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Study of Text, Chapter10: V. The Denial of God, P 9. 7-20-15

V. The Denial of God, P 9
9 Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him? If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. Yet to do this you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgement of your Father is the acknowledgement of yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.

Journal
When I read the sentence that says what is of God is His forever, and you are of God, I just cried. I cried from relief and from joy. I am His forever. I cannot suffer or be in pain. I cannot die. I cannot be or do or feel what is foreign to God. It’s kind of funny to think this is possible. I think of my child being born as a horse or an orange tree. Not possible, right? I cannot be anything unlike God because I am of Him.

So where did this story of Myron come from? Here I am in a body, feeling body things, experiencing separation. None of these things are what I must be and what I am. One thing that I am is powerful, because my Father is powerful. So with this power I dream of things that cannot be, and I imagine I am in this dream. But the same power that made this possible also makes it possible for me to wake up from the dream.

How do I stay in the dream? I continue to use my power to make stories that are different than God. I pretend they are real and so I become my own creator. At least in my mind, I am my own creator, and I am in charge of what I see, what I experience. I even give myself un-super powers and become small and weak, fragile and destined to death. Pretty interesting choices for an all-powerful, eternal being.

How do I wake up from the dream? I lose interest in it. I stop playing around with un-creation, and I acknowledge my Father as my Creator. When I feel small and weak, I remember God does not create small and weak. I must be dreaming. When I feel sick I remember that God does not create sickness. When I think of death, I remember God creates only the eternal. This is how I wake up. This is how I return to using my power for true creation.

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Study of Text, Chapter10: V. The Denial of God, P 8. 7-17-15

V. The Denial of God, P 8
8 Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgement of Him. When you acknowledge Him you will know that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgement of you lies your being. You are not sick and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His creation, from which He cannot be separated.

Journal
This paragraph has a passage that I keep on my remember board and that I use often.

“You are not sick and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do.”

When I feel sick, I remind myself that Jesus says I am not sick; I am just confused about what I am. When I forget my true nature and think I am sick, lonely, afraid, or guilty, I am turning my back on God. When I think that my brother is guilty, I am turning my back on God. When I turn from the reality of creation, I am turning from God.

Jesus has told us that sickness is a defense against God. When I am sick in body, in relationships, in finances, in emotions or in any area of my life, I have made a deliberate choice to defend against God. I am using sickness to keep out my awareness of God’s love for me and my love for Him. Through A Course in Miracles, I am remembering that I chose this, and deciding that I don’t want it anymore. I am learning how to ask for and accept healing.

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Study of Text, Chapter10: V. The Denial of God, P 7. 7-15-15

V. The Denial of God, P 7
7 Your Father has not denied you. He does not retaliate, but He does call to you to return. When you think He has not answered your call, you have not answered His. He calls to you from every part of the Sonship, because of His Love for His Son. If you hear His message He has answered you, and you will learn of Him if you hear aright. The Love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers, and God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.

Journal
God has not denied me, and He isn’t upset that I used denial of Him in my game of separation. He just wants me to come home now, and I am learning that this is what I want, too. His Voice speaks to me all through the day and I listen and sometimes I don’t. That I am not listening does not mean He has failed to answer. His answer will always be some form of love that I can understand. Over time, I have learned that this does not have to be in some concrete experience, though often it is. I am learning to recognize and accept love that is not attached to anything.

While I still need form in order to understand His Answer, it is given to me, because God wants me to recognize His Love. Jesus tells us that the Love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere.  All I need to do to receive this love is to look with peace upon my brothers. I have an unlimited number of opportunities to do this, from smiling at a stranger, to pausing in traffic to let someone merge in front of me, to overlooking an attack and recognizing it as a call for love.

When I am at peace with my brothers, I experience the love of God to the degree I am able to accept it. Guilt is a wall that I have erected between myself and love, but in being at peace with my brothers, I am relinquishing the belief in guilt and so relinquishing the need for that wall. As it comes down I am bathed in the love of God. It puts a whole other perspective on the desire to judge my brothers.  The high cost of judgment is seen when I realize what I give up when I do this.

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Study of Text, Chapter10: V. The Denial of God, P6. 7-14-15

V. The Denial of God, P 6
6 Son of God, you have not sinned, but you have been much mistaken. Yet this can be corrected and God will help you, knowing that you could not sin against Him. You denied Him because you loved Him, knowing that if you recognized your love for Him, you could not deny Him. Your denial of Him therefore means that you love Him, and that you know He loves you. Remember that what you deny you must have once known. And if you accept denial, you can accept its undoing.

