ARCIM

Daily Lesson 151 ~
May 31

The truth in all things is a Resonance of the Harmony of Heaven.

Accurate and dependable assessments cannot be based on partial evidence. A determination based on partial evidence is a judgment, an opinion that must contain aspects of ambiguity and doubt because it is partial. Any seeming certainty the determination seems to have becomes a cloak for the uncertainty it would conceal. Feigning certainty instead of honestly acknowledging uncertainty requires irrational defense because it is irrational. And if a judgment’s defenses seem strong, convincing, and without a doubt it is only because they are made to cover the uncertainty beneath the surface. If the uncertainty can be acknowledged then what was judgment can become a searching for the truth.

You do not seem to doubt the world you look upon. You do not really question what is shown you through the body’s senses. Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since that your senses do deceive. That you have believed to the last detail what they have reported to your mind is even stranger when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! Why would you trust them so implicitly when they have inaccurately reported phenomena to you countless times? Why but because of underlying doubt that would stay hidden through a show of certainty in order not to be shown as faulty?

How would you be able to accurately assess anything through the body’s senses? For the witnesses that your senses offer you provide partial evidence indeed, and they are inconsistent witnesses at best. But how else do you attempt to assess the world you look upon? You place irrational faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality and close upon the truth. This is awareness that those in this world understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice of the Divine Itself. Can this awareness be the basis of sound assessment? Can it be anything other than mere judgment and opinion?

You have often been urged to refrain from judging, but not because it is a right to be withheld from you. It is because you cannot judge in truth. You merely can believe the ego’s judgments, all of which must be false because not one of them is wholly true. The ego guides your senses carefully to prove to you how weak you are, how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of “just punishment,” how limited and ashamed in separation, how wretched in your guilt.

This thing the ego speaks of and would yet defend it tells you is yourself. And you believe with stubborn certainty that this is so. Yet underneath remains the hidden doubt that what it shows you as reality with such conviction it does not believe. And maybe you shouldn’t either.

The ego is itself alone the thing that it condemns. It is within itself that it perceives the guilt. It is its own despair as a frame of mind that it looks upon in you. Hear not its voice. The witnesses it sends to prove to you that its frailty and guilt are your own are false, and speak with seeming certainty of what they do not know. Your faith in them has to be blind in order to keep from sharing the doubts their maker cannot completely vanquish, because you still believe that to doubt the ego’s witnesses is to doubt yourself. You must learn that to doubt their evidence will clear the way to recognize yourself, and let the Voice of the Divine alone be Evaluator of what is worthy of your own belief, while belief still has a place.

The Holy Spirit will tell you that your sisters and brothers should not be assessed by what your eyes look upon in them, nor by what their bodies’ mouths report to your ears, nor by what your fingers’ touch describes of them. It passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to the Reality of the Divine’s Children.

The Holy Spirit recognizes only what the Divine loves – the eternal Perfection of Its Children – and in the holy Light of what It sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the Splendor It beholds. Let It alone be Evaluator of what you are, for It has Confidence in which there is no doubt because It rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its Vision. Divine Essence cannot doubt Itself. The Voice of the Divine can only honor Divine Essence, rejoicing in Its everlasting Perfection.

Whom Spirit has evaluated can only laugh at guilt, unwilling now to play with toys of separation, unheeding of the body’s witnesses before the rapture of Divine Essence’s holy Face. And thus Spirit evaluates you. Accept Its Word of what you and all things are, for It bears witness to your beautiful creation and the Mind Whose Thought created Reality.

What can the body mean to the Holy Spirit, Who knows the Glory of the Creator and of Its Creation? What whispers of the ego can It hear? What could convince It that your errors are real? Let It be Interpreter as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. Its Lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the Truth. It will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering, and loss. It gives you Vision, which will see beyond these grim appearances and behold the gentle Face of Divine Essence in all of them. You will no longer doubt that only Good can come to you who are beloved of the Divine, for It will interpret all happenings and teach the single Lesson that they all contain.

Spirit will select the elements in all happenings that represent the Truth, and disregard those aspects that reflect idle dreams. And It will reinterpret from Its one Frame of Reference, wholly unified and sure, all that you perceive, and all occurrences, each circumstance, and every happening that seems to touch on you in any way. And you will see the Love beyond the hate, the Constancy in change, the Pure that was obscured by the belief in separation and sin, and only Heaven’s Blessing on the world.

Such is your resurrection from the death that all illusions represent, for your Life stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself. In everyone and everything the Divine’s Voice would speak to you of nothing but your holy Self and your Creator, Who are One. So will you see the holy Face of Divine Essence in everything, and hear in everything no sound except the Resonance through Spirit of the Harmony of Heaven.

