III. Light in the Dream
1. You who have spent your life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. What you forgot was simply that God cannot destroy Himself. The light is in you. Darkness can cover it but cannot put it out.
2. As the light comes nearer you will rush to darkness, shrinking from the truth, sometimes retreating to the lesser forms of fear, and sometimes to stark terror. But you will advance because your goal is the advance from fear to truth. The goal you accepted is the goal of knowledge, for which you signified your willingness. Fear seems to live in darkness, and when you are afraid you have stepped back. Let us then join quickly in an instant of light, and it will be enough to remind you that your goal is light.
3, Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it. If you knew Who walks beside you on the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible. You do not know because the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it. A little flicker of your eyelids, closed so long, has not yet been sufficient to give you confidence in yourself, so long despised. You go toward love still hating it, and terribly afraid of its judgment upon you. And you do not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have made of it. You are advancing to love’s meaning, and away from all illusions in which you have surrounded it. When you retreat to the illusion your fear increases, for there is little doubt that what you think it means is fearful. Yet what is that to us who travel surely and very swiftly away from fear?
4. You who hold your brother’s hand also hold mine, for when you joined each other you were not alone. Do you believe that I would leave you in the darkness that you agreed to leave with me? In your relationship is this world’s light. And fear must disappear before you now. Be tempted not to snatch away the gift of faith you offered to your brother. You will succeed only in frightening yourself. The gift is given forever, for God Himself received it. You cannot take it back. You have accepted God. The holiness of your relationship is established in Heaven. You do not understand what you accepted but remember that your understanding is not necessary. All that was necessary was merely the wish to understand. That wish was the desire to be holy. The Will of God is granted you. For you desire the only thing you ever had, or ever were.
5. Each instant that we spend together will teach you that this goal is possible and will strengthen your desire to reach it. And in your desire lies its accomplishment. Your desire is not in complete accord with all the power of the Holy Spirit’s Will. No little, faltering footsteps that you may take can separate your desire from His Will and from His strength. I hold your hand as surely as you agreed to take your brother’s. You will not separate, for I stand with you and walk with you in your advance to truth. And where we go, we carry God with us.
6. In your relationship you have joined with me in bringing Heaven to the Son of God, who hid in darkness. You have been willing to bring the darkness to light, and this willingness has given strength to everyone who would remain in darkness. Those who would see will see. And they will join with me in carrying their light into the darkness when the darkness in them is offered to the light and is removed forever. My need for you, joined with me in the holy light of your relationship, is your need for salvation. Would I not give you what you gave to me? For when you joined your brother, you answered me.
7. You who are now the bringer of salvation have the function of bringing light to darkness. The darkness in you has been brought to light. Carry it back to darkness, from the holy instant to which you brought it. We are made whole in our desire to make whole. Let not time worry you, for all the fear that you and your brother experience is really past. Time has been readjusted to help us do, together, what your separate pasts would hinder. You have gone past fear, for no two minds can join in the desire for love without love’s joining them.
8. Not one light in Heaven but goes with you. Not one ray that shines forever in the Mind of God but shines on you. Heaven is joined with you in your advance to Heaven. When such great lights have joined with you to give the little spark of your desire the power of God Himself, can you remain in darkness? You and your brother are coming home together, after a long and meaningless journey that you undertook apart, and that led nowhere. You have found your brother and you will light each other’s way. And from this light will the Great Rays extend back into darkness and forward unto God, to shine away the past and so make room for His eternal Presence, in which everything is radiant in the light. [1]
We belong to God. There is no darkness in which we can hide from Him. There are no lies that will keep us from Him forever. There are no dreams, fantasies, or illusions that will ever take His place. There are no weapons that will destroy Him or His love for us. Darkness can cover the light that He has put in us, but it can never be put out or destroyed.
When we answer the call of God in our lives, when we become aware that He is Love, when we learn and experience even a little glimpse of this truth, we begin to awaken, we begin to shake off the fearful dream and find the light within. Awakening is irreversible. When we answer the call of God, when we call upon Him as He has called upon us, we have the whole of Heaven walking with us.
