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9 Atonement is for all, because it is the way to
undo the belief that anything is for you alone. To forgive is to
overlook. Look, then,
beyond error, and do not let your perception rest
upon it, for you will believe what your perception holds. Accept as true only what your brother
is if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is
not, and you cannot know what you are
because you see him falsely. Remember always that your identity is shared and that sharing
is its reality.
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Workbook for Students
Lesson 103
God, being Love, is also happiness.
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1 Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it, nor can it be experienced where love is not. Love has no limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well. Yet can the mind deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy.
2 This strange belief would limit happiness by redefining love as limited and introducing opposition in what has no limit and no opposite. Fear is associated then with love, and its results become the heritage of minds that think what they have made is real. These images, with no reality in truth, bear witness to the fear of God, forgetting being Love, He must be joy.
3 This basic error we will try again to bring to truth today and teach ourselves:
4
God, being Love, is also happiness. To fear Him is to be afraid of joy.
5 Begin your longer practice periods for today with this association, which corrects the false belief that God is fear. It also emphasizes happiness belongs to you because of what He is.
6 Allow this one correction to be placed within your mind each waking hour today. Then welcome all the happiness it brings, as truth replaces fear, and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. God being Love, it will be given you. Bolster this expectation frequently throughout the day, and quiet all your fears with this assurance, kind and wholly true:
7
God, being Love, is also happiness. And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot fail because I seek the truth.
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Text
Chapter 9
The Correction of Error
III. Atonement as a Lesson in Sharing
par 9-19
[PAUSED FOR WEEKEND]
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9 Atonement is for all, because it is the way to
undo the belief that anything is for you alone. To forgive is to
overlook. Look, then,
beyond error, and do not let your perception rest
upon it, for you will believe what your perception holds. Accept as true only what your brother
is if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is
not, and you cannot know what you are
because you see him falsely. Remember always that your identity is shared and that sharing
is its reality.
10 You have a part to play in the Atonement, but the plan of the Atonement
is beyond you. You do not know how to overlook errors, or you would not make them. It would merely be further error to think either that you do
not make them or that you can correct them
without a Guide to correction. And if you do not
follow this Guide, your errors will
not be corrected. The plan is not yours
because of your limited ideas of what you are. This limitation is where
all errors arise. The way to undo them, therefore, is not
of you but
for you.
11 The Atonement is a lesson in sharing which is given you because
you have forgotten how to do it. The Holy Spirit merely reminds you of what is your natural ability. By reinterpreting the ability to attack, which you
did make, into the ability to
share, He translates what you have made into what God created. If you would accomplish this
through Him, you cannot look on your abilities through the eyes of the ego or you will judge them as
it does. All their harmfulness lies in its judgment. All their helpfulness lies in the judgment of the Holy Spirit.
12 The ego, too, has a plan of forgiveness because you are
asking for one, though not of the right teacher. The ego's plan, of course,
makes no sense and
will not work. By following it, you will merely place yourself in an impossible situation to which the ego
always leads you. The ego's plan is to have you see error clearly
first and
then overlook it. Yet how can you overlook what you have made real? By seeing it clearly, you
have made it real and
cannot overlook it.
13 This is where the ego is forced to appeal to "mysteries" and begins to insist that you must accept the meaningless to save yourself. Many have tried to do this in my name, forgetting that my words make
perfect sense because they come from God. They are as sensible now as they ever were because they speak of ideas which are eternal. Forgiveness that is learned of me does
not use fear to
undo fear. Nor does it make real the
unreal and then destroy it.
14 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning and thus
keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds
at all, or you will also believe that
you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven. What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit, the effects of error are
totally non-existent. By steadily and consistently canceling out
all its effects
everywhere and in
all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and
proves it. Follow His teaching in forgiveness then, because forgiveness
is His function, and He knows how to fulfill it perfectly. That is what we meant when we once said that miracles are
natural, and when they do
not occur, something has gone wrong.
