ARCIM

Daily Lesson 130 ~
May 10

It is impossible to see a world of separation.

Perception is consistent in that what you perceive always reflects your thinking. And your thinking reflects your choice of what you want to perceive. Your values are determiners of this, for what you value you must want to perceive, believing that what you perceive is really there. No one can perceive a world their mind has not accorded value. And no one can fail to perceive what they believe they want.

Yet who can love and hate, fully embrace and totally reject, simultaneously? Who can desire what they do not really want to be real? And who can choose to perceive a world that frightens them? Fear must make blind, for this is its weapon. That which you fear to perceive you cannot truly perceive. Love and true perception thus go hand in hand, but fear obscures in darkness what it values.

What, then, can fear truly project upon the world? What can be perceived in darkness that is real? True perception is eclipsed by fear, and what is left in the perceptual process is merely imagined, though what is really there remains as it truly is, though unseen. For what can be real in blind imaginings of panic born? What would you want from what is shown to you by fear? What would you wish to keep in such a dream?

Your fearful thoughts have made everything you think you look upon with the body’s eyes alone: all separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Fear, which believes itself to be in opposition to Love, has made them up. Yet Love can have no opposite, and so these differences have no cause, no being, and no consequence. They can be erroneously valued, but they will remain unreal. They can be sought, but they cannot be found. Today we will not waste time in seeking what cannot be found.

It is impossible to see a world born of fear: a world of separation, a world of illusions. For seeing unites with what it beholds, while fear rejects what is feared. Seek for a delusional world and the Real World must disappear. Only one world can be seen, for only one is real. This is the range of choice beyond which your decision cannot go. The real and the unreal are all there is to choose between, and nothing more than these.

Today we will attempt no compromise where none is possible. The world you look upon is proof that you previously made a choice as all-embracing as its opposite. What we would learn today is more than just the lesson that you cannot see two worlds, only one of which is real. It also teaches that the world you look upon is quite consistent from the point of view from which it is perceived. It is consistent in itself because it stems from one emotion – fear – and reflects its source in everything you perceive of it. For everything looked upon is believed to be apart from you.

Six times today, with thanks and gratitude, we gladly give five minutes to the thought that ends all fear and compromise and doubt, and with this thought we go beyond them, seeing them as the same. We will not make a thousand meaningless distinctions, nor attempt to bring with us a little part of unreality into the Real World, as we devote our minds to finding only what is real.

Begin your searching for the Real World by asking for a Strength beyond your own, and recognize what it is you seek. You do not want illusions. And you come to these five minutes emptying your hands of all the petty treasures of this world. You wait for the Divine to help you, as you say:

“It is impossible to see a world of separation.

Let me accept the Strength that the Divine offers me

and perceive no value in this world,

that I may find my Deliverance and Freedom.”

The Divine will be there. For you have called upon the great unfailing Power Who will take this giant step with you with Gratitude. You will succeed in experiencing Its Thanks expressed in Truth and clear perception. You will trust what you behold. For though it is perception, it is not the kind of perceiving that your body’s eyes alone can perceive. And you will know that the Divine’s Strength upheld you as you made this choice.

Easily dismiss the temptation to misperceive today whenever it arises, merely by remembering the limits on your choice. The unreal or the real, the false or true is what you perceive, and only what you can perceive. Perception is consistent with your choice, and the experience of nightmares or Heaven comes to you accordingly. Accept a nightmare as real, and you have confounded your perception. Yet the Release of Heaven still remains within your range of choice, to take the place of everything that the nightmare of separation would show to you. All you need say to any appearance of fear or separation, whatever form these take, is simply this:

“It is impossible to see a world of separation.

I seek my Deliverance and Freedom,

and nightmares are not a part of what I want.”

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 10: Idols, Gods, or the Divine

 

6. Denying the Divine or Seeing the Eternal

The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. Joy is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to it. Depression means that you have relinquished the Divine. People are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not know what it means. They do not realize that to deny the Divine is to deny their own Identity, and in this sense the wage of sin is death. The sense is very literal: deny Life and you will perceive its opposite, as all misplaced forms of denial replace what is with what is not. No one can really do this, but that you can think you can, and believe you have, is beyond dispute.

Remember, however, that to deny the Divine inevitably results in mis-projection, and you will believe that others, and not yourself, have done to you what you have cast outside yourself. You will receive the message you give, because it is the message you have asked for. You may believe that you judge your sisters and brothers by the messages they give you, but you have actually judged them by the message you gave them. Do not attribute your denial of Joy to them, or you will not see the Spark of the Great Rays in them that could bring Joy to you. It is the denial of the Spark that brings depression, and whenever you perceive your sisters and brothers without the Spark, you are denying the Divine.

Allegiance to the denial of the Divine is the ego’s religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to this god’s own survival. But consider what this means to you. Unless you are sick you cannot keep the gods and idols you made, for only in sickness could you possibly think you want them. Blasphemy, then, is self-destructive, not Divine-destructive. It means that you are willing not to know yourself, in order to be sick. This is the sacrifice and offering that the god of sickness demands, because having made this god out of the insanity of the ego’s perspective, it is an insane idea. It has many forms, but though it may seem like many different things, it is just one idea: the denial of the Divine.

