"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.
Herein Lies the peace of God."
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A
Course in Miracles
TEXT
CHAPTER 19
Beyond the Body
V. Obstacles to Peace
d. The Fourth Obstacle: The Fear of God
90
What would you see without the fear of death? What would you feel and think if death held no attraction for you? Very simply, you would remember your Father. The Creator of life, the Source of everything that lives, the Father of the universe and of the universe of universes and of everything that lies even beyond them would you remember. And as this memory rises in your mind, peace must still surmount a final obstacle after which is salvation completed and the Son of God entirely restored to sanity. For here your world
does
end.
91
The fourth obstacle to be surmounted hangs like a heavy veil before the face of Christ. Yet as His face rises beyond it, shining with joy because He is in His Father's Love, peace will lightly brush the veil aside and run to meet Him and to join with Him at last. For this dark veil, which seems to make the face of Christ Himself like to a leper's and the bright rays of His Father's love which light His face with glory appear as streams of blood, fades in the blazing light beyond it when the fear of death is gone.
92
This is the darkest veil, upheld by the belief in death and protected by its attraction. The dedication to death and to its sovereignty is but the solemn vow, the promise made in secret to the ego never to lift this veil, not to approach it nor even to suspect that it is there. This is the secret bargain made with the ego to keep what lies beyond the veil forever blotted out and unremembered. Here is your promise never to allow union to call you out of separation; the great amnesia in which the memory of God seems quite forgotten; the cleavage of your Self from you—
the fear of God
, the final step in your dissociation.
93
See how the belief in death would seem to "save" you. For if this is gone, what can you fear but
life
? It is the attraction of death that makes life seem to be ugly, cruel, and tyrannical. You are no more afraid of death than of the ego. These are your chosen friends. For in your secret alliance with them, you have agreed never to let the fear of God be lifted so you could look upon the face of Christ and join Him in His Father.
94
Every obstacle that peace must flow across is surmounted in just the same way; the fear that raised it yields to the love beneath, and so the fear is gone. And so it is with this. The desire to get rid of peace and drive the Holy Spirit from you fades in the presence of the quiet recognition that you love Him. The exaltation of the body is given up in favor of the Spirit, which you love as you could never love the body. And the appeal of death is lost forever as love's attraction stirs and calls to you. From beyond each of the obstacles to love, Love Itself has called, and each has been surmounted by the power of the attraction of what lies beyond. Your wanting fear seemed to be holding them in place. Yet when you heard the voice of love beyond them, you answered and they disappeared.
95
And now you stand in terror before what you swore never to look upon. Your eyes look down, remembering your promise to your "friends." The "loveliness" of sin, the delicate appeal of guilt, the "holy" waxen image of death, and the fear of vengeance of the ego you swore in blood not to desert, all rise and bid you not to raise your eyes. For you realize that if you look on this and let the veil be lifted,
they
will be gone forever. All of your "friends," your "protectors," and your "home" will vanish. Nothing that you remember now will you remember.
96
It seems to you the world will utterly abandon you if you but raise your eyes. Yet all that will occur is you will leave the world forever. This is the reestablishment of
your
will. Look upon it open-eyed and you will nevermore believe that you are at the mercy of things beyond you, forces you cannot control, and thoughts that come to you against your will. It is your will to look on this. No mad desire, no trivial impulse to forget again, no stab of fear, nor the cold sweat of seeming death can stand against your will. For what attracts you from beyond the veil is also deep
within
you, unseparated from it and completely one.
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A Course in Miracles
WORKBOOK
Part II
Introduction
1
Words will mean little now. We use them but as guides on which we do not now depend. For now we seek direct experience of truth alone. The lessons which remain are merely introductions to the times in which we leave the world of pain and go to enter peace. Now we begin to reach the goal this course has set and find the end toward which our practicing was geared.
2
Now we attempt to let the exercise be merely a beginning. For we wait in quiet expectation for our God and Father. He has promised He will take the final step Himself. And we are sure His promises are kept. We have come far along the road, and now we wait for Him. We will continue spending time with Him each morning and at night, as long as makes us happy. We will not consider time a matter of duration now. We use as much as we will need for the result that we desire. Nor will we forget our hourly remembrance in between, calling to God when we have need of Him as we are tempted to forget our goal.