15 Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation in recognition of the fact that you do
not know what it is. His work is
not your function, and unless you accept this, you cannot learn what
your function is. The confusion of functions is so typical of the ego that you should be quite familiar with it by now. The ego believes that
all functions belong to it, even though it has no idea what they
are. This is more than mere confusion. It is a particularly dangerous combination of grandiosity
and confusion which makes it likely that the ego will attack anyone and anything for no reason at all. This is exactly what the ego
does. It is
totally unpredictable in its responses because it has no idea of
what it perceives.
16 If one has no idea of what is happening, how appropriately can you
expect him to react? You might still ask yourself, regardless of how you can
account for the reactions, whether they place the ego in a very sound position as the guide for
yours. It seems absurd to have to emphasize repeatedly that the ego's qualifications as a guide are singularly unfortunate and that it is a remarkably poor choice as a teacher of salvation. Yet this question, ridiculous as it seems, is really the crucial issue in the whole separation fantasy. Anyone who elects a totally insane guide
must be totally insane himself.
17 It is not true that you do not know the guide is insane.
You know it because
I know it, and you
have judged it by the same standard as I have. The ego literally lives on borrowed time, and its days are numbered. Do not fear the Last Judgment, but welcome it and do not wait, for the ego's time is borrowed from
your eternity. This
is the Second Coming, which was made
for you as the First was created. The Second Coming is merely the return of
sense. Can this
possibly be fearful?
18 What can be fearful but fantasy, and no one turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he will
never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope is to
change his mind about reality. Only if the decision that reality is fearful is
wrong can God be right. And I assure you that God
is right. Be glad, then, that you
have been wrong, but this was only because you did not know who you were. Had you remembered, you could no more have been wrong than God can. The impossible can happen
only in fantasy. When you search for reality in fantasies, you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of
these you will find many. But do not look for meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven.
19 Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful, pretty or ugly, but no one calls them
true. Children may believe them, and so for a while the tales
are true for them. Yet when reality dawns, the fantasies are gone.
Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second Coming is the
awareness of reality, not its
return. Behold, my children, reality is here. It belongs to you and me and God and is perfectly satisfying to all of us.
Only this awareness heals because it is the awareness of truth.
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Sarah's Reflections
Lesson 103
God, being Love, is also happiness.
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We have had two previous Lessons that say happiness is our natural inheritance. In other words, it is our very nature, given us by God. When we don't experience happiness, we are actually choosing against our nature and thus against God. We are choosing against God's Will for us. Now we see that we can actually choose happiness. We do it by looking at all the thoughts and beliefs that keep us from our inner joy, none of which are true.
It goes back to our belief that suffering can bring us something we want, as was discussed in our previous two Lessons. We have associated fear with love.
"Fear is associated then with love, and its results become the heritage of minds that think what they have made is real. These images, with no reality in truth, bear witness to the fear of God, forgetting being Love, He must be joy
.
"
(W.103.2.1-2) God is love; yet we fear Him and His love in the belief that we must sacrifice for Him, giving Him what we think He wants or He will destroy us. The god of the ego is the God described in the Bible that is loved and worshiped, but he is a terrifying God that makes demands of us and will judge us in the end.
This is a God who demands suffering and punishment for what we have presumably done. The ego myth is that we have smashed reality and left God to make up our own kingdom. Now we hold guilt in our minds for what the ego has told us is a mortal sin. We associate love with fear and suffering. We see God as a terrifying figure. That is why all of our experiences in this world are tinged with fear. Our belief that our lives are contained in these bodies is certainly a state of vulnerability, for our bodies don't protect us from the elements, from sickness, nor from death.
