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The love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers, and God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.
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Workbook for Students
Review III
Introduction
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1 Our third review begins today. We will review two of the last 20 ideas each day until we have reviewed them all. We will observe a special format for these practice periods which you are urged to follow as closely as you can. We understand, of course, that it may be impossible for you to undertake what is suggested here as optimal each day and every hour of the day.
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Workbook for Students
Lesson 114
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1 For morning and evening review:
[97]
I am Spirit.
2
I am the Son of God. No body can contain my spirit nor impose on me a limitation God created not.
[98]
I will accept my part in God's plan for salvation.
3
What can my function be but to accept the Word of God, Who has created me, for what I am and will forever be?
4 On the hour:
5
I am Spirit.
6 On the half hour:
7
I will accept my part in God's plan for salvation.
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Lesson ARCHIVE
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Course in Miracles
Original Edition
Text
Chapter 9
The Correction of Error
XI. The Denial of God
par 93-107
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93 The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. Joy is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to him. Depression means that you have foresworn God. Men are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not know what it means. They do not realize that to deny God is to deny their
own identity, and in this sense the wages of sin
is death. The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its opposite, as
all forms of denial replace what
is with what is
not. No one can really do this, but that you can
think you can and believe you
have is beyond dispute.
94 Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others,
and not yourself, have done this to you. You will receive the message you give because it is the message you
want. You may believe that you judge your brothers by the messages they give
you, but
you have judged
them by the message you give to
them. Do not attribute your denial of joy to them, or you cannot see the spark in them that could bring joy to
you. It is the
denial of the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers
without it, you
are denying God.
95 Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. But consider what this means to
you. Unless you are sick, you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in sickness could you possibly
want them. Blasphemy, then, is
self-destructive,
not God-destructive. It means that you are willing
not to know yourself
in order to be sick. This is the offering which your god demands because, having made him out of
your insanity, he is an insane idea. He has many forms, but although he may seem like many different things, he is but one idea—the denial of God.
96 Sickness and death entered the mind of God's Son
against His Will. The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression, he made the god of depression. This was his alternative to joy, because he would not accept the fact that, although he was a creator, he had been created. Yet the Son
is helpless without the Father, Who alone is his help. We said before that of yourselves you can do nothing, but you are not
of yourselves. If you were, what you have made would be true, and you could
never escape.
97 It is
because you did not make yourselves that you need be troubled by nothing. Your gods are nothing because your Father did not create them. You cannot make creators who are unlike your Creator any more than He could have created a Son who was unlike Him. If creation is sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what it
is. Depression is isolation, and so it could not have
been created.
98 Son of God, you have not sinned, but you
have been much mistaken. Yet this can be corrected, and God will help you,
knowing that you could not sin against Him. You denied Him
because you loved Him, knowing that if you
recognized your love for Him, you
could not deny Him. Your denial of Him therefore means that you love Him and that you know
He loves
you. Remember that what you deny, you
must have known. And if you accept denial, you can accept its
undoing.
99 Your Father has not denied you. He does not retaliate, but He
does call to you to return. When you think He has not answered your call,
you have not answered
His. He calls to you from every part of the Sonship because of His love for His Son. If you
hear His message, He has answered you, and you will learn of Him if you hear aright. The love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers, and God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.
100 Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the
acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him, you will
know that He has never ceased to acknowledge
you and that in His acknowledgment of you lies your Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you
can confuse yourself with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this
is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His creation, from which He cannot
be separated. Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you
are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him?
101 If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. Yet to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father
is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your
own mind because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.
102 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. To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. When you denied Him,
you were insane. Would you have Him
share your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?
103 Out of your gifts to Him, the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. His Son removed himself
from His gift by refusing to accept what had been created for him and what he himself had created in the Name of his Father. Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling place of God's Son. You are not at home anywhere else or in any other condition. Do not deny yourself the joy which was created for you for the misery you have made for yourselves. God has given you the means for undoing what you have made. Listen, and you
will learn what you are.
104 If God knows His Children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to perceive them as guilty. If God knows His Children as wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. If God knows His Children to be wholly joyous, it is blasphemous to feel depressed. All of these illusions and the many other forms which blasphemy may take are
refusals to accept creation as it is. If God created His Son perfect, that is how you must learn to see him to learn of his reality. And as
part of the Sonship, that is how you must see
yourself to learn of
yours.
105 Do not perceive
anything God did not create, or you are denying
Him. His is the
only Fatherhood, and it is yours only because
He has given it to you. Your gifts to yourself are meaningless, but your gifts to
your creations are like His because they are given in His Name. That is why your creations are as real as His. Yet the real Fatherhood must be acknowledged if the real Son is to be known. You believe that the sick things which you have made are your real creations because you believe that the sick images you perceive
are the Sons of God.
106 Only if you accept the Fatherhood of God will you have
anything because His fatherhood
gave you everything. That is why to deny Him
is to deny yourself. Arrogance is the denial of love because love
shares and arrogance
withholds. As long as both appear to you to be desirable, the concept of choice, which is
not of God, will remain with you. While this is not true in eternity, it
is true in time, so that while time lasts in
your minds, there
will be choices. Time
itself was your choice.
107 If you would remember eternity, you must learn to look
only on the eternal. If you allow yourselves to become preoccupied with the temporal, you
are living in time. As always, your choice is determined by what you value. Time and eternity cannot both be real because they contradict each other. If you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to understand eternity and make it yours.
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ACIM Edmonton
Sarah's Reflections
Lesson 114 ~ Review III
[Review Lessons 97-98]
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"I am spirit. I am the Son of God. No body can contain my spirit, nor impose on me a limitation God created not
.
