ACIM
A Course in Miracles

From the Foundation for Inner Peace: A Course In Miracles (ACIM) is a unique spiritual self-study program designed to awaken us to the truth of our oneness with God and Love.

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acim@nostriches.net

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teachonlylove@getalby.com

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Last Notes

2024-10-26 17:02:59

Lesson 294
My body is a wholly neutral thing.
1. I am a Son of God. ²And can I be another thing as well? ³Did God create the mortal and corruptible? ⁴What use has God’s beloved Son for what must die? ⁵And yet a neutral thing does not see death, for thoughts of fear are not invested there, nor is a mockery of love bestowed upon it. ⁶Its neutrality protects it while it has a use. ⁷And afterwards, without a purpose, it is laid aside. ⁸It is not sick nor old nor hurt. ⁹It is but functionless, unneeded and cast off. ¹⁰Let me not see it more than this today; of service for a while and fit to serve, to keep its usefulness while it can serve, and then to be replaced for greater good.
2. My body, Father, cannot be Your Son. ²And what is not created cannot be sinful nor sinless; neither good nor bad. ³Let me, then, use this dream to help Your plan that we awaken from all dreams we made.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-294/my-body-is-a-wholly-neutral-thing/en/s/713

2024-10-25 17:40:52

Lesson 293
All fear is past and only love is here.
1. All fear is past, because its source is gone, and all its thoughts gone with it. ²Love remains the only present state, whose Source is here forever and forever. ³Can the world seem bright and clear and safe and welcoming, with all my past mistakes oppressing it, and showing me distorted forms of fear? ⁴Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. ⁵All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last.
2. Father, let not Your holy world escape my sight today. ²Nor let my ears be deaf to all the hymns of gratitude the world is singing underneath the sounds of fear. ³There is a real world which the present holds safe from all past mistakes. ⁴And I would see only this world before my eyes today.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-293/all-fear-is-past-and-only-love-is-here/en/s/712

2024-10-16 15:26:28

Lesson 284
I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt.
1. Loss is not loss when properly perceived. ²Pain is impossible. ³There is no grief with any cause at all. ⁴And suffering of any kind is nothing but a dream. ⁵This is the truth, at first to be but said and then repeated many times; and next to be accepted as but partly true, with many reservations. ⁶Then to be considered seriously more and more, and finally accepted as the truth. ⁷I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt. ⁸And I would go beyond these words today, and past all reservations, and arrive at full acceptance of the truth in them.
2. Father, what You have given cannot hurt, so grief and pain must be impossible. ²Let me not fail to trust in You today, accepting but the joyous as Your gifts; accepting but the joyous as the truth.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-284/i-can-elect-to-change-all-thoughts-that-hurt/en/s/702

2024-10-10 14:00:05

Lesson 278
If I am bound, my Father is not free.
1. If I accept that I am prisoner within a body, in a world in which all things that seem to live appear to die, then is my Father prisoner with me. ²And this do I believe, when I maintain the laws the world obeys must I obey; the frailties and the sins which I perceive are real, and cannot be escaped. ³If I am bound in any way, I do not know my Father nor my Self. ⁴And I am lost to all reality. ⁵For truth is free, and what is bound is not a part of truth.
2. Father, I ask for nothing but the truth. ²I have had many foolish thoughts about myself and my creation, and have brought a dream of fear into my mind. ³Today, I would not dream. ⁴I choose the way to You instead of madness and instead of fear. ⁵For truth is safe, and only love is sure.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-278/if-i-am-bound-my-father-is-not-free/en/s/695

2024-10-09 16:04:58

Lesson 277
Let me not bind Your Son with laws I made.
1. Your Son is free, my Father. ²Let me not imagine I have bound him with the laws I made to rule the body. ³He is not subject to any laws I made by which I try to make the body more secure. ⁴He is not changed by what is changeable. ⁵He is not slave to any laws of time. ⁶He is as You created him, because he knows no law except the law of love.
2. Let us not worship idols, nor believe in any law idolatry would make to hide the freedom of the Son of God. ²He is not bound except by his beliefs. ³Yet what he is, is far beyond his faith in slavery or freedom. ⁴He is free because he is his Father’s Son. ⁵And he cannot be bound unless God’s truth can lie, and God can will that He deceive Himself.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-277/let-me-not-bind-your-son-with-laws-i-made/en/s/694

2024-10-07 17:29:15

Lesson 275
God’s healing Voice protects all things today.
1. Let us today attend the Voice for God, which speaks an ancient lesson, no more true today than any other day. ²Yet has this day been chosen as the time when we will seek and hear and learn and understand. ³Join me in hearing. ⁴For the Voice for God tells us of things we cannot understand alone, nor learn apart. ⁵It is in this that all things are protected. ⁶And in this the healing of the Voice for God is found.
2. Your healing Voice protects all things today, and so I leave all things to You. ²I need be anxious over nothing. ³For Your Voice will tell me what to do and where to go; to whom to speak and what to say to him, what thoughts to think, what words to give the world. ⁴The safety that I bring is given me. ⁵Father, Your Voice protects all things through me.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-275/gods-healing-voice-protects-all-things-today/en/s/692

2024-10-06 22:06:47

Lesson 274
Today belongs to love. Let me not fear.
1. Father, today I would let all things be as You created them, and give Your Son the honor due his sinlessness; the love of brother to his brother and his Friend. ²Through this I am redeemed. ³Through this as well the truth will enter where illusions were, light will replace all darkness, and Your Son will know he is as You created him.
2. A special blessing comes to us today, from Him Who is our Father. ²Give this day to Him, and there will be no fear today, because the day is given unto love.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-274/today-belongs-to-love-let-me-not-fear/en/s/691

2024-10-04 16:04:37

Lesson 272
How can illusions satisfy God’s Son?
1. Father, the truth belongs to me. ²My home is set in Heaven by Your Will and mine. ³Can dreams content me? ⁴Can illusions bring me happiness? ⁵What but Your memory can satisfy Your Son? ⁶I will accept no less than You have given me. ⁷I am surrounded by Your Love, forever still, forever gentle and forever safe. ⁸God’s Son must be as You created him.
2. Today we pass illusions by. ²And if we hear temptation call to us to stay and linger in a dream, we turn aside and ask ourselves if we, the Sons of God, could be content with dreams, when Heaven can be chosen just as easily as hell, and love will happily replace all fear.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-272/how-can-illusions-satisfy-gods-son/en/s/689

2024-10-02 14:46:05

Lesson 270
I will not use the body’s eyes today.
1. Father, Christ’s vision is Your gift to me, and it has power to translate all that the body’s eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world. ²How glorious and gracious is this world! ³Yet how much more will I perceive in it than sight can give. ⁴The world forgiven signifies Your Son acknowledges his Father, lets his dreams be brought to truth, and waits expectantly the one remaining instant more of time which ends forever, as Your memory returns to him. ⁵And now his will is one with Yours. ⁶His function now is but Your Own, and every thought except Your Own is gone.
2. The quiet of today will bless our hearts, and through them peace will come to everyone. ²Christ is our eyes today. ³And through His sight we offer healing to the world through Him, the holy Son whom God created whole; the holy Son whom God created one.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-270/i-will-not-use-the-bodys-eyes-today/en/s/686

2024-10-01 14:49:36

Lesson 269
My sight goes forth to look upon Christ’s face.
1. I ask Your blessing on my sight today. ²It is the means which You have chosen to become the way to show me my mistakes, and look beyond them. ³It is given me to find a new perception through the Guide You gave to me, and through His lessons to surpass perception and return to truth. ⁴I ask for the illusion which transcends all those I made. ⁵Today I choose to see a world forgiven, in which everyone shows me the face of Christ, and teaches me that what I look upon belongs to me; that nothing is, except Your holy Son.
2. Today our sight is blessed indeed. ²We share one vision, as we look upon the face of Him Whose Self is ours. ³We are one because of Him Who is the Son of God; of Him Who is our own Identity.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-269/my-sight-goes-forth-to-look-upon-christs-face/en/s/685

2024-09-30 18:53:46

Lesson 268
Let all things be exactly as they are.
1. Let me not be Your critic, Lord, today, and judge against You. ²Let me not attempt to interfere with Your creation, and distort it into sickly forms. ³Let me be willing to withdraw my wishes from its unity, and thus to let it be as You created it. ⁴For thus will I be able, too, to recognize my Self as You created me. ⁵In love was I created, and in love will I remain forever. ⁶What can frighten me, when I let all things be exactly as they are?
2. Let not our sight be blasphemous today, nor let our ears attend to lying tongues. ²Only reality is free of pain. ³Only reality is free of loss. ⁴Only reality is wholly safe. ⁵And it is only this we seek today.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-268/let-all-things-be-exactly-as-they-are/en/s/684

2024-09-29 16:29:28

Lesson 267
My heart is beating in the peace of God.
1. Surrounding me is all the life that God created in His Love. ²It calls to me in every heartbeat and in every breath; in every action and in every thought. ³Peace fills my heart, and floods my body with the purpose of forgiveness. ⁴Now my mind is healed, and all I need to save the world is given me. ⁵Each heartbeat brings me peace; each breath infuses me with strength. ⁶I am a messenger of God, directed by His Voice, sustained by Him in love, and held forever quiet and at peace within His loving Arms. ⁷Each heartbeat calls His Name, and every one is answered by His Voice, assuring me I am at home in Him.
2. Let me attend Your Answer, not my own. ²Father, my heart is beating in the peace the Heart of Love created. ³It is there and only there that I can be at home.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-267/my-heart-is-beating-in-the-peace-of-god/en/s/683

2024-09-28 02:56:12

Lesson 266
My holy Self abides in you, God’s Son.
1. Father, You gave me all Your Sons, to be my saviors and my counselors in sight; the bearers of Your holy Voice to me. ²In them are You reflected, and in them does Christ look back upon me from my Self. ³Let not Your Son forget Your holy Name. ⁴Let not Your Son forget his holy Source. ⁵Let not Your Son forget his Name is Yours.
2. This day we enter into Paradise, calling upon God’s Name and on our own, acknowledging our Self in each of us; united in the holy Love of God. ²How many saviors God has given us! ³How can we lose the way to Him, when He has filled the world with those who point to Him, and given us the sight to look on them?
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-266/my-holy-self-abides-in-you-gods-son/en/s/682

2024-09-27 19:27:20

Lesson 265
Creation’s gentleness is all I see.
1. I have indeed misunderstood the world, because I laid my sins on it and saw them looking back at me. ²How fierce they seemed! ³And how deceived was I to think that what I feared was in the world, instead of in my mind alone. ⁴Today I see the world in the celestial gentleness with which creation shines. ⁵There is no fear in it. ⁶Let no appearance of my sins obscure the light of Heaven shining on the world. ⁷What is reflected there is in God’s Mind. ⁸The images I see reflect my thoughts. ⁹Yet is my mind at one with God’s. ¹⁰And so I can perceive creation’s gentleness.
2. In quiet would I look upon the world, which but reflects Your Thoughts, and mine as well. ²Let me remember that they are the same, and I will see creation’s gentleness.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-265/creations-gentleness-is-all-i-see/en/s/681

2024-09-26 14:50:48

Lesson 264
I am surrounded by the Love of God.
1. Father, You stand before me and behind, beside me, in the place I see myself, and everywhere I go. ²You are in all the things I look upon, the sounds I hear, and every hand that reaches for my own. ³In You time disappears, and place becomes a meaningless belief. ⁴For what surrounds Your Son and keeps him safe is Love itself. ⁵There is no source but this, and nothing is that does not share its holiness; that stands beyond Your one creation, or without the Love which holds all things within itself. ⁶Father, Your Son is like Yourself. ⁷We come to You in Your Own Name today, to be at peace within Your everlasting Love.
2. My brothers, join with me in this today. ²This is salvation’s prayer. ³Must we not join in what will save the world, along with us?
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-264/i-am-surrounded-by-the-love-of-god/en/s/680

2024-09-23 14:23:01

Lesson 262
Let me perceive no differences today.
1. Father, You have one Son. ²And it is he that I would look upon today. ³He is Your one creation. ⁴Why should I perceive a thousand forms in what remains as one? ⁵Why should I give this one a thousand names, when only one suffices? ⁶For Your Son must bear Your Name, for You created him. ⁷Let me not see him as a stranger to his Father, nor as stranger to myself. ⁸For he is part of me and I of him, and we are part of You Who are our Source, eternally united in Your Love; eternally the holy Son of God.
2. We who are one would recognize this day the truth about ourselves. ²We would come home, and rest in unity. ³For there is peace, and nowhere else can peace be sought and found.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-262/let-me-perceive-no-differences-today/en/s/678

2024-09-22 15:13:19

Lesson 261
God is my refuge and security.
1. I will identify with what I think is refuge and security. ²I will behold myself where I perceive my strength, and think I live within the citadel where I am safe and cannot be attacked. ³Let me today seek not security in danger, nor attempt to find my peace in murderous attack. ⁴I live in God. ⁵In Him I find my refuge and my strength. ⁶In Him is my Identity. ⁷In Him is everlasting peace. ⁸And only there will I remember Who I really am.
2. Let me not seek for idols. ²I would come, my Father, home to You today. ³I choose to be as You created me, and find the Son whom You created as my Self.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-261/god-is-my-refuge-and-security/en/s/677

2024-09-18 15:18:24

Lesson 257
Let me remember what my purpose is.
1. If I forget my goal I can be but confused, unsure of what I am, and thus conflicted in my actions. ²No one can serve contradicting goals and serve them well. ³Nor can he function without deep distress and great depression. ⁴Let us therefore be determined to remember what we want today, that we may unify our thoughts and actions meaningfully, and achieve only what God would have us do this day.
2. Father, forgiveness is Your chosen means for our salvation. ²Let us not forget today that we can have no will but Yours. ³And thus our purpose must be Yours as well, if we would reach the peace You will for us.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-257/let-me-remember-what-my-purpose-is/en/s/672

2024-09-16 18:44:06

Lesson 255
This day I choose to spend in perfect peace.
1. It does not seem to me that I can choose to have but peace today. ²And yet, my God assures me that His Son is like Himself. ³Let me this day have faith in Him Who says I am God’s Son. ⁴And let the peace I choose be mine today bear witness to the truth of what He says. ⁵God’s Son can have no cares, and must remain forever in the peace of Heaven. ⁶In His Name, I give today to finding what my Father wills for me, accepting it as mine, and giving it to all my Father’s Sons, along with me.
2. And so, my Father, would I pass this day with You. ²Your Son has not forgotten You. ³The peace You gave him still is in his mind, and it is there I choose to spend today.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-255/this-day-i-choose-to-spend-in-perfect-peace/en/s/670

2024-09-13 17:40:05

Lesson 252
The Son of God is my Identity.
1. My Self is holy beyond all the thoughts of holiness of which I now conceive. ²Its shimmering and perfect purity is far more brilliant than is any light that I have ever looked upon. ³Its love is limitless, with an intensity that holds all things within it, in the calm of quiet certainty. ⁴Its strength comes not from burning impulses which move the world, but from the boundless Love of God Himself. ⁵How far beyond this world my Self must be, and yet how near to me and close to God!
2. Father, You know my true Identity. ²Reveal It now to me who am Your Son, that I may waken to the truth in You, and know that Heaven is restored to me.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-252/the-son-of-god-is-my-identity/en/s/667

2024-09-11 13:37:31

Lesson 250
Let me not see myself as limited.
1. Let me behold the Son of God today, and witness to his glory. ²Let me not try to obscure the holy light in him, and see his strength diminished and reduced to frailty; nor perceive the lacks in him with which I would attack his sovereignty.
2. He is Your Son, my Father. ²And today I would behold his gentleness instead of my illusions. ³He is what I am, and as I see him so I see myself. ⁴Today I would see truly, that this day I may at last identify with him.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-250/let-me-not-see-myself-as-limited/en/s/664

2024-09-09 14:43:29

Lesson 248
Whatever suffers is not part of me.
1. I have disowned the truth. ²Now let me be as faithful in disowning falsity. ³Whatever suffers is not part of me. ⁴What grieves is not myself. ⁵What is in pain is but illusion in my mind. ⁶What dies was never living in reality, and did but mock the truth about myself. ⁷Now I disown self-concepts and deceits and lies about the holy Son of God. ⁸Now am I ready to accept him back as God created him, and as he is.
2. Father, my ancient love for You returns, and lets me love Your Son again as well. ²Father, I am as You created me. ³Now is Your Love remembered, and my own. ⁴Now do I understand that they are one.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-248/whatever-suffers-is-not-part-of-me/en/s/662

2024-09-08 15:53:40

Lesson 247
Without forgiveness I will still be blind.
1. Sin is the symbol of attack. ²Behold it anywhere, and I will suffer. ³For forgiveness is the only means whereby Christ’s vision comes to me. ⁴Let me accept what His sight shows me as the simple truth, and I am healed completely. ⁵Brother, come and let me look on you. ⁶Your loveliness reflects my own. ⁷Your sinlessness is mine. ⁸You stand forgiven, and I stand with you.
2. So would I look on everyone today. ²My brothers are Your Sons. ³Your Fatherhood created them, and gave them all to me as part of You, and my own Self as well. ⁴Today I honor You through them, and thus I hope this day to recognize my Self.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-247/without-forgiveness-i-will-still-be-blind/en/s/661

2024-09-07 16:23:51

Lesson 246
To love my Father is to love His Son.
1. Let me not think that I can find the way to God, if I have hatred in my heart. ²Let me not try to hurt God’s Son, and think that I can know his Father or my Self. ³Let me not fail to recognize myself, and still believe that my awareness can contain my Father, or my mind conceive of all the love my Father has for me, and all the love which I return to Him.
2. I will accept the way You choose for me to come to You, my Father. ²For in that will I succeed, because it is Your Will. ³And I would recognize that what You will is what I will as well, and only that. ⁴And so I choose to love Your Son. ⁵Amen.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-246/to-love-my-father-is-to-love-his-son/en/s/660

