IA´s Journal

[IA56]

LESSON 158

”Today I learn to give as I receive.”

What has been given you? The knowledge that you are a mind, in Mind and purely mind, sinless forever, wholly unafraid, because you were created out of Love. Nor have you left your Source,remaining as you were created. This was given you as knowledge which you cannot lose. It was given as well to every living thing, for by that knowledge only does it live. You have received all this. No one who walks the world but has received it. It is not this knowledge which you give, for that is what creation gave. All this cannot be learned. What, then, are you to learn to give today?Our lesson yesterday evoked a theme found early in the text. Experience cannot be shared directly, in the way that vision can. The revelation that the Father and the Son are one will come in time to every mind. Yet is that time determined by mind itself, not taught. The time is set already. It appears to be quite arbitrary. Yet there is no step along the road that anyone takes but by chance. It has already been taken by him, although he has not yet embarked on it. For time but seems to go in one direction. We but undertake a journey that is over. Yet it seems to have a future stil unknown to us. Time is a trick, a leight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic.Yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. The script is written. When experience will come to end your doubting has been set. For we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it,imagining we make it once again; reviewing mentally what has gone by. A teacher does not give experience, because he did not learn it. It revealed itself to him at its appointed time. But vision is his gift. This he can give directly,for Christ´s knowledge is not lost, because He has a vision He can give to anyone who asks. The Father´s Will and His are joined in knowledge. Yet there is a vision which the Holy Sprit sees because the mind of Christ beholds itt oo. Here is the joining of the world of doubt and shadows make with the intangible. Here is a quiet place within the world made holy by forgiveness and by love. Here are all contradictions reconciled, for here the journey ends. Experience – unlearned, untaught, unseen – is merely there. This is beyond our goal, for it transcends what needs to be accomplished. Our concern is with Christ´s vision. This we can attain. Christ´s vison has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees.This can be taught; and must be taught by all who would achieve it. It requires but the recognition that the world can not give anything that faintly can compare with this in value; nor set up a goal that does not merely disappear when this has been perceived. And this you give today: See no one as a body.Greet him as the Son of God he is, acknowledging that he is one with you inholiness. Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision that has Power to overlook them all. In His forgiveness are they gone. Unseen by One they merely disappear, because a vision of the holiness that lies beyond them comes to take their place. It matters not what form they took, nor how enormous the appeared to be, nor who seemed to be hurt by them. They are no more. And all effects they seemed to have are gone with them, undone and never to be done.Thus do you learn to give as you recieve. And thus Christ´s vision looks on you as well. This lesson is not difficult to learn, if you remember in your brother you but see yourself. If he be lost in sin, so must you be; if you see light in him, your sin shave been forgiven by yourself. Eack brother whom you meet today provides another chance to let Christ´s vision shine on you, and offer you the peace of God. It matters not when revelation comes, for that is not of time.Yet time has still one gift to give, in which true knowledge is reflected in away so accurate its image shares its unseen holiness; its likeness shines with its immortal love. We practice seeing with the eyes of Christ today. And by the holy gifts we give, Christ´s vision looks upon ourselves as well.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 159

”I give the miracles I have received.”

