"Father, Your Mind created all that is, Your Spirit entered into it; Your Love gave life to it. And would I look upon what You created as if it could be made sinful? I would not perceive such dark and fearful images. A madman's dream is hardly fit to be my choice, instead of all the loveliness with which You blessed creation; all its purity, its joy, and its eternal, quiet home in You."
And while we still remain outside the gate of Heaven, let us look on all we see through holy vision and the eyes of Christ. Let all appearances seem pure to us, that we may pass them by in innocence, and walk together to our Father's house as brothers and the holy Sons of God.
The things that happen in the world don't really matter. All the efforts to build things, reach goals, assemble cities, improve governments, it's not really the point. It's not why we're here. We're here because we're stubborning refusing to live with God. We have lessons to learn and the purpose is to get to a point where we leave the world permanently. It's not about building a wonderful human civilization on the planet. There is no real benefit to doing that. We're not really supposed to be here. We belong in heaven. This world is just a temporary outpost, a corner in which we're hiding, while we delay being with God. Don't get too comfortable, because it was never meant to last.
"Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is NOT your home; its laws are NOT imposed on you, its values are NOT yours. And nothing that you THINK you see in it is REALLY there at all."
"Yet who can build his home upon a straw, and count on it as shelter from the wind? The body can be made a home like this BECAUSE it lacks foundation in the truth. And yet, BECAUSE it does, it can be seen as NOT your home, but merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides."
"The world I see has nothing that I want."
"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him."
"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."
"I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world."
"The body is hardly worth the least defense."
"The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?"
This idea is another step in the direction of identifying cause and effect as it really operates. You see no neutral things because you have no neutral thoughts. It is always the thought that comes first, despite the temptation to believe that it is really the other way around. This is not the way the world thinks, but you must learn that it is the way you think. If it were not so, perception would have no cause, and would itself be the cause of reality. In view of its highly variable nature, this is hardly likely.
In applying today's idea, say to yourself, with eyes open:
"I see no neutral things because I have no neutral thoughts."
Then look about you, resting your glance on each thing that catches your eye long enough to say:
"I do not see a neutral ____ because my thoughts about ____ are not neutral."
For example, you might say:
"I do not see a neutral wall, because my thoughts about walls are not neutral."
"I do not see a neutral body, because my thoughts about bodies are not neutral."
As usual, it is essential to make no distinction between what you believe to be animate or inanimate; pleasant or unpleasant. Regardless of what you may believe, you do not see anything which is really alive and really joyous. That is because you are unaware as yet of any thoughts which are really true and therefore really happy.
Three or four specific practice periods are recommended, and no less than three are required for maximum benefit, even if you experience resistance. However, if you do, the length of the practice period may be reduced to less than the minute or so which is otherwise recommended.
You are hampered in your progress by your demands to know what you do not know. This is actually a way of hanging on to deprivation. You cannot reasonably object to following instructions in a course FOR knowing, on the grounds that you do not know. The need for the course is implicit in your objection. Knowledge is not the motivation for learning this course. PEACE is. As the PREREQUISITE for knowledge, peace MUST be learned. This is ONLY because those who are in conflict are not peaceful, and peace is the CONDITION of knowledge because it is the condition of the Kingdom.
Knowledge will be restored when YOU meet its conditions. This is not a bargain made by God, who made no bargains at all. It is merely the result of your misuse of His Laws on behalf of a will that was not His. Knowledge IS His Will. If you are OPPOSING His Will, how CAN you have knowledge? I have told you what knowledge OFFERS you, but it is clear that you do NOT regard this as wholly desirable. If you did, you would hardly be willing to throw it away so readily, when the ego asks for your allegiance.
The distraction of the ego SEEMS to interfere with your learning, but it HAS no power to distract unless you GIVE it the power. The ego's voice is an hallucination. You cannot expect the EGO to say "I am not real." Hallucinations ARE inaccurate perceptions of reality. But you are NOT asked to dispel them alone. You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results TO YOU. If you DO NOT WANT THEM on the basis of LOSS OF PEACE, they will be removed from your mind FOR you. Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war DOES deprive you of peace.
Yet in this war THERE IS NO OPPONENT. THIS is the re-interpretation of reality which you must make to secure peace, and the ONLY one you need ever make.
