ARCIM

Daily Lesson 97 ~
April 7

I am spirit, a holy Child of the Divine.

Today’s idea identifies you with your one Self. It accepts no split identity, nor tries to weave opposing factors into unity. It simply states the Truth. Practice this Truth today as often as you can, for it will bring your mind from conflict to the quiet Fields of Peace. No chill of fear can enter, for your mind has been absolved of madness, letting go illusions of a split identity.

We state again the Truth about your Self, the holy Child of the Divine who rests in you, whose mind has been restored to Sanity. You are the spirit lovingly endowed with all your Creator’s Love and Peace and Joy. You are the spirit that completes the Divine, sharing your Creator’s Function as creator of your creations. The Holy Spirit is with you always, as you are with It.

Today we practice bringing Reality still closer to your mind. Each time you practice, awareness is brought a little nearer at least. The minutes that you give are multiplied over and over, for the miracle makes use of time but is not ruled by it. Sometimes a thousand years or more in the world’s time are saved in moving toward Reality. Awakening is a miracle, the goal of all miracles from the first miracle to the last—the first awakening that holds the last awakening in itself, for miracles and awakening are One.

You are the spirit in whose mind abides the miracle in which all time stands still; the miracle in which a minute spent in using these ideas becomes a time that has no limit and therefore has no end. Give, then, these minutes willingly, and count on the Holy Spirit, Who promises to lay Timelessness beside each minute. It will offer all Its Strength to every sincere effort that you make.

Give Spirit the minutes that It needs today to help you understand with It that you are the spirit that abides in It, and that calls through Its Voice to every living thing, offers Its Vision to everyone who asks, and replaces errors with the simple Truth. The Holy Spirit will be joyful to receive five minutes of each hour from your hands, and carry them around this aching world where pain and misery and insanity appear to rule. It will not overlook one open mind that will accept the healing gifts your practicing brings, and It will lay them everywhere It knows they will be welcome. And they will increase in healing Power each time someone accepts them as their thoughts, and uses them to heal.

Thus will each gift given to Spirit be multiplied a thousand-fold and tens of thousands more. And when it is returned to you, it will surpass in might the little gift you gave as much as does the radiance of the Sun outshine the tiny gleam a firefly makes an uncertain moment before fading away. The steady Brilliance of this Light remains and leads you out of darkness. And you will always remember the Way, that others may follow in It.

Begin these happy exercises with the words the Holy Spirit speaks to you, and let them echo round the world through It:

“Spirit am I, a holy Child of the Divine,

free of all limits, safe and healed and whole,

free to forgive, and free to awaken the world.”

Expressed through you, the Holy Spirit will accept this gift that you received of It, increase its Power, and give it back to you.

Offer each practice period today gladly to Spirit. And It will speak to you, reminding you that you are spirit, One with It and the Divine, with all your sisters and brothers and your holy Self. Listen for Its Assurance every time you speak the words It offers you today, and let It assure your mind that they are true. Use these holy words to free yourself from the belief that you are something other than spirit—a holy Child of the Divine. And thus be released from the thought of mis-projection, and from mis-projection’s sorry consequences.

The Holy Spirit gives you Peace today. Receive Its Words, and offer them to It.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 6: Spirit’s Lessons of Undoing

 

4C. Be Vigilant Only for the Divine and Its Realm

For your own awakening you must be critical (evaluative), because your awakening is critical (essential) to the whole Divine Family. It was stated that the Holy Spirit’s Guidance is evaluative, and must be. Yet Its Evaluation as your Guide does not extend beyond you or you would attempt to share this Evaluation – which is unique to you – because whatever is extended is shared. Because Spirit’s Evaluation of your creative activity is unique to you, It is only for you, being highly personal. In each one’s mind, then, and in each one’s mind only, Spirit sorts out the true from the false. Spirit teaches you to assess every thought that you consider allowing to enter and be accepted in your mind in the Light of what the Divine created there.

