A Course in Miracles Workbook Daily Lesson 357, Year 2022

ACIM Daily Lesson 357 Truth answers every call we make to God, responding first with miracles, and then returning unto us to be itself.

Lesson 357

Truth answers every call we make to God, responding first with miracles, and then returning unto us to be itself.

1. Forgiveness, truth’s reflection, tells me how to offer miracles, and thus escape the prison house in which I think I live. ²Your holy Son is pointed out to me, first in my brother; then in me. ³Your Voice instructs me patiently to hear Your Word, and give as I receive. ⁴And as I look upon Your Son today, I hear Your Voice instructing me to find the way to You, as You appointed that the way shall be:

⁵“Behold his sinlessness, and be you healed.”

Jesus could not be clearer than in this lesson. To find our way to God, we must forgive our brothers. In this way, we receive forgiveness and remember that we are God’s Son. We can say that we are His Son and can believe it, but that does not mean we know it. The Son is One; we cannot know ourselves as one if we think we are separate. We will believe we are separate when we judge and hold grievances. Through consistent forgiveness, we come to know our brother as one with our Self.

I still have judgmental thoughts at times, but I never have one I am not willing to forgive.

I have no desire to hold anyone guilty because guilt is what holds the ego in place. Guilt is not part of God, and so I cannot know my Self if I believe in guilt. As the Son of God, I am one with all creation. So, to judge someone unworthy of the perfect Oneness by seeing them as guilty makes no sense. To deny their perfection is to deny mine and to keep myself prisoner to the world as well. We go to God as One.

No one is guilty of their story. That is not to say that there will not be consequences for their actions within the story, but only within the story. We are as God created us, and nothing can change that. What we are cannot be made guilty. When this particular story is over, and I move into the next dimension, I leave behind all that occurred. The only thing that goes with me is love because that is what I am. This cycle of birth and death will continue until we have forgiven the world we made. I am doing everything I can to achieve total forgiveness.

This lesson reminds me that we are studying a course in miracles.

We call on God, which is a call for miracles, and it is answered. I call for awakening, and this is the call we all make even though, at first, we probably don’t recognize that this is so. We think we want safety and love, and we think we have safety when we are healthy and prosperous, and we think we have love when we have the perfect partner and good friends and family. So, we ask for these things, but safety and love come from awakening from the world, and as we awaken, we begin to experience our lives differently, and we discover safety and love exist no matter how the story unfolds.

Forgiveness tells us how to offer miracles. I forgive as I refuse to believe what my eyes and ears show me. I see someone suffering, and I believe in their suffering and their circumstances, and this is all I can offer them. But if I see that they are suffering and I remember the truth that they are fine, that everything is OK, that their Self is unaffected by the story, that is forgiveness, and it is a miracle. How it affects the story will vary according to how ready the individual is to accept the miracle, but the miracle is never lost, and the healing has occurred whether it is accepted now or later. Forgiveness is simply seeing the truth rather than the apparent illusion. It is knowing that the illusion is just an illusion.

2 Your holy Son is pointed out to me, first in my brother; then in me.

When we perceive the truth, we are perceiving the Son of God. We are perceiving what is actually there, not the shadowy image made from imagination to provide an impossible experience. If we want to know our Self, we must first know our brother as his Self.

I love praying for my brothers because this is a way for me to offer the miracle in a very deliberate way. Someone tells me how sick they are and how they suffer, and I know that this is their experience, and I feel compassion for them, but I am not fooled. That which is sick and suffers is not them, it is the image they made to represent themselves.

I know that it is only guilt and fear that manifest as sickness, and I know that they are innocent. Knowing this is true about another helps me to know it about myself. Refusing to see it in another will make it impossible to see it in me. I will behold his sinlessness, and I will be healed.”

Past Entries

Yesterday, I talked about something that happened a few years ago. I had an ongoing forgiveness lesson with the plumber who failed to live up to his contract to plumb my house even though he was paid to do so. I am grateful to have had this opportunity for lots of wrong-minded thinking to be flushed up.  

However, at the time it was happening, I was not so clear. I did stay sane enough to know it was an opportunity, but I was going back and forth between the desire to forgive and the need to make him guilty. Here are some of the thoughts I was having as I experienced it at that time.

I keep wanting to blame the plumber for my upset even though I know that I am the writer of my script. Thus it is that I want to abdicate responsibility and make the plumber the cause of my experience. “I really want to forgive,” she says through gritted teeth. But I know that it is not true. I want it to be true, but I cannot really believe it. How frustrating!

This is so silly because what if it were true that I am a victim? I would be stuck feeling small, helpless, cheated, vulnerable, and angry. I would have no true recourse and would be doomed to remain so. You would think that I would be happy to take responsibility because then my experience of what is happening would be different. This situation is helping me to see how much I need the world on which to project my anger.

There are other issues with it as well.

I feel foolish when people ask me how the house is going, and I have to say the plumber still hasn’t shown up. I see them struggling for a way to ask me why on earth I paid him before he was through. So, I care how they see me, and that is another thought that I can give to the Holy Spirit.

This plumber is still innocent, and he is still my dear brother who is helping me to clear away a lot of ego baggage that I didn’t even know I was carrying. I have much gratitude for my “dance” partner. We are waltzing through life in perfect harmony. He is offering me many opportunities to look at and release ego beliefs.

I still want the world to be my scapegoat for what I don’t want to see in myself. It is my chance to release this and, at the same time to be the love I was created to be. I can find the plumber guilty, or I can see his innocence and what he does or does not do has nothing to do with which one I choose.

From a later year when I accepted healing.

Looking back on it now, I see I went through a period of denial in which I tried to skip my anger, dress it up in spiritual garb and convince myself I was in forgiveness. I was clearly struggling with the idea that this man did something that needed my forgiveness. Also, I was conflicted because I felt I needed to be right while also wanting to be happy. I was having trouble deciding which was more important to me. And, I hated being confronted by my obvious decision to be a victim. I so much wanted him to be guilty, but couldn’t entirely convince myself that this was true.

“Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that…. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition.” (T-21.IN.1:1-2,5)

What happens in my life reflects my beliefs, so that leaves me 100% responsible. I did not choose on a conscious level to be cheated, but the belief that I could be a victim was in my mind and so was reflected in my life. The whole thing felt like a nightmare at the time, but now I recognize what a great learning device it was.

When I think of the whole plumbing situation and all the money I threw at it only to have to do it all over again, I feel only gratitude. It seems little enough to pay for the lesson I received. And when we come to the bottom line, there was never any choice about what needed to be done. I accept 100% responsibility for my world. No matter what it looks like, I am never a victim of the world I see. Sonny, the plumber, is completely innocent.

2016

“Behold his sinlessness, and be you healed.”

There was a situation with a close family member. I went through a monumental struggle to see my dear one as sinless. It lasted for weeks and was the most painful experience. My mind was in constant conflict between what I perceived in the world and what I knew to be true in reality and in deciding which version I wanted to be true. Eventually, I (metaphorically) fell to my knees in surrender and was finally of one mind.

When I asked for the truth, everything changed in an instant. I saw his sinlessness, and I was healed. My mind was at peace, and the peace that I chose was then projected as an image that reflects that peace. My brother is sinless, and there are no exceptions to this truth because what makes the truth true is that there are no exceptions.

Contemplation 2025

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