No one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession.Here the laws of Heaven and the world agree. But here they also separate. The world believes that to possess a thing, it must be kept. Salvation teaches otherwise. To give is how to recognize you have recieved. It is the proof that what you have is yours. You understand that you are healed when you give healing. You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole. There is no miracles you cannot give, for all are given you. Receivet hem now by opening the store house of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away. Christ´s vision is a miracle. It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects Eternal Love and the rebirth of love which never dies, but has been kept obscure. Christ´s vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven that what God created perfect can be mirrored there. The darkened glass the world presents can show but twisted images in broken parts. The real world pictures Heaven´s innocence. Christ´s vision is the miracles in which all miracles are born. It is their source, remaining with each miracle you give,and yet remaining yours. It is the bond by which the giver and receiver areunited in extention here on earth, as they are one in Heaven. Christ beholds no sin in anyone. And in His sight the sinless are as one. Their holiness was given by His Father and Himself. Christ´s vision is the bridge between the worlds. And in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there; transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see. This is the Holy Sprit´s single gift; the treasure house to which you can appeal with perfect certainty for all the things that can contribute to your happiness. All are laid here already. All can be received but for the asking. Here the door is never locked, and no one is denied his least requestor his most urgent need. There is no sickness not already healed, no lack unsatisfied, no need unmet within this golden treasure of Christ. Here does the world remember what was lost when it was made. For here it is repaired, made new again, but in a different light. What was to be the home of sin becomes the center of redemtion and the hearth of mercy, where the suffering are healed and welcome. No one will be turned away from this new home, where his salvation waits. No one is stranger to him. No one asks for anything of him exept the gift of his acceptance of his welcoming. Christ´s vision is the holy ground in which the lilies of forgiveness set their roots. This is their home. They can be brought from here back to the world, but they can never grow in its unnorishing and shallow soil. They need the light and warmth and kindly care Christ´s charity provides. They need the love with which He looks on them. And they become His messengers, who give as they received. Take from His storehouse, that its treasures may increase. His lilies do not leave their home when they are carried back into the world. Their roots remain. They do not leave their source, but carry its beneficence with them, and turn the world into a garden like the one they came from, and to which they go again with added fragrance. Now are they twice blessed. The messages they brought from Christ have been delivered, and returned to them. And they return them gladly unto Him. Behold the store of miracles set out for you to give. Are you not worth the gift, when God appointed it be given you? Judge not God´s Son, but follow in the way He has established. Christ has dreamed the dream of a forgiven world. It is His gift, wherby a sweet transition can be made from death to life; from hopelessness to hope. Let us an instant dream with Him. His dream awakens us to truth. His vision gives the means for a return to our unlost and everlasting sanctity in God.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 160

”I am at home. Fear is the stranger here.”

Fear is a stranger to the ways of love. Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself. And thus you are unknown to you. What is your Self remains an alien to the part of you which thinks that it is real, but different from yourself. Who could be sane in such a cricumstance? Who but a madman could believe he is what he is not, and judge against himself? There is a stranger in our mindst, who comes from an idea so foreign to the truth he speaks a different language, looks upon a world truth does not know, and understands what truth regards as senseless. Stranger yet, he does not recognize to whom he comes, and yet maintains his home belongs to him, while he is alien now who is at home. And yet, how easy it would be to say. ”This is my home. Here I belong, and will not leave because a madman says I must.” What reason is there for not saying this? What could the reason be except that you had asked this stranger in to take your place, and let you be a stranger to yourself? No one would let himself be dispossessed no needlessly,unless he thought there were another home more suited to his tastes. Who is the stranger? Is it fear or you that is unsuited to the home which God provides for His Son? Is fear His Own, created in His likeness? Is it fear that love completes, and is completed by? There is no home can shelter love and fear.They cannot coexist. If you are real, then fear must be illusion. And if fear is real, then you do not exist at all. How simply, then, the question is resolved. Who fears has but denied himself and said. ”I am the stranger here. And so I leave my home to one more like me than myself, and give him all I thought belonged to me.” Now is he exiled of necessity, not knowing who he is,uncertain of all things but this; that he is not himself, and that his home has been denied to him. What does he search for now? What can he find? A stranger to himself can find no home wherever he may look, for he has made return impossible. His way is lost, except a miracle will search him out and show him that he is no stranger now. The miracel will come. For in his home his Self remains. It asked no stranger in, and took no alien though to be Itself. And It will call Its Own unto Itself in recognition of what is Its Own. Who is the stranger? Is he not the one your Self calls not? You are unable now to recognize this stranger in your midst, for you have given him your rightful place. Yet is yours Self as certain of Its Own as God is of His Son. He cannot be confused about creation. He is sure of what belongs to Him. No stranger can be interposed between His knowledge and His Son´s reality. He does not know of strangers. He is certain of His Son. God´s certainty suffices. Who He know to be His Son belongs where He has set His Son forever. He has answered you who ask, ”Who is the stranger?” Hear His Voice assure you, quietly and sure, that you are not a stranger to your Father, nor is your Creator stranger made to you. Whom God has joined remain forever one, at home in Him, no stranger to Himself. Today we offer thanks that Christ has come to search to world for what belongs to Him. His vision sees no strangers, but belongs His Own and joyously unites with them. They see Him as a stranger, for they do not recognize themselves. Yet as they give Him welcome, they remember. And He leads them gently home again, where they belong. Not one does Christ forget. Not one He fails to give you to remember, that your home may be complete and perfect as it was established. He has not forgotten you. But you will not remember Him until you look onall as He does. Who denies his brother is denying Him, and thus refusing to accept the gift of sight by which his Self is clearly recognized,his home remembered and salvation come.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 161

”Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.”

Today we practice differently,and take a stand against our anger, that our fears may disappear and offer room to love. Here is salvation in the simple words in which we practice with today´s idea. Here is the answer to temptation which can never fail to welcome in the Christ where fear and anger had prevailed before. Here is Atonement made complete, the world passed safely by and Heaven now restored. Here is the answer of the Voice for God. Complete abstraction is the natural condition ofthe mind. But part of it is now unnatural. It does not look on everything as one. It sees instead but fragments of the whole, for only thus could it invent the partial world you see. The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.Thus were specifics made. And now it is specifics we must use in practicing. We give them to the Holy Spirit, that He may employ them for a purpose which is different from the one we gave to them. Yet He can use but what we made, to teach us from a different clarity with them to you? What can they seem to be but empty sounds; pretty, perhaps, correct in sentiment, yet fundamentally not understood nor understandable. The mind that taught itself to Think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all-encompassing. We need to see a little, that we learn a lot. It seems to be the body that we feel limits our freedom, makes us suffer, and at last puts out our life. Yet bodies are but symbols for a concrete form of fear. Fear without symbols calls for no response, for symbols can stand for the meaningless. Love needs no symbols, being true. But fear attaches to specifics, being false.Bodies attack, but minds do not. This thought is surely reminiscent of our text, where it is often emphasized. This is the reason bodies easily become fear´s symbols. You have many times been urged to look beyond the body, for its sight presents the symbol of love´s ”enemy” Christ´s vision does not see. The body is the target for attack, for no one thinks he hates a mind. Yet what but mind directs the body to attack? What else could be the seat of fear exept what thinks of fear? Hate is specific. There must be a thing to be attacked. An enemy must be preceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard,and ultimately killed. When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God´s Voice proclaims there is no death. Fear is insatiable,consuming everything its eyes behold, seeing itself in everything, complelled to turn upon itself and to destroy. Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear´s symbol. And he will attack, because what he beholds is his own fearexternal to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again.Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him. This do the body´s eyes behold in one whom Heaven cherishes, the angels love and God created perfect. This is his reality. And in Christ´s vision is his loveliness reflected in a form so holy and so beautiful that you could scarce refrain from kneeling at his feet. Yet you will take his hand instead,for you are like him in the sight that sees him thus. Attack on him is enemy to you, for you will not preceive that in his hands is your salvation. Ask him but for this, and he will give it to you. Ask him not to symbolize your fear. Would you request that love destroy itself? Or would you have it revealed to you and set you free? Today we practice in a form we have attempted earlier. Your readiness is closer now, and you will come today nearer Christ´s vision. If you are intent on reaching it, you will succeed today. And once you have succeeded,you will not be willing to accept the witnesses your body´s eyes call forth.What you will see will sing to you of ancient melodies you will remember. You are not forgot in Heaven. Would you not remember it? Select one brother, symbol of the rest, and ask salvation of him. See him first as clearly as you can, inthe same form to which you are accustomed. See his face, his hands and feet,his clothing. Watch him smile, and see familar gestures which he makes so frequently. Then think of this: What you are seeing now conceals from you the sight of one who can forgive you all your sins; whose sacred hands can take away that nails which pierce your own, and lift the crown of thorns which you have placed upon your bleeding head. Ask this of him, that he may set you free:

”Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.
I would behold you with the Eyes of Christ,
And see my perfect sinlessness in you.”

