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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 12. 7-31-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 12
12 The miracle is the recognition that this is true. Where there is love, your brother must give it to you because of what it is. But where there is a call for love, you must give it because of what you are. Earlier I said this course will teach you how to remember what you are, restoring to you your Identity. We have already learned that this Identity is shared. The miracle becomes the means of sharing It. By supplying your Identity wherever It is not recognized, you will recognize It. And God Himself, Who wills to be with His Son forever, will bless each recognition of His Son with all the Love He holds for him. Nor will the power of all His Love be absent from any miracle you offer to His Son. How, then, can there be any order of difficulty among them?

Journal
In the previous paragraph, Jesus said this. “Let the Holy Spirit show him to you, and teach you both his love and his call for love. Neither his mind nor yours holds more than these two orders of thought.” Now he is reminding us that we are love. When our brother is in his right mind, he is giving us love because that is what he is. And when he is not in his right mind, he is asking for love, which we can give him because it is what we are.

Through this process, we remember our true Identity as love. I mentioned before that someone I care about was angry with me. The first impulse, coming from ego, is to defend against this anger. But as I reconsider, the love that I am surfaces in my awareness, and I recognize her anger as a call for love, which I answer.

Each time I make that choice, I become more fully aware of myself as love, and I am that much less likely to forget my Identity. It is helpful to my friend as well. If I defended against her, I would be teaching her that she is a threat and so not loved. By loving her, I help her to recognize that she is love, too. Each time the choice for love is made, the result is a miracle. Each miracle is equal because each one is equally blessed by the power of God’s Love.

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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 11. 7-27-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 11
11 As God communicates to the Holy Spirit in you, so does the Holy Spirit translate His communications through you, so you can understand them. God has no secret communications, for everything of Him is perfectly open and freely accessible to all, being for all. Nothing lives in secret, and what you would hide from the Holy Spirit is nothing. Every interpretation you would lay upon a brother is senseless. Let the Holy Spirit show him to you, and teach you both his love and his call for love. Neither his mind nor yours holds more than these two orders of thought.

Journal
I often have the experience of learning as I teach. In fact, when I am given a new idea or greater clarity, I deliberately teach it right away. I want to make it mine. I want to understand what was given to me so I pass it along. As I am sharing, inevitably more comes. It is exactly as Jesus is telling us in this paragraph. As God communicates to the Holy Spirit in you, so does the Holy Spirit translate His communications through you, so you can understand them. What is given me is meant for everyone so I share it everywhere he would have me share, and my own understanding grows with each sharing.

The second thing he is telling me is that I must hide nothing from the Holy Spirit. When I ask the ego for an interpretation, I am hiding it from the Holy Spirit. This includes what I would think of my brother. Would I ask the ego to interpret my brother? As Jesus says elsewhere in the Course (T 20: III, 7) Ask not this transient stranger, “What am I?” He is the only thing in all the universe that does not know.” I don’t want to ask the ego anything about my brothers. Let me always turn to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to teach me my brother’s love and his call for love.

Recently, someone who means a lot to me became angry with me. I hear the ego offering me its interpretation of this situation. It insists that it is unfair and unreasonable for this person to be angry with me. The ego wants me to retaliate, or if I won’t go for that, it wants me to defend myself. It sounds reasonable if judged from the ego’s perspective. But I keep asking the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit keeps showing me this being of Love who in her pain is calling for love. What could I do but answer?

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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 10. 7-25-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 10
10 It is impossible to remember God in secret and alone. For remembering Him means you are not alone, and are willing to remember it. Take no thought for yourself, for no thought you hold is for yourself. If you would remember your Father, let the Holy Spirit order your thoughts and give only the answer with which He answers you. Everyone seeks for love as you do, but knows it not unless he joins with you in seeking it. If you undertake the search together, you bring with you a light so powerful that what you see is given meaning. The lonely journey fails because it has excluded what it would find.

Journal
And so once again, Jesus is telling us that our brother is essential to our salvation. We are not alone and acting like we are is what keeps the separation going. We all act like we are alone, if not all the time, then some of the time, and in some ways. Some people choose to keep their body separate from other bodies and that is one way of being alone.

Someone else keeps her thoughts away from others, and that is another way of being alone. Some people pick and choose who they will share their time with, or how much they will share, and that, too, is being alone. And perhaps the loneliest of all is searching for God apart from our brothers, a hopeless task because He is not to be found alone. Being alone is separation, and separation is suffering.

We cannot know ourselves until we join fully and completely. We cannot know God until we do this. I practice this by noticing my tendencies to separate, and to become willing to see this differently. I notice the thoughts that make me feel separate and alone, the thoughts that make me feel different than the other. Once noticed, I become willing to see this differently, too. I remind myself that I am only dreaming of separation because I cannot be separate. I was created whole and that can’t be changed. No matter how deeply I have fallen into my sleep and no matter how strange and convoluted my dreams, reality remains unaffected. I am not alone; I am whole.

