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Study of Text, C 14: I. The Conditions of Learning, P 1. 1-30-17

I. The Conditions of Learning, P 1

1 If you are blessed and do not know it, you need to learn it must be so. The knowledge is not taught, but its conditions must be acquired for it is they that have been thrown away. You can learn to bless, and cannot give what you have not. If, then, you offer blessing, it must have come first to yourself. And you must also have accepted it as yours, for how else could you give it away? That is why miracles offer you the testimony that you are blessed. If what you offer is complete forgiveness you must have let guilt go, accepting the Atonement for yourself and learning you are guiltless. How could you learn what has been done for you, unknown to you, unless you do what you would have to do if it had been done for you?

Journal
An example of this is my relationship with my ex-husband. We had a very contentious marriage and the break-up was even worse in some ways. I spent a long time looking at each unforgiven thought about him and forgiving it as quickly and as completely as I could. Eventually, I had forgiven him, myself, and the situation. I knew it was forgiven when I offered him a miracle.

We still worked for the same company, and sometimes found ourselves, of necessity, working together. This time we were at an awards banquet and for a few minutes everyone else from the company had left the table to do other things. Out of nowhere I heard myself telling him that I was sorry for my part in our problems.

For so many years I had not considered me to be a problem. He seemed so obviously guilty, you see. ~smile~ It wasn’t until I said those words that I knew they were true. The miracle for him was in hearing them said. I saw his antagonism, whatever was left of it, simply melt away. It happened right there before my eyes. I knew that I must have accepted the Atonement for my grievances because I saw myself sharing that blessing with him. How could I have shared it if I had not received it?

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Study of Text, C 14: Teaching For Peace, Introduction. 1-25-17

Chapter 14: TEACHING FOR TRUTH
Introduction
1 Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world you do not know it. But you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly. The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except that His conclusions are not insane. They take a direction exactly opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego’s logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And having seen them, we have realized that they cannot be seen except in illusions, for there alone their seeming clearness seems to be clearly seen. Let us now turn away from them, and follow the simple logic by which the Holy Spirit teaches the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and only truth.

Journal
I laugh every time I read this sentence. “The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except that His conclusions are not insane.” Did he mean it to be kind of funny? Anyway, Jesus talks about the ego’s insanity often. It is insane thinking because it is opposite to reality. The definition for insane is, “lacking reasonable thought,” or “exhibiting a severely disordered state of mind.”

I know someone who is considered to have a mental disorder, so you can say he is insane. He hears voices that are not there. He sees things that are not there. He imagines that he is threatened by different conspiracies. He absolutely believes these things and to him they are as apparent as the sun coming up in the morning. He thinks that those of us who doubt him must be insane or at the very least conspiring to make him doubt the obvious.

This is what is happening to us all. We are hearing voices, too. I can be doing anything and there is a voice in my head that tells me stories or gives me meanings to what is going on around me. The stories are rehashes of the past, often changed a bit so that I feel better about the past. Or they are stories projected into the future based on the stories from the past.
Sometimes it just narrates my life, as if I would not be aware that the sky is a pretty shade of blue unless the voices in my head told me so.

This voice will judge everything going on around me, deciding what it means, based on… well, that’s hard to say. One moment it is based on something from the past or something read in a book, or heard on TV. Or, who knows. It offers one meaning and then in the next moment, offers another. Its ideas are disordered, and if I listen and believe them, and, Heaven forbid, act on them, I will often find myself in trouble. And the chatter never stops.

I followed these ideas in my mind for a long time. Once I began to understand the insanity of doing this, I started questioning that voice. The book by Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul, helped me to notice the insanity of listening to these voices, and now I have a quieter mind than I used to. The chatter isn’t quite as insistent as it used to be and often when I notice some particularly insane idea I am able to laugh at it, rather than believe it.

As I question the voice of the ego and with the Holy Spirit’s help, I let many of the crazy thoughts go. I am becoming aware of not just moments of blessed silence, but also thoughts I think with God. The ego thoughts were always about a personal self and defending that self from other personal selves. Now, much of the time, I am aware of a sense of union with others, and of love without cause, simply there, and of peace.

