Lesson 43: God is my Source. I cannot see apart from Him.

Feb 13 in Feed

💡 Buckle up, dear friends! We have a cool but intense lesson ahead with a lot of important concepts and extensive extracts from Kennet's work. In this lesson, Jesus will explicitly define what the Holy Spirit is and its role in our minds, and Kenneth will make sure that we don't get confused by the language used. 💪 Please bear with me, you won't regret it! 🤓 We are only one week away from our 10 days of revision period, this is not the moment to yield to discouragement. On the contrary, let's get excited and keep engaging with this incredible material! 🌈

🧩 WHERE WE STAND AS THE DECISION MAKER

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💡 I here share, see the image joined in the attachement below, the chart of the body/mind that Kenneth includes in his book as an introduction to Lesson 43, with a few colorful annotations, followed by his explanations:

🔎 “Before discussing this lesson, I should like to review a chart I hope will help in our study of this and subsequent lessons. This is a modified version of the chart I usually use, because in these lessons the mind’s structure is portrayed as going from the bottom up, instead of the other way around.

🔎 At the bottom is God, the One Mind, the place of truth in our minds and subsumed under the term knowledge. This is the realm of our real thoughts, which we have always thought with God. These do not have form, and can be understood as an expression of eternal life, love, the Will of God, and the oneness of creation.

🔎 The split mind is represented by the layers above God, beginning with the right mind, the home of the Holy Spirit. In these lessons Jesus does not make a distinction between our right-minded real thoughts and our One-minded real thoughts. This is but another example, incidentally, of how A Course in Miracles cannot be approached as a scientific treatise in which each term is carefully analyzed. Jesus is relatively loose with words, probably more so in the workbook than in the text. It would thus be more accurate to say that our right-minded thoughts are the reflection of our real thoughts. For the purposes of these lessons, however, our real thoughts include both those that are held for us by the Holy Spirit in our right minds, as well as the Thoughts of God in the One Mind.

🔎 Above the Holy Spirit is the wrong mind, the domain of the ego, wherein reside our unreal thoughts. It is these that are projected out, thereby making the world in which our bodies live.

The wrong and right minds are the domain of perception. The ego’s false perceptions are corrected in our right minds by what is referred to in the text as true perception. The entire realm of the split mind—the right and wrong minds, and the projections that make the world—comprises the world of perception. All of this, as will be evident in a moment, is contrasted with the realm of knowledge, the Home of Christ, our true Self.

🔎 We shall see in the lessons that follow how Jesus guides us in the process of sinking down into our minds, past our external perceptions and through the ego’s unreal thoughts that gave rise to them, to the real thoughts of the Holy Spirit. These correction thoughts will then ultimately fade into the Thoughts of God.”

Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 135-136.

💡 Now, let's dive into the lesson proper.

🧩 THE 'TWO LEVELS' OF ACIM

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📘 "Perception is not an attribute of God. ²His is the realm of knowledge. ³Yet He has created the Holy Spirit as the Mediator between perception and knowledge. ⁴Without this link with God, perception would have replaced knowledge forever in your mind. ⁵With this link with God, perception will become so changed and purified that it will lead to knowledge. ⁶That is its function as the Holy Spirit sees it. ⁷Therefore, that is its function in truth." (ACIM, W-43.1:1-7)

💡 Kenneth's comment on this first paragraph will give us a better idea of the 'two levels' in ACIM, a topic mentioned in many places in the Textbook. Confusing them puts a lot of ACIM students in trouble so a better understanding of them should, not only help us understand this lesson but also the upcoming ones as well:

🔎 “In this first paragraph we find a clear example of what I sometimes refer to as the two levels on which A Course in Miracles is written. Level One reflects the Course’s metaphysical principle that only God is true and real, and everything else is unreal, an illusion. Or as the very opening of the text states:

"²Nothing real can be threatened. ³Nothing unreal exists. (ACIM, T-in.2:2-3)"

It is that distinction between what is true and untrue that comprises this highly important aspect of A Course in Miracles. The first two sentences of this paragraph express Level One: the world of perception—which is not just the world we see with our eyes, but the very fact that we think we see a world at all—is an illusion. The split mind, which includes our thoughts of separation, the world which expresses those thoughts, as well as the Holy Spirit’s correction, is totally unreal. Since this separated mind cannot be part of totality, wholeness, and perfect Oneness—the very nature of God—it cannot be true in any way. Stated differently, if the contents of the split mind are not part of God, they must be outside Him. If they are outside God, they cannot exist. Only knowledge is true and therefore real.

🔎 Level Two deals only with illusion: the contrast between the ego’s wrong-minded perceptions of separation and specialness, and the Holy Spirit’s right-minded corrected perceptions of forgiveness and healing. This level can be thought of as the more practical one, insofar as this is the part of A Course in Miracles that deals with the condition in which we think we are (T-25.I.7:4): the world of the body. Thus is the world of illusion split into perceptual realms: the false perception of the ego and its correction, the true perception of the Holy Spirit.

