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Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 12. 7-136-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 12

12 To “single out” is to “make alone,” and thus make lonely. God did not do this to you. Could He set you apart, knowing that your peace lies in His Oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for suffering is not of His creation. Having given you creation, He could not take it from you. He could but answer your insane request with a sane answer that would abide with you in your insanity. And this He did. No one who hears His answer but will give up insanity. For His answer is the reference point beyond illusions, from which you can look back on them and see them as insane. But seek this place and you will find it, for Love is in you and will lead you there.

Journal
We see ourselves as separate and alone, each in our own little bodies. This is a state that induces pain and suffering and ultimately death. Then we blamed God and said He kicked us out of paradise for disobedience. Maybe the first attempt to use projection to make the other guy guilty. From that story we made up about God, we taught ourselves guilt and fear of God.

None of this is true. God did not create suffering and He has not condemned us for thinking separation thoughts. We have certainly condemned ourselves, though. We asked him for pain and suffering and He could not give it to us. How could Love give hate? Not possible. But neither could he deny our desire for the experience of it. He had given us creation and would not take that back. So we made for ourselves what Love did not have and so could not give us.

God loves us, though, and did not leave us without help. He answered our insane question with sanity. That answer is in us, and as Jesus tells us, it is a reference point. We can stand in love and look back on what we made. The comparison lets us know what is real and what is not. This is what we are doing right now. We are learning to disregard the outer illusion, to go within and find the love that God placed there.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 11. 7-11-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 11

11 In peace he needed nothing and asked for nothing. In war he demanded everything and found nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, except by departing in peace and returning to the Father? If the Son did not wish to remain in peace, he could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place of darkness where it can believe it is where it is not. God did not allow this to happen. Yet you demanded that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so.

Journal
In our desire for specialness and thus separation, we declared war on peace. How could we be at peace in this state? In asking for the impossible our mind now believed in something other than peace. There would always be a for and against, a good and a bad. There would always be competition and chaos. And so love returned to the Father and waited.

So here we are. In the world of darkness that we made, but that God did not allow. We demanded it and so we believe in it and because we believe in it we cannot undo it without help. God’s love for us would not leave us in our conundrum so He created the Holy Spirit to guide us home when we are ready. We will be guided to the truth of ourselves and the truth of God. He will guide us to where we never left and are now.

This is the journey of no distance because we made nothing and therefore went nowhere. We are simply being awakened from a dream of being somewhere other than God. I often pray the simple prayer that Cate suggested for me. “God, wake me up.” It is the only thing we need to do, but to desire this awakening we must leave behind all that we made here that is in opposition to Reality.

So I pray to be awakened and then I spend my day noticing any thought or feeling that I must release. I ask the Holy Spirit to do this for me, and He gladly responds to the degree I allow. It seems to be taking a long time for me to change my mind completely, but then what is time except another illusion I made.

I did Lesson 173 today and in this lesson Jesus tells us that all things are lessons God would have us learn, because He wants us to be happy and not to suffer. And if we believe we are separate from Him we will suffer. In this lesson Jesus also gives us a shortcut that will undo much all at once. He says that,

“These are words which give you power over all events that seem to have been given power over you. You see them rightly when you hold these words in full awareness, and do not forget these words apply to everything you see or any brother looks upon amiss.”

So today I will say these words: “I will forgive and this will disappear.” The problem I see will disappear, and eventually, the world I see will disappear. Saying these words, forgiving what has been done, will make every problem the same and is, at the same time, the solution to every problem.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 10. 7-6-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 10

10 You who prefer separation to sanity cannot obtain it in your right mind. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an unloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give. And the peace of God’s Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him.

Journal
Jesus says that if I prefer separation to sanity I cannot obtain this in my right mind. I must use the ego mind to do this. I have a feeling there is a deeper meaning to this statement than I am aware of, but I do understand that this is why we have a split in our mind. In order to experience separation we had to find a way to make that happen. We could not do it unless we left our mind in some way, because we could not believe such an insane idea.