Think of someone you love and all the fear and worry you have associated with your love for them. Think of how many of your activities are based on fear of consequences, worrying about how you might be letting someone down if you don’t meet their perceived expectations. We try to please others in order to defend against our fear of their rejection of us. This is what keeps us from feeling the abundance and the joy in us. If you really think deeply about it, isn’t every happiness you experience in this world tinged with pain? It is the pain of loss; it is the pain of the transient nature of happiness here and it takes a lot of mind training for us to really get in touch with our fear. We spend a lot of our lives covering it over. Imagine a life motivated only by love and nothing else. Because of our fear, we do not experience the consistency of joy that comes from experiencing the truth about the Self---we are One with our Source.
Our reality is love, and happiness is an attribute of love. In other words, happiness and love go together.
"Nor can it be experienced where love is not."
(W.103.1.3) Without love, there can be no happiness, because a state of fear is a state separate from God. To be in a state separate from God is to be in the illusion, which is not real. This is a state of lack and limitation, which defines our condition in the world.
We have made an adjustment to the world, and we have substituted our own definition of love for what is God’s Love. In truth, love has no limits. In this world, there are limits on our love. It is not a consistent state. The nature of this world and our separate identities are, in themselves, limits.
"Love has no limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well
.
"
(W.103.1.4-5) Clearly then, our true state is unlimited joy, but in this illusion, that is not what we experience. The ego's notion of happiness is related to getting, having, keeping, avoiding, defending, planning, and controlling. When we limit love to certain people, it is not about real love as it is about having our needs met. When they are not met, we feel unloved and unappreciated.
Jesus says that when we deny our happiness, we are denying God. We do this by thinking God can't make us happy, so we seek substitutes instead that we think can bring us happiness. When we pursue these substitutes, we suffer. Looking outside of ourselves for happiness means our happiness is dependent on circumstances over which we have no control. Happiness comes and goes but is never constant. Sometimes we experience tremendous joy, but we don't believe it can last. It seems to us to be situational. Yet if happiness is our nature, it is there all the time. Until we experience this, we will be suspicious that this is the truth. The ego’s range goes from suspicious to vicious. It becomes vicious when it appears we are ready to release its hold on us. We don't believe we deserve to be happy all the time, and while we hold onto the guilt and fear in our minds, the happiness that is always there will not be in our awareness.
Jesus says that we believe
". . . there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy
.
"
(W.103.1.6) In other words, love is a very inconsistent experience for us because we have seemingly separated from that love. We say things like we were once in love but no longer are. Yet where can the love go? If it goes, it never was love. That is why this inconsistent kind of love that we believe in is called a strange belief.
"This strange belief would limit happiness by redefining love as limited, and introducing opposition in what has no limit and no opposite."
(W.103.1.7)
We love some people some of the time when they are meeting our needs, but we turn away from that love when those needs are no longer met. We see ourselves as lacking and incomplete and believe we need others to complete us. The lack we experience in ourselves is the reason we continually seek for something to fill it. Love needs no completion. Love simply is; it holds no one apart from it. When we recognize ourselves as the love we are, then the gap we hold between ourselves and God is healed. That healing is experienced when we forgive our brothers. Forgiveness could perhaps be said to be the most perfect reflection of love in this world because we have healed what stands between ourselves and our brothers. Now we know we are the same.
Jesus is showing us that our special love has never made us happy. We can see from our own experiences of love in this world that with it comes a huge amount of pain and disappointment. When we feel the pain sufficiently, we are more motivated to be shown another way. Our way cannot be God's way. His way is for us to know the consistency of the love that is in us.
If love, joy, and peace are in us and in everyone all the time, are we willing to accept it as the truth? Are we willing to be happy today by letting go of our grievances, our expectations, and our judgments that block the love we are? Do we walk through life expecting things to go wrong? When we are willing to see the unconscious guilt we project onto others and take responsibility for it, healing can happen. We can watch the news and see a world of death and destruction and get very depressed; or we can ask for help to see through the "eyes" of the Holy Spirit and bring our judgments and fears to Him to reinterpret what we see. He will help us to see everything as either love or a call for love.