We practice wordlessly today, except at the beginning of the time we spend with the Divine. We introduce these times with just a single, slow repeating of the thought with which the day begins. And then we watch our thoughts, appealing silently to Spirit Who sees the elements of Truth in them. Let It evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of idle dreams, and give them back to you as clean ideas that do not contradict the Will of the Divine.

Give Spirit your thoughts, and It will give them back as miracles that joyously proclaim the Wholeness and the Happiness the Divine wills Its Children as Witness of Its eternal Love. And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing Power from the Mind That saw the Truth in it, and could never be deceived by what was falsely added. All the threads of fantasy are gone, and what remains is unified into a perfect Thought that offers Its Perfection Everywhere.

Spend fifteen minutes thus as soon as possible after you awake, and gladly give another fifteen more before you go to sleep. Your Mission of awakening begins as all your thoughts are purified. So are you taught to teach your sisters and brothers the holy Lesson of their Sanctity. Each sister and brother will succeed in listening when you hear the Voice of the Divine give honor to the Divine’s Children. And everyone will share the Thoughts with you that Spirit has retranslated in your mind.

So are you born anew to Reality. And so you bestow the lovely gift of the flowers of forgiveness on the world, replacing witnesses to separation and death with Witnesses to Innocence and Life. Through your transfiguration is the world awakened and joyfully released from guilt. Now do we lift our transformed minds in gladness and with gratitude to Spirit, Who has restored our Sanity to us.

And we will hourly remember the Voice of the Divine, Who leads us into our awakening and Deliverance. As we give thanks, the world unites with us, and happily accepts our holy thoughts, which Heaven has corrected and made pure. Now has our Mission begun at last, to carry around the world the joyous news that Truth has no illusions, and the Peace of the Divine, through us, belongs to everyone.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 13: From Guilt to the Promise of Heaven

 

1. Guilt and the World of Delusion

If you did not feel guilty, or self-condemning, you could not seek to hurt another or yourself. For condemnation is the root of harmfulness. It is the judgment of one mind by another or itself as unworthy of Love, and deserving of punishment. But herein lies the split in the mind and its mis-projection as the separation. For the mind that judges and condemns perceives itself as separate from the mind being judged and condemned, believing that by separating itself from and punishing another, it will escape punishment from what it fears.

All this is merely the delusional attempt of the mind to deny its Self, and at the same time to escape the consequence of its denial. It is not an attempt to relinquish denial, but to hold on to it. For it is guilt that has obscured the Creator, and it is guilt that has driven the mind mad. The acceptance of guilt into the mind of the Divine’s Child was the beginning of the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end.

The world you look upon is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Observe this world carefully and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws that seem to govern it are laws in homage to the belief in death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. The mind seems to be trapped in the brain, and its powers seem to fade if the brain is hurt or declines. People seem to love, yet they abandon and are abandoned. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and their spirits which inhabited them seem to be no more. Everyone who has experienced this delusional system and thought it real has also thought that the Divine is cruel.

If this were the way the world really is, the Divine would be cruel. For no parent could subject its children to such as this as the price of existence, and be loving. Love does not kill to save. For if it did, attack would be salvation. That is the ego’s interpretation of salvation, but not the Divine’s. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could conceive of it. Adam and Eve’s “sin” could have touched no one had they not believed that it was the Creator Who drove them out of paradise. For it is in that belief that Knowledge of the Creator is lost, for only those who do not understand the Creator could believe it.

This world is an image of the harming of the Divine’s Children. And until you realize that the Divine’s Children cannot be harmed, this is the world you will perceive. But you will not realize this until you accept the eternal Fact that the Innocence of the Divine’s Children is complete and perfect. They deserve only Love, because in truth they have given only Love. They cannot be condemned, because in reality they have never condemned. The Atonement is the final Lesson they need learn, for It teaches them that, never having sinned, guilt is meaningless and they therefore have no need of salvation, but only of awakening.

This Course has said that the Holy Spirit shares the goal of all good teachers, whose ultimate aim is to make themselves unnecessary by teaching their students all they know. The Holy Spirit wills only this, for through sharing the Creator’s Love for Its Children, It wills to remove all guilt from their mind, that they may remember their Creator in Peace. For Peace and guilt are antithetical, and the Creator can be remembered only in Peace. Love and guilt cannot coexist, and to accept one is to deny the other.

Guilt hides Divine Essence from your perception, for guilt is the denial of Divine Essence. From the perspective of this strange world that the separated ones have made, the Children of the Divine have sinned, and have lost their divine Essence. How could you see them, then, if you hold this perspective? By making them invisible, the world of retribution arose in the dark cloud of guilt that you accepted, and that you hold on to until you fundamentally change your mind. For the Innocence of Divine Essence is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego has no existence. And the Divine’s Children are without guilt.

