ARCIM

Daily Lesson 167 ~
June 16

There is one Life, and that I share with the Divine.

There are not different kinds of life, for Life is like the Truth. It does not have levels or degrees or types. It is the one Condition in Which all the Divine’s Children share. Like all of the Divine’s Thoughts, Life has no opposite. There is no death because what the Divine created shares Its Life. There is no death because an opposite to the Divine does not exist. There is no death because the Creator and Its Creation are One.

In this world there appears to be a state that is Life’s opposite. The world calls it death. We have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea that underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the perceived alarm of danger and lack to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect Joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety, suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus deny that you truly live.

You think that death is of the body. Yet death is only an idea, irrelevant to what is looked upon as physical. Ideas are in the mind. From there they can be applied as mind directs. But an idea’s origin is where it must be changed, if change is to occur. And ideas that are not Thoughts of the Divine must be changed for awakening from their effects to occur. Thoughts and ideas leave not their source. The emphasis this Course has placed on that Idea is due to Its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal, being the Cause of healing. It is why in reality you cannot die. Its Truth establishes you as One with the Divine.

Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. It is the belief that conditions change, and that emotions alternate because of causes you did not make, cannot control, and can never change. Death is the fixed belief that ideas can leave their source, and take on qualities their source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as in distance, time, and form.

In spite of these insane beliefs, death cannot come from Life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can extend all that their source contains, and in that ability they can go far beyond themselves. But they cannot give birth to what was never given them. As they are created or made, so will their creating or making be. As they were born, so will they then give birth. And where they come from, there will they return.

The mind can think it sleeps, but it cannot in truth slumber. It cannot change what is its awakened State. It cannot in reality make a body, or abide within a body. What seems to die is merely the sign of a mind that believes it is asleep. What is alien to the whole mind does not exist, because it has no source. For true mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful State. It cannot make the physical, opposite of itself.

The “opposite” of Life can only be another expression of Life. As such, this opposite can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. The form of its expression may seem to change, and thus may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind awake or apparently sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.

The Divine creates only Mind awake. The Divine does not sleep, and Its Creations cannot share what It gives not, nor make conditions that It does not share with them. The thought of death is not the opposite to Thoughts of Life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of the Divine remain forever changeless, with the Power to extend Forever changelessly and yet within Themselves, for They are Everywhere.

What seems to be the opposite of Life is merely the semblance of sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power that it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time, an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakens, it simply continues as it always was.

Let us today be Children of the Truth, and not deny our holy Heritage. Our life is not as we imagine it. Who changes life because they close their eyes, and who can make themselves what they are not because they sleep and perceive in dreams an opposite to what they are? We will not ask for death in any form today. Nor will we let imagined opposites to Life abide even an instant where the Thought of Life eternal has been set by the Divine Itself.

Life’s holy Home we strive to find today as the Divine established It, and wills It be forever and forever. The Divine is Source of what we think today. And in Its Thoughts, Which have no opposite and no beginning or end, we understand that there is one Life, and that this Life we share with our Creator and with Its Thoughts as well; with all Creation, Which It created in a Unity of Life that cannot in death separate and leave the Source of Life from where It came.

We share our life because we have one Source, a Source from Which Perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds that It created perfect. As we were, so are we now and will forever be. A sleeping mind must awaken as it sees its own Perfection reflecting the Source of Life so perfectly that it fades into what is reflected there. And now it is no more a mere reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the Light that makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the awakened mind is One that knows its Source, its Self, and its Holiness.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 15: Dissolving Dissociation

 

3. The Guiltless Learner

Learning will be proportional to the motivation for it, and the interference in your motivation for learning is exactly the same as that which interferes with all your thinking. To be a joyful learner you cannot feel guilty about learning. This is so essential to learning that it should always be remembered. Guiltless learners learn so easily because their thoughts are free. But this entails the recognition that guilt is interference, not honesty or enlightenment, and serves no useful function at all.

