ACIM Lesson 245. Your peace is with me Father. I am safe.
Lesson 245
Your peace is with me, Father. I am safe.
1. Your peace surrounds me, Father. ²Where I go, Your peace goes there with me. ³It sheds its light on everyone I meet. ⁴I bring it to the desolate and lonely and afraid. ⁵I give Your peace to those who suffer pain, or grieve for loss, or think they are bereft of hope and happiness. ⁶Send them to me, my Father. ⁷Let me bring Your peace with me. ⁸For I would save Your Son, as is Your Will, that I may come to recognize my Self.
2. And so we go in peace. ²To all the world we give the message that we have received. ³And thus we come to hear the Voice for God, Who speaks to us as we relate His Word; Whose Love we recognize because we share the Word that He has given unto us.
To know peace, I must know who I am.
It is my highest aspiration to be the peace of God and to give peace wherever I go, to know that I am safe, and to help others know this, too. To do this, I must know that I am the peace of God. I stay vigilant for thoughts that obscure this fact. To live in the certainty that we are peace and that we are safe in that peace, we must know that we are as God created us. This means that we are only That and nothing else. We are not Spirit and a body; we are not in God and in the world. We are only what God created.
The ego never gives up trying to entice us into the world again.
I love this lesson, and it made my heart soar to read it. But even as I sat here rejoicing in these words, my mind began to wander. I thought about my son leaving early to drive back to New Orleans to for a job interview. I hoped all went well for him and that he would be safe on the road. This hope implied the fear that he was not safe.
I rolled my eyes. This is the way the ego seeks to bring us back down to the level of the world. It points out the many dangers, and if the mind is not disciplined, it is easy to fall for this. But not this time, ego. There is no world, and we are not in these bodies. We are watchers and decision-makers only. The story we are watching is just an ancient memory we have placed before our eyes. This detachment from the story makes it possible to step back from the temptation to believe what the body’s senses tell us and to remember the truth.
I share His Word in different ways.
Sometimes I share His Word literally as I answer a prayer request or comfort someone in pain or grief. Sometimes I share His Word through my smile, my openness, and my caring. And sometimes it is done silently, mind to mind. They are all equally effective when I am an open channel, or to put another way, when I am miracle-ready.
I become miracle-ready when I accept the peace of God and do not block this gift with my ego thoughts. When I am open and receptive to His Word, I am His channel, and I bring peace with me wherever I go, and that peace is shared with whoever he brings my way. I don’t decide who it is for or how it is shared. As I give this gift, I receive it, and I am happier and more peaceful and miracle ready for the next opportunity. It is a lovely and efficient way to awaken the Sonship, and I am grateful to be part of it.
Regina’s Tips
On “What is the World?”
The Teachings of Inner Ramana says:
“Think of mind as a filter. This filter enables one to see objects where there is light. This filter enables one to distinguish differences where there are none. … Without the mind, one would be unable to experience the world. But this does not mean that one must be subject to the mind.
The mind, when believed and taken seriously, seems to define reality. But as I have just shown, the mind does not define reality. It places a veil of perception over reality so reality can be experienced in a new way. This means that the mind is a trickster or illusionist, and that which it creates is purely illusion. To believe the mind is to believe illusion. To think illusion is reality is to be completely deluded.
Again, I emphasize that belief in illusion, or the process of being deluded, comes from believing the mind.
This must mean then, that the process of awakening is also the process of learning not to believe the stories of the mind.
My Thoughts
I love this explanation from The Teachings of Inner Ramana. It is very much what we are learning from ACIM, and put into different words, it helps me to absorb it more fully. I always think of the mind as a filter. For instance, we use the mind to perceive. I see a tree that has meaning to me because of my thoughts about the tree.
It has a different meaning to someone else because they have different thoughts about trees. Using the language of the Inner Ramana, the tree is filtered through the mind and interpreted. These filters are developed over our lifetimes, but we don’t have to continue to live with the filters we have. They can be changed; this is what the lessons in A Course in Miracles are doing for us. They are changing the filters to make them purer and closer to the truth.
Regina suggests we use meditations to help us become aware of our Self and that we practice surrender, asking “What am I to do now?” rather than using thought which is the source of delusion.
This is something I wrote three years ago.
Now that I have been studying the Course for several years, I have a certain perspective. I can look back and see how I have changed, though, like most words we use, change is not really accurate. I have not changed, being a changeless creation of God. A better way to say it would be to look back and see myself as I appeared while deeply engaged in the ego and compare that to myself as I am slowly revealed. It looks like layers of the mask are falling away as I allow the ego thoughts to be corrected by the Holy Spirit, and so it looks like I have changed.