"
(W.114.(97)1.1-3) I was writing this commentary a few years ago, right after hearing the news that my brother and friend, James, had made his transition. These words registered deep in my mind. They were a beautiful reminder that the body simply can't contain the spirit. All we are is Spirit. The body was made by the ego, seemingly to bind us to the illusion, giving us the apparatus of the eyes, ears, and brain to fool us into thinking that what we see, hear, and process with our brains affirm what is real, but it is not. Now we know we have a choice. We do not have to buy into this dream. We are not limited by what the world shows us and says is true. In fact, what we see and think that we know blocks the truth. This occurs until we recognize that we don't know anything and that everything we have learned about the illusory world is false. Only then are we willing to be taught. Only when we let go of our false beliefs is truth revealed.
Jesus reminds us,
"The lessons you have taught yourself have been so overlearned and fixed they rise like heavy curtains to obscure the simple and the obvious."
(T.31.I.3.4) (ACIM T.31.I.3) Our minds, conditioned by past learning, are not simple and obvious. We have overlearned a very large number of complex messages. This is why the Course seems difficult to us, even though Jesus says it is our first language. The truth is already in our right minds where the Holy Spirit dwells. Our problem is that we have overlearned the false, which is what must be undone.
We think of ourselves as human beings, living in a body, contained by it, and constrained by its limitations. We think that as human beings we can have spiritual experiences from time to time if we are fortunate. We are, in truth, spiritual beings who happen to be dreaming this human existence. In this human existence, we have all kinds of fears, all associated with the body and its vulnerabilities, including the certainty of death. If we truly knew we were spirit, what could we fear? What could limit us? What kind of boundaries could contain what we are? What could then die?
"Salvation seeks to prove there is no death, and only life exists."
(T.29.VII.10.2) (ACIM T.29.VIII.51)
Our spiritual reality is the only one there is. There is nothing outside of God's power, and therefore, we are not outside of God. Even though we believe in the human experience, it can't alter the truth of our being as One Self, united with our Creator. Right now, we experience ourselves as bodies and personalities, so how do we transcend these seeming limitations? What is our path to freedom? Jesus tells us that instead of using our bodies for our own (ego) purposes, they can become a communication vehicle for extending love, and when used for this purpose, they become holy. Thus, we learn about our true nature as love and as spirit, for we receive what we give. We become instruments of healing in the world. Thus, we transcend all limitations.
We learn about the magnificence of the power of His love working through us. This is the basis for what we call the supernatural, although Jesus reminds us,
"Miracles
occur naturally as expressions of love
.
"
(T.1.I.3.1) (ACIM OE T.1.I.3) What is unnatural is the world of the ego. The miracle teaches us that we need not be limited by any laws of this world. Thus, the miracle is not subject to limitations of space and time, and neither are we.
When we accept this, we accept our part in God's plan for salvation. We become channels of His love and peace. We take His Word for what we are instead of hanging onto our own beliefs. Our self-concepts and our self-determined limitations have no reality. I am as God created me. He is the author of my life, not me. When I surrender my authority over my own life, I become ready to take His Word for what I am. That is all He is asking of us. He is asking us to accept His Word for who we are and will always be.
Step back today from your definitions of yourself, all your self-imposed limitations and descriptions, all your self-concepts, all the beliefs in your unworthiness limitations, and realize that all of them are wrong. Why try to fix and improve what is not the truth about you? This is not a self-improvement course. It is not about raising your self-esteem. It is not about becoming worthy for God. This is a course in having all our self-limiting thoughts and beliefs removed by accepting God's Truth. I am Spirit. The body can never contain me. I cannot be limited. God says so. The Atonement Principle affirms that we cannot and have not changed ourselves. As God created us, we still are.
In the Manual for Teachers, Section 25, on psychic powers, we are told that psychic powers are not ends in themselves, but they are there to help free us from limitation by making the illusion of limitation less solid. Even if we don't currently claim to have psychic powers, we have probably all experienced that
"Communication is not limited to the small range of channels the world recognizes
.
"
(M.25.2.2) We have many examples of this in our own lives: when we think of someone and they call; when we forgive someone in our own thoughts by reclaiming our projections and releasing them, and our relationship miraculously shifts in a dramatic way; when we are in the flow and everything comes easily without any intervention or planning on our part; or when we experience miraculous healing. All these kinds of events help us recognize that the limits of the world do not apply.
To have these experiences, we must get out of our own way.
"I will step back and let Him lead the way
.
"
(W.155) As long as we think of ourselves as responsible for our lives, in control and relying on the tiny wings of the sparrow, we limit ourselves and bind ourselves to this illusion. As Jesus says,
"Who would attempt to fly with the tiny wings of a sparrow when the mighty power of an eagle has been given him?"
(M.4.I.2.2) Today, we remind ourselves that we are Spirit, and we have a part to play in God's plan for salvation. Our part is to accept the truth about ourselves, which means I accept you as part of me, and together, we are One Self.
Again, remember to bring the idea to any perceived needs, problems, or concerns that arise during the day. Whenever you are not at peace, apply the idea to any upsets that come up. Look at any limitations in your mind today. If you are not feeling well, recognize that suffering is not part of you. This Lesson, when applied, truly offers us reprieve from whatever we are feeling.
Today, you might want to watch for times when you are missing the practices and deceiving yourself about the other activities and goals you are making more important, recognizing this is resistance. This requires self-reflection and great honesty. The goals we set for ourselves offer us nothing while applying these Lessons offer us everything. How much do we want this? Doing the Lessons diligently can put us on
". . . more solid ground, with firmer footsteps and with stronger faith
.
"
(W.RIII.12.3) (ACIM OE W.RIII.13)
Love and blessings, Sarah
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