ARCIM

Daily Lesson 109 ~
April 19

I rest in the Divine.

We ask for rest today, and quietness unshaken by the world’s appearances. We ask for peace and stillness in the midst of all the turmoil born of clashing dreams. We ask for safety and for happiness, although we seem to look on danger and on sorrow. And we have the Thought that will answer our asking with what we request:

“I rest in the Divine.”

This Thought will bring to you the Rest and Quiet, Peace and Stillness, and the Safety and the Happiness you seek.

“I rest in the Divine.”

This Thought has power to awaken the Truth sleeping in you, whose Vision sees beyond appearances to that same Truth in everyone and everything there is. Here is the end of suffering for all the world, and everyone who ever came and yet will come to linger for a while. Here is the Thought in which the Children of the Divine are born anew, to recognize themselves.

“I rest in the Divine.”

Completely undismayed, this Thought will carry you through all storms and strife, past all appearances of misery and pain, loss and death, and onward to the Certainty of the Divine. There is no suffering It cannot heal. There is no problem that It cannot solve. And every appearance will turn to Truth before the eyes of you who rest in the Divine.

This is a day of Peace. You rest in the Divine, and while the world is torn by winds of hate, your rest remains completely undisturbed. For yours is the rest of Truth. Illusions and appearances cannot intrude on you. You call to all to join you in your rest, and they will hear and come to you because you rest in the Divine. They will not hear another voice but yours, because you gave your voice to the Divine and now you rest in It, and let It speak through you.

In the Divine you have no cares and no concerns, no burdens, no anxiety, no pain, no fear of future, and no past regrets. In Timelessness you rest, while time goes by without its touch upon you, for your rest can never change in any way at all.

You rest today. And as you close your eyes, sink into stillness. Let these hourly periods of rest and respite reassure your mind that all its frantic fantasies were but the dreams of fever that have passed away. Let it be still and thankfully accept its healing. No more fearful dreams will come now that you rest in the Divine.

Take time today to slip away from dreams and into Peace. Each hour that you take your five-minute rest today a tired mind is suddenly made glad, a bird with broken wings is healed and begins to sing, a stream long dry begins to flow again. The world is born anew each time you rest, and hourly remember that you came to bring the Peace of the Divine into the world, that it might take its rest along with you.

With each five minutes that you rest today the world is nearer awakening. And the time when rest will be the only thing there is comes closer to all worn and tired minds, too weary now to go their way alone. And they will hear the birds begin to sing, and see the streams begin to flow again, with hope reborn and energy restored to walk with lightened steps along the Road that suddenly seems easy as they go.

You rest within the Peace of the Divine today, and call upon your sisters and brothers from your rest, to draw them to their rest along with you. You will be faithful to your trust today, forgetting no one, bringing everyone into the boundless circle of your Peace, the holy Sanctuary where you rest. Open the Sanctuary Doors and let everyone come from far across the world and near as well; your distant sisters and brothers and your closest friends. Invite them all to enter here and rest with you.

You rest within the Peace of the Divine today, quiet and unafraid. Each sister and brother comes to take their rest, and offer it to you. We rest together here, for thus our rest is made complete, and what we give today we have received already. Time is not the guardian of what we give today. We give to those unborn and those passed by, to every Thought of the Divine, and to the Mind in which these Thoughts were created, and where they rest. And we remind them of their resting place each time we tell ourselves:

“I rest in the Divine.”

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 8: The Journey Home

 

1. The Direction and Content of the Curriculum

You may be hampered in your progress in this Course by wanting to know what you do not yet know. Such a desire is actually a way of hanging on to deprivation. Following instructions in a course for knowing cannot reasonably be objected to on the grounds that you do not yet know. The need for this Course is implicit in the need to know, and the steps to knowing are being provided.

Knowledge, however, is not the motivation for learning this Course. Peace is. As the prerequisite for Knowledge, Peace must be learned. This is only because those who are in conflict are not peaceful, and Peace is the Condition of Knowledge because It is the Condition of the Realm of Heaven. Knowledge will be restored to you when you meet Its Conditions. This is not a bargain made by the Divine, Who makes no bargains at all. It is merely the result of your misuse of Its Laws on behalf of a will that was not the Divine’s and that does not exist.

Knowledge is the Divine’s Will. If your thought system opposes Its Will, how can you have Knowledge? This Course has shared with you what Knowledge offers you, but you may not yet regard this as wholly desirable. If you did, you would not be willing to throw the Gifts of Knowledge away when the ego asks for your allegiance. The distraction of the ego seems to interfere with your learning, but it has no power to distract unless you give it this power.

