LESSON 165
Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.
1 What makes this world seem real except your own denial of the truth that lies beyond? What but your thoughts of misery and death obscure the perfect happiness and the eternal life your Father wills for you? And what could hide what cannot be concealed except illusion? What could keep from you what you already have except your choice to see it not, denying it is there?
2 The Thought of God created you. It left you not, nor have you ever been apart from it an instant. It belongs to you. By it you live. It is your Source of life, holding you one with it, and everything is one with you because it left you not. The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love. Eternity and everlasting life shine in your mind, because the Thought of God has left you not, and still abides with you.
3 Who would deny his safety and his peace, his joy, his healing and his peace of mind, his quiet rest, his calm awakening, if he but recognized where they abide? Would he not instantly prepare to go where they are found, abandoning all else as worthless in comparison with them? And having found them, would he not make sure they stay with him, and he remain with them?
4 Deny not Heaven. It is yours today, but for the asking. Nor need you perceive how great the gift, how changed your mind will be before it comes to you. Ask to receive, and it is given you. Conviction lies within it. Till you welcome it as yours, uncertainty remains. Yet God is fair. Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow.
5 Ask with desire. You need not be sure that you request the only thing you want. But when you have received, you will be sure you have the treasure you have always sought. What would you then exchange for it? What would induce you now to let it fade away from your ecstatic vision? For this sight proves that you have exchanged your blindness for the seeing eyes of Christ; your mind has come to lay aside denial, and accept the Thought of God as your inheritance.
6 Now is all doubting past, the journey’s end made certain, and salvation given you. Now is Christ’s power in your mind, to heal as you were healed. For now you are among the saviors of the world. Your destiny lies there and nowhere else. Would God consent to let His Son remain forever starved by his denial of the nourishment he needs to live? Abundance dwells in him, and deprivation cannot cut him off from God’s sustaining Love and from his home.
7 Practice today in hope. For hope indeed is justified. Your doubts are meaningless, for God is certain. And the Thought of Him is never absent. Sureness must abide within you who are host to Him. This course removes all doubts which you have interposed between Him and your certainty of Him.
8 We count on God, and not upon ourselves, to give us certainty. And in His Name we practice as His Word directs we do. His sureness lies beyond our every doubt. His Love remains beyond our every fear. The Thought of Him is still beyond all dreams and in our minds, according to His Will.
INITIAL INSIGHT: “The Thought of God created you. It left you not, nor have you ever been apart from it an instant. It belongs to you. By it you live. It is your Source of life, holding you one with it, and everything is one with you because it left you not. The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love. Eternity and everlasting life shine in your mind, because the Thought of God has left you not, and still abides with you.”
I know that the Thought of God is not just me thinking about God. It is the Creative Force that is Life. I could not have lost that or I would not live. It remains with me even in my dreams of separation. All the things that the Thought of God gives me, care, protection, happiness, and love, are still there for me and if that is not my experience it is because I have turned away from them. My attention is on the ego’s gifts of pain, suffering, and death. As I have released more and more of the ego beliefs, my experience is closer to my reality.
“Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow.”
It’s a good thing this is true. When I started asking for healing, I was not entirely certain I wanted it. I wanted to be free of the effects of choosing ego, but I sometimes still wanted to feel like a victim or unfairly treated. I often wanted to keep pointing at my brother as the guilty one so as to obscure my part. But that I asked, meant that I was answered. And, as I was able, I accepted the answer even if I had to do so a little at a time.
“Ask with desire.”
When I first began this journey, I asked out of desperation for a better life. It took a while before that asking changed to one of true desire. Now my heart longs for the memory of Self and the memory of the oneness of God. Now the answers come quicker and I embrace them faster and more completely.
“Now is all doubting past, the journey’s end made certain, and salvation given you. Now is Christ’s power in your mind, to heal as you were healed. For now you are among the saviors of the world.”
This isn’t 100% true for me 100% of the time, but it is truer for me than it ever has been, and true enough for me to know that the journey’s end is imminent. Abundance dwells in me and what deprivation is left in my mind is being undone even now as I write about this. It cannot cut me off from God’s sustaining Love.
“We count on God, and not upon ourselves, to give us certainty. And in His Name we practice as His Word directs we do. His sureness lies beyond our every doubt. His Love remains beyond our every fear. The Thought of Him is still beyond all dreams and in our minds, according to His Will.”
DAILY APPLICATION: Here is what I do these days. I woke up with a thought of guilt in my mind. I saw the error that prompted the guilt and I let it go. I used to cherish my errors, holding them close, obsessing over them. But I have no need to do that anymore, no interest in it. I look at them with the Holy Spirit and I let them go. It is so simple that I have trouble remembering why I didn’t always do that. This change of mind is the result of vigilant practice until it becomes second nature.
