ARCIM

Daily Lesson 181 ~
June 30

Introduction to Lessons 181-200

Lesson 181: As I trust my sisters and brothers, I remember our Oneness.

Introduction to Lessons 181-200

Our next set of lessons aims to firm up your willingness to make your commitment to awakening strong, in order to focus your scattered goals into one intent. You are not yet asked for total dedication all the time. But you are asked to practice now in order to attain, if only intermittently, the sense of Peace such unified commitment will bestow. It is experiencing this that makes it sure that you will give your total willingness to following the Way this Course sets forth.

Our lessons now are geared specifically to widening horizons and providing direct approaches to clearing the special blocks that keep your perception narrow, and too limited to let you see the value of our Goal. We are attempting now to lift these blocks, however briefly. Words alone cannot convey the sense of Liberation that their lifting brings. But the experience of Freedom and of Peace that comes as you release yourself from the ego’s tight control of what you perceive speaks for itself. Your motivation will be so intensified that words become of little consequence. You will be sure of what you want, and of what is valueless.

And so we start our journey beyond words by concentrating first on what impedes our progress still. Experience of what exists beyond defensiveness remains beyond achievement while It is denied. It may be there, but you have not yet fully accepted Its Presence. So we now attempt to go beyond all defenses for a little while each day. No more than this is asked because no more than this is needed. It will be enough to guarantee that the rest will come.

 

Lesson 181
As I trust my sisters and brothers, I remember our Oneness.

Trusting your sisters and brothers is essential to establishing and strengthening your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself. When you oppose a brother or sister, you proclaim that they are limited by what you have looked upon in them. You do not see beyond their errors. Rather, these errors are magnified, becoming blocks to your awareness of the holy Self that is beyond your own mistakes, and past the seeming shortcomings or “sins” of your sisters and brothers as well as yours.

Perception has a focus, and focus is what you give your attention to. It is this that gives consistency to what you perceive. Change only this focus, and what you perceive will change accordingly. Your perception now will shift to give support to the intent that has replaced the one you held before. Remove your attention and focus from being on your sisters and brothers’ “shortcomings,” and you experience the Peace that comes from faith in Innocence. This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others beyond their mistakes. For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to yours. And with this focus you will not transcend the perception of error and see the Innocence that is beyond.

Therefore, in practicing today we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our Innocence become apparent. We instruct our minds that it is this we seek for just a little while, and only this. We do not care about our future goals, and what we perceived an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. We seek for Innocence and nothing else. We seek for It with no concern but now.

A major hazard to success is involvement with past and future goals. You may have experienced concern with how extremely different the goals this Course is advocating are from those you held before. And you may also have experienced dismay by the depressing and restricting thought that even if you should succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.

How could this matter? For the past is gone, the future merely imagined. These concerns are simply defenses against present change of focus in perception. Nothing more. We lay these pointless imagined limitations by a little while. We do not look to past beliefs, and what we imagine we will believe in the future will not intrude upon us now. We enter in the time of practicing with one intent: to behold the Innocence within, now.

We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. And if a brother’s or sister’s mistakes, shortcomings, or “sins” occur to us, our narrowed focus will restrict our perception and turn our eyes again upon our own mistakes, which will also become magnified in our perception.

So, without regard to past or future, for a little while should such blocks arise we will transcend them with instructions to our minds to change their focus, as we say:

 

“It is not this that I would perceive.

As I trust my sisters and brothers, I remember our Oneness.”

 

And we will also use these thoughts to keep us safe from attack throughout the day. We do not seek for long-term goals. As any obstruction seems to block the vision of our Innocence, we seek only for cessation an Instant from the misery the focus upon separation and error will bring, and uncorrected will remain.

Nor do we ask for fantasies. For what we seek to see is really there. And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly innocent world. When perceiving this is all we want to perceive, when this is all we seek for in the name of true perception, is the Vision of Divine Essence inevitably ours. And the Love that Divine Essence feels for us becomes our own as well. This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.

The world that once proclaimed our separation and errors becomes the proof that we are guiltless. And our love for everyone we behold attests to our remembrance of the holy Self that knows no flaw or guilt, and never could conceive of anything without Its Innocence.

We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. We look neither ahead nor backward. We see straight into the present. And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. Our Innocence is just the Will of the Divine. This Instant is our willing One with Its.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 16: The Holy Instant

 

6. The Full Communication of Ideas with Ideas

It is impossible to use one relationship at the expense of another and not suffer guilt. And it is equally impossible to condemn part of a relationship and find Peace within it.

