Hi Pieter and Sharon and . . . good discussion thnx
Is a dreamer responsible for the dream? If not maybe the dream comparison
to the separation scenario isn't an accurate comparison. Can you be
responsible if you are unaware? If you've really forgotten something can
you be responsible for what you've forgotten?
(I'll state this as fact but we all know the many limitations) Somehow even
all of this perceiving, consciousness, time, space and matter has to be held
in a mind that is not subject to these ideas. There is a mind being this.
Most likely since it has been asked and answered there is a mind being this
by remembering the separation idea. At Oneness there can only be BEING.
Ultimately there can only be a mind being this though it may just be a
fantasy of that mind and it was resolved in the instant it was thought.
But then it seems to get even more complicated, at least from my little
toadstool perspective. It seems mind can think on its own or separate from
spirit. Below is a lengthy compilation of C quotes that mol supports the
independence of mind from spirit but yet can't really be separate.
"What can they seem to be but empty sounds; pretty, perhaps, correct in
sentiment, yet fundamentally not understood nor understandable. The mind
that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in
the sense that it is all-encompassing." Guess I'm bumping into that
statement kind of hard.
jon
Holiness can never be really hidden in darkness, but you can deceive
yourself about it. This deception makes you fearful because you realize in
your heart it is a deception, and you exert enormous efforts to establish
its reality. The miracle sets reality where it belongs. Reality belongs
only to spirit, and the miracle acknowledges only truth. It thus dispels
illusions about yourself, and puts you in communion with yourself and God.
The miracle joins in the Atonement by placing the mind in the service of the
Holy Spirit. This establishes the proper function of the mind and corrects
its errors, which are merely lacks of love. Your mind can be possessed by
illusions, but spirit is eternally free. If a mind perceives without love,
it perceives an empty shell and is unaware of the spirit within. But the
Atonement restores spirit to its proper place. The mind that serves spirit
is invulnerable.
Whatever is true is eternal, and cannot change or be changed. Spirit is
therefore unalterable because it is already perfect, but the mind can elect
what it chooses to serve. The only limit put on its choice is that it
cannot serve two masters. If it elects to do so, the mind can become the
medium by which spirit creates along the line of its own creation. If it
does not freely elect to do so, it retains its creative potential but places
itself under tyrannous rather than Authoritative control. As a result it
imprisons, because such are the dictates of tyrants. To change your mind
means to place it at the disposal of true Authority.
Only the mind can create because spirit has already been created, and the
body is a learning device for the mind.
Before miracle workers are ready to undertake their function in this world,
it is essential that they fully understand the fear of release. Otherwise
they may unwittingly foster the belief that release is imprisonment, a
belief that is already very prevalent. This misperception arises in turn
from the belief that harm can be limited to the body. That is because of
the underlying fear that the mind can hurt itself. None of these errors is
meaningful, because the miscreations of the mind do not really exist. This
recognition is a far better protective device than any form of level
confusion, because it introduces correction at the level of the error. It
is essential to remember that only the mind can create, and that correction
belongs at the thought level. To amplify an earlier statement, spirit is
already perfect and therefore does not require correction. The body does
not exist except as a learning device for the mind. This learning device is
not subject to errors of its own, because it cannot create. It is obvious,
then, that inducing the mind to give up its miscreations is the only
application of creative ability that is truly meaningful.
It should be emphasized again that the body does not learn any more than it
creates. As a learning device it merely follows the learner, but if it is
falsely endowed with self-initiative, it becomes a serious obstruction to
the very learning it should facilitate. Only the mind is capable of
illumination. Spirit is already illuminated and the body in itself is too
dense. The mind, however, can bring its illumination to the body by
recognizing that it is not the learner, and is therefore unamenable to
learning. The body is, however, easily brought into alignment with a mind
that has learned to look beyond it toward the light.
Corrective learning always begins with the awakening of spirit, and the
turning away from the belief in physical sight. This often entails fear,
because you are afraid of what your spiritual sight will show you.
Perception always involves some misuse of mind, because it brings the mind
into areas of uncertainty. The mind is very active. When it chooses to be
separated it chooses to perceive. Until then it wills only to know.
Afterwards it can only choose ambiguously, and the only way out of ambiguity
is clear perception. The mind returns to its proper function only when it
wills to know. This places it in the service of spirit, where perception is
changed. The mind chooses to divide itself when it chooses to make its own
levels. But it could not entirely separate itself from spirit, because it
is from spirit that it derives its whole power to make or create. Even in
miscreation the mind is affirming its Source, or it would merely cease to
be. This is impossible, because the mind belongs to spirit which God
created and which is therefore eternal.
