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Study of the Text, VI, From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 2. 4-10-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 2
2 The mind that accepts attack cannot love. That is because it believes it can destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. If it does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter confusion. Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose is part of its power. If you do not believe you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief.

Jesus has told us that what we believe is true for us. When we don’t believe in our power we feel powerless. This kind of thinking drives us to a dead end. The power of our mind allowed us to drive there as we used it to make up a story of powerlessness, and the power of our mind allowed us to believe we are stuck there because our story of powerlessness left us no way out.

Fortunately, through our power we can manipulate the story in any way we like, even to the point of feeling powerless, but since the power is in us but not of us, we cannot destroy the power or be without the power. So we seem stuck, but we are not. What we are doing now is choosing to rediscover our power.

We start by allowing ourselves to remember that we are imagining the world we see, then we allow our mind to be awakened from the imagined world into reality. The power that made the illusion will undo the illusion through the Holy Spirit. Our true and holy Self will emerge in our minds and we will remember who we are. What a moment that will be!

Yesterday’s lesson offered this prayer: God still is Love and this is not His Will. That was very simple and easy to remember, but I wrote it on the palm of my hand anyway. I had been having some confusion about my place in the Kingdom and so the prayer was right on time. I was also listening to a book called Divergence. It is a Young Adult book about a sixteen year old girl finding her place in the world.

In the part I was listening to yesterday, she was going through a training technique to help her learn to be in control of her fear. She sits in a chair and receives an injection that causes her to hallucinate something that symbolizes her greatest fears. In the first one she is attacked by a flock of crows. It is very real to her and she feels the terror of being helpless as they peck away at her body, even getting into her body through her mouth.

At first she flails away at them, screaming in terror, but she starts to calm herself by remembering it is just a simulation. She begins to hear the voice of her instructor reminding her of the truth. She is still in the illusion but she is remembering it is an illusion. She gets calm enough to use breathing to calm herself even more, and finally she lies down and surrenders to the experience. She finds herself back in the chair and the birds are gone. It was awful and the fear stays with her but at least she is out of the simulated experience until the next time she will have to face a fear.

I thought about what a good metaphor this is for us. We are imagining a life with lots of fears and they seem so real to us. We have the power to let go of the fear and see that it is all just an illusion, but often our fear is too great for us to do so. When we are ready we begin to listen to our Instructor as He reassures us that it is all just a dream, an illusion.

He encourages us to relax and to listen to His Voice and not the voice of our fears. We probably all go through an experience similar to Trices’ and learn to use tools to help us when we are afraid, breathing techniques, mantras, remembering the words from the Course. We learn to surrender to the experience and let the fear fall away.

In her second time in the chair, Trice gets another injection and has another horrific experience. This time she is in a glass box that slowly fills with water. She is drowning and cannot get out. As before, she reacts in panic and terror, but she remembers pretty quickly that it is a simulation and not real through listening to the Voice of her instructor.

It feels so real, though, that it is hard to hold onto the idea that it is not real. Then Trice does something that she shouldn’t be able to do. She breaks to glass. She got hold of her fear enough to think and to act instead of react. She changed the simulation. This is our next step, too. First we learn that the world we see is an illusion, then we learn to listen to the Voice of our Instructor even when we are afraid. We learn to stop fighting the illusion and just let it be.

Finally, we begin to glimpse our true power and this is the first step to manipulating the illusion. Trice lost her fear of the simulations once she saw through them. Breaking that box showed her she was not powerless and so the fear no longer controlled her. We are learning that we are not powerless. Dreaming about fear cannot make fear real. We are learning to manipulate the dream and this proves to us that we are not powerless and that if a scary situation can be manipulated it cannot be real, and we cannot be a victim to it.

We are powerful beings who deliberately chose to look at fear. This whole world we see is a simulation, a very realistic hallucination with lots of scary stuff. But it is scary only as long as we believe in it. We are only in danger as long as we believe we are in danger, but the story of danger continues for as long as we continue to believe it.

When we start to doubt the authenticity of the story, we begin to wake up. We can then manipulate it as did Jesus when he healed the sick and resurrected the dead. There was nothing special in what Jesus did; he simply stopped believing in the story. If you don’t believe in sickness and death, changing the simulation is simple. We can do this, too.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, VI.From Vigilance to Peace. Paragraph 1. 4-9-14

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, Paragraph 1
1 Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented. It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. If it is not relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. Fear and love make or create, depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they will return to the mind of the thinker and they will affect his total perception. That includes his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. He will not appreciate any of them if he regards them fearfully. He will appreciate all of them if he regards them with love.