And he will answer Whom you called upon. For He will hear the Voice for God in you, and answer in your own.Behold him now, whom you have seen as merely flesh and bone, and recongnizethat Christ has come to you. Today´s idea is your safe escape from anger and from fear. Be sure you use it instantly, should you be tempted to attack a brother and perceive in him the symbol of your fear. And you will see him suddenly transformed from enemy to savior; from the devil into Christ.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 162

”I am as God created me.”

This single thought, held firmly in the mind, would save the world. From time to time we will repeat it, as we reach another stage in learning. It will mean far more to you as you advance. These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. For they come from God.Here is the Word by which the Son became His Father´s happiness, His Love and His completion. Here creation is proclaimed, and honored as it is. There is no dream these words will not dispel; no thought of sin and no illusion which the dream contains that will not fade away before their might. They are the ♥♥♥♥♥etof awakening that sounds around the world. The dead awake in answer to itscall. And those who live and hear this sound will never look on death. Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind,recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure, his safety certain and his body healed, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. He will save the world, because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth. Today we practice simply. For the words we use are mighty,and they need no thoughts beyond themselves to change the mind of him who usese them. So wholly is it changed that it is now the treasury in which God places all His gifts and all His Love, to be distributed to all the world,increased in giving; kept complete because its sharing is unlimited. And thus youl earn to think with God. Christ´s vision has restored your sight by salvaging your mind. We honor you today. Yours is the right to perfect holiness you now accept. With this acceptance is salvation brought to everyone, for who could cherish sin when holiness like this has blessed the world? Who could despair when perfect joy is yours, available to all as remedy for grief and misery, all sense of loss, and for complete escape from sin and guilt? And who would not be brother to you now; you, his redeemer and his savior. Who could fail to welcome you into his heart with loving invitation, eager to unite with one like him inholiness? You are as God created you. These words dispel the night, and darkness is no more. The light is come today to bless the world. For you have recognized the Son of God, and in that recognition is the world´s.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 163

”There is no death. The Son of God is free.”

Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoutghts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release. Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sighless eyes. The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image,thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worhty of their trust. For it alone will surely come. All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake, in place of aspirations and of dreams. But death is counted on. For it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. It will never fail to take all life as hostage of itself. Would you bow down to idols such as this?Here is the strength and might of God Himself perceived within an idol made of dust. Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God´s Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven´s perfect,changeless constancy. Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally,and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God. Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be.His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he as passed to dust. It says but this: ”Here lies a withned God is dead.” And this is writess again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree,and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whispers fearfully that it is so. It is impossible to worship death in any form, and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid, while still believing in the rest.For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die.No compromise is possible. For here again was see an obvious position, which we must accept if we be sane; what contradicts one thought entirely cannot be true, unless its opposite is proven false. This idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, bythose who did not want Him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son aswell. Death´s worshippers may be afraid. And yet, can thoughts like these be fearful? If they saw that it is only this which they believe, they would be instantly released. And you will show them this today. There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death, and see the life beyond.

”Our Father, bless our Eyes today. We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. We live and move in You alone. We are not spearate from Your eternal life. There is no death, for death is not Your Will. And we abide where You have placed us, in the life we share with You and with all living things, to be like You and part of You forever. We accept YourThoughts as ours, and our will is one with Yours eternally. Amen.”

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 164

”Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.”