The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive
something and with something. That is why perception involves an exchange
or translation, which knowledge does not need. The interpretative function
of perception, a distorted form of creation, then permits you to interpret
the body as yourself in an attempt to escape from the conflict you have
induced. Spirit, which knows, could not be reconciled with this loss of
power, because it is incapable of darkness. This makes spirit almost
inaccessible to the mind and entirely inaccessible to the body. Thereafter,
spirit is perceived as a threat, because light abolishes darkness merely by
showing you it is not there. Truth will always overcome error in this way.
This cannot be an active process of correction because, as I have already
emphasized, knowledge does not do anything. It can be perceived as an
attacker, but it cannot attack. What you perceive as its attack is your own
vague recognition that knowledge can always be remembered, never having been
destroyed.
God and His creations remain in surety, and therefore know that
no miscreation exists. Truth cannot deal with errors that you want. I was
a man who remembered spirit and its knowledge. As a man I did not attempt
to counteract error with knowledge, but to correct error from the bottom up.
I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body and the power of the mind.
By uniting my will with that of my Creator, I naturally remembered spirit
and its real purpose. I cannot unite your will with God's for you, but I
can erase all misperceptions from your mind if you will bring it under my
guidance. Only your misperceptions stand in your way. Without them your
choice is certain. Sane perception induces sane choosing. I cannot choose
for you, but I can help you make your own right choice. "Many are called
but few are chosen" should be, "All are called but few choose to listen."
Therefore, they do not choose right. The "chosen ones" are merely those who
choose right sooner. Right minds can do this now, and they will find rest
unto their souls. God knows you only in peace, and this is your reality.
Eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a symbolic expression for
usurping the ability for self-creating. This is the only sense in which God
and His creations are not co-creators. The belief that they are is implicit
in the "self-concept," or the tendency of the self to make an image of
itself. Images are perceived, not known. Knowledge cannot deceive, but
perception can. You can perceive yourself as self-creating, but you cannot
do more than believe it. You cannot make it true. And, as I said before,
when you finally perceive correctly you can only be glad that you cannot.
Until then, however, the belief that you can is the foundation stone in your
thought system, and all your defenses are used to attack ideas that might
bring it to light. You still believe you are an image of your own making.
Your mind is split with the Holy Spirit on this point, and there is no
resolution while you believe the one thing that is literally inconceivable.
That is why you cannot create and are filled with fear about what you make.
The mind can make the belief in separation very real and very
fearful, and this belief is the "devil." It is powerful, active,
destructive and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies
His Fatherhood. Look at your life and see what the devil has made.
I do not attack your ego. I do work with your higher mind, the home of the
Holy Spirit, whether you are asleep or awake, just as your ego does with
your lower mind, which is its home. I am your vigilance in this, because
you are too confused to recognize your own hope. I am not mistaken. Your
mind will elect to join with mine, and together we are invincible.
I have repeatedly emphasized that one level of the mind is not
understandable to another
The separation is merely another term for a split mind.
Ideas of the spirit do not leave the mind that thinks them, nor can they
conflict with each other. However, ideas of the ego can conflict because
they occur at different levels and also include opposite thoughts at the
same level. It is impossible to share opposing thoughts. You can share only
the thoughts that are of God and that He keeps for you. And of such is the
Kingdom of Heaven. The rest remains with you until the Holy Spirit has
reinterpreted them in the light of the Kingdom, making them, too, worthy of
being shared. When they have been sufficiently purified He lets you give
them away. The decision to share them is their purification.
The Holy Spirit, like the ego, is a decision. Together they constitute all
the alternatives the mind can accept and obey. The Holy Spirit and the ego
are the only choices open to you. God created one, and so you cannot
eradicate it. You made the other, and so you can. Only what God creates is
irreversible and unchangeable. What you made can always be changed because,
when you do not think like God, you are not really thinking at all.
Delusional ideas are not real thoughts, although you can believe in them.
But you are wrong. The function of thought comes from God and is in God.
As part of His Thought, you cannot think apart from Him.
God commended His Spirit to you, and asks that you commend yours to Him. He
wills to keep it in perfect peace, because you are of one mind and spirit
with Him. Excluding yourself from the Atonement is the ego's last-ditch
defense of its own existence. It reflects both the ego's need to separate,
and your willingness to side with its separateness. This willingness means
that you do not want to be healed.
Thoughts begin in the mind of the thinker, from which they reach outward.
This is as true of God's Thinking as it is of yours. Because your mind is
split, you can perceive as well as think. Yet perception cannot escape the
basic laws of mind. You perceive from your mind and project your
perceptions outward. Although perception of any kind is unreal, you made it
and the Holy Spirit can therefore use it well. He can inspire perception
and lead it toward God. This convergence seems to be far in the future only
because your mind is not in perfect alignment with the idea, and therefore
does not want it now.
The Holy Spirit uses time, but does not believe in it. Coming
from God He uses everything for good, but He does not believe in what is not
true. Since the Holy Spirit is in your mind, your mind can also believe
only what is true. The Holy Spirit can speak only for this, because He
speaks for God. He tells you to return your whole mind to God, because it
has never left Him. If it has never left Him, you need only perceive it as
it is to be returned. The full awareness of the Atonement, then, is the
recognition that the separation never occurred. The ego cannot prevail
against this because it is an explicit statement that the ego never
occurred.