The idea that stands out to me is that attack is never discrete, and so it must be relinquished entirely. If I believe in attack, if I believe in guilt and fear, then this will show up in my life. If I forgave everyone except one person or one situation, I would still experience attack. I would experience myself attacking and myself being attacked. I would see attack all around me.

The world I see is a projection from my mind, so it is made from the beliefs in my mind. The only way to be free of attack is to forgive attack completely and for all time. If I don’t relinquish attack then I will believe that my brothers are attacking me. I was posting from my Manual for Teachers journal this morning and in this entry I was talking about an experience with my daughter.

She had said something that seemed unloving to me. I experienced her words as an attack. When I asked Holy Spirit to look with me, He showed me that they were an expression of her own fear. That example showed me that as long as I hold onto attack I will see attack. If I see her words as an attack I will defend myself, even if only in my mind. But if I don’t believe in attack, I will see her words as a call for love and respond with love.

I also see how I will never be able to relinquish my fear of God if I believe in attack. Attack is never discreet. “It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it.” My belief in attack will cause me to see God as a threat, just as I saw my sweet daughter as a threat. If I don’t relinquish attack, the whole world will be my enemy and I will never be safe. I will spend my life trying to defend myself against perceived threats. I will never be at peace. If peace and happiness are my goal, I must relinquish attack entirely.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: V.Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 11. 4-8-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 11
11 Come therefore unto me, and learn of the truth in you. The mind we share is shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly they will be healed. Let your mind shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make them aware of the light in them. This light will shine back upon you and on the whole Sonship, because this is your proper gift to God. He will accept it and give it to the Sonship, because it is acceptable to Him and therefore to His Sons. This is true communion with the Holy Spirit, Who sees the altar of God in everyone, and by bringing it to your appreciation, He calls upon you to love God and His creation. You can appreciate the Sonship only as one. This is part of the law of creation, and therefore governs all thought.

It’s all very simple. How do we wake up? How do we remember who we are? How do we return our minds to God? We let go of the judgments we hold about everyone and everything. Just let that piece of fiction go. There’s nothing to it, anyway. Instead look where the Holy Spirit directs us. He sees only the altar of God in everyone. Imagine that! Imagine that everywhere you look, you see only God! It’s easy, because that is all there is to see.

Imagine the beauty of it! Everywhere you look you see perfection, holiness, and love. You feel lovable, and loved and loneliness is a fading memory, never to be experienced again. How could you be lonely when you share the same mind with all brothers and sisters, with an entire Sonship, and that mind is in God? You can never be misunderstood because communication is perfectly clear and flawless, with no gap between you to distort or disrupt communication. Look all around and you will see only us, our one glorious Self, living in perfect harmony, safe and happy.

As I consider this vision of Heaven which is mine for the taking, I consider also the alternative which I still sometimes choose. Yesterday at work, I was preparing a plan for a customer and it was my first time to do this particular plan. I was worried about getting it right and so was uneasy. In the middle of this I was interrupted and given another task. I felt anger rush through me and snapped at my boss. That hasn’t happened in so long that I was shocked by my reaction, as probably was my boss.

I took care of the extra job and as I did so, sanity slowly returned. I watched myself react and feel resentment, and project blame, and all the ego stuff we do when we think we are separate from each other and have different agendas which conflict. Someone will win, and someone must lose. Jeez, in the snap of a finger, I’m back in hell, just like that. Would I be so willing to relinquish the Kingdom just to keep my little piece of hell safe from interlopers? If I think of my brother as an interruption in my day, then I guess the answer was yes, at least in that moment of insanity.

As I was writing this, I had a vision of my mother slipping quietly into my room to comfort me. I had a really bad sunburn and was in pain. Pain to a little child is very scary and I wanted her there with me, reassuring me and making me feel better, but she couldn’t stay. My dad thought she was babying me and told her not to make a big deal of it. She had to leave me.

As I thought of this moment, I felt a surge of rage, the same rage that had been silently eating away at me for all these years. The rage was directed at my father for not caring about me, and at my mom for giving into his demands, and this rage was like wild fire in dry brush. It spread over the terrain of my life touching all the men with whom I had been in relationship. All were burned with the same fire, because that pain had never been looked at or forgiven. I had no idea that grievance was lurking in my mind and had caused so much damage.

