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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 7. 4-21-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 7

7 If you will keep in mind what the Holy Spirit offers you, you cannot be vigilant for anything but God and His Kingdom. The only reason you may find this hard to accept is because you may still think there is something else. Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted. If it is, there are conflicting components within it that have led to a state of war, and vigilance has therefore become essential. Vigilance has no place in peace. It is necessary against beliefs that are not true, and would never have been called upon by the Holy Spirit if you had not believed the untrue. When you believe something, you have made it true for you. When you believe what God does not know, your thought seems to contradict His, and this makes it appear as if you are attacking Him.

This is what really stands out to me this morning.

“When you believe something, you have made it true for you.”

Jesus has made it clear to us that the life we think we are living is just a dream, an illusion, and it has no real effects. In other words, we cannot affect reality. We cannot change creation or make God something that He is not. So, ultimately our beliefs and actions are meaningless. However, what we believe is true for us, so in time we are suffering because of our beliefs. We are holding ourselves apart from God because of our beliefs.

The second thing that stands out for me is this.

“When you believe what God does not know, your thought seems to contradict His, and this makes it appear as if you are attacking Him.”

This is the source of our fear and guilt. We think that we are attacking God through holding beliefs that are in opposition to His nature. The solution is to be vigilant for signs that we are believing what is not in alignment with Truth, and to ask the Holy Spirit to undo this belief for us. We will not always have to do this because one day we will have allowed healing of these separate thoughts often enough to realize that they are all the same. This transfer of learning allows healing of the one thought, that we are separated from God. Once that is healed we will be at peace.

In the meantime, I am vigilant for my thoughts and my emotions. I notice when they are not the thoughts I think with God. I realize that I am willing to be corrected. I accept the healing of my mind. So simple. Oh yeah, I disregard appearances. What appears to have substance, my body and of all I see with the body’s eyes, is just an expression of the beliefs in my mind. I will notice when I am taking them for fact and remember that they are meaningless except for the opportunity they afford me to see what is going on in my head.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 6. 4-17-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 6

6 The Holy Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them, because He cannot perceive them at all. They therefore do not exist for Him. He resolves the apparent conflict they engender by perceiving conflict as meaningless. I have said before that the Holy Spirit perceives the conflict exactly as it is, and it is meaningless. The Holy Spirit does not want you to understand conflict; He wants you to realize that, because conflict is meaningless, it is not understandable. As I have already said, understanding brings appreciation and appreciation brings love. Nothing else can be understood, because nothing else is real and therefore nothing else has meaning.

I found out late yesterday that my beloved sister-in-law is dying. I always feel a little strange around death because my reaction to death is so different than it is for others who still believe in death. When my mom died some of my Course friends came to the wake and we laughed more than anything else. I know others who were there must have thought I was either unfeeling or maybe still in shock. I was happy for my mom. She was ready to move on.

I do miss her even now. I miss talking to her and seeing her and touching her. I still wouldn’t wish her back and never was I sad for her. When I am less identified with the body as self, I am certain that communication will be unbroken between those of us who are still embodied and those who are not. Then there will be no grief at all.

One of the problems that I face at times like this is that I resist the natural grief that comes with loss. If I feel no loss then there is no reason for grief. But I still do feel loss, at least for awhile, and I hate feeling the emotion that comes with that. I have always pushed it down and resisted it as much as I could. I realized this morning that it makes me feel afraid and vulnerable and that’s probably why I try not to feel it.

But in reading this paragraph I am reminded that it doesn’t matter why I feel like I do, and why I am afraid of my feelings. I don’t need to dig around in my childhood to come up with answers. I don’t even need to know what I should feel. All of it is a part of the illusion. Fear and grief and confusion have no place in God so none of it is real. The Holy Spirit will undo what I have done simply because I want Him to.

