A Course in Miracles Workbook Daily Lesson 349, Year 2022

ACIM Daily Lesson 349 Today I let Christ’s vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead.

Photo by John Gardiner of Whangarei, New Zealand 

Lesson 349

Today I let Christ’s vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead.

1. So would I liberate all things I see, and give to them the freedom that I seek. ²For thus do I obey the law of love, and give what I would find and make my own. ³It will be given me, because I have chosen it as the gift I want to give. ⁴Father, Your gifts are mine. ⁵Each one that I accept gives me a miracle to give. ⁶And giving as I would receive, I learn Your healing miracles belong to me.

2. Our Father knows our needs. ²He gives us grace to meet them all. ³And so we trust in Him to send us miracles to bless the world, and heal our minds as we return to Him.

It only makes sense to give what I want to receive.

One day last year, the contractor came by to finish the work I needed to be done on the outside of my house. I was excited to get this done so that now all the damage done by hurricanes last year would be repaired. After I paid him and he had left, I had to put some potted plants back into place. It was then I noticed that he had done one part very poorly. My first inclination was to feel frustrated and worried that I would have to pay twice to get this done. I felt angry that he had done this.

That reaction lasted only a couple of minutes. I have no desire to make anyone guilty. To do so would be what we used to call instant karma and would come back on me. A Course in Miracles says that what we give, we receive, and what I want to receive are forgiveness and love. So that was what I chose. I texted the contractor and told him my concerns.

He promised to be back the next day to make it right and apologized for the error. Even if he had not responded positively to my concerns, I would still not have gone back to ego thinking. It makes no sense to attack or defend, and so I don’t do that anymore. I don’t do it even when the ego-mind insists that defense is called for. In this case, I was able to look past the apparent situation to see with Christ’s vision.

It takes vigilance and consistency to disregard ego reactions.

My Pathways of Light prayer I say each time I start work in one of their courses has this sentence. “I am willing to let go of judgments about myself and others and see the innocence beyond the circumstances and events.” This was the choice I made. I let the Holy Spirit correct my thinking and experienced the miracle of a healed mind. It was all done quickly because I practice it consistently.

“Our Father knows our needs. ²He gives us grace to meet them all.” This was just one example of how I am cared for by my loving Father. I needed a way to go from fear to love, and His grace was given to me. Of course, I had to do my part. I had to be willing to let go of the grievance. And I had to trust the process in which what I give is given to me. I do trust, and my trust has been well-founded.

How do I look with Christ’s vision?

I look without judgment, and in not judging, I bless what I see with the miracle of love. Faced with a difficult situation, I have a choice about how I see it. If I judge the situation as bad and wish it were different, I will suffer. Thus the root cause of my distress will remain unhealed and so invite more of the same. If, on the other hand, I don’t judge, if I look with clear eyes and see that this is a neutral situation waiting for me to decide what it means, I can let the Holy Spirit judge it for me. The Holy Spirit’s only judgment is one of love.

In Song of Prayer, Jesus tells us that true prayer is a stepping aside: a letting go, a quiet time of listening and loving. I was reminded of this as I read that our Father knows our needs. I used to entreat God to give me what I was missing in my life. But I eventually learned that God gave me all I need in my creation. So now I simply lay my concerns on the altar, knowing He gives me the grace to meet them all. Then with empty hands and a glad heart, I spend the rest of the prayer loving God and accepting His love.

In this lesson, Jesus also shares something we need to know about receiving when he says, 6 And giving as I would receive, I learn Your healing miracles belong to me. Repeatedly in the Course, we are told that giving is receiving. Give what you want to receive. That is the way you receive, and at the same time, it is the way you learn that we are one.

Regina’s tip on “What Is a Miracle?” is excellent.

Let’s review what we’ve already contemplated about the miracle in order to look at the miracle as a whole.

1. A miracle is a shift in perception, which is a shift in our way of seeing and experiencing. It isn’t an actual change.
2. The miracle could be called a shift in meaning. It gently shifts away from the valueless (temporary appearance) and towards the valuable (reality). That means circumstances that we saw as meaningful before gradually have less meaning, while awareness, which once had no meaning at all, becomes more present and centrally meaningful.
3. The core shift that occurs with the miracle is a shift from a self-centered existence and way of perceiving to existence that is not centered in the self. Existence not centered in the self is called true perception because perception is not colored by self’s personal biases. This core shift may be dramatic, or it may be gradual, the culmination of many smaller shifts.
4. Because the self-centered self will attempt to cling to its self-centered nature, it is important for the individual to have a desire to go beyond the self-centered self and faith that existence beyond the self-centered self is more valuable than existence as a self-centered self.
5. The way to enable the miracle is to abide, to the best of one’s ability, as the unaffected self. Being unaffected is synonymous with not being self-centered or not believing self-centered thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. The Loving All Method is a simple, gentle, and clear method for abiding as the unaffected self. When we abide as the unaffected self, we do not cling to the self-centered self. This enables the miracle because we are no longer fighting against the miracle.

6. The miracle is both personal and impersonal.

It is personal because the medium of the miracle is the only one who experiences the shift directly. It is impersonal because the shift in perception causes material effects through the creative principle. The one who experienced the miracle may or may not witness the material effects.

7. People often confuse a material effect with the miracle by thinking the material effect is the miracle. The miracle is the shift in perception. It is permanent and irreversible. The effect of the shift is not the miracle; it is a temporary appearance.