As you observe yourself and your world and honestly assess your creative activity, which you have been asked to do, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless. But consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in Eternity. You have “sinned” – or believed that you violated the Laws of the Divine – in the past, but there is no past. Eternity has no direction—Everything being Everywhere forever. Time seems to go in one direction, but when you reach its end, it will roll up like a long carpet that has spread along the past behind you, and will disappear. As long as you believe the Children of the Divine are guilty, you will walk along this carpet of time, believing that it leads to death. And the journey will seem long and cruel and senseless, for so it will be.

The journey on which the Children of the Divine set themselves long ago in their detour into fear is foolish indeed. But the Journey on which their Creator sets them is one of Release and Joy. The Creator is not cruel, and Its Children cannot hurt themselves in truth. The retaliation that they fear, and that they look upon because they believe in it, will never touch them, for although they believe in it, the Holy Spirit knows it is not true. Spirit stands at the end of time and on the Threshold of Eternity, where you must be because It is with you. It has always undone everything unworthy of the Children of the Divine, for such is Its Mission, given It by the Divine. And what the Divine gives has always been.

You will see me as you learn that the Children of the Divine are innocent. They have always sought their Innocence, and they have now found It. For everyone is seeking release from the prison they made, and the Way to find Release is not denied them. Being in them, they have found It. When they find It is only a matter of time, and time is only an illusion. For the Children of the Divine are innocent now, and the Brightness of their Purity shines untouched forever in the Divine’s Mind. The Divine’s Children will always be as they were created. Withdraw all allegiance to the delusional world, and judge not your sisters and brothers. For their eternal Innocence – and yours – is in the Mind of their Creator, and protects you forever.

When you have accepted the Atonement for yourself you will realize that there is no flaw, sin, or guilt in the Divine’s Children. And only as you behold them as guiltless can you understand their Oneness, and yours with them. For the idea of guilt brings a belief of condemnation of one by another, projecting separation in place of Unity. You can condemn only yourself, and by doing so you cannot know that you are the Divine’s Child. For you will have denied the Condition of your Being, which is your perfect Innocence. In Love you were created, and in Love you abide now and forever. Goodness and Mercy have always accompanied you, for you have always extended the Love of your Creator, though you have forgotten this.

As you perceive the holy Companions who travel with you, you will realize that there is no journey, but only an awakening. Your holy Self – Divine Essence – Who does not sleep, has kept faith with your Creator for you. There is no road to travel on, and no time to travel through. For the Divine waits not for Its Children in time, willing forever to be with them in Eternity. And so it has always been. Let the holiness of the Divine’s Children shine away the cloud of guilt that darkens your mind, and by accepting their Purity as yours, learn of them that It is yours.

You are invulnerable because you are innocent. You can hold on to the past only through guilt. For guilt establishes that you will be punished for the mistakes you have made, and thus depends on one-dimensional time proceeding straight from past to future while skipping the present. No one who believes this can understand what always means. And therefore guilt must deprive them of the appreciation of Eternity. You are immortal because you are Eternal, and always must be now. Guilt, then, is a way of holding past and future as the same in your mind to ensure the ego’s continuity. For if what the ego has done will be punished, its continuity would be guaranteed.

Yet the guarantee of your Continuity is the Divine’s, not the ego’s. And Immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away while Immortality remains always and is constant. Accepting the Atonement for yourself teaches you what Immortality is, for by accepting your Innocence you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless. The future in time is always associated with amends, and only guilt could induce a sense of need for amends. Accepting the Innocence of the Children of the Divine as yours is therefore the Divine’s Way of reminding you of the Divine Family, and what This is in Truth. For the Divine has never condemned Its Children, and being guiltless they are Eternal.

You cannot dispel guilt by making it real and then atoning for it. For this is the ego’s plan of atonement, which offers guilt instead of dispelling it. The ego believes in atonement through punishment, being fully committed to the insane notion that punishment is salvation. And those who cherish guilt must also believe this notion, for how else but by identifying with the ego could they hold on to what they do not want?

The ego teaches you to attack yourself believing you are guilty, and this must increase the guilt, for guilt is the result of attack. In the ego’s teaching, then, there is no escape from guilt or hell. For attack seems to make guilt real, and if it is real then it is hell and there is no way to overcome it. The Holy Spirit dispels guilt simply through the calm Recognition that guilt has never been. As Spirit beholds the innocent Children of the Divine, It knows this is true. And being true for you, you cannot attack yourself, for without guilt attack is impossible. You, then, are awakened because the Divine’s Children are innocent. And being wholly innocent, you and your sisters and brothers are invulnerable.