God created us like Him, in His Image and with all the power and the glory that is God. He gave all of Himself to us in our creation. To believe that the world is out to get us, and that we are endangered to the point that our life is spent making up of defense and attack strategies, this is surely insane.

The ego uses its twisted logic to make all this seem reasonable but it cannot make it sane. I have a choice. I can continue to follow the insane logic of the ego, or I can choose to see the clarity of the logic of the Holy Spirit. The ego uses logic to bring us through suffering to death. The Holy Spirit uses logic to bring us to union, to love and peace, to Heaven. I am learning to choose the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit to untangle the mess the ego left behind in my mind. Yes, it is another voice, but it is a sane Voice and it is my chosen Voice.

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Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 10. 1-20-17

XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 10

10 Can God’s Son lose himself in dreams, when God has placed within him the glad call to waken and be glad? He cannot separate himself from what is in him. His sleep will not withstand the call to wake. The mission of redemption will be fulfilled as surely as the creation will remain unchanged throughout eternity. You do not have to know that Heaven is yours to make it so. It is so. Yet to know it, the Will of God must be accepted as your will.

Journal
What stood out to me in this paragraph is that I cannot be lost in my dreams because the call to awaken is in me. How can I be separate from something that is in me? So regardless of how dark my dream becomes, or how lost I feel, I am perfectly safe. I will wake up and I will remember what I am. I will know Heaven and I will know my Divinity.

I will also experience pain suffering and death until I do wake up. That, too, is a fact, and it is the reason I choose to do this work. It feels hard sometimes, upsetting, especially at the beginning when my world as I knew it was turned upside down, and it feels incredibly frustrating and disappointing when I resist it. But I will not veer from my path. I will continue the work until it is done. I must because now that I have begun to listen, I hear the Voice calling me home. I can no longer ignore it.

And what is all this work I do to return to my natural state, to know who I am? It is whatever it takes for me to remember and accept that the Will of God is my own. I am given 365 lessons, pages and pages of explanatory text, and many processes and personal guidance, all to help me make that transition. Not to change myself, just to become willing to accept my Self. All God wants for me is my happiness, and my job seems to be to realize that I would rather be happy than be right. Oh, my dear God, I surrender! And I will keep surrendering until there is no thought in my mind of resistance.

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Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 9. 1-19-17

XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 9

9 You will learn salvation because you will learn how to save. It will not be possible to exempt yourself from what the Holy Spirit wants to teach you. Salvation is as sure as God. His certainty suffices. Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbs the mind of God’s sleeping Son holds no power over him. He will learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him and light surrounds him.

Journal
Another wonderfully encouraging and comforting paragraph from Jesus. Our salvation is assured; it is inevitable. Nothing can prevent it. The question I ask myself is, how long do I want to hold out against salvation? What do I think I am holding onto that is worth this effort? Recently, I was given a visual that is helping me to see differently.

I have this picture in my mind. I really wish I could draw or paint so that I could put it on canvas or at least on a piece of paper. But no matter how clear the picture in my mind, the one my hand draws looks more like a stick figure. ~smile~ I see this vast light which represents for me the Christ Mind, or Awareness. It is what I am. And from this brilliant, indescribably beautiful light there is a single point of awareness extending outward.

That point of awareness is I, experiencing myself as Myron. It is extending out, but in no way unconnected to the Christ Mind. From that extension, that singular point of awareness, I experience Myron and her story, but at the same time, I know myself as Christ. But here is what happens. As I watch my projection of the Life of Myron, I get so engrossed in it that I forget that I am just watching. I become, in my experience of it, Myron.

Evidently, I am tired of the show and ready to wake up because… well, here I am studying A Course in Miracles, and remembering that I am not Myron. So now I am aware that I am watching the show, but still falling into the show and forgetting. My practice right now is that when I start to tumble into it and feel myself losing touch with reality again, I envision myself looking over my shoulder, and seeing that I am still one with All That Is. I see that I cannot be Myron, because I am simply extending from the Christ Mind, not disconnected from it.

