Sean Reagan

I thank my Father for His gifts to me.

Lesson 123 invites us to a very specific form of gratitude – we offer gratitude to our Creator for the gifts we have been given in and through our practice of becoming responsible for projection and thus remembering Creation. As we make this shift from fear to love, love expands and increases, accelerating the shift.

Gratitude heals and its healing is generative.

In his book The Voice that Precedes All Thought, Tara Singh, who credited his personal relationship with Helen Schucman for his understanding of the role gratitude plays in A Course in Miracles, wrote that gratitude anchors us in nondual awareness of love.

Gratefulness does not know a lack.
It trusts in the Will of God
and leaves God’s things to God.
It knows that
for what you are grateful you will never be denied.

All else is duality, fear, and selfishness,
bound to the body and its sensations (11)

So gratitude is not ancillary to a meaningful spiritual practice. It is not merely a list that we make. It is integrated into the woof and weave of our learning. It is not an accident that the previous two lessons’ emphasis on forgiveness arrives here, asking us to adopt a posture of giving thanks in order to receive thanks.

In other words, to be grateful is to be forgiving in the specific way that A Course in Miracles understands and asks us to apply that concept.

Be glad today, in loving thankfulness, your Father has no left you to yourself, nor let you wander in the dark alone. Be grateful He has saved you from the self you though you made to take the place of Him and His creation (W-pI.123.2:2-3).

Forgiveness is both the light of understanding, and the end of self-imposed darkness. We no longer believe the lies of ego, and turn instead to the truth revealed by the Holy Spirit when we simply listen. When we listen to the Holy Spirit, which is to forgive, we see the real world and for that vision, we naturally give thanks. That thanks returns to us a thousandfold, creating a cycle of sharing that “fills the world with gladness and with gratitude” (W-pI.123.6:5).

ACIM students are messengers who carry the word of God forth to their brothers and sisters, not as a function of wordiness or intellectual insight, but rather in gentleness, happiness and kindness. We know one another as equals and that equality means we are given to cooperation and communication with one another. We are beyond competition and the suffering it begets.

We sing the song of thankfulness today, in honor of the Self that God has willed to be our true Identity in Him. Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do (W-pI.123.4:2-3).

The time we set aside to give to gratitude is designed to remind us that the cause for gratitude never goes away. It is not merely a holy half hour but holiness itself. As we allow this holiness to inform our day – minute by minute, hour by hour – we find ourselves increasingly blessed by the sustainable awareness of God’s Love as the foundation of our shared existence.

←Lesson 122
Lesson 124→

Forgiveness offers everything I want

Lesson 121 is both well-integrated into the workbook curriculum of A Course in Miracles and a handy guide to what forgiveness means to students of the course. With its overview of what forgiveness is and how it functions in our daily practice, we are better-equipped to tackle the dramatic promise of lesson 122.

Forgiveness offers everything we want.

Yet we have to ask – we have to go into – what is it that we actually want? Winning lottery tickets? Hot sex? Calorie-free ice cream sundaes? And end to this or that politician’s career? A house on the beach?

The external thing that we want – and we all want them, to one degree or another, in one form or another – is in fact a symbol of what we actually want. What we want is what the external thing points to – and, in the end, it always points to clarity, certainty, meaningfulness. It points to happiness and peace.

Thus the promise of Lesson 122 is not that we’ll secure the material abundance bodies crave but rather the gentle tranquility of a mind no longer imprisoned in – no longer mercilessly subject to – the body’s drives and appetites. It’s not that the body goes away but that our focus shifts with respect to it. This shift begets happiness.

In A Course in Miracles, the peace and joy of a healed (and healing) mind are themselves indicated by another symbol, one which encapsulates all the others to simplify our learning: forgiveness shows us the face of Christ.

[Forgiveness] lets you recognize the Son of God, and clears your memory of all dead thoughts so that remembrance of your Father can arise across the threshold of your mind . . . What gifts but these are worthy to be sought? (W-pI.122.3:2, 4)

Whatever uncertainty we have, whatever sacrifice we think we’ve made, whatever suffering we believe we undergo undergo, whatever doubt plagues our mind . . . forgiveness is “the perfect answer and solution to them all (W-pI.122.4:2). It is effectively an open door unto the perfect peace and happiness of Heaven, offering us salvation in the simplest form imaginable. We merely ask the Teacher of God to show us the Face of Christ, and then wait in quiet confidence that what is true will be revealed to us because it is true.

Accept salvation now. It is the gift of God, and not the world. The world can give no gifts of any value to a mind that has received what God has given as its own (W-pI.122.7:3-5).

