Lesson 151
Accept His Word for what you are
All things are echoes of the Voice for God.
1. No one can judge on partial evidence. ²That is not judgment. ³It is merely an opinion based on ignorance and doubt. ⁴Its seeming certainty is but a cloak for the uncertainty it would conceal. ⁵It needs irrational defense because it is irrational. ⁶And its defense seems strong, convincing, and without a doubt because of all the doubting underneath.
Probably you have heard this quote. “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.” Of all the writings of Shakespeare, why is it that this sentence is among those that comes to mind so easily? I think it is because so many relate to it. We have ourselves protested too much or know someone who does so. We protest too much because while we want something to be true, we doubt our honesty. We do this deliberately to convince others of what is not true, or we do it because something in us knows that we are not being honest and we are trying desperately to convince ourselves that it is true. This is what we do all the time in an effort to believe there is a world and we are part of it.
2. You do not seem to doubt the world you see. ²You do not really question what is shown you through the body’s eyes. ³Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. ⁴That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger, when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! ⁵Why would you trust them so implicitly? ⁶Why but because of underlying doubt, which you would hide with show of certainty?
Recently, I awoke to the sound of rain coming down hard and lay there thinking about what this would mean to my plans for the day. When I got up, I realized that my ears had deceived me; it was only the sound of the air conditioning. I was looking for my keys the other day and couldn’t find them. I looked where they were supposed to be and then in each room and didn’t see them anywhere. I knew they had to be here, so I started over and looked again, and there they were in plain sight. My eyes had deceived me at first glance.
Scientists have proven that our eyes deceive us all the time. We look at a table and think it is a solid piece of furniture. It is really just a cloud of tiny particles held together by powerful electrical forces. Solid objects are mostly empty space. After reading that fact, I never again trusted my eyes to tell me the truth. The further quantum physicists peer into the nature of reality, the more evidence they are finding that everything is energy at the most fundamental levels. Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. So why is it we still fail to question what we think is reality? ⁶Why but because of underlying doubt, which you would hide with show of certainty?
3. How can you judge? ²Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. ³Yet witness never falser was than this. ⁴But how else do you judge the world you see? ⁵You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. ⁶You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. ⁷This is awareness that you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself.
What do you believe? Honestly, what is your most persistent belief about the world? Jesus could not be any clearer. He tells us repeatedly that there is no world, and yet, we insist that what is true is not true. We base our judgment on partial and unreliable evidence and resist any other interpretation even though we know that we cannot trust our senses.
4. Can this be judgment? ²You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. ³You cannot judge. ⁴You merely can believe the ego’s judgments, all of which are false. ⁵It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt.
We should always doubt our judgments based on the fact that we cannot judge. We don’t have enough information; we cannot see the whole picture. We turn to the ego thought system for information and it cannot tell us the truth because it does not know the truth nor does it desire the truth. The ego thought system was made to obscure the truth and to promote its own agenda, that is, we are bodies in a world of time and space. This thought system tells us over and over that we are here to hide from God because we are guilty.
5. This thing it speaks of, and would yet defend, it tells you is yourself. ²And you believe that this is so with stubborn certainty. ³Yet underneath remains the hidden doubt that what it shows you as reality with such conviction it does not believe. ⁴It is itself alone that it condemns. ⁵It is within itself it sees the guilt. ⁶It is its own despair it sees in you.
The world seen from the perspective of the ego thought system is guilty and it appears as if this guilt and the resultant despair is mine. But it is not.
6. Hear not its voice. ²The witnesses it sends to prove to you its evil is your own are false, and speak with certainty of what they do not know. ³Your faith in them is blind because you would not share the doubts their lord can not completely vanquish. ⁴You believe to doubt his vassals is to doubt yourself.
This appears to be true only because we took on the ego as our identity when we rejected our true identity. But nothing actually happened. Our Self is unaffected by this evil entity that is the ego’s idea of what we are.
7. Yet you must learn to doubt their evidence will clear the way to recognize yourself, and let the Voice for God alone be Judge of what is worthy of your own belief. ²He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body’s mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers’ touch reports of him. ³He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God’s Son. ⁴He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds.
So, what happens is that in some way we are always asking either the ego or the Holy Spirit for advice and interpretations. When we ask the ego what we are, we receive our answer in what the eyes show us, and what we hear with our ears. But that only shows us what is part of the illusion, not the truth. When we ask the Holy Spirit what we are, we are given to understand what the Holy Spirit understands. . ⁴He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds.
8. Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt, because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its face. ²Christ cannot doubt Himself. ³The Voice for God can only honor Him, rejoicing in His perfect, everlasting sinlessness. ⁴Whom He has judged can only laugh at guilt, unwilling now to play with toys of sin; unheeding of the body’s witnesses before the rapture of Christ’s holy face.