Later this morning, I had a surge of grief come over me for the loss of the relationship with my brother. I let it come and then in its time, I let it go. I don’t wallow in it and I don’t use it to gain sympathy and expressions of love. I don’t use it as proof that I am separate from those who are not suffering and I don’t use it to prove that death is real and God is not.
I don’t need to do those kinds of things anymore. I know that relationships with loved ones come for a while and then go. I cannot lose the love that was shared in the relationship so I don’t need to cling to the form love took once the relationship has passed. At least that is my experience today. I am always open to whatever experience comes and open to more healing when it is needed.
Today, thoughts will come and go and most of those thoughts will not be true. If some of them interest me, I look at them as I have done for years now and when I see they hold no value, I release them to the Holy Spirit and return to peace. This is how I protect my peace. To do otherwise is to deny the Thought of God that is my Life.
Another thing I do is to contemplate my reality. Sometimes this is just a simple awareness of what I am. I do this at an inner prompting. I might ask, “Who am I?” And then I wait in stillness for the answer. There are no words, just a knowing. Sometimes it is a welling up of gratitude to know who I am. And I have discovered that knowing who I am, I know who my brothers are. Only occasionally do I have thoughts of judgment about someone and it passes leaving hardly a ripple in its wake. I am a Thought in the Mind of God and so are all of us and that is a truth that is so undeniable that judgment can obscure it briefly but can’t shake it.
INSIGHTS FROM HOLY SPIRIT: Right now, I have some small physical experiences in this body that I am looking at with the Holy Spirit. I’m not sure what they are for, what they have to teach me. Because I am used to a more immediate release of beliefs, I find myself getting impatient and so I pause for a moment and rest in God. I wait for answers knowing they will come in perfect timing. Why wouldn’t they? God has placed the answer right next to the problem. I am waiting for the light to dawn, Holy Spirit, as I know it will.
GRATITUDE: Thank you, God. I love you, God.
REGINA’S TIPS
Since Lesson 156, I walk with God in perfect holiness, we have spent the majority of our days noticing awareness-life-presence. We have noticed it is always present. We have noticed it is what we are. And yet, most of us do not fully realize our Self as awareness-life-presence. Why?
The answer is, the mind denies truth, and we continue to believe the mind.
Here are some common doubt thoughts that arise in the mind of a spiritual aspirant:
~ I do not want truth enough.
~ I do not practice well enough.
~ The truth is out of reach.
~ I do not give enough time to practice in order to realize truth.
~ I do not know what truth is.
~ I will never realize truth.
~ I am not good enough to realize truth.
~ Truth does not exist.
All of these doubt thoughts deny truth. When any one of these thoughts is believed, it keeps us from noticing awareness-life-presence now. And as yesterday’s lesson said, “What time but now can truth be recognized? The present is the only time there is. And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there.”
Today’s workbook lesson encourages us to practice with hope, because hope counteracts doubt.
What if we replaced every thought of doubt with a thought of hope? For example, we could replace, “I do not want truth enough” with “I must want truth more than I think, because spirituality is an ongoing focus in my life.”
Which do you think benefits the purpose of awakening more: negative thoughts of doubt or positive thoughts of hope? Which do you think benefits the ego more?
Let’s do two things today:
1 – Pay particular attention to discover the thoughts of doubt that you listen to. Look at those thoughts with reason, meaning notice that those thoughts serve the ego and discourage spiritual aspiration. Look for reasonable thoughts of hope to replace them with, thoughts that encourage you instead of discouraging you.
2 – Continue to notice awareness-life-presence. Throughout the day, each time you remember, take a moment to notice that you are aware and you exist. Even when you are distracted from awareness-life-presence by doubt, you are still aware and you still exist. Doubt does not change the truth; it only denies it.
MY THOUGHTS
One of my common doubt thoughts was that I do not practice well enough or long enough to realize truth. That is no longer true for me. I have noticed the Holy Spirit’s nudge from time to time to give more time to meditation. It feels more like a strong desire to meditate or just an awareness that I am not as happy when I don’t give time for meditation.
It is not that same feeling of dread that I used to have when I thought I was slacking off and my laziness or inability to do this right was going to keep me in hell. I am grateful for these gentle reminders. I am also grateful that doubt does not change the truth and I have seen that doubt does deny the truth or as Jesus phrases it, my doubt denies the Thought of God. When I notice doubt these days, I gently but firmly release it knowing it is just the ego thinking mind and not to be believed even for a moment.