2024-09-01 20:10:06

Lesson 240
Fear is not justified in any form.
1. Fear is deception. ²It attests that you have seen yourself as you could never be, and therefore look upon a world which is impossible. ³Not one thing in this world is true. ⁴It does not matter what the form in which it may appear. ⁵It witnesses but to your own illusions of yourself. ⁶Let us not be deceived today. ⁷We are the Sons of God. ⁸There is no fear in us, for we are each a part of Love Itself.
2. How foolish are our fears! ²Would You allow Your Son to suffer? ³Give us faith today to recognize Your Son, and set him free. ⁴Let us forgive him in Your Name, that we may understand his holiness, and feel the love for him which is Your Own as well.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-240/fear-is-not-justified-in-any-form/en/s/653

2024-08-31 15:15:20

Lesson 239
The glory of my Father is my own.
1. Let not the truth about ourselves today be hidden by a false humility. ²Let us instead be thankful for the gifts our Father gave us. ³Can we see in those with whom He shares His glory any trace of sin and guilt? ⁴And can it be that we are not among them, when He loves His Son forever and with perfect constancy, knowing he is as He created him?
2. We thank You, Father, for the light that shines forever in us. ²And we honor it, because You share it with us. ³We are one, united in this light and one with You, at peace with all creation and ourselves.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-239/the-glory-of-my-father-is-my-own/en/s/652

2024-08-25 17:32:44

Lesson 233
I give my life to God to guide today.
1. Father, I give You all my thoughts today. ²I would have none of mine. ³In place of them, give me Your Own. ⁴I give You all my acts as well, that I may do Your Will instead of seeking goals which cannot be obtained, and wasting time in vain imaginings. ⁵Today I come to You. ⁶I will step back and merely follow You. ⁷Be You the Guide, and I the follower who questions not the wisdom of the Infinite, nor Love whose tenderness I cannot comprehend, but which is yet Your perfect gift to me.
2. Today we have one Guide to lead us on. ²And as we walk together, we will give this day to Him with no reserve at all. ³This is His day. ⁴And so it is a day of countless gifts and mercies unto us.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-233/i-give-my-life-to-god-to-guide-today/en/s/646

2024-08-23 18:06:00

Lesson 231
Father, I will but to remember You.
1. What can I seek for, Father, but Your Love? ²Perhaps I think I seek for something else; a something I have called by many names. ³Yet is Your Love the only thing I seek, or ever sought. ⁴For there is nothing else that I could ever really want to find. ⁵Let me remember You. ⁶What else could I desire but the truth about myself?
2. This is your will, my brother. ²And you share this will with me, and with the One as well Who is our Father. ³To remember Him is Heaven. ⁴This we seek. ⁵And only this is what it will be given us to find.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-231/father-i-will-but-to-remember-you/en/s/644

2024-08-23 02:18:36

Lesson 230
Now will I seek and find the peace of God.
1. In peace I was created. ²And in peace do I remain. ³It is not given me to change my Self. ⁴How merciful is God my Father, that when He created me He gave me peace forever. ⁵Now I ask but to be what I am. ⁶And can this be denied me, when it is forever true?
2. Father, I seek the peace You gave as mine in my creation. ²What was given then must be here now, for my creation was apart from time, and still remains beyond all change. ³The peace in which Your Son was born into Your Mind is shining there unchanged. ⁴I am as You created me. ⁵I need but call on You to find the peace You gave. ⁶It is Your Will that gave it to Your Son.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-230/now-will-i-seek-and-find-the-peace-of-god/en/s/642

2024-08-23 02:17:32

Lesson 229
Love, which created me, is what I am.
1. I seek my own Identity, and find It in these words: “Love, which created me, is what I am.” ²Now need I seek no more. ³Love has prevailed. ⁴So still It waited for my coming home, that I will turn away no longer from the holy face of Christ. ⁵And what I look upon attests the truth of the Identity I sought to lose, but which my Father has kept safe for me.
2. Father, my thanks to You for what I am; for keeping my Identity untouched and sinless, in the midst of all the thoughts of sin my foolish mind made up. ²And thanks to You for saving me from them. ³Amen.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-229/love-which-created-me-is-what-i-am/en/s/641

2024-08-20 14:43:02

Lesson 228
God has condemned me not. No more do I.
1. My Father knows my holiness. ²Shall I deny His knowledge, and believe in what His knowledge makes impossible? ³Shall I accept as true what He proclaims as false? ⁴Or shall I take His Word for what I am, since He is my Creator, and the One Who knows the true condition of His Son?
2. Father, I was mistaken in myself, because I failed to realize the Source from which I came. ²I have not left that Source to enter in a body and to die. ³My holiness remains a part of me, as I am part of You. ⁴And my mistakes about myself are dreams. ⁵I let them go today. ⁶And I stand ready to receive Your Word alone for what I really am.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-228/god-has-condemned-me-not-no-more-do-i/en/s/640

2024-08-19 14:18:44

Lesson 227
This is my holy instant of release.
1. Father, it is today that I am free, because my will is Yours. ²I thought to make another will. ³Yet nothing that I thought apart from You exists. ⁴And I am free because I was mistaken, and did not affect my own reality at all by my illusions. ⁵Now I give them up, and lay them down before the feet of truth, to be removed forever from my mind. ⁶This is my holy instant of release. ⁷Father, I know my will is one with Yours.
2. And so today we find our glad return to Heaven, which we never really left. ²The Son of God this day lays down his dreams. ³The Son of God this day comes home again, released from sin and clad in holiness, with his right mind restored to him at last.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-227/this-is-my-holy-instant-of-release/en/s/639

2024-08-18 15:21:15

Lesson 226
My home awaits me. I will hasten there.
1. If I so choose, I can depart this world entirely. ²It is not death which makes this possible, but it is change of mind about the purpose of the world. ³If I believe it has a value as I see it now, so will it still remain for me. ⁴But if I see no value in the world as I behold it, nothing that I want to keep as mine or search for as a goal, it will depart from me. ⁵For I have not sought for illusions to replace the truth.
2. Father, my home awaits my glad return. ²Your Arms are open and I hear Your Voice. ³What need have I to linger in a place of vain desires and of shattered dreams, when Heaven can so easily be mine?
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-226/my-home-awaits-me-i-will-hasten-there/en/s/638

2024-08-17 23:01:41

Lesson 225
God is my Father, and His Son loves Him.
1. Father, I must return Your Love for me, for giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me. ²I must return it, for I want it mine in full awareness, blazing in my mind and keeping it within its kindly light, inviolate, beloved, with fear behind and only peace ahead. ³How still the way Your loving Son is led along to You!
2. Brother, we find that stillness now. ²The way is open. ³Now we follow it in peace together. ⁴You have reached your hand to me, and I will never leave you. ⁵We are one, and it is but this oneness that we seek, as we accomplish these few final steps which end a journey that was not begun.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-225/god-is-my-father-and-his-son-loves-him/en/s/637

2024-08-16 14:01:49

Lesson 224
God is my Father, and He loves His Son.
1. My true Identity is so secure, so lofty, sinless, glorious and great, wholly beneficent and free from guilt, that Heaven looks to It to give it light. ²It lights the world as well. ³It is the gift my Father gave to me; the one as well I give the world. ⁴There is no gift but this that can be either given or received. ⁵This is reality, and only this. ⁶This is illusion’s end. ⁷It is the truth.
2. My Name, O Father, still is known to You. ²I have forgotten It, and do not know where I am going, who I am, or what it is I do. ³Remind me, Father, now, for I am weary of the world I see. ⁴Reveal what You would have me see instead.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-224/god-is-my-father-and-he-loves-his-son/en/s/636

2024-08-15 20:10:29

Lesson 223
God is my life. I have no life but His.
1. I was mistaken when I thought I lived apart from God, a separate entity that moved in isolation, unattached, and housed within a body. ²Now I know my life is God’s, I have no other home, and I do not exist apart from Him. ³He has no Thoughts that are not part of me, and I have none but those which are of Him.
2. Our Father, let us see the face of Christ instead of our mistakes. ²For we who are Your holy Son are sinless. ³We would look upon our sinlessness, for guilt proclaims that we are not Your Son. ⁴And we would not forget You longer. ⁵We are lonely here, and long for Heaven, where we are at home. ⁶Today we would return. ⁷Our Name is Yours, and we acknowledge that we are Your Son.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-223/god-is-my-life-i-have-no-life-but-his/en/s/635

2024-08-14 13:47:40

Lesson 222
God is with me. I live and move in Him.
1. God is with me. ²He is my Source of life, the life within, the air I breathe, the food by which I am sustained, the water which renews and cleanses me. ³He is my home, wherein I live and move; the Spirit which directs my actions, offers me Its Thoughts, and guarantees my safety from all pain. ⁴He covers me with kindness and with care, and holds in love the Son He shines upon, who also shines on Him. ⁵How still is he who knows the truth of what He speaks today!
2. Father, we have no words except Your Name upon our lips and in our minds, as we come quietly into Your Presence now, and ask to rest with You in peace a while.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-222/god-is-with-me-i-live-and-move-in-him/en/s/634

2024-08-14 13:47:10

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. ²I come in silence. ³In the quiet of my heart, the deep recesses of my mind, I wait and listen for Your Voice. ⁴My Father, speak to me today. ⁵I 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. ²God is here, because we wait together. ³I am sure that He will speak to you, and you will hear. ⁴Accept my confidence, for it is yours. ⁵Our minds are joined. ⁶We 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.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-221/peace-to-my-mind-let-all-my-thoughts-be-still/en/s/633

2024-08-12 13:16:28

Lesson 220
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (200) There is no peace except the peace of God.
²Let me not wander from the way of peace, for I am lost on other roads than this. ³But let me follow Him Who leads me home, and peace is certain as the Love of God.
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-220/en/s/629

2024-08-11 20:26:20

Lesson 219
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (199) I am not a body. ²I am free.
³I am God’s Son. ⁴Be still, my mind, and think a moment upon this. ⁵And then return to earth, without confusion as to what my Father loves forever as His Son.
⁶I am not a body. ⁷I am free.
⁸For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-219/en/s/628

2024-08-10 20:07:27

Lesson 218
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (198) Only my condemnation injures me.
²My condemnation keeps my vision dark, and through my sightless eyes I cannot see the vision of my glory. ³Yet today I can behold this glory and be glad.
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-218/en/s/627

2024-08-09 13:09:53

Lesson 217
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (197) It can be but my gratitude I earn.
²Who should give thanks for my salvation but myself? ³And how but through salvation can I find the Self to Whom my thanks are due?
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-217/en/s/626

2024-08-07 22:50:58

Lesson 216
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (196) It can be but myself I crucify.
²All that I do I do unto myself. ³If I attack, I suffer. ⁴But if I forgive, salvation will be given me.
⁵I am not a body. ⁶I am free.
⁷For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-216/en/s/625

2024-08-07 22:50:39

Lesson 215
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (195) Love is the way I walk in gratitude.
²The Holy Spirit is my only Guide. ³He walks with me in love. ⁴And I give thanks to Him for showing me the way to go.
⁵I am not a body. ⁶I am free.
⁷For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-215/en/s/624

2024-08-04 19:31:20

Lesson 214
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (194) I place the future in the Hands of God.
²The past is gone; the future is not yet. ³Now am I freed from both. ⁴For what God gives can only be for good. ⁵And I accept but what He gives as what belongs to me.
⁶I am not a body. ⁷I am free.
⁸For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-214/en/s/623

2024-08-03 17:49:57

Lesson 213
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (193) All things are lessons God would have me learn.
²A lesson is a miracle which God offers to me, in place of thoughts I made that hurt me. ³What I learn of Him becomes the way I am set free. ⁴And so I choose to learn His lessons and forget my own.
⁵I am not a body. ⁶I am free.
⁷For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-213/en/s/622

2024-08-02 16:56:37

Lesson 212
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (192) I have a function God would have me fill.
²I seek the function that would set me free from all the vain illusions of the world. ³Only the function God has given me can offer freedom. ⁴Only this I seek, and only this will I accept as mine.
⁵I am not a body. ⁶I am free.
⁷For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-212/en/s/621

2024-08-01 18:08:39

Lesson 211
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (191) I am the holy Son of God Himself.
²In silence and in true humility I seek God’s glory, to behold it in the Son whom He created as my Self.
³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-211/en/s/620

2024-08-01 18:08:18

Lesson 210
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (190) I choose the joy of God instead of pain.
²Pain is my own idea. ³It is not a Thought of God, but one I thought apart from Him and from His Will. ⁴His Will is joy, and only joy for His beloved Son. ⁵And that I choose, instead of what I made.
⁶I am not a body. ⁷I am free.
⁸For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-210/en/s/619

2024-07-30 17:50:27

Lesson 209
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (189) I feel the Love of God within me now.
²The Love of God is what created me. ³The Love of God is everything I am. ⁴The Love of God proclaimed me as His Son. ⁵The Love of God within me sets me free.
⁶I am not a body. ⁷I am free.
⁸For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-209/en/s/618

2024-07-29 13:59:50

Lesson 208
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (188) The peace of God is shining in me now.
²I will be still, and let the earth be still along with me. ³And in that stillness we will find the peace of God. ⁴It is within my heart, which witnesses to God Himself.
⁵I am not a body. ⁶I am free.
⁷For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-208/en/s/617

2024-07-29 13:59:22

Lesson 207
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (187) I bless the world because I bless myself.
²God’s blessing shines upon me from within my heart, where He abides. ³I need but turn to Him, and every sorrow melts away, as I accept His boundless Love for me.
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-207/en/s/616

2024-07-27 23:31:18

Lesson 206
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (186) Salvation of the world depends on me.
²I am entrusted with the gifts of God, because I am His Son. ³And I would give His gifts where He intended them to be.
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-206/en/s/615

2024-07-26 09:38:45

Lesson 205
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (185) I want the peace of God.
²The peace of God is everything I want. ³The peace of God is my one goal; the aim of all my living here, the end I seek, my purpose and my function and my life, while I abide where I am not at home.
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-205/en/s/614

2024-07-25 16:07:52

Lesson 204
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (184) The Name of God is my inheritance.
²God’s Name reminds me that I am His Son, not slave to time, unbound by laws which rule the world of sick illusions, free in God, forever and forever one with Him.
³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-204/en/s/613

2024-07-24 10:28:17

Lesson 203
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (183) I call upon God’s Name and on my own.
²The Name of God is my deliverance from every thought of evil and of sin, because it is my own as well as His.
³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-203/en/s/612

2024-07-23 18:47:47

Lesson 202
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (182) I will be still an instant and go home.
²Why would I choose to stay an instant more where I do not belong, when God Himself has given me His Voice to call me home?
³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-202/en/s/611

2024-07-22 10:33:30

Lesson 201
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (181) I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
²No one but is my brother. ³I am blessed with oneness with the universe and God, my Father, one Creator of the whole that is my Self, forever One with me.
⁴I am not a body. ⁵I am free.
⁶For I am still as God created me.
https://acim.org/acim/review-vi/lesson-201/en/s/610

2024-07-21 23:02:48

Lesson 200
There is no peace except the peace of God.
1. Seek you no further. ²You will not find peace except the peace of God. ³Accept this fact, and save yourself the agony of yet more bitter disappointments, bleak despair, and sense of icy hopelessness and doubt. ⁴Seek you no further. ⁵There is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God, unless you seek for misery and pain.
2. This is the final point to which each one must come at last, to lay aside all hope of finding happiness where there is none; of being saved by what can only hurt; of making peace of chaos, joy of pain, and Heaven out of hell. ²Attempt no more to win through losing, nor to die to live. ³You cannot but be asking for defeat.
3. Yet you can ask as easily for love, for happiness, and for eternal life in peace that has no ending. ²Ask for this, and you can only win. ³To ask for what you have already must succeed. ⁴To ask that what is false be true can only fail. ⁵Forgive yourself for vain imaginings, and seek no longer what you cannot find. ⁶For what could be more foolish than to seek and seek and seek again for hell, when you have but to look with open eyes to find that Heaven lies before you, through a door that opens easily to welcome you?
4. Come home. ²You have not found your happiness in foreign places and in alien forms that have no meaning to you, though you sought to make them meaningful. ³This world is not where you belong. ⁴You are a stranger here. ⁵But it is given you to find the means whereby the world no longer seems to be a prison house or jail for anyone.
5. Freedom is given you where you beheld but chains and iron doors. ²But you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape. ³You will be bound till all the world is seen by you as blessed, and everyone made free of your mistakes and honored as he is. ⁴You made him not; no more yourself. ⁵And as you free the one, the other is accepted as he is.
6. What does forgiveness do? ²In truth it has no function, and does nothing. ³For it is unknown in Heaven. ⁴It is only hell where it is needed, and where it must serve a mighty function. ⁵Is not the escape of God’s beloved Son from evil dreams that he imagines, yet believes are true, a worthy purpose? ⁶Who could hope for more, while there appears to be a choice to make between success and failure; love and fear?
7. There is no peace except the peace of God, because He has one Son who cannot make a world in opposition to God’s Will and to his own, which is the same as His. ²What could he hope to find in such a world? ³It cannot have reality, because it never was created. ⁴Is it here that he would seek for peace? ⁵Or must he see that, as he looks on it, the world can but deceive? ⁶Yet can he learn to look on it another way, and find the peace of God.
8. Peace is the bridge that everyone will cross, to leave this world behind. ²But peace begins within the world perceived as different, and leading from this fresh perception to the gate of Heaven and the way beyond. ³Peace is the answer to conflicting goals, to senseless journeys, frantic, vain pursuits, and meaningless endeavors. ⁴Now the way is easy, sloping gently toward the bridge where freedom lies within the peace of God.
9. Let us not lose our way again today. ²We go to Heaven, and the path is straight. ³Only if we attempt to wander can there be delay, and needless wasted time on thorny byways. ⁴God alone is sure, and He will guide our footsteps. ⁵He will not desert His Son in need, nor let him stray forever from his home. ⁶The Father calls; the Son will hear. ⁷And that is all there is to what appears to be a world apart from God, where bodies have reality.
10. Now is there silence. ²Seek no further. ³You have come to where the road is carpeted with leaves of false desires, fallen from the trees of hopelessness you sought before. ⁴Now are they underfoot. ⁵And you look up and on toward Heaven, with the body’s eyes but serving for an instant longer now. ⁶Peace is already recognized at last, and you can feel its soft embrace surround your heart and mind with comfort and with love.
11. Today we seek no idols. ²Peace can not be found in them. ³The peace of God is ours, and only this will we accept and want. ⁴Peace be to us today. ⁵For we have found a simple, happy way to leave the world of ambiguity, and to replace our shifting goals and solitary dreams with single purpose and companionship. ⁶For peace is union, if it be of God. ⁷We seek no further. ⁸We are close to home, and draw still nearer every time we say:
⁹There is no peace except the peace of God, and I am glad and thankful it is so.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-200/there-is-no-peace-except-the-peace-of-god/en/s/608

