ACIM Daily Lesson 277 Let me not bind Your Son with laws I made. 1. Your Son is free, my Father.

Lesson 277

Let me not bind Your Son with laws I made.

1. Your Son is free, my Father. ²Let me not imagine I have bound him with the laws I made to rule the body. ³He is not subject to any laws I made by which I try to make the body more secure. ⁴He is not changed by what is changeable. ⁵He is not slave to any laws of time. ⁶He is as You created him, because he knows no law except the law of love.

2. Let us not worship idols, nor believe in any law idolatry would make to hide the freedom of the Son of God. ²He is not bound except by his beliefs. ³Yet what he is, is far beyond his faith in slavery or freedom. ⁴He is free because he is his Father’s Son. ⁵And he cannot be bound unless God’s truth can lie, and God can will that He deceive Himself.

You are healed. God and sin no more.

We are free, all of us. I will not bind myself or others with the laws of the world that we made up. When someone asks me for prayers, I will not join them in their fear for the body. I will not join them in their belief in sickness, suffering, and death. I will know who they are for them until they know themselves. We are not bound to the laws of man unless we choose to believe them.

When the sick and the lame came to Jesus for help, he didn’t send them to the doctor or tell them there was no cure for leprosy. He didn’t tell them that they were too far gone; they should have come sooner. He just told them they were healed and to go and sin no more. Our ‘sin’ is that we made up laws to govern the body, and we live by them instead of living by the laws of God.

We don’t need the laws of social interaction.

When someone is unkind to me or neglectful of me, I won’t look sad or feel abandoned or rejected. We made up laws that say our happiness depends on others and their actions toward us. I won’t do anything to make someone feel guilty that they are not living up to those laws. After all, guilt is another man-made law.

These laws of social interaction are supposed to protect our individual selves, but we do not need to protect a personal self that is an illusion. We don’t need to defend ourselves from each other. The idea of a personal self is another law we made up that keeps us bound to the world and its suffering. We are One even as we pretend to be many.

I am under no laws but God’s.

The law of independence is the one that is the most destructive. This law says that we can be independent of our Source, that we can choose what is real and what is not. We seem to think that we are fine making decisions on our own. We think we can make of ourselves whatever it is we want to be. This makes no sense, and yet, we treasure this one the most.

I am not slave to any laws of time. While I know that, ultimately, this is true, I also know that it is not true for me at this time. There are any number of laws within time that still govern me. I am not asked to deny how I feel because it is not in alignment with the truth at this moment. Nor do I feel guilty about that, as if I am doing something wrong. I used to, but I don’t anymore.

I don’t pretend to be free when I am not.

Instead, when these laws come to my attention, I remind myself of the truth. I am not forced to believe in them, but rather, I am choosing to believe in them. Then I give my willingness to have my mind corrected. In this way, my beliefs are slowly being undone for me.

There is another perspective from which to understand this lesson. I, my Self, is not bound by the laws made to bind us to the illusory world of our imagination. This Self is free right now and always has been. As I frequently remind myself of who I am, I use this process in concert with the correction of belief. By learning to identify with Self rather than self, I experience freedom even in the world of time and space.

We act like it would be a sacrifice to accept our self as God created us instead of recognizing it as our salvation. Today, I will celebrate that I am under no laws but God’s. I will watch my mind carefully for thoughts that indicate I believe in laws I made in opposition to His. And I will forgive those beliefs and let them go. I am going to thank my Father that He created me like Himself and that His laws are inviolate and remember who I am, in truth.

Regina’s tips on What Is the Christ?

Our special theme provides a clue to help us become more skilled at listening to spiritual intuition. It refers to Christ-consciousness as the “home of the Holy Spirit.” It doesn’t refer to human consciousness as its home. This is an important point.

When we are fully identified with human consciousness (the mind), we are fully identified with thought. That means we are identified with chatter about what should be and what should not be, what we like and don’t like etcetera. These thoughts are not the home of spiritual intuition. They are the home of the ego. When we ask for guidance from this place of concern—from wanting things to be a certain way—we invite the ego to chatter even more.

When we identify with Christ-consciousness, or at least with the qualities of Christ-consciousness, we open ourselves to know the guidance of spiritual intuition. Some of the qualities we might identify with are acceptance of what is, openness, non-attachment, and unconditional trust. When we shift our perspective into these qualities, spiritual intuition can become clear because we have shifted into the perspective that is the home of spiritual intuition.

My Thoughts

I want to talk about allowing all things to be as they are. When I first heard teachers talk about this, it scared me. I was not happy with my life as it was. It was often painful to be me. I didn’t want to allow it to stay the same. Regina introduced me to Michael Langford. While I don’t follow him, preferring the A Course in Miracles approach, he had a teaching that helped me a lot. He calls it the Loving All Method.

He tells us to love everything. I was torn. I know that only love heals, so this appeals to me. On the other hand, how do I love something painful? Do I not stop the pain? Will loving it stop the pain? But here is an excerpt that helped me.

