Lesson 181
I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
p1. Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding
up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction
in yourself. 2 When you attack a brother, you
proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. 3
You do not look beyond his errors. 4 Rather,
they are magnified, becoming blocks to your awareness of the Self that lies
beyond your own mistakes, and past his seeming sins as well as yours.
p2. Perception has a focus. 2 It is
this that gives consistency to what you see. 3
Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. 4
Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced
the one you held before. 5 Remove your focus
on your brother’s sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith
in sinlessness. 6 This faith receives its only
sure support from what you see in others past their sins. 7
For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. 8
And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies
beyond.
p3. Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little
focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent.
2 We instruct our minds that it is this we seek,
and only this, for just a little while. 3 We
do not care about our future goals. 4 And what
we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of
time wherein we practice changing our intent. 5
We seek for innocence and nothing else. 6 We
seek for it with no concern but now.
p4. A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past
and future goals. 2 You have been quite preoccupied
with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from
those you held before. 3 And you have also been
dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that, even if you should
succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.
p5. How could this matter? 2 For the
past is gone; the future but imagined. 3 These
concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception.
4 Nothing more. 5
We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. 6
We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude
upon us now. 7 We enter in the time of practicing
with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.
p6. We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our
way in any form. 2 And if a brother’s sins occur
to us, our narrowed focus will restrict our sight, and turn our eyes upon
our own mistakes, which we will magnify and call our “sins.” 3
So, for a little while, without regard to past or future, should such blocks
arise we will transcend them with instructions to our minds to change their
focus, as we say:
- 4 It is not this that I would look upon.
- 5 I trust my brothers, who are one with
me.
p7. And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout
the day. 2 We do not seek for long-range goals.
3 As each obstruction seems to block the vision
of our sinlessness, we seek but for surcease an instant from the misery
the focus upon sin will bring, and uncorrected will remain.
p8. Nor do we ask for fantasies. 2
For what we seek to look upon is really there. 3
And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world.
4 When seeing this is all we want to see, when
this is all we seek for in the name of true perception, are the eyes of
Christ inevitably ours. 5 And the Love He feels
for us becomes our own as well. 6 This will
become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.
p9. The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof
that we are sinless. 2 And our love for everyone
we look upon attests to our remembrance of the holy Self which knows no
sin, and never could conceive of anything without Its sinlessness. 3
We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. 4
We look neither ahead nor backwards. 5 We look
straight into the present. 6 And we give our
trust to the experience we ask for now. 7 Our
sinlessness is but the Will of God. 8 This instant
is our willing one with His.
Posted on July 1, 2008 :: Print This Post
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