Daily Inspiration for Living A Course in Miracles

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A Core Lesson from the Course

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.

This is how A Course in Miracles begins. It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God. Truth is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite; no beginning and no end. It merely is.

The world of perception, on the other hand, is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings. It is based on interpretation, not on facts. It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death. It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual emphases, unstable in its functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.

From knowledge and perception respectively, two distinct thought systems arise which are opposite in every respect. In the realm of knowledge no thoughts exist apart from God, because God and His Creation share one Will. The world of perception, however, is made by the belief in opposites and separate wills, in perpetual conflict with each other and with God. What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. This leads to a world of illusions, a world which needs constant defense precisely because it is not real. (A Course in Miracles, Preface.1:1–4:5)

No matter how convinced we are that we are right, our perceptions are never true. Perceptions require an observer and an object observed. Thus perceptions depend upon separation to seem to exist.

The Course is telling us that what we think of as seeing is fundamentally flawed. It starts with the body which itself is within the false thought system of separation. It can only perceive within a dream world of separation.

A central teaching in the Course is that we are not a body. Our mistaken identification with the body keeps our attention on illusions of differences. Yet we have another way of seeing in the mind that does not use the body’s senses. It calls this vision, which only sees the reality of Love. Because Love is one, It sees only Itself, eternally extending to Love. This vision sees only truth.

As we give priority in our mind to this true vision, we free ourselves from the limitations of the body. We learn that we are eternally Love, loving and loved, and nothing else.

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