LESSON ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: The Course text is in bold face. The Guidance is in normal type In His Guidance, He has asked Me to capitalize the pronouns You and We as an acknowledgement of the Divinity of All of Us, an acknowledgement of Equality, an expression of His Love and respect for You. When You see the word ‘YOU’ capitalized in the Guidance, know that He is not just speaking to YOU, He is honoring YOU.

Part I

L e s s o n  135

If I defend myself, I am attacked.

By Whom?  It must be Myself, for I must then have perceived My sinless Self as guilty of some thing or another, forgetting My Innocence.  Please explain Brother?

Perhaps You do not understand the Innocence of All Creation:  God’s Revelation of Himself as Each One of Us.

The term ‘Creation’ does imply a beginning, and there never was one.  The verb form of the word found in the first chapter of the Bible more properly implies a ‘fattening’ or perhaps augmenting, and thus is more appropriate to the separation, where the sleeping Son of God – in His arrogance – thinks He can change God’s Revelation.

Fearful of retribution, understanding not Our God of Love, defense became the Son’s fixation.

¹ Who would defend himself unless he thought he was attacked, that the attack is real, and that his own defense can save himself?

Having – only in His separated sense of mind – believed He made a successful attack on God, the Son has projected His aggression onto God and now feels needful of ‘defense’, an idea that’s quite unknown to God.

And herein lies the folly of defense-it gives illusions full reality and then attempts to handle them as real. It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult.

While You are busy making Your defense, You see the ‘attacker’ as a hostile presence, and all of this seems to give reality to the unreal.  You have joined Your adversary sunk deep in the dream of attack/defend.  Ad infinitum.

² And it is this you do when you attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or organize the present as you wish. You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what is happening because it must contain what threatens you. A sense of threat is an acknowledgment of an inherent weakness, a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense.

This does presuppose a hostile world instead of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Expecting hostility, You’re sure to find it.

³ The world is based on this insane belief. And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.

Having – in Your own minds – mounted an attack on God, You now see Your reflections  everywhere You look.  Not a pretty picture dear Son of God.

⁴ Defense is frightening. It stems from fear, increasing fear as each defense is made. You think it offers safety. Yet it speaks of fear made real and terror justified. Is it not strange you do not pause to ask, as you elaborate your plans and make your armor thicker and your locks more tight, what you defend, and how, and against what?

⁵ Let us consider first what you defend. It must be something that is very weak and easily assaulted. It must be something made easy prey, unable to protect itself, and needing your defense. What but the body has such frailty that constant care and watchful, deep concern is needful to protect its little life? What but the body falters and must fail to serve the Son of God as worthy host?

⁶ Yet it is not the body that can fear, nor be a thing to fear. It has no need but those which you assign to it. It needs no complicated structures of defense, no health-inducing medicine, no care, and no concern at all. Defend its life, or give it gifts to make it beautiful or walls to make it safe, and you but say your home is open to the thief of time, corruptible and crumbling, so unsafe it must be guarded with your very life.

I’m ‘trying’ to wrap My mind around this, dear Elder Brother.  Recently – from Your words – I understood that All of Us are is consciousness, not bodies, and – as such – only We can attack Ourselves.  Kind of an ‘inside job’, so to speak.

Yet You teach that minds are joined.  Can You please elucidate here?  And, in addition, some more on body, please.  Can We walk in front of railroad trains with impunity?

Just elucidate?  I’d be glad to expound at length on this!

You are quite correct that You – and All the Universe – are consciousness.  As You have observed, the amount of consciousness that is Conscious Awareness varies greatly upon the choice of the individual.  Turn on the television and the percentage can drop close to zero.

On the heels of Christian Science and Quantum Physics, as minds were reopening to the idea of a Universe of Spirit, came the great new god: the television, to tell You how to think and act and all the proper standards, and show You everything that You don’t have, but You should.

It brought Your minds right back to the body.

Its goal?  To make You feel inadequate, and vulnerable.

⁷ Is not this picture fearful? Can you be at peace with such a concept of your home? Yet what endowed the body with the right to serve you thus except your own belief? It is your mind which gave the body all the functions that you see in it and set its value far beyond a little pile of dust and water. Who would make defense of something that he recognized as this?

How crucial is its own misinterpretation of the body to the ego.

