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Manual for Teachers: III. The Function of the Teacher of God, P 2. 1-31-18

III. The Function of the Teacher of God, P 2
2 To them God’s teachers come, to represent another choice which they had forgotten. The simple presence of a teacher of God is a reminder. His thoughts ask for the right to question what the patient has accepted as true. As God’s messengers, His teachers are the symbols of salvation. They ask the patient for forgiveness for God’s Son in his own Name. They stand for the Alternative. With God’s Word in their minds they come in benediction, not to heal the sick but to remind them of the remedy God has already given them. It is not their hands that heal. It is not their voice that speaks the Word of God. They merely give what has been given them. Very gently they call to their brothers to turn away from death. Behold, you Son of God, what life can offer you. Would you choose sickness in place of this?

Journal
In the previous paragraph, Jesus tells us that we cannot change the patient’s mind. Now he tells us how we can help. As a teacher of God, we stand for the truth. We stand for the Alternative. We do not come to heal the sick, but simply to remind them of the remedy God has already given them. We give them our certainty that they are still as God created them. We do this not with our hands or our voice. Our mind calls to their mind through the truth that is in both. We are symbols of salvation.

This is how I pray for people. I simply remember who they are. I remember that pain and sickness are not real. I remember that this is not God’s Will for His children and so it cannot be. I see in my mind, not the sick and hopeless, but the flawless children of God. I see the truth in their mind blazing into life, guiding them, comforting them and healing any remaining confusion in our mind. I see the essence of who we are and know that we are joined in perfect communion within the Mind of God. I merely give what I have been given.

 

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Study of Text, C 15: V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 8. 1-30-18

V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 8
8 Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and although this is not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here. In the holy instant no one is special, for your personal needs intrude on no one to make your brothers seem different. Without the values from the past, you would see them all the same and like yourself. Nor would you see any separation between yourself and them. In the holy instant, you see in each relationship what it will be when you perceive only the present.

Journal
This paragraph is almost incomprehensible to the ego mind. In the holy instant no one is special… Wait, let me review what Jesus means by the holy instant. Oh yes, it is the instant outside of time in which we choose forgiveness instead of guilt, the miracle instead of a grievance, the Holy Spirit instead of the ego. Yes, I know that the Holy Spirit will bring me to the holy instant if that is my true desire. I choose the Holy Spirit instead of ego, and the rest will follow.

In this timeless moment, no one is special. I see everyone as they are, as they were created, and that means I see (perceive) them as united and me with them, as one glorious self. It is not that one is the same as another, each being interchangeable. It is that there is no other. I love you and you and you because I love because we are all together the One I love. How very strange the idea of one is to a mind mired in separation.

… your personal needs intrude on no one to make your brothers seem different. In the holy instant, outside of time, there is no personal. There is only a shared self. There are no needs. All is given to all. This is another nearly incompressible idea. I wonder if there is any relationship I have ever had that was not burdened by my personal needs. Even those to whom I am the closest bear this burden. I expect something from everyone and feel abandoned or rejected when I don’t receive it.

Without the values from the past, you would see them all the same and like yourself. How did I learn that I have needs and that people I love are expected to fill those needs? I learned it as those expectations were placed on me. I learned it from my parents and other loved ones, and from friends. I learned it from books and movies, and even commercials. All this past learning still drives me today, though not as forcefully as it used to. The holy instant is outside the idea of time. It is free of time and thus free of the past and all that was learned in the past.

In the holy instant, I will see in each relationship what it will be when I perceive only the present. And what is clear to me is that I cannot give myself the holy instant that will lead me to the holy relationship. I can barely grasp its meaning. I need the Holy Spirit for this. That is His function, and mine is to accept the Atonement as it is offered. I can understand just enough to know that I long for holy relationships and I long for the holy instant. I understand enough to do my part. I am assured that this is enough.

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Manual for Teachers: III. The Function of the Teacher of God, P 1. 1-29-18

III. The Function of the Teacher of God, P 1
1 If the patient must change his mind in order to be healed, what does the teacher of God do? Can he change the patient’s mind for him? Certainly not. For those already willing to change their minds he has no function except to rejoice with them, for they have become teachers of God with him. He has, however, a more specific function for those who do not understand what healing is. These patients do not realize they have chosen sickness. On the contrary, they believe that sickness has chosen them. Nor are they open-minded on this point. The body tells them what to do and they obey. They have no idea how insane this concept is. If they even suspected it, they would be healed. Yet they suspect nothing. To them the separation is quite real.

Journal
In the first paragraph, Jesus tells us that we do not change the patient’s mind for him. That is not our part. We will have to wait for the next paragraph to be told our part in their healing.