2024-07-20 15:45:34

Lesson 199
I am not a body. I am free.
1. Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. ²The body is a limit. ³Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found. ⁴The mind can be made free when it no longer sees itself as in a body, firmly tied to it and sheltered by its presence. ⁵If this were the truth, the mind were vulnerable indeed!
2. The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked. ²Attack thoughts cannot enter such a mind, because it has been given to the Source of love, and fear can never enter in a mind that has attached itself to love. ³It rests in God. ⁴And who can be afraid who lives in Innocence, and only loves?
3. It is essential for your progress in this course that you accept today’s idea, and hold it very dear. ²Be not concerned that to the ego it is quite insane. ³The ego holds the body dear because it dwells in it, and lives united with the home that it has made. ⁴It is a part of the illusion that has sheltered it from being found illusory itself.
4. Here does it hide, and here it can be seen as what it is. ²Declare your innocence and you are free. ³The body disappears, because you have no need of it except the need the Holy Spirit sees. ⁴For this, the body will appear as useful form for what the mind must do. ⁵It thus becomes a vehicle which helps forgiveness be extended to the all-inclusive goal that it must reach, according to God’s plan.
5. Cherish today’s idea, and practice it today and every day. ²Make it a part of every practice period you take. ³There is no thought that will not gain thereby in power to help the world, and none which will not gain in added gifts to you as well. ⁴We sound the call of freedom round the world with this idea. ⁵And would you be exempt from the acceptance of the gifts you give?
6. The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom. ²In Him they have found what they have sought. ³The body’s purpose now is unambiguous. ⁴And it becomes perfect in the ability to serve an undivided goal. ⁵In conflict-free and unequivocal response to mind with but the thought of freedom as its goal, the body serves, and serves its purpose well. ⁶Without the power to enslave, it is a worthy servant of the freedom which the mind within the Holy Spirit seeks.
7. Be free today. ²And carry freedom as your gift to those who still believe they are enslaved within a body. ³Be you free, so that the Holy Spirit can make use of your escape from bondage, to set free the many who perceive themselves as bound and helpless and afraid. ⁴Let love replace their fears through you. ⁵Accept salvation now, and give your mind to Him Who calls to you to make this gift to Him. ⁶For He would give you perfect freedom, perfect joy, and hope that finds its full accomplishment in God.
8. You are God’s Son. ²In immortality you live forever. ³Would you not return your mind to this? ⁴Then practice well the thought the Holy Spirit gives you for today. ⁵Your brothers stand released with you in it; the world is blessed along with you, God’s Son will weep no more, and Heaven offers thanks for the increase of joy your practice brings even to it. ⁶And God Himself extends His Love and happiness each time you say:
⁷I am not a body. ⁸I am free. ⁹I hear the Voice that God has given me, and it is only this my mind obeys.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-199/i-am-not-a-body-i-am-free/en/s/607

2024-07-18 16:08:10

Lesson 197
It can be but my gratitude I earn.
1. Here is the second step we take to free your mind from the belief in outside force pitted against your own. ²You make attempts at kindness and forgiveness. ³Yet you turn them to attack again, unless you find external gratitude and lavish thanks. ⁴Your gifts must be received with honor, lest they be withdrawn. ⁵And so you think God’s gifts are loans at best; at worst, deceptions which would cheat you of defenses, to ensure that when He strikes He will not fail to kill.
2. How easily are God and guilt confused by those who know not what their thoughts can do. ²Deny your strength, and weakness must become salvation to you. ³See yourself as bound, and bars become your home. ⁴Nor will you leave the prison house, or claim your strength, until guilt and salvation are not seen as one, and freedom and salvation are perceived as joined, with strength beside them, to be sought and claimed, and found and fully recognized.
3. The world must thank you when you offer it release from your illusions. ²Yet your thanks belong to you as well, for its release can only mirror yours. ³Your gratitude is all your gifts require, that they be a lasting offering of a thankful heart, released from hell forever. ⁴Is it this you would undo by taking back your gifts, because they were not honored? ⁵It is you who honor them and give them fitting thanks, for it is you who have received the gifts.
4. It does not matter if another thinks your gifts unworthy. ²In his mind there is a part that joins with yours in thanking you. ³It does not matter if your gifts seem lost and ineffectual. ⁴They are received where they are given. ⁵In your gratitude are they accepted universally, and thankfully acknowledged by the Heart of God Himself. ⁶And would you take them back, when He has gratefully accepted them?
5. God blesses every gift you give to Him, and every gift is given Him, because it can be given only to yourself. ²And what belongs to God must be His Own. ³Yet you will never realize His gifts are sure, eternal, changeless, limitless, forever giving out, extending love and adding to your never-ending joy while you forgive but to attack again.
6. Withdraw the gifts you give, and you will think that what is given you has been withdrawn. ²But learn to let forgiveness take away the sins you think you see outside yourself, and you can never think the gifts of God are lent but for a little while, before He snatches them away again in death. ³For death will have no meaning for you then.
7. And with the end of this belief is fear forever over. ²Thank your Self for this, for He is grateful only unto God, and He gives thanks for you unto Himself. ³To everyone who lives will Christ yet come, for everyone must live and move in Him. ⁴His Being in His Father is secure, because Their Will is One. ⁵Their gratitude to all They have created has no end, for gratitude remains a part of love.
8. Thanks be to you, the holy Son of God. ²For as you were created, you contain all things within your Self. ³And you are still as God created you. ⁴Nor can you dim the light of your perfection. ⁵In your heart the Heart of God is laid. ⁶He holds you dear, because you are Himself. ⁷All gratitude belongs to you, because of what you are.
9. Give thanks as you receive it. ²Be you free of all ingratitude to anyone who makes your Self complete. ³And from this Self is no one left outside. ⁴Give thanks for all the countless channels which extend this Self. ⁵All that you do is given unto Him. ⁶All that you think can only be His Thoughts, sharing with Him the holy Thoughts of God. ⁷Earn now the gratitude you have denied yourself when you forgot the function God has given you. ⁸But never think that He has ever ceased to offer thanks to you.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-197/it-can-be-but-my-gratitude-i-earn/en/s/605

2024-07-17 19:01:30

Lesson 196
It can be but myself I crucify.
1. When this is firmly understood and kept in full awareness, you will not attempt to harm yourself, nor make your body slave to vengeance. ²You will not attack yourself, and you will realize that to attack another is but to attack yourself. ³You will be free of the insane belief that to attack a brother saves yourself. ⁴And you will understand his safety is your own, and in his healing you are healed.
2. Perhaps at first you will not understand how mercy, limitless and with all things held in its sure protection, can be found in the idea we practice for today. ²It may, in fact, appear to be a sign that punishment can never be escaped because the ego, under what it sees as threat, is quick to cite the truth to save its lies. ³Yet must it fail to understand the truth it uses thus. ⁴But you can learn to see these foolish applications, and deny the meaning they appear to have.
3. Thus do you also teach your mind that you are not an ego. ²For the ways in which the ego would distort the truth will not deceive you longer. ³You will not believe you are a body to be crucified. ⁴And you will see within today’s idea the light of resurrection, looking past all thoughts of crucifixion and of death, to thoughts of liberation and of life.
4. Today’s idea is one step we take in leading us from bondage to the state of perfect freedom. ²Let us take this step today, that we may quickly go the way salvation shows us, taking every step in its appointed sequence, as the mind relinquishes its burdens one by one. ³It is not time we need for this. ⁴It is but willingness. ⁵For what would seem to need a thousand years can easily be done in just one instant by the grace of God.
5. The dreary, hopeless thought that you can make attacks on others and escape yourself has nailed you to the cross. ²Perhaps it seemed to be salvation. ³Yet it merely stood for the belief the fear of God is real. ⁴And what is that but hell? ⁵Who could believe his Father is his deadly enemy, separate from him, and waiting to destroy his life and blot him from the universe, without the fear of hell upon his heart?
6. Such is the form of madness you believe, if you accept the fearful thought you can attack another and be free yourself. ²Until this form is changed, there is no hope. ³Until you see that this, at least, must be entirely impossible, how could there be escape? ⁴The fear of God is real to anyone who thinks this thought is true. ⁵And he will not perceive its foolishness, or even see that it is there, so that it would be possible to question it.
7. To question it at all, its form must first be changed at least as much as will permit fear of retaliation to abate, and the responsibility returned to some extent to you. ²From there you can at least consider if you want to go along this painful path. ³Until this shift has been accomplished, you can not perceive that it is but your thoughts that bring you fear, and your deliverance depends on you.
8. Our next steps will be easy, if you take this one today. ²From there we go ahead quite rapidly. ³For once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear. ⁴You cannot then believe that fear is caused without. ⁵And God, Whom you had thought to banish, can be welcomed back within the holy mind He never left.
9. Salvation’s song can certainly be heard in the idea we practice for today. ²If it can but be you you crucify, you did not hurt the world, and need not fear its vengeance and pursuit. ³Nor need you hide in terror from the deadly fear of God projection hides behind. ⁴The thing you dread the most is your salvation. ⁵You are strong, and it is strength you want. ⁶And you are free, and glad of freedom. ⁷You have sought to be both weak and bound, because you feared your strength and freedom. ⁸Yet salvation lies in them.
10. There is an instant in which terror seems to grip your mind so wholly that escape appears quite hopeless. ²When you realize, once and for all, that it is you you fear, the mind perceives itself as split. ³And this had been concealed while you believed attack could be directed outward, and returned from outside to within. ⁴It seemed to be an enemy outside you had to fear. ⁵And thus a god outside yourself became your mortal enemy; the source of fear.
11. Now, for an instant, is a murderer perceived within you, eager for your death, intent on plotting punishment for you until the time when it can kill at last. ²Yet in this instant is the time as well in which salvation comes. ³For fear of God has disappeared. ⁴And you can call on Him to save you from illusions by His Love, calling Him Father and yourself His Son. ⁵Pray that the instant may be soon,—today. ⁶Step back from fear, and make advance to love.
12. There is no Thought of God that does not go with you to help you reach that instant, and to go beyond it quickly, surely and forever. ²When the fear of God is gone, there are no obstacles that still remain between you and the holy peace of God. ³How kind and merciful is the idea we practice! ⁴Give it welcome, as you should, for it is your release. ⁵It is indeed but you your mind can try to crucify. ⁶Yet your redemption, too, will come from you.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-196/it-can-be-but-myself-i-crucify/en/s/604

2024-07-16 12:43:39

Lesson 195
Love is the way I walk in gratitude.
1. Gratitude is a lesson hard to learn for those who look upon the world amiss. ²The most that they can do is see themselves as better off than others. ³And they try to be content because another seems to suffer more than they. ⁴How pitiful and deprecating are such thoughts! ⁵For who has cause for thanks while others have less cause? ⁶And who could suffer less because he sees another suffer more? ⁷Your gratitude is due to Him alone Who made all cause of sorrow disappear throughout the world.
2. It is insane to offer thanks because of suffering. ²But it is equally insane to fail in gratitude to One Who offers you the certain means whereby all pain is healed, and suffering replaced with laughter and with happiness. ³Nor could the even partly sane refuse to take the steps which He directs, and follow in the way He sets before them, to escape a prison that they thought contained no door to the deliverance they now perceive.
3. Your brother is your “enemy” because you see in him the rival for your peace; a plunderer who takes his joy from you, and leaves you nothing but a black despair so bitter and relentless that there is no hope remaining. ²Now is vengeance all there is to wish for. ³Now can you but try to bring him down to lie in death with you, as useless as yourself; as little left within his grasping fingers as in yours.
4. You do not offer God your gratitude because your brother is more slave than you, nor could you sanely be enraged if he seems freer. ²Love makes no comparisons. ³And gratitude can only be sincere if it be joined to love. ⁴We offer thanks to God our Father that in us all things will find their freedom. ⁵It will never be that some are loosed while others still are bound. ⁶For who can bargain in the name of love?
5. Therefore give thanks, but in sincerity. ²And let your gratitude make room for all who will escape with you; the sick, the weak, the needy and afraid, and those who mourn a seeming loss or feel apparent pain, who suffer cold or hunger, or who walk the way of hatred and the path of death. ³All these go with you. ⁴Let us not compare ourselves with them, for thus we split them off from our awareness of the unity we share with them, as they must share with us.
6. We thank our Father for one thing alone; that we are separate from no living thing, and therefore one with Him. ²And we rejoice that no exceptions ever can be made which would reduce our wholeness, nor impair or change our function to complete the One Who is Himself completion. ³We give thanks for every living thing, for otherwise we offer thanks for nothing, and we fail to recognize the gifts of God to us.
7. Then let our brothers lean their tired heads against our shoulders as they rest a while. ²We offer thanks for them. ³For if we can direct them to the peace that we would find, the way is opening at last to us. ⁴An ancient door is swinging free again; a long forgotten Word re-echoes in our memory, and gathers clarity as we are willing once again to hear.
8. Walk, then, in gratitude the way of love. ²For hatred is forgotten when we lay comparisons aside. ³What more remains as obstacles to peace? ⁴The fear of God is now undone at last, and we forgive without comparing. ⁵Thus we cannot choose to overlook some things, and yet retain some other things still locked away as “sins.” ⁶When your forgiveness is complete you will have total gratitude, for you will see that everything has earned the right to love by being loving, even as your Self.
9. Today we learn to think of gratitude in place of anger, malice and revenge. ²We have been given everything. ³If we refuse to recognize it, we are not entitled therefore to our bitterness, and to a self-perception which regards us in a place of merciless pursuit, where we are badgered ceaselessly, and pushed about without a thought or care for us or for our future. ⁴Gratitude becomes the single thought we substitute for these insane perceptions. ⁵God has cared for us, and calls us Son. ⁶Can there be more than this?
10. Our gratitude will pave the way to Him, and shorten our learning time by more than you could ever dream of. ²Gratitude goes hand in hand with love, and where one is the other must be found. ³For gratitude is but an aspect of the Love which is the Source of all creation. ⁴God gives thanks to you, His Son, for being what you are; His Own completion and the Source of love, along with Him. ⁵Your gratitude to Him is one with His to you. ⁶For love can walk no road except the way of gratitude, and thus we go who walk the way to God.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-195/love-is-the-way-i-walk-in-gratitude/en/s/603

2024-07-15 16:04:19

Lesson 194
I place the future in the Hands of God.
1. Today’s idea takes another step toward quick salvation, and a giant stride it is indeed! ²So great the distance is that it encompasses, it sets you down just short of Heaven, with the goal in sight and obstacles behind. ³Your foot has reached the lawns that welcome you to Heaven’s gate; the quiet place of peace, where you await with certainty the final step of God. ⁴How far are we progressing now from earth! ⁵How close are we approaching to our goal! ⁶How short the journey still to be pursued!
2. Accept today’s idea, and you have passed all anxiety, all pits of hell, all blackness of depression, thoughts of sin, and devastation brought about by guilt. ²Accept today’s idea, and you have released the world from all imprisonment by loosening the heavy chains that locked the door to freedom on it. ³You are saved, and your salvation thus becomes the gift you give the world, because you have received.
3. In no one instant is depression felt, or pain experienced or loss perceived. ²In no one instant sorrow can be set upon a throne, and worshipped faithfully. ³In no one instant can one even die. ⁴And so each instant given unto God in passing, with the next one given Him already, is a time of your release from sadness, pain and even death itself.
4. God holds your future as He holds your past and present. ²They are one to Him, and so they should be one to you. ³Yet in this world, the temporal progression still seems real. ⁴And so you are not asked to understand the lack of sequence really found in time. ⁵You are but asked to let the future go, and place it in God’s Hands. ⁶And you will see by your experience that you have laid the past and present in His Hands as well, because the past will punish you no more, and future dread will now be meaningless.
5. Release the future. ²For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course. ³Then is each instant which was slave to time transformed into a holy instant, when the light that was kept hidden in God’s Son is freed to bless the world. ⁴Now is he free, and all his glory shines upon a world made free with him, to share his holiness.
6. If you can see the lesson for today as the deliverance it really is, you will not hesitate to give as much consistent effort as you can, to make it be a part of you. ²As it becomes a thought that rules your mind, a habit in your problem-solving repertoire, a way of quick reaction to temptation, you extend your learning to the world. ³And as you learn to see salvation in all things, so will the world perceive that it is saved.
7. What worry can beset the one who gives his future to the loving Hands of God? ²What can he suffer? ³What can cause him pain, or bring experience of loss to him? ⁴What can he fear? ⁵And what can he regard except with love? ⁶For he who has escaped all fear of future pain has found his way to present peace, and certainty of care the world can never threaten. ⁷He is sure that his perception may be faulty, but will never lack correction. ⁸He is free to choose again when he has been deceived; to change his mind when he has made mistakes.
8. Place, then, your future in the Hands of God. ²For thus you call the memory of Him to come again, replacing all your thoughts of sin and evil with the truth of love. ³Think you the world could fail to gain thereby, and every living creature not respond with healed perception? ⁴Who entrusts himself to God has also placed the world within the Hands to which he has himself appealed for comfort and security. ⁵He lays aside the sick illusions of the world along with his, and offers peace to both.
9. Now are we saved indeed. ²For in God’s Hands we rest untroubled, sure that only good can come to us. ³If we forget, we will be gently reassured. ⁴If we accept an unforgiving thought, it will be soon replaced by love’s reflection. ⁵And if we are tempted to attack, we will appeal to Him Who guards our rest to make the choice for us that leaves temptation far behind. ⁶No longer is the world our enemy, for we have chosen that we be its friend.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-194/i-place-the-future-in-the-hands-of-god/en/s/602

