ARCIM

Daily Lesson 126 ~
May 6

All that I give is given to myself.

Today’s idea, completely alien to the ego mindset and the thinking of the world, is essential to the thought reversal that this Course will bring about. When you truly believe this statement, you will have no problem giving your complete forgiveness, and receiving certainty of goal and sure direction. You will understand the means by which awakening comes to you, and will not hesitate to use them now.

Let us consider the alternative belief to today’s idea. This belief asserts that other people are apart from you, and able to behave in ways that have no connection with your thoughts, nor your behavior with their thoughts. Therefore your attitudes have no effect on them, and their appeals for help, in whatever form these take, are not in any way related to your own. Others can commit “egregious” errors without such an interpretation of their actions affecting your perception of yourself, while their mistakes can be judged and yet the one judging them can be at peace and remain apart from the condemnation they gave forth.

This alternative belief maintains that when you forgive mistakes there is no connection with you or gain to you directly. That in forgiving you give charity to one not really deserving it, merely because you have been advised to do so, or maybe to subtly indicate that you are on a more evolved plane than they whom you forgive. They have not merited your charitable tolerance, which you bestow on those not truly worthy of the gift because their errors in judgment and mistaken choices have lowered them beneath a real equality with you. They therefore have no grounds to receive your forgiveness. It holds out a gift to them but hardly to yourself.

In this perspective forgiveness is basically unsound: a charitable notion, benevolent yet undeserved; a gift bestowed at times, at other times withheld. Because it is unmerited, withholding it is just, nor is it fair that you should experience consequences when it is withheld, because the actions that you forgive or not are not your own. Someone apart from you committed them, and if you then are gracious unto them by giving them what they do not deserve, the gift is no more yours than were their errors.

If these thoughts were true, then forgiveness would have no grounds on which to rest dependably and sure. It would be an eccentricity in which you sometimes choose to give indulgently an undeserved reprieve, yet retaining your right to let the “offender” be held to the justified consequences for their shortcomings.

Think you the Creator of Heaven would allow the world’s awakening to depend on such a whim? Would not Its Care for you and your sisters and brothers be miniscule indeed if your awakening rested on such as this?

Beliefs such as these indicate that forgiveness has not been understood. Perceived in this way, forgiveness is simply a check upon overt aggression against the one who errs, without requiring correction in your own mind. Perceived in this way, forgiveness cannot give you Peace. It cannot be a Means for your Release from what you perceive in someone other than yourself. It has no Power to restore your Unity with them to your awareness. It is therefore not what the Divine intended it to be for you.

Not having truly given the gift the Divine asks of you, you cannot recognize Its Gifts to you, and then believe It has not given Them. Yet would It ask you for a gift unless it was for you? Could It be satisfied with empty gestures, and evaluate such petty gifts as worthy of Its Children? Awakening is a better gift than that. True forgiveness, as the means by which awakening is attained, must heal the mind that gives, for giving is receiving. What remains as unreceived has not yet been truly given, but what has been truly given must be received.

Today we try to understand the truth that giver and receiver are the same. Practice and support are needed to make this meaningful because it is so strange to the thoughts on which a world that can be looked upon is built. And the Help you need is there. Give It your faith today and ask It that It share your practicing in Truth today. And if you catch even a tiny glimpse of the Release that is in the idea we practice for today, then this is a day of Glory for the world.

Give fifteen minutes twice today, at times you determine are most suitable, to the attempt to understand today’s idea. It is the Thought by which forgiveness takes its proper place in your priorities. It is the Thought that will release your mind from every block to what forgiveness means, and let you realize its Worth to you.

In silence close your eyes upon the world that does not understand forgiveness, and seek Sanctuary in the quiet Place where thoughts are changed and false beliefs laid by. Repeat today’s idea, and ask for help in understanding what it really means. Be willing to be taught. Be glad to hear the Voice of Truth and Healing speak to you, and you will understand the Words It speaks, and recognize It speaks your words to you.

As often as you can during the day, remind yourself you have a goal today, an aim that gives this day unique value to yourself and all your sisters and brothers. Help your mind to remember this goal during the day by reminding yourself:

“All that I give is given to myself. The Help I need to learn that this is true is with me now. And I will trust in It.”