Here is what I love in this paragraph. Jesus is completely uncompromising in telling us that we choose our sickness; it does not choose us. I almost hate to write about this and I seldom post on my Facebook page my thoughts on this. Some people who are suffering from illness often take offense and will argue for their illness. I can understand this. I understand how the error occurs.

If someone has chosen illness and are in denial about this, they probably do not understand how it occurred. Sometimes we hide our motives from ourselves. I know that this has happened to me. It has been a while since I believed that sickness chose me, but even so, I am sometimes flummoxed as I try to understand why I did this to myself or how I did it.

What I have discovered through A Course in Miracles and my own Inner Teacher is that my choice for sickness is always driven by guilt. Guilt demands punishment and illness is one of the ways we punish ourselves. I may not know which particular story of guilt is the one that drove me to this punishment, but if I need to know, the Holy Spirit will inform me. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Guilt is not real and so none of the forms it takes are real.

I have learned that I hold onto sickness when I see some value in it. Sometimes I can find the value within the story. For instance, I need a headache so that I don’t have to do something I should have said no to in the first place. Or I choose sickness because I feel unloved or lonely and want someone to pay attention to me. The ego mind has use of sickness to keep us firmly in the story of separation and bodies. Ultimately, the ego uses sickness to prove that I am a body and so I cannot be part of God. Sickness settles it; I am not as God created me.

Another reason why the idea that we choose sickness is hard to swallow is that in the untrained mind it brings up guilt. It is bad enough to be suffering, one does not want to feel guilty for suffering as well. But as the mind is healed, the guilt falls away and responsibility takes its place. I am not guilty of anything, but I am responsible. And with the acceptance of responsibility, comes the solution.

If I chose sickness, I can choose health as easily. When I am occasionally sick, I ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the beliefs that sourced this sickness. I become willing to look at my choice with the Holy Spirit and to hide nothing from Him or from myself. What is the value of this sickness? As I lose interest in keeping the sickness, it is no longer sustained by my mind and generally goes pretty quickly.

Of course, I don’t want a sick body. It is a miserable way to experience this illusion. But more importantly, I want the mind to be healed. The body is used by the ego to prove I am separate from God, but the Holy Spirit uses it to undo that belief. The body experiences sickness and that tells me that there is something in my mind that needs to be seen and released. The body is used as a classroom and as I learn my lessons, the body takes on a new purpose, that is to communicate love. I become a more effective teacher of God.

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Study of Text, C 15: V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 7. 1-26-18

V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 7
7 The ego’s use of relationships is so fragmented that it frequently goes even farther; one part of one aspect suits its purpose, while it prefers different parts of another aspect. Thus does it assemble reality to its own capricious liking, offering for your seeking a picture whose likeness does not exist. For there is nothing in Heaven or earth that it resembles, and so, however much you seek for its reality, you cannot find it because it is not real.

Journal
We began by acknowledging that our use of relationships is fragmented. I choose to love certain parts of the Sonship, and not to love others. One person suits my desires and others don’t. That is very clear to me. I love my child more than another person’s child. I love my sibling’s children perhaps less than I love mine, but more than I love a stranger’s children. I love one man more than I love another, one friend more than I love another friend. None of that is as true as it used to be more me, but still has elements of truth in it.

So, do I fragment my relationships even further? I love one thing about this child than I do other things about him or her. I love one aspect of my friend but really don’t love another thing about her. Maybe I even hate another thing about her. I wonder how we can call that love at all. We even have a name for this weird phenomenon; we call it the love/hate relationship. And we accept it as if it was natural.

Love is love all the time, in every circumstance, under every condition, or it is not love. It is not quantifiable. There is no “more” love or “less” love. There is only love. If I can qualify or quantify my love, then it is not actually love; it is something else. And since there is nothing outside love, then what I am calling love is actually nothing. Love exists and it cannot be altered and still be love.

Gravity is a force which tries to pull two objects toward each other. Anything which has mass also has a gravitational pull. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull is. Earth’s gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what causes objects to fall. Suppose I found a way to add something else to this natural force, or to take something away from its true nature. Then it wouldn’t be gravity anymore. It would be something else and I would have to find another name for it. Love is immutable and yet we add and take away and still insist it is love.

What if I agree that gravity is the same all the time but I also decide it will be in operation only on those particular objects of my choosing. When I stand on my scale to see what I weigh, gravity is going to be less than when I walk across my floor. Now I have a special relationship with gravity as it applies to my scale. This is silly, and it doesn’t work that way. But this is what we try to do with relationships, and then we wonder why they don’t work.

