in your ability to transcend doubt
and lack of sure conviction in yourself.
When you attack a brother, you proclaim
that he is limited by what you have
perceived in him. You do not look beyond
his errors. Rather, they are magnified,
becoming blocks to your awareness of
the Self that lies beyond your own mistakes
and past his seeming sins as well as yours.
Perception has a focus. It is this
that gives consistency to what you see.
Change but this focus, and what you behold
will change accordingly. Your vision now
will shift to give support to the intent
which has replaced the one you held before.
Remove your focus on your brother's sins,
and you experience the peace that comes
from faith in sinlessness. This faith receives
its only sure support from what you see
in others past their sins. For their mistakes,
if focused on, are witnesses to sins
in you. And you will not transcend their sight
and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.
Therefore, in practicing today, we first
let all such little focuses give way
to our great need to let our sinlessness
become apparent. We instruct our minds
that it is this we seek and only this
for just a little while. We do not care
about our future goals, and what we saw
an instant previous has no concern
for us within this interval of time
wherein we practice changing our intent.
We seek for innocence and nothing else.
We seek for it with no concern but now.|
A major hazard to success has been
involvement with your past and future goals.
You have been quite preoccupied with how
extremely different the goals this course
is advocating are from those you held
before. And you have also been dismayed
by the depressing and restricting thought
that even if you should succeed, you will
inevitably lose your way again.|
How can this matter? For the past is gone;
the future but imagined. These concerns
are but defenses against present change
of focus in perception. Nothing more.
We lay these pointless limitations by
a little while. We do not look to past
beliefs, and what we will believe will not
intrude upon us now. We enter in
the time of practicing with one intent;
to look upon the sinlessness within.|
We recognize that we have lost this goal
if anger blocks our way in any form.
And if a brother's sins occur to us,
our narrowed focus will restrict our sight
and turn our eyes upon our own mistakes,
which we will magnify and call "our sins".
So, for a little while, without regard
to past or future, should such blocks arise,
we will transcend them with instructions to
our minds to change their focus as we say:
"
It is not this that I would look upon.
I trust my brothers, who are one with me."|
And we will also use these thoughts to keep
us safe throughout the day. We do not seek
for long-range goals. As each obstruction seems
to block the vision of our sinlessness,
we seek but for surcease an instant from
the misery the focus upon sin
will bring, and uncorrected, will remain.|
Nor do we ask for fantasies. For what
we seek to look upon is really there.
And as our focus goes beyond mistakes,
we will behold a wholly sinless world.
When seeing this is all we want to see,
when this is all we seek for in the name
of true perception are the eyes of Christ
inevitably ours. And the love
He feels for us becomes our own as well.
This will become the only thing we see
reflected in the world and in ourselves.
The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes
the proof that we are sinless. And our love
for everyone we look upon attests
to our remembrance of the holy Self
Which knows no sin, and never could conceive
of anything without Its sinlessness.
We seek for this remembrance as we turn
our minds to practicing today. We look
neither ahead nor backward. We look straight
into the present. And we give our trust
to the experience we ask for now.
Our sinlessness is but the Will of God.
This instant is our willing one with His.