Lesson 227
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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
CH 20 THE PROMISE OF THE RESURRECTION
V. ENTERING THE ARK    
    
34 This is the purpose given you. Think not that your forgiveness of each other serves but you two alone. For the whole new world rests in the hands of every two who enter here to rest. And as they rest, the face of Christ shines on them, and they remember the laws of God, forgetting all the rest and yearning only to have His laws perfectly fulfilled in them and all their brothers. Think you when this has been achieved that you will rest without them? You could no more leave one of them outside than I could leave you and forget part of myself.

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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
WORKBOOK for STUDENTS
What is Forgiveness
WHAT IS FORGIVENESS? 

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*IAMBIC PENTAMETER*
 
   Forgiveness recognizes what you thought
   your brother did to you has not occurred.
   It does not pardon sins, and make them real.
   It sees there was no sin. And in this view
   are all your sins forgiven. What is sin
   except a false idea of God's Son?
   Forgiveness merely sees its falsity,
   and therefore lets it go. What then is free
   to take its place is now the Will of God.
 
   An unforgiving thought is one which makes
   a judgment that it will not raise to doubt,
   although it is untrue. The mind is closed,
   and will not be released. The thought protects
   projection, tightening its chains, so that
   distortions are more veiled and more obscure;
   less easily accessible to doubt,
   and further kept from reason. What can come
   between a fixed projection and the aim
   that it has chosen as its needed goal?
 
   An unforgiving thought does many things.
   In frantic action it pursues its goal,
   twisting and overturning what it sees
   as interfering with its chosen path.
   Distortion is its purpose, and the means
   by which it would accomplish it as well.
   It sets about its furious attempts
   to smash reality without concern
   for anything that would appear to pose
   a contradiction to its point of view.
 
   Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still
   and quietly does nothing. It offends
   no aspect of reality, nor seeks
   to twist it to appearance that it likes.
   It merely looks and waits and judges not.
   He who would not forgive must judge, for he
   must justify his failure to forgive.
   But he who would forgive himself must learn
   to welcome truth exactly as it is.
 
   Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show
   you what to do through Him Who is your Guide,
   your Saviour and Defender, strong in hope
   and certain of your ultimate success.
   He has forgiven you already, for
   such is His function, given Him by God.
   Now must you share His function, and forgive
   whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees,
   and whom He honors as the Son of God. "
 
  ~ Original Hand Script September 21, 1970

  
CIRCLE OF ATONEMENT ~ COMMENTARY
          
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DAILY LESSON
SonShip Workbook
 L e s s o n 227
This is my holy instant of release.  


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    Father, it is today that I am free,
    because my will is Yours. I thought to make
    another will. Yet nothing that I thought
    apart from You exists. And I am free
    because I was mistaken, and did not
    affect my own reality at all
    by my illusions. Now I give them up,
    and lay them down before the feet of truth,
    to be removed forever from my mind.
    This is my holy instant of release.
    Father, I know my will is one with Yours.
  
   And so today we find our glad return
   to Heaven, which we never really left.
   The Son of God this day lays down his dreams.
   The Son of God this day comes home again,
   released from sin and clad in holiness,
   with his right mind restored to him at last.

    ~ Original Handscript of ACIM
ACIM OE WORKBOOK LESSON 227
  
          
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ACIM Edmonton - Sarah's Reflections 
ACIM Edmonton, CA
LESSON 227

This is my holy instant of release.

Sarah's Commentary:   

The intent of our practice right now is to enter the holy instant. What is the holy instant? It is the instant outside of time in which we choose forgiveness instead of guilt, the miracle instead of the grievance, and the Holy Spirit instead of the ego. It is the expression of our little willingness to enter the experience of the present, which is a window on eternity. Holding onto the past and fearing the future is what keeps us in hell. The holy instant is an experience of Oneness. It is a sense of transcendence from our identification with the body. It is recognizing that we are joined with our brothers where separate interests are dissolved. It is an acceptance of the truth about ourselves. Thus, we can see the holy instant as a very flexible concept covering a variety of experiences of the truth of who we are as Spirit. The experiences may be fleeting, yet they increase as we practice the Lessons and apply them in our lives more and more. They bring us to a way of being as we approach the real world. The real world reflects the truth in our right minds.
 
Through the experiences of the holy instant, we are released from our mistaken idea that we have defiled ourselves and are too guilt-ridden to ever return home. With guilt comes the fear of God's punishment, which the ego has told us we have coming to us because of our sin. The guilt and fear that come to us as a result of our belief in sin are projected onto the world. Now we experience a world of suffering, where problems abound. But the experience of separation will be dissolved in the Holy Spirit's gentle love as we bring all of our misperceptions about ourselves and the world to His healing light. Now our wrong-minded thoughts give way and the recognition that our will is one with God's Will comes to awareness.
 