Then I close my eyes a moment to shut out the show, and I open my heart to feel the love that flows from and through the Christ. It feels warm and safe and I feel supported, so that when I open my eyes I can remain more the observer than the participant. This has been truly helpful. For instance, last night my daughter called me with disturbing news. Her father is unable to take care of himself now and wants to come live with her and her husband.
My daughter is very distressed by this and feels trapped with no options.

Her dad is mentally disturbed. Their house is very small; her marriage very new. I can feel her misery and hopelessness. I feel myself falling headlong into the story. What happens when I fall into the story is I start to believe in it. I start looking for solutions in the story. If only I could find a way for her dad to be on his own, a cheap place for him to live nearby but not in my daughter’s home, then all would be better.

I don’t know if this could work. How could he pay for it? Could they take on that expense? I know I can’t. I start to feel panicky. What if she thinks I should take him in? After all, it’s my fault that he is her father. I cannot abide the thought. I feel guilty for my refusal, though no one has suggested this, I still feel guilty because I know I would refuse. I feel guilty that I cannot accept him. What if I need to do this to heal the relationship? What if my very salvation depends on this?

My mind is spinning with guilt and fear and confusion. I feel resentment and hatred for her father. I feel resentment and rage over the situation. This is what happens when we forget that we are the writers of the script and the director and the audience. So what I did was stop the chatter. I realized that right now in the only moment there is, nothing is happening. I remember that this is a story that I did not write alone. We are all in it together and I am responsible for only my part of it. I realize that the only thing that is happening in this moment is that I asked the ego what it all means and I got an ego answer.

I ask for another way to see and I am told to look over my shoulder. I see, with great relief, that I am still what I have always been. I am still part of the Christ Mind, extending itself to this point of awareness. I look to my right and I see the point of awareness that I know in my story as my sweet daughter, and we smile at each other. I look to my left and I see the point of awareness that in the story is her father, and we smile at each other. It is my self looking at my self and I feel the love of Christ enfolding me and I know I am safe, and with me my daughter and her father as well.

There is still a situation to be dealt with in this story we are experiencing together, but now I am clear that the solution does not come from Myron, but from the Holy Spirit Who speaks for God in my mind. I ask Him for His interpretation of the story and for His guidance. I absolutely trust in the answer, that it will come as needed and that it will be for the good of all. The peace of God is all I want and right now I have it. I trust I will continue to seek only that.

God watches over us and light surrounds us.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 8. 1-18-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 8
8 The communication link that God Himself placed within you, joining your mind with His, cannot be broken. You may believe you want it broken, and this belief does interfere with the deep peace in which the sweet and constant communication God would share with you is known. Yet His channels of reaching out cannot be wholly closed and separated from Him. Peace will be yours because His peace still flows to you from Him Whose Will is peace. You have it now. The Holy Spirit will teach you how to use it, and by extending it, to learn that it is in you. God willed you Heaven, and will always will you nothing else. The Holy Spirit knows only of His Will. There is no chance that Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what He wills is as sure as He is.

Journal
What I understand from reading this paragraph is that God is communicating with us and that communication never ends. He placed a communication link within us, joining our mind to His and it cannot be broken. I am not aware of this constant communication, primarily because I choose not to listen. Not listening does not in anyway affect the communication, but it does cost me dearly.

Jesus says that it is God’s Will that His peace flow from Him to us. This reminds me that communication is not about words. In fact, words limit communication. It is not about explaining things or convincing us of something. I think the communication we get from God is the flow of love, the flow of peace and joy. I think that is the only form of communication with meaning.

My life has been a real roller coaster ride lately. I have experienced situations that leave me feeling angry and depressed and very discouraged. Then I have experienced that flow of love and joy and a peace that is beyond expression. Right now I feel the flow of love in me and through me. I would love to tell you what I did to make that shift, but the only thing I had any part in was my persistent desire to see differently. Anything that happened after that had nothing to do with Myron.

