III. From Darkness to Light
- When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but you cannot. You do not know how, for if you did you could never have grown weary. Unless you hurt yourself, you could never suffer in any way, for that is not God’s Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack and His peace surrounds you silently. God is very quiet, for there is no conflict in Him. Conflict is the root of all evil, for being blind it does not see whom it attacks. Yet it always attacks the Son of God, and the Son of God is you.
- God’s Son is indeed in need of comfort, for he knows not what he does, believing his will is not his own. The Kingdom is his, and yet he wanders homeless. At home in God he is lonely, and amid all his brothers he is friendless. Would God let this be real when He did not will to be alone Himself? And if your will is His it cannot be true of you because it is not true of Him.
- O my child, if you knew what God wills for you, your joy would be complete! And what He wills has happened, for it was always true. When the light comes and you have said, “God’s Will is mine,” you will see such beauty that you will know it is not of you. Out of your joy you will create beauty in His Name, for your joy could no more be contained than His. The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven, and into the Presence of God. I cannot tell you what this will be like, for your heart is not ready. Yet I can tell you, and remind you often, that what God wills for Himself He wills for you, and what He wills for you is yours.
- The way is not hard, but it is very different. Yours is the way of pain, of which God knows nothing. That way is hard indeed, and very lonely. Fear and grief are your guests, and they go with you and abide with you on the way. But the dark journey is not the way of God’s Son. Walk in light and do not see the dark companions, for they are not fit companions for the Son of God, who was created of light and in light. The Great Light always surrounds you and shines out from you. How can you see the dark companions in a light such as this? If you see them, it is only because you are denying the light. But deny them instead, for the light is here and the way is clear.
- God hides nothing from His Son, even though His Son would hide himself. Yet the Son of God cannot hide his glory, for God wills him to be glorious, and gave him the light that shines in him. You will never lose your way, for God leads you. When you wander, you but undertake a journey that is not real. The dark companions, the dark way, are all illusions. Turn toward the light, for the little spark in you is part of a Light so great that it can sweep you out of all darkness forever. For your Father is your Creator, and you are like Him.
- The children of light cannot abide in darkness, for darkness is not in them. Do not be deceived by the dark comforters, and never let them enter the mind of God’s Son, for they have no place in His temple. When you are tempted to deny Him remember that there are no other gods to place before Him and accept His Will for you in peace. For you cannot accept it otherwise.
- Only God’s Comforter can comfort you. In the quiet of His temple, He waits to give you the peace that is yours. Give His peace, that you may enter the temple and find it waiting for you. But be holy in the Presence of God, or you will not know that you are there. For what is unlike God cannot enter His Mind, because it was not His Thought and therefore does not belong to Him. And your mind must be as pure as His, if you would know what belongs to you. Guard carefully His temple, for He Himself dwells there and abides in peace. You cannot enter God’s Presence with the dark companions beside you, but you also cannot enter alone. All your brothers must enter with you, for until you have accepted them you cannot enter. For you cannot understand Wholeness unless you are whole, and no part of the Son can be excluded if he would know the Wholeness of his Father.
- In your mind you can accept the whole Sonship and bless it with the light your Father gave it. Then you will be worthy to dwell in the temple with Him, because it is your will not to be alone. God blessed his Son forever. If you will bless him in time, you will be in eternity. Time cannot separate you from God if you use it on behalf of the eternal. [1]
Fatigue, stress, weariness, and pain of any kind are the result of conflict in our life. Many people say that money is the root of all evil, but Jesus says that conflict is the root of all evil, for it blinds us to the God in each other and makes us want to strike out at each other, build cases against each other, judge each other and ourselves as unworthy of God’s Kingdom.
God’s Will for us is exactly what we want for ourselves. We want warmth, love, fellowship, and place to call Home. We want our lives to matter! We want to do things that have meaning and purpose. We want safety and security. We do not want to be lonely, afraid, homeless, and wandering listlessly about with the dark companions that this world gives us in lieu of the gifts of God.
We could not truly love, respect, or align ourselves with a God who willed for us to suffer, to go without, to be alone, persecuted, and afraid. When we hold beliefs that cause us to fear God, when we are more inclined to think of God as angry, wrathful, punishing, and vengeful, we have accepted the world’s perception of God, we have taken the dark companions of the world as our god and made an idol to take the place of our loving and forgiving Father.
Our joy is only complete in the Will of God! When we get even a glimpse of the light within us and recognize that God’s Will is our will, our minds will be so peaceful that we will know that there is no way we could have manufactured this on our own! Our minds will be such a joyful place that we will only be able to create that which is beautiful in His name, for there will be no place for sin, shame, condemnation, and spite. The joy of the Lord will not only be our strength but will touch and heal the thoughts we hold toward others, strengthening them and helping them to see their own light of God within. We will not have the heart or the inclination to ever again make of God a fearful image for we will only know His love, His patience, His devotion toward His Creation.
This bleak little world with its false concepts of God, its mean little versions of all that is Love and Joy and Peace, its calls for sacrifice, suffering, sin, and shame will vanish in the light of our joy. We will literally leap into Heaven to be in the Presence. There are no words that Jesus can use to describe to us what this will be like for our human hearts and our human minds have no conceptual experience that relates to our return to God’s Kingdom. But we can be assured and will be reminded frequently that what God wills for Himself He wills for His creation and what He wills for you is yours and what He wills for me is mine. He has only goodness and goodwill toward us.