The ego cannot hear the Holy Spirit, but it does believe that part of the
mind that made it is against it. It interprets this as a justification for
attacking its maker. It believes that the best defense is attack, and wants
you to believe it. Unless you do believe it you will not side with it, and
the ego feels badly in need of allies, though not of brothers. Perceiving
something alien to itself in your mind, the ego turns to the body as its
ally, because the body is not part of you. This makes the body the ego's
friend. It is an alliance frankly based on separation. If you side with
this alliance you will be afraid, because you are siding with an alliance of
fear.
The ego uses the body to conspire against your mind, and because
the ego realizes that its "enemy" can end them both merely by recognizing
they are not part of you, they join in the attack together. This is perhaps
the strangest perception of all, if you consider what it really involves.
The ego, which is not real, attempts to persuade the mind, which is real,
that the mind is the ego's learning device; and further, that the body is
more real than the mind is. No one in his right mind could possibly believe
this, and no one in his right mind does believe it.
God does not teach. To teach is to imply a lack, which God knows is not
there. God is not conflicted. Teaching aims at change, but God created
only the changeless. The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a
failure in communication. A harsh and strident form of communication arose
as the ego's voice. It could not shatter the peace of God, but it could
shatter yours. God did not blot it out, because to eradicate it would be to
attack it. Being questioned, He did not question. He merely gave the
Answer. His Answer is your Teacher.
We have said that without projection there can be no anger, but it is also
true that without extension there can be no love. These reflect a
fundamental law of the mind, and therefore one that always operates. It is
the law by which you create and were created. It is the law that unifies
the Kingdom, and keeps it in the Mind of God. To the ego, the law is
perceived as a means of getting rid of something it does not want. To the
Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law of sharing, by which you give what
you value in order to keep it in your mind. To the Holy Spirit it is the
law of extension. To the ego it is the law of deprivation. It therefore
produces abundance or scarcity, depending on how you choose to apply it.
This choice is up to you, but it is not up to you to decide whether or not
you will utilize the law. Every mind must project or extend, because that
is how it lives, and every mind is life.
The ego's use of projection must be fully understood before the
inevitable association between projection and anger can be finally undone.
The ego always tries to preserve conflict. It is very ingenious in devising
ways that seem to diminish conflict, because it does not want you to find
conflict so intolerable that you will insist on giving it up. The ego
therefore tries to persuade you that it can free you of conflict, lest you
give the ego up and free yourself. Using its own warped version of the laws
of God, the ego utilizes the power of the mind only to defeat the mind's
real purpose. It projects conflict from your mind to other minds, in an
attempt to persuade you that you have gotten rid of the problem.
Save him from his illusions that you may accept the magnitude of your Father
in peace and joy. But exempt no one from your love, or you will be hiding a
dark place in your mind where the Holy Spirit is not welcome. And thus you
will exempt yourself from His healing power, for by not offering total love
you will not be healed completely. Healing must be as complete as fear, for
love cannot enter where there is one spot of fear to mar its welcome.
You who prefer separation to sanity cannot obtain it in your
right mind. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God
did not give it for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this
of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an unloving
father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give. And the peace
of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He
feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having
attacked his own glorious equality with Him.
In peace he needed nothing and asked for nothing. In war he
demanded everything and found nothing. For how could the gentleness of love
respond to his demands, except by departing in peace and returning to the
Father? If the Son did not wish to remain in peace, he could not remain at
all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place
of darkness where it can believe it is where it is not. God did not allow
this to happen. Yet you demanded that it happen, and therefore believed
that it was so.
To "single out" is to "make alone," and thus make lonely. God
did not do this to you. Could He set you apart, knowing that your peace
lies in His Oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for
suffering is not of His creation. Having given you creation, He could not
take it from you. He could but answer your insane request with a sane
answer that would abide with you in your insanity. And this He did. No one
who hears His answer but will give up insanity. For His answer is the
reference point beyond illusions, from which you can look back on them and
see them as insane. But seek this place and you will find it, for Love is
in you and will lead you there.
Spirit makes use of mind as means to find its Self expression. And the mind
which serves the spirit is at peace and filled with joy. Its power comes
from spirit, and it is fulfilling happily its function here. Yet mind can
also see itself divorced from spirit, and perceive itself within a body it
confuses with itself. Without its function then it has no peace, and
happiness is alien to its thoughts.
Yet mind apart from spirit cannot think. It has denied its
Source of strength, and sees itself as helpless, limited and weak.
Dissociated from its function now, it thinks it is alone and separate,
attacked by armies massed against itself and hiding in the body's frail
support. Now must it reconcile unlike with like, for this is what it thinks
that it is for.