• The Loving-All Method refers only to your emotions.
• No changes in your external behavior are required.
• For example: if a vase falls and you would normally try and catch it, you will also try and catch the vase while you are practicing the Loving-All Method.
• You do not allow the vase to fall because you are loving the falling.

Knowing that we are talking about emotions only, I was able to fully embrace something I intuitively knew was important. If I am sick, I don’t emotionally resist the experience. I accept it in equanimity as my current classroom and find the lesson, I forgive it. In this relaxed and loving state, I am fully open to being taught. I then accept healing of the physical problem. Or, if I am not able to do this, I go to the doctor to give form to my desire to heal. As the Borg (Star Trek reference) would say, resistance is futile. And it is suffering.

Here are a couple of past entries that were helpful.

At a group study, I listened to a new student of the Course explain to the group how difficult it is to let go of a grievance she is holding toward a friend. Each person in the group has had that same experience, and so each eagerly explained how this works and why she should let it go. In the end, though, her mind always returned to the idea of being right.

For those of us outside the situation, it was very clear that she had made a law in her own mind that her friend had broken, and that was why she believed she was right and her friend was wrong. But when we are the ones in the ego prison of wrong thinking, it is not at all so clear. We all sincerely thanked her for sharing because error corrected is error corrected regardless of who carries it for us.

Through her situation, we all had the opportunity to heal what is within us that is reflected in her story. She was supported and given thoughts that may be helpful to her. If not right now, then the seed is planted, and I am sure it will be harvested when the fruit is ripe. I call that joining in purpose.

The idols I worship are the untrue beliefs I hold in my mind.

These beliefs are all that imprisons the sleeping mind. I believe an untrue thought, I feel the effects of that belief, and the effects seem real to me, and so reinforce my belief in the thought. How do I break this cycle? Until I question these beliefs, I will continue to suffer, and so I watch my mind for any thought not in alignment with the truth, and I ask the Holy Spirit to remove it from my mind. This is the easy solution, and it is also the only solution because I have taught myself that the untrue is true. Now that I believe it, I must have help to change it. This help must come from something outside this cycle, and this help is the Holy Spirit.

Because I have accepted this upside-down thought system for so long that I take the false for true, it requires my vigilance and my willingness even to see the error. I have made a rule for everything the body experiences. Food has so many shifting rules I can hardly keep up. What causes sickness and how to avoid it, and if not avoid then treat it, has a whole book of rules. And they should be written in pencil because we change our minds about them so often. We have rules about relationships, and my rules may be different than your rules, and I will probably change my mind about those rules more than once.

Is it any wonder that I used to be depressed?

I lived my life based on ever-shifting and completely undependable laws, most of which I didn’t understand because they were not understandable. I came to believe that the roller coaster ride of emotions was normal, even desirable, even necessary. When I first began to feel peace in my life, I, like a lot of people, was a little panicky. It felt boring and if salvation was boring, was I doomed to choose between being forever lost and being bored? I stuck to it, though, and I discovered that peace is not boring; it is sublime. It felt boring at first only because I was so used to a wild range of emotions, I thought they were necessary to my life.

I have decided to give up the laws we have made that imprison us in our delusions. For instance, I used to believe that I had to be with someone to be complete, that alone I was not enough. So I sought and found an array of special people to do that for me. And I let that go and discovered a sense of freedom I had never imagined.

I used to believe that sickness was caused by germs and heredity and some mysterious and unknown causes. Now I know that sickness is how I defend the special separated self from God. I do it to myself. Every time. I do it in a way that looks realistically like an attack from without, clever me. But all sickness is self-imposed. So, another law was wiped from the books.

I have other laws that I have been questioning and that are being discarded.

The only reason it takes a while for some of them is the fear that I need them or will need them or that there is no other law to take their place. For instance, when I was working, I thought about losing my job, home, and hope for retirement, and I felt panic and fear. There is a stubborn rule in my book of laws that governs me and binds me to the world. It says I must work hard and earn my way to survive. After all, I was thrown from the Garden of Eden, and so the easy life is over.

Eventually, this hardened law was softened as I remembered that the peace of God is everything I want. I wondered if I could just sit back and watch this little play and see what happened. I wondered if I could trust life and let it show me something. Then, I noticed the tension leaving my body and a warm and comforting peace taking its place and I knew I could. For a while, I still chose to believe the painful beliefs. I became, at least for a while, mesmerized by these fearful thoughts. But that law was on its way out. I could feel its unreality at least as much as I feared its reality.

Over time, I chose to question all of the laws we made to keep the illusion in place.

I questioned the laws made to keep our minds from remembering the truth of who we are. The Holy Spirit and I are working in unison to let these laws go, as I am ready to do so. Eventually, I am going to lose interest in any laws, but the laws of Love, and then I am going to throw the whole rulebook out the door! I can hardly wait. Can you imagine the freedom?!?

Contemplation 2025

To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 277 click here.

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