Daily Inspiration for Living A Course in Miracles

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Opening Our Minds to God’s Answers

The secret of true prayer is to forget the things you think you need. To ask for the specific is much the same as to look on sin and then forgive it. Also in the same way, in prayer you overlook your specific needs as you see them, and let them go into God’s Hands. There they become your gifts to Him, for they tell Him that you would have no gods before Him; no love but His. What could His answer be but your remembrance of Him? Can this be traded for a bit of trifling advice about a problem of an instant’s duration? God answers only for eternity. But still all little answers are contained in this.

Prayer is a stepping aside; a letting go, a quiet time of listening and loving. It should not be confused with supplication of any kind, because it is a way of remembering your holiness. Why should holiness entreat, being fully entitled to everything Love has to offer? And it is to Love you go in prayer. Prayer is an offering; a giving up of yourself to be at one with Love. There is nothing to ask because there is nothing left to want. That nothingness becomes the altar of God. It disappears in Him. (A Course in Miracles, S-1.I.4-5)

The ego, maker of the dream of separation, can only conceive of images or forms to which it gives meaning based on the belief in separation. Its dedication to separation makes it oblivious to the eternal oneness of Love. While we are believing in the dream, God provides answers in forms that we can understand. His answers are always a reflection of the oneness of Love. They lead us toward the recognition that only Love is real. His answers meet us where we believe we are, taking us gently and progressively toward awakening from the dream.

Our part in the process of awakening from the dream is to be willing to turn over to God the things we think we need in the world with willingness to see them as Love sees them. An example of a way to do this in our mind regarding a specific perceived need is to ask, “How would Love see this? How would Love respond to this?”

This is an expression of willingness to let Love’s reflection be revealed to us in the dream. We are promised that answers specific to our perceived need will be given us. They will always in some way reflect the reality of Love’s oneness. We do not have to understand how it works. We need only be willing to let go of what we think the need is. This is how we open our mind to receive specific guidance for what to think, do or say.

We must be willing to frequently step back from our perceptions and offer them to the Holy Spirit for His loving correction. The more consistently we do this with an open mind, the more peace we will experience in our lives. We will be shifting our attention from the ego mindset to the Love that is our true Self.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Understanding True Prayer

Prayer is a way offered by the Holy Spirit to reach God. It is not merely a question or an entreaty. It cannot succeed until you realize that it asks for nothing. How else could it serve its purpose? It is impossible to pray for idols and hope to reach God. True prayer must avoid the pitfall of asking to entreat. Ask, rather, to receive what is already given; to accept what is already there.

You have been told to ask the Holy Spirit for the answer to any specific problem, and that you will receive a specific answer if such is your need. You have also been told that there is only one problem and one answer. In prayer this is not contradictory. There are decisions to make here, and they must be made whether they be illusions or not. You cannot be asked to accept answers which are beyond the level of need that you can recognize. Therefore, it is not the form of the question that matters, nor how it is asked. The form of the answer, if given by God, will suit your need as you see it. This is merely an echo of the reply of His Voice. The real sound is always a song of thanksgiving and of Love.

You cannot, then, ask for the echo. It is the song that is the gift. Along with it come the overtones, the harmonics, the echoes, but these are secondary. In true prayer you hear only the song. All the rest is merely added. You have sought first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all else has indeed been given you. (A Course in Miracles, S-1.I.1-3)

As we seek to apply the principles of A Course in Miracles in our daily life, asking for the Holy Spirit’s guidance can seem confusing. How do we ask for help? What should we ask for?

In the ACIM supplement, The Song of Prayer, we are provided with help in understanding true prayer. The key to prayer for help is willingness to set aside our ideas of what the answer should look like. These ideas come from the ego, which always seeks forms to satisfy its perceived needs. These forms are always a limit on Love. True prayer seeks to join with unlimited Love.

While we believe we are in the dream of separation, answers to true prayer will come in a form that helps us let go of our limits on Love. These answers will help us bring into focus the ever-present Love beyond all form. The answer may look like a new job, a transformed relationship, a holy instant of forgiveness. These are reflections or echos of recognizing and joining in Love. Our heart’s desire is to remember that we are Love and nothing else. We truly want to see only the innocence of Christ in everyone. True prayer is a means to welcome this vision.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Receiving Truly Helpful Guidance

Prayer is the greatest gift with which God blessed His Son at his creation. It was then what it is to become; the single voice Creator and creation share; the song the Son sings to the Father, Who returns the thanks it offers Him unto the Son. Endless the harmony, and endless, too, the joyous concord of the Love They give forever to Each Other. And in this, creation is extended. God gives thanks to His extension in His Son. His Son gives thanks for his creation, in the song of his creating in his Father’s Name. The Love They share is what all prayer will be throughout eternity, when time is done. For such it was before time seemed to be.