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; not in our sight, but in the eyes of Christ. He looks past time, and sees eternity as represented there. He hears the sounds the senseless, busy world engenders, yet He hears them faintly. For beyond them all He hears the song of Heaven, and the Voice for God more clear, more meaningful, more near. The world fades easily away before His sight, Its sounds grow dim. A melody from far behond the world incresingly is more and more distinct; and ancient Call to Which He gives an ancient answer.You will recognize them both, for they are but your answer to your Father´s Call to you. Christ answers to you, echoing your Self, using your voice to give His glad consent; accepting your deliverance for you. How holy is your practicing today, as Christ gives you His sight and hears for you, and answers in your name the Call He hears! How quiet is the time you give to spend with Him, beyond the world. How easily are all your seeming sins forgot, and all your sorrows unremembered. On this day is grief laid by, for sights and sounds that come from nearer than the world are clear to you who will today accept the gift He gives. There is a silence into which the world can not inturde. Threre is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. There is a sense of holiness in you that thought of sin has never touched. All this today you will remember. Faithfulness in practicing today will bring rewards so great and so completely different from all things you sought before, that you will know that here your treasure is, and here you rest. This is the day when vain imaginings part like a curtain, to reveal what lies beyond them. Now is what is really there made visible, while all the shadows which appeared to hide it merely sink away. Now is the balance righted, and the scale of judgment left to Him Who judges true. And in His judgment will a world unfold in perfect innocence before your eyes. Now will you see it with the eyes of Christ. Now is its transformation clear to you.Brother, this day is sacred to the world. Your vision, given you from far beyond all things within the world, looks back ont hem in a new light. And what you see becomes the healing and salvation of the world. The valuable and valueless are both perceived and recognized for what they are. And what is worthy of your love receives your love, while nothing to be feared remains. We will not judge today. We will receive but what is given us from judgment made beyond the world. Our practicing today becomes our gift of thankfulness for our release from blindness and from misery. All that we see will but increase our joy, because its holiness reflects our own. We stand forgiven in the sight of Christ, with all the world forgiven in our own. We bless the world, as we behold it in the light in which our Savior looks on us, and offer it the freedom given us through His forgiving vision, not our own. Open the curtain in your practicing by merely letting go all things you think you want.Your trifling treasures put away, and leave a clear and open space within your mind where Christ can come, and offer you the treasure of salvation. He has need of your most holy mind to save the world. Is not this purpose worthy to be yours? Is not Christ´s vision worthy to be sought above the world´s unsatisfying goals? Let not today slip by without the gifts it holds for you receiving your consent and your acceptance. We can change the world, if you acknowledge them. You may not see the value your acceptance gives the world. But this you surely want; you can exchange all suffering for joy this very day. Practice in earnest, and the gift is yours. Would God deceive you? Can His promise fail? Can you withhold so little, when His Hands holds out complete salvation to His Son?

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 165

”Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.”

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 happpiness 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? 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 own 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. 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? Deny not Heaven. It is yours today, but for the asking. Nor need you perceive how grea 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 appearance can bestow. 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 estatic 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. 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? Abudance dwells in him, and deprivation cannot cut him off from God´s sustaining Love and from his home.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. 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.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 166

”I am entrusted with the gifts of God.”