The ego wants to fan that fire, and to feel sorry and sad and unloved because of it. But Spirit is showing it to me so that I can let it go into His hands and be healed. My dad had an agenda. He thought it was his job to toughen up his kids so they could face life. My mom thought her job was to comfort and protect her children from pain. I thought my job was to find someone to make me feel safe and cared for. But really, we all had the same agenda. We all wanted to be love, and to be loved. We just didn’t know how.

Because there is no time and because there is only one mind and we are all in it, and because space and even death are illusions, I am being given the opportunity to heal this old wound right now this morning with all of you as witnesses. I can hold onto the resentment and unfairness of it all, and feel vindicated in my anger, or I can relinquish that illusion and embrace our oneness.

Holy Spirit, I have no use for the ego. It is not me. Please show me God’s Altar in my dad, my mom and myself. I want only to awaken to the love that we are. Show me the place where we are one.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, Chapter 7: V.Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 10. 4-7-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 10

10 You cannot forget the Father because I am with you, and I cannot forget Him. To forget me is to forget yourself and Him Who created you. Our brothers are forgetful. That is why they need your remembrance of me and of Him Who created me. Through this remembrance, you can change their minds about themselves, as I can change yours. Your mind is so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours. I do not want to share my body in communion because this is to share nothing. Would I try to share an illusion with the most holy children of a most holy Father? Yet I do want to share my mind with you because we are of one Mind, and that Mind is ours. See only this Mind everywhere, because only this is everywhere and in everything. It is everything because it encompasses all things within itself. Blessed are you who perceive only this, because you perceive only what is true.

“Your mind is so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours.” By this time in the Text and in the Daily Lessons, it should be obvious that my mind, my true mind is powerful. I am spirit, not body, and my mind is part of the Mind that is one with all. I live in God. Now Jesus is reminding me again that my mind is powerful, so powerful in fact that I can enlighten others as he enlightens me.

The way this seems to work is that as I allow my mind to be healed I begin to remember who I am and so I remember who my brother is. My remembrance becomes their remembrance. My mind is illuminated and so I illuminate my brother. Jesus is helping me change my mind about myself and I help my brother change his mind about himself by knowing the truth about him.

I am beginning to remember that I am not the body and the world I see does not exist. I am mind within Mind and all that exists is encompassed within this Mind. As I turn my attention from ego, disregard all things ego, the only thing left to see in my self and in my brother is our holiness. Would I hold onto his ego, choose to believe in his errors, rather than to know him as he is? Because if I do, I throw away my remembrance of my Self as well.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 9. 4-4-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 9
9 As you can hear two voices, so you can see in two ways. One way shows you an image, or an idol that you may worship out of fear, but will never love. The other shows you only truth, which you will love because you will understand it. Understanding is appreciation, because what you understand you can identify with, and by making it part of you, you have accepted it with love. That is how God Himself created you; in understanding, in appreciation and in love. The ego is totally unable to understand this, because it does not understand what it makes, does not appreciate it and does not love it. It incorporates to take away. It literally believes that every time it deprives someone of something, it has increased. I have spoken often of the increase of the Kingdom by your creations, which can only be created as you were. The whole glory and perfect joy that is the Kingdom lies in you to give. Do you not want to give it?

I am crying this morning as I read these sweet, sweet words from Jesus. God created me in understanding, in appreciation and in love. Joy and gratitude well up in me so forcefully that it must escape through my tears, and even more so as he reminds me about my creations. I feel a longing to return to full remembrance, to embrace my brothers, my creations and my Creator.

Two voices in my mind, two ways to be, and it is up to me to choose the voice I will follow. I choose in every moment to be in the Kingdom or to be in hell. I don’t get to choose whether or not to choose. There is no sitting this one out. Not choosing is sticking my head in the sand and pretending I am not choosing hell.

Choosing the ego is choosing hell. I cannot love this because it is meaningless. It is not me and so I have no understanding of it and without understanding, I have no appreciation. The ego self can only be experienced in fear and guilt and that is as good as it gets. I will never love it, and never feel love from it.

Or I can choose Love. I can choose the self that God made out of His Love. I can love this self because I understand and appreciate it. I know it even though I have concealed it from my mind, hidden it from myself, I know it and long for it because it is me. I remember it as I give it.

The ego only takes and believes it increases in the taking, but my Heart knows differently. It knows it can only increase through giving, and so I give love in whatever form seems helpful. I watch for the ego desire to take and lay it gently aside, something no longer needed or wanted because now I understand that it doesn’t increase and doesn’t bring me in the direction my heart longs to go.

I was thinking about how this works in my life. In the past I have given generously of my time and money and when I have not felt that I received equally in return, it seemed to me that I was being taken advantage of. In other words, I did not give for the joy of giving, but because I expected gratitude or admiration.