"You are the Will of God. Do not accept anything else as your will, or you are denying what you are. Deny this and you will attack, believing you have been attacked. But see the Love of God in you, and you will see it everywhere because it is everywhere. See His abundance in everyone and you will know that you are in Him with them. They are part of you, as you are part of God. You are as lonely without understanding this as God Himself is lonely when His Sons do not know Him. The peace of God is understanding this." (T.7.VII.10.1-8) (ACIM OE T.7.VIII.80)
 
Yes, as Jesus tells us in this Lesson, we do think we have made another will, but in spite of what we believe, it does not actually exist at all. To us, it does seem that we have a separate will from God's Will. We experience ourselves as separate and alone with a unique individual identity. We seem to have private thoughts, beliefs, and opinions that we think are ours alone. Yet it is clear ". . . nothing that I thought apart from You (God) exists." (W.227.1.3) Thus, who I think I am does not even exist! We are all characters in a dream playing out a role with other characters we think are as real as we think we are! Ideas do not leave their source. Everything we see is a projection of what is in our minds.
 
We exercise our separate will when we focus on what we want to accomplish, what we are hoping will happen, what conflicts we believe are in front of us to resolve, our chosen individual goals, our plans for safety, comfort, and pleasure, and our self-preservation, both physically and psychologically. We talk of using our willpower to overcome some addiction or other perceived malady in ourselves, and thus we try to exert our will instead of connecting to the true power available within our right minds. When we recognize ". . . my will is Yours [God's]," (W.227.1.1) we are surrendering to His Will and joining in His power, which is in us. We admit that in and of ourselves and through our own willpower we are actually powerless. We give up our illusions and ". . . lay them down before the feet of truth." (W.227.1.5) When we sincerely give up our illusions, they are forever removed from our minds.
 
The key is to surrender our goals, our plans, our perceived outcomes, and our control. We surrender our thoughts, release them into His Hands, and give up being in charge of our own lives. Through forgiveness, we release the thoughts we are holding that interfere with our ability to experience the holy instant. In the Song of Prayer pamphlet, a supplementary to the Course, we are told forgiveness, as defined in the Course, is very different from how we understand traditional forgiveness. Jesus calls traditional forgiveness " forgiveness to destroy. "
 
" Forgiveness-to-destroy has many forms, being a weapon of the world of form. Not all of them are obvious, and some are carefully concealed beneath what seems like charity. Yet all the forms that it may seem to take have but this single goal; their purpose is to separate and make what God created equal, different. The difference is clear in several forms where the designed comparison cannot be missed, nor is it really meant to be. " (S.2.II.1.1-4) The key difference is forgiveness, as defined in the Course, rests on the truth that what your brother did to you did not happen. Why? The reason is that in truth nothing that does not come from God exists. Only our interpretation about what seemed to happen is what must be released.
 
Our beliefs create a struggle for us. We believe our reality is a body. We believe we can find happiness in special relationships. We believe this world is real. We believe we can accomplish anything we determine to do entirely on our own. We believe we are separate from each other and different from each other. We believe there are things in this world that will make us happy. We believe we are totally justified in the way we see things. We defend our positions vigorously. Don't all these things seem to be the case in this seeming reality? What do we do? Why do we stay attached to these positions? Why have we closed our minds instead of raising all of our perceptions to doubt? We do this because we have become comfortable with the status quo, which means we are comfortable with our suffering, our experiences, our struggle, and our story. It is something we know and it demonstrates we exist. Where will this Course take me if I really commit to learning these Lessons? What will God want from me? What will I have to give up? What will I become? Who will I be? The fear of annihilation of this special self is what makes us cling to it.
 
Jesus tells us, "Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing." (W.PII.Q1.4.1) My spouse left me. "It [Forgiveness] merely looks, and waits, and judges not." (W.PII.Q1.4.3) My boss chastised me. "It [Forgiveness] merely looks, and waits, and judges not." Someone cut me off in traffic. "It [Forgiveness] merely looks, and waits, and judges not." What it means is, forgiveness looks at the ego thought system, waits patiently for us to change our minds, and makes no judgment. It does not smash reality into a more desirable shape. We have no idea what anything in our lives is for. We simply do not know what any of it means. Our own interpretations are always wrong. Now we agree to release our interpretations and instead turn them over to the Holy Spirit, Who will infuse everything that seems to happen with His purpose, which is undoing the way we see now. We surrender our will and our way!
 