All things are given you. God´strust in you is limitless. He knows His Son. He gives without exception,holding nothing back that can contribute to your happiness. And yet, unless your will is one with His, His gifts are not received. But what would make you think there is another will than His? Here is the paradox that underlies the making of the world. This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real.Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one that leads to opposite effects from those He wills. Impossible indeed; but every mind that looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid,trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in one God. The gifts of God are not acceptable to anyone who holds such strange beliefs. He must believe that to accept God´s gifts, however evident they may become, however urgently he may be called to claim them as his own, is to be pressed to treachery against himself. He must deny their presence,contradict the truth, and suffer to preserve the world he made. Here is the only home he thinks he knows. Here is the only safety he believes that he canfind. Without the world he made is he an outcast; homless and afraid. He does not realize that it is here he is afraid indeed, and homeless, too; an outcast wandering so far from home, so long away, he does not realize he has forgotten where he came from, where he goes, and even who he really is. Yet in his lonely, senseless wanderings. God´s gifts go with him, all unknown to him. He cannot lose them. Bu the will not look at what is given him. He wanders on, aware of the futility he sees about him everywher, preceiving how his little lot but dwindles, as he goes ahead to nowhere. Still he wanders on in misery and poverty, alone though god is with him, and a treasure his so great that everything the world contains is valueless before its magnitude. He seems a sorry figure; weary, worn, in threadbare clothing, and with feet that bleed a little from the rocky road he walks. No one but has identfied with him, fore veyone who comes here has pursued the path he follows, and has felt defeat and hopelessness as he is feeling them. Yet is he really tragic, when you see thathe is following the way he chose, and need but realize Who walks with him and open up his treasures to be free? This is your chosen self, the one you made as a replacement for reality. This is the self you savagely defend against all reason, every evidence, and all the withnesses with proof to show this is not you. You heed them not. You go on your appointed way, with eyes cast down lest you might catch a glimpse of truth, and be released from self-deception, and set free. You cower fearfully lest you should feel Christ´s touch upon your sholder, and perceive His gentle hand directing you to look upon your gifts.How could you then proclaim your poverty in exile? He would make you laugh at this perception of yourself. Where is self-pity then? And what becomes of all the tragedy you sought to make for him whom God intended only joy? Your ancient fear has come upon you now, and justice has caught up with you at last.Christ´s hand has touched your shoulder, and you feel that you are not alone.You event hink the miserable self you thought was you may not be your Identity.Perhaps God´s Word is truer than your own. Perhaps His gifts to you are real.Perhaps He has not wholly been outwitted by your plan to keep His Son in deep oblivion, and go the way you chose without your Self. God´s Will does not oppose. It merely is. It is not God you have imprisoned in your plan to lose your Self. He does not know about a plan so alien to His Will. There was a need He did not understand, to which He gave an Answer. That is all. And you who have this Answer given you have need no more of anything but This. Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be. One walks with you Who gently answers all your fears with this one merciful reply, ”It is not so.” He points to all the gifts you have each time the thought of poverty oppresses you, and speaks of His Companionship when you preceive yourself as lonely and afraid. Yet He reminds you still of one thing more you had fogotten. For His touch on you has made you like Himself. This gifts you have are not for you alone. What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make in which to hide from God. He has reminded you of all the gifts that God has given you. He speaks as well of what becomes your will when you accept these gifts, and recognize they are your own. The gifts are yours, entrusted to your care, to give to all who chose the lonely road you have escaped. They do not understand they but pursue their wishes. It is you who teach them now. For you have learned of Christ there is another way for them to walk. Teach them by showing them the happiness that comes to those who feel the touch of Christ, and recognize God´s gifts. Let sorrow not tempt you to be unfaithful to your trust.Your sighs will now betray the hopes of those who look to you for their release. Your tears are theirs. If you are sick, you but withhold their healing. What you fear but teaches them their fears are justified. Your hand becomes the giver of Christ´s touch; your change of mind becomes the proof that who accepts God´s gifts can never suffer anything. You are entrusted with the world´s release from pain. Betray it not. Become the living proof of what Christ´s touch can offer everyone. God has entrusted all His gifts to you. Be withness in your happiness to how transformed the mind becomes which chooses to accept His gifts, and feel the touch of Christ. Such is your mission now. For God entrusts the giving of His gifts to all who have received them. He has shared His joy with you. And now you go to share it with the world.

Love

[IA56]

LESSON 167

”There is one life, and that I share with God.”

There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all the God created share. Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares His Life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are one. In this world, there appears to be a state that is life´s opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown,acknowledge death. And thus deny you live. You think that death is of the body.Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be then applied as mind directs it. But its origin as where it must be changed, if change occurs. Ideas leave not their source. The emphasis this course has placed on the idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God. Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. It is the belief conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you can never change. It is the fixed belief ideas can leave their source, and take an qualities the source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as distance, time and form. Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can extend all that their source contains. In that, they can go far beyond themselves. But they can not give birth to what was never given them. As they are made, so will their makeing be. As they were born, so will they then give birth. And where they come from, there will they return. The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what isi ts waking state. It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is Alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep. The opposite of life can only be another form of life.As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps. God created only mind awake.He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. The thought of death is not the oppoiste to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within themselves, for they are everywhere. What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was. Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny your holy heritage. Our life is not as we imagined it. Who changes life because he shuts his eyes, or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? We will not ask for death in any form today. Nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself. His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. And in HisThoughts, which have no opposite, we understand there is one life, and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of life from where it came. We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from Which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect. As we were, so are we now and will forever be. A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of Life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. And now it is no more a mere reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.

Love