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Study of Text, C 14: V. The Circle of Atonement, P 4. 4-17-17

V. The Circle of Atonement, P 4
4 The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God’s Son, given him in his creation. Do not try to steal it from him, or you will ask for guilt and will experience it. Protect his purity from every thought that would steal it away and keep it from his sight. Bring innocence to light, in answer to the call of the Atonement. Never allow purity to remain hidden, but shine away the heavy veils of guilt within which the Son of God has hidden himself from his own sight.

Journal
Jesus says that the Kingdom is the right of God’s Son and admonishes us not to steal it from him. How could I do that? He gives us the answer to that. It is our thoughts that we must guard. I am careful of my thoughts, and when I notice thoughts of guilt or fear, I ask for the Atonement for them.

I am aware of attack thoughts and judgments very quickly these days, and when I am aware of them, I ask the Holy Spirit to purify my mind. In this way, I protect my purity and my brother’s innocence as well. The Sonship is all of us together, so I want to do my part in God’s plan for salvation that all of us be saved as one.

Protecting our innocence is simple once you get the hang of it. I started off watching my thoughts and releasing the ones I don’t think with God. Then I began to see the beliefs that sourced the thoughts, and I started releasing those beliefs, and soon I understood what it means that there are only one problem and one solution. There is nothing complicated about the process, but it did take time for me to accept that so much of what I valued was valueless.

Now, it seems to have become distilled into the desire to love. I just don’t want to hurt anyone, not myself or any other person. That desire not to harm is what motivates me to remain vigilant. Happiness is another strong motivator. Now that I have become happy more than I am stressed, I don’t have a lot of tolerance for unhappiness. I might express that as being peaceful because the effects are inseparable. I am happy when I am peaceful, and I am peaceful when I am happy. Guilt robs me of my peaceful happiness, so I don’t want it anymore.

This is not to say that I never have thoughts of guilt. I worked with those thoughts this morning as a matter of fact. I had some upsetting news yesterday about a loved one. I spent the rest of the day releasing thoughts and picking them back up. Probably we all do this sometimes. I was on a roller coaster ride of being at peace for awhile, then losing that peace as I returned to being anxious for my loved one.

This morning when I woke up, I awoke to the anxiety. As I lay there allowing the possible outcomes to run through my mind the anxiety increased. I decided to meditate on this and, hopefully, to let these thoughts be undone for me. I began with the simple statement, “Lord, here I am.” Then I told Him all about it.

As I spoke, I realized that there was a lot of guilt involved in this tale. I felt guilty,
and in turn, I had been spreading the guilt around. I had made so many people guilty for what was going on that it was ridiculous. Some of this I had been aware of, but a lot of it was unconscious. I was glad to see it come out into the light so I could choose to heal.

Then I told God that I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to live in guilt and fear. I want to go back to love because that is where my happiness and my peace of mind are. I just want to love and be love, all the time. I knew that if I stayed in fear that it would appear as anger and I just don’t want to do that. I don’t want to hide our purity from any of us. Then I lay there quietly and allowed my mind to be soothed and restored to peace. I think this is the kind of thing that Jesus is asking us to do.

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Study of Text, C 14: V. The Circle of Atonement, P 3. 4-13-17

V. The Circle of Atonement, P 3
3 Blessed Son of a wholly blessing Father, joy was created for you. Who can condemn whom God has blessed? There is nothing in the Mind of God that does not share His shining innocence. Creation is the natural extension of perfect purity. Your only calling here is to devote yourself, with active willingness, to the denial of guilt in all its forms. To accuse is not to understand. The happy learners of the Atonement become the teachers of the innocence that is the right of all that God created. Deny them not what is their due, for you will not withhold it from them alone.

Journal
What a powerful passage this is! This sentence grabbed my attention right away:

There is nothing in the Mind of God that does not share His shining innocence.

Of course! I am in the Mind of God and so I must share His innocence. There can be nothing in God that is different than God. What a relief it is to know that there is no way I could be guilty.

