Part 1 Undoing the Way We See Things Now
Lesson 151 All Things Are Echoes of the Voice for God.
- No one can judge on partial evidence. That is not judgment. It is merely an opinion based on ignorance and doubt. Its seeming certainty is but a cloak for the uncertainty it would conceal. It needs irrational defense because it is irrational. And its defense seems strong, convincing, and without a doubt because of all the doubting underneath.
- You do not seem to doubt the world you see. You do not really question what is shown you through the body’s eyes. Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger, when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! Why would you trust them so implicitly? Why but because of underlying doubt, which you would hide with show of certainty?
- How can you judge? Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. Yet witness never falser was then this. But how else do you judge the world you see? You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. This is awareness that you understand and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself.
- Can this be judgment? You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. You cannot judge. You merely can believe the ego’s judgments, all of which are false. It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt.
- This thing it speaks of, and would yet defend, it tells you is yourself. And you believe that this is so with stubborn certainty. Yet underneath remains the hidden doubt that what it shows you as reality with such conviction it does not believe. It is itself alone that it condemns. It is within itself it sees the guilt. It is its own despair it sees you.
- Hear not its voice. The witnesses it sends to prove to you its evil is your own are false and speak with certainty of what they do not know. Your faith in them is blind because you would not share the doubts their lord cannot completely vanquish. You believe to doubt his vassals is to doubt yourself.
- Yet you must learn to doubt their evidence will clear the way to recognize yourself and let the Voice for God alone be judge of what is worthy of your own belief. He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body’s mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers’ touch reports of him. He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God’s Son. He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds.
- Let Him be judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt, because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its face. Christ cannot doubt Himself. The Voice for God can only honor Him, rejoicing in His perfect, everlasting sinlessness. Whom He has judged can only laugh at guilt, unwilling now to play with toys of sin, unheeding of the body’s witnesses before the rapture of Christ’s holy face.
- And thus He judges you. Accept His word for what you are, for He bears witness to your beautiful creation, and the Mind Whose Thought created your reality. What can the body mean to Him who knows the glory of the Father and the Son? What whispers of the ego can He hear? What could convince Him that your sins are real? Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth.
- He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering, and loss. He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances and can behold the gentle face of Christ in all of them. You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings, and teach the single lesson that they all contain.
- He will select the elements in them which represent the truth and disregard those aspects which reflect but idle dreams. And He will reinterpret all you see, and all occurrences, each circumstance, and every happening that seems to touch on you in any way from His one frame of reference, wholly unified and sure. And you will see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world.
- Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself. In everyone and everything His voice would speak to you of nothing but your Self and your Creator, who is one with Him. So will you see the holy face of Christ in everything, and here in everything no sound except the echo of God’s Voice.
- We practice wordlessly today, except at the beginning of the time we spend with God. We introduce these times with but a single, slow repeating of the thought with which the day begins. And then we watch our thoughts, appealing silently to Him who sees the elements of truth in them. Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back again as clean ideas that do not contradict the Will of God.
- Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son, as proof of His eternal love. And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing power from the mind which saw the truth in it and failed to be deceived by what was falsely added. All the threads of fantasy are gone. And what remains is unified into a perfect thought that offers its perfection everywhere.
- Spend 15 minutes thus when you are awake and gladly give another 15 minutes before you go to sleep. Your ministry begins as all your thoughts are purified. So are you taught to teach the Son of God the Holy lesson of His sanctity. No one can fail to listen, when you hear the Voice for God give honor to God’s Son. And everyone will share the thoughts with you which He has retranslated in your mind.
- Such is your Eastertide. And so you lay the gift of snow-white lilies on the world, replacing witnesses to sin and death. Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed, and joyfully released from guilt. Now do we lift our resurrected minds in gladness and in gratitude to Him who has restored our sanity to us.
- And we will hourly remember Him who is Salvation and deliverance. As we give thanks, the world unites with us and happily accepts our holy thoughts, which Heaven has corrected and made pure. Now has our ministry begun at last, to carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone.[1]
Notes and Personal Application: This morning as we spend our first fifteen minutes in devotion with the Lord, we teach ourselves the holy lesson of our sanctity in Christ. We do not believe what the ego has painted us out to be – a fallible body, a soulless avatar, motivated by hunger, thirst, and greed for pleasure. We honor ourselves as the holy eternal spirits God created. We are as God created us – and God only creates that which is good and that which lasts forever.
We do not believe the false report. And in today’s lesson Jesus teaches us that whatever our physical senses report is false. It is fake news. We can rest assured that the thoughts we hold of ourselves are the thoughts we hold of our brothers. For we are unified in our minds; we are not separated by the color of our skin or by our gender, we are not separated by time or space, we are not separated by political beliefs or religious practices. There is no difference at all if you come from the South or if you come from the North. We are one creation. What we believe of others is what we believe of ourselves, no matter how the ego wants to play games with our head and make us think otherwise!
We are no longer witnesses to death and sin; we are witnesses to life and holiness. This is our calling – we are transformed, and the world is transformed by our transfiguration. We set ourselves and the world free when we refuse to believe the false report. When we begin to stir from the stupor in which the ego has enslaved our minds, we are no longer willing pawns in the soap operatic games of the ego. No guilt. No sin. No separation. It was all a big mistake in identity, a child’s blustering stab at autonomy and specialness, a journey through the dark valley of let’s-do-it-my-way-and-not-God’s-way.
We no longer give faith to the loveless tales, the spiteful judgments, the thousands upon thousands of curious ways in which the ego has dreamed to kill us off and terrorize our minds, poisoning us against one another. We love with the love of God. We see with the eyes of Christ.
Jesus tells us that we will see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world. We will no longer doubt that God has planned only goodness for His creation, for we will know Him not only as our Lord and King, but as our loving and devoted Father.
Throughout the day today we remember Christ – our Salvation and our deliverance. When we give Him thanks, the world is no longer our enemy, but our friend who joins happily in our wholeness and our correction. This is our ministry in which we all have a part. We share this joyful message of truth. We no longer believe the false reports of death and decay, of sin and shame, for we share the only the blessed peace of God which resonates through us one and all.
[1] https://acim.org/workbook/lesson-151/
Audio credit: http://www.eckiefriar.com
the friar patch 