Daily Inspiration for Living A Course in Miracles

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Learning to See No One as a Body

Christ’s vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. [Christ’s vision] sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees.

[Christ’s vision] can be taught; and must be taught by all who would achieve it. It requires but the recognition that the world can not give anything that faintly can compare with [Christ’s vision] in value; nor set up a goal that does not merely disappear when this has been perceived. And this you give today: See no one as a body. Greet him as the Son of God he is, acknowledging that he is one with you in holiness.

Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision that has power to overlook them all. In His forgiveness are they gone. Unseen by One they merely disappear, because a vision of the holiness that lies beyond them comes to take their place. (A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 158, W-pI.158.7:1-9:3. See also ACIM Lesson 158 Insights.)

To have the experience of Christ’s vision, we must see no one as a body. This is because the body was made by the ego for the purpose of making separation (sin) appear real. Without our belief in this central image of the ego thought system, the world fades from our awareness. The ego uses all the experiences of the body to make this world of separation seem real.

As we accept Christ’s vision, the seeming reality of the world fades. By seeing past the form to the reality of Love’s innocence, we forgive the world and let it go. This is the process the Holy Spirit leads us through. It is the way we awaken from the dream of fear and guilt into the Holy Spirit’s dream of true perception, where all is forgiven. Our minds are cleared of false perception and we are ready to accept the revelation of our oneness with all Love.

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

Only those who recognize they cannot know unless the effects of understanding [peace] are with them, can really learn at all. For this it must be peace they want, and nothing else. Whenever you think you know, peace will depart from you, because you have abandoned the Teacher of peace. Whenever you fully realize that you know not, peace will return, for you will have invited Him to do so by abandoning the ego on behalf of Him. Call not upon the ego for anything; it is only this that you need do. The Holy Spirit will, of Himself, fill every mind that so makes room for Him.

If you want peace you must abandon the teacher of attack. The Teacher of peace will never abandon you. You can desert Him but He will never reciprocate, for His faith in you is His understanding. It is as firm as is His faith in His Creator, and He knows that faith in His Creator must encompass faith in His creation. In this consistency lies His Holiness which He cannot abandon, for it is not His Will to do so. With your perfection ever in His sight, He gives the gift of peace to everyone who perceives the need for peace, and who would have it. Make way for peace, and it will come. For understanding is in you, and from it peace must come.

The power of God, from which [peace and understanding] arise, is yours as surely as it is His [the Teacher of peace]. …Leave room for Him, and you will find yourself so filled with power that nothing will prevail against your peace. And this will be the test by which you recognize that you have understood.” (A Course in Miracles, T-14.XI.13-14;15:1,5-6. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)

Because the ego is the denial of the oneness of God’s Love, it teaches attack. The ego is constantly attacking by perceiving separation as real. The perception of separate bodies makes peace impossible because it brings with it the perception of harm and loss. Whenever we feel lack of peace, we are buying into the ego belief in harm and loss.

The Teacher of peace will teach us to recognize the ego’s images of attack and defend have no effect on the truth of Love’s oneness. As we accept the Holy Spirit’s teaching, we accept the power of God’s Love as ours, for such it is. We were created by Love as Love, forever united in Love. Love never changes and is therefore invincible.

We can abandon Love by aligning with the ego and make Love unknown to us. Yet Love remains unaffected by this abandonment. Love is still the truth of What we are. As we align with the Teacher of peace, we accept the power of God in us. This is how we free ourselves from the teacher of attack. Love always prevails because only Love is real.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Accepting God’s Love Wholeheartedly

God speaks to us. …He is not distant. …He remains entirely accessible. He loves His Son. There is no certainty but this, yet this suffices. He will love His Son forever. When his [Son’s] mind remains asleep, He loves him still. And when his mind awakes, He loves him with a never-changing Love.