Sickness and death entered the mind of some of the Divine’s Children in opposition to Its Will. The “attack on the Divine” made these Children think they were creator-less, and out of their depression they made the god of depression. This was their alternative to Joy, because they would not accept the fact that, although they are creators, they had been created. Yet the Child is helpless without the Creator, Who alone is Its Help. This Course said before that of yourself you can do nothing, but you are not of yourself. If you were, then what you made would be true, and you could never escape it.

It is because you did not make yourself that nothing need trouble you. Your gods and idols and demons are nothing, because your Creator did not create them. You cannot make creations that are unlike your Creator, any more than It could have created a Child who was unlike Itself. If the act of creation is sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what it is. Depression is isolation, and so it could not have been created, because isolation cannot be shared.

Child of the Divine, you have not sinned, but you have been much mistaken. But this can be corrected, and the Divine will help you, knowing that you could not sin against It. In a strange way, you denied your Creator because you love It, knowing that if you recognized and acknowledged your love for It, you could not deny It. Apart from the insanity of your denial, in its sane essence it therefore means that you love the Divine, and that you know It loves you. Remember that what you erroneously deny you must first have known. And if you can accept the false use of denial, you can accept its undoing.

Your Creator has not denied you, and never will. It does not retaliate, but It does call you to return. When you think It has not answered your call, it means that you have not answered Its. Because of Its Love for Its Children, It calls to you from every Part of the Divine Family. If you hear Its Call and Message, then It has answered you, and you will learn what you are from Its Voice if you hear aright. The Love of the Divine is in Everything It created, for Its Creation is Everything, and Everywhere. Behold with Peace your sisters and brothers, and the Divine will come rushing into your heart, with Gratitude for your gift to them.

Do not turn to the god of sickness for healing, but only to Divine Love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Love. When you acknowledge It, you will know that It has always and without ceasing acknowledged you, and that in Its Acknowledgment of you is your Being. Your holy Self cannot be sick and cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do seem to sicken and die. Remember, though, that to do this is blasphemous in its actual meaning, for it means that you are perceiving without love the Divine, and Its Creation from which It cannot be separated. Only the Eternal can be loved, for Love does not perish or fade away. What is of the Divine belongs to It forever, and you are of the Divine. Would It allow Itself to suffer? And would It offer Its Children anything that is not acceptable to Itself?

If you will accept yourself as the Divine created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge the Divine as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your true Creator is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. Your Creator created you wholly without flaw or sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny the Divine as your true Creator, you bring the beliefs of flaw, sin, pain, and suffering into your own mind, because of the Power your Creator gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but because it is free it can also deny what it creates, as it has denied its Creator. And this is a precise description of the world you look upon.

You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much the Divine, in Its Love, would not have it so. Yet It will not interfere with you, because It would not know Its Children if they were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Itself, and the Divine is not insane. When you denied It, you acted insanely. Would you have It share this insanity?

The Divine will never cease to love Its Children, and Its Children will never cease to love It. That was the Condition of the creation of the Divine’s Children, fixed forever in the Mind of the Divine and in the minds of Its Children. To know this Condition is Sanity. To deny It is insanity. The Divine gave Itself to you in your Creation, and Its Gifts are eternal. Would you deny yourself to It? Its separated Children temporarily removed themselves from Its Gifts by refusing to accept what had been created for them, and what they themselves had created in the Name of their Creator. Out of your Gifts to It and to your sisters and brothers, the Realm of Heaven will be restored to Its Children who sleep.

Heaven waits for their Return and yours, for It was created as the eternal Dwelling Place of the Divine Family. You are not at home anywhere else or in any other condition. Accept and receive the Joy that was created for you, in exchange for the misery you have made for yourself. The Divine has given you the Means for undoing what you have made. Listen, and you will learn what you are.

If the Divine knows Its Children as wholly Innocent, then it must be blasphemous to perceive any of your sisters and brothers as guilty, regardless of how deeply they seem to wander in nightmares of hell. If the Divine knows Its Children as wholly without pain, then it must be blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. If the Divine knows Its Children to be wholly Joyous, then it must be blasphemous to feel depressed. All these illusions, and the many other forms that blasphemy, or the denial of the Divine, may take, are refusals to accept Creation as It is. If the Divine created Its Children perfect, that is how you must learn to see them to learn of their reality. And as Part of the Divine Family, that is how you must see yourself to learn yours.

Perceive only what the Creator created or you are denying all of the Divine. The Divine’s is the only Creatorship, and It is yours only because the Divine has given It to you. Your gifts to yourself are meaningless, but your Gifts to your creations are like the Divine’s, because They are given in Its Name. That is why your creations are as real as Its. But the real Creator must be acknowledged if the real Creation is to be known. You have believed that the sick things you made are your creations, because you believed that the sick images you perceive as your sisters and brothers are the Children of the Divine.

Only if you accept the Creatorship of the Divine will you have anything, because Its Creatorship gave you Everything. That is why to deny It is to deny yourself. The denial of Love must be arrogance, because Love shares and arrogance withholds. As long as both appear to you to be desirable, the concept of choice, which is not of the Divine, will remain with you. While this is not true in Eternity, it is true in time, so that while time lasts in your mind, there will be choices. Time itself was your choice.

If you would remember Eternity, you must learn to see the Eternal, and perceive that only. If you allow yourself to become preoccupied with the temporal, you are choosing to continue living in time. As always, your choice is determined by what you value. Eternity and time cannot both be real, because they contradict each other. If you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to understand Eternity, and make It yours.