Journal
This is a short paragraph, but very helpful. I have not sinned, but have only been mistaken. Every sinful thing I have ever done is just a symbol, a reflection, of the one sin that I believe in. I believe that I denied God, turned my back on Him, and so, changed Him. That is the sin that keeps me in the illusion, afraid to leave it no matter how painful it becomes. Jesus is telling us that we don’t have to be afraid of this imagined sin. He says that we could not have sinned against God.

This sentence intrigued me: “You denied Him because you loved Him, knowing that if you recognized your love for Him, you could not deny Him.” Here is the thought that came to me as I read this. In order to have the experience of not-God, or separation, we had to deny God. If we did not, our love for God would have made pretending to be separate from Him impossible.

In the eons of time since this tiny mad idea took form and we took a detour into fear and guilt, we have forgotten the original intention. Now we are afraid of our denial, thinking we accomplished the impossible and truly affected God. This is the mistaken idea that we are holding onto, and it is the belief that keeps us in the dream, afraid to wake up.

But the truth is in our mind, and God calls to us to awaken. We can hear that call, and in fact, we have heard it. That is the reason we were led to this Course and the reason we keep at it even when it seems hard. We have heard the call and it has awakened an ancient memory that remains in our mind. We are remembering that we love God and that He loves us.

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Study of Text, Chapter10: V. The Denial of God, P5. 7-13-15

V. The Denial of God, P 5
5 I said before that of yourself you can do nothing, but you are not of yourself. If you were, what you have made would be true, and you could never escape. It is because you did not make yourself that you need be troubled over nothing. Your gods are nothing, because your Father did not create them. You cannot make creators who are unlike your Creator, any more than He could have created a Son who was unlike Him. If creation is sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what it is. Depression is isolation, and so it could not have been created.

Journal
Oh my! What a relief it is to know that none of this is real. I believe something that isn’t true and from that belief I project a representative image of that untrue belief and that is all that has happened. It is not real because I cannot create something that is unlike Creation. Creation is sharing and God created me through sharing Himself, so I am like God. I can only create through sharing myself, and so my creations must be like God. Anything else is just an illusion, a dream of something different.

In my desire to experience myself as something different than I am, I made up the idea of different gods so that I could mimic creation. The god of depression is one of them and now I can pretend to be created in the image of the god of depression. I think about something sad or difficult or fearful and I feel depressed. But it is a false feeling because it was sourced by a false god. This is nothing for me to be concerned about because nothing actually happened.

God is not alone and it is His nature to create through sharing. Depression is isolation, and so it could not have been created. In truth, I can only feel joy and peace and love because that is what I am. And thank God, I cannot be anything else. When I feel depressed, I am only confused. I cannot do anything about the confusion alone, but I am not alone. The Holy Spirit will correct my mistakes, as I am willing to relinquish them to Him.

This is going to be a very hectic week for me with long hours, because it is conference week. I think of all that I have to do, and how tired I am every year at this time, and I feel depressed. But I am only temporarily discouraged because through my study of the Course I have discovered that I am not bound by the laws of my false god.

I have discovered that I can experience these things without feeling discouraged and depressed. Bowing down to this false god is simply a choice I make and I can make a different choice. With the Holy Spirit’s help I can relinquish the belief that depression is real. Today’s Lesson says that I place the future in the Hands of God. This is a statement that leads out of confusion and into Reality. I make that choice today. I turn from the false gods I made to the God of Creation and I put everything in His Hands.

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Cruelty in the World and Our Part in Undoing It

Some thoughts about how I understand cruelty in the world, and my part in undoing it. This was in answer to a question about ISIS and soldiers beheading people.

Here is how I think of it. From where my mind is now, I seem to have thoughts and take actions and speak words. You seem to do these things, too, and what you seem to say or do has little to do with me. Those soldiers and that organization is the same. They do some pretty horrible things, and aside from how I react to hearing about it, what they do seems to have little to do with me. Even if I were there and affected by the actions of the soldiers, it would be the same. I would react to them, but their behavior would not be my behavior, their thoughts not my thoughts.