2024-07-15 16:02:56

Lesson 193
All things are lessons God would have me learn.
1. God does not know of learning. ²Yet His Will extends to what He does not understand, in that He wills the happiness His Son inherited of Him be undisturbed; eternal and forever gaining scope, eternally expanding in the joy of full creation, and eternally open and wholly limitless in Him. ³That is His Will. ⁴And thus His Will provides the means to guarantee that it is done.
2. God sees no contradictions. ²Yet His Son believes he sees them. ³Thus he has a need for One Who can correct his erring sight, and give him vision that will lead him back to where perception ceases. ⁴God does not perceive at all. ⁵Yet it is He Who gives the means by which perception is made true and beautiful enough to let the light of Heaven shine upon it. ⁶It is He Who answers what His Son would contradict, and keeps his sinlessness forever safe.
3. These are the lessons God would have you learn. ²His Will reflects them all, and they reflect His loving kindness to the Son He loves. ³Each lesson has a central thought, the same in all of them. ⁴The form alone is changed, with different circumstances and events; with different characters and different themes, apparent but not real. ⁵They are the same in fundamental content. ⁶It is this:
⁷Forgive, and you will see this differently.
4. Certain it is that all distress does not appear to be but unforgiveness. ²Yet that is the content underneath the form. ³It is this sameness which makes learning sure, because the lesson is so simple that it cannot be rejected in the end. ⁴No one can hide forever from a truth so very obvious that it appears in countless forms, and yet is recognized as easily in all of them, if one but wants to see the simple lesson there.
5. Forgive, and you will see this differently.
²These are the words the Holy Spirit speaks in all your tribulations, all your pain, all suffering regardless of its form. ³These are the words with which temptation ends, and guilt, abandoned, is revered no more. ⁴These are the words which end the dream of sin, and rid the mind of fear. ⁵These are the words by which salvation comes to all the world.
6. Shall we not learn to say these words when we are tempted to believe that pain is real, and death becomes our choice instead of life? ²Shall we not learn to say these words when we have understood their power to release all minds from bondage? ³These are words which give you power over all events that seem to have been given power over you. ⁴You see them rightly when you hold these words in full awareness, and do not forget these words apply to everything you see or any brother looks upon amiss.
7. How can you tell when you are seeing wrong, or someone else is failing to perceive the lesson he should learn? ²Does pain seem real in the perception? ³If it does, be sure the lesson is not learned. ⁴And there remains an unforgiveness hiding in the mind that sees the pain through eyes the mind directs.
8. God would not have you suffer thus. ²He would help you forgive yourself. ³His Son does not remember who he is. ⁴And God would have him not forget His Love, and all the gifts His Love brings with it. ⁵Would you now renounce your own salvation? ⁶Would you fail to learn the simple lessons Heaven’s Teacher sets before you, that all pain may disappear and God may be remembered by His Son?
9. All things are lessons God would have you learn. ²He would not leave an unforgiving thought without correction, nor one thorn or nail to hurt His holy Son in any way. ³He would ensure his holy rest remain untroubled and serene, without a care, in an eternal home which cares for him. ⁴And He would have all tears be wiped away, with none remaining yet unshed, and none but waiting their appointed time to fall. ⁵For God has willed that laughter should replace each one, and that His Son be free again.
10. We will attempt today to overcome a thousand seeming obstacles to peace in just one day. ²Let mercy come to you more quickly. ³Do not try to hold it off another day, another minute or another instant. ⁴Time was made for this. ⁵Use it today for what its purpose is. ⁶Morning and night, devote what time you can to serve its proper aim, and do not let the time be less than meets your deepest need.
11. Give all you can, and give a little more. ²For now we would arise in haste and go unto our Father’s house. ³We have been gone too long, and we would linger here no more. ⁴And as we practice, let us think about all things we saved to settle by ourselves, and kept apart from healing. ⁵Let us give them all to Him Who knows the way to look upon them so that they will disappear. ⁶Truth is His message; truth His teaching is. ⁷His are the lessons God would have us learn.
12. Each hour, spend a little time today, and in the days to come, in practicing the lesson in forgiveness in the form established for the day. ²And try to give it application to the happenings the hour brought, so that the next one is free of the one before. ³The chains of time are easily unloosened in this way. ⁴Let no one hour cast its shadow on the one that follows, and when that one goes, let everything that happened in its course go with it. ⁵Thus will you remain unbound, in peace eternal in the world of time.
13. This is the lesson God would have you learn: There is a way to look on everything that lets it be to you another step to Him, and to salvation of the world. ²To all that speaks of terror, answer thus:
³I will forgive, and this will disappear.
⁴To every apprehension, every care and every form of suffering, repeat these selfsame words. ⁵And then you hold the key that opens Heaven’s gate, and brings the Love of God the Father down to earth at last, to raise it up to Heaven. ⁶God will take this final step Himself. ⁷Do not deny the little steps He asks you take to Him.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-193/all-things-are-lessons-god-would-have-me-learn/en/s/601

2024-07-13 15:48:14

Lesson 192
I have a function God would have me fill.
1. It is your Father’s holy Will that you complete Himself, and that your Self shall be His sacred Son, forever pure as He, of love created and in love preserved, extending love, creating in its name, forever one with God and with your Self. ²Yet what can such a function mean within a world of envy, hatred and attack?
2. Therefore, you have a function in the world in its own terms. ²For who can understand a language far beyond his simple grasp? ³Forgiveness represents your function here. ⁴It is not God’s creation, for it is the means by which untruth can be undone. ⁵And who would pardon Heaven? ⁶Yet on earth, you need the means to let illusions go. ⁷Creation merely waits for your return to be acknowledged, not to be complete.
3. Creation cannot even be conceived of in the world. ²It has no meaning here. ³Forgiveness is the closest it can come to earth. ⁴For being Heaven-born, it has no form at all. ⁵Yet God created One Who has the power to translate in form the wholly formless. ⁶What He makes are dreams, but of a kind so close to waking that the light of day already shines in them, and eyes already opening behold the joyful sights their offerings contain.
4. Forgiveness gently looks upon all things unknown in Heaven, sees them disappear, and leaves the world a clean and unmarked slate on which the Word of God can now replace the senseless symbols written there before. ²Forgiveness is the means by which the fear of death is overcome, because it holds no fierce attraction now and guilt is gone. ³Forgiveness lets the body be perceived as what it is; a simple teaching aid, to be laid by when learning is complete, but hardly changing him who learns at all.
5. The mind without the body cannot make mistakes. ²It cannot think that it will die, nor be the prey of merciless attack. ³Anger becomes impossible, and where is terror then? ⁴What fears could still assail those who have lost the source of all attack, the core of anguish and the seat of fear? ⁵Only forgiveness can relieve the mind of thinking that the body is its home. ⁶Only forgiveness can restore the peace that God intended for His holy Son. ⁷Only forgiveness can persuade the Son to look again upon his holiness.
6. With anger gone, you will indeed perceive that, for Christ’s vision and the gift of sight, no sacrifice was asked, and only pain was lifted from a sick and tortured mind. ²Is this unwelcome? ³Is it to be feared? ⁴Or is it to be hoped for, met with thanks and joyously accepted? ⁵We are one, and therefore give up nothing. ⁶But we have indeed been given everything by God.
7. Yet do we need forgiveness to perceive that this is so. ²Without its kindly light we grope in darkness, using reason but to justify our rage and our attack. ³Our understanding is so limited that what we think we understand is but confusion born of error. ⁴We are lost in mists of shifting dreams and fearful thoughts, our eyes shut tight against the light; our minds engaged in worshipping what is not there.
8. Who can be born again in Christ but him who has forgiven everyone he sees or thinks of or imagines? ²Who could be set free while he imprisons anyone? ³A jailer is not free, for he is bound together with his prisoner. ⁴He must be sure that he does not escape, and so he spends his time in keeping watch on him. ⁵The bars that limit him become the world in which his jailer lives, along with him. ⁶And it is on his freedom that the way to liberty depends for both of them.
9. Therefore, hold no one prisoner. ²Release instead of bind, for thus are you made free. ³The way is simple. ⁴Every time you feel a stab of anger, realize you hold a sword above your head. ⁵And it will fall or be averted as you choose to be condemned or free. ⁶Thus does each one who seems to tempt you to be angry represent your savior from the prison house of death. ⁷And so you owe him thanks instead of pain.
10. Be merciful today. ²The Son of God deserves your mercy. ³It is he who asks that you accept the way to freedom now. ⁴Deny him not. ⁵His Father’s Love for him belongs to you. ⁶Your function here on earth is only to forgive him, that you may accept him back as your Identity. ⁷He is as God created him. ⁸And you are what he is. ⁹Forgive him now his sins, and you will see that you are one with him.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-192/i-have-a-function-god-would-have-me-fill/en/s/600

2024-07-13 15:47:46

Lesson 191
I am the holy Son of God Himself.
1. Here is your declaration of release from bondage of the world. ²And here as well is all the world released. ³You do not see what you have done by giving to the world the role of jailer to the Son of God. ⁴What could it be but vicious and afraid, fearful of shadows, punitive and wild, lacking all reason, blind, insane with hate?
2. What have you done that this should be your world? ²What have you done that this is what you see? ³Deny your own Identity, and this is what remains. ⁴You look on chaos and proclaim it is yourself. ⁵There is no sight that fails to witness this to you. ⁶There is no sound that does not speak of frailty within you and without; no breath you draw that does not seem to bring you nearer death; no hope you hold but will dissolve in tears.
3. Deny your own Identity, and you will not escape the madness which induced this weird, unnatural and ghostly thought that mocks creation and that laughs at God. ²Deny your own Identity, and you assail the universe alone, without a friend, a tiny particle of dust against the legions of your enemies. ³Deny your own Identity, and look on evil, sin and death, and watch despair snatch from your fingers every scrap of hope, leaving you nothing but the wish to die.
4. Yet what is it except a game you play in which Identity can be denied? ²You are as God created you. ³All else but this one thing is folly to believe. ⁴In this one thought is everyone set free. ⁵In this one truth are all illusions gone. ⁶In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything, the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality.
5. But let today’s idea find a place among your thoughts and you have risen far above the world, and all the worldly thoughts that hold it prisoner. ²And from this place of safety and escape you will return and set it free. ³For he who can accept his true Identity is truly saved. ⁴And his salvation is the gift he gives to everyone, in gratitude to Him Who pointed out the way to happiness that changed his whole perspective of the world.
6. One holy thought like this and you are free: You are the holy Son of God Himself. ²And with this holy thought you learn as well that you have freed the world. ³You have no need to use it cruelly, and then perceive this savage need in it. ⁴You set it free of your imprisonment. ⁵You will not see a devastating image of yourself walking the world in terror, with the world twisting in agony because your fears have laid the mark of death upon its heart.
7. Be glad today how very easily is hell undone. ²You need but tell yourself:
³I am the holy Son of God Himself. ⁴I cannot suffer, cannot be in pain; I cannot suffer loss, nor fail to do all that salvation asks.
⁵And in that thought is everything you look on wholly changed.
8. A miracle has lighted up all dark and ancient caverns, where the rites of death echoed since time began. ²For time has lost its hold upon the world. ³The Son of God has come in glory to redeem the lost, to save the helpless, and to give the world the gift of his forgiveness. ⁴Who could see the world as dark and sinful, when God’s Son has come again at last to set it free?
9. You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given unto you in earth and Heaven. ²There is nothing that you cannot do. ³You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. ⁴Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you.
10. Then let the Son of God awaken from his sleep, and opening his holy eyes, return again to bless the world he made. ²In error it began, but it will end in the reflection of his holiness. ³And he will sleep no more and dream of death. ⁴Then join with me today. ⁵Your glory is the light that saves the world. ⁶Do not withhold salvation longer. ⁷Look about the world, and see the suffering there. ⁸Is not your heart willing to bring your weary brothers rest?
11. They must await your own release. ²They stay in chains till you are free. ³They cannot see the mercy of the world until you find it in yourself. ⁴They suffer pain until you have denied its hold on you. ⁵They die till you accept your own eternal life. ⁶You are the holy Son of God Himself. ⁷Remember this, and all the world is free. ⁸Remember this, and earth and Heaven are one.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-191/i-am-the-holy-son-of-god-himself/en/s/599

2024-07-11 16:07:27

Lesson 190
I choose the joy of God instead of pain.
1. Pain is a wrong perspective. ²When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. ³It is not a fact at all. ⁴There is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen aright. ⁵For pain proclaims God cruel. ⁶How could it be real in any form? ⁷It witnesses to God the Father’s hatred of His Son, the sinfulness He sees in him, and His insane desire for revenge and death.
2. Can such projections be attested to? ²Can they be anything but wholly false? ³Pain is but witness to the Son’s mistakes in what he thinks he is. ⁴It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. ⁵It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love, which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.
3. Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. ²It demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad, and seen as traitor to Himself. ³If God is real, there is no pain. ⁴If pain is real, there is no God. ⁵For vengeance is not part of love. ⁶And fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. ⁷The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain.
4. Peace to such foolishness! ²The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. ³There is no need to think of them as savage crimes, or secret sins with weighty consequence. ⁴Who but a madman could conceive of them as cause of anything? ⁵Their witness, pain, is mad as they, and no more to be feared than the insane illusions which it shields, and tries to demonstrate must still be true.
5. It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. ²Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. ³There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. ⁴No one but yourself affects you. ⁵There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. ⁶But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. ⁷As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. ⁸And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness.
6. My holy brother, think of this awhile: The world you see does nothing. ²It has no effects at all. ³It merely represents your thoughts. ⁴And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want. ⁵Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable, forever and forever. ⁶And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own inheritance, and keep it as a hospital for pain; a sickly place where living things must come at last to die?
7. The world may seem to cause you pain. ²And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. ³As an effect, it cannot make effects. ⁴As an illusion, it is what you wish. ⁵Your idle wishes represent its pains. ⁶Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. ⁷Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live.
8. Pain is the thought of evil taking form, and working havoc in your holy mind. ²Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free. ³In pain is God denied the Son He loves. ⁴In pain does fear appear to triumph over love, and time replace eternity and Heaven. ⁵And the world becomes a cruel and a bitter place, where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the savage pain that waits to end all joy in misery.
9. Lay down your arms, and come without defense into the quiet place where Heaven’s peace holds all things still at last. ²Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. ³Let no attack enter with you. ⁴Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness.
10. Here will you understand there is no pain. ²Here does the joy of God belong to you. ³This is the day when it is given you to realize the lesson that contains all of salvation’s power. ⁴It is this: Pain is illusion; joy, reality. ⁵Pain is but sleep; joy is awakening. ⁶Pain is deception; joy alone is truth.
11. And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven. ²Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts, as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-190/i-choose-the-joy-of-god-instead-of-pain/en/s/598

2024-07-10 09:45:21

Lesson 189
I feel the Love of God within me now.
1. There is a light in you the world can not perceive. ²And with its eyes you will not see this light, for you are blinded by the world. ³Yet you have eyes to see it. ⁴It is there for you to look upon. ⁵It was not placed in you to be kept hidden from your sight. ⁶This light is a reflection of the thought we practice now. ⁷To feel the Love of God within you is to see the world anew, shining in innocence, alive with hope, and blessed with perfect charity and love.
2. Who could feel fear in such a world as this? ²It welcomes you, rejoices that you came, and sings your praises as it keeps you safe from every form of danger and of pain. ³It offers you a warm and gentle home in which to stay a while. ⁴It blesses you throughout the day, and watches through the night as silent guardian of your holy sleep. ⁵It sees salvation in you, and protects the light in you, in which it sees its own. ⁶It offers you its flowers and its snow, in thankfulness for your benevolence.
3. This is the world the Love of God reveals. ²It is so different from the world you see through darkened eyes of malice and of fear, that one belies the other. ³Only one can be perceived at all. ⁴The other one is wholly meaningless. ⁵A world in which forgiveness shines on everything, and peace offers its gentle light to everyone, is inconceivable to those who see a world of hatred rising from attack, poised to avenge, to murder and destroy.
4. Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God’s Love in them. ²Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them; the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them; the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within. ³What they have felt in them they look upon, and see its sure reflection everywhere.
5. What would you see? ²The choice is given you. ³But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: You will look upon that which you feel within. ⁴If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death’s sharp-pointed, bony fingers. ⁵If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.
6. Today we pass illusions, as we seek to reach to what is true in us, and feel its all-embracing tenderness, its Love which knows us perfect as itself, its sight which is the gift its Love bestows on us. ²We learn the way today. ³It is as sure as Love itself, to which it carries us. ⁴For its simplicity avoids the snares the foolish convolutions of the world’s apparent reasoning but serve to hide.
7. Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. ²Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. ³Hold onto nothing. ⁴Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. ⁵Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.
8. Is it not He Who knows the way to you? ²You need not know the way to Him. ³Your part is simply to allow all obstacles that you have interposed between the Son and God the Father to be quietly removed forever. ⁴God will do His part in joyful and immediate response. ⁵Ask and receive. ⁶But do not make demands, nor point the road to God by which He should appear to you. ⁷The way to reach Him is merely to let Him be. ⁸For in that way is your reality proclaimed as well.
9. And so today we do not choose the way in which we go to Him. ²But we do choose to let Him come. ³And with this choice we rest. ⁴And in our quiet hearts and open minds, His Love will blaze its pathway of itself. ⁵What has not been denied is surely there, if it be true and can be surely reached. ⁶God knows His Son, and knows the way to him. ⁷He does not need His Son to show Him how to find His way. ⁸Through every opened door His Love shines outward from its home within, and lightens up the world in innocence.
10. Father, we do not know the way to You. ²But we have called, and You have answered us. ³We will not interfere. ⁴Salvation’s ways are not our own, for they belong to You. ⁵And it is unto You we look for them. ⁶Our hands are open to receive Your gifts. ⁷We have no thoughts we think apart from You, and cherish no beliefs of what we are, or Who created us. ⁸Yours is the way that we would find and follow. ⁹And we ask but that Your Will, which is our own as well, be done in us and in the world, that it become a part of Heaven now. ¹⁰Amen.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-189/i-feel-the-love-of-god-within-me-now/en/s/597

