ACIM Daily Lesson 279 Creation’s freedom promises my own. 1. The end of dreams is promised me, because God’s Son is not abandoned by His Love.
Creation’s freedom promises my own.
Lesson 279
Creation’s freedom promises my own.
1. The end of dreams is promised me, because God’s Son is not abandoned by His Love. ²Only in dreams is there a time when he appears to be in prison, and awaits a future freedom, if it be at all. ³Yet in reality his dreams are gone, with truth established in their place. ⁴And now is freedom his already. ⁵Should I wait in chains which have been severed for release, when God is offering me freedom now?
2. I will accept Your promises today, and give my faith to them. ²My Father loves the Son Whom He created as His Own. ³Would You withhold the gifts You gave to me?
Good News!
This is good news! God has not abandoned us, and He loves us. In our minds, we are prisoners. Our prison doesn’t have walls, but we imagine we are trapped in these bodies, destined to suffer and die. Then we do it all over again and again. Even being assured by our elder brother that it is safe to leave this prison, we stay, believing that it is safer here than in some unknown existence. It makes no sense, but we do it anyway. No matter that we sit in our cell pretending to be imprisoned, we are free. We are as God created us, an extension of our Creator pretending to be a body in a world that doesn’t exist.
Regina’s Tips on What Is the Christ?
The end of the ego is near when we view all events from the perspective of Christ-consciousness. When loving all is our natural way of being, we identify with awareness-life-presence instead of the body-mind, and we see life as the truth of everything; we can know we are only a whisper away from the final end of the ego.
How do we know this is true?
The ego simply doesn’t see that way. The ego is judgment and separation. So, when judgment has died in us, and we see everything as the same life-awareness that we identify with, the ego has grown very, very weak in us. It is on its last legs, assuming we continue with the spiritual practice that brought us this far. It is important to note that some sages warn that as long as even one thought remains in the ego thought system, the ego can regain strength if we do not continue to be vigilant.
My Thoughts
I am given everything I need to awaken, but I must use what I am given. I must do my part, and put simply, my part is to stop judging. If I don’t judge, I don’t attack or hold grievances or play the victim. All these things Jesus talks to us about are the effect of judging. This is why it is so important to love everything and accept everything without deciding with the ego mind what any of it means. What we need to know becomes apparent to us as we make room for it in our minds by letting go of the idea that we can figure it out on our own.
Regina says that some sages warn us that if we hold even one ego thought, the ego can regain strength. Jesus tells us the same thing. He says that even when the mind is clear, we must be vigilant, or we will fall back into the ego thought system. These are not his words, and I can’t remember where the exact passage is, but that is what he is saying. It is why I remain as vigilant as ever even though I have achieved a sense of fundamental well-being.
Regina’s Tips on the lesson
What are you?
Where do you place your faith?
Abide as that. Be that.
My Thoughts
We all are going to awaken, we cannot prevent that, but we can slow it down. We slow it down by believing what is untrue and living from those beliefs without questioning them. Regina said more in her tips, but I thought these three sentences summed it up beautifully.
What am I? I am spirit. I am Thought. I am an Idea in the Mind of God. I am God the Son. I am Self. I am life-awareness.
Where do I place my faith? Sometimes I place it with the truth of my being. At times I place it in the body/personality that is the ego’s projection and chosen home, the self. Sometimes I place my faith in the ego’s ability to reason and think and decide on its own. Every day, I became more dedicated and closer to, placing my faith almost entirely on my Self as opposed to my self, and that has made all the difference.
Here is an experience I had in the past that was very helpful.
I have been upset about something happening in my life. The details are unimportant because I see they are just symbolic of all the little dramas in which I participate. One drama is truly no different from the next one except in form. Sometimes, a drama comes along, and I watch it for a few minutes, give it to Holy Spirit and go on as if nothing had happened, which is exactly true; nothing happened. But sometimes, like now, I hold onto the drama and suffer awhile.
After it is over and I have finally released it, I wonder why I did that. But while it is going on, I can’t remember how to get free of it or seem unable to make the decision to do so. This was frightening to me because I thought it meant that somehow, maybe, I could not let go. If it was up to me and yet I was the one resisting, I was doomed. Circular ego thinking would keep me trapped longer. But over time, after watching this happen many times, I now understand that eventually, I will come around to sane thinking because I can only stand so much pain.
I was talking to the Holy Spirit about this particular drama this morning.
And I asked Him why I could not get loose from this. What did I need to do? In my mind, I saw myself standing behind bars, clutching them in a white-knuckled grip, longing to be on the other side.