"If I defend myself I am attacked."
"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."
"Defense do what they would defend."
"In my defenselessness lies my safety."
It's interesting but, when we try to defend ourselves, under the belief that we are making ourselves more protected, more safe, more secure, we ACTUALLY are undermining ourselves and attacking ourselves. So now self attack masquerades as self defense.
The ego splits off the illusion of attack and defense because it splits cause and effect. It tries to make out that attacks are not defenses, and defense are not attacks. That you can cause in order to not be caused. Or you can defend in order to not be caused. But both attack and defend are forms of the same ego plot to weaken you.
A defense automatically presumes that you need defending, because there is something weakened, vulnerable and wrong with you. That you are frail and fragile and attackable. Without this belief in being attackable, you cannot have defenses, and there would be no point defending something that isn't attackable in the first place.
Therefore the defenses undermine your integrity and require you to believe that you need them, due to being attacked already, and therefore your defenses attack you. It's the same as with e.g. virus protection software. It is designed to save you, but the belief in viruses causes the eruption of enemies.
And so defenses are attempts at saving yourself from attack, but in fact are themselves attacks. So they cannot work. And all they do is paint an illusion that you are safer without in any way undoing the belief that you are weak or vulnerable. You then think you are safer because of the illusion of protection, but you have not really increased your belief in invulnerability whatsoever.
To be truly defenseless requires you to be convinced that you cannot be attacked, which requires you to recognize that you are immortal.
"You are immortal and you cannot die."
"There is no death. The Son of God is free."
When you defend yourself, you make yourself sick. Defenses are self-attack. You think you need to be defended and this attacks the body, making it sick. Sickness is a defense against the truth, or in other words, sickness is a self attack masquerading as being attacked by something else in an attempt to defend yourself. Attempting to defend yourself weakens you and makes you sick.
If you defend yourself, you undermine your immortality.
"The body is hardly worth the least defense."
"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."
"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.
Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy, should this occur, ****by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer.**** Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:
"I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick.""
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"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and ***hardly worth the least defense***, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?
Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source."
The ultimate elephant in the room I think is God ... because a) he's very big and b) hardly anyone seems to talk about him.
Have you noticed that? We talk about holy spirit, jesus, forgiveness, miracles, bodies, worlds, guilts, fears, sickness, death, and all that. ... but I hardly ever see anyone talking about God.
"God" is in fact the most frequently occurring regular word in ACIM. You'd think we'd be talking about God more?
You could also say the whole course is about your relationship with God. The separation from God is the only problem, and reunion with God is the only solution.
So it's not really so much about the world, or the body, or people outside you, or worldly events and forgivenesses, or even our relationships in the world. It's actually about something deeper than that, something that comes even before your own creation.
Your relationship with your source, where you come from, what created you and wills you to exist. We've interfered with our relationship to God, and it is precisely that relationship that needs the healing.
In the separation, we denied God, shut God out, rejected love, threw away the inheritance of what God was giving us, pretended not to have a father, didn't want to be loved, disconnected our minds from spirit, and basically closed ourselves off to him.
That's essentially the whole problem. Everything else is based on that. The sense of separation from God is the only problem to be corrected. Which means, we have to acknowledge first of all that we have in fact shut God out, and secondly that we now need to let God in again and recognize our relationship to him.
The love of God must be received again. The power of God must be owned again. The gifts of God must be opened to again. The inheritance from God must be reclaimed. Your oneness with God must be restored. Your identity as part of God must be owned up to. Your location in God as your home must become your anchor. Your reliance and dependence on God in symbiotic relationship must be trusted again. Trust in God has to be developed again. And you have to be willing to extend God's love and power again as a co-creator.
What seems to be separation from brothers, issues about projecting onto the world, struggles with sin and guilt and fear and sickness and death, that all comes later. That's all symptomatic of not having God in your awareness. God - or love - is literally all you need. God is the answer to your prayers. God is the solution to all your problems. God is your strength, your power, your innocence, the light in which you see, the love with which you forgive, the life in which you resurrect.
God is everything to you. There is nothing else.
"God and the Souls He created ARE symbiotically related. They are COMPLETELY dependent on each other."
"Your creation by God is the only foundation which cannot be shaken, because the light is IN it."