That doesn’t mean He will wave a magic wand and it will all be gone without any effort on my part. My part is to look at my fears and agree that I am through with them and ready for them to be healed. I can’t get out of that. It, however, doesn’t need to be a protracted experience. I’ve noticed that it goes by pretty quickly these days for the most part. Once I have done my part, then the magic wand trick comes out and, poof, just like that I am healed and all the confusion and fear falls away.

Whatever needs to be looked at and whatever I need to experience, I am ready. I want only to heal my mind and awaken from the dream. My friend Rev Cathy Doran sent me a helpful message this morning. Here is what she said.

“I know that you have the intellectual understanding about death. I would simply urge you to stay in the present moment and experience whatever emotions come up. Do not place an expectation on what emotions should look like, or feel like or which emotion is appropriate for the moment. Simply allow yourself to experience the seeming loss of a friend, sister, loved one. You may discover that you are mourning the loss of others; other people, other things; the loss of your separate identity as Myron. In doing so, you will allow those around you, in fact all of the Christ body, to mourn their own ‘losses’. This mourning is a healing when done in awareness.”

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 5. 4-16-14

If you are following along, you may want to look at yesterdays posting. I added a postscript after contemplating further.

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 5

5 The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all sane perception and all knowledge. It perceives their threat as total, because it senses that all commitments the mind makes are total. Forced, therefore, to detach itself from you, it is willing to attach itself to anything else. But there is nothing else. The mind can, however, make up illusions, and if it does so it will believe in them, because that is how it made them.

Oh my, it is becoming clearer how we got into this mess, this entanglement with illusions. We made the ego as a separation idea, and it is opposite to everything that is true and real. It is in opposition to what we are and so it must detach itself from us. So where does it go? It makes up someplace to go. It makes up illusions, bodies, and stories to hold our attention with lots of drama. And I love how Jesus explains this why this works: “The mind can, however, make up illusions, and if it does so it will believe in them, because that is how it made them.”

We did such a good job making these illusions (of course we did, we are God’s Son) that we have confused ourselves. We made them from belief and now we believe them. So when a story unfolds, and that story holds our attention, we have a hard time remembering that it is only an illusion and has nothing to do with us other than to make more illusion for our entertainment.

But dang, it sure seems real. And if it is real, we are guilty and in danger. Luckily, only part of the mind has been driven mad by its insane beliefs and there is a way out of our illusory experience. The Holy Spirit is the answer to our predicament, and the Holy Spirit is in our mind, right next to the problem. Handy, right?

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 4. 4-15-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 4

4 The ego cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego does not love you it is faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was begotten. Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to love because you are love. Love is your power, which the ego must deny. It must also deny everything this power gives you because it gives you everything. No one who has everything wants the ego. Its own maker, then, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only decision the ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it knew itself. And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.

Some paragraphs have several ideas that I can look at with Holy Spirit. This is one of them. It begins by telling me that the ego cannot afford to know anything. This is because Knowledge is total and the ego doesn’t believe in totality. I suppose this should not be news to me, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. The whole point for the ego is to allow the idea of separation to be experienced, so if it cannot know wholeness or totality, or it could not be ego. The bottom line is, ego is not where I would want to go to for knowledge because it does not know anything.

The ego begets as it was begotten is another idea that I am seeing more clearly this morning. The ego was produced by fear so it reproduces fear. If I am feeling fearful about something, it will do me no good to check in with ego for a solution even though I do this sometimes, at least briefly until I catch myself. The ego will not give me comfort or a real solution because it was not created in love. It will only give me fearful thoughts and solutions that lead to more fear.

All of my life I have been a problem-solver. If something is going wrong, I look at the options and choose the one most likely to fix the problem, then I get busy. This process always made me feel like I was in control. I still solve my problems in the same way, but there is a difference now. Here is an example. If I am concerned about income, in the past I would look for ways to decrease expenses or increase income, or perhaps the problem calls for a defensive strategy. Then I would get busy making it happen.