Recall the last of our miracle principles. Spirit retains in your mind whatever is in accord with Light, to strengthen the Realm of Heaven in you. When what is in your mind is partly in accord with Truth, Spirit accepts it and purifies or refines it. But what is out of accord entirely Spirit rejects, or returns to nothingness, because it can’t be refined to be in accord with Divine Will and therefore can’t be in your whole mind. This is how the Holy Spirit keeps the Realm perfectly Consistent and perfectly Unified.

What you must remember is that what the Holy Spirit rejects the ego embraces. This is because they are in fundamental disagreement about everything, being in fundamental disagreement about the holy Child of the Divine. The ego’s beliefs on this crucial issue vary, and that is why it promotes different moods. The Holy Spirit never varies on this point, and so the one mood that It engenders is Joy. It protects this by rejecting everything that does not foster Joy, and so It alone can keep you wholly joyous.

The Holy Spirit does not teach your mind to be assessive or evaluative of other minds because It does not want you to focus on your errors, which, because of mis-projection, is what you would perceive in other minds, and which would cause you to teach and reinforce these errors yourself. Spirit would hardly be consistent if It allowed you to strengthen what you must learn to let go of. In the mind of the thinker, then, Spirit is evaluative, but only in order to unify each mind so it can perceive without judgment. This enables the mind to teach without judgment and therefore learn to be without judgment.

The undoing of error is necessary only in each person’s mind, so that they cannot mis-project error. The Divine Itself has established what you can appropriately project or extend with perfect Safety. Therefore, the Holy Spirit’s third Lesson is:

Be vigilant only for the Divine and Its Realm.

This is a major step toward fundamental change. Yet it is still a lesson in thought reversal because it implies that there is something you must be vigilant against as well as for. The process has advanced far from the first Lesson, which was primarily a reversal, and also from the second, which was essentially the identification of what is more desirable.

This third step, which follows from the second as the second does from the first, emphasizes the dichotomy between the desirable and the undesirable. It therefore makes the ultimate choice inevitable. But while the first step seems to increase conflict, and the second still entails it to some extent, this one calls for consistent effort against conflict, or for Harmony.

This Course already stated that you can be as vigilant against the ego as for it, which means that you can be as vigilant for Spirit as against It. This third Lesson of undoing and atoning from the Holy Spirit teaches not that you can be vigilant, but that you must be. It does not concern itself with levels or orders of magnitude of difficulty, but with the clearcut priority for vigilance. This step is unequivocal in that it teaches that there must be no exceptions, but it does not deny that the temptation to make exceptions will occur. Here, then, your consistency is called on despite chaos. But chaos and consistency cannot coexist for long because they are mutually exclusive. As long as you must be vigilant for or against anything – chaos or consistency, conflict or Harmony, the ego or the Holy Spirit – you haven’t yet recognized this, and are holding the belief that you can choose either option.

By teaching you what to choose, based unequivocally on what you really want, the Holy Spirit will ultimately be able to teach you that you need not choose at all. This will finally liberate your will from choice, and direct it toward creation within the Realm. Choosing through the Holy Spirit will only lead you to this liberation. You create by what you are, and this is what you must learn. The way to learn it is inherent in this third step, which brings together the lessons inherent in the first two, and goes beyond them toward real integration.

If you allow yourself to have in your mind only what the Divine created there, you are acknowledging your mind as the Divine created it. Therefore, you are accepting it as it is. And since it is whole, you are teaching Peace because you have believed in It.

The fourth and final step in this process will still be taken for you by the Divine Itself. But by the completion of the third step, the Holy Spirit has prepared you for the Divine’s Final Step.

Spirit is getting you ready to translate having into being by the very nature of the steps you are taking with It. You learn first that having rests on giving and not getting. Next you learn that what you teach is what you learn. You want to learn Peace in order to have It, so Peace is what you want to teach. This is the condition for identifying with the Realm of Heaven, because Peace is the Condition of the Realm.

