Lesson 156

I walk with God in perfect holiness.

Today’s idea but states the simple truth that makes the thought of sin impossible. It promises there is no cause for guilt, and being causeless it does not exist. It follows surely from the basic thought so often mentioned in the text; ideas leave not their source. If this be true, how can you be apart from God? How could you walk the world alone and separate from your Source?

We are not inconsistent in the thoughts that we present in our curriculum. Truth must be true throughout, if it be true. It cannot contradict itself, nor be in parts uncertain and in others sure. You cannot walk the world apart from God, because you could not be without Him. He is what your life is. Where you are He is. There is one life. That life you share with Him. Nothing can be apart from Him and live.

Yet where He is, there must be holiness as well as life. No attribute of His remains unshared by everything that lives. What lives is holy as Himself, because what shares His life is part of Holiness, and could no more be sinful than the sun could choose to be of ice; the sea elect to be apart from water, or the grass to grow with roots suspended in the air.

There is a light in you which cannot die; whose presence is so holy that the world is sanctified because of you. All things that live bring gifts to you, and offer them in gratitude and gladness at your feet. The scent of flowers is their gift to you. The waves bow down before you, and the trees extend their arms to shield you from the heat, and lay their leaves before you on the ground that you may walk in softness, while the wind sinks to a whisper round your holy head.

The light in you is what the universe longs to behold. All living things are still before you, for they recognize Who walks with you. The light you carry is their own. And thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God. Accept their reverence, for it is due to Holiness Itself, which walks with you, transforming in Its gentle light all things unto Its likeness and Its purity.

This is the way salvation works. As you step back, the light in you steps forward and encompasses the world. It heralds not the end of sin in punishment and death. In lightness and in laughter is sin gone, because its quaint absurdity is seen. It is a foolish thought, a silly dream, not frightening, ridiculous perhaps, but who would waste an instant in approach to God Himself for such a senseless whim?

Yet you have wasted many, many years on just this foolish thought. The past is gone, with all its fantasies. They keep you bound no longer. The approach to God is near. And in the little interval of doubt that still remains, you may perhaps lose sight of your Companion, and mistake Him for the senseless, ancient dream that now is past.

“Who walks with me?” This question should be asked a thousand times a day, till certainty has ended doubting and established peace. Today let doubting cease. God speaks for you in answering your question with these words:

I walk with God in perfect holiness. I light the world,

I light my mind and all the minds which God created

one with me.

INITIAL INSIGHT: This is a beautiful lesson. I was looking at past entries in my journal and saw how I went from doubt to amazement that this lesson could be true. And from there to expectation of the transformation that was sure to come. For several years, my entries show me that I became accepting that I am not the body experience that seems so apparent in this dimension. I really am spirit; I really am walking with God in perfect holiness and with each of those years this became truer in my experience.

At first, it was as if I were dreaming I was a Divine Being wandering through a maze of impossibilities, caught up in the story so thoroughly that I couldn’t remember my actual self. Eventually, this shifted so that I began to see myself as a Divine Being who was dreaming of being in this weird impossible world and trying to wake up. How long would I have stayed in this bizarre dream if an elder brother who had found his way out had not inserted this book into the dream to remind me of who I am and to give me lessons that awaken me as I do them?

DAILY APPLICATION: How does one use this lesson in their daily life? Even now that my life has shifted so completely, I feel the pull of the ego-mind. The world we made to experience separation and specialness is what we see every single day and it feels real. In this world right now, there is a pandemic with an unknown quality that makes it feel frightening. The way the mind works is that it gathers and stores information so that when we face a situation, the mind looks through its files for an answer that correlates with what is currently happening. When we are still looking to the mind for answers, it is frightening to discover that we don’t have anything in our files that we can use for this situation.

As scary as that is, it is actually helpful to awakening. Without any useful information from the ego-mind, we must turn to the Holy Spirit for an answer. The Holy Spirit doesn’t tell us what will happen tomorrow. He doesn’t tell us our character will come out just fine. He tells us that this is just an illusion, an ancient memory and that we are not in any danger at all no matter what happened long ago in this story. He then tells us how innocent we are and how holy. He tells us we walk this illusion with God!

Look at paragraph five.

“The light in you is what the universe longs to behold. All living things are still before you, for they recognize Who walks with you. The light you carry is their own. And thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God. Accept their reverence, for it is due to Holiness Itself, which walks with you, transforming in Its gentle light all things unto Its likeness and Its purity.”

The above statement is true of Who I am. It feels weird to say this about myself only when I think of myself as Myron the body/personality mask I assume for this dreamy experience. Even if I think of myself without the body but still dreaming of being separate from God, I cannot believe what Jesus is saying here.