"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."
"The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen."
"God is my refuge and security."
"The Name of God is my inheritance."
"God is my strength. Vision is His gift."
"God is my Father, and His Son loves Him."
"God is my Source. I cannot see apart from Him."
"God is my life. I have no life but His."
"I call upon God's Name and on my own. The Name of God is my deliverance from every thought of evil and of sin, because it is my own as well as His."
"I want the peace of God. The peace of God is everything I want. The peace of God is my one goal"
"God is my Life and YOURS, and NOTHING is denied by God to His Son."
"My only function is the one God gave me."
"I am as God created me."
21) "I am determined to see things differently."
What I see now are but signs of disease, disaster and death. This cannot be what God created for His beloved Son. The very fact that I see such things is proof that I do not understand God. Therefore I also do not understand His Son. What I see tells me that I do not know who I am. I am determined to see the witnesses to the truth in me, rather than those which show me an illusion of myself.
22) "What I see is a form of vengeance."
The world I see is hardly the representation of loving thoughts. It is a picture of attack on everything and by everything. It is anything but a reflection of the Love of God and the love of His Son. It is my own attack thoughts which give rise to this picture. My loving thoughts will save me from this perception of the world, and give me the peace God intended me to have.
23) "I can escape from the world by giving up attack thoughts."
Herein lies my salvation, and nowhere else. Without attack thoughts I could not see a world of attack. As forgiveness allows love to return to my awareness I will see a world of peace and safety and Joy. And It is this that I choose to see, in place of what I look on now.
24) "I do not perceive my own best interests."
How could I recognize my own best interests when I do not know who I am? What I think are my best interests would merely bind me closer to the world of illusions. I am willing to follow the Guide God has given me to find out what my own best interests are, recognizing that I cannot perceive them by myself.
25) "I do not know what anything is for."
To me, the purpose of everything is to prove that my illusions about myself are real. It is for that purpose that I attempt to use everyone and everything. It is this that I believe the world is for. Therefore I do not recognize its real purpose. The purpose I have given the world has led to a frightening picture of it. Let me open my mind to its real purpose by withdrawing the one I have given it, and learning the truth about it.
Whatever you believe is true, you are constantly teaching. Teaching is demonstration.
If you believe sickness and sin are real, you will demonstrate them by showing them in your body.
If you do not believe sickness and sin are real, the body will no longer be used to demonstrate a contradictory belief, and will be restored to health.
If you believe that God's truth is true, then you will not believe in sickness and death, and you will demonstrate this by proving that there are no causes outside of you, and therefore you, *symbolized by* your body, have not suffered any effects of separation.
Otherwise if the body remains sick, it is demonstrating and teaching to others that the Son of God can be sick, and that healing has not fully occurred. Sickness also demonstrates to others that they are guilty for causing the sickness, which is hardly an enlightened teaching.
This is why it is not enough just to convince yourself that you believe in God's truth, in some detached intellectual way. You must LIVE IT. You must demonstrate it and show it, in order to teach your brother that He is innocent, BECAUSE He cannot do anything to cause sickness in your body due to your mind's correctness.
You are supposed to be the "living proof" of miracles!
"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you. This does not mean that I/Jesus am in any way separate or different from you except in time." - ACIM
Here Jesus is telling us that He, who is a Son of God, who has a soul, only has what "comes from God", because He is an effect/creation of God, and God has created Him perfectly as a free-willed son, and He needs nothing else and lacks nothing.
There are parts in this which sound contradictory to the ego. If Jesus only has what comes from God, does that imply that Jesus IS God? No. Jesus speaks as an individual soul. An individual Son. He simply says that all that he is was given him by his Father.
Also when Jesus says there is nothing "different or separate" about Him and you, to the ego this implies you ARE Jesus. This is NOT what it means. You are one with Him, but you have also your own soul. You share with Him. Creation is all about sharing, and therefore having someone to share WITH.
You would hardly accuse your own child of being their own parent, and neither does this deny their individual freedom.
You do have a soul. You do have spirit. You are created permanent and an equal part of the sonship. You do share with God and with all brothers. Yet you are also a perfect creation in and of yourself. God created many many perfect souls/sons.
This is ACIM fact.