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Gentle Healing Lesson 132, Manual for Teachers, Text.  4-26-19

LESSON 132
I loose the world from all I thought it was.

“Belief is powerful indeed. The thoughts you hold are mighty, and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth.”

“Yet is salvation easily achieved, for anyone is free to change his mind, and all his thoughts change with it.”

I have understood the power of thought for a long time now, and even before the Course, I believed I had to be careful of the thoughts in my mind. It was a long time though before I learned what it means to really monitor my thoughts and that I could learn to change my mind, and then it took time for me to become willing to do this practice and to become consistent in it. Now I do it without hesitancy.

It feels like I am bringing individual thoughts to the Holy Spirit to be removed from my mind, and that is one way to think of it. But to think of it as asking for another way to see reflects the truth more accurately. I am not really changing my thoughts, I am changing the source of my thoughts. Those thoughts that I don’t want to keep come from thinking with the ego mind. I am developing the habit of thinking with my holy mind instead.

“Here in the present is the world set free.”

The world is nothing. It seems to be something as my mind gives it meaning and when I use the ego mind to do that. Those thoughts are based on fear and guilt and so I imprison the world with the suffering that comes from those thoughts. But right now at this moment and only in the now moment, I can change that.

“There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source.”

Jesus is so very clear here. We came into the world that we wanted. It is exactly what we chose it to be. In learning to think from our holy mind rather than our ego mind, we will change the world. It is impossible that this not happen. The world is what we think it is, so if we change what we think, the world will change.

The reason we don’t see this change as we give up one thought after another is that we are still in the baby stage of changing the mind with which we think. I have a thought of judgment and I immediately feel uneasy because I have practiced releasing judgmental thoughts and now I know I don’t want them anymore.

I have learned through contrast how it feels to judge and how much better it feels when I don’t judge. The bigger picture is that I am teaching myself that I want to think with my holy mind, that this is how I reach peace. I am teaching myself to change the source of my thinking.

So, while changing my mind about individual thoughts is the way I learn that I want to change the source of my thinking, the world does not experience a substantive change until I achieve the larger goal of changing the source of my thoughts. And it will not become the real world until all of the mind changes. My concern, however, is to do my part in changing my mind.

“There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach.”

There can be a lot of resistance to this idea but eventually, we must come to accept it. This is the reason the world changes with our thoughts. It exists only in our mind. Jesus says that when we accept this truth, the lesson will be given them in a form they can understand. Maybe it will occur as we do this lesson. Or another one. Maybe it will come gradually as it is happening for me. Just a few months ago, the idea of the world not being real was something I resisted. Today, I have no idea why I resisted it. It seems so obvious to me now.

“And if it is indeed your own imagining, then you can loose it from all things you ever thought it was by merely changing all the thoughts that gave it these appearances. The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness, and the dead arise when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death.”

I love reading about people whose minds have changed to the degree that they experience these miracles of healing and even rising from the dead. I love reading about it because it reminds me of the truth and since we are all faced constantly with the illusion of our making, it really helps to be reminded that we can as easily make something else, something closer to reality, at least kinder than what we made with the ego.

One of my favorite reminders happened at a workshop put on by Nouk Sanchez. She was teaching that there is no death and that miracles are literal. There was one skeptic in the group who doubted everything. He crossed his arms stubbornly and said, “I would like to see a literal miracle.” And then he dropped dead.

His heart had stopped at that moment, and one in the group began to resuscitate him with CPR, the rest of the group stood in a circle around them and firmly held to believe that there is no death. The paramedics arrived and used the paddles on him repeatedly. After he had been without a heartbeat for 25 minutes, the paramedics were ready to give up, thinking they were not going to get a heartbeat and even if they did, he would be a vegetable because of the length of time he went without a heartbeat.

They were in touch with the hospital and the doctors told them to try one more time and then to call it. The last attempt they made brought his heart back online. I was amazed that these people were able to hold their vision that there is no death for that length of time without flagging. One of the people there was his daughter and another was a niece. Not only did he start breathing but he fully recovered. He came back as a kinder better person and as a healer.

“How can a world of time and place exist, if you remain as God created you?”

“What is the lesson for today except for another way of saying that to know your Self is the salvation of the world? To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought.”

