Lesson 245:

Your peace is with me, Father. I am safe…

I started to notice a sort of detachment from my so-called daily life, once I really got rockin’ and rollin’ with forgiveness as the one operative for addressing it. Things on the surface still looked relatively the same; night and day, you and me, acting, feeling, participating… yet, I was becoming more and more removed from it; watching, resting just behind it. Also, it become easier to hear the Voice for God, as resistance began to diminish, easier to feel the ever-present love I felt. Simultaneously, I began to notice I was noticing, which grounded me still further into a sense that my Self was residing beyond the drama we call life, and that that was exactly where I have always been. Furthermore, this being space where I reside is absolute, immutable peace, already known to me so intimately, as my own being and Gods.

Okay now, I was having exquisitely peaceful experiences in meditation as well and one might argue that this sense of detached peacefulness was a carry over from peak meditative experiences. Here’s the thing, I began to recognize that this sense of immutable peace, it seems, is even closer than that. It is Spirit, and being what I am, is impossible to avoid… it is the peace of God…

The invitation of today’s lesson is to place our attention firmly on this peace as we move about the seeming nuances of the day. Talk about safety! We purposefully bring the peace of God into every encounter. And when we remember that no encounter is by accident, no matter how seemingly brief, we can feel the unfolding of the holy encounter we have been given.

Your peace surrounds me, Father. Where I go, Your peace goes there with me. It sheds its light on everyone I meet. I bring it to the desolate and lonely and afraid. I give Your peace to those who suffer pain, or grieve for loss, or think they are bereft of hope and happiness. Send them to me, my Father. Let me bring Your peace with me. For I would save Your Son, as is Your Will, that I may come to recognize my Self.

Lesson 244:

I am in danger nowhere in the world…

I am not in the world. I am the beyond; the vast freedom expanse in which the world arises. I am the Self; forever one that which is, from which creation springs. And, I am the Son which God created one with Him, blending in fullness and completion. All danger and suffering and time and space arise from me. But I am not it. What arises from me cannot possibly, now, overtake me. I am beyond in the Now-eternity-in-God, before time was... aware and witnessing… In truth, that which is what I am, has never been here at all…

If a dream of danger or doubt plays out upon the screen of time and space and seems to doubt or endanger myself or you in the world, I witness to that dream play, and I, too, am the forgiveness that remembers it is not the dream, but the dreamer.

We can’t change our core nature. Fidelity to premise is the law of mind. In this holographic dynamism of creation, we see this fact regardless of the level at which we are looking at it; fidelity to premise is the law of mind. So, whatever the premise is, fathers what is seen. Period. The thought of God’s love is the premise of our being… it cannot leave its Source.

The process of forgiving all that seemingly happens, by seeing beyond it, back to the truth of where we already reside in the peace of God, is all we can do within the premise of this world, for we are beyond and exist not within the illusion of ego-identities. This re-collecting brings us back into alignment in mind with our Self in God, which is what we are …

Today’s lesson offers us another chance to choose once again what we will see:

“Your Son is safe wherever he may be, for You are there with him. He need but call upon Your Name, and he will recollect his safety and Your Love, for they are one. How can he fear or doubt or fail to know he cannot suffer, be endangered, or experience unhappiness, when he belongs to You, beloved and loving, in the safety of Your Fatherly embrace?”

Lesson 243:

Today, I will judge nothing that occurs…

Isn’t judgment, when it boils down to it, merely the refusal to see outside the boundary one has drawn around the I-self of the personal world; to give up the throne of ‘being right’ and justified in our wrongful misery?

Today’s lesson asks us to get honest with ourselves. Isn’t it true that we have been wrong about virtually every interpretation we have made or bought in to and made ours? And furthermore, haven’t those very interpretations been the very thing that ended up bringing us the very pain we thought we were trying to avoid? I mean, if we’re really being honest here… It’s spectacular that we could have such a love affair with our “right to be right and miserable” in the mist of our blatant failure at happiness… In fact, isn’t this very mechanism, judgment, that, finally, through its utter hopelessness, we found ourselves throwing our hands in the air and dropping to our knees in downright defeat, barely eking out that prayer of hope we’re all familiar with: “Please, there has got to be another way! I want it now”, that brought us to attract this Course into our lives in the first place. Which actually began our happiness by way of forgiving all we thought we were before this moment?