⁸ The body is in need of no defense.

For it is – right here and now – Eternal Spirit.  It is consciousness personified, yet not matter.

This cannot be too often emphasized. 

Experience it as matter and it will seem to decay and die.  Know it as Spirit, and its perfection is eternal.  The body is obedient to the consciousness expressing it.  The body ruled by ego seems solid yet quite far from permanent.

The body governed by the Holy Spirit is forever whole and pure and free.

You choose Your ruler.

It will be strong and healthy if the mind does not abuse it by assigning it to roles it cannot fill, to purposes beyond its scope, and to exalted aims which it cannot accomplish. Such attempts, ridiculous yet deeply cherished, are the sources for the many mad attacks you make upon it. For it seems to fail your hopes, your needs, your values, and your dreams.  That is, when You think it material.

⁹ The “self” that needs protection is not real. –You made it up and called it the ego: the little i, i am, quite far from the I AM, the Holy Spirit. – The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, – for You are Spirit, and it seems to be ‘matter’; yet when You dissociate from it and free it from Your fears, it then will serve You well, – and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. – i.e. while You still experience Yourself as matter. Once Your mind is healed, You will see that You are Light. Then the misperception will no longer be useful. – Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?  And when You are realizing that You are truly Spirit.

¹⁰ Defend the body, and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits, and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source.

The body does what the mind directs.  If the mind is full with resentment that grows and spreads throughout One’s consciousness, do not be surprised to find the body mirroring the mind.  The good news is that You can at any time change Your mind, and You will have a new result.

¹¹ These are the thoughts in need of healing, and the body will respond with health when they have been corrected and replaced with truth. – Change Your mind about the body You be, and the body will change accordingly. – This is the body’s only real defense. Yet is this where you look for its defense? You offer it protection of a kind from which it gains no benefit at all but merely adds to your distress of mind. You do not heal but merely take away the hope of healing, for you fail to see where hope must lie if it be meaningful.

You think to save the body through things You do or give it without asking help from Your Divine Healer, the Holy Spirit.  And yet Your access to Her – to Him – is instant through the door that I have opened.₁  When You need help, come, take My hand, and I will walk You through it.  Together We will listen, learn, and do the Holy Spirit’s kind, healing counsel.

¹² A healed mind does not plan. It carries out the plans which it receives through listening to Wisdom that is not its own. It waits until it has been taught what should be done and then proceeds to do it. It does not depend upon itself for anything except its adequacy to fulfill the plans assigned to it. It is secure in certainty that obstacles cannot impede its progress to accomplishment of any goal which serves the greater plan established for the good of everyone.

And in this way, the Gift of Healing sought for the body also becomes the simultaneous joined healing of the mind.

¹³ A healed mind is relieved from the belief that it must plan, although it cannot know the outcome which is best, the means by which it is achieved, nor how to recognize the problem that the plan is made to solve. It must misuse the body in its plans until it recognizes this is so. But when it has accepted this as true, then is it healed and lets the body go.

You may be surprised to find the healing of the mind to heal beliefs of time and age along with illness.  The blessing of a mind that’s healed radiates far beyond all expectations.

¹⁴ Enslavement of the body to the plans the unhealed mind sets up to save itself must make the body sick. It is not free to be a means of helping in a plan which far exceeds its own protection and which needs its service for a little while. In this capacity is health assured. For everything the mind employs for this will function flawlessly and with the strength that has been given it and cannot fail.

¹⁵ It is, perhaps, not easy to perceive that self-initiated plans are but defenses with the purpose all of them were made to realize. They are the means by which a frightened mind would undertake its own protection at the cost of truth. This is not difficult to realize in some forms which these self-deceptions take, for the denial of reality is very obvious. Yet planning is not often recognized as a defense.

Why is it defense?  Because it is insistence on control.  Plans made apart from God, from Me, and from the Holy Spirit.

¹⁶ The mind engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. It does not think that it will be provided for unless it makes its own provisions. Time becomes a future emphasis to be controlled by learning and experience obtained from past events and previous beliefs. It overlooks the present, for it rests on the idea the past has taught enough to let the mind direct its future course.

The ‘past’ and ‘future’ are ineffective. For all healing does take place only Now.  Yet the ego stubbornly insists upon avoiding Now.

