*
Our next few lessons make a special point
of firming up your willingness to make your weak commitment strong; your
scattered goals blend into one intent. You are not asked for total dedication
all the time, as yet. But you are asked to practice now in order to attain the
sense of peace such unified commitment will bestow, if only intermittently. It
is experiencing this which makes it sure that you will give your total
willingness to following the way the course sets forth.
Our lessons now are geared specifically to widening horizons, and direct
approaches to the special blocks which keep your vision narrow, and too limited
to let you see the value of our goal. We are attempting now to lift these
blocks, however briefly. Words alone can not convey the sense of liberation
which their lifting brings. But the experience of freedom and of peace that
comes as you give up your tight control of what you see speaks for itself. Your
motivation will be so intensified that words become of little consequence. You
will be sure of what you want and what is valueless.
And so we start our journey beyond words by concentrating first on what impedes
our progress still. Experience of what exists beyond defensiveness remains
beyond achievement while it is denied. It may be there, but you cannot accept
its presence. So we now attempt to go past all defenses for a little while each
day. No more than this is asked because no more than this is needed. It will be
enough to guarantee the rest will come.
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. When
you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived
in him. You do not look beyond his errors. 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.
Perception has a focus. It is this which gives consistency to what you see.
Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. Your vision
now will shift to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held
before. Remove your focus on your brother's sins, and you experience the peace
that comes from faith in sinlessness. This faith receives its only sure support
from what you see in others past their sins. For their mistakes, if focused on,
are witnesses to sins in you. And you will not transcend their sight and see the
sinlessness that lies beyond.
Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to
our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent. We instruct our minds
that it is this we seek and only this, for just a little while. We do not care
about our future goals, and what we saw an instant previous has no concern for
us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. We seek
for innocence and nothing else. We seek for it with no concern but now.
A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals.
You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this
course is advocating are from those you held before. 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. How could this matter? For the
past is gone; the future but imagined. These concerns are but defenses against
present change of focus in perception. Nothing more.
We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. We do not look to past
beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. We enter in the
time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within. We
recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. 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."
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:
"It is not this that I would look upon. I trust my brothers, who are one with me."
And we will also use these thoughts to keep
us safe throughout the day. We do not seek for long range goals. 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.
Nor do we ask for fantasies. For what we seek to look upon is really there. And
as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. 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. And the love He feels
for us becomes our own as well. This will become the only thing we see reflected
in the world and in ourselves.
The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless.
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. We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing
today. We look neither ahead nor backwards. We look straight into the present.
And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. Our sinlessness is but
the Will of God. This instant is our willing one with His.
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