DAILY LESSON

 

L e s s o n  95

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¹Today's idea accurately describes you as God created you. You are one within yourself and one with Him. Yours is the unity of all creation. Your perfect unity makes change in you impossible. You do not accept this and you fail to realize it must be so, only because you believe that you have changed yourself already. You see yourself as a ridiculous parody on God's creation-weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable and beset with pain. 

²Such is your version of yourself-a self divided into many warring parts, separate from God, and tenuously held together by its erratic and capricious maker, to which you pray. It does not hear your prayers, for it is deaf. It does not see the oneness in you, for it is blind. It does not understand you are the Son of God, for it is senseless and understands nothing. 

³We will attempt today to be aware of only what can hear and see and what makes perfect sense. We will again direct our exercises towards reaching your One Self, which is united with its Creator. In patience and in hope we try again today. 

⁴The use of the first five minutes of every waking hour for practicing the idea for the day has special advantages at the stage of learning in which you are at present. It is difficult at this point not to allow your mind to wander if it undertakes extended attempts. You have surely realized this by now. You have seen the extent of your lack of mental discipline and of your need for mind training. It is necessary that you be aware of this, for it is indeed a hindrance to your advance. 

⁵Frequent but shorter practice periods have other advantages for you at this time. In addition to recognizing your difficulties with sustained attention, you must also have noticed that, unless you are reminded of your purpose frequently, you tend to forget about it for long periods of time. You often fail to remember the short applications of the idea for the day, and you have not yet formed the habit of using it as an automatic response to temptation. 

⁶Structure, then, is necessary for you at this time, planned to include frequent reminders of your goal and regular attempts to reach it. Regularity in terms of time is not the ideal requirement for the most beneficial form of practice in salvation. It is advantageous, however, for those whose motivation is inconsistent and who remain heavily defended against learning. 

⁷We will therefore keep to the five minutes an hour practice periods for a while and urge you to omit as few as possible. Using the first five minutes of the hour will be particularly helpful since it imposes firmer structure. Do not, however, use your lapses from this schedule as an excuse not to return to it again as soon as you can. 

⁸There may well be a temptation to regard the day as lost because you have already failed to do what is required. This should, however, merely be recognized as what it is-a refusal to let your mistakes be corrected and an unwillingness to try again. 

⁹The Holy Spirit is not delayed in His teaching by your mistakes. He can be held back only by your unwillingness to let them go. Let us therefore be determined, particularly for the next week or so, to be willing to forgive ourselves for our lapses in diligence and our failures to follow the instructions for practicing the day's idea. 

¹⁰This tolerance for weakness will enable us to overlook it, rather than give it power to delay our learning. If we give it power to do this, we are regarding it as strength and are confusing strength with weakness. When you fail to comply with the requirements of this course, you have merely made a mistake. This calls for correction and for nothing else. 

¹¹To allow a mistake to continue is to make additional mistakes based on the first and reinforcing it. It is this process that must be laid aside, for it is but another way in which you would defend illusions against the truth. Let all these errors go by recognizing them for what they are. They are attempts to keep you unaware you are One Self, united with your Creator, at one with every aspect of creation, and limitless in power and in peace. 

¹²This is the truth, and nothing else is true. Today we will affirm this truth again and try to reach the place in you in which there is no doubt that only this is true. Begin the practice periods today with this assurance, given to your mind with all the certainty that you can give: 

   At one with every aspect of creation,
   And limitless in power and in peace.

¹⁴Then close your eyes and tell yourself again, slowly and thoughtfully, attempting to allow the meaning of the words to sink into your mind, replacing false ideas: 

¹⁶Repeat this several times, and then attempt to feel the meaning which the words convey. You are One Self, united and secure in light and joy and peace. You are God's Son, One Self with one Creator and one goal-to bring awareness of this oneness to all minds, that true creation may extend the Allness and the Unity of God. 

¹⁷You are One Self, complete and healed and whole, with power to lift the veil of darkness from the world and let the light in you come through to teach the world the truth about itself. You are One Self, in perfect harmony with all there is and all that there will be. You are One Self, the holy Son of God, united with your brothers in this Self, united with your Father in His Will. 

¹⁸Feel this One Self in you, and let it shine away all your illusions and your doubts. This is your Self, the Son of God Himself, sinless as its Creator, with His strength within you and His Love forever yours. You are One Self, and it is given you to feel this Self within you and to cast all your illusions out of the one Mind which is this Self, the holy truth in you. 