I can completely disregard all my errors as unreal. In the world, there may be corrections to be made and amends to be done, but those errors change nothing. I, not my ego, but I, remain in God and thus innocent. It helps me to remember that the body is ego; the personality is ego. I am not ego. I am spirit, and as spirit, I am invulnerable and I am changeless.

When I accuse myself of being guilty it is only because I do not understand. It is identity confusion that makes me think I could be guilty. My ego is guilty of many things, but I am not my ego. That bears repeating because of this; the more strongly I identify with ego, the harder it is to believe in innocence. And so I remind myself often that I am still as God created me. That has not changed just because I am confused. I also ask often, “Who am I?” Slowly, I have begun to remember.

That is why it is essential that I remember that my only calling here is to devote myself, with active willingness, to the denial of guilt in all its forms. There are few sentences in the Course more helpful than this one. This is my daily practice. I am vigilant for attack thoughts, judgmental thoughts, and the desire to project blame.

It doesn’t matter if this projected inward, or outward, if it is guilt I deny it. I devote myself to this practice. I am completely willing to do this practice. This is an active practice. It is not just something I learned about. It is not a passive idea in my mind. I act on each guilty thought that comes into my awareness. I deny that thought is true. As I allow my mind to be healed of the belief in guilt, I naturally become a teacher of innocence.

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Study of Text, C 14: V. The Circle of Atonement, P 2. 4-12-17

V. The Circle of Atonement, P 2
2 Everyone has a special part to play in the Atonement, but the message given to each one is always the same; God’s Son is guiltless. Each one teaches the message differently, and learns it differently. Yet until he teaches it and learns it, he will suffer the pain of dim awareness that his true function remains unfulfilled in him. The burden of guilt is heavy, but God would not have you bound by it. His plan for your awaking is as perfect as yours is fallible. You know not what you do, but He Who knows is with you. His gentleness is yours, and all the love you share with God He holds in trust for you. He would teach you nothing except how to be happy.

Journal
I have been doing the happiness lessons in which Jesus tells us over and over and over in lesson after lesson that our function is to be happy. He tells us that God has a plan for our salvation and that our part of that plan is to be happy. How appropriate it is that I am reading this paragraph now. The last sentence says that the Holy Spirit would teach me nothing except how to be happy.

The way to be happy is to realize that God’s Son is guiltless. I will play this part out in my own story of Myron. My story will look different from your story, but the purpose is the same. We are going to come to the same conclusion. There is no guilt to be found in the Son of God. This is our salvation and it is our part in the salvation of the Son. We will not fail.

In the meantime, as we continue to watch the story and learn from it that guilt is not real, we will suffer to the extent that we resist that one lesson. We will suffer because, even though we pretend not to know what is happening, there is a dim awareness that we are failing to fulfill our function. God does not want us to suffer and that is why He gave us the Holy Spirit to help us. That is why we have the Holy Spirit to teach us and guide us and comfort us and to hold our love in trust for us.

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Study of Text, C 14: V. The Circle of Atonement, P 1. 4-11-17

V. The Circle of Atonement, P 1
1 The only part of your mind that has reality is the part that links you still with God. Would you have all of it transformed into a radiant message of God’s Love, to share with all the lonely ones who have denied Him? God makes this possible. Would you deny His yearning to be known? You yearn for Him, as He for you. This is forever changeless. Accept, then, the immutable. Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there. Listen to the Holy Spirit, and to God through Him. He speaks of you to you. There is no guilt in you, for God is blessed in His Son as the Son is blessed in Him.

Journal
I want very much to have my mind transformed into a radiant message of God’s Love. I want to share this with everyone. I do yearn for God and I am overwhelmed with joy at the thought that He yearns for me. Perhaps it is the nature of God to desire unbroken communication with Its creations.