Our responsibility for our healing is to bring to awareness anything that triggers us. When we project the conflict that is in our minds, we experience conflict with others. The unconscious guilt in our minds results in self-attack in the form of suffering, depression, disease, pain, and unworthiness. Our job is now to bring these painful thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and concepts that we hold, to awareness and recognize they are not of God because God brings us only happiness. He has placed the Holy Spirit in our minds. He will heal our pain when we place it on the altar of truth within, where He abides. If we resist taking responsibility for our suffering and try to control, manage, or defend against it, then this reflects a decision to keep the pain and make someone else responsible for it.
Jesus reminds us that God did not make this world of illusion, so the world of suffering and pain cannot be true. Today, we can take each unhappy thought, each disappointment, all impatience, fear and guilt, to the Holy Spirit to be released. The truth is that we were created happy by Happiness Itself. Anything less is a denial of our Self and of our Creator. We literally shut off this happiness with each grievance we hold. It may be a grudge we have against someone because of a past issue. It may be a fear that there may be a crash in the market. It may be a worry about our kids or our aging parents. It may be distress about the world situation. There are many ways we keep ourselves from our happiness. In the bigger picture, of course, we keep ourselves from happiness by identifying with the character in the dream that we think we are, as a unique and special self, housed in a body, and living in an illusory world.
In Chapter 10, we read the god of sickness demands our depression as a sign that we are committed to him.
"Joy is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to him
.
"
(T.10.V.1.2) (ACIM OE T.9.XI.93) We then project our responsibility for our depression onto others, thus holding them responsible for our sadness. We
". . . cannot see the spark in them that would bring joy."
(T.10.V.2.4) (ACIM OE T.9.XI .94)
"It is the denial of the spark that brings depression, for whenever you see your brothers without it, you are denying God
.
"
(T.10.V.2.5) (ACIM OE T.9.XI.94)
"You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free
.
"
(T.10.V.10.1-2) (ACIM OE T.9.XI.102) No matter how much joy and happiness we deny ourselves, and no matter how much God does not want this for us, He loves us enough to value our freedom to choose our own experience. It is up to us to choose to give up our sadness. It will never be removed from us without our agreement. Our freedom of choice is our own and will not be taken from us, not even by God.
The choice we make as to what we want to see is between our brother's body or his holiness. Peace and happiness are dependent on the choice we make. It is a choice to see our brother's holiness, rather than his guilt, for that is the choice we are making for ourselves as well.
"He is the mirror of yourself, wherein you see the judgment you have laid on both of you
.
"
(T.24.VI.8.6) (ACIM OE T.24.VII.56) To the extent we fear our brother, we also fear God. It is in every brother that we can know our Self. It is in everyone we encounter that we can choose to see him as our savior by seeing in him a reflection of our unhealed or healed mind. The decision is ours to make, and with each decision we make, our choice for joy or suffering is reflected. Be very honest with yourself to see what you might be projecting onto your brother that is your own unconscious guilt so it can be brought to light to be healed. Today, we accept that
"God being Love is also happiness
.
"
(W.103) We learn this by releasing our judgments and grievances.
Today, we start our longer practice periods with the thought
"God, being Love, is also happiness. To fear Him is to be afraid of joy
.
"
(W.103.2.4-5) We do this each waking hour today, always bringing our false beliefs to the truth. Then sit in silence, welcoming all the happiness it brings, as truth replaces fear and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. God, being Love, wants to give everything to us.
Throughout the day, stay vigilant of any fear thoughts, any triggers you experience in your relationships, and any conflicts that show you what is in your mind; and bring these to the inner altar.
"God, being Love, is also happiness
.
"
(W.103.3.5) Reminding yourself often,
"And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot fail, because I seek the truth
.
"
(W.103.3.6-7) Whenever you are aware of fear, anxiety, guilt, or pain, bring awareness to this condition and ask Holy Spirit, how would you have me look on this?
Love and blessings, Sarah
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