Now if I am concerned about finances, I look at my thoughts about lack and loss and I ask Holy Spirit to heal my mind and show me how to see this problem differently. The difference is that I no longer ask the ego for help. First, it doesn’t know anything, and second, it only begets fear because that is how it was begotten. None of its solutions will fix the problem. Using the ego will sometimes change the form of the problem, but no healing has transpired so the problem will reoccur and I will be left with more fear than ever.

Another idea from this paragraph is that the ego is against me always because it cannot afford to be for me. The ego is made from fear and I am created in Love. There is no common ground between the two. Fear cannot act in love and love has no use for fear. As my Self, as Love, I have no use for the ego. Love is whole and complete and safe. What use would I have for ego if I remembered who I was? My very being is a threat to ego’s existence. For its own preservation it must always strive to keep me from knowing my Self.

The last sentence is the one that grabs my attention the most. Jesus is telling us that we would reject the ego if we knew who we are. Then he says this: “And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.” The mind that made the ego will know itself as soon as it recognizes any part of the Sonship. I don’t know what to say about that.

I understand it intellectually, of course, but I don’t know how that feels. I have no experience of it, so I don’t really understand it. It is my goal to recognize some part of the Sonship for what it is. I don’t care where that happens. I don’t care if I see Christ in my mirror or in my precious child, or in the homeless person on the street. I just want to know my self and I understand that my self can be known through knowing any part of it.

PS: It is hard to understand and I probably didn’t do a good job explaining it. More simply; through the power that is ours as extensions of God, we made an ego. (Think of the ego manifesting itself as a body, a personality, the world you see around you.) Then the ego, in order to insure its existence, to hide the idea that it has no power,  and to protect itself from our rejection, tried to turn the tables on us. It said that it made us and that we are the ones who are bodies, weak and vulnerable, and, by the way, guilty and sinful.

But the truth is, we are part of God, powerful beyond measure, brilliant and gorgeous. We light up the universe. We are so vast that everything is in us. One of those things is a little mad idea that is the ego. It is like a splinter it is so small, but it cannot stand that thought so it has convinced us that it made us up and we are the splinter.

In reality it has no power over us and no power at all. All its power comes from us and when we stop desiring the ego it will simply cease to exist. I think of it like this. I can be having a very vivid and interesting day dream, but when I get tired of it I stop thinking it and it disappears as if it had never been there and really, it had not. This is what is going to happen to the ego. We are learning that it is just a dream, imagination run wild, and when we get tired of it we will stop thinking it. Poof. Its gone.

A Course in Miracles is helping us realize we are dreaming and helping us see that we don’t want to dream anymore.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: VI.From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 3. 4-14-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 3
3 The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems from the very power of the mind the ego denies. This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, which must result in extreme anxiety. That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. It is perfectly logical but clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to its existence for its existence. Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own existence, a state which it finds intolerable. Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. It does not perceive its existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you, and perceiving your being as non-existent. This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety.

Jesus did an excellent job of explaining something unexplainable, but to understand it better, I am going to put it in my own words. First I am going to remind myself that the ego is not a person or entity of any kind. It is a way of thinking, a thought system that produces effects. The effects are like the thought system so all effects are separate, vulnerable, weak, defensive, and mortal.
This thought system was made through the power that is ours as creations of a powerful God. It was made as a way to deny God and exist outside God. So for the ego to continue to exist it must depend on the power that it is trying to deny. This causes extreme anxiety within the thought system. I can understand this. In fact, I wonder how we tolerate it.

The ego has a plan for dealing with this impossible situation. It simply denies it. It refuses to see what is happening. And rather than perceiving it’s self as threatened, it projects onto us and sees us as non-existent. So the ego is a thought system made up by us, but in order for this to work, the ego must see us as made up instead of it as made up. Is this really what I believe in? Apparently. It makes logical sense in a way, but as Jesus says, it is insane thinking.