I know it is possible, even certain, I will be transformed. I know it somewhere in me, like a spark of light that refuses to be snuffed out.  That certainty is why I keep working toward this, working to undo the blocks to the awareness of Love’s presence in my mind. I want to live in awareness of that Love. The only thing standing in my way is the value I still place in the world.

An interesting thing I have discovered is that if I let go of the need for something, I then can enjoy it fully without guilt or fear of loss. That was an amazing discovery because I had previously believed that I had to sacrifice the things I liked here if I wanted to be saved. As it turns out, this is not so. I either don’t miss them when I let them go, or I still have them but without the neediness.

I am right now deciding to release the value I have placed on my children being what I think they need to be for me. The closer I get to a full release the more I enjoy them and the less fear and guilt there is in our relationships. This is still a work in progress, but already it is making a huge difference in my life.

Sometimes it is a seemingly small thing, like a favorite distraction. I seem to place a lot of value on my end of the day entertainment. I watch two or three episodes of some show on Netflix. There is nothing wrong with that, but I noticed reluctance at the thought of asking Holy Spirit to decide for me if my time could be better spent. This means I value that entertainment. Would I stay in the illusion just so that I could discover how the town of Jericho deals with their challenges? Evidently.

So what do I do about these areas of my life that I have afforded value where there is none, and yet I resist releasing them? Here is what I have learned about this. I cannot force myself not to want something. Also, it doesn’t help to change my behavior if I have not changed my mind. That just creates conflict and that is not helpful. And guilt makes it worse.

What seems to work for me is to forgive myself for my stubbornness and simply keep asking the Holy Spirit to help me see differently. I’m not trying to talk the Holy Spirit into doing His job. He never fails to answer me. But He cannot force a change onto me. I have to truly want it. And this is why I keep returning to my desire for Awakening. No, I am not convincing Holy Spirit, I am convincing myself.

It feels like I am slowly moving more deeply into surrender. I will spend some days in surrender to the Holy Spirit, asking Him what He would have me do and say, and where He would have me go. I will ask Him to decide for me what to do, how I feel, what I want. I am practicing giving up my self-identity so that I can know my Identity. Then I will inwardly rebel and before you know it I feel that stress entering my day, and I realize that I am trying, once again, to decide on my own.

But I keep going back to surrender. I keep returning my awareness to my holy mind. I start asking again that the Holy Spirit decide for me by deciding for God, and that He do this in every instant of the day and of the night as I sleep. The ego mind is very stubborn about wanting to decide for me, but I am very certain that I want to Awaken.

I want to remember who I am. It’s helping a lot that I don’t go into guilt when I notice that I am listening to ego again. All this work to release the belief in guilt is starting to pay off. That is not complete yet, but it is definitely shifting. I am vigilant for the guilt thoughts and quick to remember that guilt is just ego and thus not real. Mostly, I resolve the situation pretty quickly.

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 10. 4-10-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 10
10 The guiltless and the guilty are totally incapable of understanding one another. Each perceives the other as like himself, making both unable to communicate, because each sees the other unlike the way he sees himself. God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in your mind, because only He shares the knowledge of what you are with God. And only the Holy Spirit can answer God for you, for only He knows what God is. Everything else that you have placed within your mind cannot exist, for what is not in communication with the Mind of God has never been. Communication with God is life. Nothing without it is at all.

Journal

Here are some thoughts that came to me as I read this. First, Jesus divided everyone into only two groups, those who think they are guilty and those who know they are guiltless. That feels significant to me. For awhile now I have had the feeling that guilt is the only effect of the separation. It seems like there are many other effects but I think they are just different forms that guilt takes.

For instance, some people are jealous. Jealousy seems to say that the other person is guilty of betrayal and it also says that the jealous one is guilty of not being good enough and of being a victim. I think that guilt is far more pervasive than normally realized. When I am afraid for someone I love, this, too, is an expression of guilt. They are guilty of making me afraid. They are guilty of not being enough and so being vulnerable. I am guilty of attacking them with my thoughts that they are guilty, weak and vulnerable.