In the Holy Spirit’s Teaching, all relationships, and therefore all relationships you are in, are seen as total commitments, yet they do not conflict with one another in any way. Perfect faith in each one for its ability to satisfy you completely arises only from perfect faith in yourself. And this you cannot have while guilt remains. And there will be guilt as long as you accept and cherish the possibility that you can make a brother or sister what they are not, because you would have them so.

You currently have so little faith in yourself because you are unwilling to accept the fact that perfect Love is in you. And so you seek outside yourself for what you can only find within. I offer you my perfect faith in you in place of all your doubts. But forget not that my faith must be as perfect in all our sisters and brothers as it is in you, or it would be a limited gift to you. In the Holy Instant we share our faith in the Divine’s Children because we recognize together that they are wholly worthy of it, and in our appreciation of their Worth we cannot doubt their holiness. And so we love them.

All separation vanishes as Holiness is shared. For Holiness is Power, and by sharing It, It gains in Strength. If you seek for satisfaction in gratifying your needs as you perceive them, you must believe that strength comes from another, and that what you gain they lose, and what they gain you lose. Someone must always lose if you perceive yourself as weak. Yet there is another interpretation of relationships that transcends completely the concept of the loss of power.

You do not find it difficult to believe that when another calls on the Divine for Love, your call for Love remains as strong. Nor do you think that by the Divine’s Answer to another, your hope of answer is diminished. On the contrary, you are far more inclined to regard another’s success in being answered as witness to the possibility of yours. That is because you recognize, however dimly, that the Divine is an Idea, and so your faith in It is strengthened by sharing It. What you find difficult to accept is the fact that, like your Creator, you are an Idea. And, like your Creator, you can give yourself completely, wholly without loss, and only with gain. Herein is Peace, for here there is no conflict.

Love has no meaning and Peace is impossible to experience in a world of scarcity. For in such a world gain and loss are both accepted, and those that accept these must be unaware that perfect Love is in them. And only perfect Love is Love’s Meaning, and only This brings Peace. In the Holy Instant you recognize the Idea of perfect Love in you, and unite this Idea with the Mind that thought It and is It. So by recognizing perfect Love in the Holy Instant you know there can be no loss. The Holy Instant thus becomes a Lesson in how to hold all of your sisters and brothers in your mind, experiencing not gain or loss but completion.

From this it follows that in Reality you can only give. And this is Love, for this alone is natural within the Laws of the Divine. In the Holy Instant the Laws of the Divine prevail, and only They have Meaning, while the laws of this world cease to hold any meaning at all. When the Children of the Divine accept the Laws of the Divine as what they gladly will, it is impossible that they be bound or limited in any way. For in that Instant they are as free as the Divine would have them be. For the Instant that they refuse to be bound, they are not bound.

In the Holy Instant nothing happens that has not always been. Only the veil that has been drawn across Reality is lifted. Nothing real has changed. But the awareness of Changelessness comes swiftly as the veil of time is pushed aside. Only those who have experienced the lifting of the veil, and felt themselves drawn irresistibly into the Light beyond it, can have Faith in Love without fear. The Holy Spirit gives you this Faith, because It offered It to me and I accepted It for all my sisters and brothers.

Trust that the Holy Instant will be given you, for It was given to me and I denied It not. And through me the Holy Spirit gives It unto you, as you will give It to our sisters and brothers. Let no need that you perceive obscure your need of this. For in the Holy Instant you will recognize the only need the Children of the Divine share equally, and by this Recognition you will join with me in offering what is needed. It is through us that Peace will come. Join me in the Idea of Peace, for in Ideas minds can truly join and communicate.

When you give yourself as your Creator gives Its Self, you will learn to understand Selfhood. And therein is Love’s Meaning understood. But remember that Understanding is of the whole mind, and only of this mind. Knowledge is therefore of the mind, and Its Conditions are in the mind with It. If you were not an Idea only, and nothing else, you could not be fully joined and in full Communication with all that is or ever was or will be. But as long as you prefer to be something else, or attempt to be something else and nothing else together, the Language of true Communication, which you know perfectly in your unified mind, you will not remember.

In the Holy Instant the Divine is remembered, and the Language of Communication with all your sisters and brothers is remembered with them. For full Communication is remembered together, as is Truth. There is no exclusion in the Holy Instant because the past is gone, and with it goes the entire basis for exclusion. Exclusion vanishes without its source, and this permits your Source, and that of all your sisters and brothers, to replace exclusion in your awareness. The Divine and Its Power will take Their rightful place in you, and you will experience the full Communication of Ideas with Ideas. Through your ability to do this you will learn what you must be, because you will begin to understand what your Creator is, and what Its Creation is along with It.