3
We will continue with a central thought for all the days to come. And we will use that thought to introduce our times of rest and calm our minds at need. Yet we will not content ourselves with simple practicing in the remaining holy instants which conclude the year that we have given God. We say some simple words of welcome and expect our Father to reveal Himself as He has promised. We have called on Him, and He has promised that His Son will not remain unanswered when he calls His Name.
4
Now do we come to Him with but His Word upon our minds and hearts. And wait for Him to take the step to us that He has told us, through His Voice, He would not fail to take when we invited Him. He has not left His Son in all his madness nor betrayed His trust in him. Has not His faithfulness earned Him the invitation that He seeks to make us happy? We will offer it, and it will be accepted. So our times with Him will now be spent. We say the words of invitation that His Voice suggests, and then we wait for Him to come to us.
5
Now is the time of prophecy fulfilled. Now are all ancient promises upheld and fully kept. No step remains for time to separate from its accomplishment. For now we cannot fail. Sit silently and wait upon your Father. He has willed to come to you when you have recognized it is your will He do so. And you could have never come this far unless you saw, however dimly, that it is your will.
6
I am so close to you we cannot fail. Father, we give these holy times to You in gratitude to Him Who taught us how to leave the world of sorrow in exchange for its replacement given us by You. We look not backward now. We look ahead and fix our eyes upon the journey's end. Accept these little gifts of thanks from us, as through Christ's vision we behold a world beyond the one we made and take that world to be the full replacement of our own.
7
And now we wait in silence, unafraid and certain of Your coming. We have sought to find our way by following the Guide You sent to us. We did not know the way, but You did not forget us. And we know that You will not forget us now. We ask but that Your ancient promises be kept which are Your Will to keep. We will with You in asking this. The Father and the Son, Whose holy Will created all that is, can fail in nothing. In this certainty, we undertake these last few steps to You and rest in confidence upon Your Love, Which will not fail the Son who calls to You.
8
And so we start upon the final part of this one holy year which we have spent together in the search for truth and God, Who is its one Creator. We have found the way He chose for us and made the choice to follow it as He would have us go. His hand has held us up. His Thoughts have lit the darkness of our minds. His Love has called to us unceasingly since time began.
9
We had a wish that God would fail to have the Son whom He created for Himself. We wanted God to change Himself and be what we would make of Him. And we believed that our insane desires were the truth. Now we are glad that this is all undone, and we no longer think illusions true. The memory of God is shimmering across the wide horizons of our minds. A moment more, and it will rise again. A moment more, and we who are God's Sons are safely home, where He would have us be.
10
Now is the need for practice almost done. For in this final section we will come to understand that we need only call to God and all temptations disappear. Instead of words, we need but feel His Love. Instead of prayer, we need but call His Name. Instead of judging, we need but be still and let all things be healed. We will accept the way God's plan will end, as we received the way it started. Now it is complete. This year has brought us to eternity.
11
One further use for words we still retain. From time to time, instructions on a theme of special relevance will intersperse our daily lessons and the periods of wordless, deep experience which should come afterwards. These special thoughts should be reviewed each day, each one of them to be continued till the next is given you. They should be slowly read and thought about a little while, preceding one of the holy and blessed instants in the day. We give the first of these instructions now.
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A Course in Miracles
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Part II
What is Forgiveness
1
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 about 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.
2
An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. 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?
3
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.
4
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.
5
Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior 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.
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A Course in Miracles
WORKBOOK
Lesson 221
Peace to my mind. Let all my thoughts be still.
1
Father, I come to You today to seek the peace that You alone can give. I come in silence. In the quiet of my heart, the deep recesses of my mind, I wait and listen for Your Voice. My Father, speak to me today. I come to hear Your Voice in silence and in certainty and love, sure You will hear my call and answer me.
2
Now do we wait in quiet. God is here because we wait together. I am sure that He will speak to you, and you will hear. Accept my confidence, for it is yours. Our minds are joined. We wait with one intent—to hear our Father's answer to our call, to let our thoughts be still and find His peace, to hear Him speak to us of what we are, and to reveal Himself unto His Son.
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ACIM Edmonton
Sarah's Reflections
Lesson 221
Peace to my mind. Let all my thoughts be still.