In lesson 121, our practice emphasizes our brothers and sisters as objects of love and hate, inviting us to learn how in truth they are the same, and we with them. Today, we step into the gentle abstraction of love itself, without insisting on (indeed, refusing to settle for) anything that readily reduces to form.

Before the light you will receive today the world will fade until it disappears, and you will see another world arise you have no words to picture. Now we walk directly into the light, and we receive the gifts that have been held in store for us since time began . . . (W-pI.122.12:1-2).

The Face of Christ is not literally the face of the one who studied with John the Baptist, suffered under Rome’s imperial cruelty, and lived on in the collective of followers who survived him. Rather, it is “the great symbol of forgiveness” (C-3.4:5).

It is salvation. It is the symbol of the real world. Whoever looks on this no longer sees the world. He is as near to Heaven as is possible outside the gate. Yet from this gate it is no more than just a step inside. It is the final step. And this we leave to God (C-3.4:6-12).

We are ready, you and I, to enter into the light in which our proximity to Heaven is made real, delivering us unto the open arms and welcome of God. This is the unity which forgiveness reflects, the Will of God which is the “bridge to Heaven” (C-3.5:2-3). Shall we cross it now, hand in hand?

←Lesson 121
Lesson 123→

I rest in God (Lesson 109)

I am as God created me (Lesson 110)

To remember that we are as God created us is to rest in God. It is to know our being in and as Creation, seamlessly united with our Creator in the One Life beyond all appearances of difference.

What do we want? Do we want more things for the body? Rituals to soothe the brain’s longing for pattern? All these things do is temporarily obscure the road to death, the meaningless journey the ego insists is the only one we can take.

Or do we want peace and happiness? And, beyond that, do we want to rest our weary minds – do we want to no longer be vexed by paradoxes, beset by problems, hunted by sickness and snared by death?

Do we not long for a respite – even a brief one – from the cruel and banal existence to which we seem condemned?

A Course in Miracles is an invitation to end the ego’s death rattles and empty promises once and forever – to end them so thoroughly we can barely remember they ever bothered us. Tara Singh used to say that any daily lesson, properly attended, could end our insane belief in separation.

Can we use this lesson that way? Are we ready for it?

For the answer is given: we remain as God created us and therefore are not separate from God’s Creation and therefore are at rest. We have no problems and there are no mysteries. Suffering is a nightmare already forgotten, pain the dimmest of dim memories.

Are we ready to see the truth of it?

If we are honest, the answer is something along the lines of “maybe.” Yes we want it, but we’re scared still. Or we don’t entirely believe it. Or maybe part of us still believes we deserve to suffer.

But if we are willing to sit quietly with the lesson, and open our mind to the truth that God has set forever shining there, then we will know – even if only briefly – that our reality is beyond the aggressive violations of ego. We are forever blessed and thus know only blessing and thus can only extend blessing.

There is only love, and it does not know fear at all.

It doesn’t matter if our journey ends today with this lesson. What matters is the willingness we bring to our practice. When we are ready, God will take the final step, which is merely the restoration to our shared mind that our reality is perfectly clear and totally without compromise of any kind.

We are the sons and daughters of a living God whose love ensures that only complete peace and joy are worthy of us. Today let us at least be willing to remember it – and if we can’t be, let us at least allow that one day we will. God asks no more of us.

←Lesson 119
Lesson 121→

Truth will correct all errors in my mind (Lesson 107).

To give and receive are one in truth (Lesson 108).

One of the errors to which we are subject when we believe in separation is that cause precedes effect. The two are related but independent. In fact, giving and receiving are the same because the apparent giver and receiver are not separate from one another.

This does not make sense at the level of the body. At that level, if we have one piece of pie and I eat it, you don’t get any pie. But A Course in Miracles is an invitation to learn that we are not bodies, and that what we give away we receive.

One way to think about this is to focus on abstract ideas, like love or mercy. When I show mercy to a brother or sister, have I lost the capacity to extend mercy to someone else?

Or this. If I share my ideas about the importance of closely reading Emily Dickinson, have I lost my understanding of the importance of giving careful attention to Emily Dickinson’s poetry?

It’s clear that ideas do not leave their source, even when shared. The implication is similarly clear: whatever we are, we share a source from which we are not separate and – by extension – which unites us in a fundamental way that does not allow for actual separation.

To perceive ourselves as bodies and thus separate from one another in time and space is an error, which leads to other errors (for example about cause and effect and giving and receiving) that effectively double down on separation, making it appear real and beyond question.

Correction begins with our willingness to learn a new way of seeing that makes the illusion of separation obvious. This has nothing to do with the bodies eyes, but rather with how our thinking functions. We are giving attention in mind to mind, and learning that there is only mind.