I mean, on the most basic level, reason speaks so loudly of our inadequacy to see the big picture, that, at this stage of the curriculum, it is relatively easy to see the importance of today’s lesson; one simple day, completely removing the self-fenced-off-from-the-One, from the equation…

We’re capable of this now; in this present moment, to be only with what actually IS, absent of interpretation. We will be given what we need… each moment is already alive with fullness.

The reason we fail to be aware of it is because of our attachment to the time/space belief as a reality. But haven’t we seen its subjectivity in all our investigations of the body-mind thoughts system, at every turn? The past resides only within memory, which is selective and distorted at best, and cannot ever be adequately investigated in present awareness. We can’t actually experience the past, because when we attempt to, it is only in the now in which we experience a present awareness of a memory. And haven’t we seen that what compels us to the future, is more of the same, resulting from lessons learned; attachments and aversions, based on the stored past memory? How can we continue to give it credence, let alone judge and plan our lives from it?

Leave judgment to the Self (Holy Spirit) who knows… Leave it to the unknowing fullness we experience in awareness during full surrender of the fenced off self… Isn’t it enough?

I love how the lesson puts it: “today, we leave creation free to be itself’…

Today, we will judge nothing that occurs…

Lesson 242:

This day is God’s. It is my gift to Him…

Duh. Each day is both ours and God’s, as one, ultimately. So too, it is our gift to each other. The point of the lesson is to empty out, completely, our little agendas and wholly open our minds to God’s...

We reside where our awareness is at any given moment... The question is: Where is our awareness? Today, we place our full awareness in our oneness with God through the Holy Spirit within our mind. It is a day of true faith and trust. Trust that the Holy Spirit not only, will handle, perfectly, every circumstance that occurs, with ultimate good for all concerned, but that it has already been done, and our little resistance and interference couldn’t impact it in the least. The Atonement answered the tiny mad idea of separation in a blazing instant of recognition that GOD IS…period…

This is a day, too, of steadfast faithfulness. We place our faith in God’s plan for salvation; which means we give wholehearted faith to all our brothers, knowing that they are doing their part perfectly. Regardless of what the little itch of ego in our minds is trying to serve up; we look past its irritating distractions and straight into the eyes of Christ in our brothers, letting forgiveness tell us what’s what…

This liberates us to a day of appreciation, peace and happiness~ guaranteed by God…

Let’s wrap with the prayer from the lesson, yeah:

And so we give today to You. We come with wholly open minds. We do not ask for anything that we may think we want. Give us what You would have received by us. You know all our desires and our wants. And You will give us everything we need in helping us to find the way to You…

3. What is the World?

Lesson 241:

This holy instant is salvation come…

The Course tells us that the world is a false perception; made by the thought of separation and held in place by our cherishing that thought. It also reminds us that when the thought of separation is changed to one of true forgiveness, we perceive an entirely different, world. Now haven’t you noticed that this dynamic is so, even in your very own life? Regardless of where we might be on our so-called ‘spiritual journey’; we’ve all experienced this, yes?

The holy instant, where salvation comes, is ours to day, for it is always, already ours. This lesson invites into this holy instant together, today. Please join me on a walk through here…

Let’s just turn ourselves around in mind and go inward; simply relaxing the mind and body and with deepest respect and faith, we move just deeper than the mind and peer into the Mind we share… With awareness as our sensor, we feel into the Love-light glow penetrating our former state…filling and expanding mind as we’ve known it, and including all within its light. With each breath we go a little deeper… and deeper still… Unmistakably, we begin to feel a warm, all-empowering Presence of Benevolence, which we recognize as the Holy Spirit, and we are aware that we are one with all that is; magnificently vast, and yet pinpointing in the zero point of Self ~And, now, in going still deeper, as we have risen to the level of our true Self~ the level where you and I are one, here we gladly receive the vision that is our birthright…