2024-07-09 12:41:10

Lesson 188
The peace of God is shining in me now.
1. Why wait for Heaven? ²Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. ³The light is in them now. ⁴Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. ⁵Light is not of the world, yet you who bear the light in you are alien here as well. ⁶The light came with you from your native home, and stayed with you because it is your own. ⁷It is the only thing you bring with you from Him Who is your Source. ⁸It shines in you because it lights your home, and leads you back to where it came from and you are at home.
2. This light can not be lost. ²Why wait to find it in the future, or believe it has been lost already, or was never there? ³It can so easily be looked upon that arguments which prove it is not there become ridiculous. ⁴Who can deny the presence of what he beholds in him? ⁵It is not difficult to look within, for there all vision starts. ⁶There is no sight, be it of dreams or from a truer Source, that is not but the shadow of the seen through inward vision. ⁷There perception starts, and there it ends. ⁸It has no source but this.
3. The peace of God is shining in you now, and from your heart extends around the world. ²It pauses to caress each living thing, and leaves a blessing with it that remains forever and forever. ³What it gives must be eternal. ⁴It removes all thoughts of the ephemeral and valueless. ⁵It brings renewal to all tired hearts, and lights all vision as it passes by. ⁶All of its gifts are given everyone, and everyone unites in giving thanks to you who give, and you who have received.
4. The shining in your mind reminds the world of what it has forgotten, and the world restores the memory to you as well. ²From you salvation radiates with gifts beyond all measure, given and returned. ³To you, the giver of the gift, does God Himself give thanks. ⁴And in His blessing does the light in you shine brighter, adding to the gifts you have to offer to the world.
5. The peace of God can never be contained. ²Who recognizes it within himself must give it. ³And the means for giving it are in his understanding. ⁴He forgives because he recognized the truth in him. ⁵The peace of God is shining in you now, and in all living things. ⁶In quietness is it acknowledged universally. ⁷For what your inward vision looks upon is your perception of the universe.
6. Sit quietly and close your eyes. ²The light within you is sufficient. ³It alone has power to give the gift of sight to you. ⁴Exclude the outer world, and let your thoughts fly to the peace within. ⁵They know the way. ⁶For honest thoughts, untainted by the dream of worldly things outside yourself, become the holy messengers of God Himself.
7. These thoughts you think with Him. ²They recognize their home. ³And they point surely to their Source, Where God the Father and the Son are one. ⁴God’s peace is shining on them, but they must remain with you as well, for they were born within your mind, as yours was born in God’s. ⁵They lead you back to peace, from where they came but to remind you how you must return.
8. They heed your Father’s Voice when you refuse to listen. ²And they urge you gently to accept His Word for what you are, instead of fantasies and shadows. ³They remind you that you are the co-creator of all things that live. ⁴For as the peace of God is shining in you, it must shine on them.
9. We practice coming nearer to the light in us today. ²We take our wandering thoughts, and gently bring them back to where they fall in line with all the thoughts we share with God. ³We will not let them stray. ⁴We let the light within our minds direct them to come home. ⁵We have betrayed them, ordering that they depart from us. ⁶But now we call them back, and wash them clean of strange desires and disordered wishes. ⁷We restore to them the holiness of their inheritance.
10. Thus are our minds restored with them, and we acknowledge that the peace of God still shines in us, and from us to all living things that share our life. ²We will forgive them all, absolving all the world from what we thought it did to us. ³For it is we who make the world as we would have it. ⁴Now we choose that it be innocent, devoid of sin and open to salvation. ⁵And we lay our saving blessing on it, as we say:
⁶The peace of God is shining in me now.
⁷Let all things shine upon me in that peace, and let me bless them with the light in me.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-188/the-peace-of-god-is-shining-in-me-now/en/s/596

2024-07-08 10:36:02

Lesson 187
I bless the world because I bless myself.
1. No one can give unless he has. ²In fact, giving is proof of having. ³We have made this point before. ⁴What seems to make it hard to credit is not this. ⁵No one can doubt that you must first possess what you would give. ⁶It is the second phase on which the world and true perception differ. ⁷Having had and given, then the world asserts that you have lost what you possessed. ⁸The truth maintains that giving will increase what you possess.
2. How is this possible? ²For it is sure that if you give a finite thing away, your body’s eyes will not perceive it yours. ³Yet we have learned that things but represent the thoughts that make them. ⁴And you do not lack for proof that when you give ideas away, you strengthen them in your own mind. ⁵Perhaps the form in which the thought seems to appear is changed in giving. ⁶Yet it must return to him who gives. ⁷Nor can the form it takes be less acceptable. ⁸It must be more.
3. Ideas must first belong to you, before you give them. ²If you are to save the world, you first accept salvation for yourself. ³But you will not believe that this is done until you see the miracles it brings to everyone you look upon. ⁴Herein is the idea of giving clarified and given meaning. ⁵Now you can perceive that by your giving is your store increased.
4. Protect all things you value by the act of giving them away, and you are sure that you will never lose them. ²What you thought you did not have is thereby proven yours. ³Yet value not its form. ⁴For this will change and grow unrecognizable in time, however much you try to keep it safe. ⁵No form endures. ⁶It is the thought behind the form of things that lives unchangeable.
5. Give gladly. ²You can only gain thereby. ³The thought remains, and grows in strength as it is reinforced by giving. ⁴Thoughts extend as they are shared, for they can not be lost. ⁵There is no giver and receiver in the sense the world conceives of them. ⁶There is a giver who retains; another who will give as well. ⁷And both must gain in this exchange, for each will have the thought in form most helpful to him. ⁸What he seems to lose is always something he will value less than what will surely be returned to him.
6. Never forget you give but to yourself. ²Who understands what giving means must laugh at the idea of sacrifice. ³Nor can he fail to recognize the many forms which sacrifice may take. ⁴He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death. ⁵He recognizes sacrifice remains the one idea that stands behind them all, and in his gentle laughter are they healed.
7. Illusion recognized must disappear. ²Accept not suffering, and you remove the thought of suffering. ³Your blessing lies on everyone who suffers, when you choose to see all suffering as what it is. ⁴The thought of sacrifice gives rise to all the forms that suffering appears to take. ⁵And sacrifice is an idea so mad that sanity dismisses it at once.
8. Never believe that you can sacrifice. ²There is no place for sacrifice in what has any value. ³If the thought occurs, its very presence proves that error has arisen and correction must be made. ⁴Your blessing will correct it. ⁵Given first to you, it now is yours to give as well. ⁶No form of sacrifice and suffering can long endure before the face of one who has forgiven and has blessed himself.
9. The lilies that your brother offers you are laid upon your altar, with the ones you offer him beside them. ²Who could fear to look upon such lovely holiness? ³The great illusion of the fear of God diminishes to nothingness before the purity that you will look on here. ⁴Be not afraid to look. ⁵The blessedness you will behold will take away all thought of form, and leave instead the perfect gift forever there, forever to increase, forever yours, forever given away.
10. Now are we one in thought, for fear has gone. ²And here, before the altar to one God, one Father, one Creator and one Thought, we stand together as one Son of God. ³Not separate from Him Who is our Source; not distant from one brother who is part of our one Self Whose innocence has joined us all as one, we stand in blessedness, and give as we receive. ⁴The Name of God is on our lips. ⁵And as we look within, we see the purity of Heaven shine in our reflection of our Father’s Love.
11. Now are we blessed, and now we bless the world. ²What we have looked upon we would extend, for we would see it everywhere. ³We would behold it shining with the grace of God in everyone. ⁴We would not have it be withheld from anything we look upon. ⁵And to ensure this holy sight is ours, we offer it to everything we see. ⁶For where we see it, it will be returned to us in form of lilies we can lay upon our altar, making it a home for Innocence Itself, Who dwells in us and offers us His Holiness as ours.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-187/i-bless-the-world-because-i-bless-myself/en/s/595

2024-07-07 20:03:08

Lesson 186
Salvation of the world depends on me.
1. Here is the statement that will one day take all arrogance away from every mind. ²Here is the thought of true humility, which holds no function as your own but that which has been given you. ³It offers your acceptance of a part assigned to you, without insisting on another role. ⁴It does not judge your proper role. ⁵It but acknowledges the Will of God is done on earth as well as Heaven. ⁶It unites all wills on earth in Heaven’s plan to save the world, restoring it to Heaven’s peace.
2. Let us not fight our function. ²We did not establish it. ³It is not our idea. ⁴The means are given us by which it will be perfectly accomplished. ⁵All that we are asked to do is to accept our part in genuine humility, and not deny with self-deceiving arrogance that we are worthy. ⁶What is given us to do, we have the strength to do. ⁷Our minds are suited perfectly to take the part assigned to us by One Who knows us well.
3. Today’s idea may seem quite sobering, until you see its meaning. ²All it says is that your Father still remembers you, and offers you the perfect trust He holds in you who are His Son. ³It does not ask that you be different in any way from what you are. ⁴What could humility request but this? ⁵And what could arrogance deny but this? ⁶Today we will not shrink from our assignment on the specious grounds that modesty is outraged. ⁷It is pride that would deny the Call for God Himself.
4. All false humility we lay aside today, that we may listen to God’s Voice reveal to us what He would have us do. ²We do not doubt our adequacy for the function He will offer us. ³We will be certain only that He knows our strengths, our wisdom and our holiness. ⁴And if He deems us worthy, so we are. ⁵It is but arrogance that judges otherwise.
5. There is one way, and only one, to be released from the imprisonment your plan to prove the false is true has brought to you. ²Accept the plan you did not make instead. ³Judge not your value to it. ⁴If God’s Voice assures you that salvation needs your part, and that the whole depends on you, be sure that it is so. ⁵The arrogant must cling to words, afraid to go beyond them to experience which might affront their stance. ⁶Yet are the humble free to hear the Voice which tells them what they are, and what to do.
6. Arrogance makes an image of yourself that is not real. ²It is this image which quails and retreats in terror, as the Voice for God assures you that you have the strength, the wisdom and the holiness to go beyond all images. ³You are not weak, as is the image of yourself. ⁴You are not ignorant and helpless. ⁵Sin can not tarnish the truth in you, and misery can come not near the holy home of God.
7. All this the Voice for God relates to you. ²And as He speaks, the image trembles and seeks to attack the threat it does not know, sensing its basis crumble. ³Let it go. ⁴Salvation of the world depends on you, and not upon this little pile of dust. ⁵What can it tell the holy Son of God? ⁶Why need he be concerned with it at all?
8. And so we find our peace. ²We will accept the function God has given us, for all illusions rest upon the weird belief that we can make another for ourselves. ³Our self-made roles are shifting, and they seem to change from mourner to ecstatic bliss of love and loving. ⁴We can laugh or weep, and greet the day with welcome or with tears. ⁵Our very being seems to change as we experience a thousand shifts in mood, and our emotions raise us high indeed, or dash us to the ground in hopelessness.
9. Is this the Son of God? ²Could He create such instability and call it Son? ³He Who is changeless shares His attributes with His creation. ⁴All the images His Son appears to make have no effect on what he is. ⁵They blow across his mind like wind-swept leaves that form a patterning an instant, break apart to group again, and scamper off. ⁶Or like mirages seen above a desert, rising from the dust.
10. These unsubstantial images will go, and leave your mind unclouded and serene, when you accept the function given you. ²The images you make give rise to but conflicting goals, impermanent and vague, uncertain and ambiguous. ³Who could be constant in his efforts, or direct his energies and concentrated drive toward goals like these? ⁴The functions which the world esteems are so uncertain that they change ten times an hour at their most secure. ⁵What hope of gain can rest on goals like this?
11. In lovely contrast, certain as the sun’s return each morning to dispel the night, your truly given function stands out clear and wholly unambiguous. ²There is no doubt of its validity. ³It comes from One Who knows no error, and His Voice is certain of Its messages. ⁴They will not change, nor be in conflict. ⁵All of them point to one goal, and one you can attain. ⁶Your plan may be impossible, but God’s can never fail because He is its Source.
12. Do as God’s Voice directs. ²And if It asks a thing of you which seems impossible, remember Who it is that asks, and who would make denial. ³Then consider this; which is more likely to be right? ⁴The Voice that speaks for the Creator of all things, Who knows all things exactly as they are, or a distorted image of yourself, confused, bewildered, inconsistent and unsure of everything? ⁵Let not its voice direct you. ⁶Hear instead a certain Voice, which tells you of a function given you by your Creator Who remembers you, and urges that you now remember Him.
13. His gentle Voice is calling from the known to the unknowing. ²He would comfort you, although He knows no sorrow. ³He would make a restitution, though He is complete; a gift to you, although He knows that you have everything already. ⁴He has Thoughts which answer every need His Son perceives, although He sees them not. ⁵For Love must give, and what is given in His Name takes on the form most useful in a world of form.
14. These are the forms which never can deceive, because they come from Formlessness Itself. ²Forgiveness is an earthly form of love, which as it is in Heaven has no form. ³Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. ⁴In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still. ⁵Salvation of the world depends on you who can forgive. ⁶Such is your function here.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-186/salvation-of-the-world-depends-on-me/en/s/594

2024-07-06 11:13:19

Lesson 185
I want the peace of God.
1. To say these words is nothing. ²But to mean these words is everything. ³If you could but mean them for just an instant, there would be no further sorrow possible for you in any form; in any place or time. ⁴Heaven would be completely given back to full awareness, memory of God entirely restored, the resurrection of all creation fully recognized.
2. No one can mean these words and not be healed. ²He cannot play with dreams, nor think he is himself a dream. ³He cannot make a hell and think it real. ⁴He wants the peace of God, and it is given him. ⁵For that is all he wants, and that is all he will receive. ⁶Many have said these words. ⁷But few indeed have meant them. ⁸You have but to look upon the world you see around you to be sure how very few they are. ⁹The world would be completely changed, should any two agree these words express the only thing they want.
3. Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God. ²For minds can only join in truth. ³In dreams, no two can share the same intent. ⁴To each, the hero of the dream is different; the outcome wanted not the same for both. ⁵Loser and gainer merely shift about in changing patterns, as the ratio of gain to loss and loss to gain takes on a different aspect or another form.
4. Yet compromise alone a dream can bring. ²Sometimes it takes the form of union, but only the form. ³The meaning must escape the dream, for compromising is the goal of dreaming. ⁴Minds cannot unite in dreams. ⁵They merely bargain. ⁶And what bargain can give them the peace of God? ⁷Illusions come to take His place. ⁸And what He means is lost to sleeping minds intent on compromise, each to his gain and to another’s loss.
5. To mean you want the peace of God is to renounce all dreams. ²For no one means these words who wants illusions, and who therefore seeks the means which bring illusions. ³He has looked on them, and found them wanting. ⁴Now he seeks to go beyond them, recognizing that another dream would offer nothing more than all the others. ⁵Dreams are one to him. ⁶And he has learned their only difference is one of form, for one will bring the same despair and misery as do the rest.
6. The mind which means that all it wants is peace must join with other minds, for that is how peace is obtained. ²And when the wish for peace is genuine, the means for finding it is given, in a form each mind that seeks for it in honesty can understand. ³Whatever form the lesson takes is planned for him in such a way that he can not mistake it, if his asking is sincere. ⁴But if he asks without sincerity, there is no form in which the lesson will meet with acceptance and be truly learned.
7. Let us today devote our practicing to recognizing that we really mean the words we say. ²We want the peace of God. ³This is no idle wish. ⁴These words do not request another dream be given us. ⁵They do not ask for compromise, nor try to make another bargain in the hope that there may yet be one that can succeed where all the rest have failed. ⁶To mean these words acknowledges illusions are in vain, requesting the eternal in the place of shifting dreams which seem to change in what they offer, but are one in nothingness.
8. Today devote your practice periods to careful searching of your mind, to find the dreams you cherish still. ²What do you ask for in your heart? ³Forget the words you use in making your requests. ⁴Consider but what you believe will comfort you, and bring you happiness. ⁵But be you not dismayed by lingering illusions, for their form is not what matters now. ⁶Let not some dreams be more acceptable, reserving shame and secrecy for others. ⁷They are one. ⁸And being one, one question should be asked of all of them, “Is this what I would have, in place of Heaven and the peace of God?”
9. This is the choice you make. ²Be not deceived that it is otherwise. ³No compromise is possible in this. ⁴You choose God’s peace, or you have asked for dreams. ⁵And dreams will come as you requested them. ⁶Yet will God’s peace come just as certainly, and to remain with you forever. ⁷It will not be gone with every twist and turning of the road, to reappear, unrecognized, in forms which shift and change with every step you take.
10. You want the peace of God. ²And so do all who seem to seek for dreams. ³For them as well as for yourself, you ask but this when you make this request with deep sincerity. ⁴For thus you reach to what they really want, and join your own intent with what they seek above all things, perhaps unknown to them, but sure to you. ⁵You have been weak at times, uncertain in your purpose, and unsure of what you wanted, where to look for it, and where to turn for help in the attempt. ⁶Help has been given you. ⁷And would you not avail yourself of it by sharing it?
11. No one who truly seeks the peace of God can fail to find it. ²For he merely asks that he deceive himself no longer by denying to himself what is God’s Will. ³Who can remain unsatisfied who asks for what he has already? ⁴Who could be unanswered who requests an answer which is his to give? ⁵The peace of God is yours.
12. For you was peace created, given you by its Creator, and established as His Own eternal gift. ²How can you fail, when you but ask for what He wills for you? ³And how could your request be limited to you alone? ⁴No gift of God can be unshared. ⁵It is this attribute that sets the gifts of God apart from every dream that ever seemed to take the place of truth.
13. No one can lose and everyone must gain whenever any gift of God has been requested and received by anyone. ²God gives but to unite. ³To take away is meaningless to Him. ⁴And when it is as meaningless to you, you can be sure you share one Will with Him, and He with you. ⁵And you will also know you share one Will with all your brothers, whose intent is yours.
14. It is this one intent we seek today, uniting our desires with the need of every heart, the call of every mind, the hope that lies beyond despair, the love attack would hide, the brotherhood that hate has sought to sever, but which still remains as God created it. ²With Help like this beside us, can we fail today as we request the peace of God be given us?
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-185/i-want-the-peace-of-god/en/s/593

