ARCIM

Daily Lesson 95 ~
April 5

I am one Self, united with my Creator.

Today’s idea accurately describes you as the Divine created you. You are One within yourself, and One with the Divine. Yours is the Unity of all Creation. Your perfect Unity makes change to your true Self impossible. You do not yet fully accept this, and you may fail to realize it must be so, only because you believe that you have changed yourself already from how you were created.

At times you have perceived yourself as a ridiculous parody of the Divine’s Creation: weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable, and beset with pain. Such is the version that many hold of themselves: a self divided into many warring parts, separated from the Divine, and tenuously held together by their erratic and capricious maker, to which the separate parts pray. This little self does not hear these prayers, for it is deaf. It does not see the Oneness in you, for it is blind. It does not understand that you are the Child of the Divine, for it is senseless and understands nothing.

We will attempt today to be aware only of what can truly hear and see, and what makes perfect sense. We will again direct our exercises toward reaching your one Self, which is united with Its Creator. With patience and full of hope we practice again today.

The use of the first five minutes of every waking hour for practicing the idea for the day has advantages at this stage of learning. It may be difficult at this point not to allow your mind to wander when you undertake extended practice periods. You may have experienced this already, and felt the extent of a current lack of mental discipline, and subsequently of your need for mind training. It is necessary that you be aware of this to the extent that it is present, for lack of mental discipline to the degree that it is present is indeed a hindrance to fruitfully practicing the exercises in this Workbook and advancing toward the achievement of the Goal of this Course.

Frequent but shorter practice periods have other advantages for you at this time. In addition to helping build up the capacity for sustained attention, they also help strengthen your capacity to remember your function during the day. You may have noticed that, unless you are reminded of your Purpose frequently, there can be a tendency to forget about It for long periods during the day. You may also often forget the short applications of the idea for the day, and might not as yet have formed the habit of using the idea as an automatic response to all temptation to mis-project and misperceive.

More structure, then – planned to include frequent reminders of your goal and regular attempts to reach it – can only be helpful, and may even be necessary, at this time. Regularity in terms of time is not the ideal arrangement for the most beneficial form of practice in awakening, which will not require such structured learning but will give whatever is needed to learn any awakening lesson that a situation offers. To work toward that, more structured learning can help those whose motivation is yet inconsistent in action, and who remain resistant against learning.

For these reasons, using the first five minutes of the hour will be particularly helpful right now because it provides firmer structure. We will therefore keep to the five-minutes-an-hour practice periods for a while, and urge you to omit as few as possible. Do not, however, use your lapses from this schedule as an excuse not to return to it again as soon as you can. There may well be a temptation to regard the day as lost because you have already failed to do what is asked. This should, however, merely be recognized as what it is: a refusal to let your mistake be corrected, and an unwillingness to try again. The Holy Spirit is not delayed in Its Teaching by your mistakes. It can be held back only by your unwillingness to let them go.

Let us therefore be determined, particularly for the next week or so, to be willing to forgive ourselves for our lapses in diligence and our failures to follow the instructions for practicing the day’s idea. This tolerance for weakness will enable us to see beyond it, rather than give it power to delay our learning. If we give it power to do this, we are regarding it as strength, and are confusing Strength and weakness. When you fail to comply with the guidelines of this Course, you have merely made a mistake. This calls for correction and for nothing else. To allow a mistake to continue is to make additional mistakes based on the first, thus reinforcing it. It is this process that must be laid aside, for it is merely another way in which illusions would be defended against the Truth.

Let all these errors go by recognizing them for what they are. They are attempts to keep you unaware that you are one Self, united with your Creator, at One with every Aspect of Creation, and limitless in Power and in Peace. This is the Truth, and nothing else is true. Today we will affirm this Truth again, and try to reach the Place in you in which there is no doubt that only this is true.

Begin the hourly five-minute practice periods with this assurance, offered to your mind with all the certainty that you can give:

“I am one Self, united with my Creator,

at One with every Aspect of Creation,

and limitless in Power and in Peace.”

Then close your eyes and tell yourself again, slowly and thoughtfully, attempting to allow the meaning of the words to sink into your mind, replacing false ideas:

“I am one Self.”

Repeat this several times, and then attempt to feel the Meaning that the words convey. You are one Self, united and secure in Light and Joy and Peace. You are the Divine’s Child, one Self with one Creator and one Goal: to bring awareness of this Oneness to all minds, so that true Creation may extend the Allness and the Unity of the Divine.