Regina Dawn Akers gave me a way to understand this, and so I have a helpful visual. We made a room in our mind that we could enter and be separate from our Self. Once in this room we shut the door on reality (on our right mind) and so we are able to imagine an experience that could not happen, and convince ourselves that it is happening.

Then Jesus tells us that we were at peace until we asked for special favor, which of course He could not give us. Here is how I understand this. We had this tiny mad idea. It was the idea that there could be something separate, that there could be a you and a me, and that we could be apart from each other and different. Now that we are imagining ourselves as separate from each other, we often project this idea of asking special favor in a direct way, and because we believe we are separate, we believe this is possible.

For instance, when I hear a siren, there is a secret prayer in my heart that I don’t know anyone it is coming for. In other words, I am praying that my family is safe, and this is happening to a different family. Or I see sports teams praying for victory over their opponents, or stars praising God for making them more successful than their competitor.

All these are examples of asking for special favor. We could not have this thought in our right mind because we could no more believe in the possibility that love could have favorites or degrees, than could God. Looking at this it is easy to see why Jesus said that we were at peace before…. How could we be at peace with the idea of separation? There can be no peace in this idea.

This idea of separation, of special favor, was alien to God and of course being not God, could not be granted. So we pretended it had. We made that little room, we went into it and we closed the door on reality. Now we could pretend that God was giving special favor. We traded peace for a belief in specialness. We traded love for specialness.

Just as we had to give up sanity for this experience, we had to give up God as He is. Instead, we made up an illusory god that could participate in our fantasy. This was a scary god, one who might grant favors and might not. One who might choose us or might choose another, and there seemed no sure way to gain his favor or even to predict it. We made up a god who we imagined wanted our sacrifice in exchange for his strange unpredictable love. No wonder we are afraid of this god.

But worse yet, because in our minds we betrayed our true God and our true Self, we feel like we have reason to fear Him as well. This is another totally foreign concept to God, but it is hard for us to let it go because in our little room betrayal is possible and even expected.  We fear what we made and our peace has been shattered. Now we are trying to backtrack, to find out way back to that door, and to leave this insane and awful room. We are learning that we have nothing to fear and that our peace is whole and complete just as it always has been, in spite of our dreams.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13:III. The Fear of Redemption, P 9. 7-5-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 9

9 Save him from his illusions that you may accept the magnitude of your Father in peace and joy. But exempt no one from your love, or you will be hiding a dark place in your mind where the Holy Spirit is not welcome. And thus you will exempt yourself from His healing power, for by not offering total love you will not be healed completely. Healing must be as complete as fear, for love cannot enter where there is one spot of fear to mar its welcome.

Journal
Wow! Love cannot enter where there is one spot of fear to mar its welcome. That is an uncompromising statement. So if I insist on seeing my neighbor as nosy and bossy, I have blocked the flow of love and I have prevented complete healing. It seems like such a small thing, so unimportant. I hardly ever see my neighbor and think of her even less, and certainly I don’t express any antagonism toward her. But that dark thought is in my mind and because I have not opened it to light, I have barred the Holy Spirit from that place, and I am not healed.

So now I am going to change my mind about that. I listened to this neighbor talk and make demands and I asked the ego what that meant. The ego and I are now joined in this decision, how I see my neighbor and how I respond to her. What I am going to do instead is to cancel that decision and all that came with it, and I am going to be in union with the Holy Spirit instead. The Holy Spirit will be my adviser and together we will join in a different decision making process.

I haven’t given my neighbor much thought and have not become deeply attached to my decision about her, so it is not hard to do this. I readily choose to see the Christ in this woman and am happy to do it. Some other decisions I have made with the Holy Spirit are harder to walk away from. I am deeply invested in the previous decision made with ego and so I have to gently extricate myself from it.

My son was in the hospital recently and I worry about him. This is a dark spot in my mind that I bring to the light, then hide away again. I have been pulling it out and putting back for a long time now. He has had a lot of physical challenges and so it stays on my mind. Here is what is happening. I think of his problems and I feel afraid for him. I tell myself it is a mother’s love, but it is an attack on him.