It reminds me of an ex-husband who was a paranoid schizophrenic. His brain didn’t work right and showed him things that didn’t exist. His defense was to project the insanity onto the world and so instead of seeing himself as insane, he saw everyone else as insane. It seemed to him that all these insane people were out to get him because they kept saying there was something wrong with him.
This seems a lot like what the ego is doing, and I see it played out all the time. It is usually subtler than it was in Charlie’s case, or maybe that is because most people are in agreement with its insanity so it looks normal to us. When I become upset about something my first response is often to blame it on someone else.

For instance, when I saw that I made less money this year than last year, I felt fearful and I blamed the new pay structure at work, and of course, my boss who implemented it. Then I saw what I was doing, recognized it for the typical insane logic of ego, and asked for correction. If I make less money it is a reflection of my belief in loss, and everything that occurs to give me what I believe in is my responsibility.
But the ego has a rule that says always project what is intolerable to it onto us, and so perceive us as weak instead of it. And when we identify with ego, we do the same thing. We project what we find intolerable onto others. It’s a good plan for ego. It defends itself and at the same time, it keeps the separation idea in place through keeping attack and defense in place. I cannot afford to be one with my brother if I need him as a place onto which to project my fears.

If I continue to side with the ego, to believe I am protecting myself through projection, to believe I am weak and vulnerable and to ensure I never learn differently by believing that I need to hide from God, I am virtually guaranteeing I will never know my safety. The way out of this dilemma is to ignore apparent threats and the defenses ego would have me use against them, and accept that I am saved from my insanity.
I am asked to come out of hiding, to stand before God stripped of my defenses, and trust that I am loved, that I am not what I made of myself when I made the ego, and that nothing ever really happened anyway.
At first glance that seems kind of iffy and pretty scary. But actually, if I take the first step and disregard appearances, everything else follows logically and easily.

What I am learning through doing this is that I am not the ego. I can only dream of being endangered. I am sane. I am safe. I am strong. I am loved. I am in God and part of Him. Nothing can touch me where I am. The ego can project and project and nothing happens unless I agree with ego and believe ego, then although nothing happens I will believe that something is happening and will suffer for my belief.

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Study of the Text, VI, From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 2. 4-10-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 2
2 The mind that accepts attack cannot love. That is because it believes it can destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. If it does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter confusion. Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose is part of its power. If you do not believe you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief.

Jesus has told us that what we believe is true for us. When we don’t believe in our power we feel powerless. This kind of thinking drives us to a dead end. The power of our mind allowed us to drive there as we used it to make up a story of powerlessness, and the power of our mind allowed us to believe we are stuck there because our story of powerlessness left us no way out.

Fortunately, through our power we can manipulate the story in any way we like, even to the point of feeling powerless, but since the power is in us but not of us, we cannot destroy the power or be without the power. So we seem stuck, but we are not. What we are doing now is choosing to rediscover our power.

We start by allowing ourselves to remember that we are imagining the world we see, then we allow our mind to be awakened from the imagined world into reality. The power that made the illusion will undo the illusion through the Holy Spirit. Our true and holy Self will emerge in our minds and we will remember who we are. What a moment that will be!

Yesterday’s lesson offered this prayer: God still is Love and this is not His Will. That was very simple and easy to remember, but I wrote it on the palm of my hand anyway. I had been having some confusion about my place in the Kingdom and so the prayer was right on time. I was also listening to a book called Divergence. It is a Young Adult book about a sixteen year old girl finding her place in the world.

In the part I was listening to yesterday, she was going through a training technique to help her learn to be in control of her fear. She sits in a chair and receives an injection that causes her to hallucinate something that symbolizes her greatest fears. In the first one she is attacked by a flock of crows. It is very real to her and she feels the terror of being helpless as they peck away at her body, even getting into her body through her mouth.

At first she flails away at them, screaming in terror, but she starts to calm herself by remembering it is just a simulation. She begins to hear the voice of her instructor reminding her of the truth. She is still in the illusion but she is remembering it is an illusion. She gets calm enough to use breathing to calm herself even more, and finally she lies down and surrenders to the experience. She finds herself back in the chair and the birds are gone. It was awful and the fear stays with her but at least she is out of the simulated experience until the next time she will have to face a fear.