To you who are in time a little while, prayer takes the form that best will suit your need. You have but one. What God created one must recognize its oneness, and rejoice that what illusions seemed to separate is one forever in the Mind of God. Prayer now must be the means by which God’s Son leaves separate goals and separate interests by, and turns in holy gladness to the truth of union in his Father and himself.

Lay down your dreams, you holy Son of God, and rising up as God created you, dispense with idols and remember Him. Prayer will sustain you now, and bless you as you lift your heart to Him in rising song that reaches higher and then higher still, until both high and low have disappeared. Faith in your goal will grow and hold you up as you ascend the shining stairway to the lawns of Heaven and the gate of peace. For this is prayer, and here salvation is. This is the way. It is God’s gift to you. (A Course in Miracles, S-1.in.1-3)

Everyone in this world is searching for Love, because it is a dream where Love is denied. True prayer leads us out of this dream to the recognition of our unity with the Love that created us. Praying for any form in the world is praying for idols. Love has no form, for it is one and the same eternally.

In the world it seems that we have needs. These needs are the reflection of the dream’s denial of Love, Which is all we really need. True prayer has at its core the willingness to join in Love. The willingness to accept Love is reflected in our dream world as specific answers to perceived specific needs. These answers are truly helpful. They always answer in a way that no one loses and in some way the remembrance of Love’s innocence and oneness is facilitated.

As we are willing to be truly helpful and ask for guidance for what to think and say and do, we will always receive answers that are helpful and healing.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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The Return from Fear to Love

Nothing I see means anything.

The reason this is so is that I see nothing, and nothing has no meaning. It is necessary that I recognize this, that I may learn to see. What I think I see now is taking the place of vision. I must let it go by realizing it has no meaning, so that vision may take its place.

These thoughts do not mean anything.

The thoughts of which I am aware do not mean anything because I am trying to think without God. What I call “my” thoughts are not my real thoughts. My real thoughts are the thoughts I think with God. I am not aware of them because I have made my thoughts to take their place. I am willing to recognize that my thoughts do not mean anything, and to let them go. I choose to have them be replaced by what they were intended to replace. My thoughts are meaningless, but all creation lies in the thoughts I think with God. (A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 51, W-pI.51.1;4. See also ACIM Lesson 51 Insights.)

“Nothing I see means anything” is the title of the first lesson of the ACIM Workbook. It is this idea that is the basis for all healing of our mind that will bring us back to remembering the truth that we are Love and nothing else, united with the Love of our Creator.

Our identification with the body is the denial of our true Self, which is formless Love and nothing else. It is what the body can seem to do and experience that is the cause of all fear and guilt. The body is incapable of recognizing Love, for it can perceive only form which denies Love.

We are so convinced that we are a body that we insist what the body sees is real. In order to see the unreality of the world, we must question the reality of the body. This brings up fear because if we are not a body, what are we?

Our belief in being a body denies the experience of unlimited, eternal Love. So the loss of the body as our identity seems to mean the end of our existence. Yet the body is a made up image that seems to exist only in a dream of separation. But dreams have no existence in reality. Anything experienced in the dream is recognized as having no effect when we wake up. Nothing in the world has ever happened in reality. It only seems to happen in the dream because we have given the world meaning based on the false idea of being disconnected from the oneness of Love. That is why the dream is a dream of death because our real life comes only from the Love of God.

To shift our perspective from the ego’s denial of Love to the Love of our true Self, we need to step back from the dream. We need to ask the help of God’s Voice to see with Love’s vision. With practice, we begin to see the antics of the world as being less disturbing. We begin to recognize them as calls for Love that come from a mistaken thought of lack of Love.

Everything in the dream is a representation of belief in lack of Love. But as we accept Love’s vision more and more, we respond to the world’s calls for Love with Love. Our mistaken beliefs are healed as we let Love lead the way. This reversal of our thoughts takes time only because of our resistance to giving up our mistaken identity as separate from Love. But the effect of this practice is the return from fear to Love. Our thoughts join with God in extending His Thoughts of Love.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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How to Bring Healing to the World

You are as God created you. There is no place where you can suffer, and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. How can a world of time and place exist, if you remain as God created you?

What is the lesson for today except another way of saying that to know your Self is the salvation of the world? To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought.

Yet if you are as God created you, you cannot think apart from Him, nor make what does not share His timelessness and Love.