I think this joy and peace that I feel right now is at least a trickle if not a flow of the love that God communicates to us all the time. It makes me cry to think of it, to think of the love that God has for me, and to think of my continued refusal to fully open to it. I was explaining someone’s bad behavior to a mutual friend the other day. I talked about how hard it is for that person to receive our love because he doesn’t feel worthy of it. Getting something he thinks he does not deserve scares him and he fights against it.

Maybe I am doing the same thing. Maybe accepting the unconditional, unfailing love that flows to me from God feels like a theft, taking something I don’t deserve, and shouldn’t have. Maybe I can one day disregard this ego assessment, and trust that I belong to God and He knows me, and loves me, so I must be worthy. Maybe I will stop resisting and blocking the peace of God and simply accept my inheritance as His Creation. What I am doing with that love and that peace that I have accepted is to extend it to my brothers and sisters as best as I can, and that I do extend it further convinces me that I do have it.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 7. 1-18-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 7
7 Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit will restore your sanity because insanity is not the Will of God. If that suffices Him, it is enough for you. You will not keep what God would have removed, because it breaks communication with you with whom He would communicate. His Voice will be heard.

Journal
Wow! Could Jesus be any clearer? This awakening that we are moving toward, this is going to happen. We cannot fail and this is a hard fact. I know that it doesn’t always seem so. The mind seems to be in control of me sometimes, rather than the other way around. Life seems to be happening to me rather than by me. And it seems the harder I try the less I succeed. But as I continue to do the work regardless of appearances, things start to shift and I notice a forward motion once again. But honestly, I am very appreciative of this paragraph. I am printing this out and keeping it with me for those moments of discouragement.

This morning the daily lesson is another one of those times when Jesus is very clear. He tells us that we have no neutral thoughts and he makes it clear that our thoughts are making the world we see. Every thought contributes to the world, every one of them! I love the way Carol Howe expressed it in her video of the lesson. She said that unspeakable power is passing through the matrix of thoughts I am engaged in and the world as I experience it shows up. I can’t be careless about where I put my attention. I am quite literally making the world with these thoughts.

I mention this because it bears on todays Text passage. Why is it that we need this strong reminder of the inevitable return to God? It is because we have used the power of our thinking to make a world that implies the opposite. Our careless thoughts are making a world that seems to prove we are sinners, that we are helpless victims, that we are fools to hope for the peace of God. With what we think of as idle thoughts we have made a world where there is unkindness and even cruelty every day, everywhere. This is a world of lack and loss, of pain and sickness, of suffering of every kind. Who can hold out hope in the face of this?
And yet, Jesus tells us this in Lesson 16.

The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact. Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false. Those that are true create their own likeness. Those that are false make theirs.

So if my world seems impossibly cruel and if I seem to suffer even unto death, it can only be because I made it so. The same unspeakable power that made this mockery of “life” can create from love, joy and peace. What a different world I will see as I change my mind. What a different world I do see as I change my mind. I know this because I have experienced that change as I practice what Jesus tells me in his Course.

I think about my last year at work, and at the relationships that were healed. The world I made at that workplace was one of strife, and of constant conflict. I had reached the point of dreading to show up on Mondays. It stayed that way, and got worse because I chose to tell myself that my distress was caused by the workplace and the people in it. I had all the proof. All I had to do was look around and see the unpleasant people and the misery they caused.

Then when I decided that enough was enough and that there had to be a better way, I surrendered my thoughts to the Holy Spirit and I allowed Him to purify them. The relationships began to heal and the situation changed completely. By the time I left I was in perfect peace with that company, and in love with the people who worked there. They treated me with respect and kindness.

What changed was me. I had been joining with the ego in how I chose to think and therefore what I saw was a reflection of separation. It was stressful and it was suffering. When I changed my mind, I joined with the Holy Spirit and my thinking changed. My new thoughts were more in line with the thoughts of God. They were infused with kindness and love. When that happened, the world I experienced changed. I was a kind and loving world. It was a perfect example of what Lesson 16 is telling us.

