ACIM II. Miracles As True Perception, P 3, 4. When you lack confidence in what someone will do, you are attesting to your belief that he is not in his right mind.

3 II. Miracles As True Perception, P 3

3 When you lack confidence in what someone will do, you are attesting to your belief that he is not in his right mind. This is hardly a miracle-based frame of reference. It also has the disastrous effect of denying the power of the miracle. The miracle perceives everything as it is. If nothing but the truth exists, right-minded seeing cannot see anything but perfection. I have said that only what God creates or what you create with the same Will has any real existence. This, then, is all the innocent can see. They do not suffer from distorted perception.

The following is something from my journal. It happened a number of years ago and was an essential lesson for me that has been reinforced and refined over time.

For the last two days, I have had an experience of lacking confidence in what someone will do. A friend has been sick, and I have experienced confusion about it. In my mind, I have had thoughts about what she is doing wrong, about what she is thinking that is wrong. Then I would want to school her and get her back on the right track. I would want to use whatever means I could to bring her to good health. In my fear for her, I was tempted to use guilt to make her feel wrong so she would change her behavior.

This Can’t Be Right

Even as all of this was going through my mind, I knew it was not right-minded thinking and that it meant I was an unhealed healer. I had prayed for her, but I was now the one in need of healing. For a while, I was in that uncomfortable place where I knew I needed a change of mind but was having trouble taking my eye off the thing that scared me. I was in conflict, and conflict causes fear, and fear causes confusion.

So here is what I did. Since I was now the unhealed healer, I asked for help. I opened myself to the Atonement and asked that Love heal my mind. Then, I asked that I be guided to right-minded words and actions. I was told to just focus on love, and anything I needed to say or do would come through me. I felt immediate peace, and it was such a relief. I’m not used to being in confusion anymore and have little tolerance for it.

Love Changed It All

The next thing that happened is that I began to feel the love I have for my friend. This was real love that believed in her and trusted her. It was love without fear and judgment. I felt a strong desire to tell my friend how much I love her, so I acted on that guidance and called her. I felt kind of silly just calling out of nowhere and telling her that I love her very much and just wanted her to know. But I knew I was supposed to.

I did feel awkward at first, but she responded positively, and it was a short but loving conversation. At that moment, she and I joined in perfect agreement on this one thing. It was a holy instant. Later her caretaker told me she was responding better today. I felt like it was our shared moment of allowing the love that changed things.

Of course, the ego mind thought it was responsible and started thinking of things it could do to keep the momentum going. I recognized this for what it was and brought the desire to “do” something to the Holy Spirit. I received another strong message. It said, “When you think about her, clear your mind of everything except love.” Well, ok. The ego hates not having anything to decide and nothing to do, but it makes me feel very peaceful to follow this guidance.

Love and Trust

So, this morning as I read this paragraph, I realized that I just went through a practice of regaining confidence in my friend through the healing of my own mind. It’s funny, when I think of it, to realize that I thought she needed to see things differently, and all along, it was me that needed a change of mind.

How will it turn out for my friend? Will her body heal? I don’t know. I don’t know how her story will unfold or where her lessons will take her. There is no reason to feel upset about that. It must be that I am suffering from the misconception that I know how it needs to happen. I trust her, and I trust the Guide that gently plans each step of our way home.

I trust that she is healed regardless of appearances and that she will accept her healing when she is ready for it. Just because she has not accepted it today, or even in this lifetime, does not in any way alter the healing. It seems my only job is to love her and to trust in the miracle that has occurred through our love. If I allow a lack of trust to obscure the miracle again, I will simply ask for healing of my mind.

4 II. Miracles As True Perception, P 4

4 You are afraid of God’s Will because you have used your own mind, which He created in the likeness of His Own, to miscreate. The mind can miscreate only when it believes it is not free. An “imprisoned” mind is not free because it is possessed, or held back, by itself. It is therefore limited, and the will is not free to assert itself. To be one is to be of one mind or will. When the Will of the Sonship and the Father are one, their perfect accord is Heaven.