We would be ruined for this world completely once we experienced the return to God’s Kingdom. It is ruined for some of us anyway – for once we experience even a glimpse or a touch of His presence, the joy and the bliss makes of the world a place of meanness and poverty. I have talked to several people and read about several more, who come back from a near death experience and express such sorrow at having to return to this place where peace and love and joy are disrespected and made into commodities by the commercial and perceptual world. The world is never the same to them, nor should it be for once we encounter reality and truth, we can never accept illusions and lies again.
Our humanity takes us on a hard path full of fear and sorrow. We are not here long at all before we experience the inequality, the injustice, the meanness, the poverty, the predatory nature of this world and its inhabitants. No matter how loving and kind, protective and nurturing our guardians are, we are alone, separate. They cannot really know us and we cannot really know them. We are not only separate from each other, but we feel far removed from God for our innocence and holiness simply does not last in the world. It is knocked out of our consciousness sometimes from day one!
Dark companions obscure the light of God within us, we learn fear, we learn mistrust, we learn shame and we learn sorrow. We learn to lie, we learn to hide, we learn that we are never good enough, we learn to pretend, we learn how to survive in separation, in a meaty, fleshy body that is vulnerable to attack from within and from without. We learn how to put a pretty ribbon on the hellish realm and call it courage, call it bravery, call it happiness. We learn to strut our triumphs and project our mistakes. Our idols are punitive gods of wrath, vengeance, and bloodshed which must be appeased through flattery, through material gifts, through rituals and rites and sacrifices.
Jesus tells us to stop perceiving these dark companions but rather to ask for and accept the Great Light which surrounds each one of us and shines out through us. We are to deny the dark companions the spotlight in which they crave. We are to stop worshipping them, stop cherishing them, stop accepting them in place of the light of God’s Love.
God withholds nothing from us no matter what our egos do to hide us from Him. God will never let us lose our way for He leads us. We can wander away from the path of God, we can deny His Light, we can worship the false concepts of God which come in many forms, we can choose conflict and condemnation over peace and love. But we cannot lose God. For these are useless journeys which may stretch our stint in time but will not affect our eternity with Him. The dark companions we may choose to fill our minds with shadows are simply lies, they are illusions, they are a smokescreen that cannot obscure the light of God forever!
When we accept God’s Love, the little spark in us is united with the Light of God and darkness is removed from our consciousness forever. We will not want anything to do with the dark companions that are so rampant in the world. No matter what hold the need for conflict, confusion, and condemnation seem to have upon our mind, our mind is so full of light that peace, certainty, and love are ours forever.
Our mind is the temple of God. You can think that your body is God’s temple, but bodies are symbols of the ego. They start out adorable enough for the most part, but they cannot prevail in time. Because they symbolize the ego, their end is decay. God’s temple is forever for God is forever. When we are tempted to deny that our will is God’s Will, we will fall into fear and confusion. We will make of a brother who does not agree with our spiritual insights an enemy. We will think of him as a foe and our hearts will be fearful. When we perceive the political climate of the world, we will mistakenly believe our function is to correct the world, to judge it, to make of this kingdom, God’s Kingdom. We will make of this kingdom something which it simply cannot ever be – our home. Jesus tells us when we are tempted to resort to conflict and condemnation, to remember that there are no other gods, there are no other kingdoms, there is no other reality or truth. We are to accept His Will for us in peace – for if we are fighting senseless battles, if our minds are full of fear, attack thoughts, and arrogant judgments against this one and that one, we are not at peace and can therefore not accept God’s Will.
Only Holy Spirit comforts us. His peace is our peace, and we find it in the stillness and quietness where the Voice for God abides in us. To have His peace we must give His peace. Be holy for God is holy – for when we do and say wrongful things we are disrespecting God Who made us to be like Him. We do not bring our grudges to God and ask Him to go after our enemies, we bring our grudges to God and lay them down and ask Him to fill our hearts with love and forgiveness for those whom we cannot love without Him. We ask for correction for ourselves and those who hold our human error against us. We do not ask for special favors for our people, our sports team, our side in the needless battles of the world. We do not get ourselves worked up into a frenzy over politics, social unrest, or the causes of the world. We put down all of our plotting and scheming – for this is not mutuality and it is not holy. We can find no comfort in this world. If you political candidate wins the election, any comfort your derive from it will be snatched away when your idol fails you. Leave God out of this kingdom for He was never in it, nor does He want to be insinuated into it by our projections. When we pray for His Kingdom to come, His Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven, we are praying that we accept His Kingdom in our earthly domain for this is our salvation from it.
Our minds must be pure to know God and to know what belongs to us as His Son. We are to diligently guard our minds from the dark companions that would insinuate themselves into our consciousness and whisper of conflict and specialness, shame and sorrow.
Be very careful of any messages that put you above your brothers. Guard your mind and heart from accepting flattery and praise. Do not credit yourself when your prayers are answered for a particular person – for when we pray for a particular person, all of the Sonship prays with us. We are not special in God’s eyes; nor should we be special in each other’s eyes. All of our brothers come with us, we do not let one behind, for if we would let some behind, we are excluding ourselves from the Presence of God.
Today in your personal devotional practice, bless the entire Sonship with the light our Father placed in you. Do not say I will bless everyone except the people I don’t like but bless them in particular. Call them by name. Ask Holy Spirit to overlook their mistakes, their cruelty, their wrongdoing and give all your hard feelings, your stony heart, your sense of hurt and shame to the Comforter Who will whisk the shadows away in the light of your Father’s love. When we withhold God’s Love from nobody for any reason we enter the secret place of the Most High, sheltered from all storms, protected from all strife. Blessing the Sonship, honoring the Creation, becoming perfectly peaceful, harmless, and helpful we use time on behalf of eternity, which is exactly what we are called to do!
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 11. God or the ego. III. From darkness to light. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992). pp. 198-200.
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