The problem we seem to face, and we all do, is that we have been so habituated to the perceptual world it still holds many attractions – our flesh still seems of utmost importance to us, our food and our drink, our need for shelter, our need for safety, for exercise, for opportunities for growth and development – all which leads to death. Born into the flesh-driven, separated world, this is the world in which we work, we love, we breathe, and do our best to find our meaning. To give up this world is to give up our lives – as we have come to know them. No matter the inner light, no matter the everlasting Spirit, this is the world we find ourselves in at this time. It is all too easy to retreat to the perceptual world, to ignore the call of God, to put aside the light within.
Jesus tells us today in our devotional text, that this is not to be a source of worry and concern for us. We may feel as if we are not living fully for Christ, that we are doing very little for His Vision, that the consciousness of the world is not being raised today due to any of our special efforts, that anything we contribute to the Sonship is miniscule and unworthy. We are not alone! God’s Gift to us is forever. And we have accepted it. We have opened our eyes. We are on our way Home.
In paragraph four Jesus tells us that we do not have to understand the Sonship, we do not have to understand holiness, we do not have to understand the things of God – we must simply want to understand. We must seek to know truth, to know God, to raise our consciousness, to know and be God’s Will. That is all that is required of us.
When we spend time in our devotional practice, when we take time each day to spend with Holy Spirit, to ask for truth, to ask for understanding, to ask to be enlightened, when we do not ignore our inner yearnings for our Creator, but rather honor His Call to us with our response – we are more motivated to continue in this practice. It is our very desire to know God that accomplishes our knowing Him for as long as we content ourselves with the flesh world and the dream of death – we cannot know God or the things of God for He cannot be found in darkness.
We are the Sonship of God exiled from our Father in an illusion of our own making. We will not find our way Home in the illusion – no matter how tempted we are to get caught up in the things that this world offers us – Christ holds us by the hand, the Sonship stands with us and walks with us in our advance to truth, for as His Son we carry God within us.
As we seek to bring all our relationships to holiness, we bring light to that which was obscured by the dark. Because we bring darkness to light and are no longer content to lie, to project, to judge and condemn, to plot and scheme and practice vengeance – we strengthen the whole of the Sonship. Those who are ready to awaken will awaken. They will join with Christ in His Vision of a world that is made whole and is one again with God, where the light of all that is good and forever is no longer obscured by that which opposes and makes opposites.
Christ calls to us. As Savior He needs us to be saved not one here and one there, but as a whole. We find salvation only through relationship. Only when we bring our relationships to holiness, we join with Christ. We give Him what He gave us – a truly loving, wholesome, appreciative communion – an unwillingness to save ourselves alone, a devotion to the whole of Creation through the relationships we have in the flesh.
We are made whole by our desire to make whole! Time is of no consequence, our individual pasts pose no hindrance, time is kind to those who will with God and choose love and happiness for each other and for all.
No matter how weak and small and ineffectual we may feel, no matter how faintly our little light seems to sputter – all of Heaven’s light is with us. Heaven is with us from the moment we ask. We simply cannot remain in darkness. We are coming home, and we are not coming home alone. We are bringing our brothers with us. No matter the time and distance between us, no matter the great gulf of all you fail to know about me and all I fail to know about you, no matter how mean and spiteful we have been toward one another, the cases we built and the judgments we pronounced, we are going Home together, you light my way and I light yours. My light alone will not light my way nor will your light alone light yours. It is our enjoined light of our undeniable love of God for each other that purges the dark past and makes the Eternal shine.
In our devotional practice today, we ask Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds. To show us the light in our brothers, to unite us in the Great Ray that is given us in our desire to be wholly loving, joyous, and peaceful. We invite the light of truth into all our thoughts, words, and deeds – indeed all our interactions with each other so that our individual lights are joined in the holy Sonship of God. We practice vigilance for we have put down the dark arts of judgment and condemnation, spite and vengeance which would obscure our holiness and oneness in Christ keeping us trapped in ongoing serials of dismay. We ask that all worries over time and place, strength and weakness, mistakes and triumphs will be lifted from our consciousness as we practice our walk in the light of His Love. We ask in the name of Sonship, Christ who makes us one. Amen.
[1]A Course in Miracles. Chapter 18 The passing of the dream. III Light in the dream. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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