When my mind is clear I remember that separation is an illusion, and that there is actually only Mind rather than a lot of separate minds. So each seemingly separate person is just an aspect, a thought form within the one mind. It is hard to think that our mind can make thought forms like the soldiers you mentioned and that we have the kind of hate and rage that is projected through these thought forms, but we see the proof all the time. This hatred and rage are effects of the unconscious guilt in the mind.

The soldiers and others who are consumed by guilt are part of the same mind that we are. We heal the mind of guilt, of hatred and rage, when we look at these things in our mind and release them to the Holy Spirit. It makes no difference if the form guilt, hatred, and rage take in our mind seems milder and less destructive than it is in others, it is still the same guilt, the same hatred and rage, the same fear. And it belongs to us, all of it.

And we can heal it by forgiving it everywhere we see it, recognizing that seeing it in someone else does not mean it belongs to someone else and not to us. “Someone else” is just another out picturing of our shared mind, and so is us.

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Lesson 190

Lesson 190
I choose the joy of God instead of pain.

(The sections in parenthesis are my perspectives on the paragraphs)

Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen aright. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form? It witnesses to God the Father’s hatred of His Son, the sinfulness He sees in him, and His insane desire for revenge and death.

(Pain is not a fact, but merely a wrong perspective. This means that I am seeing something wrong and pain will disappear if I change my perspective. In fact, Jesus emphasizes this when he says that there is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen aright. The reason we can know that pain is not real is that for it to be real, God would have to be cruel.

I bet that many people who have had extreme pain or chronic pain have thought that God must think him guilty and is punishing his Son for his sins. I knew a woman who had many physical challenges and suffered a lot of pain for most of her life. She believed that this was her plight because of some sin, if not actual on her part, then because man is inherently sinful.

She tried to appease God by offering her pain as sacrifice to Him in hopes of a reward after death. If she is right, then God is indeed, cruel and awful. Is it more likely, she is seeing things from the wrong perspective? Could she have watched her pain disappear if she had been willing to see this differently? Jesus says that this is exactly what would have happened.)

Can such projections be attested to? Can they be anything but wholly false? Pain is but witness to the Son’s mistakes in what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love, which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.

(Jesus is telling us that when we experience pain, and he is not making a difference between the forms and degrees pain can take, that it is part of our dream, not reality. We are having this fierce dream because we believe we are guilty for leaving God and He has abandoned us. Neither is possible. We, being the Sons of God are created unassailable and God is Eternal Love, and Love does not abandon what it creates.)

Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad, and seen as traitor to Himself. If God is real, there is no pain. If pain is real, there is no God. For vengeance is not part of love. And fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain.

(We are using pain to prove that God is not God and we are not His Son. The apparent existence of pain proves that God is not Love because vengeance is not part of love. It also proves that we are not eternal because only in a body can we experience pain of any sort, and so if we are in pain we must be the body. We must be corruptible. Through the experience of pain we think that first we have slain God, making Him something He is not, then we kill His Son through the death of the body we have proclaimed his reality.)

Peace to such foolishness! The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. There is no need to think of them as savage crimes, or secret sins with weighty consequence. Who but a madman could conceive of them as cause of anything? Their witness, pain, is mad as they, and no more to be feared than the insane illusions which it shields, and tries to demonstrate must still be true.

(The insane illusion which pain shields is the belief we have forever altered God and taken over as our own creator, making of ourselves something mortal and corruptible. And we are therefore guilty and deserving of pain and death. What does Jesus say to this premise? He tells us it is so ridiculous that we should be laughing at it, not taking it seriously.)

It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness.

(This is the paragraph that gets right to the point. Up until now Jesus has been leading us to understand that we are doing this to ourselves. He has been showing us that we are only punishing ourselves because we mistakenly believe we have affected Reality with our little games of separation, and that we deserve to be punished.

Now he is telling us outright that the only cause of pain is our thoughts. Let me repeat that. “It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain.” Nothing outside of us can cause us pain. Not the cruel words of someone who is supposed to love us. Not the abandonment of the special love in our life. Not the loss of financial support. Not the death of a loved one. Not any illness or accident. It is only our thoughts that cause us pain. “No one but yourself affects you.”

If you are paying attention to this, it might seem like Jesus just pulled the rug out from under you when you think of it. Shoot, the very foundation on which you stand as a self-created body begins to dissolve right from under you. Pain, in which Jesus seems to include all forms of suffering even unto death, is a thought in our mind.

