A Course in Miracles Lesson 151

All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

Be careful! The lesson doesn’t teach that things are echoes of God – it teaches that all things are echoes of the Voice for God, which is the Holy Spirit. The temptation is to try and bring God into the world – to see God as having agency and intelligence. But this world is a dream, already passing. God is beyond it. Here, in the dream, God’s Word is given through the Holy Spirit – the part of our mind that remembers what we are in truth, and accepts no substitute for what it knows.

Therefore, he Holy Spirit is our guide for understanding the world wrought by separation, and for knowing what to do within it, so long as we believe we are in it.

The world we perceive is based on our senses, which are themselves judgmental and partial. Even something as simple as a buttercup, which we take for granted, is something else to a cow, and something else yet again to a butterfly. Your perspective is always partial, and always slanted to your need to survive. This might temporarily serve the body’s interest in not dying, but you and I are not bodies.

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 (W-pI.151.3:5-7).

We live in that world – we obey the laws of that world – and all of it merely reflects our belief in the judgments of ego, all of which are false (W-pI.151.4:4). Under ego’s interpretation, the world we perceive reinforces our vulnerability and sinfulness, and ultimately the inevitability of punishment for our guilt. It is a dark and hopeless construction.

There is – there is always – another way. Students of A Course in Miracles should have that tattooed someplace prominent. It really is the foundation of our practice and study.

. . . you must learn to doubt their (ego and body senses) evidence will clear the way to recognizing yourself, and let the Voice for God alone by Judge what is worthy of your own belief . . . 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 (W-pI.151.7:1, 4).

It is helpful to remember that the above passage revolves not around how we see ourselves – or a buttercup, say – but rather how we see our brothers and sisters. It is our judgment of them which we need to release, in order to see in them only what God sees, and thus recognize our savior at last.

Heaven is the home of perfect purity, and God created it for you. Look on your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there (T-22.II.13:6-7).

Is it clear? We recognize our savior because we recognize ourself. Of our own, we can recognize this. We are too confused, too distracted, too vain, too scared. That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us how to hear only the Holy Spirit, who knows exactly how to make God’s perfect love clear to us in a loveless place.

He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. He gives you visions which can look beyond these grim apperances, 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 (W-pI.151.10:1-3).

We experience this as an interpretation. As the ego told us what the world meant, now we listen to another Voice, and accept its meaning rather than our own. Ego speaks for survival, because fear is its reality. The Holy Spirit speaks for sharing and extension, because it knows that Love, not fear, is all the reality there is. Thus, we literally “see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world” (W-pI.151.11:3). Can you imagine how this feels?

It feels like salvation. It feels like being born again.

That is why ACIM calls this “resurrection” – not the rising again of the body after death, but rather the realization that our life “stands beyond the body and the world” altogether (W-pI.151.12:2). This realization – this resurrection, which is internal, of the mind – reveals the face of Christ in all things, and removes all doubt in us about the sanctity and accessibility of God’s Will.

Today, we turn our minds over to our Creator, and ask that every thought be cleansed and purified of ego’s mistaken reading, so that the light of Love will be all that remains in each of them. Today we remember the peace of our creator, as a gift to us, which extends through us to all the world. In this way are all minds healed and unified “into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere” (W-pI.151.14:4).

This lesson reveals to us our ministry as students of A Course in Miracles. We are healed in order to bear witness to healing – to “carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone” (W-pI.151.17:3).

This is our function now, not to be taken lightly. Let us learn how to gaze on our brothers and sisters as our saviors, and then accept the salvation they offer us, that we might extend it throughout the cosmos, a “gift of snow-white lilies” (W-pI.151.16:2) restoring to all minds their innocence and wholeness in Love.

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