2024-07-05 14:40:51

Lesson 184
The Name of God is my inheritance.
1. You live by symbols. ²You have made up names for everything you see. ³Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. ⁴By this you carve it out of unity. ⁵By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. ⁶This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted by a name.
2. This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world’s perception is achieved. ²You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. ³Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. ⁴By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will.
3. What are these names by which the world becomes a series of discrete events, of things ununified, of bodies kept apart and holding bits of mind as separate awarenesses? ²You gave these names to them, establishing perception as you wished to have perception be. ³The nameless things were given names, and thus reality was given them as well. ⁴For what is named is given meaning and will then be seen as meaningful; a cause of true effect, with consequence inherent in itself.
4. This is the way reality is made by partial vision, purposefully set against the given truth. ²Its enemy is wholeness. ³It conceives of little things and looks upon them. ⁴And a lack of space, a sense of unity or vision that sees differently, become the threats which it must overcome, conflict with and deny.
5. Yet does this other vision still remain a natural direction for the mind to channel its perception. ²It is hard to teach the mind a thousand alien names, and thousands more. ³Yet you believe this is what learning means; its one essential goal by which communication is achieved, and concepts can be meaningfully shared.
6. This is the sum of the inheritance the world bestows. ²And everyone who learns to think that it is so accepts the signs and symbols that assert the world is real. ³It is for this they stand. ⁴They leave no doubt that what is named is there. ⁵It can be seen, as is anticipated. ⁶What denies that it is true is but illusion, for it is the ultimate reality. ⁷To question it is madness; to accept its presence is the proof of sanity.
7. Such is the teaching of the world. ²It is a phase of learning everyone who comes must go through. ³But the sooner he perceives on what it rests, how questionable are its premises, how doubtful its results, the sooner does he question its effects. ⁴Learning that stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning. ⁵In its proper place, it serves but as a starting point from which another kind of learning can begin, a new perception can be gained, and all the arbitrary names the world bestows can be withdrawn as they are raised to doubt.
8. Think not you made the world. ²Illusions, yes! ³But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming. ⁴When you call upon a brother, it is to his body that you make appeal. ⁵His true Identity is hidden from you by what you believe he really is. ⁶His body makes response to what you call him, for his mind consents to take the name you give him as his own. ⁷And thus his unity is twice denied, for you perceive him separate from you, and he accepts this separate name as his.
9. It would indeed be strange if you were asked to go beyond all symbols of the world, forgetting them forever; yet were asked to take a teaching function. ²You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. ³But be you not deceived by them as well. ⁴They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought that will release you from them. ⁵They become but means by which you can communicate in ways the world can understand, but which you recognize is not the unity where true communication can be found.
10. Thus what you need are intervals each day in which the learning of the world becomes a transitory phase; a prison house from which you go into the sunlight and forget the darkness. ²Here you understand the Word, the Name which God has given you; the one Identity which all things share; the one acknowledgment of what is true. ³And then step back to darkness, not because you think it real, but only to proclaim its unreality in terms which still have meaning in the world that darkness rules.
11. Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. ²Yet accept them not as your reality. ³The Holy Spirit uses all of them, but He does not forget creation has one Name, one meaning, and a single Source which unifies all things within Itself. ⁴Use all the names the world bestows on them but for convenience, yet do not forget they share the Name of God along with you.
12. God has no name. ²And yet His Name becomes the final lesson that all things are one, and at this lesson does all learning end. ³All names are unified; all space is filled with truth’s reflection. ⁴Every gap is closed, and separation healed. ⁵The Name of God is the inheritance He gave to those who chose the teaching of the world to take the place of Heaven. ⁶In our practicing, our purpose is to let our minds accept what God has given as the answer to the pitiful inheritance you made as fitting tribute to the Son He loves.
13. No one can fail who seeks the meaning of the Name of God. ²Experience must come to supplement the Word. ³But first you must accept the Name for all reality, and realize the many names you gave its aspects have distorted what you see, but have not interfered with truth at all. ⁴One Name we bring into our practicing. ⁵One Name we use to unify our sight.
14. And though we use a different name for each awareness of an aspect of God’s Son, we understand that they have but one Name, which He has given them. ²It is this Name we use in practicing. ³And through Its use, all foolish separations disappear which kept us blind. ⁴And we are given strength to see beyond them. ⁵Now our sight is blessed with blessings we can give as we receive.
15. Father, our Name is Yours. ²In It we are united with all living things, and You Who are their one Creator. ³What we made and call by many different names is but a shadow we have tried to cast across Your Own reality. ⁴And we are glad and thankful we were wrong. ⁵All our mistakes we give to You, that we may be absolved from all effects our errors seemed to have. ⁶And we accept the truth You give, in place of every one of them. ⁷Your Name is our salvation and escape from what we made. ⁸Your Name unites us in the oneness which is our inheritance and peace. ⁹Amen.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-184/the-name-of-god-is-my-inheritance/en/s/592

2024-07-04 15:16:22

Lesson 183
I call upon God’s Name and on my own.
1. God’s Name is holy, but no holier than yours. ²To call upon His Name is but to call upon your own. ³A father gives his son his name, and thus identifies the son with him. ⁴His brothers share his name, and thus are they united in a bond to which they turn for their identity. ⁵Your Father’s Name reminds you who you are, even within a world that does not know; even though you have not remembered it.
2. God’s Name can not be heard without response, nor said without an echo in the mind that calls you to remember. ²Say His Name, and you invite the angels to surround the ground on which you stand, and sing to you as they spread out their wings to keep you safe, and shelter you from every worldly thought that would intrude upon your holiness.
3. Repeat God’s Name, and all the world responds by laying down illusions. ²Every dream the world holds dear has suddenly gone by, and where it seemed to stand you find a star; a miracle of grace. ³The sick arise, healed of their sickly thoughts. ⁴The blind can see; the deaf can hear. ⁵The sorrowful cast off their mourning, and the tears of pain are dried as happy laughter comes to bless the world.
4. Repeat the Name of God, and little names have lost their meaning. ²No temptation but becomes a nameless and unwanted thing before God’s Name. ³Repeat His Name, and see how easily you will forget the names of all the gods you valued. ⁴They have lost the name of god you gave them. ⁵They become anonymous and valueless to you, although before you let the Name of God replace their little names, you stood before them worshipfully, naming them as gods.
5. Repeat the Name of God, and call upon your Self, Whose Name is His. ²Repeat His Name, and all the tiny, nameless things on earth slip into right perspective. ³Those who call upon the Name of God can not mistake the nameless for the Name, nor sin for grace, nor bodies for the holy Son of God. ⁴And should you join a brother as you sit with him in silence, and repeat God’s Name along with him within your quiet mind, you have established there an altar which reaches to God Himself and to His Son.
6. Practice but this today; repeat God’s Name slowly again and still again. ²Become oblivious to every name but His. ³Hear nothing else. ⁴Let all your thoughts become anchored on this. ⁵No other word we use except at the beginning, when we say today’s idea but once. ⁶And then God’s Name becomes our only thought, our only word, the only thing that occupies our minds, the only wish we have, the only sound with any meaning, and the only Name of everything that we desire to see; of everything that we would call our own.
7. Thus do we give an invitation which can never be refused. ²And God will come, and answer it Himself. ³Think not He hears the little prayers of those who call on Him with names of idols cherished by the world. ⁴They cannot reach Him thus. ⁵He cannot hear requests that He be not Himself, or that His Son receive another name than His.
8. Repeat God’s Name, and you acknowledge Him as sole Creator of reality. ²And you acknowledge also that His Son is part of Him, creating in His Name. ³Sit silently, and let His Name become the all-encompassing idea that holds your mind completely. ⁴Let all thoughts be still except this one. ⁵And to all other thoughts respond with this, and see God’s Name replace the thousand little names you gave your thoughts, not realizing that there is one Name for all there is, and all that there will be.
9. Today you can achieve a state in which you will experience the gift of grace. ²You can escape all bondage of the world, and give the world the same release you found. ³You can remember what the world forgot, and offer it your own remembering. ⁴You can accept today the part you play in its salvation, and your own as well. ⁵And both can be accomplished perfectly.
10. Turn to the Name of God for your release, and it is given you. ²No prayer but this is necessary, for it holds them all within it. ³Words are insignificant, and all requests unneeded when God’s Son calls on his Father’s Name. ⁴His Father’s Thoughts become his own. ⁵He makes his claim to all his Father gave, is giving still, and will forever give. ⁶He calls on Him to let all things he thought he made be nameless now, and in their place the holy Name of God becomes his judgment of their worthlessness.
11. All little things are silent. ²Little sounds are soundless now. ³The little things of earth have disappeared. ⁴The universe consists of nothing but the Son of God, who calls upon his Father. ⁵And his Father’s Voice gives answer in his Father’s holy Name. ⁶In this eternal, still relationship, in which communication far transcends all words, and yet exceeds in depth and height whatever words could possibly convey, is peace eternal. ⁷In our Father’s Name, we would experience this peace today. ⁸And in His Name, it shall be given us.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-183/i-call-upon-gods-name-and-on-my-own/en/s/591

2024-07-03 11:17:04

Lesson 182
I will be still an instant and go home.
1. This world you seem to live in is not home to you. ²And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. ³A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. ⁴Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. ⁵Nothing so definite that you could say with certainty you are an exile here. ⁶Just a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again.
2. No one but knows whereof we speak. ²Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. ³Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all. ⁴Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream. ⁵Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?
3. We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. ²He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find; not recognizing what it is he seeks. ³A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind. ⁴He does not understand he builds in vain. ⁵The home he seeks can not be made by him. ⁶There is no substitute for Heaven. ⁷All he ever made was hell.
4. Perhaps you think it is your childhood home that you would find again. ²The childhood of your body, and its place of shelter, are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened. ³Yet there is a Child in you Who seeks His Father’s house, and knows that He is alien here. ⁴This childhood is eternal, with an innocence that will endure forever. ⁵Where this Child shall go is holy ground. ⁶It is His Holiness that lights up Heaven, and that brings to earth the pure reflection of the light above, wherein are earth and Heaven joined as one.
5. It is this Child in you your Father knows as His Own Son. ²It is this Child Who knows His Father. ³He desires to go home so deeply, so unceasingly, His voice cries unto you to let Him rest a while. ⁴He does not ask for more than just a few instants of respite; just an interval in which He can return to breathe again the holy air that fills His Father’s house. ⁵You are His home as well. ⁶He will return. ⁷But give Him just a little time to be Himself, within the peace that is His home, resting in silence and in peace and love.
6. This Child needs your protection. ²He is far from home. ³He is so little that He seems so easily shut out, His tiny voice so readily obscured, His call for help almost unheard amid the grating sounds and harsh and rasping noises of the world. ⁴Yet does He know that in you still abides His sure protection. ⁵You will fail Him not. ⁶He will go home, and you along with Him.
7. This Child is your defenselessness; your strength. ²He trusts in you. ³He came because He knew you would not fail. ⁴He whispers of His home unceasingly to you. ⁵For He would bring you back with Him, that He Himself might stay, and not return again where He does not belong, and where He lives an outcast in a world of alien thoughts. ⁶His patience has no limits. ⁷He will wait until you hear His gentle Voice within you, calling you to let Him go in peace, along with you, to where He is at home and you with Him.
8. When you are still an instant, when the world recedes from you, when valueless ideas cease to have value in your restless mind, then will you hear His Voice. ²So poignantly He calls to you that you will not resist Him longer. ³In that instant He will take you to His home, and you will stay with Him in perfect stillness, silent and at peace, beyond all words, untouched by fear and doubt, sublimely certain that you are at home.
9. Rest with Him frequently today. ²For He was willing to become a little Child that you might learn of Him how strong is he who comes without defenses, offering only love’s messages to those who think he is their enemy. ³He holds the might of Heaven in His hand and calls them friend, and gives His strength to them, that they may see He would be Friend to them. ⁴He asks that they protect Him, for His home is far away, and He will not return to it alone.
10. Christ is reborn as but a little Child each time a wanderer would leave his home. ²For he must learn that what he would protect is but this Child, Who comes defenseless and Who is protected by defenselessness. ³Go home with Him from time to time today. ⁴You are as much an alien here as He.
11. Take time today to lay aside your shield which profits nothing, and lay down the spear and sword you raised against an enemy without existence. ²Christ has called you friend and brother. ³He has even come to ask your help in letting Him go home today, completed and completely. ⁴He has come as does a little child, who must beseech his father for protection and for love. ⁵He rules the universe, and yet He asks unceasingly that you return with Him, and take illusions as your gods no more.
12. You have not lost your innocence. ²It is for this you yearn. ³This is your heart’s desire. ⁴This is the voice you hear, and this the call which cannot be denied. ⁵The holy Child remains with you. ⁶His home is yours. ⁷Today He gives you His defenselessness, and you accept it in exchange for all the toys of battle you have made. ⁸And now the way is open, and the journey has an end in sight at last. ⁹Be still an instant and go home with Him, and be at peace a while.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-182/i-will-be-still-an-instant-and-go-home/en/s/590

2024-07-02 13:13:14

Lesson 181
I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
1. Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself. ²When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. ³You do not look beyond his errors. ⁴Rather, 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.
2. Perception has a focus. ²It is this that gives consistency to what you see. ³Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. ⁴Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before. ⁵Remove your focus on your brother’s sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. ⁶This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins. ⁷For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. ⁸And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.
3. Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent. ²We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while. ³We do not care about our future goals. ⁴And what we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. ⁵We seek for innocence and nothing else. ⁶We seek for it with no concern but now.
4. A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals. ²You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from those you held before. ³And you have also been dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that, even if you should succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.
5. How could this matter? ²For the past is gone; the future but imagined. ³These concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception. ⁴Nothing more. ⁵We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. ⁶We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. ⁷We enter in the time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.
6. We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. ²And 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.” ³So, 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:
⁴It is not this that I would look upon.
⁵I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
7. And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day. ²We do not seek for long-range goals. ³As 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.
8. Nor do we ask for fantasies. ²For what we seek to look upon is really there. ³And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. ⁴When 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. ⁵And the Love He feels for us becomes our own as well. ⁶This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.
9. The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless. ²And 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. ³We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. ⁴We look neither ahead nor backwards. ⁵We look straight into the present. ⁶And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. ⁷Our sinlessness is but the Will of God. ⁸This instant is our willing one with His.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-181/i-trust-my-brothers-who-are-one-with-me/en/s/589

2024-07-01 12:31:29

Lesson 180
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (169) By grace I live. ²By grace I am released.
³God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (170) There is no cruelty in God and none in me.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-180/en/s/587

2024-06-30 23:50:43

Lesson 179
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (167) There is one life, and that I share with God.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (168) Your grace is given me. ²I claim it now.
³God is but Love, and therefore so am I. y
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-179/en/s/586

2024-06-29 15:38:35

Lesson 178
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (165) Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (166) I am entrusted with the gifts of God.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-178/en/s/585

2024-06-29 15:33:26

2024-06-28 00:39:25

Lesson 177
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (163) There is no death. ²The Son of God is free.
³God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (164) Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-177/en/s/584

2024-06-26 22:17:27

Lesson 176
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (161) Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (162) I am as God created me.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-176/en/s/583

2024-06-25 16:10:04

Lesson 175
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (159) I give the miracles I have received.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (160) I am at home. ²Fear is the stranger here.
³God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-175/en/s/582

2024-06-24 14:57:34

Lesson 174
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (157) Into His Presence would I enter now.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (158) Today I learn to give as I receive.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-174/en/s/581

2024-06-23 16:46:59

Lesson 173
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (155) I will step back and let Him lead the way.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (156) I walk with God in perfect holiness.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-173/en/s/580

2024-06-22 14:48:00

Lesson 172
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (153) In my defenselessness my safety lies.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (154) I am among the ministers of God.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-172/en/s/579

2024-06-21 13:21:17

Lesson 171
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
1. (151) All things are echoes of the Voice for God.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
2. (152) The power of decision is my own.
²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
https://acim.org/acim/review-v/lesson-171/en/s/578

2024-06-20 13:34:40

Lesson 170
There is no cruelty in God and none in me.
1. No one attacks without intent to hurt. ²This can have no exception. ³When you think that you attack in self-defense, you mean that to be cruel is protection; you are safe because of cruelty. ⁴You mean that you believe to hurt another brings you freedom. ⁵And you mean that to attack is to exchange the state in which you are for something better, safer, more secure from dangerous invasion and from fear.
2. How thoroughly insane is the idea that to defend from fear is to attack! ²For here is fear begot and fed with blood, to make it grow and swell and rage. ³And thus is fear protected, not escaped. ⁴Today we learn a lesson which can save you more delay and needless misery than you can possibly imagine. ⁵It is this:
⁶You make what you defend against, and by your own defense against it is it real and inescapable. ⁷Lay down your arms, and only then do you perceive it false.
3. It seems to be the enemy without that you attack. ²Yet your defense sets up an enemy within; an alien thought at war with you, depriving you of peace, splitting your mind into two camps which seem wholly irreconcilable. ³For love now has an “enemy,” an opposite; and fear, the alien, now needs your defense against the threat of what you really are.
4. If you consider carefully the means by which your fancied self-defense proceeds on its imagined way, you will perceive the premises on which the idea stands. ²First, it is obvious ideas must leave their source, for it is you who make attack, and must have first conceived of it. ³Yet you attack outside yourself, and separate your mind from him who is to be attacked, with perfect faith the split you made is real.
5. Next, are the attributes of love bestowed upon its “enemy.” ²For fear becomes your safety and protector of your peace, to which you turn for solace and escape from doubts about your strength, and hope of rest in dreamless quiet. ³And as love is shorn of what belongs to it and it alone, love is endowed with attributes of fear. ⁴For love would ask you lay down all defense as merely foolish. ⁵And your arms indeed would crumble into dust. ⁶For such they are.
6. With love as enemy, must cruelty become a god. ²And gods demand that those who worship them obey their dictates, and refuse to question them. ³Harsh punishment is meted out relentlessly to those who ask if the demands are sensible or even sane. ⁴It is their enemies who are unreasonable and insane, while they are always merciful and just.
7. Today we look upon this cruel god dispassionately. ²And we note that though his lips are smeared with blood, and fire seems to flame from him, he is but made of stone. ³He can do nothing. ⁴We need not defy his power. ⁵He has none. ⁶And those who see in him their safety have no guardian, no strength to call upon in danger, and no mighty warrior to fight for them.
8. This moment can be terrible. ²But it can also be the time of your release from abject slavery. ³You make a choice, standing before this idol, seeing him exactly as he is. ⁴Will you restore to love what you have sought to wrest from it and lay before this mindless piece of stone? ⁵Or will you make another idol to replace it? ⁶For the god of cruelty takes many forms. ⁷Another can be found.
9. Yet do not think that fear is the escape from fear. ²Let us remember what the text has stressed about the obstacles to peace. ³The final one, the hardest to believe is nothing, and a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful and beyond surmounting, is the fear of God Himself. ⁴Here is the basic premise which enthrones the thought of fear as god. ⁵For fear is loved by those who worship it, and love appears to be invested now with cruelty.
10. Where does the totally insane belief in gods of vengeance come from? ²Love has not confused its attributes with those of fear. ³Yet must the worshippers of fear perceive their own confusion in fear’s “enemy”; its cruelty as now a part of love. ⁴And what becomes more fearful than the Heart of Love Itself? ⁵The blood appears to be upon His Lips; the fire comes from Him. ⁶And He is terrible above all else, cruel beyond conception, striking down all who acknowledge Him to be their God.
11. The choice you make today is certain. ²For you look for the last time upon this bit of carven stone you made, and call it god no longer. ³You have reached this place before, but you have chosen that this cruel god remain with you in still another form. ⁴And so the fear of God returned with you. ⁵This time you leave it there. ⁶And you return to a new world, unburdened by its weight; beheld not in its sightless eyes, but in the vision that your choice restored to you.
12. Now do your eyes belong to Christ, and He looks through them. ²Now your voice belongs to God and echoes His. ³And now your heart remains at peace forever. ⁴You have chosen Him in place of idols, and your attributes, given by your Creator, are restored to you at last. ⁵The Call for God is heard and answered. ⁶Now has fear made way for love, as God Himself replaces cruelty.
13. Father, we are like You. ²No cruelty abides in us, for there is none in You. ³Your peace is ours. ⁴And we bless the world with what we have received from You alone. ⁵We choose again, and make our choice for all our brothers, knowing they are one with us. ⁶We bring them Your salvation as we have received it now. ⁷And we give thanks for them who render us complete. ⁸In them we see Your glory, and in them we find our peace. ⁹Holy are we because Your Holiness has set us free. ¹⁰And we give thanks. ¹¹Amen.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-170/there-is-no-cruelty-in-god-and-none-in-me/en/s/576

