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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
CH 30 "THE NEW BEGINNING"
IX. THE CHANGELESS REALITY
92 Reality is changeless. Miracles but show what you have interposed between reality and your awareness is unreal and does not interfere at all. The cost of the belief there must be some appearances beyond the hope of change is that the miracle cannot come forth from you consistently. For you have asked it be withheld from power to heal all dreams. There is no miracle you cannot have when you desire healing. But there is no miracle that can be given you unless you want it. Choose what you would heal, and He Who gives all miracles has not been given freedom to bestow His gifts upon God's Son. When he is tempted, he denies reality. And he becomes the willing slave of what he chose instead.
CHAPTER 30 IX, 89-94
Voice and Music by CIMS SonShip Radio
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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
DAILY LESSON
WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT?
Voice and Music by CIMS SonShip Radio
Christ's Second Coming gives the Son of God
the gift to hear the Voice for God proclaim
that what is false is false, and what is true
has never changed. And this the judgment is
in which perception ends. At first you see
a world which has accepted this as true,
projected from a now corrected mind.
And with this holy sight, perception gives
a silent blessing and then disappears,
its goal accomplished and its mission done.
The final judgment on the world contains
no condemnation. For it sees the world
as totally forgiven, without sin,
and wholly purposeless. Without a cause,
and now without a function in Christ's sight,
it merely slips away to nothingness.
There it was born, and there it ends as well.
And all the figures in the dream in which
the world began go with it. Bodies now
are useless, and will therefore fade away,
because the Son of God is limitless.
You who believed that Gods last judgment would
condemn the world to hell along with you,
accept this holy truth: God's judgment is
the gift of the Correction He bestowed
on all your errors, freeing you from them,
and all effects they ever seemed to have.
To fear His saving grace is but to fear
complete release from suffering, return
to peace, security and happiness,
and union with your own Identity.
God's final judgment is as merciful
as every step in His appointed plan
to save His Son, and call Him to return
to the eternal peace He shares with him.
Be not afraid of Love. For It alone
can heal all sorrow, wipe away all tears,
and gently waken from his dreams of pain
the Son whom God acknowledges as His.
Be not afraid of this. Salvation asks
you give it welcome. And the world awaits
your glad acceptance, which will set it free.
This is God's final judgment: "You are still
My holy Son, forever innocent,
forever loving and forever loved,
as limitless as Your Creator, and
completely changeless and forever pure.
Therefore awaken and return to Me.
I am Your Father, and you are My Son.
~ Original Hand Script
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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
DAILY LESSON
L e s s o n 320
My Father gives all power unto me.
Voice and Music by CIMS SonShip Radio
<VIDEO>
The Son of God is limitless. There are
no limits on his strength, his peace, his joy,
or any attributes his Father gave
in his creation. What he wills with his
Creator and Redeemer must be done.
His holy will can never be denied
because his Father shines upon his mind,
and lays before it all the strength and love
in earth and Heaven. I am he to whom
all this is given. I am he in whom
the power of my Father's Will abides.
Your Will can do all things in me, and then
extend to all the world as well through me.
There is no limit on Your Will. And so
all power has been given to Your Son.
~ Original Handscript of ACIM
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ACIM Edmonton - Sarah's Reflections
LESSON 320
My Father gives all power unto me.
Sarah's Commentary:
In the Bible, Matthew 28:18, Jesus speaks the words, "All power is given unto me," which he spoke shortly after his resurrection. These words are now being spoken by us. Just as Jesus is proclaimed as the Son of God, we are as well. There is no separation from each other or from our elder brother Jesus. In the Clarification of Terms, we read, "The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God." (Clarification of Terms.5.2.1) He walked this path we walk and went all the way home. Our task is to learn to ignore the voice of the ego, so we can listen only to the Voice for God (the Holy Spirit). Freedom from the ego is indeed the reality of the mind of the mystic who, while still in this dream, is nevertheless in true perception. To be in true perception is to be in the real world. We come to the real world when we see the face of Christ in all our brothers with no exceptions.
We, together with Jesus, are all equal as the Sons of God, although Jesus explains that he is further in time. This makes sense to us since we still believe in time, but in truth, there is no time. There is only now. Time is of our own making. Jesus, as a symbol of the truth within us, is outside of the dream, guiding us, step by step, up the ladder we seemed to have descended. "There is no need for help to enter Heaven for you have never left." (C.5.1.1) Yet we do believe we have left Heaven and thus we need his help to awaken to what we really are. We need this help as it comes from outside of the thought system of the ego. With the ego, we are in a never-ending loop.