A Metaphorical Fable

As I read this paragraph, I imagine myself as an unlimited being, wondering what it would be like if I were not unlimited. Visually, I imagine the Self as existing in every direction with no end. (Yes, I know there is no direction outside the illusion, but bear with me here. I am working from within the limitations imposed by the illusion as I do this.) So here I am, existing everywhere at the same time, and in my desire to imagine something different, I draw a box around a small part of Self and pretend there is nothing outside the box.

Ok, now I have set my parameters, and I can allow the experience to unfold. And, oh boy, does it unfold! There are quickly billions of little boxes within the box, and within each of the tiny boxes, experiences unfold and unfold and unfold. Organic is a word that comes to me—changing and shifting and growing into something I had perhaps not anticipated. As it gets out of hand, I begin to feel something entirely new to me. I begin to feel claustrophobic. How could I be so small? This can’t be right. What have I done? This new feeling is guilt, and it is followed closely by fear.

Hiding Out

I decide the best thing to do is to hide out in the strange and awful world I have made until I figure out what to do. There are so many new experiences; if I focus on them, I can temporarily forget how small and confined I feel in this little box. I can also forget the guilt and fear. But now that guilt and fear are in this mind of mine, I see them everywhere within my little prison.

Guilt and fear and all its effects are the stuff of “creation,” the material I use to build this world, so to speak. As I think of what I have “created,” I feel more fear because deeply buried in my mind is the certainty that this is not creation at all, and the fear is that to create outside God is defiance. Yikes!

I use it to make a world filled with guilty people doing guilty things, and isn’t that handy. “Look, God; it was him. His behavior is so much worse than mine. Punish him.” My world is so far out of reality now that I have forgotten who I am and who God is, and even that I am not really imprisoned at all, just thinking about all this.

If it were real, all would be lost, but it cannot be real. Remember, all that happened is that I wondered what it would be like. My wondering took the form of drawing a box around an unlimited Self and, within that box, allowing a world of impossibilities to grow. But it is still only wondering, imagination, pretend–like. I am not guilty of anything, and there is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, there is no guilt and no fear except in my little box.

An Escape

There is an escape route, a way out, and a Guide to help me find it. I cannot be held captive to my imagination. My captivity is part of my play and is self-imposed. The feeling of being trapped and cramped within my story is the awakening of the memory of who I am. The path out is one small step at a time which seems to take forever, but what is time to an eternal being? And remember, we are utterly free, and it is only a thought within this holy mind that we are, which imagines imprisonment.

I used to envision the path out as being lovely white stones, one in front of the other, going on and on, out of sight. And I just trusted that they would lead me Home. I saw myself studying and practicing and, with each effort moving forward to the next stone. Now I see it a little differently. I see that the path is made up of two stones side by side. One for each foot? No, silly, one for me and one for you. We go home hand in hand.

Our imagination made a world of separate beings, and to undo this world, we must rejoin. In the world of illusion, that looks like me and you recognizing that we are in agreement on a single thing. I was mad at you, and you were feeling offended. Still separate. I am getting a glimmer of the path out and that I want out.

A Different Decision

I decide that more than I want you to be wrong, I want to be free of this confining existence. So, I accept the Atonement in this situation, and Love heals my mind. I take your hand, and we move forward a step. We don’t care about the disagreement anymore. And we don’t care who is right or who is wrong. We don’t even need someone else to be guilty, so the entire situation shifts. Instead of standing in fear and guilt, our willingness, our true desire, drew us together and forward.

It is so simple that the mind, mired in complexity, tends to overlook it. But practice has brought it to the forefront of my mind, and now it occurs to me more and more often. Each time I make that simple and obvious choice, I get closer to Heaven. As we make this journey, we are preparing our minds for the ultimate undoing, the moment we take God’s Hand (metaphorically speaking) and the memory bubble bursts.

The world we made and all the dramas, pain, and suffering we take so seriously dissolve like a dream on awakening. How we will laugh to realize we did this to ourselves and that we did nothing at all. We were not taking a journey to Heaven; we were remembering that where God and His Son join, Heaven is. We could never have been separate from God because that is not His Will or Ours. This is only a dream of separation, and the dream is over.

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