You may be using the idea of guiltlessness merely to offset the pain of guilt, and not perceiving it as having value in itself. Many believe that guilt and guiltlessness are both of value, each representing an escape from what the other does not offer. They do not want either alone, for they have taught themselves that without both they are not whole, and therefore not happy. However, you are whole only in your Guiltlessness, and only in your Guiltlessness can you be happy, because there is no conflict there.

If you wish for guilt in any way, in any form, you will lose appreciation of the value of your Guiltlessness, and push It from your sight. There is no compromise that you can make with guilt and still release yourself, even temporarily, from the pain that only Guiltlessness alleviates. Living in this world means to learn, just as being in Heaven means to create. Whenever the pain of guilt seems to attract you, remember that if you yield to it you will be deciding against your Happiness, and you will accordingly not learn how to be happy. Therefore say to yourself gently, and with the conviction born of the Love of the Divine and of Its Children:

 

What I experience is a manifestation of the perspective I choose. Because I am eternally innocent, there is never anything to fear. By my decision for the perspective of Guiltlessness, I choose to witness to my acceptance of the Atonement, not for Its rejection through belief in guilt. I would accept my Guiltlessness by making It manifest and sharing It. Let me bring Peace to the Divine’s Children from our Creator.

 

Each day, hour and minute, and even every second, you are deciding whether to listen to the ego’s voice in your mind or follow the Holy Spirit’s Guidance, between the depressing belief in death or the joyful Promise of Resurrection. The ego is the choice for the perspective of guilt, while the Holy Spirit is the decision for the Perspective of Guiltlessness. The power of the decision of attention and perspective is the power that is yours in this world. What you can decide between is fixed, because there are no alternatives except Truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites that cannot be reconciled, and cannot both be true. You are either guilty or innocent, bound or free, unhappy or happy.

The miracle teaches you that you have chosen Innocence, Freedom, and Joy. The miracle is not a cause, but an effect of your decision of perspective and attention. It is the natural result of choosing right, attesting to your happiness that comes from deciding to be free of guilt.

Everyone you offer healing to returns it to you. Everyone you attack will appear to you to keep the attack and cherish it, by holding it against you. Whether anyone does or doesn’t actually respond to your attacks this way will make no difference. You will believe they do. It is impossible to offer others what you do not want without the “penalty” of this belief. The cost of giving is receiving. The receiving will either be experienced as a penalty and punishment from which you suffer, or the happy reception of a treasure to hold dear.

No penalty or punishment is ever asked of the Divine’s Children except by themselves and of themselves. Every chance given to them to heal is another opportunity to replace darkness with Light, and fear with Love. Each time they refuse this opportunity, they keep themselves bound to darkness and fear because they did not choose to free their sisters and brothers, and enter the Light with them. Each time they give power to nothing, they reject the joyous opportunity to learn that nothingness has no power. And by not dispelling darkness, they become afraid of darkness and of Light.

The joy of learning that darkness has no power over the Children of the Divine is the happy Lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, and would have you teach with It. It is Its Joy to teach It, as it will be yours. The way to teach this simple Lesson is merely this: Innocence is Invulnerability. Therefore, make your invulnerability manifest to everyone by perceiving through its perspective, and teach everyone that regardless of what they may try or seem to do in the dream of this world, your perfect freedom from the belief in this dream shows them that they are guiltless. In truth no one can do anything that can actually threaten or harm your holy Self, and by refusing to support their thinking that they can, you teach them that the Atonement, which you have accepted for yourself, is also theirs.

There is nothing in Reality to forgive. No one can hurt a Child of the Divine. Guilt is entirely without cause, and, being without cause, cannot in truth exist. The Divine is the only Cause, and guilt is not of It. Teach no one that they have harmed you, for if you do you teach yourself that what is not of the Divine has power over you. The causeless cannot be. Do not attest to it, and do not foster belief in it in any mind. Remember always that Mind is One, and therefore true Cause is One. You will learn Communication with this Oneness only when you learn to deny the causeless, and accept the Cause of the Divine as yours. The power of the decision of attention and perspective that the Divine has given to Its Children in this world is theirs. Accepting this power brings to them all the joyful Teaching the Holy Spirit would gladly offer them in place of the guilt they thought belonged to them.