Then spend a quiet moment opening your mind to Spirit’s Correction and Its Love. And what you hear of It you will believe, for what It gives will be received by you.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 10: Idols, Gods, or the Divine

 

2. Waking from the Double Dream

Nothing beyond yourself can make you fearful or loving, because nothing is beyond you. Eternity and time are both in your mind, and will conflict until you perceive time solely as a means to regain Eternity. You cannot do this as long as you believe that anything that happens to you is caused by factors outside yourself. You must learn that time is solely at your disposal, and that nothing in the world can take this responsibility from you. You can violate the Divine’s Laws in your imagination, but you cannot escape from Them. They were established for your Protection, and are as inviolate as your Safety.

The Divine created no part of you beside your holy Self, and nothing beside your holy Self and Its Creator exists, for you and They are One. What except the Divine and Its perfect Creation can exist? Nothing beyond the Divine can actually happen, because nothing except It is real. Your creations add to the Divine, as you do. But nothing is added that is different, because everything Real has always been. What can upset you except the perishable, and how can the perishable be real if you are Part of the Divine’s one Creation, and It created you eternal?

Your will establishes everything that happens to you, and your experience of it. You are the creator of your world, and you are in charge of it. This also means that you are free to invite Truth as your Advisor in your creatorship, and your sisters and brothers as cocreators. Thus is the Trust the Divine has in you. The Divine does not change Its Mind about you, for It is not uncertain of Itself. And only what It knows can be known, because It does not know only for Itself. It created you and all Creation for Itself, but It gave you the Power to create for your Self, so you would be like the Divine. That is why your will is holy.

Can anything be beyond the Love of the Divine? Can anything, then, be beyond your holy will? Nothing can reach you from beyond it, because, being in the Divine, you encompass Everything. Believe this, and you will realize how much is up to you.

When anything threatens your peace of mind, ask yourself:

 

Has the Divine changed Its Mind about me?

 

Then accept Its eternal Decision about you, for It is indeed Changeless, and refuse to change your mind about yourself. The Divine will never decide against you, or It would be deciding against Itself.

You do not currently know your creations because your mind has dreamed that it has split itself, and so it alternates between creativity and miscreation. Until you awaken from this dream, your ability to tell the true from the false is unstable, and in this state you are capable of deciding against your true creations. To counter Creation, including what you have created, is impossible, just as is the idea of cancelling the Eternal. But remember that this is just as impossible for the Divine. The Law of Creation is that you love your creations as yourself because they are part of you. Everything that has been created is therefore perfectly safe, because the Laws of the Divine protect each creation by Its Love. Any part of your mind that does not know this has banished itself from Knowledge, because it has not met Its Conditions.

Given the holy sovereignty of your will, who except you could have done this to yourself? Or seemed to do it, because it has not happened in Reality. Recognize this gladly, for in this recognition rests the realization that your banishment from Knowledge and from Reality is not of the Divine, and therefore does not exist. You are still at home in the Divine, only dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to Reality. Is it your will to do so? You know, from your own experience, that you think what you experience in dreams is real only as long as you are asleep. But as soon as you waken, you know that everything that seemed to happen in the dream did not happen in the world. You do not think this mysterious, even though all the laws of the world you awake to were transcended while you slept.

Is it not possible that when you woke from sleeping and its dreams you merely shifted from one dream to another without truly awakening in Reality? If you found this to be true, would you bother to try to reconcile what happens in your conflicting dreams – your dreams while you sleep and the dream that you are awake – or would you dismiss them together, discovering that Reality is in accord with neither? You do not yet remember being fully awake in Reality. At your current phase of awakening, when you hear the Holy Spirit while in your sleeping dreams or in your dream of being “awake” you simply feel better because loving seems possible to you in that moment. But you do not remember yet that it once was so that you were fully awake, immersed in no dreams, and it is in this remembering that you will know it can be so again.

What is possible to achieve has not yet been accomplished in you in the dream of time. But what has once been in Eternity is so now. When you remember being fully awake, you will know that what you remember is eternal, and therefore is now.

You will remember Everything the instant you desire It wholly, for if to desire wholly is to create, you will have willed away the separation, returning your mind simultaneously to your Creator and your creations. Knowing them, you will have no wish to sleep and dream, but only the will to awaken and be glad. Dreams will be impossible, because you will want only Truth, and being at last your will, Truth will be yours.