¹⁹Do not forget today. We need your help, your little part in bringing happiness to all the world. And Heaven looks to you in confidence that you will try today. Share, then, its surety, for it is yours. Be vigilant. Do not forget today. 

²⁰Throughout the day do not forget your goal. Repeat today's idea as frequently as possible and understand each time you do so, someone hears the voice of hope, the stirring of the truth within his mind, the gentle rustling of the wings of peace. Your own acknowledgment you are One Self, united with your Father, is a call to all the world to be at one with you. To everyone you meet today be sure to give the promise of today's idea and tell him this: 

   United with our Creator in this Self.
   I honor you because of what I am,
   And what He is, Who loves us both as one.

ACIM Edmonton - Sarah's Reflections 

Love and blessings, Sarah 

[email protected]

Quotes in this article are from Foundation for Inner Peace edition; To locate the same quotes in the 'Original Edition', use this link:  http://www.jcim.net/acim_us/Acim.php    

A Course in Miracles   
TEXT 

Chapter Eight

The Journey Back

IX. Healing as Corrected Perception

⁸⁰ We once said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. He is the Answer to everything because He knows what the answer to everything is. The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless number. Yet you can learn this as you learn to question the value of the ego and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions. When the ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego's belief that the body is the proper aim for healing. Ask rather that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be sick because only perception can be wrong.

⁸¹ Wrong perception is distorted willing, which wants things to be as they are not. The reality of everything is totally harmless because total harmlessness is the condition of its reality. It is also the condition of your awareness of its reality. You do not have to seek reality. It will seek you and find you when you meet its conditions. Its conditions are part of what it is. And this part only is up to you. The rest is of itself. You need do so little because it is so powerful that your little part will bring the whole to you. Accept then your little part, and let the whole be yours.

⁸² Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce unconsciousness out of fear of consciousness. This is a pathetic way of trying not to know by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual. "Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is joining. Dreams are illusions of joining, taking on the ego's distortions about what joining means if you are sleeping under its guidance. Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep and can use dreams on behalf of waking if you will let Him.

⁸³ How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you give it? Under which teacher did you place it? Whenever you wake dispiritedly, it was not of the Holy Spirit. Only when you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to the Holy Spirit's purpose. You can indeed be "drugged by sleep," but this is always because you have misused it on behalf of sickness. Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is impossible. You can rest in peace only because you are awake.

⁸⁴ Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the will to wake. The will to wake is the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true.

⁸⁵ The ego, which always weakens the will, wants to separate the body from the mind. This is an attempt to destroy it, yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous and that to make mindless is to heal. But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what God created. The ego despises weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. The ego wants only what it hates. To the ego this is perfectly sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants attack.

⁸⁶ You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course which means exactly what it says. So does the Bible, if it is properly understood. There has been a marked tendency on the part of many of the Bible's followers and also its translators to be entirely literal about fear and its effects but not about love and its results. Thus, "hellfire" means "burning," but raising the dead becomes allegorical. Actually, it is particularly the references to the outcomes of love which should be taken literally because the Bible is about love, being about God.

⁸⁷ The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal all errors, to take no thought of the body as separate, and to accomplish all things in my name. This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. The name of God's Son is one, and you are enjoined to do the works of love because we share this oneness. Our minds are whole because they are one. If you are sick you are withdrawing from me. Yet you cannot withdraw from me alone. You can only withdraw from yourself and me.

⁸⁸ I would not ask you to do the things you cannot do, and it is impossible that I could do things you cannot do. Given this, and given this quite literally, there can be nothing which prevents you from doing exactly what I ask, and everything which argues for your doing it. I give you no limits because God lays none upon you. When you limit yourself, we are not of one mind and that is sickness. Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. All forms of dysfunction are merely signs that the mind has split and does not accept a unified purpose.

⁸⁹ The unification of purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit's only way of healing. This is because it is the only level at which healing means anything. The re-establishing of meaning in a chaotic thought system is the only way to heal it. We have said that your task is only to meet the conditions for meaning since meaning itself is of God. Yet your return to meaning is essential to His because your meaning is part of His. Your healing, then, is part of His health since it is part of His Wholeness. He cannot lose this, but you can not know it. Yet it is still His Will for you, and His Will must stand forever and in all things.

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