What if I absolutely loved my friend? I loved her exactly the same whether she was being kind or hateful, funny or ridiculous, serious or lighthearted. I loved her regardless of how she felt about me. I loved her if she stole from me or gave to me most generously. What if I love your friend in the same way that I love my friend? What if I love the store clerk exactly as much as I love my children, no differently, not more nor less. We would then know what love really is, knowledge we have lost in our quest to redefine it for our own purposes.

Can you imagine what relationships would be like in this case? They would be as dependable as gravity. They would be as sublime as the love of a mother for her newborn child. Every relationship would bring utter joy to us and if we left the presence of one person and came into the presence of another, no matter who they were, we would feel the same transcendent love. If we left everyone and were alone we would still feel that bliss because the love did not leave. It is what we are so we cannot be away from it; we can only deny it. We deny love when we redefine it as our special relationships. We lose the joy of relationship when we make them special.

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Manual for Teachers: II.The Shift in Perception, P 4. 1-24-18

II. The Shift in Perception, P 4
4 With this idea is pain forever gone. But with this idea goes also all confusion about creation. Does not this follow of necessity? Place cause and effect in their true sequence in one respect, and the learning will generalize and transform the world. The transfer value of one true idea has no end or limit. The final outcome of this lesson is the remembrance of God. What do guilt and sickness, pain, disaster and all suffering mean now? Having no purpose, they are gone. And with them also go all the effects they seemed to cause. Cause and effect but replicate creation. Seen in their proper perspective, without distortion and without fear, they re-establish Heaven.

Journal

I find the idea of pain and sickness as a function of the mind to be easy to understand. I believe what I read here. The body is not the source of what seems to be happening to it. It is the mind that creates and the mind that produces form, all form, including pain and sickness. When I feel pain, I remind myself that the pain did not originate in the body, but in my mind. Even further, it is not in my body at all but in my mind being projected onto the idea of a body.

If pain and sickness occur as a function of the mind, then it is the mind that is cause and the body experience as effect. And if this is true for pain and sickness and the body, then it is true for every form within the world, and this means that the mind is the cause of the world altogether. The mind is the cause of all of it, and the forms we see with our eyes are the effect of what the mind caused. What this means is that we have been wasting our time trying to heal and fix the effect. It is the cause that must be adjusted if we want a different effect.

What would be the outcome of placing cause and effect in their true order? Here is what has changed thus far within my story of the body and the world around me. When I get sick, I never look for a cause outside my mind. The idea of one might come into my mind briefly, but I know that is just an old habit and meaningless to me. I think the most persistent of these ideas is that the size and shape and weight of my body are caused by outside forces like what I eat and how much exercise I get. I still go back and forth on that even though I know the truth.

I still get sick sometimes but because I know the cause, I immediately turn to the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the beliefs that produced this form. As Jesus told us, all thought produces form at some level. If my thought is of the lower level, that is untrue thoughts, I will see it as form in the body and other places in this world. Even the truest perception will not produce form on a higher level, I think, but just make for a happier dream.

If the thought is of the higher level, that is, true thoughts or thoughts I think with God, then I assume I will see it as a higher form, at another level. There is a place in the Course where Jesus tells us that there is a real world beneath this illusion we have made. So maybe that is how higher thoughts produce a higher form. Who knows what that is like? Maybe a world of light and color, of pure love, beautiful beyond our imagining. But I digress.

The point that Jesus is making here in this paragraph is that all we see is caused by our mind. If we are willing to accept this, and if we are willing to allow the mind to be purified of ego thinking, then all we see will change. Pain and sickness, poverty, cruelty, suffering and death, all will be gone because the sick mind that caused these things will have been healed. From a healed mind comes a healed world. It is the only way that this can work. Cause is first, effect follows. The final outcome of this lesson is the remembrance of God.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Study of Text, C 15: V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 6. 1-23-18

V. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships, P 6
6 Any relationship you would substitute for another has not been offered to the Holy Spirit for His use. There is no substitute for love. If you would attempt to substitute one aspect of love for another, you have placed less value on one and more on the other. You have not only separated them, but you have also judged against both. Yet you have judged against yourself first, or you would never have imagined that you needed your brothers as they were not. Unless you had seen yourself as without love, you could not have judged them so like you in lack.

Journal
When we are lost in our neediness, we don’t love and appreciate our friends and lovers, we use them. We feel lonely and so call a friend to keep us company. If the friend doesn’t show up for us we feel abandoned and so reject that one. Thinking she isn’t a good friend, we look for someone to take her place. We feel attacked by someone and we look to our friends to take our side, and if they don’t do this for us, we look for new friends who better suit our purpose.

