Lesson 35: My mind is part of God's. I am very holy.

Feb 4 in Feed

🧩 The Restoration of Our Right Mind

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🌟 After a month spent removing the carpet on which sat our perception of basically everything, Jesus keeps on building upon the two previous lessons and gives us more "restorative" ideas to contemplate about our true nature. This will continue for the next lessons until we reach the revision period and it offers a nice contrast to the first chunk of lessons dedicated to our "undoing". If you are still on board, you have successfully passed a critical threshold in your learning without running away, so congratulations! This is a big deal.

🔎 “In this lesson, and increasingly so for the next fifteen, Jesus helps us realize there is another part of us—what is known in the early part of the text as the right mind. This part, through the Holy Spirit, is still connected with the holiness of God that has never changed, despite our unholy dreams of guilt and judgment.” Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 107.

🧩 Feeling Doubtful? Good!

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📘 "Today’s idea does not describe the way you see yourself now. ²It does, however, describe what vision will show you. ³It is difficult for anyone who thinks he is in this world to believe this of himself. ⁴Yet the reason he thinks he is in this world is because he does not believe it." (ACIM, W-35.1:1-4)

🌟 Jesus is very aware that we will most likely not believe in this idea or will at least have some serious reservations. Because we have all these ideas about ourselves that are critical and unloving, raising our awareness of our resistance to our "holiness" is the point. As repeated many times in the previous lessons, what we are not aware of, can not be corrected:

🔎 “He does not want this used as a mantra that we repeat over and over throughout the day to shout down our unloving thoughts. Rather, in keeping with our training, he wants us to bring our unloving thoughts to this loving thought. These unloving thoughts involve some expression of our belief that we are unholy or sinful. Thus would we rise to our new way of understanding, which is that there is another way of not only looking at ourselves, but another way of thinking about ourselves.” Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 107.

🌟 By contrasting his thought system to the ego thought system, Jesus helps us become aware of the one we have adopted. This is very smart and helps us touch on the root of the problem as Kenneth noticed by moving from another way of "looking" at ourselves, to another way of "thinking" about ourselves.

🧩 Everything Is As We Wish It

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📘 "You will believe that you are part of where you think you are. ²That is because you surround yourself with the environment you want. ³And you want it to protect the image of yourself that you have made. ⁴The image is part of this environment. ⁵What you see while you believe you are in it is seen through the eyes of the image. ⁶This is not vision. ⁷Images cannot see." (ACIM, W-35.2:1-7)

🌟 In this paragraph, Jesus reminds of of what is at stake and what our motivation is in seeing ourselves as "unholy". The "environment" mentioned is the environment of separation. We have defined ourselves as separated entities (CAUSE) and have made up (EFFECT) a world around us to fit this description, just as we are making our brothers and sisters play the role we need them to play to confirm our unworthiness, neediness, lack, sinfulness, victimhood, etc...

🧩 Turning Our Attention To the Perceiver

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📘 "The idea for today presents a very different view of yourself. ²By establishing your Source it establishes your Identity, and it describes you as you must really be in truth. ³We will use a somewhat different kind of application for today’s idea because the emphasis for today is on the perceiver, rather than on what he perceives." (ACIM, W-35.3:1-3)

🌟 To whom we identify ourselves is everything and that is where Jesus attempts to bring a first correction here by restoring our original divine identity:

🔎 “In other words, I am a part of God and am very holy. That is why Source and Identity are capitalized: Jesus is talking about God and the Christ that is our true Self. Jesus turns now to the perceiver, rather than to what he perceives. Indeed, at this point Jesus is not interested in what we perceive outside, but only in what we think (...) We can better understand the overriding emphasis in these early lessons on searching our minds, since it is our minds—the true perceiver—that need correction.” Excerpt from Journey through the Workbook of "A Course in Miracles", Kenneth Wapnick, Vol. 1, p. 108.

🧩 More Mind Searching

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🌟 The next paragraphs of the lesson are dedicated to our mind-searching and specific instructions for this lesson. The mind-searching process should be more familiar by now. Merely reading the lesson isn't going to help us as much as applying the idea to the multitude of illusions we entertain about ourselves. We find the usual recommendations to keep in mind when listing all the positive or negative attributes we believe to be true about ourselves:

🎯 Non-discrimination between our attributes (an illusion is an illusion)

🎯 Specificity of our attributes: 📘 "You should not think of these terms in an abstract way." (ACIM, W-35.7:1)

🎯 While not taking any of them seriously: 📘 "Try to recognize that the direction of your fantasies about yourself does not matter." (ACIM, W-35.5:3)

🎯 With gentleness! This is not a punishment but a loving and forgiving mind training: 📘 "Although nothing that does occur should be omitted from the exercises, nothing should be “dug out” with effort. ⁴Neither force nor discrimination should be used." (ACIM, W-35.8:3-4)

🎯 And we then conclude the lesson by replacing the illusions with the truth: 📘 "But my mind is part of God’s. ⁶I am very holy." (ACIM, W-35.7:5-6)

💙🪄 Love and Light 🪄💙

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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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