interlopers? If I think of my brother as an interruption in my day, then I guess the answer was yes, at least in that moment of insanity.

As I was writing this, I had a vision of my mother slipping quietly into my room to comfort me. I had a really bad sunburn and was in pain. Pain to a little child is very scary and I wanted her there with me, reassuring me and making me feel better, but she couldn’t stay. My dad thought she was babying me and told her not to make a big deal of it. She had to leave me.

As I thought of this moment, I felt a surge of rage, the same rage that had been silently eating away at me for all these years. The rage was directed at my father for not caring about me, and at my mom for giving into his demands, and this rage was like wild fire in dry brush. It spread over the terrain of my life touching all the men with whom I had been in relationship. All were burned with the same fire, because that pain had never been looked at or forgiven. I had no idea that grievance was lurking in my mind and had caused so much damage.

The ego wants to fan that fire, and to feel sorry and sad and unloved because of it. But Spirit is showing it to me so that I can let it go into His hands and be healed. My dad had an agenda. He thought it was his job to toughen up his kids so they could face life. My mom thought her job was to comfort and protect her children from pain. I thought my job was to find someone to make me feel safe and cared for. But really, we all had the same agenda. We all wanted to be love, and to be loved. We just didn’t know how.

Because there is no time and because there is only one mind and we are all in it, and because space and even death are illusions, I am being given the opportunity to heal this old wound right now this morning with all of you as witnesses. I can hold onto the resentment and unfairness of it all, and feel vindicated in my anger, or I can relinquish that illusion and embrace our oneness.

Holy Spirit, I have no use for the ego. It is not me. Please show me God’s Altar in my dad, my mom and myself. I want only to awaken to the love that we are. Show me the place where we are one.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: V.Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 10. 4-7-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 10

10 You cannot forget the Father because I am with you, and I cannot forget Him. To forget me is to forget yourself and Him Who created you. Our brothers are forgetful. That is why they need your remembrance of me and of Him Who created me. Through this remembrance, you can change their minds about themselves, as I can change yours. Your mind is so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours. I do not want to share my body in communion because this is to share nothing. Would I try to share an illusion with the most holy children of a most holy Father? Yet I do want to share my mind with you because we are of one Mind, and that Mind is ours. See only this Mind everywhere, because only this is everywhere and in everything. It is everything because it encompasses all things within itself. Blessed are you who perceive only this, because you perceive only what is true.

“Your mind is so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours.” By this time in the Text and in the Daily Lessons, it should be obvious that my mind, my true mind is powerful. I am spirit, not body, and my mind is part of the Mind that is one with all. I live in God. Now Jesus is reminding me again that my mind is powerful, so powerful in fact that I can enlighten others as he enlightens me.

The way this seems to work is that as I allow my mind to be healed I begin to remember who I am and so I remember who my brother is. My remembrance becomes their remembrance. My mind is illuminated and so I illuminate my brother. Jesus is helping me change my mind about myself and I help my brother change his mind about himself by knowing the truth about him.

I am beginning to remember that I am not the body and the world I see does not exist. I am mind within Mind and all that exists is encompassed within this Mind. As I turn my attention from ego, disregard all things ego, the only thing left to see in my self and in my brother is our holiness. Would I hold onto his ego, choose to believe in his errors, rather than to know him as he is? Because if I do, I throw away my remembrance of my Self as well.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 9. 4-4-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 9
9 As you can hear two voices, so you can see in two ways. One way shows you an image, or an idol that you may worship out of fear, but will never love. The other shows you only truth, which you will love because you will understand it. Understanding is appreciation, because what you understand you can identify with, and by making it part of you, you have accepted it with love. That is how God Himself created you; in understanding, in appreciation and in love. The ego is totally unable to understand this, because it does not understand what it makes, does not appreciate it and does not love it. It incorporates to take away. It literally believes that every time it deprives someone of something, it has increased. I have spoken often of the increase of the Kingdom by your creations, which can only be created as you were. The whole glory and perfect joy that is the Kingdom lies in you to give. Do you not want to give it?

