Morning!
Some thoughts from Ken today:
“Our confusion about what constitutes strength and weakness is the same as the confusion between joy and pain, freedom and imprisonment.”
“It is not the body’s laws that affect us, but our decision; we are the jailers, not the body, for we are imprisoned only by our own thoughts.”
“If you are not a body, what are you? If it is not your brain that can think, who then is thinking? Taking it one step further, who then is even reading this course and doing this lesson? If you realize that Jesus is not asking you to give up your bodily identification, but merely to question it, there will be no anxiety. Anxiety arises because you believe he is taking your special relationship with your body away from you.”
OK, this is a very important point. I think it will be the only other excerpt from Ken I will share today as it is a meaningful one, at least it is to me. Where Jesus states, “Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them.” (4:1-2), Ken writes:
“Here, too, is a statement that can be very easily misunderstood. Jesus is not saying we do not see the illusion. By overlook – a word he uses frequently in ACIM – he does not mean we overlook the ego in the sense of not seeing something that is present, which is the usual meaning of the word, as when you overlook some papers you are looking for on your desk and know are there. In ACIM, we overlook the ego by LOOKING THROUGH IT. (Emphasis is mine.) We first look at the appearance, which seems to be our egos to be as solid as a wall of granite.
With the love of Jesus beside us – as he says in the text: “”Together we have the lamp that will dispel it (the ego’s thought system)”” (T-11.V.1:3) – we look at the ego’s darkness with his light, shining through what appeared as an impenetrable wall. Now it is nothing more than a flimsy veil, powerless to conceal the truth beyond it. When Jesus talks about looking past appearances or overlooking the ego, he, once again, does not mean not to see it. He is teaching us to look at it with him, for only then do we realize there is nothing to see.”
Finally:
“Our goal is to see through Christ’s vision, which enables us to reinterpret the perceptual world the ego told us was true. The form, now seen differently, reveals the content of reality’s reflection that the ego tried to conceal from our awareness. The clarity of this new perception looks beyond the seeming differences among illusions to the one truth that categorizes them all: they are unreal.”
I will close by quoting paragraph 5:3-7 as these sentences read as a prayer I will practice today throughout the day:
“Truth is a savior and can only will for happiness and peace for everyone. It gives its strength to everyone who asks, in limitless supply. It see that lack in anyone would be a lack in all. And so it gives its light that all may see and benefit as one. Its strength is shared, that it may bring to all the miracle in which they will unite in purpose and forgiveness and in love.”
Have a lovely day!
Love,
Gayle
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