Our true reality is limitless and eternal. We have all the characteristics of God, but we can only know this through experience. When we identify with the ego and think the body and personality define us, we are in the confines of time and space. "But there is need for help beyond yourself as you are circumscribed by false beliefs of your Identity, which God alone established in reality." (C.5.1.2) Jesus is a familiar symbol in our minds. He is eager to help us and always available to us when we turn to him.
He assures us that the truth about us, as the Son of God, is that we are limitless. We can't limit our strength, our peace, our joy, nor any other of the attributes that are natural to us because they have been given to us by God in our creation, and His Will must be done. Again and again, we are told that we are limitless and have not changed ourselves. In fact, we can't change ourselves. We can simply lose ourselves, temporarily, in this illusion and forget what we are. We believe that we have messed up, we have experienced pain and grief, and we feel that we have been abandoned by God. We feel unworthy of His Love, but they are just thoughts we give power to and are not the truth. We have come to believe in our thoughts so thoroughly that we actually think we are these characters in the dream. Jesus reminds us, it is our dream and we are dreaming it. We are not the dream figures.
We fear love because the ego has convinced us that we have done something terrible. It has constructed a myth that we have killed God to achieve our separate identity, we deserve to suffer, and we need to continue to stay away from God's love or we will be annihilated. None of this is true. It just keeps us small, limited, and confined to our tiny kingdoms, circumscribed by our bodies and our world. Yet the truth of the Son is that "His holy will can never be denied, because his Father shines upon his mind, and lays before it all the strength and love in earth and Heaven." (W.320.1.4) What He wills must be done. We are told again that nothing we have done, or still can do, will ever change the truth about us. We just have to wake up to the truth, and we do so by bringing all our false beliefs and perceptions to the altar of truth within.
We reclaim our innocence and our unlimited will when we forgive all our misperceptions with the help of the Holy Spirit. "The Holy Spirit wants only this, for sharing the Father's Love for His Son, He seeks to remove all guilt from his mind that he may remember his Father in peace." (T.13.I.1.2) (ACIM OE T.11.X.89) Our way home comes from undoing the false beliefs we hold and releasing our sense of specialness, judgments, and grievances which block God's love from our awareness. By surrendering our values, beliefs, and concepts, we recognize that they have never served us. Our way has never made us happy. The conditioned mind has been deceived. We have bought into the cult of the ego and are marching onto death.
By now, we have been well versed in the process of forgiveness. It requires that we start to look at our own minds and take responsibility for our projections. Our nature is love, and therefore, being unloving brings us pain. We are called to admit that we are wrong when we think we can gain something through attack, judgment, comparison, and trying to win at someone else's expense. The pleasure of putting someone down and seeing ourselves as superior always brings more pain and more guilt. We have betrayed our true loving nature and this has hurt us. We think that by seeing guilt in them, we will feel more innocent, but we are wrong. All that happens is that we feel more pain. A high level of self-honesty and personal responsibility is called for. "How do I try to get away with something?" "How do I try to protect and defend myself?" "How do I do my best to look after my own interests?" "What do I get impatient and indignant with others about?" "What do I think I can gain with my opinions and my judgments?" "How do I try to manipulate others to do my will?" "How do I try to gain at their expense?"
I have had people say that they have totally forgiven someone in their lives, but the standard for true forgiveness is extremely high. Jesus says, if we have totally forgiven someone, then we would see a vision of loveliness "reflected in a form so holy and so beautiful that you could scarce refrain from kneeling at his feet." (W.161.9.3) Forgiving anyone perfectly and completely means Jesus would generalize this experience to everyone, and our work here would be over because we would know everyone as the Christ.
It does not matter what misbehavior a brother is engaged in. When we make a judgment about it, we can be assured that we have first judged ourselves for some version of the very same thing. They are a mirror of our own inner self-judgment reflected back at us. They are there to help us see our own shadow. It is the self-concept that we value in ourselves, but all self-concepts are false, whether we see them as positive or negative. Anything we describe as our personalities is not the truth. When we take responsibility for our judgments and are prepared to look at our own version of what we are judging, the healing can begin. In our self-acceptance, we will find acceptance of others. Pay attention to what is going on inside of you.