Our Father comes to us in the stillness of our minds. In this stillness, we meet Him. It is our invitation to Him, and through our trust and faith, He is always there, as close as our breath. Left to itself, the mind continually ruminates on the past and focuses on the future. Thoughts go around and around in our minds until deep ruts develop in our thought processes, and we obsess about things that have happened in the past, or we fear what might happen. This keeps us from the truth of what we are and keeps us from the peace that is ever-present but blocked by our thoughts.
"There is no peace except the peace of God."
(W.200) Today, we seek this peace that He alone can give. (W.221.1.1) For us to enter this place of silence and stillness takes a lot of mind training. When we started the Course, most of us were totally unaware that there is a part of the mind outside of the ego thought system. Another way to look at this is to see that our egoic thoughts are like a software program, somehow inserted into our hard drive. Thus, it elicits all kinds of feelings and reactions that seemed "natural." This is the nature of the conditioned mind, where we have learned we are something we are not. In other words, we have deceived ourselves as to who we really are. When our false thoughts about ourselves are changed, our experience in the world changes as well. We learn that changing our thoughts requires forgiveness. We are not exchanging one illusory thought for another, but we are becoming aware of our misperceptions and bringing them to the Holy Spirit. The darkness of our thoughts, when brought to the light of Truth, cannot remain.
This is what Course-based forgiveness is. It is about releasing judgments and recognizing that
"what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred."
(W.PII.Q1.1.1) Of course, this would only make sense in the context of the world’s unreality. If everything we see in our brother is a projection of our own guilt and self-attack, bringing those projections back to our own mind is how the healing can happen. With it comes the recognition that we too are as guiltless as our brothers. When we no longer engage with our thoughts but simply watch them go by without judgment, we become the observer of those thoughts. The one observing is not the false self. It is the ever-present awareness. It is a place of perfect peace, perfect stillness, and perfect quietness. When we connect with this place, we rest from the seeming demands of the world and the body. With it comes a feeling of gentle, soft expansion of peace, beauty, and joy.
Jesus waits with us. He has joined us in our meditation time.
"God is here, because we wait together."
(W.221.2.2) Jesus asks us to accept his confidence. Why? He asks this because he says his confidence is ours. We are the same.
"Our minds are joined."
(W.221.2.5) There is no separation. Jesus is the symbol of the part of the mind that has accepted the truth. He says he is like us. The only difference between us is that we do not know we are equal to him. He is helping us to recognize this, as we learn from him to undo the ego thought system through forgiveness.
In Chapter 19, Jesus asks us to forgive him.
"I ask for your forgiveness, for if you are guilty, so must I be. But if I surmounted guilt and overcame the world, you were with me. Would you see in me the symbol of guilt or of the end of guilt, remembering that what I signify to you you see within yourself?"
(T.19.IV.B.6.4-6) (ACIM OE T.19.V.b.65) Why would he say this? He says this because if we perceive that he has something that we do not have, we are acknowledging separation as real. If he is innocent and the rest of us are guilty, it would mean that deep down we believe that he has something special that we do not. If that is the case, it would mean that he must be more special, and thus we make him guilty. Specialness, in the Course, is all about our brother taking something from us that rightly belongs to us. The undoing of this perception is what forgiveness is about. It is the recognition of our sameness with Jesus and all our brothers, without exception. How could there be differences with anyone, except in the dream, if we are all One Self? The process of forgiveness is the process of coming to the recognition day-by-day that we are the Christ Self.
This is how we come to know who we are as unlimited beings of light and love. We do so by applying this teaching to our everyday experiences and the people and situations we encounter in our lives. It is our way back to what we are in truth. Yes, there is tremendous resistance because we are so invested in our individuality and specialness, which we defend vociferously. It is why Jesus urges us to be gentle with ourselves and to take the process step-by-step. Nothing is demanded of us. We can take all the time we need. We are not guilty if we have resistance or even if we need to lay the Course down for a while. But, as we take the steps given to us daily in these practices, they take us closer to the peace we crave.
We can only achieve real happiness through forgiveness, based on the willingness to look at the beliefs we hold. It is all about coming to the recognition that our judgments are always wrong. In fact, we must come to the recognition that everything we think is wrong. All our thinking comes from being deceived in who we think we are. Byron Katie challenges our thinking by asking, "Who would you be without that thought?"
