ACIM Daily Lesson 341 I can attack but my own sinlessness, and it is only that which keeps me safe.1. Father, Your Son is holy.
I can attack but my own sinlessness, and it is only that which keeps me safe.
Lesson 341
I can attack but my own sinlessness, and it is only that which keeps me safe.
1. Father, Your Son is holy. ²I am he on whom You smile in love and tenderness so dear and deep and still the universe smiles back on You, and shares Your Holiness. ³How pure, how safe, how holy, then, are we, abiding in Your Smile, with all Your Love bestowed upon us, living one with You, in brotherhood and Fatherhood complete; in sinlessness so perfect that the Lord of Sinlessness conceives us as His Son, a universe of Thought completing Him.
2. Let us not, then, attack our sinlessness, for it contains the Word of God to us. ²And in its kind reflection we are saved.
How do we attack our sinlessness?
One way is to believe in our sin, and it becomes true for us. ⁵What you believe is true for you. (ACIM, T-2.VII.5:5) Someone can accuse me, but for the sin to be real to me, I must believe it. Another way to think of this is that we attack our sinlessness when we believe in guilt. The Course tells us this.
- ⁷For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors must be sins. (ACIM, T-27.I.4:7)
- ³Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. (ACIM, W-140.4:3).
- But while the guilt remains attractive the mind will suffer, and not let go of the idea of sin. (ACIM, T-19.III.1:4)
Believing we are separated from God and each other is another way we attack our sinlessness. ⁸However ridiculous the idea of attacking God may be to the sane mind, never forget that the ego is not sane. (ACIM, T-5.V.3:8)
Who can believe they are sinless when they believe they have separated themselves from God? We try to get rid of the guilt by seeing it in others. However, ⁷Ideas leave not their source, and their effects but seem to be apart from them. (ACIM, T-26.VII.4:7) Thus, guilt is only reinforced in the mind, and those who assume guilt cannot believe in sinlessness.
So, how do we undo this belief in guilt?
I am undoing it by looking at it with the Holy Spirit. I then state emphatically that I used to believe in guilt. Now I am so grateful that I believe in innocence. This is a form of forgiveness. I do this repeatedly until the mind goes naturally to innocence rather than to guilt.
I instruct my mind to innocence because that is what is true; that is what keeps me safe. God created me innocent and holy, and so I am. I talk to myself about my innocence because it contains the Word of God to us. Fear of sin can lead to defensiveness, and we know that it is only in our defenselessness that our safety lies. Jesus tells us this: ⁶Let not your fear of sin protect it from correction, for the attraction of guilt is only fear. (ACIM, T-22.I.4:6)
I undo the belief in sin when I free my brother of that belief. If I think he is guilty, I teach him his guilt, and what I teach, I learn. So instead, I forgive the belief he is guilty and free us both. ⁹Whom you forgive is free, and what you give you share. ¹⁰Forgive the sins your brother thinks he has committed, and all the guilt you think you see in him. (ACIM, T-19.IV-D.15:9-10)
²The need for guilt is gone because it has no purpose, and is meaningless without the goal of sin. (ACIM, T-25.V.1:2)
To sum this up nicely, we read this in Chapter 25. The state of sinlessness is merely this: The whole desire to attack is gone, and so there is no reason to perceive the Son of God as other than he is. (ACIM, T-25.V.1:1)
This excerpt from our lesson intrigues me.
“…the Lord of Sinlessness conceives us as His Son, a universe of Thought completing Him.” We are told there is no world, but sometimes Jesus speaks of the universe as a creation. This phrase, a universe of Thought, is perhaps the universe he speaks of. After all, we are described as a Thought in the Mind of God. We are also told that 4. We are creation; we the Sons of God. (ACIM, W-pII.11.4:1) And in this lesson we are told that Lord of Sinlessness conceives us as His Son, and that we are pure, safe and holy.
More Thoughts on the Lesson
Every time we take the world seriously, we attack our sinlessness. Every time we think we are guilty or that someone else is guilty, we attack our sinlessness. We talk ourselves into believing that we are sinners and condemned because of our sins. We talk ourselves into believing that we have changed God’s creation through our evil deeds, and so our guilt grows until it seems insurmountable. The solution to this is to realize that we are simply wrong.
We remain as we were created, whatever happens in the world of time. I don’t know why the idea of guilt can be so hard to release, I just know that it was. But there is no other way to return Home than to do this. It seems it would take a miracle, and luckily, we have access to that miracle. We receive it through forgiveness. We forgive the world we made as we recognize that it is just an experience and that it can help us return home.
