VIII. The Problem and the Answer, P 9
9 Ask anything of God’s Son and his Father will answer you, for Christ is not deceived in His Father and His Father is not deceived in Him. Do not, then, be deceived in your brother, and see only his loving thoughts as his reality, for by denying that his mind is split you will heal yours. Accept him as his Father accepts him and heal him unto Christ, for Christ is his healing and yours. Christ is the Son of God Who is in no way separate from His Father, Whose every thought is as loving as the Thought of His Father by which He was created. Be not deceived in God’s Son, for thereby you must be deceived in yourself. And being deceived in yourself you are deceived in your Father, in Whom no deceit is possible.
Journal
Jesus says that when I believe something about our brother that is not true, then I believe the same about myself, and I am deceived in my Father as well. If I look at a sick brother and believe in his sickness, then I am deceived in him. If I hear him say something that seems misguided and believe in his confusion, then I am deceived in him. He is the Son of God and thus he has the truth in him and all else is an illusion. Let me see the truth rather than the illusion.
What I see in my brother I will see in myself. If I believe in sickness, for instance, it is inevitable that I will experience sickness because what I believe, is true for myself. If I think that someone attacks me, I believe in attack. I will then defend myself, and inevitably attack others. This is how we maintain the illusion, by believing in it.
Since I am created by God and thus forever a part of God, when I see something in my brother or myself that is not God, this is perceived in my mind as an attack on God. It feels like I am pulling myself out of God all over again. Or it feels like I redefining God, making Him something I want him to be, it feels like I am making myself creator of God. This necessarily triggers fear and guilt.
What a perfect reading for me this morning. I read a posting on Facebook that I strongly disagreed with. It felt like an attack on me because I saw it as an attack on my beliefs. Even as these thoughts were appearing in my mind, I knew they were nonsense. First, I saw that I had a strong personal opinion that I was defending as a truth. I saw the error in that. I don’t really know anything, and my assumptions are not the truth, so why would I want to defend them?
Second, I am not my beliefs, so why was I seeing this seeming attack on my beliefs as an attack on me? Obviously, I really do believe I am my beliefs. I let myself feel this reaction fully without trying to cover it up with the spiritual truths that I have learned. I noticed how fiercely I defended myself and how much rage was hiding behind the veil my spiritual ego uses to pretend it is a nice ego, too nice to be enraged.
I tried to push the attack thoughts aside. I tried to say that now that I see them, I can reject them and they will be gone. But they just kept popping up in words that sounded different, but were equally deceptive. This felt scary to me because what was I to do if I couldn’t let this go? Reading this paragraph helped a lot. I don’t want to be deceived in my brother, in myself or in God. I don’t want to believe that deception is in my brother or me and I certainly don’t want to believe it is in God.
I asked the Holy Spirit to heal my mind. I accepted the Atonement in this situation. Another way to say it is that I forgave myself and my error. I forgave my brother and my fear that in my ignorance I had offended God. The Holy Spirit wiped my mind clear of the offense. The facts are still there. I read what this person wrote, but there is no need for it to be different. There is nothing in me that wants to respond or correct or convince. In this situation, I am not deceived in my brother. As it turned out, the error was in my mind, not his, and it has been undone. I am free.
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