We are now in touch with the Teacher within in the right mind that knows what we are. When we turn to Him, we turn away from the incessant noise of the ego and trust in guidance. We do not look to the brain to figure things out, but turn to the Holy Spirit for His interpretation. How am I to see this person. How am I to respond to this situation. And what am I to do, if anything, with regard to this perceived problem?
We will not hear the Voice for Truth while our minds are in turmoil, but neither can we force stillness onto our minds. Our job is simply to look at our thoughts and feelings without judging them, denying them, repressing them, or projecting them. We bring our thoughts to awareness simply by looking at them without guilt or self-judgment, and then the Holy Spirit does the rest, as we willingly hand them over to Him.
We cannot heal our own minds. To try to do so will defeat us because the ego will never undo itself. We must let go of our way and turn to the One Who knows. It requires surrender, which we may see as a defeat, yet it is to give up nothing to gain everything. We cannot reach the stillness within by our own efforts. We must take the hand of Jesus and invite him to go with us through the darkness. The ego tells us not to go there, as all we will find is the darkness. But Jesus assures us that while we cannot circumvent the darkness, the light is just beyond it. The ego is afraid of this light, as it knows it signals its end.
Our part is to do the work to bring awareness to our thoughts as they come up and ask for Jesus to join us in this process so we can reach the quiet center within, where all truth abides. Forgiveness is easy because it is done for us. Our part is only to bring the darkness to the light, and then trust that everything else will be done for us.
There is no need to do more than this. We do not need to understand anything further about the process. In fact, Jesus says,
"For this is but another way in which you would still try to keep understanding to yourself."
(T.16.II.2.3) (ACIM OE T.16.III.11) And later he says,
"You do not understand what you accepted, but remember that your understanding is not necessary."
(T.18.III.4.11) (ACIM OE T.18.IV.27) We think we need to understand how all this happens, but again, Jesus says that our problem is,
"You are still convinced that your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and makes it what it is."
(T.18.IV.7.5) (ACIM OE T.18.V.39) That is why we are told in Chapter 18 VII (ACIM OE T 18 VIII)
"I Need do Nothing,"
meaning there is nothing we can do to change the truth of what we are. The only part we play is to bring to the light the thoughts that block the truth of our Being and to continue to surrender what we think we know.
Today, when worry thoughts occupy your mind, or you feel anxious or distressed about anything, take a moment to step back, look at the thoughts, give up the story of what brought them about, accept the feelings, and trust that when they are given over to the Holy Spirit, you can now rest in God. When I feel upset about anything, or start planning or obsessing about something, I remember this Lesson and find that it is a wonderful invitation to my mind to step back and be willing to accept that I just don’t know. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves over and over, as each interfering thought comes to obsessively occupy our minds, that we can choose peace. With practice, we can learn to let these thoughts go. They have no substance, but when we hold onto them, they obstruct our peace. Why would we want to keep them? It seems that these thoughts have value to us, or we would not hold onto them. The perceived value is that they define who we think we are, and they keep us invested in the illusion. That is precisely why we stubbornly insist on working out our own problems in form, instead of turning to the quiet Answer. This is the nature of resistance. We think we know better.
In the introduction to the prayers in Part II of the workbook, we are told that:
"We say some simple words of welcome, and expect our Father to reveal Himself, as He has promised."
(W.P.II.IN.3.3)
"We say the words of invitation that His Voice suggests, and then we wait for Him to come to us."
(W.P.II.IN.4.6)
It is a prayerful time that we spend in preparation of our minds, where we speak directly to our Father, then wait with silent expectancy, bringing our minds back into focus with the Lesson when our thoughts start to wander. It takes practice, so do not be discouraged by your interfering thoughts. We are still practicing the process of watching our thoughts and releasing them to the truth.
While we still use our structured practice, our dependence on the structure of the Lessons may have diminished by now; but, we must still stay vigilant throughout the day and be willing to continually invite the Holy Spirit in. We trust that He is always there in every situation because He is in our minds. Increasingly, we are recognizing that it is all mind. Everything and everyone we perceive is a reflection of our own mind. The Holy Spirit is simply a symbol of the light within our minds, rather than something separate from us.
And now we are looking at,
"What is Forgiveness?"
(W.PII.Q1) as questions are answered for us in this second part of the workbook, where
"Words will mean little now."
(W.PII.IN.1.1)
I will comment further on this introduction and the question of forgiveness in the commentaries for the next few days.
Love and blessings, Sarah
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