I was giving to get, and I would always be disappointed to some degree. I thought the recipients of my largess were disappointing me. But really, the disappointment was a result of seeking love through guilt. I was asking the ego to provide me with love, appreciation and gratitude and the ego doesn’t understand the request because it was not created in love, appreciation and gratitude. It can only give me bitter disappointment, fear and guilt because that is all it has to give.

Now if I feel that sense of disappointment or resentment, I recognize what happened. I was not giving for the joy of giving. My giving was really a form of taking. I slipped back into the ego belief that what I take from another actually increases me. Fortunately, I now realize that this doesn’t work and I can change my mind. I can choose to remember that I only increase in true giving, and that my brother’s increase is my increase.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 8. 4-3-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 8
8 When you heal, that is exactly what you are learning. You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by realizing that he could not have changed his mind. That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is only the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His Mind. He himself may think he can, or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know what his Self is. If you see only the changeless in him you have not really changed him. By changing your mind about his for him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him.

If I am sick I believe that I have changed my mind from its original state. In other words, I believe I have undone what God has done, and that impossible belief is the only way I could ever have an experience of sickness. Of course I could never change God’s creation so I cannot actually be sick. I can only dream of sickness, pretend sickness, think I am sick. I am healed from this illusion by recognizing that, in spite of my beliefs, my mind is changeless. It remains as God created it.

This is the way I heal myself, and also the way I heal others. I see in them the changeless mind and I see nothing else. My unwavering certainty about my brother helps to undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him. Poor ego; it is so delusional. On the other hand, if I look on my brother with my ego I see him as the ego sees him and I reinforce that error in the mind, which is also my mind, and so I teach myself what I don’t want to learn.

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Study of the Text, V, Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 7. 4-2-14

V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind. Paragraph 7
7 The unhealed healer wants gratitude from his brothers, but he is not grateful to them. That is because he thinks he is giving something to them, and is not receiving something equally desirable in return. His teaching is limited because he is learning so little. His healing lesson is limited by his own ingratitude, which is a lesson in sickness. True learning is constant, and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change. This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as God created it, but you think that you have changed it as long as you learn through the ego. This places you in a position of needing to learn a lesson that seems contradictory; - you must learn to change your mind about your mind. Only by this can you learn that it is changeless.

I am going to frequently remind myself that it is only my mind I heal and only through changing my mind will I return to my Self. This does not mean that I can change the world or change my mind. It means that when I change the world nothing happens. For instance, if I want to lose weight and I change my diet, nothing has actually happened even if I lose weight.

I have actually only changed an illusion (the diet) to change an illusion (the body). Another way to think of this is: I pretended to have a fat body and pretended to make a thinner body and pretended to effect this change by manipulating the illusion through eating differently. Now I pretend that my manipulation gave me the thinner body I claim to want. I did a lot of nothing about nothing.

What if instead of trying to play around in the illusion, I change my mind about what I want? I may still be only changing the illusion, but in using my mind to do this rather than manipulating the illusion, I am reminding myself of who I am. I am learning to remember that my mind is powerful.

This is what Jesus says about changing the mind: “…a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change.” When I read those words today they brought tears to my eyes. It is like suddenly remembering something wonderful and feeling the emotion of that memory.

But here is the truth. I don’t really have to think back to find a time when I changed the world through changing my mind. I do this all the time. Most of those times it is in very small increments and so I don’t realize what I have done right away. Only later do I notice how much my world has changed. But every time I change my mind, in that instant the world changes, not just for me, but for all of us.

Lesson 190 says there is no pain. When I first read this I was at a loss as to how this could be true because I seemed to have pain, and it felt very real. As I continued to study and practice the lesson, I let go of what I believed about pain and changed my mind. I accepted that there is no pain. Even when I felt pain, I accepted there is no pain. I refused to be distracted by appearances, which are only illusions.

The pain I had been dealing with vanished. It took many moments of working with that idea for me to come to full acceptance, but in that moment of full acceptance the world changed. Pain was no longer something I felt in my body, but was simply a projection from my mind, and could be alleviated through changing my mind. I continue to master that choice to believe the truth rather than appearances.

Jesus did this and his accomplishment was our accomplishment. All I had to do was to accept it. I just had to talk myself into believing it. In my acceptance of his accomplishment it became easier for the next person to do so. And of course, I am not the only one to accept the truth, which made it easier for me to do so in my turn. We all benefit from every small shift in the mind.

© 2014, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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