I am crying this morning as I read these sweet, sweet words from Jesus. God created me in understanding, in appreciation and in love. Joy and gratitude well up in me so forcefully that it must escape through my tears, and even more so as he reminds me about my creations. I feel a longing to return to full remembrance, to embrace my brothers, my creations and my Creator.

Two voices in my mind, two ways to be, and it is up to me to choose the voice I will follow. I choose in every moment to be in the Kingdom or to be in hell. I don’t get to choose whether or not to choose. There is no sitting this one out. Not choosing is sticking my head in the sand and pretending I am not choosing hell.

Choosing the ego is choosing hell. I cannot love this because it is meaningless. It is not me and so I have no understanding of it and without understanding, I have no appreciation. The ego self can only be experienced in fear and guilt and that is as good as it gets. I will never love it, and never feel love from it.

Or I can choose Love. I can choose the self that God made out of His Love. I can love this self because I understand and appreciate it. I know it even though I have concealed it from my mind, hidden it from myself, I know it and long for it because it is me. I remember it as I give it.

The ego only takes and believes it increases in the taking, but my Heart knows differently. It knows it can only increase through giving, and so I give love in whatever form seems helpful. I watch for the ego desire to take and lay it gently aside, something no longer needed or wanted because now I understand that it doesn’t increase and doesn’t bring me in the direction my heart longs to go.

I was thinking about how this works in my life. In the past I have given generously of my time and money and when I have not felt that I received equally in return, it seemed to me that I was being taken advantage of. In other words, I did not give for the joy of giving, but because I expected gratitude or admiration.

I was giving to get, and I would always be disappointed to some degree. I thought the recipients of my largess were disappointing me. But really, the disappointment was a result of seeking love through guilt. I was asking the ego to provide me with love, appreciation and gratitude and the ego doesn’t understand the request because it was not created in love, appreciation and gratitude. It can only give me bitter disappointment, fear and guilt because that is all it has to give.

Now if I feel that sense of disappointment or resentment, I recognize what happened. I was not giving for the joy of giving. My giving was really a form of taking. I slipped back into the ego belief that what I take from another actually increases me. Fortunately, I now realize that this doesn’t work and I can change my mind. I can choose to remember that I only increase in true giving, and that my brother’s increase is my increase.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 8. 4-3-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 8
8 When you heal, that is exactly what you are learning. You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by realizing that he could not have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is only the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His Mind. He himself may think he can, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his Self is. If you see only the changeless in him you have not really changed him. By changing your mind about his for him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him.

If I am sick I believe that I have changed my mind from its original state. In other words, I believe I have undone what God has done, and that impossible belief is the only way I could ever have an experience of sickness. Of course I could never change God’s creation so I cannot actually be sick. I can only dream of sickness, pretend sickness, think I am sick. I am healed from this illusion by recognizing that, in spite of my beliefs, my mind is changeless. It remains as God created it.

This is the way I heal myself, and also the way I heal others. I see in them the changeless mind and I see nothing else. My unwavering certainty about my brother helps to undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him. Poor ego; it is so delusional. On the other hand, if I look on my brother with my ego I see him as the ego sees him and I reinforce that error in the mind, which is also my mind, and so I teach myself what I don’t want to learn.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 7. 4-2-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 7
7 The unhealed healer wants gratitude from his brothers, but he is not grateful to them. That is because he thinks he is giving something to them, and is not receiving something equally desirable in return. His teaching is limited because he is learning so little. His healing lesson is limited by his own ingratitude, which is a lesson in sickness. True learning is constant, and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change. This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as God created it, but you think that you have changed it as long as you learn through the ego. This places you in a position of needing to learn a lesson that seems contradictory; - you must learn to change your mind about your mind. Only by this can you learn that it is changeless.