¹⁷The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. What it has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals. Its past experience directs its choice of what will happen. – As You may recall, this is but the definition of insanity: repeating of old ways, expecting new results. – And it does not see that here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs. – Here and now, great transformation is being offered to You!  Will You ignore it as You have before?  Or will You, this time, gladly accept it? – Anticipation plays no part at all, for present confidence directs the way.

Trust in the unseen Help being offered You.  It is Your Saviour and Your Redeemer, being True.

¹⁸ Defenses are the plans you undertake to make against the truth. Their aim is to select what you approve and disregard what you consider incompatible with your beliefs of your reality. Yet what remains is meaningless indeed. For it is your reality which is the “threat” that your defenses would attack, obscure, and take apart and crucify.

¹⁹ What could you not accept if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present, and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to eternal life.

Doubt You this?  Are You not right here reading My words this instant?

²⁰ Your present trust in Him is the defense which promises a future undisturbed, without a trace of sorrow and with joy which constantly increases as this life becomes a holy instant, set in time but heeding only immortality. Let no defenses but your present trust direct the future, and this life becomes a meaningful encounter with the truth that only your defenses would conceal.

Where else could be found a ‘defense’ so sweet, so kind, so gentle, and, most importantly, so effective!

²¹ Without defenses, you become a light which Heaven gratefully acknowledges to be its own. And it will lead you on in ways appointed for your happiness according to the ancient plan begun when time was born. Your followers will join their light with yours, and it will be increased until the world is lighted up with joy. And gladly will our brothers lay aside their cumbersome defenses which availed them nothing and could only terrify.

Are You yet a believer?  Only the ego – ‘source’ of all Your seeming problems – would insist to You that to trust in God is quite dangerous.  Ignore its raucous voice.  Take My hand and We will walk joyfully together into the Light and see Here all Good revealed.

²² We will anticipate that time today with present confidence, for this is part of what was planned for us. We will be sure that everything we need is given us for our accomplishment of this today. We make no plans for how it will be done but realize that our defenselessness is all that is required for the truth to dawn upon our minds with certainty.

²³ For 15 minutes twice today, we rest from senseless planning and from every thought which blocks the truth from entering our minds. Today we will receive instead of plan, that we may give instead of organize. And we are given truly, as we say:

²⁴ If I defend myself, I am attacked.
But in defenselessness, I will be strong,
And I will learn what my defenses hide.

²⁵ Nothing but that. If there are plans to make, you will be told of them. They may not be the plans you thought were needed nor indeed the answers to the problems which you thought confronted you. But they are answers to another kind of question which remains unanswered yet in need of answering until the Answer comes to you at last.

²⁶ All your defenses have been aimed at not receiving what you will receive today. And in the light and joy of simple truth, you will but wonder why you ever thought that you must be defended from release. Heaven asks nothing. It is hell that makes extravagant demands for sacrifice. You give up nothing in these times today when undefended you present yourself to your Creator as you really are.

²⁷ He has remembered you. Today we will remember Him. For this is Easter time in your salvation. And you rise again from what was seeming death and hopelessness. Now is the light of hope reborn in you, for now you come without defense to learn the part for you within the plan of God. What little plans or magical beliefs can still have value when you have received your function from the Voice of God Himself?

²⁸ Try not to shape this day as you believe would benefit you most. For you can not conceive of all the happiness that comes to you without your planning. – Step back and trust Me to lead You.  You know I will never fail You nor forsake You. – Learn today. And all the world will take this giant stride and celebrate your Easter time with you.  – What is today but Your Resurrection? – Throughout the day, as foolish little things appear to raise defensiveness in you and tempt you to engage in weaving plans, remind yourself this is a special day for learning, and acknowledge it with this:

²⁹ This is my Easter time. And I would keep It holy.
I will not defend myself,
Because the Son of God needs no defense
Against the truth of his reality.

I trust You Brother.

 

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[Thank you Dear Brother]

*Sun~Rose is the scribe of the recently published book,“YOU ARE LOVED AND SAFE: PREP NOTES FOR EXPERIENCING GOD’S LOVE“, Jesus’ Guidance on the Miracle Principles

She is also author of,“RADIANT LIFE: RAW FOOD AND THE PRESENCE OF LOVE”

BOTH now available on amazon.com