We choose our mates to provide for us what we think we need, a faithful lover, a good listener, someone who puts us first, someone who believes in us. Maybe we are looking for a good provider or a good parent for our children. Maybe we just want someone who will see in us what we fail to see in ourselves. And at the same time, they are looking for certain attributes in us and when two find this perfect match, they say they are in love. They stay in love until one or the other fails to provide what they thought they needed. When the bargain is broken the other feels betrayed and begins his or her search again.

What if we fulfill our own needs? We can do this through A Course in Miracles. We can learn that we are sufficient and eventually learn that we have no needs because we were created perfect and this has not changed. We can learn that we can’t be abandoned or betrayed. All of this can be learned through the relationship if we give it to the Holy Spirit for His use instead of throwing it away and looking for the relationship that provides for us what we are unwilling to give ourselves.

Sometimes circumstances are such that a relationship must end, at least in form. But all relationships must be healed, and they can be healed whether the partners are together or apart because the relationship is the mind. However, judging against the partner or friend and so trading one for another in the hope that another is the special one that is going to fulfill imagined needs is not the solution.

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Manual for Teachers: II.The Shift in Perception, P 3. 1-19-18

II. The Shift in Perception, P 3
3 What is the single requisite for this shift in perception? It is simply this; the recognition that sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body. What does this recognition “cost”? It costs the whole world you see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it is. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea.

Journal
It is very clear by now that sickness is not caused by the body nor anything in the world; it is caused by the mind. As Jesus says, it has nothing to do with the body. This alone is a complete reversal of the thinking of the mind. It seems to fly in the face of reason because we experience sickness as if it is about the body. But it only flies in the face of ego thinking which made the body and the world as a place to project our guilt.

Guilt is the cause of sickness. Did you catch that? “Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one.” If we would be willing to give up guilt, the very idea of guilt, once and for all, then this would be reflected as a perfectly healthy body. For us to do this we would have to accept that the body is insignificant. This is very hard to swallow if you still believe that you are your body. For some people who have a very high regard for their body, it will be very hard indeed.

The greater cost of accepting this shift in perception is that it would mean that we would have to accept that we are fully responsible for the world. We would have to give up using the world as a scapegoat for what goes wrong in our lives. We could never again say that we got sick because we were exposed to sickness or that we have a disease because it was in our DNA.

But more than that, we would not be able to blame anything or anyone for whatever is happening in the world. All begins in the mind and is then projected outward and we are all part of that mind. I am usually pretty clear on this, but I have been conflicted about it lately, not in concept, but in practice.

President Trump has said something I find intolerable, and truly, I want to distance myself from him. I want to think that his sentiments and the effects of his thoughts have nothing to do with me. But his thoughts came from the same mind that is mine. He came from the same mind we all share, as did I. I have been agitated and it seems like Donald Trump is the cause of my agitation.

This cannot ever again be true for me because I know that the world does not rule my mind. I pretend it does for awhile, but I know better now. I look at the world and see what I want to see. I see what is in my mind and only that. Is guilt in my mind? Evidently, it is because I have been certain that Trump is guilty. Is fear in my mind? Must be, because I fear for the people affected by Trump’s vision of our country.

I am seeing a world of guilt and fear and the political arena is just a form my fear and guilt are taking at this moment. What do some other people see when they look at this situation? They see a savior and a defender of the lifestyle they treasure and are afraid of losing. They see a hero willing to defend them from fearful outside forces. In other words, we look at the world and see two very different things happening.

Their fear and guilt take them in one direction, and my fear and guilt take me in another. But, neither vision is the truth. We are all just looking at what we choose to see and nothing else. We cannot see what is there because we have superimposed our wishes on the world and cannot see past them.

I am reminded of what Jesus says about unforgiveness in the workbook under, 1. What is Forgiveness? An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. And if I have judged a Son of God as guilty, it is not true and needs to be raised to doubt.  What if I were to forgive what my fear and guilt have shown me and to forgive the idea of guilt and fear? What would the world look like then? What would Donald Trump look like then?

Even as I write this and know in my heart that it is true, that the world I see comes only from my mind and nowhere else, and that I can live in perfect peace if I am willing to change my mind, I find myself resistant. I find myself clinging to my ego’s interpretation of this situation and I want Trump to be wrong and the cause of my distress. I want to argue for my point of view and to believe that his thoughts and actions have nothing to do with me.

But I also want to be free. I owe it to us, to the Sonship, to do my part in undoing the ego. After all, I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing or my thoughts. I affect all of humanity with my decision to see with ego or to see with God. Here is what Jesus say that I can do about this.

Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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