8. The spiritual aspirant helps in the process of shifting from self-centered existence to existence that is not self-centered by being aware of his own process, participating in it fully, and prayerfully asking for clarity, guidance, and shifts.

9. To continually seek advancement on a journey from the known to the unknown takes faith. If one will have faith and take the journey, miracles and their effects will reinforce faith. This results in confidence, which enables one to go further into the unknown.

Past Entry

Today, everything I look at is going to be loved. That is, I will see it as innocent and perfect regardless of what the body’s eyes show me. Well, that’s the plan, anyway. Very likely, what is going to happen is that I am going to notice that sometimes I am judging, and then I am going to practice this lesson. Here are some things Cate Grieves shared with me.

“The image is projected from “my” confused thinking – not his. Everything is in “my” mind and can only be corrected there. See no bodies – just pure innocent spirit. The course says that there are no people “out there” they are all being projected by the unconscious guilt. (By the way, that includes the body that I think of as me.) Seeing the innocence heals the misperceptions of the ego mind.”

What I love about this statement is its simplicity. It cuts through the story and goes to the heart of the only problem we have. We think we are separated from God and so are guilty. From the guilt, we project the world we see with all its bodies and all these stories that all end in death.

So, really, the stories and the bodies are not the problem. They are the effect of the problem. They are just guilt projected outward and seen as if they are real and happening and matter. This keeps us very busy for eons of time, and so we never get around to addressing the real problem. In this way, the ego mind does an excellent job of keeping the story going.

There is a place in the Course where Jesus tells us that the ego wants to kill us.

I heard Nouk Sanchez say that the ego wants us dead before we can wake up to its plan and choose love instead. Then we just turn around, and here we are back in another story that we spend a lifetime trying to fix just so we can die and do it all again.

So far, it has been working, but Jesus is giving us the way out of the endless loop of false thinking that keeps us focused on the story rather than the escape from the story. The problem we see everywhere, regardless of the form it takes, is guilt. The solution is love. It is choosing to see the innocence behind the story.

I am amazed at how often I see guilt rather than innocence. It pervades every story in my life. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since this is the way I have used the ego mind to keep me in the dark, and, creator that I am, it is only natural that I would have done a good job of it. For eons, I have looked for and found guilt. I think of it as looking through a guilt filter so that everything I see looks like guilt.

Here is an example. I have a plumbing leak, and I need to get it fixed. I have been putting it off because I don’t feel competent to do it myself, and I am not sure who to call to fix it. Calling a plumber would be really expensive, and I’m pretty sure I know someone who could do it for me.

I thought about my son-in-law, who has fixed things for me before.

I was going to send him a text and ask him if he could find the time, but my daughter mentioned he was changing an engine in a car this weekend and was totally absorbed in that job. It didn’t feel right asking him to drop everything and work on my stuff, so I didn’t send him the text.

This morning when I got up, I saw the leak was worse, and I started worrying about the cabinet under the sink being damaged. The first feeling I noticed following the fear was resentment that my son-in-law didn’t fix this for me. Now mind you, he doesn’t even know about the problem, and certainly, even if he did know about it, he is not obligated to do this for me. But the ego always sees guilt. Its answer to all problems is to discover who is guilty.

Little guilt thoughts like this show up in my mind all the time, it seems. The good news is that I mostly don’t believe them, and when I do, I look at them with Holy Spirit. It seems like they always stem from fear, just like the plumbing problem was causing me fear, and the ego’s automatic response is to find someone to blame.

Here is another response from Cate to my questions.

“That’s how My mind was healed through practicing this. Seeing the face of Christ in all our brothers heals my mind back to pure Christ mind. The mind knows no difference between out there and in here. If all are seen as perfect and innocent, then my mind IS perfect and innocent, and the ego falls away gently. The ego cannot exist in a mind of innocent perception.”

So, I perceived my son-in-law as guilty, and the solution is to recognize this was just an ego response to fear and that he is completely innocent. I do the same with all these little ego guilt bombs. Instead of letting them explode into something messy, I disarm them with the truth, and they just fizzle out. Sometimes it is a little harder because I have projected a better guilt story, and it really looks like someone is guilty.

In a situation like that, I can point to their behavior as proof of guilt. But then I remember that the guilt came first, and what I am seeing is not reality but just a projection of that guilt. This reminder can sometimes derail the ego’s attempt to reinforce guilt in the mind. Sometimes I get caught up in my most recent projection of guilt, and then I have to pull myself out of it.

But all of it is good practice, whether it is easy to do or whether it feels difficult. The point is, there is nothing out there to forgive and nothing out there to correct. There is only my mind to be healed. I ask to see with true perception, and the more often I do this, the easier it is to go there very quickly.

Here is how Cate says she did it.

“The guilt is undone by

1)holding the perfection and innocence of all brothers.

2) truly realizing I am not a body but pure spirit. Perfect whole and complete.

It needs to be practiced before it becomes fully known as a truth by the mind.”

Sometimes I feel discouraged when I notice, yet again, that I am judging and seeing guilt, and worse, believing in the guilt. But as Cate says, seeing the innocence is something we need to practice. Without practice, it is just words in the mind, something understood intellectually, maybe a concept that sounds like something we want, but it does not become truly known without practice. Realizing this, I can practice all day and be glad of the opportunities.

Contemplation 2025

To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 349 click here.

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