2024-06-19 12:51:38

Lesson 169
By grace I live. By grace I am released.
1. Grace is an aspect of the Love of God which is most like the state prevailing in the unity of truth. ²It is the world’s most lofty aspiration, for it leads beyond the world entirely. ³It is past learning, yet the goal of learning, for grace cannot come until the mind prepares itself for true acceptance. ⁴Grace becomes inevitable instantly in those who have prepared a table where it can be gently laid and willingly received; an altar clean and holy for the gift.
2. Grace is acceptance of the Love of God within a world of seeming hate and fear. ²By grace alone the hate and fear are gone, for grace presents a state so opposite to everything the world contains, that those whose minds are lighted by the gift of grace can not believe the world of fear is real.
3. Grace is not learned. ²The final step must go beyond all learning. ³Grace is not the goal this course aspires to attain. ⁴Yet we prepare for grace in that an open mind can hear the Call to waken. ⁵It is not shut tight against God’s Voice. ⁶It has become aware that there are things it does not know, and thus is ready to accept a state completely different from experience with which it is familiarly at home.
4. We have perhaps appeared to contradict our statement that the revelation of the Father and the Son as one has been already set. ²But we have also said the mind determines when that time will be, and has determined it. ³And yet we urge you to bear witness to the Word of God to hasten the experience of truth, and speed its advent into every mind that recognizes truth’s effects on you.
5. Oneness is simply the idea God is. ²And in His Being, He encompasses all things. ³No mind holds anything but Him. ⁴We say “God is,” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. ⁵There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. ⁶It has united with its Source. ⁷And like its Source Itself, it merely is.
6. We cannot speak nor write nor even think of this at all. ²It comes to every mind when total recognition that its will is God’s has been completely given and received completely. ³It returns the mind into the endless present, where the past and future cannot be conceived. ⁴It lies beyond salvation; past all thought of time, forgiveness and the holy face of Christ. ⁵The Son of God has merely disappeared into his Father, as his Father has in him. ⁶The world has never been at all. ⁷Eternity remains a constant state.
7. This is beyond experience we try to hasten. ²Yet forgiveness, taught and learned, brings with it the experiences which bear witness that the time the mind itself determined to abandon all but this is now at hand. ³We do not hasten it, in that what you will offer was concealed from Him Who teaches what forgiveness means.
8. All learning was already in His Mind, accomplished and complete. ²He recognized all that time holds, and gave it to all minds that each one might determine, from a point where time was ended, when it is released to revelation and eternity. ³We have repeated several times before that you but make a journey that is done.
9. For oneness must be here. ²Whatever time the mind has set for revelation is entirely irrelevant to what must be a constant state, forever as it always was; forever to remain as it is now. ³We merely take the part assigned long since, and fully recognized as perfectly fulfilled by Him Who wrote salvation’s script in His Creator’s Name, and in the Name of His Creator’s Son.
10. There is no need to further clarify what no one in the world can understand. ²When revelation of your oneness comes, it will be known and fully understood. ³Now we have work to do, for those in time can speak of things beyond, and listen to words which explain what is to come is past already. ⁴Yet what meaning can the words convey to those who count the hours still, and rise and work and go to sleep by them?
11. Suffice it, then, that you have work to do to play your part. ²The ending must remain obscure to you until your part is done. ³It does not matter. ⁴For your part is still what all the rest depends on. ⁵As you take the role assigned to you, salvation comes a little nearer each uncertain heart that does not beat as yet in tune with God.
12. Forgiveness is the central theme that runs throughout salvation, holding all its parts in meaningful relationships, the course it runs directed and its outcome sure. ²And now we ask for grace, the final gift salvation can bestow. ³Experience that grace provides will end in time, for grace foreshadows Heaven, yet does not replace the thought of time but for a little while.
13. The interval suffices. ²It is here that miracles are laid; to be returned by you from holy instants you receive, through grace in your experience, to all who see the light that lingers in your face. ³What is the face of Christ but his who went a moment into timelessness, and brought a clear reflection of the unity he felt an instant back to bless the world? ⁴How could you finally attain to it forever, while a part of you remains outside, unknowing, unawakened, and in need of you as witness to the truth?
14. Be grateful to return, as you were glad to go an instant, and accept the gifts that grace provided you. ²You carry them back to yourself. ³And revelation stands not far behind. ⁴Its coming is ensured. ⁵We ask for grace, and for experience that comes from grace. ⁶We welcome the release it offers everyone. ⁷We do not ask for the unaskable. ⁸We do not look beyond what grace can give. ⁹For this we can give in the grace that has been given us.
15. Our learning goal today does not exceed this prayer. ²Yet in the world, what could be more than what we ask this day of Him Who gives the grace we ask, as it was given Him?
³By grace I live. ⁴By grace I am released.
⁵By grace I give. ⁶By grace I will release.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-169/by-grace-i-live-by-grace-i-am-released/en/s/575

2024-06-18 12:26:16

Lesson 168
Your grace is given me. I claim it now.
1. God speaks to us. ²Shall we not speak to Him? ³He is not distant. ⁴He makes no attempt to hide from us. ⁵We try to hide from Him, and suffer from deception. ⁶He remains entirely accessible. ⁷He loves His Son. ⁸There is no certainty but this, yet this suffices. ⁹He will love His Son forever. ¹⁰When his mind remains asleep, He loves him still. ¹¹And when his mind awakes, He loves him with a never-changing Love.
2. If you but knew the meaning of His Love, hope and despair would be impossible. ²For hope would be forever satisfied; despair of any kind unthinkable. ³His grace His answer is to all despair, for in it lies remembrance of His Love. ⁴Would He not gladly give the means by which His Will is recognized? ⁵His grace is yours by your acknowledgment. ⁶And memory of Him awakens in the mind that asks the means of Him whereby its sleep is done.
3. Today we ask of God the gift He has most carefully preserved within our hearts, waiting to be acknowledged. ²This the gift by which God leans to us and lifts us up, taking salvation’s final step Himself. ³All steps but this we learn, instructed by His Voice. ⁴But finally He comes Himself, and takes us in His Arms and sweeps away the cobwebs of our sleep. ⁵His gift of grace is more than just an answer. ⁶It restores all memories the sleeping mind forgot; all certainty of what Love’s meaning is.
4. God loves His Son. ²Request Him now to give the means by which this world will disappear, and vision first will come, with knowledge but an instant later. ³For in grace you see a light that covers all the world in love, and watch fear disappear from every face as hearts rise up and claim the light as theirs. ⁴What now remains that Heaven be delayed an instant longer? ⁵What is still undone when your forgiveness rests on everything?
5. It is a new and holy day today, for we receive what has been given us. ²Our faith lies in the Giver, not our own acceptance. ³We acknowledge our mistakes, but He to Whom all error is unknown is yet the One Who answers our mistakes by giving us the means to lay them down, and rise to Him in gratitude and love.
6. And He descends to meet us, as we come to Him. ²For what He has prepared for us He gives and we receive. ³Such is His Will, because He loves His Son. ⁴To Him we pray today, returning but the word He gave to us through His Own Voice, His Word, His Love:
⁵Your grace is given me. ⁶I claim it now. ⁷Father, I come to You. ⁸And You will come to me who ask. ⁹I am the Son You love.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-168/your-grace-is-given-me-i-claim-it-now/en/s/574

2024-06-16 14:26:07

Lesson 167
There is one life, and that I share with God.
1. There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. ²It does not have degrees. ³It is the one condition in which all that God created share. ⁴Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. ⁵There is no death because what God created shares His life. ⁶There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. ⁷There is no death because the Father and the Son are one.
2. In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite. ²You call it death. ³Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. ⁴It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. ⁵It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. ⁶All sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. ⁷And thus deny you live.
3. You think that death is of the body. ²Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. ³A thought is in the mind. ⁴It can be then applied as mind directs it. ⁵But its origin is where it must be changed, if change occurs. ⁶Ideas leave not their source. ⁷The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. ⁸It is the reason you can heal. ⁹It is the cause of healing. ¹⁰It is why you cannot die. ¹¹Its truth established you as one with God.
4. Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. ²It is the belief conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you can never change. ³It is the fixed belief ideas can leave their source, and take on qualities the source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as distance, time and form.
5. Death cannot come from life. ²Ideas remain united to their source. ³They can extend all that their source contains. ⁴In that, they can go far beyond themselves. ⁵But they can not give birth to what was never given them. ⁶As they are made, so will their making be. ⁷As they were born, so will they then give birth. ⁸And where they come from, there will they return.
6. The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. ²It cannot change what is its waking state. ³It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. ⁴What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. ⁵For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. ⁶It cannot make the physical. ⁷What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.
7. The opposite of life can only be another form of life. ²As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. ³Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. ⁴Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. ⁵It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.
8. God creates only mind awake. ²He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. ³The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. ⁴Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within themselves, for they are everywhere.
9. What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. ²When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. ³It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. ⁴When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.
10. Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. ²Our life is not as we imagine it. ³Who changes life because he shuts his eyes, or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? ⁴We will not ask for death in any form today. ⁵Nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself.
11. His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. ²He is Lord of what we think today. ³And in His Thoughts, which have no opposite, we understand there is one life, and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of life from where it came.
12. We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect. ²As we were, so are we now and will forever be. ³A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. ⁴And now it is no more a mere reflection. ⁵It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. ⁶No vision now is needed. ⁷For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-167/there-is-one-life-and-that-i-share-with-god/en/s/573

2024-06-16 14:25:40

Lesson 166
I am entrusted with the gifts of God.
1. All things are given you. ²God’s trust in you is limitless. ³He knows His Son. ⁴He gives without exception, holding nothing back that can contribute to your happiness. ⁵And yet, unless your will is one with His, His gifts are not received. ⁶But what would make you think there is another will than His?
2. Here is the paradox that underlies the making of the world. ²This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real. ³Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one that leads to opposite effects from those He wills. ⁴Impossible indeed; but every mind that looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. ⁵But never in one God.
3. The gifts of God are not acceptable to anyone who holds such strange beliefs. ²He must believe that to accept God’s gifts, however evident they may become, however urgently he may be called to claim them as his own, is to be pressed to treachery against himself. ³He must deny their presence, contradict the truth, and suffer to preserve the world he made.
4. Here is the only home he thinks he knows. ²Here is the only safety he believes that he can find. ³Without the world he made is he an outcast; homeless and afraid. ⁴He does not realize that it is here he is afraid indeed, and homeless, too; an outcast wandering so far from home, so long away, he does not realize he has forgotten where he came from, where he goes, and even who he really is.
5. Yet in his lonely, senseless wanderings, God’s gifts go with him, all unknown to him. ²He cannot lose them. ³But he will not look at what is given him. ⁴He wanders on, aware of the futility he sees about him everywhere, perceiving how his little lot but dwindles, as he goes ahead to nowhere. ⁵Still he wanders on in misery and poverty, alone though God is with him, and a treasure his so great that everything the world contains is valueless before its magnitude.
6. He seems a sorry figure; weary, worn, in threadbare clothing, and with feet that bleed a little from the rocky road he walks. ²No one but has identified with him, for everyone who comes here has pursued the path he follows, and has felt defeat and hopelessness as he is feeling them. ³Yet is he really tragic, when you see that he is following the way he chose, and need but realize Who walks with him and open up his treasures to be free?
7. This is your chosen self, the one you made as a replacement for reality. ²This is the self you savagely defend against all reason, every evidence, and all the witnesses with proof to show this is not you. ³You heed them not. ⁴You go on your appointed way, with eyes cast down lest you might catch a glimpse of truth, and be released from self-deception and set free.
8. You cower fearfully lest you should feel Christ’s touch upon your shoulder, and perceive His gentle hand directing you to look upon your gifts. ²How could you then proclaim your poverty in exile? ³He would make you laugh at this perception of yourself. ⁴Where is self-pity then? ⁵And what becomes of all the tragedy you sought to make for him whom God intended only joy?
9. Your ancient fear has come upon you now, and justice has caught up with you at last. ²Christ’s hand has touched your shoulder, and you feel that you are not alone. ³You even think the miserable self you thought was you may not be your Identity. ⁴Perhaps God’s Word is truer than your own. ⁵Perhaps His gifts to you are real. ⁶Perhaps He has not wholly been outwitted by your plan to keep His Son in deep oblivion, and go the way you chose without your Self.
10. God’s Will does not oppose. ²It merely is. ³It is not God you have imprisoned in your plan to lose your Self. ⁴He does not know about a plan so alien to His Will. ⁵There was a need He did not understand, to which He gave an Answer. ⁶That is all. ⁷And you who have this Answer given you have need no more of anything but this.
11. Now do we live, for now we cannot die. ²The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be. ³One walks with you Who gently answers all your fears with this one merciful reply, “It is not so.” ⁴He points to all the gifts you have each time the thought of poverty oppresses you, and speaks of His Companionship when you perceive yourself as lonely and afraid.
12. Yet He reminds you still of one thing more you had forgotten. ²For His touch on you has made you like Himself. ³The gifts you have are not for you alone. ⁴What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. ⁵This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make in which to hide from God. ⁶He has reminded you of all the gifts that God has given you. ⁷He speaks as well of what becomes your will when you accept these gifts, and recognize they are your own.
13. The gifts are yours, entrusted to your care, to give to all who chose the lonely road you have escaped. ²They do not understand they but pursue their wishes. ³It is you who teach them now. ⁴For you have learned of Christ there is another way for them to walk. ⁵Teach them by showing them the happiness that comes to those who feel the touch of Christ, and recognize God’s gifts. ⁶Let sorrow not tempt you to be unfaithful to your trust.
14. Your sighs will now betray the hopes of those who look to you for their release. ²Your tears are theirs. ³If you are sick, you but withhold their healing. ⁴What you fear but teaches them their fears are justified. ⁵Your hand becomes the giver of Christ’s touch; your change of mind becomes the proof that who accepts God’s gifts can never suffer anything. ⁶You are entrusted with the world’s release from pain.
15. Betray it not. ²Become the living proof of what Christ’s touch can offer everyone. ³God has entrusted all His gifts to you. ⁴Be witness in your happiness to how transformed the mind becomes which chooses to accept His gifts, and feel the touch of Christ. ⁵Such is your mission now. ⁶For God entrusts the giving of His gifts to all who have received them. ⁷He has shared His joy with you. ⁸And now you go to share it with the world.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-166/i-am-entrusted-with-the-gifts-of-god/en/s/572

2024-06-14 12:28:21

Lesson 165
Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.
1. What makes this world seem real except your own denial of the truth that lies beyond? ²What but your thoughts of misery and death obscure the perfect happiness and the eternal life your Father wills for you? ³And what could hide what cannot be concealed except illusion? ⁴What could keep from you what you already have except your choice to see it not, denying it is there?
2. The Thought of God created you. ²It left you not, nor have you ever been apart from it an instant. ³It belongs to you. ⁴By it you live. ⁵It is your Source of life, holding you one with it, and everything is one with you because it left you not. ⁶The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love. ⁷Eternity and everlasting life shine in your mind, because the Thought of God has left you not, and still abides with you.
3. Who would deny his safety and his peace, his joy, his healing and his peace of mind, his quiet rest, his calm awakening, if he but recognized where they abide? ²Would he not instantly prepare to go where they are found, abandoning all else as worthless in comparison with them? ³And having found them, would he not make sure they stay with him, and he remain with them?
4. Deny not Heaven. ²It is yours today, but for the asking. ³Nor need you perceive how great the gift, how changed your mind will be before it comes to you. ⁴Ask to receive, and it is given you. ⁵Conviction lies within it. ⁶Till you welcome it as yours, uncertainty remains. ⁷Yet God is fair. ⁸Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow.
5. Ask with desire. ²You need not be sure that you request the only thing you want. ³But when you have received, you will be sure you have the treasure you have always sought. ⁴What would you then exchange for it? ⁵What would induce you now to let it fade away from your ecstatic vision? ⁶For this sight proves that you have exchanged your blindness for the seeing eyes of Christ; your mind has come to lay aside denial, and accept the Thought of God as your inheritance.
6. Now is all doubting past, the journey’s end made certain, and salvation given you. ²Now is Christ’s power in your mind, to heal as you were healed. ³For now you are among the saviors of the world. ⁴Your destiny lies there and nowhere else. ⁵Would God consent to let His Son remain forever starved by his denial of the nourishment he needs to live? ⁶Abundance dwells in him, and deprivation cannot cut him off from God’s sustaining Love and from his home.
7. Practice today in hope. ²For hope indeed is justified. ³Your doubts are meaningless, for God is certain. ⁴And the Thought of Him is never absent. ⁵Sureness must abide within you who are host to Him. ⁶This course removes all doubts which you have interposed between Him and your certainty of Him.
8. We count on God, and not upon ourselves, to give us certainty. ²And in His Name we practice as His Word directs we do. ³His sureness lies beyond our every doubt. ⁴His Love remains beyond our every fear. ⁵The Thought of Him is still beyond all dreams and in our minds, according to His Will.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-165/let-not-my-mind-deny-the-thought-of-god/en/s/571