You are one Self, complete and healed and whole, with Power to lift the veil of darkness from the world and let the Light in you come through to teach the world the Truth about itself. You are one Self, in perfect Harmony with all there is and all that there will forever be. You are one Self, the holy Child of the Divine, united with your sisters and brothers in this Self; united with your Creator in Its Will.

Feel this one Self in you, and let It shine away all your illusions and your doubts. This is your holy Self, the Child of the Divine Itself, innocent as Its Creator, with Its Strength within you and Its Love forever yours. You are one Self, and it is given you to feel this Self within you, and to dispel all illusions from your mind—the one Mind which is this Self, the holy Truth in you.

Remember your goal of awakening today. The Divine Family needs your help, your part in bringing Happiness to all the world. And Heaven turns to you with confidence that you will try today. Share, then, Its Surety, for It is yours. Be vigilant. Remember today.

Remember your goal throughout the day. Repeat today’s idea as frequently as possible, and understand that each time you do so someone will hear the Voice of Hope, the stirring of the Truth within their mind, the gentle rustling of the Wings of Peace. Your own acknowledgment that you are one Self, united with your Creator, is a call to all the world to be at One with you.

To everyone you meet today be sure to give the promise of today’s idea, and tell them this:

“You are one Self with me,

united with our Creator in this Self.

I honor you because of what I am, what you are,

and what our Creator is, Who loves us as One.”

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 6: Spirit’s Lessons of Undoing

 

4A. To Have, Give All to All

To the Holy Spirit, miracles transcend every law of time and space and are therefore free of all levels and orders of magnitude of difficulty. This first principle of miracles is familiar enough by now, but it may not have become wholly believable to you yet. If so, then you do not understand it and cannot use it. We have too much to accomplish on behalf of the Realm to let this crucial concept be relegated to the unconscious in your mind. It is a real foundation stone of the thought system I teach and invite you to teach with me. You cannot perform miracles appropriately without believing it, because it is a belief in perfect Equality.

Only one equal gift can be offered to the equal Children of the Divine, and that is full appreciation, nothing more and nothing less. Without a range or spectrum, the idea of levels and orders of magnitude of difficulty is meaningless, and there must be no range or spectrum in what you offer to each other. The Holy Spirit, Who leads to the Divine, translates communication into Being, just as It ultimately translates perception into Knowledge.

You do not lose what you communicate truly, because this is by definition shared. The ego uses the body for attack, for pleasure, and for pride. The insanity of these perceptions makes the body fearful. The Holy Spirit sees the body only as a means of communication. And because true communicating is sharing, it leads to communion—the deep connection with others. It might be argued that fear as well as Love can be communicated and therefore can be shared. But consider the reality of this. Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack always breaks communication and therefore makes deep connection with others impossible. Egos do join together in temporary allegiances and alliances, but always for what each one can get separately.

The Holy Spirit communicates only what each one can give to all. It never takes anything back or away, because It wants you to keep it. Therefore, Its Teaching begins with the Lesson:

To have, give all to all.

This is a very preliminary step, and the only one you must take yourself. It is not even necessary that you complete the step yourself, but it is necessary that you turn in that direction. Once you decide freely to go that way, you place yourself in charge of the journey, where you and only you must remain.

This step appears to exacerbate conflict rather than resolve it because it is the beginning step in reversing your perception and turning it right-side-up. This conflicts with the upside-down perception that you have not yet abandoned, or a change in direction would not be necessary. Some people remain at this step for a long time, experiencing very acute conflict. Many try to accept the conflict rather than to take the necessary steps toward its resolution. But having taken the first step, they will be helped. Having willed what they cannot complete alone, they will experience what has always been true: that they are not alone.

You will only take this step if you believe in it, and then you can teach it to those who still believe in the solution of sleep to the problem of the dream of separation. However, you must be consistent in teaching it, and as you do so often enough you will enable yourself to truly learn its lesson. Once another learns this of you, they can teach you how to become more consistently awake, and thus begin to awaken themself. This will place them, too, in command of their journey.

The recognition of the direction the journey Home must take will be perfectly expressed when you and your sisters and brothers insist on collaboration with one another. Regardless of how far into conflict you have wandered, learning this first of the Holy Spirit’s Lessons of undoing and awakening will turn both you and your sisters and brothers in the right direction. And the more you teach this Lesson, the more you will learn It.