But if I simply accept as true that I am not separate from God nor different than He created me to be, then I must be a holy savior. I must be God. The one Who walks with me is my true Self. That Self is part of God. Ultimately, that Self is God because God is Whole and does not have parts. I am practicing simply accepting that what Jesus says about me is true, and everything I perceive is part of a dream I am having, a long con I am playing on myself.

And what is it that keeps me from reclaiming my birthright? It is only the belief in sin. This is why Jesus keeps reiterating that we are innocent, and that we are sinless, and that guilt does not exist. I don’t have to undo every error I ever made or somehow make amends for them as the idea of karma suggests. Instead, what I need to do is to accept that I have never done anything that makes me guilty except in time and time doesn’t exist. I can know that I am God the Son if I simply step into that role, I think.

This Holiness that walks with us is not someone else. It is what we are. It is our true Self that walks the world with the body construct we think of as our self. As our mind heals and we start to remember who we are, the light in us goes before us. The body construct is not lit, but the Light we are shows itself in a way that is not easy to define.

Jesus says this: And thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God. All living things have this light because we are all made of the same thing, we might call this God. We are all made of God. The God in us recognizes the God in others even if it is on such an unconscious level that there is no understanding of what is happening.

How do we use this lesson in our daily life? We do so by remembering this, by reminding ourselves often of what is real and true about us. I do this in regard to the self of Myron that is my avatar in this life, and I do so for those I meet. I ask often who walks with me and with them. Then I remind myself of the answer.

I walk with God in perfect holiness. I light the world,

I light my mind and all the minds which God created

one with me.

INSIGHTS FROM HOLY SPIRIT: In 2007 when I was doing this lesson I was experiencing passive resistance in the form of forgetfulness often during the day. It is as if my mind was coated with Teflon and I could not hold onto this lesson. This is the message of encouragement I received from the Holy Spirit.

Forgive your resistance, Myron. Never make yourself guilty. Today we did work together with this thought. You are very holy indeed, and this is the simple truth about you. It is not a grandiose statement because we are not speaking of your ego self. It is the simple truth of your creation in God. To notice that your mind is straying is not a failure, but exactly what I need you to do. Continue to give Me your mind, step back, and allow me to correct and heal. Do your part by being willing for this to happen. Focus your willingness by taking a few moments every hour of the day to remind yourself that this is something you want to do. Don’t worry about how it is going, or consider how much there is left to do. After all, you walk with God, today… and every day.

GRATITUDE: These kinds of messages were very helpful to me. They reassured me that I was not alone in this study and they kept me going when it seemed I would never succeed.

REGINA’S TIPS

If one is to awaken to truth, it is important to let go of concepts, because concepts are not truth. They are imagination.

Today’s lesson asks, “How could you walk the world alone and separate from your Source?”

What is your Source? It is life. Life is what you are.

NTI Acts, Chapter 5 makes this point when it says, “God is Life, and you live, so Life must be within you. This means that God is within you also. … Right now, as you sit reading this, you live. So right now, you cannot be separate from God. Right now, God is in you and you are in God. There is no separation. Right now, your oneness with God is complete …”

Guilt and unworthiness are concepts. They are imagination. This is easy to see if you will look beyond your imagination to truth.

Think of the guiltiest person you can think of. Bring that one clearly into your mind. Now look closer. Is there life there? (Does or did that person live?) As today’s lesson points out, “There is one life,” and God is life. So look very, very carefully at your guilty one. What is most true (permanent and unchanging) about him/her, guilt or life-presence?

Who is the most unworthy person you can think of? Look at him/her in the same way. Look very, very carefully and honestly. What is most true about this one? Unworthiness or life?

Life is always clean, untouched by what the body does or what the mind thinks, just as sunlight is untouched by the stained glass window that it shines through. And life is what you are, and what others are. This is what’s consistently true. When your eyes have learned to look at truth, everything else pales by comparison.

Today’s lesson says, “’Who walks with me?’ is a question that “should be asked a thousand times a day, till certainty has ended doubting and established peace.” When you ask this question, look. Is life here now? Does it go wherever you go? Is life what you are? Keep looking. Keep noticing until you have trained your eyes to look beyond everything temporary and focus themselves on life.

MY THOUGHTS

Did someone come to mind when you read Regina’s suggestion? Did you immediately think of someone who seems unworthy or guilty? I did. And then I thought about what is always true about this one; he is one with God. God is in him and he is in God and there is no separation so that I can see he is God. Now I can’t see him as his construct because what is that compared to his reality? The light in Him shines so brightly, I am barely aware of his body, his personality, his words and actions, which really are not him at all anyway.