I want to wake up. I want to remember God. I want to remember what I am, not just learn about what I am, but to feel it, to know it. There are still times that my thoughts are disordered and I have no means of communicating anything real. So I ask the Holy Spirit to order my thoughts and I communicate only what He gives me, which is always some form of love. And love is whole. So when I do this, I begin to experience wholeness and my memory is awakened.

Dear God, may I always communicate love and may I always allow the Holy Spirit to show me what love looks like in each situation. May each person and each situation be as one to me. May my mind be illuminated with the Light that is God, and may I shine that Light into my brother’s mind and thus join with him on the deepest level. God, please wake me up and help me wake up all of us so that we remember we are one with you.

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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 9. 7-24-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 9
9 This is characteristic of the ego’s judgments. Separately, they seem to hold, but put them together and the system of thought that arises from joining them is incoherent and utterly chaotic. For form is not enough for meaning, and the underlying lack of content makes a cohesive system impossible. Separation therefore remains the ego’s chosen condition. For no one alone can judge the ego truly. Yet when two or more join together in searching for truth, the ego can no longer defend its lack of content. The fact of union tells them it is not true.

Journal
I am not certain, but I believe it was Diederik Wolsak that said the following.

“It is so clear that what I do is irrelevant. It is the purpose behind it that gives what I do meaning. Confusion arises because my ego cannot distinguish between form and content and always rushes in to ‘improve’ form. Our financial system, our political system, our relationships are based on form and not on content. Time to turn inwards and embrace the content: giving and receiving Love.”

I think this perfectly illustrates what is being explained to us in this paragraph. Here is an example that I can think of. When I was married, I realized that my relationship with my husband was falling apart. I tried to recover it by looking outward for the problem. He was the problem. That seemed to make sense on the surface. I could see how true this was by observing his behavior. It was our financial situation. Many marriages that end do so over problems with money and so that seemed reasonable too. And many of our arguments and the pressures we experienced stemmed from financial strain.

I could see all sorts of things that I could “fix”. What I failed to see was that the form the problems took was just outward projections. The real problem was the content. A strong relationship is based on giving and receiving love. I would have done better had I looked within for the blocks to this love and allowed them to be removed for me by the Holy Spirit. Everything else would have flowed from that.

I have since learned that important lesson. The form (or the story) might alert me to the problem. But then I disregard the story and look at the content. What is it really about? If I am sick, the body’s illness is the form. What is the content? It is guilt, which is lack of love. Our stories can all seem different, but the content remains the same. It is either love or a lack of love.

But when we look only at the form the story takes, we miss the content altogether. Taken one at a time, we can make sense of judging by form. But if we start putting it all together, it feels like chaos. It feels like our problems stretch before us in an endless line, the end of which we will never reach. Each problem must be solved individually and as we try to do this, we fail more often than not.

If we start looking at the content, however, we see that all the problems are the same, love or lack of love. This understanding not only helps us to actually solve our problems but also shows us that the problems are not endless. We solve a number of problems and soon we see that they are all the same and so we solve the one problem and it is done.

Love is wholeness and lack of love is separation, so union is the solution. When we join in this search for truth, we are no longer separate and so the problem as we saw it before becomes indefensible. Our very joining proves that separation is not real. And instead of looking at each situation as if it is separate from all others, we look at each situation as being part of the one problem. This problem is the belief in separation, or to say it another way, the lack of love.

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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 8. 7-20-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 8

8 The ego is incapable of understanding content, and is totally unconcerned with it. To the ego, if the form is acceptable the content must be. Otherwise it will attack the form. If you believe you understand something of the “dynamics” of the ego, let me assure you that you understand nothing of it. For of yourself you could not understand it. The study of the ego is not the study of the mind. In fact, the ego enjoys studying itself, and thoroughly approves the undertakings of students who would “analyze” it, thus approving its importance. Yet they but study form with meaningless content. For their teacher is senseless, though careful to conceal this fact behind impressive sounding words, but which lack any consistent sense when they are put together.

Journal
I have become very interested in understanding the difference between content and form. Content might be guilt and form would be the belief that I am guilty of something I did or did not do. An example is that I might feel guilty for not being a better parent. Or I might think someone else is guilty of that. The confusion comes in when I think that I need to correct the form, so I try to make up for not being a better parent, or I might think the other person should do better at her parenting.

To truly experience a change, I will deal with the content instead of the individual forms the content takes. The way I do this is to recognize the uncomfortable feeling I have when I think of my seemingly failed parenting efforts. I then ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the belief in guilt. In this way, a real shift occurs as opposed to the ego solutions, which are designed to make me feel better temporarily but with no intent to provide an actual solution.

The ego is never going to teach me anything of use. It has nothing to teach. And studying the ego is useless, though that is what we are encouraged to do. The ego loves the attention but nothing of importance is done in this study. I am not interested in the ego, only in undoing it. As I recognize that my thoughts are senseless and punishing, I give them to the Holy Spirit to correct. All I need to know about ego is how to recognize it when I use it to think so that I can change my mind.