Every worry thought is an attack on his perfection, and an attack on God Who created him perfect. Every thought is a prayer and so my thought that he is vulnerable and fragile is a prayer that he be vulnerable and fragile. That can’t be love. It is certainly not light. I gladly offer these thoughts to the Holy Spirit right now and I ask that He join with me in a new vision of my son.

Here is a new prayer that I say each time I forget and turn to the ego mind for an interpretation of what is happening to my son. I think this prayer often in between attacks, too, as it helps me to remember to join with Spirit in every decision about how I feel about my son.

My prayer is a visualization more than words. I see him standing with friends and throwing back his head in laughter. He is glowing from within and I know it is his holiness that I see. I know that there is nothing his holiness cannot do. I join my holiness with his and our holiness envelopes the world. I am saving him from his illusions that I may accept the magnitude of my Father in peace and joy.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, Chapter 13:III. The Fear of Redemption, P 8. 7-4-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 8
8 Beneath all the grandiosity you hold so dear is your real call for help. For you call for love to your Father as your Father calls you to Himself. In that place which you have hidden, you will only to unite with the Father, in loving remembrance of Him. You will find this place of truth as you see it in your brothers, for though they may deceive themselves, like you they long for the grandeur that is in them. And perceiving it you will welcome it, and it will be yours. For grandeur is the right of God’s Son, and no illusions can satisfy him or save him from what he is. Only his love is real, and he will be content only with his reality.

Journal
Love is what I am, and it alone will satisfy me. I will know myself as love when I know my brother as love. These are facts and I am glad that I know them. It is the foundation of forgiveness, of the Atonement, of my Awakening. I awaken as I awaken my brothers. I accept the Atonement for myself as I accept it for my brothers. I forgive myself as I forgive others. I recognize myself as the love that I am through recognizing it in everyone else. There is no other way.

This also helps me when I see it from the other direction. If I see guilt in my brothers, I will not see myself as love because I will inevitably see myself as guilty, and love is not guilt. I cannot contain guilt. If I see guilt anywhere, I will see it everywhere. It will not be held discreet, appearing only where I think it should be. This is what I have not wanted to know. I wanted to think that I could justify my judgments and thus keep them away from me. But it doesn’t work like that.

I had a problem with someone and I wanted to release that grievance because I want the peace of God. I cannot have the peace of God for myself if I refuse to give it to anyone else. I didn’t tell this person anything to cause them a lack of peace, or do anything to her. But in my mind, I denied her peace. I blamed her and found her guilty. There is no way I can have peace and blamelessness and guiltlessness if I choose not to give it. It is in giving it that I know it is mine. I can’t have what I don’t know is mine.

I decided that keeping her guilty was not worth the effort. It was not easy to let go of all the judgments I had against her because I had convinced myself that they were true. I had asked the ego what to believe and then had asked the ego what to do about it. The ego said that my judgments were justified by her behavior. It said that I must defend myself against her. Even if all this took place only in my mind, and never took form, it was still causing effects.

So I asked for a new way to see. The ego had no new way, and so I had to ask the Holy Spirit to interpret this situation for me. Before I could do that I was directed to look up close at all the thoughts I believed about this relationship. I was told to look at them honestly, without spiritualizing the situation, or hiding my unkindness. So I did this.

I made a list of every little thing about this person that bothered me in any way. It was ugly and it was enlightening. What I had seen only as a minor irritation was actually enraging to me. I had no idea. I saw why it was that I was told to do this exercise. Then I used a form of Ho’oponopono to forgive it. This is what I said:

I’m sorry for my projections onto you, Friend.
Please forgive me for the story I made up in the dream.
I love you, holy daughter of God. I love me as my holy Self.
And I thank you, Holy Spirit, for the Divine healing of my mind.

This was a wonderful release. All the judgments simply dissolved and I felt light. I felt like the love that I am. My justifications for holding a grievance and my defenses against her were the out-picturing of my grandiosity. My decision to see it differently by seeing it with God rather than ego, was the out-picturing of my magnitude. It was the reflection of God in and through me. I am grateful to be free, and to know that I am love. I’m willing to do this with every dark thought in my mind.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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