ACIM Daily Lesson 265. Creation’s gentleness is all I see. 1. I have indeed misunderstood the world, because I laid my sins on it and saw them looking back at me.
Creation’s gentleness is all I see.
Lesson 265
Creation’s gentleness is all I see.
1. I have indeed misunderstood the world, because I laid my sins on it and saw them looking back at me. ²How fierce they seemed! ³And how deceived was I to think that what I feared was in the world, instead of in my mind alone. ⁴Today I see the world in the celestial gentleness with which creation shines. ⁵There is no fear in it. ⁶Let no appearance of my sins obscure the light of Heaven shining on the world. ⁷What is reflected there is in God’s Mind. ⁸The images I see reflect my thoughts. ⁹Yet is my mind at one with God’s. ¹⁰And so I can perceive creation’s gentleness.
2. In quiet would I look upon the world, which but reflects Your Thoughts, and mine as well. ²Let me remember that they are the same, and I will see creation’s gentleness.
When I look on the world with my eyes only, I see my sins reflected back at me.
I see the ego world of separation where we compete with each other for all the things we idolize. I see this because it is what I want to see. I see this because it is what is in my mind. But it is not the only thing in my mind. My mind is at one with God’s, and so I see what is in that Mind as well, just not with my eyes. I see with Christ Vision, the beauty and the love and peace that is in the Mind of God and in my mind as well because I am in God’s Mind.
To see with Christ Vision, I must choose that. We consciously chose to envision a world of our own, different and separate from God. To see differently, I must consciously decide that I now want to see the real world, the world that reflects the thoughts we think with God. This is a world without the fear and guilt we have projected onto it.
I feel so peaceful and happy right now.
It is hard to think what it is I would have to give up to see differently, but I know how quickly the world changes. Well, it changes as quickly as my mind changes! So, I watch my mind for judgments and attack thoughts. I watch for anger and hatred, for jealousy and fear. Those thoughts darken my vision and show me a dark world. I quickly those thoughts to the Holy Spirit so that the Light of Heaven shines on the world.
This lesson is another reminder that I will see in the world what I expect to see and according to my beliefs.
If I see the fearful it is because I am deceived by my own thoughts. The world is not fearful, it is my mind that is fearful. I hold a belief in my mind and then project it outward as form and see that fear as if it has nothing to do with me. And seeing it, I think it must be real and that the threat comes from the world.
When my mind is focused outward, it seems like the world is fearful. But this is just an illusion, images made by my mind’s beliefs. Jesus tells me this in lesson 15. My thoughts are images that I have made. (ACIM, W-15) And in Lesson 325, All things I think I see reflect ideas. (ACIM, W-325). In this lesson, he describes the process used to make the world of images that my eyes show me.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There is truth in my mind as well as ego thoughts. I can look inward and find my thoughts that are aligned with God, and what I perceive is very different. Then I look outward, and I perceive all that I see with my eyes in a very different way. As I look inward at the thoughts I think with God, I access that truth, which is what I will perceive rather than fear.
One of the ways I become aware of true thoughts is to ask for another way to see. Another way is to look at the wrong-minded thought with the Holy Spirit so that it can be healed. However we do it, the forgiveness of untrue beliefs is the way Home, the only way Home. Jesus says that when we took our detour into fear, God placed in our minds the call to joy. This call is what the Course calls the Holy Spirit. Whatever we call It, the way Home is available to us at all times.
Regina’s tips on What Is the body?
Yesterday we looked at the duality of the body itself. (For example, health and sickness.)
However, that isn’t the only way the body “can quite suddenly revert to fear.” The body also reverts to fear when we become worried, angry, jealous, deceitful, violent, and so on. The body acts out fearfully when we believe the ego’s thoughts of fear.
Our special theme says, “But we can change the purpose that the body will obey by changing what we think that it is for. The body is the means by which God’s Son returns to sanity.”
In other words, we can use this experience of being a human in a body to wake up from the ego’s illusion. That is what we are doing when we decide to meditate instead of doing something else. That is what we are doing when we decide not to act out from worry or anger, but to inquire into our thoughts instead. As we change the purpose given to the body, the body behaves differently.
My Thoughts
One of the ways that I am most helped is to help someone else. No matter how dark my thoughts, if I help someone else to see the light, my mind lightens. As I teach, I learn. As I give, I receive.
Regina’s Tips on the lesson
Duality is fearful because it cannot be trusted. A lover can become an enemy. A leisurely drive can become a deadly automobile accident. A secure job can be lost. A smart and happy child can become addicted to drugs. And the examples continue.
For as long as we remain caught in the ego’s illusion by believing the ego’s thoughts, we experience duality, which includes all of the fear that comes with duality.
To become free of duality, we need to stop believing the ego’s judgments of what should be and should not be. We need to become gentle ourselves by abiding in love instead of in judgment.