I am going to frequently remind myself that it is only my mind I heal and only through changing my mind will I return to my Self. This does not mean that I can change the world or change my mind. It means that when I change the world nothing happens. For instance, if I want to lose weight and I change my diet, nothing has actually happened even if I lose weight.

I have actually only changed an illusion (the diet) to change an illusion (the body). Another way to think of this is: I pretended to have a fat body and pretended to make a thinner body and pretended to effect this change by manipulating the illusion through eating differently. Now I pretend that my manipulation gave me the thinner body I claim to want. I did a lot of nothing about nothing.

What if instead of trying to play around in the illusion, I change my mind about what I want? I may still be only changing the illusion, but in using my mind to do this rather than manipulating the illusion, I am reminding myself of who I am. I am learning to remember that my mind is powerful.

This is what Jesus says about changing the mind: “…a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change.” When I read those words today they brought tears to my eyes. It is like suddenly remembering something wonderful and feeling the emotion of that memory.

But here is the truth. I don’t really have to think back to find a time when I changed the world through changing my mind. I do this all the time. Most of those times it is in very small increments and so I don’t realize what I have done right away. Only later do I notice how much my world has changed. But every time I change my mind, in that instant the world changes, not just for me, but for all of us.

Lesson 190 says there is no pain. When I first read this I was at a loss as to how this could be true because I seemed to have pain, and it felt very real. As I continued to study and practice the lesson, I let go of what I believed about pain and changed my mind. I accepted that there is no pain. Even when I felt pain, I accepted there is no pain. I refused to be distracted by appearances, which are only illusions.

The pain I had been dealing with vanished. It took many moments of working with that idea for me to come to full acceptance, but in that moment of full acceptance the world changed. Pain was no longer something I felt in my body, but was simply a projection from my mind, and could be alleviated through changing my mind. I continue to master that choice to believe the truth rather than appearances.

Jesus did this and his accomplishment was our accomplishment. All I had to do was to accept it. I just had to talk myself into believing it. In my acceptance of his accomplishment it became easier for the next person to do so. And of course, I am not the only one to accept the truth, which made it easier for me to do so in my turn. We all benefit from every small shift in the mind.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 2. 4-1-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 6
6 Fear does not gladden. Healing does. Fear always makes exceptions. Healing never does. Fear produces dissociation, because it induces separation. Healing always produces harmony, because it proceeds from integration. It is predictable because it can be counted on. Everything that is of God can be counted on, because everything of God is wholly real. Healing can be counted on because it is inspired by His Voice, and is in accord with His laws. Yet if healing is consistent it cannot be inconsistently understood. Understanding means consistency because God means consistency. Since that is His meaning, it is also yours. Your meaning cannot be out of accord with His, because your whole meaning and your only meaning comes from His and is like His. God cannot be out of accord with Himself, and you cannot be out of accord with Him. You cannot separate your Self from your Creator, Who created you by sharing His Being with you.

I probably don’t understand everything there is to understand in this paragraph. What I do understand is that as I let go of fear, I become a consistent healer. I will be happy and free and I will share this with others because we are one mind. Our mind will become happier and freer. All of this happens because I am created by God and am part of Him, and healing and consistency and understanding are part of God so they are part of me.

What makes my heart sing is the last sentence.

You cannot separate your Self from your Creator, Who created you by sharing His Being with you.

If I seem to doubt and be uncertain, if I seem to be an inconsistent healer, if I seem fearful and guilty ever again, I know that I must be dreaming. None of this is in God and therefore none of this can be in me. That is the simple truth and that is fact. Everything else is an illusion and aside from asking for Atonement when I become confused, there is no reason for me to give any of the dark thoughts my attention. I cannot separate my Self from my Creator, Who created me by sharing His Being with me. I am indeed, holy and complete and it is not possible for this to change.

“Jesus, come with me today in all my doings and remind me to disregard appearances when they seem to grab my attention.”

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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