ACIM Daily Lesson Section 7. What Is the Holy Spirit? 1. The Holy Spirit mediates between illusions and the truth.

7. What Is the Holy Spirit?

1. The Holy Spirit mediates between illusions and the truth. ²Since He must bridge the gap between reality and dreams, perception leads to knowledge through the grace that God has given Him, to be His gift to everyone who turns to Him for truth. ³Across the bridge that He provides are dreams all carried to the truth, to be dispelled before the light of knowledge. ⁴There are sights and sounds forever laid aside. ⁵And where they were perceived before, forgiveness has made possible perception’s tranquil end.

2. The goal the Holy Spirit’s teaching sets is just this end of dreams. ²For sights and sounds must be translated from the witnesses of fear to those of love. ³And when this is entirely accomplished, learning has achieved the only goal it has in truth. ⁴For learning, as the Holy Spirit guides it to the outcome He perceives for it, becomes the means to go beyond itself, to be replaced by the eternal truth.

These stories we think of as our lives are just the projection of beliefs from our minds.

They are the stories of separation we wanted to experience when we had that tiny mad idea. In that instant, God gave us the Answer, the Correction for our stories, and that is what we call the Holy Spirit. God could not join us in our insanity, or He would be as insane as us. So, He placed in our mind the Holy Spirit, a representation of His Love, His Voice that would act as a bridge from fantasy to reality.

As we dream of death, the Holy Spirit guides us to Life. He corrects our thoughts and shows us another way to perceive. His perceptions are very close to the truth and allow us to shift gently from time into eternity. I generally think of the Holy Spirit as the Correction to our stories, but a bridge is a very helpful image for Him.

I see myself standing on one side of the bridge and being shown that my thinking is keeping me there. So, I ask the Holy Spirit for another way to see, and accepting His correction, I walk a few steps toward the other side of the bridge. If I do this often I will wind up on the side that stands at the gates of Heaven. At first, there is a lot of shuffling back and forth and hesitancy, but as I continue to follow His directions and accept His healing, the journey becomes tranquil and easy.

3. If you but knew how much your Father yearns to have you recognize your sinlessness…

you would not let His Voice appeal in vain, nor turn away from His replacement for the fearful images and dreams you made. ²The Holy Spirit understands the means you made, by which you would attain what is forever unattainable. ³And if you offer them to Him, He will employ the means you made for exile to restore your mind to where it truly is at home.

I appreciate being reminded that I am sinless and that it is the belief in sin that is the cause of all the fearful dreams we have made. And how lovely to know that the Holy Spirit understands and will restore my mind to the truth.

4. From knowledge, where He has been placed by God, the Holy Spirit calls to you…

to let forgiveness rest upon your dreams, and be restored to sanity and peace of mind. ²Without forgiveness will your dreams remain to terrify you. ³And the memory of all your Father’s Love will not return to signify the end of dreams has come.

I don’t consciously feel frightened of God anymore, but I suppose I must still have some fear, or I wouldn’t still be here. Jesus wants us to know we have nothing to fear from God, that He loves us and welcomes us Home. He wants us to know that we are innocent of sin and all its fearful images. We can be done with this if we so choose. The Holy Spirit understands what we have done in an attempt to make a world of our own. He will use this world to restore our minds to our true Home if we let Him.

We must forgive our dreams, and the Holy Spirit is how we do this. When we allow Him to teach us that our dreams of sin are not real, we will let them go. The memory of Who we are will return to us. The memory of our Father and our Home will return to us.

5. Accept your Father’s gift.

²It is a Call from Love to Love, that It be but Itself. ³The Holy Spirit is His gift, by which the quietness of Heaven is restored to God’s beloved Son. ⁴Would you refuse to take the function of completing God, when all He wills is that you be complete?

The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to us. He gave us the Holy Spirit to restore us to Heaven. Our function is to complete God, which is His Will for us. The Holy Spirit guarantees our function is complete as we allow Him to do this for us. Any time I notice that I am thinking with the ego, I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my thinking, and I ask Him to show me a different way to see. In this way, I accept God’s gift and am grateful.

In the Clarification of Terms, there is another section on the Holy Spirit. Jesus says this. 6 He never forgets the Creator or His creation. 7 He never forgets the Son of God. 8 He never forgets you. It makes me cry. He never forgets me.