One apparent difference is that I now understand better than I did before that there is indeed nothing for me to do in the world. I will do things as directed and guided, but it is different than I imagined. I used to think that once I knew something worth sharing, I would be a teacher, a guide, a minister, a writer. Maybe I would do workshops or speak in public. Well, I do all those things, but that is not what I am here to do. Those are just outward forms of the one thing that makes a difference.
I forgive.
The effects of forgiveness look like peace, love, and joy. I express those effects in my writing, talks, counseling, and all the things that occupy my time. I could do none of those things, and still, the effect would be peace, and that would be a gift to all I meet. If I met no one, the peace would spread throughout the Sonship anyway because the Sonship is mind, not bodies. I really need do nothing to make any of this happen. All I need to do is forgive, and everything else happens naturally.
My ego-mind had a lot of resistance to this idea at first. It balked at the thought of having so little importance in the scheme of things and insisted there was much to be done, and so it kept me quite busy and distracted. But there is the part of my mind that knows the truth, and so I just kept forgiving behind all the busyness. Slowly I surrendered to the thought that I need do nothing, that I am not special, and that all things are done not by me, but through me. I surrendered to the realization that I am a vessel for God and in no way the director or creator of that Force. It does not feel like a loss. It feels like peace.
And so I give peace more the way God gives.
As I was created by God, like God, I am peace. It extends itself naturally with no effort on my part. Everything goes as it was meant to go until I decide I want something else. I fully understand the phenomena of only being able to handle so much happiness and then retreating into fear for a while. But another apparent change I am noting is that over the years, those retreats are further apart and don’t last as long.
I might give up my peace a dozen times in a day, but I notice I have done it and change my mind very quickly. I used to go from one drama to another with only brief moments of respite, so this is quite a difference. Now, once in a while, maybe once a month, I look at some deeply held ego thought and it may take a while to get through it. But even that is better because it is more deliberate. I choose to look so that I can allow healing. And even in the chaos of an ego storm, there is a calm center that holds onto to the truth. This is my observer, I think, the decision-maker who is watching the effects of ego thinking and deciding which teacher to follow, and in the end, always chooses peace.
Here is one thing that remains a mystery to me.
When I broach some ego thoughts I am attached to, I still feel a very strong ego response. I can be deeply afraid or angry. Guilt can be almost overwhelming. It is a foregone conclusion about how I will choose in the end, so why this visceral reaction as I look at the ego belief? Depending on how much of my value system is invested in this ego belief it can feel like a little quake shaking the structure of my belief system. The good thing about it is that all that shaking makes it impossible to pretend nothing is happening. I am very aware that something needs to be looked at with the Holy Spirit.
For the last few days, I have been torturing myself believing that I can see the insanity in someone else and think it is really in someone else. This insane belief has kept me hostage to suffering, and worse than that, it has kept me from knowing myself as peace and thus extending that peace. I have done all the crazy ego things we do when we feel threatened. I have defended myself and attacked and gathered evidence, and invited others to join my insanity. It feels like I have emerged from the pits of hell.
I want to say it was a waste of time.
And the ego wants to say I should be ashamed and embarrassed and that it was a sin. But here is the truth. It was a burning away of an idea that has held a place in my mind for eons, the idea that I can project my worst beliefs about myself onto someone else and be rid of them. Is it all gone, completely and forever? I don’t know, but I don’t think it has the same hold on me. If that idea shows up again, perhaps it will be only a shadow of its old self. I read something today written by someone who has Awakened, and she said this:
It is not a pleasant process; it hurts like hell
It is not like growing wings and soaring over an abyss it is like crashing, falling down an endless cliff of rocks with jagged edges, razor clouds, and fire burning every last shred of anything you held to be true.
Not like an angel’s kiss but like a stint in a Dante painting of hell.
So the next time you feel like you must be doing something wrong and that you are going backward, or like you will never Awaken at this rate, just consider that maybe awakening is what is happening and you are doing just fine.
Holy Spirit, You know what I am ready to look at. I am patient and loving with myself, as I can afford to be since you assure me that I am as God created me. And so there is no danger of failure. I will not fail to accept the correction of all ego thinking and I will not fail to wake up. I surrender to the process.
Contemplation 2026
To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 245 click here.
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