Today our purpose is to free the world from all the idle thoughts we ever held about it, and about all living things we see upon it. They can not be there. No more can we. For we are in the home our Father set for us, along with them. And we who are as He created us would loose the world this day from every one of our illusions, that we may be free. (A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 132, W-pI.132.9:2-11:1;14. See also ACIM Lesson 132 Insights.)

God is only Love and all His Thoughts are extensions of His Love. We, as His Son, are His Thoughts of Love. Thus our real Thoughts are Thoughts of Love we share with Him.

The world we experience through a body is made by thoughts founded in the belief in separation. The very idea of separation denies the Thoughts we share with God. The world we perceive is held in place by belief in separation. We cannot believe in separation and know the oneness of Love. To return to Love, we must change our mind. We open to this change as we practice loosening the world from all we thought it was.

Willingness to step back from our perceptions of the dream opens the door to receive a different way of seeing. We open to receive the Holy Spirit’s vision in place of the image-making we have believed in. It is a radical shift in our mind from illusion to Reality, from conflict to peace, from fear to Love. Each time we are willing to step back and receive the Holy Spirit’s vision, we bring healing to ourselves and the world. It is a gift without limit. It is how we remember our real Home in the Love of God.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Love Is Our Constant Companion

…ideas leave not their source. If this be true, how can you be apart from God? How could you walk the world alone and separate from your Source?

You cannot walk the world apart from God, because you could not be without Him. He is what your life is. Where you are He is. There is one life. That life you share with Him. Nothing can be apart from Him and live.

Yet where He is, there must be holiness as well as life. No attribute of His remains unshared by everything that lives. What lives is holy as Himself, because what shares His life is part of Holiness, and could no more be sinful than the sun could choose to be of ice; the sea elect to be apart from water, or the grass to grow with roots suspended in the air.

There is a light in you which cannot die; whose presence is so holy that the world is sanctified because of you. (A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 156, W-pI.156.1:3-5;2:4-4:2. See also ACIM Lesson 156 Insights.)

The Truth in us, the Thought of Love in the Mind of Love, can never die. This Thought of Love is Love’s extension with an unbreakable connection with Its Source. We share Love’s invulnerability because we remain eternally the Thought of Love. Nothing else exists.

The fear and guilt, conflict and sadness, we feel in the world comes from believing in a false image of what we are. Being an illusion, this image is vulnerable because it has no substance, no reality in truth. It is maintained only by our belief in its reality.

But beliefs can change. So there is always an underlying sense of doubt as long as we believe we are this image of a body with a personality. We feel that something is missing. Each of us in our own way is searching to find what will fill that emptiness. But as long as we look for it in the dream world of illusions, the void will remain. We cannot fill the hole with meaningless images.

Yet throughout our journey in this wilderness, Love walks with us. It has never left. We are simply unaware of It because of our identification with an identity that denies Love. Still, our life depends upon the eternal presence of Love, which is the Source of Life.

As we remind ourselves that we walk with Love as our constant Companion, the Light of Love begins to dawn upon our mind. Love’s Light shines through the false images and we feel the Love that is in us and all about us. The certainty of Love’s changelessness brings us comfort and peace when we begin to remember Who we are.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Being Willing to Reach the Truth

I ask to see a different world, and think a different kind of
thought from those I made. The world I seek I did not make alone, the thoughts I want to think are not my own.

For several minutes watch your mind and see, although your eyes are closed, the senseless world you think is real. Review the thoughts as well which are compatible with such a world, and which you think are true. Then let them go, and sink below them to the holy place where they can enter not. There is a door beneath them in your mind, which you could not completely lock to hide what lies beyond.

Seek for that door and find it. But before you try to open it, remind yourself no one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

Put out your hand, and see how easily the door swings open with your one intent to go beyond it. Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see.

You cannot fail today. There walks with you the Spirit Heaven sent you, that you might approach this door some day, and through His aid slip effortlessly past it, to the light. Today that day has come. (A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 131, W-pI.131.11:3-12:2;13:1-2;14:1-3. See also ACIM Lesson 131 Insights.)

This passage is a process that leads to true forgiveness. It begins with a request for help to reach our goal of truth. We cannot do it alone because believing we are alone is the denial of truth. Our request for help is an acknowledgment that there is something beyond what we are aware of in the world.

We are then asked to examine our thoughts, attitudes and beliefs about the world and let them go. This makes way for us to approach the door to Heaven, for we have let go of our resistance to the truth. We have mighty Companions helping us reach this point.

The door to truth opens easily with our willingness. It remains barred shut while we insist on believing separation is real. But we have come to a turning point with willingness to reach the truth. And so we receive the truth with the help of Angels all around us to see clearly and understand wholly that we are at Home in Heaven now. Thus is the world of illusions forgiven and no longer our choice.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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