The world we return to is, as the Course refers to it, the forgiven world. Our so-called lives, themselves begin to take on the texture of a dream. The seeming specifics of person, things and situations are sort of back-grounded by a luminous shine of oneness or Christ Light. Our mood addressing life at large is no longer the somber, reparation of ‘hard-work for happiness’ gig we were up to before, but rather more one of lightness and rejoicing. Its kind of like Star Trek, with the beaming things into materializing and back out again… yes? The so-called world at large, feels more and more transparent; for our focus is on the Real, so attention is fixed in the light. Time itself has the sense of merely the passing of a dream as it takes a back seat in mind. Our attention is rightly placed on our Self as the Dreamer of the dream… What is the world, now; from this vantage point? Certainly not our Self, for we are the dreamer of it… We are the incredible Light of Being… Now, just another instant, deep within the stillness, and this universe expires into the Light of infinite changeless, formless, timeless, emptiness. And aren’t we still being; as pure awareness itself? Truth rests in us and from us and is our being, which could never ‘not be'...

Lesson 240:

Fear is not justified in any form…

Fear a funny thing. It is always, only about the perceived future. It is a distraction mechanism from present being

As I have come to recognize myself as the silent impartial witness of my ego mind, I am no longer its puppet. Because I am able to look at what goes on in mind; images, thoughts, beliefs, tendencies, I am not looking through them to view the world. And I am aware of a few undeniable facts. Fear is a fantasy.

When, through choosing truth as the only goal, stepping back in mind to watch, one naturally begins to detach from body-mind identification. When we’re able to watch the play of mind from the witness perspective, it becomes clear that fear is, as the lessons states, deception.

Ego dynamics are all about keeping the belief in its reality in the reality position in the mind. It’s a game of hide-n-seek; keeping ones awareness in bed with the past through guilty fear, while buying it off at the same time with promises of future redemption and happiness.

Now, here’s the thing, the very fact that we can be aware that we are feeling fear and we question it, throws us out of the feelings of fear, and into the present moment. And in the immediacy of present moment awareness, there is a certainty of being. And that certainty of being was actually behind the questioning, yes?This being is the certainty of God... It is the certainty of life itself. It is the eternal certainty which we are never without. It is Love.

Relief and gratitude replace fear, as, from our resting place as the witness, we see that not one single thing we ever thought about this world was true. We have slipped beyond, above the battleground, and we are can truly say:

Fear is not justified in any form…

Lesson 239:

The glory of my Father is my own…

How ‘bout it? Can we today, just let the truth of our being be true; not needing to understand any better what that means than wherever we might be at this time? Can we not judge and just allow; just for today, this hour, this moment~ this holy instant? The section called Attainment of the Real World from chapter 13 comes to mind, where it says:”You have been wrong about the world because you have misjudged yourself. From such a twisted reference point, what could you see? All seeing starts with the perceiver, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false he does not see. You who would judge reality cannot see it, for whenever judgment enters reality has slipped away. The out of mind is out of sight, because what is denied is there but is not recognized. Christ is still there, although you know Him not. His Being does not depend upon your recognition. He lives within you in the quiet present, and waits for you to leave the past behind and enter into the world He holds out to you in love”… No one in this distracted world but has seen some glimpses of the other world about him. Yet while he still lays value on his own, he will deny the vision of the other… Love leads so gladly… you but wait for yourself… to give this sad world over and exchange your errors for the peace of God…”

So, how ‘bout we just get over our little selves? Let go and let the glory of our Father, which is within us shine through and show us the real world. Let us accept Christ’s version of us and forgive ours. And let us then look about us and see but love reaching out and love taking love’s hand in glad exchange... for the glory of God is here, now… And it is our own…

We thank you, Father, for the light that shines forever in us. And we honor it, because You share it with us. We are one, united in this light and one with You, at peace with all creation and ourselves.