The Holy Spirit told me to look to the right, and I saw the bars end within a few feet. He told me to look to the left, and again the bars ended. They were connected to nothing above or below. The only way they remained upright was that I was holding them in place. The reason I was holding on so tightly was to keep the bars in place. As long as I looked straight ahead at my drama and did not glance in any other direction, I could keep the illusion of being a victim in place.
I asked the Holy Spirit why I do this. He reminded me that just this morning, He had guided me to read something that He had given Regina. It said:
“You may ask why you would choose the pain of resistance when you could experience peace. The answer is simple and one I am sure you have not overlooked. You choose resistance because you choose not to know fully that which you are. Resistance serves your choice to know yourself not as you are.”
Even now, I seem reluctant to let the bars go, and the Holy Spirit gave me a thought. He said that I have invested a lot of time in this victim stance. I have gotten pretty comfortable in my suffering. But I remain both prisoner and jailer so it is up to me to make a new choice.
As I silently listened to the Voice for God, I received another reminder.
I am the ruler of my kingdom, I created this situation, and it is good. It has brought me right to this moment that shows me what it is like to experience imprisonment. And it allows me to see that as easily as I chose to make a prison house of my mind, I can choose to experience freedom. Both are in the kingdom of my mind. Which do I choose? I am the maker of all that I experience.
Acceptance of all that is, just as it is, allows all the resistance to melt away. I feel the knot in my stomach loosen; I feel the muscles in my jaw unclench. I no longer look at my creation (my drama) as something bad that I need to fight my way out of. It is perfect and brings me the gift of release. How can I release the energy of fear if I do not know I hold it, or why would I want to if I do not realize how painful it is?
I experience it in a way that I can see and feel. Then I recognize it as something that I do not want to choose again. And if I forget this lesson, I will set up another one to remind myself of what I no longer want. I could never be the victim of the world I see. But to know this is true, I must be willing to take full responsibility for everything that is happening in my life. And just on the other side of this acceptance is freedom.
Reading what I wrote before, I am reminded of this passage in the Text.
“The Holy Spirit has the task of undoing what the ego has made. He undoes it at the same level on which the ego operates, or the mind would be unable to understand the change.”
I experience the beliefs I hold in my mind. And I see that I don’t like the effects of these beliefs. They do not reflect my true nature. I ask the Holy Spirit to undo the ego thought in my mind. And the mind that is now healed of this thought projects a different experience. I see the difference, and my mind understands the difference. This helps me to understand the process, and it also helps me to be less judgmental of my life. I see its purpose now and am more grateful for the experiences knowing how they are helping me to wake up.
2015
It is amazingly easy to get distracted from my purpose even now that I know that purpose. Even now that I am tired of the stories and mostly uninterested in them, it can feel hard. Sometimes I will just notice that I am sad, and I will wonder why. The ego scrambles to make up a story to explain the sadness. And I listen to the story and follow it to the next and the next. Or I realize it is just a distraction. A choice to remain in the prison I built to keep me separated.
What I do as often as I can is to stop the storytelling as quickly as possible. I feel sadness welling up, and instead of asking the ego mind what it means, I ask Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit never takes me into a story. He doesn’t help me to remember something sad that happened in the past, or how badly I was treated. Nor how lonely I plan to be when some imagined future arrives. This is all ego territory. One story is the same as the next.
I ask the Holy Spirit about my sad feelings, and He brings me true thoughts. These are the thoughts I share with God. At least thoughts that are symbolic of those I share with God. He reminds me of my holy purpose, which is to save the world and awaken us to our true Selves. And as these ideas are met with openness and willingness, something happens that has nothing to do with words. There is a miracle as the mind is healed and emotion is washed away; peace takes its place.
The ego offers me sad stories and little dramas.
But the peace of God is everything I want. The ego chatters away in my mind with endless past moments and more of the same projected as future moments. All for my entertainment; a roller coaster ride of endless thrills and chills and heartbreaking moments. But the peace of God is everything I want.
I sit in that peace this morning. I feel insulated from the world that seems determined to tear my peace from me. And I laugh with the Holy Spirit at that thought. As if there was a world outside my mind that could do anything to me. The world challenges me and attacks me, whether I get out of this chair or not. Or the world cherishes me and protects me from this same place, according to what I want.
The world is in my mind and nowhere else. It gives me exactly what I want regardless of where I place this body in the world. In those moments of choice, when I am deciding what story I am going to experience now, I remind myself that the peace of God is everything I want. I remind myself that I am awake if I care to throw off my imagined chains and have that experience. What I tell myself seems to be very important. So I ask the Holy Spirit to watch my thoughts with me and direct them to the truth.
Contemplation 2025
To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 279 click here.
If you found this content helpful, please share on social media so more people can read and learn.