When we do this, we experience a gentle peace which itself begets an even gentler – but still sustainable – happiness. Here, our suffering folds in on itself and disappears, and what remains is the quiet stillness of the self recollected in God.

←Lesson 118
Lesson 120→

God’s peace and joy are mine (Lesson 105)

Let me be still and listen to the truth (Lesson 106).

In our practice it is good to make space to sit quietly and give attention to what appears in the interior – the thoughts and feelings, the underlying belief system, the void from which it all emerges, and that from which the void itself arises.

We don’t have to do anything in this space other than be open-minded. Our observation is not conditional on what it observes. It is merely given to observation itself. We place no restrictions, set no conditions. Whatever is, that’s what is.

This is what it means to “be still and listen to the truth” (W-pI.rIII.3:4).

Listen, and hear your Father speak to you through His appointed Voice, which silences the thunder of the meaningless, and shows the way to peace to those who cannot see . . . Be not deceived by voices of the dead, which tell you they have found the source of life and offer it to you for your belief (W-pI.106.2:1, 3).

That language sounds dramatic – “thunder of the meaningless” “voices of the dead” – but that is merely symbolic language emphasizing the power of the clarity that comes to those who are willing to hear only the Voice of God, and to be guided by no other voice.

The truth of our identity is neither a name nor a description, but an experience of truth that exchanges the substitutes for love that we have made for the perfect and eternal joy and peace that are God’s gift to us in Creation.

In this way we learn that in truth there are no substitutes for the gifts of God.

There is no substitute for truth. And truth will maket his plan to you as you are brought into the place where you must meet with truth. And there you must be led, through gentle understanding which can lead you nowhere else. Where God is, there are you. Such is the truth (T-14.VIII.4:1-5).

We cannot be separate from God. We are not separate from God. We are united with our Creator in Creation, and this unity is without beginning or end, and is cannot be altered or affected by anything external because there is nothing external.

Thus, our practice today is simply to reinforce our willingness to give attention to God’s call which is in us as the longing to be perfectly happy and totally free. Freedom and happiness are not separate, but rather two names for the same experience, which itself is wordless.

Today, let us make a quiet space together in which we can be led by grace to the home grace makes for those it knows as family. Let us be welcomed there, and let us extend this welcome to one another, that the whole world might remember the way out of its dream of suffering.

←Lesson 117
Lesson 119→

Salvation is my only function here (Lesson 99).

My part is essential to God’s plan for salvation (Lesson 100).

In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is not the recognition of errors followed by a magnanimous willingness to forget them. You stepped on my toe and it really hurts but I’m a good guy and I like you so no worries.

In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is closer to clear seeing: it means seeing that errors aren’t actually possible. They are illusions; they never happened. Therefore, there is nothing to overlook. Judgment – I’m a good guy, I like you, fair is fair, you’re kind of a jerk – does not enter into it.

Forgiveness means recognizing our own perfection, which is salvation because in the face of our own perfection, the world itself disappears.

How lovely does the world become in just that single instant when you see the truth about yourself reflected there. Now you are sinless and behold your sinlessness. Now you are holy and perceive it so (C-3.8:1-3).

Thus, salvation becomes the recognition of what we are in truth. The world – and our brothers and sisters with whom we share the world – are the mirror in which all that impedes this recognition is obvious. We are in relationship with it in order to forgive it, on terms consistent with A Course in Miracles.

In practice, this looks like a normal life. It looks like being as gentle and patient as possible. It means holding onto the metaphysical premise of the course – I am not a body and there is no world – without pretending to be more spiritually sophisticated then we actually are.

I am annoyed with the student who keeps showing up late to class. Or I am frustrated with my kids who never clean up. Or I am disappointed with myself for stress eating again. To a body in the world, these are real problems. To a student of A Course in Miracles, given to forgiveness and the salvation forgiveness entails, they are opportunities to choose again to see my brothers and sisters as sinless and, in doing so, to remember my own as well.

And now the mind returns to its Creator; the joining of the Father and the Son, the Unity of unities that stands behind all joining but beyond them all. God is not seen but only understood. His Son is not attacked but recognized (C-3.8:4-6).

Our review then is an opportunity to remember what our practice is and why it merits our devoted attention. God Wills only peace and happiness for us, and the world provides very specific lessons adapted to our special learning needs and abilities (e.g., C-3.3:5). Let us give close attention to our lives today, seeking only the Face of Christ in all people, places and things.

Our seeking will become a mirror in which our own perfection leads us away from error (C-3.1:4) and towards the happy fiction of those who have seen past the illusion of separation.

←Lesson 114
Lesson 116→