ACIM Lesson 209
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (189) I feel the Love of God within me now.
²The Love of God is what created me. ³The Love of God is everything I am. ⁴The Love of God proclaimed me as His Son. ⁵The Love of God within me sets me free.
⁶I am not a body. ⁷I am free.
⁸For I am still as God created me.
It is so important that we accept what it is we really are. I constantly remind myself of what I am because the world is made to keep us attached to the body image and the life of the character we are currently observing. I remind myself in many ways. When my mind takes a turn toward ego thinking and I lose my peace, of course, I release the thought but I also remind myself that I am not my thoughts. Thoughts come and thoughts go, rather quickly, actually. But I am still here when the thought is no longer here.
The thoughts might affect how I feel, I might feel sad or angry. The feeling will change. For a few minutes I will feel sad because of a thought, and then the mind, which is easily distracted, will have another thought and this one will make me feel happy. No matter what happens with my feelings, which come and go, I am still here. I am something outside my thoughts, outside my feelings, untouched by any of it.
The something that I am is the Love of God. This Love created me and sustains me. I am Its Son. And it is the Love of God within my mind that frees me from all that I made. It frees me from the endless stories we made up to experience separation and specialness. It frees me from the endless cycle of birth and death. It frees me once I decide I am ready for freedom. I may not even be consciously aware of the moment that decision was made, but from that moment on, I am being guided and supported.
I am separate from this body image, from my thoughts and feelings, from the world of time and space, but I cannot be separate from the Love of God because I am this Love. Jesus tells us this.
Your starting point is truth, and you must return to your Beginning. ⁷Much has been seen since then, but nothing has really happened. ⁸Your Self is still in peace, even though your mind is in conflict. (ACIM, T-3.VII.5:6-8)
This is the reason I am unaffected by the world and all that happens here. I have seen much but nothing has happened. I am the Love of God and nothing seen happens to me. My Self is still in peace even though my mind is in conflict. This is important because when in the story we feel like a lot is happening to us, but we are actually only observing the story. We are seeing the story, not living the story no matter how much it feels like we are living it. We are safe as we observe just as we are safe as we watch an action packed movie.
We keep coming back because we want to. Maybe guilt draws us back. Maybe we just enjoy the drama and the excitement. I don’t actually remember. But at some point, and I have reached that point and so have you, we begin to wake up from this mesmerizing dream. We pick up A Course in Miracles or in some other way discover what is actually going on and begin the process of changing our minds.
We have a lot of Helpers once we make this decision. I imagine a chorus of Helpers releasing a sigh of relief and happiness each time one of us makes the decision to wake up. Then when we come back it is for a purpose. We begin to use the world differently. Instead of using it to play, to experience separation and specialness, we use it to undo the ego.
When I have disturbing thoughts, I realize that they must be coming from the split mind because my true mind is the Love of God which is not disturbing. Based on what I have discovered through the thoughts and their effects, I decide if I want to keep having this thought. If I decide I do not want to keep feeling conflict like this, I release it to the Holy Spirit and the purification of my mind continues. I do this until I have released all the false beliefs that make up the ego. When that is done, all that is left is the Love of God that I am.