April 20, 2018

Day 167 - A Course in Miracles

Day 167 - A Course in Miracles



Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

VII. The Holy Instant and the Laws of God

58 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 what you gain he loses. Someone must always lose if you perceive yourself as weak. Yet there is another interpretation of relationships which transcends the concept of loss of power completely.

59 You do not find it difficult to believe that, when another calls on God for love, your call remains as strong. Nor do you think that, by God's answer to him, your hope of answer is diminished. On the contrary, you are far more inclined to regard his success as witness to the possibility of yours. That is because you recognize, however dimly, that God is an idea, and so your faith in Him is strengthened by sharing. What you find difficult to accept is the fact that, like your Father, you are an idea. And like Him, you can give yourself completely, wholly without loss, and onlywith gain.

60 Herein lies peace, for here there is no conflict. In the world of scarcity, love has no meaning, and peace is impossible. For gain and loss are both accepted, and so no one is aware that perfect love is in him. In the holy instant, you recognize the idea of love in you and unite this idea with the Mind that thought it and could notrelinquish it. By holding it within itself, there was no loss. The holy instant thus becomes a lesson in how to hold all of your brothers in your mind, experiencing not loss, but completion. From this it follows you can only give. And this is love, for this alone is natural under the laws of God.

61 In the holy instant, the laws of God prevail, and only they have meaning. The laws of this world cease to hold any meaning at all. When the Son of God accepts the laws of God as what he gladly wills, it is impossible that he be bound or limited in any way. In this instant, he is as free as God would have him be. For the instant he refuses to be bound, he is not bound.

62 In the holy instant, nothing happens that has not always been. Only the veil that has been drawn across reality is lifted. Nothing has changed. Yet the awareness of changelessness comes swiftly as the veil of time is pushed aside. No one who has not yet experienced the lifting of the veil and felt himself drawn irresistibly into the light behind it can have faith in love without fear. Yet the Holy Spirit gives you this faith because He offered it to me and Iaccepted it. Fear not the holy instant will be denied you, for I denied it not. And through me the Holy Spirit gave it unto you, as you will give it. Let no need that you perceive obscure your need of this. For in the holy instant, you will recognize the only need the aspects of the Son of God share equally, and by this recognition you will join with me in offering what is needed.

63 It is through us that peace will come. Join me in the idea of peace, for in ideas minds can communicate. If you would give yourself as your Father gives His Self, you will learn to understand selfhood. And therein is love's meaning understood. But remember that understanding is of the mind and only of the mind. Knowledge is therefore of the mind, and its conditions are in the mind with it. If you were not only an idea and nothing else, you could not be in full communication with all that ever was. Yet as long as you prefer to be something else, or would attempt to be nothing else and something else together, the language of communication, which you know perfectly, you will not remember.

64 In the holy instant God is remembered, and the language of communication with all your brothers is remembered with Him. For 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 whole basis for exclusion. Without its source, exclusion vanishes. And this permits your Source and that of all your brothers to replace it in your awareness. God and the power of God 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, for you will begin to understand what your Creator is and what His creation is along with Him.



L e s s o n 167

There is one life, and that I share with God.

1 There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares His Life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are one.

2 In this world there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety, and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus deny you live.

3 You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be then applied as mind directs it. But its origin is where it must be changed if change occurs. 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. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God.

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

5 Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can extend all that their source contains. In that they can go far beyond themselves. But they cannot give birth to what was never given them. As they are made, so will their making be. As they were born, so will they then give birth. And where they come from, there will they return.

6 The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state. It cannot make a body nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist because it has no source. For 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. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.

7 The opposite of life can only be another form of life. As such, it can be reconciled with what created it because it is not opposite in truth. Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind awake or sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.

8 God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not nor make conditions which He 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 God remain forever changeless with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere.

9 What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not and to assume an alien power which 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 awakes, it but continues as it always was.

10 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 he shuts his eyes or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? 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 God Himself.

11 His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. And in His Thoughts, which have no opposite, we understand there is one life and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of Life from where it came.

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


365 Days Through A Course in Miracles
            A Daily Miracle Lesson


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