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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 7. 7-11-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 7
7 The only judgment involved is the Holy Spirit’s one division into two categories; one of love, and the other the call for love. You cannot safely make this division, for you are much too confused either to recognize love, or to believe that everything else is nothing but a call for love. You are too bound to form, and not to content. What you consider content is not content at all. It is merely form, and nothing else. For you do not respond to what a brother really offers you, but only to the particular perception of his offering by which the ego judges it.

Journal

Jesus is being brutally honest here. We really have no basis on which to order our thoughts. We look at a situation or a person and think we know something, and on this shaky understanding, we think we can judge and, therefore, make decisions. We cannot. This is why we have the Holy Spirit in our mind. He will make all judgments for us if we will let Him.

The ego mind rejects this offer out of hand. It is insulted by, and threatened at, the idea of giving up its ineffective but closely guarded right to judge and decide. I have looked at the effects of the ego efforts to order my mind and based on these efforts to make decisions. I see it doesn’t work.

Here is a simple example. When I was still working, I had some fractured relationships with coworkers. I thought the problem was our basic differences. For instance, I felt like one of my coworkers was dishonest and one of those people who would smile to your face and then stab you in the back. She seemed to prove I was right at every turn.

I used to wish she would quit. Then I ordered my thoughts differently by using what I had learned in the Course, and I saw her as confused and tried to forgive her for her actions. When that didn’t work, I gave up judging the situation altogether and asked the Holy Spirit to help me see this differently, though I couldn’t imagine how that could be.

Two things happened. I began to look inward instead of outward and to see in me what I thought was in her. Then I saw that we were both calling for love, and I gave it to us both. I could not have come to that place on my own. I thought the situation was about the relationship between me and a difficult co-worker, but that was just the form. I was so distracted by the form that I didn’t see the content, which was a lack of love.

Fortunately, I am not the ego and I don’t have to believe the ego thoughts in my mind. The one choice I can safely make is to decide between the part of my mind I made and the mind that God created. I happily surrender the job of judging and correcting to the Holy Spirit. He sees past the form the story takes and to the content. He sees that it is love or a call for love and He answers that call on my behalf.

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Study of Text, C 14: X. The Equality of Miracles, P 6. 7-10-17

X. The Equality of Miracles, P 6
6 It will seem difficult for you to learn that you have no basis at all for ordering your thoughts. This lesson the Holy Spirit teaches by giving you the shining examples of miracles to show you that your way of ordering is wrong, but that a better way is offered you. The miracle offers exactly the same response to every call for help. It does not judge the call. It merely recognizes what it is, and answers accordingly. It does not consider which call is louder or greater or more important. You may wonder how you who are still bound to judgment can be asked to do that which requires no judgment of your own. The answer is very simple. The power of God, and not of you, engenders miracles. The miracle itself is but the witness that you have the power of God in you. That is the reason why the miracle gives equal blessing to all who share in it, and that is also why everyone shares in it. The power of God is limitless. And being always maximal, it offers everything to every call from anyone. There is no order of difficulty here. A call for help is given help.

Journal
This paragraph addresses the question of how it is that we can do miracles when we cannot even order our thoughts, and when our efforts to do so limit us. The answer is that the miracles we perform are engendered through the power of God that is in us. In the principles of miracles, we are told that the miracle itself doesn’t matter, and the only thing that does matter is their Source.

In this paragraph, Jesus explains further. The reason for the miracle through us is to show us that we do have the power of God in us. This is a lesson we need to learn, or more accurately stated, a memory we need to recover. When we identify with the ego mind, we lose that memory. We become confused as to what is possible and our part in it. We forget the power of God is in us, and the miracle is the witness to that power.
Because in our confused state, we think we need to establish some kind of order to our thoughts, we would believe we had to make all sorts of judgments before we answered a call for a miracle. We would try to sort our thoughts about it, asking ourselves how the miracle should look, if the person is worthy of the miracle, are they ready for a miracle or would it scare them? Who gets the miracle and to what degree? Is this miracle even possible?

We would get so mired down in our judgments that nothing would ever get done, or what started as an answer to a call for help would become a condemnation of the caller. I’ve watched my thoughts long enough to know this is true. My mind can get all tangled up and confuse the illusion with the truth.

The power of God within us simply answers every call for help with help. It answers all equally; everyone shares in the miracle. God is not confused by our illusions. It does not judge the call. It doesn’t examine it to determine if it is important or how big the miracle would have to be. He doesn’t judge the level of need or the order of difficulty.

God simply recognizes the call and answers it. God’s power is limitless, His answer certain. It’s very simple: A call for help is given help. This power is in us and, therefore, this is true for all of us. Through the power of God within us, we can answer all calls for help where the call is given, with no other consideration. We are, through the power of God within us, miracle workers.

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