There was a time when I used the workplace to prove that I might never return to God, that I was hopelessly entangled with a world over which I had no control. But Jesus is right, God wills I be in Heaven, and nothing can keep me from it, or it from me. Eventually I am going to reach my limit of endurance. I am going to decide that I want out of my darkly wild and imaginative world. And right now what I feel is a longing so intense that it makes me cry to think of it. I long for God. What I know is that I made the world that seems to separate me from God and the same power that made the world will undo this insane thing I have done. I watch my thoughts now with a vigilance born, not of desperation, but of certainty. Thank you for that, Jesus.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, C 13: XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 6. 1-13-17

XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 6
6 You will not remember change and shift in Heaven. You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid and what to seek. When you have learned this, you will find the answer that makes the need for any differences disappear. Truth comes of its own will unto its own. When you have learned that you belong to truth, it will flow lightly over you without a difference of any kind. For you will need no contrast to help you realize that this is what you want, and only this. Fear not the Holy Spirit will fail in what your Father has given Him to do. The Will of God can fail in nothing.

Journal

We will not experience contrast in Heaven. Funny, but I noticed a thought of resistance to this. It was something like, “Will I miss choices? Will I miss the feelings that occur with contrast and differences?” Then I thought about standing in Walmart looking at the many different toothpastes and trying to choose the one I want. I narrowed it down to a single brand name, but even then there were a lot of choices.

Each different tube promised to do something specific for me. I wondered which one I needed the most, enamel protection, whitening, repair and strengthen, help with my bad breath, deep cleaning and on and on. So to make a choice, I read the ingredients on each one and discovered they were all pretty much the same. I also realized that when I was younger I took great pride in finding the “right” everything. It made me feel successful and in charge. Now it just makes me tired.

So what is the toothpaste example all about? Well, this is how it feels to me here in the world now. This is why I won’t miss the contrasts, the differences. First, they are all the same really, new packaging, new ways of saying the same thing, but really, all the same.  I have a worry, a fear, a guilty feeling, and the ego offers me an array of choices. Which one do I need today? I was a bad mom and now I need to make up for it. I may not have enough money so I must find a way to earn more. I don’t know what will happen with our country now that things have changed so much, and can’t find a package with a solution for that. Ha ha.

The thing is, the ego offers the same solution with different words and promises and in the end, nothing does much except to make the problems look different, if even that. The Holy Spirit, however, shows me that all the problems are the same, that the package they come in is irrelevant. He offers me a solution that works for them all. No worrying a fretting over which to choose, just accept His solution and move on.

If I don’t choose the Holy Spirit’s easy solution, I focus on the problem in its current form. I ponder one ego solution and then another. Eventually, I discover what became obvious to me at the toothpaste isle, all the solutions, while sounding good, have the same ingredients. I don’t know how important the toothpaste ingredients are. After all, people used to clean their teeth with baking soda and peroxide and that seemed to work. But what I discover through the school of hard knocks that the ego puts me through is that its solutions are pretty ineffective.

I have tried one ego solution after another and really, what has it accomplished? The best I can say for it is that the contrast between the ego solution and the Holy Spirit’s solution has helped me choose the Holy Spirit more and more often. I used to revel in making those choices for the same reason I thought it was a reflection on my self worth that I would, through careful study, choose the best toothpaste. Now I am just bored with the whole thing, choosing the right toothpaste, and choosing the right solution to life’s problems.

Sometimes I get very discouraged because I seem to go back to listening to ego even though I thought I had learned my lesson. I start to doubt that this is going to work. But Jesus keeps me on track. He reminds me over and over that I cannot fail because God’s Will is my will and God cannot fail, so I cannot fail. I suspect I have unseen help, angels and masters who stand behind me, before me and around me, uplifting and supporting as the need may be. This complete thought reversal the Course has given me, and the Holy Spirit is accomplishing in me, would be more than I could do alone.

© 2017, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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