"The Holy Spirit asks of you but this; bring to Him every secret you have locked away from Him. Open every door to Him, and bid Him enter the darkness and lighten it away. At your request He enters gladly. He brings the light to darkness if you make the darkness open to Him. But what you hide He cannot look upon. He sees for you, and unless you look with Him He cannot see." (T.14.VII.6.1-6) (ACIM OE T.14.IV.30)
 
Thus, to enter the holy instant, we clear our minds of what we think we know, what we are withholding, our defenses, our grievances, our will, and our way, and surrender into the quiet center of our being, where we commune with Stillness. This requires no effort. In fact, striving to achieve it puts the ego in charge of our awakening, which will never work. Striving will keep us from this experience. Putting the ego in charge of this process is like trying to make yourself holy. You cannot do it. Just bring your awareness to the thoughts arising and be willing to recognize they are not the truth. By taking these thoughts of past hurts, disappointments, anger, hatred, shame, pride, sickness, death, worry, aging, frustrations, and impatience, and laying ". . . them down before the feet of Truth," they are ". . . removed forever from my mind." (W.227.1.5)
 
"The world you see is but the idle witness that you were right. This witness is insane. You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave it back to you, you listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was true. You did this to yourself. See only this and you will also see how circular the reasoning on which your 'seeing' rests."
(T.21.II.5.1-5) (ACIM OE T.21.III.19) 
 
Love and Blessings, Sarah 
ACIM Original Edition
V. Entering the Ark   
 
28 Nothing can hurt you unless you give it the power to do so. For you give power as the laws of this world interpret giving---as you give you lose. It is not up to you to give power at all. Power is of God, given by Him and reawakened by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that as you give you gain. He gives no power to sin, and therefore it has none; nor to its results as this world sees them---sickness and death and misery and pain. These things have not occurred because the Holy Spirit sees them not and gives no power to their seeming source. Thus would He keep you free of them. Being without illusion of what you are, the Holy Spirit merely gives everything to God, Who has already given and received all that is true. The untrue He has neither received nor given.
 
29 Sin has no place in Heaven, where its results are alien and can no more enter than can their source. And therein lies your need to see your brother sinless. In him is Heaven. See sin in him instead, and Heaven is lost to you. But see him as he is, and what is yours shines from him to you. Your savior gives you only love, but what you would receive of him is up to you. It lies in him to overlook all your mistakes, and therein lies his own salvation. And so it is with yours. [Salvation is a lesson in giving, as the Holy Spirit interprets it.] It is the reawakening of the laws of God in minds that have established other laws and given them power to enforce what God created not.
 
30 Your insane laws were made to guarantee that you would make mistakes and give them power over you by accepting their results as your just due. What could this be but madness? And is it this that you would see within your savior from insanity? He is as free from this as you are, and in the freedom that you see in him, you see your own. For this you share. What God has given follows His laws and His alone. Nor is it possible for those who follow them to suffer the results of any other source.
 
31 Those who choose freedom will experience only its results. Their power is of God, and they will give it only to what God has given to share with them. Nothing but this can touch them, for they see only this, sharing their power according to the Will of God. And thus their freedom is established and maintained. It is upheld through all temptation to imprison and to be imprisoned. It is of them who learned of freedom that you should ask what freedom is. Ask not the sparrow how the eagle soars, for those with little wings have not accepted for themselves the power to share with you.
 
32 The sinless give as they received. See, then, the power of sinlessness within your brother and share with him the power of the release from sin you offered him. To each who walks this earth in seeming solitude is a savior given, whose special function here is to release him and so to free himself. In the world of separation, each is appointed separately, though they are all the same. Yet those who know that they are all the same need not salvation. And each one finds his savior when he is ready to look upon the face of Christ and see Him sinless.
 
33 The plan is not of you, nor need you be concerned with anything except the part that has been given you to learn. For He Who knows the rest will see to it without your help. But think not that He does not need your part to help Him with the rest. For in your part lies all of it, without which is no part complete, nor is the whole completed without your part. The ark of peace is entered two by two, yet the beginning of another world goes with them. Each holy relationship must enter here to learn its special function in the Holy Spirit's plan, now that it shares His purpose. And as this purpose is fulfilled, a new world rises in which sin can enter not, and where the Son of God can enter without fear, and where he rests a while to forget imprisonment and to remember freedom. How can he enter, to rest and to remember, without you? Except you be there, he is not complete. And it is his completion that he remembers there.
 
34 This is the purpose given you. Think not that your forgiveness of each other serves but you two alone. For the whole new world rests in the hands of every two who enter here to rest. And as they rest, the face of Christ shines on them, and they remember the laws of God, forgetting all the rest and yearning only to have His laws perfectly fulfilled in them and all their brothers. Think you when this has been achieved that you will rest without them? You could no more leave one of them outside than I could leave you and forget part of myself.
 
35 You may wonder how you can be at peace when, while you are in time, there is so much that must be done before the way to peace is open. Perhaps this seems impossible to you. But ask yourself if it is possible that God would have a plan for your salvation that does not work. Once you accept His plan as the one function that you would fulfill, there will be nothing else the Holy Spirit will not arrange for you without your effort.
 
36 He will go before you making straight your path and leaving in your way no stones to trip on and no obstacles to bar your way. Nothing you need will be denied you. Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away before you reach it. You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except the only purpose that you would fulfill. As that was given you, so will its fulfillment be. God's guarantee will hold against all obstacles, for it rests on certainty and not contingency. It rests on you. And what can be more certain than a Son of God?
      

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