Regina’s Tips

The term “Holy Spirit” is a Judeo-Christian term for spiritual intuition. All humans have intuition. However, not all intuition is spiritual intuition.

Spiritual intuition has a very specific purpose—awakening us to truth.

All humans have basic intuition. All humans who have some readiness for awakening have spiritual intuition. If a human is not yet ready for awakening, spiritual intuition lies dormant within them. It will awaken to its call, when they are ready to awaken to theirs.

It might not be important to know that everyday intuition is the intuition that informs you that someone is attempting to scam you and spiritual intuition is the intuition that guides you to love even that experience, but it might not hurt to be clear on this difference either. Everyday intuition makes our life in the world simpler if we listen to it. Spiritual intuition awakens us from the ego’s dream of the world.

My Thoughts

This is an interesting clarification. I’ve never thought of it that way before.

Past Entry

I love the analogy of the Holy Spirit as a bridge. For a long time, I was unable to completely dispel an image of the Holy Spirit as a person outside myself who would help me remember the truth. I knew this could not be the truth because that would not be oneness, but the concept of separation was so firmly fixed in my mind that this image was the one I had.

An analogy that helped me greatly at that time was one I got from Regina Dawn Akers. She talked about a cartoon character, Jimmy Neutron, who was a great inventor. When his friend started having nightmares about being attacked by a giant pickle, he invented the machine that would allow him to go into his buddy’s dreams and help him out. When he did this as planned, he had a problem. While in the nightmare, his friend did not remember their plan and was afraid and confused when Jimmy showed up in his dream. Jimmy dealt with this by using the crazy dream language to communicate in a helpful way.

What a great way for me to see the Holy Spirit.

Even now, I can visualize Him as Jimmy Neutron. Ha ha ha. He comes into my dreams of separation, and using the language and symbols I can understand, he helps me to realize that I am misunderstanding everything I see.

Like Jimmy’s friend, I think a mean giant pickle is threatening me, and the Holy Spirit is showing me that the pickle is just asking for love and understanding. And once I calm down, forgive the pickle, and offer love, the Holy Spirit can lead me further out of a dream that is so crazy I really believe I could be seriously threatened by a giant pickle (or my beloved brother, or even by my Creator.)

Now that I am a grown-up (smile), I am ready to move on from the cartoon character analogy, which, while very useful at the time, still sees the Holy Spirit as a person, apart and separate from me. This is why I like the bridge analogy so much. While in the crazy ego dream, I find form symbols helpful to my understanding. I see myself carrying an untrue thought across the Holy Spirit Bridge, and on the other side, the lie is transformed, and I see the truth.

I might begin with the belief that I am being attacked.

The neighbor complained about the water not flowing freely through my ditch and threatened to overflow into her yard. I remember that when the parish came out to clear the ditch, she turned them away because she didn’t like their work. And now she wants me to spend money to get it done to her standards. The big bad pickle is after me. Ha ha.

I feel angry and frustrated. I feel trapped because I don’t know how to fend off her attack. Not without making a permanent enemy out of someone I have to live next to for a very long time. I don’t want to spend money in this way. And I don’t know how to meet her demands in a way that works for both of us. I have started avoiding her, and that doesn’t feel good either.

My solution is to bring this situation and all these feelings to the Holy Spirit Bridge. As I carry them across, I begin to feel relief as my load gets lighter. I begin to see in my neighbor the face of Christ. I am no longer fooled by her story because now I remember who she is. What else is there to do but love her?

Funny, I thought the issue was how to get out of doing what she wants.

But that isn’t the issue at all. She only wants to feel loved and safe, just like me. I am completely willing to love her, which I couldn’t do while still seeing her as a threat. This is not about the ditch but about remembering my purpose, which is to forgive. I am still unwilling to pay to clean the ditch. Now though, I don’t feel afraid to say so, nor do I feel the need to defend that decision. I will ask her if she knows the person with the parish I can contact about it.

I went to the bridge with a problem about ditches, and in doing so, I realized it was simply a forgiveness matter. Again. I wonder why I keep forgetting. I guess that is the nature of dreams. As I continue to allow my dream story to be unraveled by the Holy Spirit, I will awaken from the crazy ego dream of separation.