The ego’s voice in your mind is a hallucination. Because of this it would be unrealistic to expect the ego to say, “I am not real.” Hallucinations are inaccurate perceptions of reality. But you are not asked to dispel them alone. You are merely asked to assess them in terms of what they offer you, and their results to you. If you decide you do not want them on the basis of the loss of Peace they incur, they will be removed from your mind for you by Truth. The ego’s voice is a call to war, and war does deprive you of Peace, as does every reaction to the ego’s voice. Yet in this war there is no opponent. This is the reinterpretation of reality that you must make to secure Peace, and the only one you need ever make.

Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your Peace, which you are giving up by attacking them. How can you have what you give up? Sharing means having, but giving something up does not exclude yourself. When you give up Peace, you are excluding yourself from It. This is a condition so strange to the Realm of Heaven that while you experience it you cannot understand the State that prevails within the Realm.

Your past learning must have taught you the wrong things if it has not made you happy. On this basis alone its value should be questioned. If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are you satisfied with the changes your learning so far has brought you? Dissatisfaction with the learning outcome must be a sign of learning failure, because it means that you did not get what you wanted through engaging in the learning process.

The Curriculum of the Atonement is the opposite of the curriculum the separated ones established for themselves, but so is Its Outcome. If the outcome of the curriculum you have been engaged in has made you unhappy, and if you want a different outcome, a change in the curriculum is obviously necessary. The first change that must be introduced is a change in direction. A meaningful curriculum cannot be inconsistent. If learning is planned by two teachers, each believing in diametrically-opposed ideas, it cannot be integrated in the learner. If such learning is carried out by these two teachers simultaneously, each one merely interferes with the other. This leads to fluctuation, but not to transformation.

The volatile have no direction. They cannot choose a single direction to go in because they cannot relinquish the other directions they are confused about even if the others do not exist. Their conflicted curriculum teaches them that all directions exist, and gives them no rationale for choice. The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized before a real change in direction becomes possible. You cannot learn simultaneously from two teachers who are in total disagreement about everything. Their separate curricula present an impossible learning task, which can only result in failure and frustration. They are teaching you entirely different things in entirely different ways, which would be possible except for the crucial fact that both are teaching you about yourself. Your reality is unaffected by either. But if you listen to both, your mind will split on what your reality is.

There is a rationale for choice. Only one of these two teachers knows what your reality is. If learning that reality is the purpose of the curriculum, then you must learn it of that teacher.

The ego literally does not know what it is trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing it. The ego is expert only in confusion. It does not understand anything else. As a teacher, then, it is totally confused and totally confusing.

Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is quite impossible, you could learn nothing from the ego, because the ego knows nothing. Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Is the total disregard of anything it teaches anything but sensible? Is this the teacher to whom a Child of the Divine should turn to find themself?

Evaluated fairly, the ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of your own experience with the ego’s teaching and curriculum, this alone should disqualify it as your future teacher. But the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural Path and facilitates the development of what you have and the knowing of who you are. But when you are taught against your Nature, you will lose by your learning, because your learning will imprison you. Your will is in your Nature, and therefore cannot go against It. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because your free will won’t listen to it. Because your true will is free, it is not your will to be imprisoned.

That is why the ego is the denial of free will. The Divine never coerces you because It shares Its Will with you. Its Voice teaches only Its Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit’s Lesson, because that is what you are. The Holy Spirit’s Lesson is that your will and the Divine’s cannot be out of accord because they are One. This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum that must be unconflicted, but also the content.

The ego wants to teach you the unnatural lesson that you want to oppose the Divine’s Will. This lesson cannot be learned, but even the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own Freedom, and makes you afraid of your will because it is free. The Holy Spirit undoes any imprisoning of the will of a Child of the Divine, knowing that the will of the Child is the Creator’s Will. Spirit leads you steadily along the Path of Freedom, teaching you how to disregard, or see beyond, anything and everything that would hold you back.

This Course said before that the Holy Spirit teaches you how to distinguish between pain and Joy. That is the same as saying that It teaches you the difference between imprisonment and Freedom. Given your current state of confusion, you cannot make this distinction without the Holy Spirit’s Guidance. That is because you have taught yourself that Freedom is fearful, and that imprisonment is freedom. Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe that they are the same to now teach you that they are different?

The Holy Spirit’s Curriculum has only one Goal and therefore teaches only one Direction. Its Direction is Freedom, and Its Goal is the Divine. It cannot conceive of the Divine without you, because it is not the Divine’s Will to be without you. When you have learned that your will is the Divine’s, you could no more will to be without the Divine than It could will to be without you. This is Freedom and this is Joy. Choose this for yourself and you are offering the Divine Its Realm, because It created you for this.