My Thoughts
The only way we are going to achieve happiness is to awaken and to help everyone else to awaken. There is no other way because as long as we believe in duality, we will suffer. My part is to accept the Atonement for myself and in so doing, I affect the whole. It is not hard. I stop believing in the ego’s judgments, and I choose love every time. It doesn’t always feel easy, but when it feels hard, it is only my resistance to releasing some belief I still value. I just have to work my way through the tangled mess of my mind, and eventually, I come through it because that is my true desire.
This entry in my journal was from a time when my mind was experiencing a lot of healing but I was still trying to stabilize my new way of seeing.
Sometimes I can see just how profound the split is in my mind. I am happy when I listen to the Holy Spirit within my mind. I feel light and free, and I cannot imagine feeling differently. When someone tells me they are experiencing fear, I know how difficult this can be, but I know that they can move out of that energy simply by choosing to do so. I feel compassion for the suffering they are experiencing and how real it seems to them, but know that it is not real and cannot really hurt them.
But when I listen to the ego in my mind, it can take over, and I forget everything I knew when listening to Holy Spirit. When that happens, it is as if I had never known anything but fear, and it can be so difficult to pull my mind away from the thought of fear. The longer I allow myself to stay with fearful thoughts, the harder it is to release them. Fear thoughts are so compelling that I have trouble taking my eyes off them once I start looking.
It feels like I am two different people.
While I am experiencing the ego’s fearful view of the world, I remind myself that I am not Myron and that Myron is not real. I am safe in God, and all the seemingly very real things that happen are just dreams, just thoughts in the mind of the sleeping Son. And the ego says, “Yes, but what about this situation and what about that person, and I am back into the dream again.
Holy Spirit, this is a perfect lesson for me right now. I am ready to set aside my fearful dreams of guilt and blame.
After I wrote this part, I took a phone call from a mind-healing partner. During our conversation, which touched on the subject of fear, I received a very clear message. I was gently reminded that I consciously chose to have fear thoughts come up so that I could look at them with the Holy Spirit and allow healing. At that moment, I remembered that I am not the victim of the fearful images in my mind.
I am the watcher, the innocent witness of the ego in the mind. Holy Spirit, thank you for the gentle nudge. Instead of feeling like poor old me, I feel gratitude for all that is rising in my mind and am glad for the chance to be corrected. I fully give my attention to the process of looking and healing rather than dividing my mind by trying to hear both voices simultaneously. No wonder I was feeling anxious.
Here is an entry in which the Holy Spirit used a dream to show me a buried guilt.
I was driving to Hot Springs, Arkansas, one weekend. It was dark, and I was driving on a stretch of road that I could remember being nervous about the other time I drove it. I have been afraid of heights for a long time, and I know that some parts of where I am are hilly, and there was the fear I would make a wrong turn and wind up on one of those roads in the dark. If you don’t have a fear of heights, this probably doesn’t seem like it should be frightening. But for me, it is very scary. I did as I always do when confronted by an ego thought and asked the Holy Spirit to heal my mind.
Everything was fine, and there was nothing about the drive to be concerned about.
I got there without falling down any mountains. ~smile~ That night, I dreamed that I was driving with my daughter beside me, and I began to feel like I was going too fast. I looked around me, and suddenly we were driving in mountains and going around sharp curves on narrow roads. I closed my eyes because I was so afraid, and I felt out of control because of the excessive speed. But I realized closing my eyes kept me from seeing the scary situation but did not protect us, so I opened them. I woke up as I heard myself say, in a little girl voice, “Mama, I don’t want to do this.”
It was so good to be awake from the dream. I lay there thinking about the symbolism in the dream, like closing my eyes. I used to close my eyes to the ego thoughts in my mind, but that didn’t keep them from affecting me. Eventually, realizing that blindness to my responsibility did not protect me, I began to take responsibility for healing everything in my life. But I was confused about the ending of the dream. Why did I tell my mama I didn’t want to do this?
Suddenly, I remembered something.
One time my daughter and I were sharing the driving on a trip from Louisiana to New York. It was very late at night, and we were going through some mountainous part of a state. Though I wasn’t afraid of driving in the mountains at that time, I had been driving most of the way, and I was exhausted. She had taken over and now didn’t want to drive because of the night and the mountains.
I guess there was nowhere to stop, and I could not hold my eyes open. She said, “I don’t want to do this, Mama.” I told her that she would be fine and just keep going. Many times over the years, I would think of that and feel guilty for putting her in that position, especially after I became so afraid of heights. I would think what a horrible mother I was to have done that to her and would feel really bad about it, especially knowing that there is nothing I could do to make it right now.
Now I have this dream, and I am telling her what she said to me, and I know this is important.