All the separated ones by definition believe that they are outside the Realm, and have therefore excluded themselves from It in their belief. It is therefore essential to teach you that you must be included in the Realm, and the belief that you aren’t is the only thing that you must exclude from your mind, as this belief excludes you from your true Home. The third step is thus one of protection for your mind by allowing you to identify only with its center, where the Divine placed the Altar to Itself. We have already said that altars are beliefs, but the Divine and Its Creations are beyond belief because they are beyond question. The Voice of the Divine speaks only for belief beyond question, but this is only in preparation for returning to being without question.

As long as belief in the Divine and Its Realm is assailed by any doubts in your mind, the Realm’s perfect Accomplishment will not be apparent to you. This is why you must be vigilant on behalf of the Divine—not for Its Sake but for your own. The ego speaks against its maker – the split mind – and therefore does engender doubt. You cannot go beyond belief until you believe wholly. No one can extend a lesson, i.e., generalize and transfer it to other related situations, that they have not learned fully. Transfer of learning, which is a form of extension, is the measure of learning because it is the measurable result. This, however, does not necessarily mean that what the learning transfers to is measurable. On the contrary, unless learning transfers to the whole Divine Family, which is immeasurable because It was created by the Immeasurable, the learning itself must be incomplete.

To teach the whole Divine Family without exception demonstrates that you perceive Its Wholeness and have learned that It is One and that you are One with It. Now you must be vigilant to hold Its Oneness in your mind, because if you allow doubt to enter, you will lose awareness of Its Wholeness and will be unable to teach It.

The Wholeness of the Realm doesn’t depend on your perception, but your awareness of Its Wholeness does. It is only your awareness that needs protection, because your being cannot be assailed. Yet a real sense of being cannot be yours while you are doubtful of what you are. This is why vigilance is essential. You must be vigilant to not allow doubts about being to continue entering your mind, or you will not know what you are with Certainty.

Certainty is of the Divine for you. Vigilance is not necessary for Truth, but it is necessary against illusion. Truth is without illusions, and therefore within the Realm. Everything outside the Realm is illusion. You must learn to accept Truth solely because you cast It away. You therefore conceived yourself as if you were without Truth. By making another realm that you valued – the realm of illusions – you did not keep the Realm of the Divine alone in your mind, and thus placed part of your mind outside of It. This is how your mind split, and what you made has thus divided your will and given you a sick mind that must be healed. Your vigilance for your Wholeness and against this sickness is the way to heal it. Say, then, to yourself:

 

“I have previously been unwilling to recognize that this Quest of awakening is one of Joy. I now will to see myself only as I truly am. Nothing else can matter but this. The Realm of Heaven is entirely filled with Peace and Joy, and I am an essential Part of It. Therefore, when I react to anything with feelings of frustration, futility or anguish, I must have been unwilling to recognize what is already obvious, even in my conflicted state—the Presence of Peace and Joy and of the Realm. Now I will only for the Divine and Its Realm. This is the only message that is meaningful, because it is my reality. All else is illusion. I will be helped as I offer help to others. I will know myself as I recognize my only true relationship with all my sisters and brothers.”

 

Once your mind is healed, it radiates health and thereby teaches healing. This establishes you as a teacher who teaches like me. Vigilance was required of me as much as it is of you. But remember that those who will to teach the same thing must agree about what they believe. The third step, then, is a statement of what you want to believe, and entails a willingness to relinquish everything else. It was said before that this third step follows from the second as the second does from the first. The Holy Spirit will enable you to complete this third step if you follow It. Your vigilance is the sign that you want Spirit to guide you.

Vigilance does require effort, but only to teach you that effort itself is ultimately unnecessary. You have had to exert great effort to preserve the realm you made because it is not true. Therefore, you must now turn your effort against the great effort you have exerted for that realm. Only this can cancel out the need for effort at all, and call upon the being that you both have and are. This Recognition is wholly without effort, because It is already true and needs no protection. It is in the perfect Safety of the Divine. Therefore, Inclusion is total and Creation is without limit.