Oh my! What an incredibly beautiful and uplifting paragraph. Let us laugh at guilt and fear. Let us lay aside the toys of sin. Let us ask for Christ Vision when we meet a brother.
9. And thus He judges you. ²Accept His Word for what you are, for He bears witness to your beautiful creation, and the Mind Whose Thought created your reality. ³What can the body mean to Him Who knows the glory of the Father and the Son? ⁴What whispers of the ego can He hear? ⁵What could convince Him that your sins are real? ⁶Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. ⁷His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth.
Let Him judge us and everything that happens to us in the world and as we accept His judgment over ours, we will be happy and peaceful. We will come to see ourselves in the reflection of His perfect judgment and thus see our brothers in this way as well.
10. He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. ²He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances, and can behold the gentle face of Christ in all of them. ³You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings, and teach the single lesson that they all contain.
Do we put our faith in pain, disaster, suffering, and loss? Well, the other day I caught myself offering anxiety to my daughters as I spoke of coming disaster and loss because the risk of hurricanes is high this summer. Jeez. What was I thinking? I had to give that one to the Holy Spirit and forgive myself for my error. A common thing is to have an unusual pain in the body and to start googling to see how bad it actually is. LOL. Or maybe we can just remove our faith in pain and suffering and assume everything is going to be alright, and that if something needs to be done about the body, we will be guided as to what to do. All things are lessons God would have me learn and so it is the lesson within these happenings that interests me.
11. He will select the elements in them which represent the truth, and disregard those aspects which reflect but idle dreams. ²And He will reinterpret all you see, and all occurrences, each circumstance, and every happening that seems to touch on you in any way from His one frame of reference, wholly unified and sure. ³And you will see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world.
This is how the Holy Spirit heals our mind. All we have to do is ask and set aside our own interpretations and accept His.
12. Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. ²It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself. ³In everyone and everything His Voice would speak to you of nothing but your Self and your Creator, Who is one with Him. ⁴So will you see the holy face of Christ in everything, and hear in everything no sound except the echo of God’s Voice.
How do we resurrect? We turn to the Holy Spirit as our Advisor and our Healer and look with Him at what keeps us bound to the world. As we do this over and over, our mind starts to clear and we begin to understand that the world is not our home and that our life is not part of anything we see. We exist in God and nowhere else. When we begin to see this is true, we will start to see truth everywhere and in everyone.
13. We practice wordlessly today, except at the beginning of the time we spend with God. ²We introduce these times with but a single, slow repeating of the thought with which the day begins. ³And then we watch our thoughts, appealing silently to Him Who sees the elements of truth in them. ⁴Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back again as clean ideas that do not contradict the Will of God.
14. Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son, as proof of His eternal Love. ²And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing power from the Mind which saw the truth in it, and failed to be deceived by what was falsely added. ³All the threads of fantasy are gone. ⁴And what remains is unified into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere.
Nothing in the world is stable and dependable, and all of it is separate and in opposition. No wonder life is hard and exhausting. But we have a choice. We can stop turning to the ego-mind for understanding and judgment. We can turn to the holy mind instead and our minds will be healed as each thought is transformed into a perfect unified Thought. All we need to do is to ask and accept the answer.
15. Spend fifteen minutes thus when you awake, and gladly give another fifteen more before you go to sleep. ²Your ministry begins as all your thoughts are purified. ³So are you taught to teach the Son of God the holy lesson of his sanctity. ⁴No one can fail to listen, when you hear the Voice for God give honor to God’s Son. ⁵And everyone will share the thoughts with you which He has retranslated in your mind.
We do these lessons and accept the purification of our thoughts for ourselves and on behalf of everyone. We give what we receive and it is given back to us. We cannot fail if we listen to the Voice for God.
16. Such is your Eastertide. ²And so you lay the gift of snow-white lilies on the world, replacing witnesses to sin and death. ³Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed, and joyfully released from guilt. ⁴Now do we lift our resurrected minds in gladness and in gratitude to Him Who has restored our sanity to us.
17. And we will hourly remember Him Who is salvation and deliverance. ²As we give thanks, the world unites with us and happily accepts our holy thoughts, which Heaven has corrected and made pure. ³Now has our ministry begun at last, to carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone.
This purification process is the beginning of our ministry. As our mind is healed, we naturally extend this healing to everyone. Sometimes they show up in a very visible and active way in our lives. Sometimes the healing goes to those who need it without our active participation. It doesn’t matter. We can trust that all we do is well used by the Holy Spirit and will help awaken the Sonship.