If you but knew the meaning of His Love, hope and despair would be impossible. For hope would be forever satisfied; despair of any kind unthinkable. His grace [is] His answer to all despair, for in it lies remembrance of His Love. Would He not gladly give the means by which His Will is recognized? His grace is yours by your acknowledgment. And memory of Him awakens in the mind that asks the means of Him whereby its sleep is done.

Today we ask of God the gift He has most carefully preserved within our hearts, waiting to be acknowledged. This [is] the gift by which God leans to us and lifts us up, taking salvation’s final step Himself. All steps but this we learn, instructed by His Voice. But finally He comes Himself, and takes us in His Arms and sweeps away the cobwebs of our sleep. His gift of grace is more than just an answer. It restores all memories the sleeping mind forgot; all certainty of what Love’s meaning is. (, A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 168,W-pI.168.1-3. See also ACIM Lesson 168 Insights.)

The means to recognize God’s Will for us is His Voice, our inner Teacher, the Holy Spirit. To remember the gift of God’s Love, we need to be willing to accept the Holy Spirit’s lessons. He will teach us to recognize that the images and beliefs of the ego thought system are mistaken. They are the cause of our despair and sense of hopelessness. As we learn to recognize the Love that remains in us beneath the shadows of the ego, the shadows fade.

By His grace, His Love has been carefully preserved eternally in our hearts. No matter how deeply we have wandered into the darkness of belief in separation and lack of Love, His Love remains in our hearts. We claim His Love by acknowledging that it is there. This acknowledgement comes as we forgive or let go of our mistaken beliefs in being separate from God. Through forgiveness we let go of the barriers to Love and welcome with gratitude God’s warm embrace. God’s embrace waits only on our willingness to accept It wholeheartedly.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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The Need for Mind Healing

When the ego tempts you to sickness do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that the body is the proper aim of healing. Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be sick, because only perception can be wrong.

Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce sleeping out of fear of waking.

Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake. The decision to wake is the reflection of the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true.

When you limit yourself we are not of one mind, and that is sickness. Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. All forms of sickness are signs that the mind is split, and does not accept a unified purpose. (A Course in Miracles,T-8.IX.1:5-7;3:1-3;5;8:5-7. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)

Sickness and death of the body are part of the ego’s scheme to make the body, and therefore separation, seem real. They are simply examples of wrong (sick) perception. As long as we believe in the body as our identity, our perceptions will be wrong because we are relying on the body’s “seeing” in place of the vision of our true Self. Because the body is an illusion, it cannot see Reality.

This is why the most repeated lesson of the ACIM Workbook asks us to affirm, “I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.” Acceptance of these statements restores us to the wholeness of our mind at one with our Creator. It withdraws our allegiance from the ego. The ego sees this as a threat and uses sickness and death to defend its claim of reality. The ego truly wants us dead because it is the ultimate “proof” that belief in the reality of separation is justified.

Yet only the wholeness of God’s Love is real. As we let the Holy Spirit teach us that we are Love and nothing else, at one with every brother in that Love, our upside down perception is righted. Our mind is healed.

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Forgiveness Is Our Only Function

[God’s] gentle Voice is calling from the known to the unknowing. He would comfort you, although He knows no sorrow. He would make a restitution, though He is complete; a gift to you, although He knows that you have everything already. He has Thoughts which answer every need His Son perceives, although He sees them not. For Love must give, and what is given in His Name takes on the form most useful in a world of form.

These are the forms which never can deceive, because they come from Formlessness Itself. Forgiveness is an earthly form of love, which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form [forgiveness] you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still. Salvation of the world depends on you who can forgive. Such is your function here.” (A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 186, W-pI.186.13-14. See also ACIM Lesson 186 Insights.)

Everyone in this world is seeking peace and happiness. We seek salvation from the conflict and emptiness that seems to dominate our experience in the world. But if we follow the direction of the ego, we will seek to find salvation in the forms of the world. They never satisfy because forms of themselves have no meaning nor substance.

