ARCIM

Daily Lesson 165 ~
June 14

Let my mind embrace the Thought of the Divine.

What makes this world seem real except denial of the Truth, Which is beyond the world and also the Light of the world? What except your thoughts of fear and misery obscure the perfect Peace and Happiness your Creator wills for you? And what but illusion could seem to hide what cannot be concealed? What could keep from you what you already have, except your choice to see It not, denying It is there?

The Thought of the Divine created you. It has not left you, nor have you ever been apart from It even for an instant. It belongs to you. By It you live. It is your Source of Life and Being, holding you One with It. And Everything is One with you because this Thought left you not. The Thought of the Divine protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with Happiness and Love. Eternity and limitless Life shine in your mind because the Thought of the Divine has left you not, and still abides with you in the midst of your troubled dreams of darkness.

Who would deny their Safety and their Peace and Joy, their healing and their quiet rest and calm awakening, if they only recognized where these things abide? Would they not instantly prepare to go where these are found, letting go of all else as worthless in comparison with them? And having found these, would a person not make sure these remain with them, and they remain with these?

Receive and embrace Heaven. It is yours today just for the asking. Nor need you perceive, before Heaven comes to you, how great the Gift, and how changed your mind will be when you have accepted It. Ask to receive the Thought of the Divine and It is given you. Conviction rests within It. Until you welcome It as yours uncertainty will remain. Yet the Divine is just. Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow.

Ask with desire for what is already yours. You need not be sure that you request the only thing you want. But when you have received It, you will be sure you have the Treasure you have always sought. What would you then exchange in place of It? What would induce you now to let It fade away from your ecstatic vision? For this sight proves that you have exchanged your blindness for the seeing Vision of Divine Essence; that your mind has come to lay aside denial and embrace the Thought of the Divine as its Inheritance.

Now is all doubting past, the journey’s End made certain, and awakening given you. Now is Divine Essence’s Power in your mind, to heal as you are healed. For now you are among the awakeners of the world. Your destiny is there and nowhere else. Would the Divine consent to let Its Children remain forever starved by their mad denial of the nourishment they need to live? Abundance dwells in them, and deprivation cannot cut them off from the Divine’s sustaining Love and from their Home.

Practice today in Hope, for Hope indeed is justified. Your doubts are meaningless, for the Divine is certain. And the Thought of It is never absent. Sureness must abide within you who are host to It. This Course removes all doubts that you have interposed between the Thought of the Divine and your Certainty of It. We count on It and not upon ourselves to give us Certainty. And in the Divine’s Name we practice as Its Word directs we do. Its Sureness is beyond our every doubt. Its Love remains beyond our every fear. The Thought of the Divine is still beyond all dreams, and in our minds, according to Its Will.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 15: Dissolving Dissociation

 

1. The Logic of the Indirect

You are blessed indeed, but in this world of illusions you do not know it. Yet you have the means for learning it, and seeing it quite clearly. The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily as and much better than the ego does, considering that Spirit’s Conclusions are always sane and true. They take a direction exactly opposite of the ego’s, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. This Course has considered much of the ego’s logic, and we have observed its logical conclusions. And having observed them, we have realized that they cannot be seen, but only perceived in delusions. For there alone their seeming clearness appears to be perceived. Let us now turn away from them, and follow the clear Logic by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple Conclusions that speak for Truth and Sanity, and only These.

If you are blessed and do not know it, then you need to learn it must be so, so you can know it again. Knowledge is not taught, but Its Conditions must be acquired, for it is They that have been thrown away. You can learn to bless, but cannot give what you have not. If, then, you offer blessing, it must have come first to yourself. And you must also have accepted it as yours, for how else could you offer it to others? This is why the miracles you perform offer you the testimony that you are blessed.

If what you offer is complete forgiveness, then you must have let guilt go completely, accepting the Atonement for yourself, and learning that you are innocent. How could you learn what has been done for you, but which you have forgotten, unless you do what you would have to do in order to know it has been done for you?

Indirect proof of Truth is needed in a world made of denial and without direction. You will perceive the need for this if you will realize that denying Reality is the decision not to know. The logic of the world, as of the ego, must therefore lead to nothing, for it has no true or real goal. While the goal of nothing is unachievable, if you decide to have and give and be nothing except a dream, then you must direct your thoughts into oblivion. And if you have and give and are Everything, and yet this has been denied by you, then your thought system must have become closed off and entirely separated from Truth and Sanity.

It is not difficult to acknowledge that this world is a manifestation of madness, but do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There is no area of your current perception that this madness has not touched, and your dream of nothing is hallowed by you, until your change your mind, because you wove it. That is why the Divine placed the Holy Spirit in you, where you placed the dream. Looking always involves perceiving an outer world. Were the source of your thoughts entirely of yourself alone, the thought system that you made would be forever dark. The thoughts projected by the minds of the Divine’s Children have all the power that they give them. The Thoughts they share with the Divine are beyond their belief, but those they made alone are their beliefs. And it is these, and not the Truth, that they have chosen to defend and love. These thoughts will not be taken from them, because Children of the Divine made them. But these thoughts can be given up by those who made them, for the Source of the undoing of these thoughts is in their makers.

There is nothing made in this world that can teach those who believe themselves to be in the world that the logic of the world is totally mad and leads to nothing. But in all of those who made up the mad logic of the world there is One Who knows it leads to nothing, for It knows of Everything.

Any direction that leads you where the Holy Spirit does not lead you goes nowhere. Anything you deny that Spirit knows to be true you have denied yourself, and Spirit must therefore teach you to accept it. Undoing is indirect, just as doing is. You were created only to create, neither to perceive nor do. These are only indirect expressions of the creative will, which has been blocked by the capricious and unholy whims of fear and guilt that your Creator shared not with you. Those thus blocked have therefore set themselves the task of sharing what cannot be shared. And while you still think it possible to learn to do this, you will not believe all that is possible for you to learn toward awakening.

The Holy Spirit, therefore, must begin Its Teaching by showing you what you can never learn. Its Message is not indirect, but It must introduce the simple Truth into a thought system that has become so twisted and complex that you cannot conceive that it means nothing. Spirit merely sees its foundation and dismisses it. But you who cannot undo by yourself what you have made, nor escape the heavy burden of its dullness that lies upon your mind, also cannot see through it by yourself. This thought system deceives you because you chose to deceive yourself. Those who choose to be deceived will merely attack direct approaches to free them, for these approaches would to the dreamer seem to encroach upon their free will, and strike at the deception which in their fragmented state of mind they hold dear. Spirit thus starts by reminding you of what you actually hold dear.