To fully accept this is to change everything. It is to release the world from all I made of it. It is only an illusion of creation and thus is not eternal and can be released as I release the thoughts that maintain it.

“I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was. For I am real because the world is not, and I would know my own reality.”

“Then merely rest, alert but with no strain, and let your mind in quietness be changed so that the world is freed, along with you.”

This brings me back to my daily practice of resting in God and allowing the change to occur. I rest in certainty, confidence and gratitude.

Regina’s Tips

“A madman thinks the world he sees is real, and does not doubt it. Nor can he be swayed by questioning his thought’s effects. It is but WHEN THEIR SOURCE IS RAISED TO QUESTION that the hope of freedom comes to him at last.”

In other words, we are not concerned with effects at all. We are not looking out to see if there is or is not sickness, war, death, etc. We are focused inward in this way:

What is the source of this thought I am thinking now? Is it ego or truth? If it is ego, I let it go because it is ego. If I can feel it is truth, I contemplate it and/or follow it, as appropriate.

If we take today’s lesson down to this basic practice, and practice it, we are doing what is intended.

It’s the ‘keep it simple’ spirit. KISS

My Thoughts

I agree that our part is to recognize that the world we see is not real at all and that we must change the source of our thoughts. That is the work to be done. I do believe in miracles that are often made manifest as the mind is healed. But that is not for me to concern myself with. I change the source of my thoughts and miracles take care of themselves.

Text
Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit’s plan of salvation… 9.IV. 6

The ego mind thinks it is helping me to solve problems. When I am looking at it from the ego mind, it seems like I must consider all angles of the situation, look closely at the story, deciding who is wrong and what I need to do about it to defend my position and protect myself. Sometimes I stumble over a useful idea and things seem to get better for a while, but nothing is solved because the ego cannot heal. The best I can hope for is a temporary secession of conflict, knowing it will show up somewhere else, in some other form.

When I choose to release this to the Holy Spirit, the experience and the outcome is entirely different. I notice that I am angry and upset with a friend. I realize that my thoughts about this situation are making me miserable and I show them to the Holy Spirit, asking Him to correct my thinking and heal my mind. He does this. Sometimes I stray back into the ego mind and pick up the problem again, but if I do, I just repeat the process with the Holy Spirit.

When I am looking at this situation with the Holy Spirit and handing it over to Him, it is all very simple and easy and the solution is permanent because a healing has occurred. All that I have to do is stay in my real mind and let Spirit complete His function. I have no part in that other than to not interfere.

I have noticed that not interfering is the only hard part for me. The ego mind wants to do the Holy Spirit’s job. It requires vigilance to be aware when I have strayed into a function that is not mine to fulfill. I remind myself that my job is to notice the ego thoughts, to realize I don’t want them and to release them to the Holy Spirit. Period. I am through. Now it is the Holy Spirit’s job to complete the forgiveness process.

What occurs when I do my part and stand back is a miracle. My mind is healed and from a healed mind, a healed world becomes manifest. If I follow this simple plan, doing only my part and allowing the Holy Spirit to do the rest, my life will be miraculous. The world’s laws will be meaningless as the miracle supersedes them. As I do this more and more, forgiveness becomes easier and more natural, and so does miraculous living.

Manual for Teachers
Is peace possible in the world? It depends on what we choose to see as the world. The world that we see with the body’s eyes is a world of war and cannot be anything else. But in T 5:V, Jesus says: “You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he is.” What we see with our eyes is just an ancient memory and it is a memory of hell. We are no longer there, we are in Heaven now, but we don’t know we are because we keep the memory of hell alive in our mind.

We can stop believing what our eyes show us and instead ask the Holy Spirit to show us what is really there. Jesus said that God redeemed the world and that it is now peaceful. It has been turned from hell into Heaven by the presence of a Thought of God. Are we not Thoughts of God? Just by being what we are, we transform the world. And yet, we choose to deny our true Self and to dwell in hell a little longer. This can and will change, why not now?

The only thing that keeps this world before our eyes is our desire for it to exist. There must be something of this world that we value or we would have already turned from it as others have done. Let those ideas rise up in your mind so that you and the Holy Spirit can look at them together and see that they have no value after all. As you let them go, the real world, the world that is actually here now, will be revealed.

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