God’s Voice offers us a form that is not based on the ego’s denial of Love’s oneness. It is the means through which we can learn where our true happiness and peace lie. Through forgiveness we learn that the peace of God is already in us. We learn that we already have God’s gift of joy. We let go of the mistaken search for peace and happiness where they cannot be found.

Forgiveness frees us from the ego’s false image of What we are. We were created as Love’s extension with all the attributes of Love as ours eternally. All that stands between the experience of the Love we are and our awareness of It is belief in the ego’s false images.

As we let God’s Voice teach us true forgiveness, we let go of the false and accept the vision of the Holy Spirit, which shows us our true Self, the Son of God. Forgiveness is the one function in this world that frees us to be the Love, peace and joy of God.

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

The Holy Spirit can use all that you give to Him for your salvation. But He cannot use what you withhold, for He cannot take it from you without your willingness. For if He did, you would believe He wrested it from you against your will. And so you would not learn it is your will to be without it. You need not give it to Him wholly willingly, for if you could you had no need of Him. But this He needs; that you prefer He take it than that you keep it for yourself alone, and [you] recognize that what brings loss to no one you would not know. This much is necessary to add to the idea no one can lose for you to gain. And nothing more.

You who know not of justice still can ask, and learn the answer. Justice looks on all in the same way. It is not just that one should lack for what another has. For that is vengeance in whatever form it takes. Justice demands no sacrifice….

It is impossible for you to share the Holy Spirit’s justice with a mind that can conceive of specialness at all.

In God’s Own justice does [the Holy Spirit] recognize all you deserve, but understands as well that you cannot accept it for yourself. It is His special function to hold out to you the gifts the innocent deserve. And every [gift] that you accept brings joy to Him as well as you. He knows that Heaven is richer made by each one you accept. And God rejoices as His Son receives what loving justice knows to be his due. For love and justice are not different. Because they are the same does mercy stand at God’s right Hand, and gives the Son of God the power to forgive himself of sin. (A Course in Miracles, T-25.VIII.1;4:1-5;5:8;9:5-11. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)

The practice of asking, “What would Love see, say or do in this situation?” is a way of allowing Holy Spirit to bring the justice of Love to our mind. While we identify with the ego, we do not know Love’s justice because we are denying the oneness of Love. But we can learn by asking for the Holy Spirit’s help. When we are willing to be taught, we can learn to see the innocence of Love beyond the ego’s projections of guilt and fear.

Each time we accept the Holy Spirit’s help, we experience the blessing of recognizing the eternal presence of Love. As we see It in another, we accept It for ourself. Today we practice asking, “What would Love do?”

© 2018, Pathways of Light. http://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Welcoming God’s Gifts in Daily Life

My thoughts are images that I have made. Whatever I see reflects my thoughts. It is my thoughts that tell me where I am and what I am. The fact that I see a world in which there is suffering and loss and death shows me that I am seeing only the representation of my insane thoughts, and am not allowing my real thoughts to cast their beneficent light on what I see. Yet God’s way is sure. The images I have made cannot prevail against Him because it is not my will that they do so. My will is His, and I will place no other gods before Him. (, A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 53, W-pI.53.5. See also ACIM Lesson 53 Insights.)

Our real thoughts are the thoughts we share with God. Because God is only Love, our real thoughts are thoughts of Love.

By allowing ourselves to tune in to peace, remember peace, we reconnect with our real thoughts to see the real world. When we disconnect from reality, we are out of peace, in chaos. We are fearful because nothing is dependable and we feel vulnerable. We can pull ourselves out of fear by tuning in to peace and reconnecting with our real thoughts, the Thoughts of the Holy Spirit. We remember that we are in the Mind of Source, and that our will is His Will. We determined to maintain our awareness of Who we are — the Son of God in the Mind of God.

Maintaining a consistent attitude of gratitude helps us open the door to peace. It keeps us out of the defense mode. As we are grateful for God’s gifts of Love, peace and joy, we welcome them into our daily experience.

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