Germs didn’t make you sick, rather you made germs as an agent to bring about suffering in a way that allows you to feel like a helpless victim of a cruel and vengeful God. Pain is not the inevitable consequence of loss, but a state you choose for yourself because you believe you are a sinner and deserve to suffer.

There are no accidents to mangle your body. They are carefully arranged illusions to prove once again how unworthy and unloved you truly are, how abandoned by your God, and how real is the fragile and vulnerable little self you have made to replace the eternal Spirit that you were created to be.

But you and I are not any of this and we can extricate ourselves from the web of deceit that makes up our illusion of pain and death. These following sentences are our way out, our very salvation, and just as we made this insane illusion, we can choose to return to reality. Here is what Jesus tells us.

“There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness.”

He has spent the lesson so far helping us to see our wrong perspective, the perspective that is pain. Now he is showing us the way out of this world of pain and suffering. He is showing us the right perspective. The wrong perspective, the perspective of believing we are sinners and are being punished by a vengeful God is what actually causes all pain.

Seeing ourselves for what we are, powerful and eternal beings of love and life, beloved children of Love Itself, will immediately undo the consequences of the wrong perspective. As our true Self we have the power to dominate all things. We recognize what we are and all things become harmless before us and they accept our holy will as theirs. Accepting who we are we see the innocence and holiness of all things. Those sentences have become a mantra I use when I become confused and choose pain for myself. They are a powerful proclamation of our identity.)

My holy brother, think of this awhile: The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want. Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable, forever and forever. And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own inheritance, and keep it as a hospital for pain; a sickly place where living things must come at last to die?

(The world you see does nothing. It does not make you sick. It does not take from you what you need. It does not abandon you. It does not hurt you. It does nothing! It merely represents your thoughts and will change entirely as you change your mind. Decide what you really want is God and the joy and love that is God,, and everything changes. Change your mind and change the world! And let’s not overlook the part where he tells us that we are using a little corner of our mind as a hospital for pain. Very expressive, Jesus. And thanks for the reminder that it is only a small part of our mind that sleeps.)

The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects. As an illusion, it is what you wish. Your idle wishes represent its pains. Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live.

Pain is the thought of evil taking form, and working havoc in your holy mind. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free. In pain is God denied the Son He loves. In pain does fear appear to triumph over love, and time replace eternity and Heaven. And the world becomes a cruel and a bitter place, where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the savage pain that waits to end all joy in misery.

(Again, Jesus is telling us, driving home the point, that pain is our way of keeping God at bay, triumphing over good, and basically making sure that our wishes to experience not-god do not get overturned by reality. As long as we suffer we can use it as proof that we are independent of God, and not in Him or part of Him, because in Him there is no suffering. And in pretending it is God who chooses suffering for us, we can protect our little game through fear of returning Home. In fact, without the fear of God, we would know His Love and would fall into Him in ecstasy. Game over.)

Lay down your arms, and come without defense into the quiet place where Heaven’s peace holds all things still at last. Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. Let no attack enter with you. Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness.

Here will you understand there is no pain. Here does the joy of God belong to you. This is the day when it is given you to realize the lesson that contains all of salvation’s power. It is this: Pain is illusion; joy, reality. Pain is but sleep; joy is awakening. Pain is deception; joy alone is truth.

And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven. Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts, as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world.

(The world of pain and suffering and death is a thought in our mind. Let go of the thought that you want to keep this in place, and the thought of God will rise up to take its place. Pain, suffering and death disappear as if they had never been, because they have never been, except in our minds. We chose them, we can banish them.

We can practice this as we can everything we are learning in the Course. I do it all the time. I notice pain in my body and I remind myself that pain is not real. If pain is real, God is not. I remind myself that this is just another thought in my mind and one easily released as I remember who I am. Can the Son of God be at the mercy of a false thought in a confused mind?

As I remember the truth of my being, I use the power that is mine to see it all differently. I see from a different perspective and fear no longer controls my mind. I see the body and the circumstances surrounding the pain as innocent choices, however misguided. I release them to the Holy Spirit in my mind where they are undone as they accept my holy will. I have done this many times.

I still accept pain sometimes and I know this is just ego thinking running my mind temporarily. I see myself do it, and sometimes I make a different choice right then. Other times, I stay in my confusion and if the pain is bad enough I resort to magical means for relief. But even then, I do it with laugh knowing that it is ridiculous. I also remind myself that even magic could not work if it were not my desire for it to do so. In this way I continue to undo the ego even as it drives me.)

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