And behind all of this is the unconscious guilt, the guilt that sourced all other forms of guilt, the guilt that occurred when we believed that we had separated ourselves from our Creator. The error we often make is that we think we have to stop doing things that make us feel guilty. A Course in Miracles is helping all of us to realize that the belief in guilt is the problem we must solve. Just this morning, a friend of mine told me about an experience she had which triggered guilt. She said that Holy Spirit let her know that only the ego cares what she does. It is our beliefs that need our attention.

Then Jesus tells us that the guilty and the guiltless cannot communicate. They don’t understand each other. I can see that this is true. When someone is telling me that they feel guilty for the jealousy in their heart and all the pain it has caused others, I don’t see their guilt. I cannot join them in their fear and regret. I cannot understand it. I see in them what I see in myself. I don’t see the belief in jealousy in me so I don’t understand it in them. Sure, I understand on an intellectual basis but not in an experiential way. I cannot share the feelings with them, and communication is sharing, so we are not communicating.

Then Jesus gets to the point he is making in this paragraph. The reason we need the Holy Spirit is that God and we cannot communicate. We believe we are unlike God and so we cannot “relate” to God. And God cannot relate to what we think we are. God has no belief in, or experience of, our guilt, our fear, our suffering. What God knows is what He created, and we don’t know the Self He created. There is no basis for sharing and so no communication.

Without this communication, there would be no life. By seeing ourselves different from God we cut off the communication that gives life. So what God did was to place in our mind His Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows what we think we are and He knows what we actually are. So God communicates to His Holy Spirit in us and the Holy Spirit faithfully communicates to us what He is given.

And God knows us because He created us and so we must be lovable, in spite of our belief in guilt. The only explanation is that guilt is not true. When we accept that one true thing, we will wake up and know God. Without the unnecessary and untrue burden of guilt, we will be able to communicate with God directly. In the meantime, we continue to live only because God communicates to us through the Holy Spirit. How God must love us!

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 9. 4-6-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 9
9 The children of Heaven live in the light of the blessing of their Father, because they know that they are sinless. The Atonement was established as the means of restoring guiltlessness to minds that have denied it, and thus denied Heaven to itself. Atonement teaches you the true condition of the Son of God. It does not teach you what you are, or what your Father is. The Holy Spirit, who remembers this for you, merely teaches you how to remove the blocks that stand between you and what you know. His memory is yours. If you remember what you have made, you are remembering nothing. Remembrance of reality is in Him, and therefore in you.

Journal
Thank you, Jesus, for reminding me over and over that I have only one choice to make; I can have awareness of my true self or I can live in my ego. And most welcome is the reminder that salvation exists in my mind. It is always available to me as a thought I think with God. That is the Atonement. This Thought of Salvation, this thought that is in both my mind and God’s Mind. An easy way to think of it is that salvation is the same as the Atonement and that it is the restoration of guiltlessness to our minds.

Our part right now is to remove the blocks that stand between us and what we know. So we are not learning what we are, just remembering. The Holy Spirit knows who we are and He will teach us to remove the blocks to that knowledge. I have spoken before about someone I care about who has some challenges right now. I heard from him yesterday and it seems these challenges are reaching a critical point.

My first thought was to speak from my fear and give him some grave warnings. I wanted to scare him or guilt him into acting in his best interest. I felt justified in taking this action because of the immediate danger. But, I have chosen this path to salvation and was determined to stay on it. My job is to notice when I am listening to the ego and to change my mind. I turned to Holy Spirit and asked Him what I should say and do.

When I spoke to this loved one, I reminded him that I was on his side. I reminded him of the choices he could make and offered to be there for him. I didn’t act like he didn’t have a problem, but I was gentle and patient with him. We spoke several times. It seems to be working out. This morning he called to let me know he is still alive, if suffering.

