CIM Lessons 194-200 and Miracles Principle #29

Miracles Principle #29—“Miracles praise God through you. They praise Him by honoring His creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm spirit-identification.” God does not need our praise. He doesn’t have an ego. A miracle “praises” God by reflecting His being and all-inclusive Love. The ego’s “special” love is distinguished from real Love in that it is always an exclusive phenomenon. God’s love is all-inclusive. Miracles heal because they move away from body-identification, which is not the problem, and identify instead with the Perfection and Oneness of Spirit. By identifying with Who we really are, we recognize that everything else is a distortion of the Truth. Our perception then shifts, and we see wholeness and perfection where we once saw lack.  We do not deny the pain. But at the same time, we realize pain is a call for love. We give that love by seeing the perfection God created within all.

Lesson 194: “I place the future in the Hands of God.” Placing our future in God’s Hands is referred to as a “giant stride” that takes us all the way to the lawns that welcome us to Heaven’s gate. Think, for a moment, how your life and mental attitude would change if you deeply knew—not just believed but knew—your future was wholly in the Hands of a loving God. Isn’t it fairly easy to see how this would remove anxiety and depression, even guilt? Once again, we’re not expected to suddenly shift from a state of near-constant worry to one of blissful trust in God. We are asked to practice having instants of such trust. In so doing, we’ll come to understand we’ve given the past and present to God as well. In that holy instant we’ll be free of grief and misery, pain and loss.

But what about grief for the loss of a loved one? Grief is clearly based on the past. The mind calls up memories of our loved one and then insists that the absence of this loved one now demands emotional pain. Yet, when the loved one was part of our lives, there were thousands of moments in which they were not physically present with us, yet we were still happy. The future enters into grief because we picture an endless stream of future moments that lack the beloved. But those moments are not now. As we learn to give each instant to God in passing, we find release. We ultimately realize our loved one was never a separate body in the first place but rather an aspect of our Self and, therefore, eternally inseparable from us.

Lesson 195: “Love is the way I walk in gratitude.” In this lesson gratitude is viewed from both a dark side and a light side. When our thinking is aligned with the ego, our gratitude is really a kind of attack on others. This is the “gratitude” that prays, “Thank you, God, that I’m not as others.” It’s the thankfulness we feel when we have a healthier body or bank account, when we have a nicer spouse or more successful children than our brother. True gratitude recognizes that we are all equally blessed. No one is excluded. We each have equal access to God’s gifts through our consciousness. “Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly.” (Text, Chapter 12, Section I, par. 6, 1-2)

Lesson 196: “It can be but myself I crucify.” CIM calls the acceptance of this idea “one step we take in leading up from bondage to the state of perfect freedom.”  If I begin to realize I’m not attacking others but myself, I can stop being afraid of retaliation from “others.” Because we believe we separated ourselves from God, represented by the parable of the Garden of Eden, we think we are guilty. That guilt is so unbearable, we project it outward onto “others.” To recognize what we are doing, and that we are in control of it, we have to step back from the ego and become aware of our greater Self. This greater Self includes my brothers and my sisters. The “others” I thought I injured are really parts of my Self. Figuratively, hurting my brother is comparable to taking a hammer and smashing my own hand. My projection of cause to outside factors has to become conscious, at least for a brief, terrifying moment. When I realize it’s me that I fear, my mind can perceive its dilemma and correct it. Seeing the enemy within instead of outside my mind, I no longer have reason to fear God. I no longer have reason to fear anyone or anything. Recognition of my own responsibility makes me realize it hasn’t been God punishing me; it’s been me. And, with the help of Spirit, I can take myself off the cross.

