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Gentle Healing Lesson 168, Text, Manual for Teachers. 10-7-19

LESSON 168
Your grace is given me. I claim it now.

God loves us and will love us forever. He gives us His grace and it is ours as soon as we acknowledge it.

“And memory of Him awakens in the mind that asks the means of Him whereby its sleep is done.”

This is what we are doing as we study A Course in Miracles. We are asking how it is we can wake up. The Voice for God answers us through this Course and through any other path that we take. He answers us in our dreams and in our waking hours. We only have to ask. I think that sometimes I have failed to hear the answer because I was asking the wrong question and so I did not recognize the relevance of His answer. Sometimes I don’t recognize the answer because it was not the one I wanted to hear. Sometimes it is because I am listening to my thinking mind instead.

Today we ask of God the gift He has most carefully preserved within our hearts, waiting to be acknowledged. This the gift by which God leans to us and lifts us up, taking salvation’s final step Himself. All steps but this we learn, instructed by His Voice. But finally He comes Himself, and takes us in His Arms and sweeps away the cobwebs of our sleep. His gift of grace is more than just an answer. It restores all memories the sleeping mind forgot; all certainty of what Love’s meaning is.

The study and practice of A Course in Miracles is not going to awaken me, this is done through the Grace of God. What the study and practice of ACIM does for me is to prepare my mind for grace. It is to clear away the ego thinking enough so that I am fully willing to accept this precious gift of God. Grace offers us the complete restoration of our mind. There will be no more fear, no more guilt, no more confusion, pain, or suffering. We will know our Self and thus know our unity in God.

“Our faith lies in the Giver, not our own acceptance.”

This is very good news, indeed. Even my acceptance is fully supported. I used to think that it was going to take forever for me to wake up because I was inconsistent in my work and there just seemed to be so much within my mind that needed to be healed. I would ask for guidance and then I would not accept that guidance. How would I ever awaken? But Jesus says that I don’t have to my faith in myself. I can trust the Giver. I know that I have faith in the Holy Spirit. Now I will extend that trust to know that He will find means to give me what I need to lay down my mistakes and accept grace. I am reminded now of a line from a song by Bob Marley.

“Don’t worry about a thing, every little thing is gonna be alright”

Regina’s Tips
Regina shares an interview with Steve Ford in which he describes his awakening experience. You may want to read it. I know that not everyone has the same experience, but the point I got from it was there needs to be a sincere desire and then God leans to us and lifts us up. This is what the lesson is telling us.

Regina says: As Steve points out, it may not work if we ask today for God’s grace of awakening, because it may be the ego that is asking. If one feels completely ready for the death of the ego, the time is right. If the ego wants awakening for itself, the time is not right.

So, what do we do with today’s lesson? My recommendation is a day of deep contemplation and sincere prayer. …Get as deep into your sincere heart as you can today, and pray the prayers that are sincere for you.

Text
X. the Time of Rebirth, P 6
6 As host to the ego, you believe that you can give all your guilt away whenever you want, and thereby purchase peace. And the payment does not seem to be yours. While it is obvious that the ego does demand payment it never seems to be demanding it of you. You are unwilling to recognize that the ego, which you invited, is treacherous only to those who think they are its host. The ego will never let you perceive this, since this recognition would make it homeless. For when the recognition dawns clearly, you will not be deceived by any form the ego takes to protect itself from your sight. Each form will be recognized as but a cover for the one idea that hides behind them all; that love demands sacrifice, and is therefore inseparable from attack and fear. And that guilt is the price of love, which must be paid by fear.


Journal

In the last paragraph, I looked at how we have entangled love with fear, guilt, and sacrifice. This paragraph is asking us to look at the ego as the cause of this confusion. We have guilt in our mind, both conscious and unconscious and the ego offers us a way to avoid looking at it. We project the guilt onto someone else and the ego mind insists this is a viable solution. It absolutely doesn’t want us to know this doesn’t work.

The ego wants us to think we need it because if we discover that it is unnecessary and even destructive to us, we will not continue to host it. We invited the ego into our minds and it is up to us to choose differently. The way we do this is to question the ego thoughts by looking at them with our right minds. It is really simple to do this. Everything is either love or fear and if the thought we have is not love we can look at it with the Holy Spirit and decide if we really want to keep it.

We have made it easy to look at our thoughts by making them images that are seen and felt. Remember Lesson 15?

My thoughts are images I have made.

It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. 2 You think you think them, and so you think you see them. 3 This is how your “seeing” was made. 4 This is the function you have given your body’s eyes. 5 It is not seeing. 6 It is image making. 7 It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions.

So, here are our thoughts, appearing as images so that we can look at them and see what it feels like to believe these thoughts and see the effects of our beliefs. Here is an example of how this worked for me in the past.

Toward the end of my marriage, I began to see my husband as the cause of my unhappiness. The ego part of my mind was always eager to project the cause of my misery onto him. When I looked with the ego at the relationship, I saw ample proof that he was the problem. It all seemed so obvious to me. It was right there in front of my eyes.

Later when I began to heal that relationship, I asked the Holy Spirit to look at it with me. I was reminded that what was before my eyes were illusions. These images were really a projection of my beliefs. If he seemed to attack me with his behavior, it was because I felt guilty and accepted the ego’s solution of projection. I wanted to see him as guilty to relieve my own guilt.

When I withdrew my projection and accepted correction, my image changed. I saw him as simply living his script as it was written and I recognized there is no guilt in this. I was doing the same thing. Our scripts are the images of the beliefs we came to undo. How could either of us be guilty for this? With no need to rid myself of guilt, there was no need to make him guilty.

Doing this with my thoughts for many years has healed my mind. I still have a few thoughts that try to return, and I deal with them as I have in the past. But I am no longer willing to host the ego. Sure, it is still there because I am still here, but I pay little attention to it other than to stay vigilant for beliefs that still hook me even momentarily. The ego is now my servant rather than the other way around.

Manual for Teachers
Chapter 1. WHO ARE GOD’S TEACHERS?
1 A teacher of God is anyone who chooses to be one. His qualifications consist solely in this; somehow, somewhere he has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else’s. Once he has done that, his road is established and his direction is sure. A light has entered the darkness. It may be a single light, but that is enough. He has entered an agreement with God even if he does not yet believe in Him. He has become a bringer of salvation. He has become a teacher of God.

How interesting this is! To be a teacher of God, I only have to make a deliberate choice in which I don’t see my interests as apart from someone else’s. I don’t have to do this all the time nor do I even need to be aware of the choice. Just that I did it once, ignited the light in my mind. I think of this as being the spark of truth that lit up and made itself known in some small way. Or I could see this as the Holy Spirit Who is now alerted to my readiness to be guided Home.

Jesus also says that when this happened, I entered an agreement with God and this would be true even if I did not yet believe in Him. I have always believed in God so that part didn’t apply to me. I misunderstood Him and sometimes I was angry with Him, and always a bit afraid of Him, but I always believed. But I find myself wondering when was the first time that I made a deliberate choice in which I don’t see my interests as apart from someone else’s.

Whenever it was without knowing it in my conscious mind, I had placed my feet on the path to be a bringer of salvation. That idea when first read frightened me. What a responsibility that is! I didn’t feel like a good student much less a good teacher, and now I was to be a bringer of salvation? Well, the thing is, once a single light is ignited in the mind, it begins to burn ever brighter and with more light, there is less darkness and the ego fears and insecurities are burnt away. I realized at some point that this is not the little ego me Jesus talks about. The Holy Spirit did all the heavy lifting and in doing so awakened me. He only needed my permission and that moment of choice was the permission He was waiting for.

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