This sounds smooth and simple and easy when I write about it. But that was not how it felt. I had to let the Holy Spirit guide me to remove some of those blocks before I could respond in a loving way. One block was that he was guilty and lord knows he offered plenty of proof for that one. But the Holy Spirit reminded me that this “proof” is illegitimate. The only proof that is true is that he is innocent.

Another block was the belief that I couldn’t keep doing this, that it is not my job to rescue him. How many times can I just forgive and go on? The Holy Spirit helped me to see that forgiveness is the only answer and it is the answer every time. Love is the only response and is always the appropriate response. He helped me to see that my upset over this was really just my fear that I would say or do the wrong thing, and that as long as I kept listening to Him, the Holy Spirit would guide me to the right thing.

It was both simple and easy and at the same time, it was nerve jangling. I had a bowl of jelly beans for supper. LOL. I guess jelly beans are better than having a Valium for supper, but being at ease with these upsets would be even better. What I know is that each time I choose Holy Spirit over ego this becomes easier. And looking back at it, I see that it was much easier than the time before. I was upset but the upset was short-lived, and I went to Spirit before I spoke. Last time I let my fear drive me to speak first and ask (Holy Spirit) questions later. Not a good plan.

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Study of Text, C 14: IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 8. 4-5-17

IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 8
8 Your task is not to make reality. It is here without your making, but not without you. You who have tried to throw yourself away and valued God so little, hear me speak for Him and for yourself. You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him resembles it ever so faintly. You cannot even give a blessing in perfect gentleness. Would you know of One Who gives forever, and Who knows of nothing except giving?

Journal
My task is not to make reality and thank goodness for that. I have enough trouble simply accepting it. And why is that? Why cannot I accept that God loves me and I have nothing to fear? Why is it so hard to accept that this world is not real and that Reality waits for my return? I think the answer lies in this paragraph. I cannot imagine the kind of love that Jesus speaks of here.

I cannot imagine perfect love. When I try to imagine perfect love, I think of my children. I love them with love as perfect as I can achieve. And yet, I still judge them and project onto them. I have moments of anger and resentment with them. I have expectations of them and can be disappointed when those expectations are not met. I don’t stop loving them, but that could hardly be thought of as a perfect love.

The love I have for my children is the highest form of love I can imagine and even so, it is a flawed love. Jesus is right when he says that there is nothing on earth that will parallel God’s love for me and so how do I relate to that love? What happens is that I project onto God the love that I can imagine. I expect Him to be disappointed because I do not meet His expectations. I expect Him to judge me and to be angry with me because this is how I understand love. So I am afraid of Him at least as much as I love Him.

On a conscious level, I don’t think about this a lot, and I push the fear of God away by telling myself that I believe what I have learned from A Course in Miracles. But I must be afraid of God’s love; otherwise, I would be with Him now. How can I imagine One Who gives forever, and knows of nothing except giving? And yet, this love must be in my mind, because I am created like God.

So here is what I am doing. I am accepting my Brother’s word on this. There is a love that is perfect and unconditional, and that love is mine. God, the Creator of All That Is, is that Love. I have blocked that love with my ego but I am removing those blocks now, and this unimaginable love is flowing back into my mind. Well, the flow might be an exaggeration, but it is trickling in. My desire to know God is making this possible.

And as this trickle becomes stronger, I am experiencing the effects. I am happier and less fearful in my story. I don’t get worried and upset over each perceived danger. I think of God more often. My love has become less conditional. When I notice I am putting conditions on it, I ask the Holy Spirit to decide for me. My love for others is more gentle now, with less judgment and fewer expectations.

It seems that it was more effective to accept the Atonement for myself and allow this healing to express through me than it was to try to be better at loving. When I was trying to be a better person by correcting my behavior, I wasn’t making a lot of headway. But as I allow my mind to be healed, the expression of that healed mind is naturally closer to perfect love. As I begin to experience that something closer to a perfect expression, I become more open to the possibility of a God Who can love perfectly and I begin to believe that I have nothing to fear from this God.

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