It took another day for me to open my eyes to what Holy Spirit wanted me to see. I suddenly understood that I will continue to be afraid of heights until I forgive myself. The ego argued very strongly that I was guilty. It was obvious I was guilty. To this day, that woman is afraid of heights, and it is probably because of what I did to her. The ego says I cannot give up the guilt because it is real and because I deserve it.
From this place of believing in guilt, the ego is right, I cannot give it up. What I can do is realize that despite my beliefs, I want to be free and that I want to give up the guilt. I cannot enter God’s presence if I attack His Son, and I am His Son, and my guilt is attacking me. I want to give up the guilt, so I ask the Holy Spirit to remove the belief that I am guilty from my mind.
Each time I have discovered guilt in my mind, I have forgiven it, and a lot has changed. But as I read this today, I realized I still feel guilty about this.
This is a teaching from Keith Kavanagh.
It was very helpful to me in forgiving this situation and any other that comes my way. Here is the link to his Facebook group where there is a lot of great teachings. https://www.facebook.com/groups/384802770144828/ Here is what he said.
Please, please, please, lock into your head what it means to look at your ego (thoughts and feelings) non-judgmentally with Jesus.
Because this IS WHAT FORGIVENESS IS.
This looking means Pure Awareness.
There are no thoughts, judgments, concepts, or opinions in Awareness.
Awareness is the Noticing of thought and feeling happening – it is the witnessing of thought.
It’s not opinion, guilt or judgment about thought. That’s just more thought.
Awareness is the Noticer of the guilt about thought.
It is the space in which thought happens.
It is not the thought.
AWARENESS “is still and quietly does nothing.
It merely looks and waits and judges not.”
Awareness is an allowing. It is that which knows of the thought or feeling’s presence. It is that which registers the thought or feeling without being involved in it.
Question
“How can I be this Awareness? Where do I put my mind? Where do I find Awareness? My mind is confused thinking about it?
Answer:
You already are Awareness!
You don’t have to go looking for it.
What is there to confused thoughts but the Awareness of them?
What is there to happiness but the Awareness of it?
What is there to anxiety but the Awareness of it?
As soon as you ask yourself, “Am I aware?” You are aware of the Awareness you always are.
We are always Awareness (Always a Decision Maker in the Cinema). But we are either Aware of the Awareness, or unaware of the Awareness through identification with thoughts and our mind going on autopilot. (We think we’re IN the Movie of separate identity that we’re watching)
As soon as your mind is observed you are the Awareness of the thoughts.
When your thoughts are on autopilot, unobserved, you are not aware of your Awareness. As soon as you notice your thoughts happening again you are back to being the awareness of your thoughts.
You put all your attention on this Awareness.
In time, this Awareness of your thoughts happening (instead of being them) will strengthen your awareness of awareness. This awareness of awareness (as your ACTUAL identitity), as it strengthens, will be the experience of being in the Cinema with Jesus (metaphorically speaking) feeling “what does it have to do with me?” Someone’s just insulted “movie me” – what does that have to do with the me that’s in the cinema?”
What does it have to do with Awareness?
What does movie me’s thoughts and feelings have to do with what I am that can look at it non-judgementally, joined with the perception of Jesus?
But we work up to that. Be non-judgemental awareness of your thoughts. Notice when you’re on autopilot (unconscious in thought streams) and become Aware again.
Ask yourself “Am I aware?” everytime you realise you’ve gone unconscious in your stream of thoughts.
We’re ALWAYS aware. It’s about awareness that you’re aware.
The question, “Am I aware?” helps unmix awareness from what it’s aware of (thought/ feeling).
This Awareness is the key to unlocking the Course and the forgiveness process for you.
The Course is not meant to be a bunch of formulas where you hope for the best that you’re undoing your guilt, but not really sure if you’re doing it right.
It’s supposed to be EXPERIENTIAL! Forgiveness is a means to step out of pain and anger, into the part of your mind that’s not in pain or angry.
How else could you forgive your Brother and the world for what THEY HAVEN’T DONE? They haven’t changed what you are in your Right mind (as Awareness) one bit. The part of you that’s upset is just the movie.
It doesn’t mean feelings will come to an end immediately. You shine the Awareness that you are with Jesus at them instead of leaving them on autopilot and in darkness. That undoes them.
This entire Course is about gradually coming to the awareness that only the part of your mind that looks non-judgementally with Jesus is real (Pure Awareness). Everything else in your mind and the world is the movie.
The part of you that looks Invincible and incapable of suffering. All the Love, Joy, Peace and happiness you have ever craved is in this Awareness- your Right Mind that can look at your wrong mind (Keith / ego / personal self) without judgment- that can be Awareness, untainted by what it is aware of.
Practice, practice, practice Awareness with Jesus
Contemplation 2025
To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 265 click here.
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