🔎 Sentence 3 represents the transition from Level One to Level Two. The Holy Spirit can be understood as that part of our split minds that remembers truth. Thus He can be defined as the memory of God’s Love we took with us into the dream when we fell asleep. Remember that all of this is metaphorical, since we never fell asleep in the first place. (...) The Holy Spirit’s thoughts are reflected in any expression of forgiveness, and these are reflections of the real thought of love that is in our minds.

🔎 One final comment, it is the integration of these two levels—the uncompromising non-dualistic view of reality, along with the specific guidelines for living within the illusory world under the principle of forgiveness—that makes A Course in Miracles so unique as a spirituality, and so perfect for our age.”

Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 136-137.

Another 'level one' sentence in paragraph 2:

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📘 "In God you cannot see. ²Perception has no function in God, and does not exist." (ACIM, W-43.2:1-2)

👆 This is a tricky one in the sense that many students try to twist what Jesus means. The reason we can not see in God is because of what 'seeing'—anything or anyone—presupposes:

🔎 “seeing presupposes duality: a perceiver and a perceived. The realm of perception, therefore, is outside God. (...) Duality and non-duality, perception and knowledge, are mutually exclusive states. True life is only of the spirit, which is beyond the subject-object or perceiver-perceived duality. ” Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 137.

Combining levels:

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📘 ""Yet in salvation, which is the undoing of what never was, perception has a mighty purpose." (ACIM, W-43.2:3)

👆 In this sentence, Jesus states the uncompromising truth—at no point do any illusions ever exist—, yet, Spirit has to meet us where we are:

🔎 “We have in this one sentence expressions of both Level One and Level Two: The “undoing of what never was” is a Level One statement: the separation never occurred. Yet as long as we believe we are here in this dream world, the Holy Spirit, the expression of God’s Love within the dream, has a purpose and function. This function, which we know to be forgiveness, constitutes the Level Two aspect of A Course in Miracles.” Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 137.

Building up on the basics:

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📘 "Made by the Son of God for an unholy purpose, it must become the means for the restoration of his holiness to his awareness. ⁵Perception has no meaning. ⁶Yet does the Holy Spirit give it a meaning very close to God’s." (ACIM, W-43.2:4-6)

💡 We can hear elements of the early lessons here, we have given the world and everything we see its meaning. This meaning reflects the ego's purpose of keeping us blind. Answering our willingness to see differently, the Holy Spirit will use whatever we weaponized 'against us and each other', to instead support us and all beings around us. And while this is still in the domain of perception, and therefore, duality, it reflects the love, holiness, and qualities of God instead of the unholiness of God. That's what is depicted in Kenneth's chart as 'true' versus 'false' perception. We have to be flexible with the language used in these lessons and understand that language can never state the truth that is beyond words, it can only point us toward it.

🧩 FORGIVENESS AS A HEALING MECHANISM

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📘 "Healed perception becomes the means by which the Son of God forgives his brother, and thus forgives himself." (ACIM, W-43.2:7)

💡 A sentence like this illustrates just how fundamental these first lessons are. We have here in a nutshell the essence of forgiveness and the Atonement principle. Jesus doesn't elaborate more at this point but we shall dive deeper into forgiveness very soon!

🧩 AS CLOSE AS IT CAN GET FROM THE TRUTH

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📘 "You cannot see apart from God because you cannot be apart from God. ²Whatever you do you do in Him, because whatever you think, you think with His Mind. ³If vision is real, and it is real to the extent to which it shares the Holy Spirit’s purpose, then you cannot see apart from God." (ACIM, W-43.3:1-3)

💡 This paragraph restates the fact that true vision only occurs within God's mind, whom we are one with. God, as this lesson's title states it, is our Source! Beyond Him, there is no seeing. But Jesus indulges us and meets us where we are by saying that within duality, 'seeing' WITH the Holy Spirit, is as close as seeing can get from the truth.

💡 I'll leave the instructions to apply today's idea to your exploration! 😊

💙🪄 Good job, everyone! We are doing amazing. Let's keep pushing our limits and renew our commitment to seek and find freedom in these lessons! It is our birthright! 🪄💙

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* My comment on this lesson follows my studying of the in-depth comment of the same lesson by Kenneth Wapnick in his published work, Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles". While it may sometimes contain my thoughts on it, it is essentially my humble take and summary of the masterful work of Kenneth. I share them here in the hope that someone might find them helpful.

** I also share, in these ACIM posts, the wallpaper images that I use on my phone and change every day to help me commit to my lesson, in the hope that some might enjoy them as well. Here is the link to a Dropbox folder where you can download the lessons's wallpaper for mobile I have uploaded so far.

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