When we justify our thoughts and feelings by the stories we tell, we see ourselves as the victims of what others do. "In dreams effect and cause are interchanged, for here the maker of the dream believes that what he made is happening to him. He does not realize he picked a thread from here, a scrap from there, and wove a picture out of nothing. For the parts do not belong together, and the whole contributes nothing to the parts to give them meaning." (T.24.V.2.2-4) (ACIM OE T.24.VI.41) By watching our thoughts and being willing to release them to the Holy Spirit, we see that no one is responsible for how we feel except ourselves. There is no one outside of us. We are all One Self. When we release all the comparisons we make, all the judgments, all the feelings of jealousy, and all the attack thoughts and truly surrender our will, love comes pouring in. We must take responsibility for everything. We are not victims of anyone or of any circumstance. Forgiveness is not about forgiving anything real, but only our interpretation of an event, person, or situation. The truth is that we are all innocent. We share the same nature as Jesus.
Why does this seem so difficult? We need to understand how invested we are in our individuality. This self that we have made is very threatened by the truth. Recognize this and be gentle with yourself, but don't delay your homecoming. Salvation is not in the future. It is available to us now. In every moment, we can release what is keeping us from the love we are. Choose love now.
As long as we rationalize our anger or defend our perceptions, we will not know of our changeless nature and of our unlimited power. Because we want so much to be right about the way we see things, we have agreed to forsake our own happiness-as crazy as that is!
Today, ask yourself, "What limitations am I putting on myself?" A limitation is to believe in the reality of the body. We think we are these separate individuals, fighting for our survival in the world and competing with every other body. We feel vulnerable. We fear death. We may be feeling anger, pain, distress, sadness, disappointment, anticipation, stress, grief, or even pleasure, but these all come from our incorrect perceptions, reminding us of what is false and limiting.
Let us today bring all these thoughts to the Holy Spirit and be willing to have Him undo them so we can know the truth about the Self. What we are called to do is bring these thoughts to the light of Truth, which is already in us. Through this process, we increasingly recognize that all God's power is given unto us because we are God's Son. This is not a statement of arrogance because it is not a power that is ours alone. We can only know this power when we realize that we all share the same power and the same Self. This Self is invulnerable. It is eternal. It can never die.
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Chapter Thirty
The New Beginning
CHAPTER 30 IX, 89-94
Voice and Music by Martin Weber, CIMS SonShip Radio
IX. The Changeless Reality
89 Appearances deceive but can be changed. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all, and if you fail to see beyond appearances, you
are deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form and capable of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that makes it real and keeps it separate from
all appearances. It must transcend all form to be itself. It
cannot change.
90 The miracle is means to demonstrate that all appearances can change because they
are appearances and cannot have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation from appearances by
showing they can change. Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both. It is obscured by changing views of him which you
perceive as his reality. The happy dream about him takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health, his perfect freedom from all forms of lack, and safety from disaster of all kinds. The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form because it can so easily be
changed. This demonstrates that it was
never real and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal
because they change.
91 What is temptation but a wish to make illusions real? It does not seem to be the wish that no reality be so. Yet it is an assertion that some forms of idols have a powerful appeal which makes them harder to resist than those you would not
want to have reality. Temptation, then, is nothing more than this-a prayer the miracle touch not some dreams but keep their unreality obscure and give to them reality instead. And Heaven gives no answer to the prayer, nor can a miracle be given you to heal appearances you do not like. You have established
limits. What you ask
is given you, but not of God Who knows no limits. You have limited
yourself.
92 Reality is changeless. Miracles but show what you have interposed between reality and your awareness is unreal and does not interfere at all. The cost of the belief there must be some appearances beyond the hope of change is that the miracle cannot come forth from you consistently. For you have
asked it be withheld from power to heal all dreams. There is no miracle you cannot have when you
desire healing. But there is no miracle that can be given you
unless you want it. Choose what you would heal, and He Who gives all miracles has not been given freedom to bestow His gifts upon God's Son. When he is tempted, he denies reality. And he becomes the willing slave of what he chose instead.
93
Because reality is changeless is a miracle already there to heal all things that change and offer them to you to see in happy form, devoid of fear. It will be given you to look upon your brother thus. But not while you would have it otherwise in some respects. For this but means you would not have him healed and whole. The Christ in him is perfect. Is it this that you would look upon? Then let there be no dreams about him which you would prefer to seeing this. And you will see the Christ in him because you
let Him come to you. And when He has appeared to you, you will be certain you are like Him, for He is the changeless in your brother
and in you.
94 This will you look upon when you decide there is not one appearance you would hold in place of what your brother really is. Let no temptation to prefer a dream allow uncertainty to enter here. Be not made guilty and afraid when you are tempted by a dream of what he is. But do not give it power to replace the changeless in him in your sight of him. There is no false appearance but will fade if you request a miracle instead. There is no pain from which he is not free if you would have him be but what he is. Why should you fear to see the Christ in him? You but behold
your Self in what you see. As he is healed are you made free of guilt, for his appearance
is your own to you.
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