Miracles News

April-June, 2019

My Holiness Blesses the World

by Joyce Peebles, Ministerial Candidate

This is the lesson for today. I know I have seen this lesson many times over the years, because there are underlined sentences, different colors of markers, and notes in the margins from previous years. Yet today the lesson and thought for the day seem fresh and new, as if I had not seen it before. The focus of this lesson is my thoughts.

Chapter 27 of the Text, Section VII, tells us “of one thing you were sure: of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was not among them.”

I don’t want to be guilty! Nobody does. We are taught as little children if we are guilty, we will get punished. ACIM does not appeal to the ego. The ego does not want us to look at the idea of guilt in ourselves. Its strategy is to project the guilt onto someone we perceive as outside of us.

We know the ego is not our amigo and certainly not interested in our highest good. For years the separation idea and guilt ideas did not feel real. They do now. Jesus says until we look at what we think we did, we cannot get out of the mess we made.

As an earlier student of the Course, I liked to quote the lesson, “I am not a body, I am free, I am as God created me.”

This sounded comforting, I was also deceiving myself because what I believed was mirrored to me by what I was seeing in the world I projected. Observing myself above the battleground, I certainly acted like I believed I was a body and with all my judgments, certainly not free. I did not see that every time I judged or made someone “out there” wrong, I was attempting to get rid of unconscious guilt and thereby keeping it. How could I be free when I was keeping my guilt intact and making myself a victim?

I thought I understood that I needed to resign my ego as my teacher. It is my habit to start the day with “The rules for Decision” as described in Chapter 30 of the Text, putting the Holy Spirit as my teacher. I guess I forgot that I now wanted the Holy Spirit’s guidance as it was not long in the day before I was judging and trying to throw off more guilt.

Today’s lesson tells us we are holy. I cannot believe this unless I choose to see myself and everyone else as innocent, no exceptions. If I believe, “I am as God created me,” I know I cannot ever be a victim because I am not a body. I choose to believe the separation is impossible. Again, I remember this is all happening in my Mind. I now ask the Holy Spirit to take away these distressing thoughts as they have not served Me.

One of the biggest benefits of studying A Course in Miracles is the gratefulness I feel as I practice forgiveness. Simply put, forgiveness looks at the “world” differently, judges it not, and sees me and others as innocent, reminding us who we really are. This is how our belief in guilt is dissolved. This is also the only way I believe I am Holy.

Joyce Peebles is a POL student from Hot Springs, AR .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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