2024-06-13 15:22:57

Lesson 164
Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.
1. What time but now can truth be recognized? ²The present is the only time there is. ³And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there; not in our sight, but in the eyes of Christ. ⁴He looks past time, and sees eternity as represented there. ⁵He hears the sounds the senseless, busy world engenders, yet He hears them faintly. ⁶For beyond them all He hears the song of Heaven, and the Voice for God more clear, more meaningful, more near.
2. The world fades easily away before His sight. ²Its sounds grow dim. ³A melody from far beyond the world increasingly is more and more distinct; an ancient call to which He gives an ancient answer. ⁴You will recognize them both, for they are but your answer to your Father’s Call to you. ⁵Christ answers for you, echoing your Self, using your voice to give His glad consent; accepting your deliverance for you.
3. How holy is your practicing today, as Christ gives you His sight and hears for you, and answers in your name the Call He hears! ²How quiet is the time you give to spend with Him, beyond the world. ³How easily are all your seeming sins forgot, and all your sorrows unremembered. ⁴On this day is grief laid by, for sights and sounds that come from nearer than the world are clear to you who will today accept the gifts He gives.
4. There is a silence into which the world can not intrude. ²There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. ³There is a sense of holiness in you the thought of sin has never touched. ⁴All this today you will remember. ⁵Faithfulness in practicing today will bring rewards so great and so completely different from all things you sought before, that you will know that here your treasure is, and here your rest.
5. This is the day when vain imaginings part like a curtain, to reveal what lies beyond them. ²Now is what is really there made visible, while all the shadows which appeared to hide it merely sink away. ³Now is the balance righted, and the scale of judgment left to Him Who judges true. ⁴And in His judgment will a world unfold in perfect innocence before your eyes. ⁵Now will you see it with the eyes of Christ. ⁶Now is its transformation clear to you.
6. Brother, this day is sacred to the world. ²Your vision, given you from far beyond all things within the world, looks back on them in a new light. ³And what you see becomes the healing and salvation of the world. ⁴The valuable and valueless are both perceived and recognized for what they are. ⁵And what is worthy of your love receives your love, while nothing to be feared remains.
7. We will not judge today. ²We will receive but what is given us from judgment made beyond the world. ³Our practicing today becomes our gift of thankfulness for our release from blindness and from misery. ⁴All that we see will but increase our joy, because its holiness reflects our own. ⁵We stand forgiven in the sight of Christ, with all the world forgiven in our own. ⁶We bless the world, as we behold it in the light in which our Savior looks on us, and offer it the freedom given us through His forgiving vision, not our own.
8. Open the curtain in your practicing by merely letting go all things you think you want. ²Your trifling treasures put away, and leave a clean and open space within your mind where Christ can come, and offer you the treasure of salvation. ³He has need of your most holy mind to save the world. ⁴Is not this purpose worthy to be yours? ⁵Is not Christ’s vision worthy to be sought above the world’s unsatisfying goals?
9. Let not today slip by without the gifts it holds for you receiving your consent and your acceptance. ²We can change the world, if you acknowledge them. ³You may not see the value your acceptance gives the world. ⁴But this you surely want; you can exchange all suffering for joy this very day. ⁵Practice in earnest, and the gift is yours. ⁶Would God deceive you? ⁷Can His promise fail? ⁸Can you withhold so little, when His Hand holds out complete salvation to His Son?
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-164/now-are-we-one-with-him-who-is-our-source/en/s/570

2024-06-12 10:37:50

Lesson 163
There is no death. The Son of God is free.
1. Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. ²It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. ³All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.
2. Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. ²For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. ³The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. ⁴For it alone will surely come.
3. All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake, in place of aspirations and of dreams. ²But death is counted on. ³For it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. ⁴It will never fail to take all life as hostage to itself.
4. Would you bow down to idols such as this? ²Here is the strength and might of God Himself perceived within an idol made of dust. ³Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God’s Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven’s perfect, changeless constancy. ⁴Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God.
5. Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. ²His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. ³It says but this: “Here lies a witness God is dead.” ⁴And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so.
6. It is impossible to worship death in any form, and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid, while still believing in the rest. ²For death is total. ³Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. ⁴No compromise is possible. ⁵For here again we see an obvious position, which we must accept if we be sane; what contradicts one thought entirely can not be true, unless its opposite is proven false.
7. The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. ²For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive. ³Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. ⁴And with the Father died the Son as well.
8. Death’s worshippers may be afraid. ²And yet, can thoughts like these be fearful? ³If they saw that it is only this which they believe, they would be instantly released. ⁴And you will show them this today. ⁵There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. ⁶God made not death. ⁷Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. ⁸This the stand we take today. ⁹And it is given us to look past death, and see the life beyond.
9. Our Father, bless our eyes today. ²We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. ³We live and move in You alone. ⁴We are not separate from Your eternal life. ⁵There is no death, for death is not Your Will. ⁶And we abide where You have placed us, in the life we share with You and with all living things, to be like You and part of You forever. ⁷We accept Your Thoughts as ours, and our will is one with Yours eternally. ⁸Amen.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-163/there-is-no-death-the-son-of-god-is-free/en/s/569

2024-06-11 10:40:45

Lesson 162
I am as God created me.
1. This single thought, held firmly in the mind, would save the world. ²From time to time we will repeat it, as we reach another stage in learning. ³It will mean far more to you as you advance. ⁴These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. ⁵By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. ⁶For they come from God.
2. Here is the Word by which the Son became his Father’s happiness, His Love and His completion. ²Here creation is proclaimed, and honored as it is. ³There is no dream these words will not dispel; no thought of sin and no illusion which the dream contains that will not fade away before their might. ⁴They are the trumpet of awakening that sounds around the world. ⁵The dead awake in answer to its call. ⁶And those who live and hear this sound will never look on death.
3. Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. ²His dreams are happy and his rest secure, his safety certain and his body healed, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. ³He will save the world, because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth.
4. Today we practice simply. ²For the words we use are mighty, and they need no thoughts beyond themselves to change the mind of him who uses them. ³So wholly is it changed that it is now the treasury in which God places all His gifts and all His Love, to be distributed to all the world, increased in giving; kept complete because its sharing is unlimited. ⁴And thus you learn to think with God. ⁵Christ’s vision has restored your sight by salvaging your mind.
5. We honor you today. ²Yours is the right to perfect holiness you now accept. ³With this acceptance is salvation brought to everyone, for who could cherish sin when holiness like this has blessed the world? ⁴Who could despair when perfect joy is yours, available to all as remedy for grief and misery, all sense of loss, and for complete escape from sin and guilt?
6. And who would not be brother to you now; you, his redeemer and his savior. ²Who could fail to welcome you into his heart with loving invitation, eager to unite with one like him in holiness? ³You are as God created you. ⁴These words dispel the night, and darkness is no more. ⁵The light is come today to bless the world. ⁶For you have recognized the Son of God, and in that recognition is the world’s.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-162/i-am-as-god-created-me/en/s/568

2024-06-10 20:06:03

Lesson 161
Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.
1. Today we practice differently, and take a stand against our anger, that our fears may disappear and offer room to love. ²Here is salvation in the simple words in which we practice with today’s idea. ³Here is the answer to temptation which can never fail to welcome in the Christ where fear and anger had prevailed before. ⁴Here is Atonement made complete, the world passed safely by and Heaven now restored. ⁵Here is the answer of the Voice for God.
2. Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. ²But part of it is now unnatural. ³It does not look on everything as one. ⁴It sees instead but fragments of the whole, for only thus could it invent the partial world you see. ⁵The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. ⁶All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.
3. Thus were specifics made. ²And now it is specifics we must use in practicing. ³We give them to the Holy Spirit, that He may employ them for a purpose which is different from the one we gave to them. ⁴Yet He can use but what we made, to teach us from a different point of view, so we can see a different use in everything.
4. One brother is all brothers. ²Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. ³Such is the truth. ⁴Yet do these thoughts make clear the meaning of creation? ⁵Do these words bring perfect clarity with them to you? ⁶What can they seem to be but empty sounds; pretty, perhaps, correct in sentiment, yet fundamentally not understood nor understandable. ⁷The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all-encompassing. ⁸We need to see a little, that we learn a lot.
5. It seems to be the body that we feel limits our freedom, makes us suffer, and at last puts out our life. ²Yet bodies are but symbols for a concrete form of fear. ³Fear without symbols calls for no response, for symbols can stand for the meaningless. ⁴Love needs no symbols, being true. ⁵But fear attaches to specifics, being false.
6. Bodies attack, but minds do not. ²This thought is surely reminiscent of our text, where it is often emphasized. ³This is the reason bodies easily become fear’s symbols. ⁴You have many times been urged to look beyond the body, for its sight presents the symbol of love’s “enemy” Christ’s vision does not see. ⁵The body is the target for attack, for no one thinks he hates a mind. ⁶Yet what but mind directs the body to attack? ⁷What else could be the seat of fear except what thinks of fear?
7. Hate is specific. ²There must be a thing to be attacked. ³An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed. ⁴When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God’s Voice proclaims there is no death. ⁵Fear is insatiable, consuming everything its eyes behold, seeing itself in everything, compelled to turn upon itself and to destroy.
8. Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear’s symbol. ²And he will attack, because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. ³Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. ⁴It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him.
9. This do the body’s eyes behold in one whom Heaven cherishes, the angels love and God created perfect. ²This is his reality. ³And in Christ’s vision is his loveliness reflected in a form so holy and so beautiful that you could scarce refrain from kneeling at his feet. ⁴Yet you will take his hand instead, for you are like him in the sight that sees him thus. ⁵Attack on him is enemy to you, for you will not perceive that in his hands is your salvation. ⁶Ask him but for this, and he will give it to you. ⁷Ask him not to symbolize your fear. ⁸Would you request that love destroy itself? ⁹Or would you have it be revealed to you and set you free?
10. Today we practice in a form we have attempted earlier. ²Your readiness is closer now, and you will come today nearer Christ’s vision. ³If you are intent on reaching it, you will succeed today. ⁴And once you have succeeded, you will not be willing to accept the witnesses your body’s eyes call forth. ⁵What you will see will sing to you of ancient melodies you will remember. ⁶You are not forgot in Heaven. ⁷Would you not remember it?
11. Select one brother, symbol of the rest, and ask salvation of him. ²See him first as clearly as you can, in that same form to which you are accustomed. ³See his face, his hands and feet, his clothing. ⁴Watch him smile, and see familiar gestures which he makes so frequently. ⁵Then think of this: What you are seeing now conceals from you the sight of one who can forgive you all your sins; whose sacred hands can take away the nails which pierce your own, and lift the crown of thorns which you have placed upon your bleeding head. ⁶Ask this of him, that he may set you free:
⁷Give me your blessing, holy Son of God. ⁸I would behold you with the eyes of Christ, and see my perfect sinlessness in you.
12. And He will answer Whom you called upon. ²For He will hear the Voice for God in you, and answer in your own. ³Behold him now, whom you have seen as merely flesh and bone, and recognize that Christ has come to you. ⁴Today’s idea is your safe escape from anger and from fear. ⁵Be sure you use it instantly, should you be tempted to attack a brother and perceive in him the symbol of your fear. ⁶And you will see him suddenly transformed from enemy to savior; from the devil into Christ.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-161/give-me-your-blessing-holy-son-of-god/en/s/567

2024-06-10 02:03:57

Lesson 160
I am at home. Fear is the stranger here.
1. Fear is a stranger to the ways of love. ²Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself. ³And thus you are unknown to you. ⁴What is your Self remains an alien to the part of you which thinks that it is real, but different from yourself. ⁵Who could be sane in such a circumstance? ⁶Who but a madman could believe he is what he is not, and judge against himself?
2. There is a stranger in our midst, who comes from an idea so foreign to the truth he speaks a different language, looks upon a world truth does not know, and understands what truth regards as senseless. ²Stranger yet, he does not recognize to whom he comes, and yet maintains his home belongs to him, while he is alien now who is at home. ³And yet, how easy it would be to say, “This is my home. ⁴Here I belong, and will not leave because a madman says I must.”
3. What reason is there for not saying this? ²What could the reason be except that you had asked this stranger in to take your place, and let you be a stranger to yourself? ³No one would let himself be dispossessed so needlessly, unless he thought there were another home more suited to his tastes.
4. Who is the stranger? ²Is it fear or you who are unsuited to the home which God provided for His Son? ³Is fear His Own, created in His likeness? ⁴Is it fear that love completes, and is completed by? ⁵There is no home can shelter love and fear. ⁶They cannot coexist. ⁷If you are real, then fear must be illusion. ⁸And if fear is real, then you do not exist at all.
5. How simply, then, the question is resolved. ²Who fears has but denied himself and said, “I am the stranger here. ³And so I leave my home to one more like me than myself, and give him all I thought belonged to me.” ⁴Now is he exiled of necessity, not knowing who he is, uncertain of all things but this; that he is not himself, and that his home has been denied to him.
6. What does he search for now? ²What can he find? ³A stranger to himself can find no home wherever he may look, for he has made return impossible. ⁴His way is lost, except a miracle will search him out and show him that he is no stranger now. ⁵The miracle will come. ⁶For in his home his Self remains. ⁷It asked no stranger in, and took no alien thought to be Itself. ⁸And It will call Its Own unto Itself in recognition of what is Its Own.
7. Who is the stranger? ²Is he not the one your Self calls not? ³You are unable now to recognize this stranger in your midst, for you have given him your rightful place. ⁴Yet is your Self as certain of Its Own as God is of His Son. ⁵He cannot be confused about creation. ⁶He is sure of what belongs to Him. ⁷No stranger can be interposed between His knowledge and His Son’s reality. ⁸He does not know of strangers. ⁹He is certain of His Son.
8. God’s certainty suffices. ²Whom He knows to be His Son belongs where He has set His Son forever. ³He has answered you who ask, “Who is the stranger?” ⁴Hear His Voice assure you, quietly and sure, that you are not a stranger to your Father, nor is your Creator stranger made to you. ⁵Whom God has joined remain forever one, at home in Him, no stranger to Himself.
9. Today we offer thanks that Christ has come to search the world for what belongs to Him. ²His vision sees no strangers, but beholds His Own and joyously unites with them. ³They see Him as a stranger, for they do not recognize themselves. ⁴Yet as they give Him welcome, they remember. ⁵And He leads them gently home again, where they belong.
10. Not one does Christ forget. ²Not one He fails to give you to remember, that your home may be complete and perfect as it was established. ³He has not forgotten you. ⁴But you will not remember Him until you look on all as He does. ⁵Who denies his brother is denying Him, and thus refusing to accept the gift of sight by which his Self is clearly recognized, his home remembered and salvation come.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-160/i-am-at-home-fear-is-the-stranger-here/en/s/566

2024-06-08 15:15:26

Lesson 159
I give the miracles I have received.
1. No one can give what he has not received. ²To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession. ³Here the laws of Heaven and the world agree. ⁴But here they also separate. ⁵The world believes that to possess a thing, it must be kept. ⁶Salvation teaches otherwise. ⁷To give is how to recognize you have received. ⁸It is the proof that what you have is yours.
2. You understand that you are healed when you give healing. ²You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. ³You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole. ⁴There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. ⁵Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away.
3. Christ’s vision is a miracle. ²It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects eternal love and the rebirth of love which never dies, but has been kept obscure. ³Christ’s vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven that what God created perfect can be mirrored there. ⁴The darkened glass the world presents can show but twisted images in broken parts. ⁵The real world pictures Heaven’s innocence.
4. Christ’s vision is the miracle in which all miracles are born. ²It is their source, remaining with each miracle you give, and yet remaining yours. ³It is the bond by which the giver and receiver are united in extension here on earth, as they are one in Heaven. ⁴Christ beholds no sin in anyone. ⁵And in His sight the sinless are as one. ⁶Their holiness was given by His Father and Himself.
5. Christ’s vision is the bridge between the worlds. ²And in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. ³Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there; transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. ⁴Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see.
6. This is the Holy Spirit’s single gift; the treasure house to which you can appeal with perfect certainty for all the things that can contribute to your happiness. ²All are laid here already. ³All can be received but for the asking. ⁴Here the door is never locked, and no one is denied his least request or his most urgent need. ⁵There is no sickness not already healed, no lack unsatisfied, no need unmet within this golden treasury of Christ.
7. Here does the world remember what was lost when it was made. ²For here it is repaired, made new again, but in a different light. ³What was to be the home of sin becomes the center of redemption and the hearth of mercy, where the suffering are healed and welcome. ⁴No one will be turned away from this new home, where his salvation waits. ⁵No one is stranger to him. ⁶No one asks for anything of him except the gift of his acceptance of his welcoming.
8. Christ’s vision is the holy ground in which the lilies of forgiveness set their roots. ²This is their home. ³They can be brought from here back to the world, but they can never grow in its unnourishing and shallow soil. ⁴They need the light and warmth and kindly care Christ’s charity provides. ⁵They need the love with which He looks on them. ⁶And they become His messengers, who give as they received.
9. Take from His storehouse, that its treasures may increase. ²His lilies do not leave their home when they are carried back into the world. ³Their roots remain. ⁴They do not leave their source, but carry its beneficence with them, and turn the world into a garden like the one they came from, and to which they go again with added fragrance. ⁵Now are they twice blessed. ⁶The messages they brought from Christ have been delivered, and returned to them. ⁷And they return them gladly unto Him.
10. Behold the store of miracles set out for you to give. ²Are you not worth the gift, when God appointed it be given you? ³Judge not God’s Son, but follow in the way He has established. ⁴Christ has dreamed the dream of a forgiven world. ⁵It is His gift, whereby a sweet transition can be made from death to life; from hopelessness to hope. ⁶Let us an instant dream with Him. ⁷His dream awakens us to truth. ⁸His vision gives the means for a return to our unlost and everlasting sanctity in God.
https://acim.org/acim/lesson-159/i-give-the-miracles-i-have-received/en/s/565