I have been sick. Guilt says I must have done something wrong, and I need to Atone for it. I hear this, but I don’t believe it. I have learned not to listen to guilt, but guilt is stubborn and doesn’t give up easily. Nevertheless, I have learned to let it talk, not to argue with it, and instead, just to disregard it. I don’t know what this sickness means or what it is for. I just ask for guidance as to what to do about it, and I ask what it is that I need to forgive. So, I just open my mind to the solution and wait for it to show itself to me. In the meantime, I am fine whatever happens.
Regina’s Tips
Recently, we played a game based on the teaching in Rupert Spira’s book, The Transparency of Things. We used a book or some other piece of paper with words on it as a prop. First, we read the words on the page, and we noticed what they said, and then we shifted our focus to notice the paper on which the words were written. We became aware of the paper that was already present, even though we weren’t consciously aware of it when our attention was focused on the words.
A miracle is similar to that shift in focus.
When we shifted our attention from the words to the paper, we did not create the paper. We merely became aware of it. In fact, nothing changed at all. The words already appeared on paper. There was no material change. The only change, if we call it a change, was that we became more aware of the paper.
A miracle is like that. It shifts our awareness from the specific focus of the ego to another focus that is not of the ego.
My Thoughts
When A Course in Miracles asks us to forgive, it is asking us to disregard the way we see things so that the miracle can show us another way to see. If I think someone is being deliberately unkind, I forgive that idea. This means I stop looking with that particular focus and open my mind to another way to see it.
Perhaps what will occur to me is that this person is afraid and is lashing out in fear. I understand this because I have done the same thing. Suddenly, I don’t see the unkindness, I just see the fear and confusion. If I forgive that idea, the fear and confusion disappear, and I see a Son of God learning through an experience of their choice, and I am happy for them. It is just a shift in focus.
Regina’s Tips
Regina helps us see this even more clearly using a sentence from the lesson with the choice of emphasis changing the meaning of the sentence.
I can attack but my own sinlessness,
and it is only that (attack) which keeps me safe.
She points out how this sounds crazy but is exactly what the ego believes, that attack keeps me safe. I can remember that happening to me. I used to attack my husband because I thought if I didn’t point out how wrong he was he would take that as me agreeing with him. So my attack was, in my mind, keeping me safe.
I can attack but my own sinlessness,
and it is only that (sinlessness) which keeps me safe.
Look how different this sentence is now. Now I can see that in attacking my husband’s point of view, I was attacking my own sinlessness and sinlessness is what keeps me safe. So I was attacking myself.
Regina says: The only “change” is a shift in focus, but the shift in focus changes everything.
This shift in perception from seeing attack as my safety to seeing non-attack as my safety is a miracle.
Regina then gives an excellent process to help make this clearer in your own mind. I highly recommend it. https://awakening-together.org/tips-regina-lesson-341/
Past Entry
We are so like little children squabbling with each other, play fighting, pushing, and shoving to see who gets to be king of the hill this time. Who gets to play hero and who gets the part of villain? Who wins, and who loses? All of it is meaningless because all of it is equally unreal, just imaginative play. And all the while, our Father smiles down on us in unconditional love. Our Creator sees only our sinlessness, our perfect innocence.
No matter how serious the game becomes and how awful the actions of the players, it still remains unreal. This sin is not bigger than that sin, but rather this sin is as unreal as that sin. We judge how much worse is one action over another, but the only judgment we need make is whether it is true or not. Is this action in alignment with God? That is the only question we need to answer. If it is not, then we may want to admit that it is causing us to suffer and choose again.
The world is not real, but it is real to us because we believe in it.
As long as we believe in it, then our actions are going to have the potential to cause suffering. We escape from this suffering as we turn to the Holy Spirit with our thoughts and beliefs and allow them to be corrected. The miracle inspires the true thoughts we are entitled to, being the Sons of God.
We can allow the Holy Spirit to be the catalyst that breaks apart our false perceptions and rearranges them so that they are true perceptions. For a while yet, we turn to Him with this mistaken thought and that one, allowing them to be corrected one at a time until we become aware that all are one, and so we ask that the one be healed. Then our play becomes gentle and sweet until we become ready to ascend from this playground altogether, and God lifts us up to Him.
Contemplation 325
To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 341 click here.
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