I thought about what a good metaphor this is for us. We are imagining a life with lots of fears and they seem so real to us. We have the power to let go of the fear and see that it is all just an illusion, but often our fear is too great for us to do so. When we are ready we begin to listen to our Instructor as He reassures us that it is all just a dream, an illusion.

He encourages us to relax and to listen to His Voice and not the voice of our fears. We probably all go through an experience similar to Trices’ and learn to use tools to help us when we are afraid, breathing techniques, mantras, remembering the words from the Course. We learn to surrender to the experience and let the fear fall away.

In her second time in the chair, Trice gets another injection and has another horrific experience. This time she is in a glass box that slowly fills with water. She is drowning and cannot get out. As before, she reacts in panic and terror, but she remembers pretty quickly that it is a simulation and not real through listening to the Voice of her instructor.

It feels so real, though, that it is hard to hold onto the idea that it is not real. Then Trice does something that she shouldn’t be able to do. She breaks to glass. She got hold of her fear enough to think and to act instead of react. She changed the simulation. This is our next step, too. First we learn that the world we see is an illusion, then we learn to listen to the Voice of our Instructor even when we are afraid. We learn to stop fighting the illusion and just let it be.

Finally, we begin to glimpse our true power and this is the first step to manipulating the illusion. Trice lost her fear of the simulations once she saw through them. Breaking that box showed her she was not powerless and so the fear no longer controlled her. We are learning that we are not powerless. Dreaming about fear cannot make fear real. We are learning to manipulate the dream and this proves to us that we are not powerless and that if a scary situation can be manipulated it cannot be real, and we cannot be a victim to it.

We are powerful beings who deliberately chose to look at fear. This whole world we see is a simulation, a very realistic hallucination with lots of scary stuff. But it is scary only as long as we believe in it. We are only in danger as long as we believe we are in danger, but the story of danger continues for as long as we continue to believe it.

When we start to doubt the authenticity of the story, we begin to wake up. We can then manipulate it as did Jesus when he healed the sick and resurrected the dead. There was nothing special in what Jesus did; he simply stopped believing in the story. If you don’t believe in sickness and death, changing the simulation is simple. We can do this, too.

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Study of the Text, VI.From Vigilance to Peace. Paragraph 1. 4-9-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 1
1 Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented. It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. If it is not relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. Fear and love make or create, depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they will return to the mind of the thinker and they will affect his total perception. That includes his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. He will not appreciate any of them if he regards them fearfully. He will appreciate all of them if he regards them with love.

The idea that stands out to me is that attack is never discrete, and so it must be relinquished entirely. If I believe in attack, if I believe in guilt and fear, then this will show up in my life. If I forgave everyone except one person or one situation, I would still experience attack. I would experience myself attacking and myself being attacked. I would see attack all around me.

The world I see is a projection from my mind, so it is made from the beliefs in my mind. The only way to be free of attack is to forgive attack completely and for all time. If I don’t relinquish attack then I will believe that my brothers are attacking me. I was posting from my Manual for Teachers journal this morning and in this entry I was talking about an experience with my daughter.

She had said something that seemed unloving to me. I experienced her words as an attack. When I asked Holy Spirit to look with me, He showed me that they were an expression of her own fear. That example showed me that as long as I hold onto attack I will see attack. If I see her words as an attack I will defend myself, even if only in my mind. But if I don’t believe in attack, I will see her words as a call for love and respond with love.

I also see how I will never be able to relinquish my fear of God if I believe in attack. Attack is never discreet. “It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it.” My belief in attack will cause me to see God as a threat, just as I saw my sweet daughter as a threat. If I don’t relinquish attack, the whole world will be my enemy and I will never be safe. I will spend my life trying to defend myself against perceived threats. I will never be at peace. If peace and happiness are my goal, I must relinquish attack entirely.

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