Lesson 197: “It can be but my gratitude I earn.” This lesson identifies itself as “the second step” in freeing our minds from the belief in outside forces pitted against us. In the previous lesson, we learned that our attacks are always directed at ourselves, and that the attacks we thought were coming from outside ourselves were really coming from our own minds. This lesson looks at the other side of the coin: gratitude. We may understand that our attack is coming from within ourselves and yet not realize that any gratitude we receive is also coming from within ourselves and not from outside forces. If we fail to understand this, when someone fails to acknowledge our gifts, we typically resent them and take our gifts back. If we do this, we will always suspect that God’s gifts are equally undependable. The CIM Teacher’s Manual says it’s not our function to evaluate the outcome of our gifts. It’s only our function to give them. All the gratitude we require is our own gratitude for the opportunity of giving and forgiving. The Manual further says that we should never feel disappointed if we offer a gift that doesn’t appear to be accepted. Our gifts are always accepted on the spiritual level. (Manual, Section 6).

Lesson 198: “Only my condemnation injures me.” If I judge someone, my condemnation states that the person is less worthy of love. I believe, therefore, that I am justified in offering injury or withholding love. The principle I establish by this belief can be turned against me. If I measure my love to others according to my perception of them, I’m affirming that this is how love works. I’m asserting that God measures His love to me based on my perceived unworthiness. In reality, injury is not possible because there is no physical world to give and receive injury. Yet though CIM says the world is an illusion, it also says, “What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all. Yet must we deal with them a while as if it had.” Time itself is an illusion, yet Course talks about saving time and urges us to use time wisely, particularly in the practice of these lessons. We meet illusion with illusion. To undo the illusion of injury we need the illusion of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the bridge that brings illusion to truth and provides the escape route out of illusion entirely.

Lesson 199: “I am not a body. I am free.” To the ego, today’s lesson is “quite insane.” Yet it’s one of the basic principles the Course uses to free us from our bondage. The lesson attaches a great deal of importance to this idea, telling us to “cherish” and “practice it today and every day.” The idea that I am a body is not one the mind will let go of easily. Our entire existence is rooted in the idea that we are bodies and so it will take a great deal of “unlearning” to release this false belief. That is why we are urged to make this thought a part of daily practice. The body recedes from awareness in the holy instant, offering a foretaste of our reality. As we experience this state more and more, it will lessen our fears of the unfamiliar idea of formlessness and strengthen our confidence. We still have a body, but we realize we’re not bound to it. Ironically, the more we detach our mind from our body, the more perfect the body becomes. “It becomes perfect in the ability to serve an undivided goal.” If perfecting the body is our goal, we will never achieve it; the body will find wholeness only when our goal becomes unified with Spirit in seeking to extend forgiveness to everyone and everything. The body isn’t the home of the mind; Spirit is. Our aim in practicing is to free our mind from its connection to the body and to give our mind to Spirit for Its purposes. Our energy then is focused more on bringing forgiveness to the world than on survival. If we do this, Spirit assures us He will take care of all the rest.

Lesson 200: “There is no peace except the peace of God.” Every means we use to find peace through or from the world will fail. Only the peace that comes from God, a peace we already have as part of our created being, is real and eternal. Everything in this world ends in death. This world is hell, because no matter what course we follow, no matter how hard we strive, we wind up losing everything in the end. What a depressing scenario! Though we may not be fully conscious of this despair, it underlies everything we do. This lesson asks us to give up the futile search for happiness through our bodies and the world, and to relax into the peace of God. If we can accept the fact that we will not find happiness or peace any other way, we can save ourselves a lot of misery. If we can decide we don’t know the purpose of this world, we’ll be free to see the purpose Spirit sees in it. It’s the letting go of what we think the world is for that allows its only true purpose to dawn upon us. Peace “begins within the world perceived as different.” Notice this says peace begins within the world. It begins with a new perception of the world, and a new perception of the world begins with forgiveness. Let us connect with that part of our mind that is native to Heaven and knows it doesn’t belong here. The more I connect with it, the sooner I’ll know the peace that is my natural inheritance.

Assignment: Read and study Miracles Principle #30 and Lessons 201-207. Supplementary reading: Text, Chapter 24, The Goal of Specialness.

Practical Application: This week, as you look at each person in your daily life—family members, strangers at Wal-mart, co-workers—take a second to realize that each one you seem to see outside yourself is but an aspect of your Self. “I am that.”