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Notes from "Miracles"
Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.
You need not know the way to Him. Your part is simply to allow all obstacles that you have interposed between the Son and God the Father to be quietly removed forever. God will do His part in joyful and immediate response. Ask and receive. But do not make demands, nor point the road to God by which He should appear to you. The way to reach Him is merely to let Him be. God knows His Son, and knows the way to him. He does not need His Son to show Him how to find His way.
Father, we do not know the way to You. But we have called, and You have answered us. We will not interfere. Salvation's ways are not our own, for they belong to You. And it is unto You we look for them. Our hands are open to receive Your gifts. We have no thoughts we think apart from You, and cherish no beliefs of what we are, or Who created us. Yours is the way that we would find and follow. And we ask but that Your Will, which is our own as well, be done in us and in the world that it become a part of Heaven now. Amen. [Lesson 189.]
I Place The Future in the Hands of God
This idea sets you down just short of Heaven, with the goal in sight and obstacles behind where you await with certainty the final step of God. How short the journey still to be pursued!
Accept this idea, and you have passed all anxiety, all pits of hell, all blackness of depression, thoughts of sin, and devastation brought about by guilt. You are saved, and your salvation thus becomes the gift you give the world, because you have received.
Each instant given unto God in passing, with the next one given Him already, is a time of your release from sadness, pain and even death itself.
God holds your future as He holds your past and present. They are one to Him, and so they should be one to you. You are not asked to understand the lack of sequence really found in time. You are but asked to let the future go, and place it in God's Hands. The past will punish you no more, and future dread will now be meaningless.
Release the future. The past is gone, and what is present becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course.
Give as much consistent effort as you can to make this lesson be a part of you. What worry can beset the one who gives his future to the loving Hands of God? What can he suffer? What can cause him pain, or bring experience of loss to him? He who has escaped all fear of future pain has found his way to present peace, and certainty of care the world can never threaten.
Place your future in the Hands of God. For in God's Hands we rest untroubled, sure that only good can come to us. No longer is the world our enemy, for we have chosen that we be its friend. [Lesson 194.]"
Love is the Way I Walk in Gratitude
Your brother is your "enemy" because you see in him the rival for your peace; a plunderer who takes his joy from you, and leaves you nothing but a black despair so bitter and relentless that there is no hope remaining. Now is vengeance all there is to wish for. Now can you but try to bring him down to lie in death with you, as useless as yourself; as little left within his grasping fingers as in yours.
Gratitude can only be sincere if it be joined to love. We offer thanks to God our Father that in us all things will find their freedom. Therefore give thanks, but in sincerity.
We thank our Father for one thing alone; that we are separate from no living thing, and therefore one with Him. Walk, then, in gratitude the way of love. Learn to think of gratitude in place of anger, malice and revenge. Gratitude goes hand in hand with love, and where one is the other must be found. For gratitude is but an aspect of the Love which is the Source of all creation. Love can walk no road except the way of gratitude, and thus we go who walk the way to God. [Lesson 195.]
It Can Be But Myself I Crucify
When this is firmly understood, you will not attack yourself, and you will realize that to attack another is but to attack yourself. You will be free of the insane belief that to attack a brother saves yourself. You will understand his safety is you own, and in his healing you are healed.
Teach your mind that you are not an ego. You will not believe you are a body to be crucified. It is not time we need for this. It is but willingness. What would seem to need a thousand years can easily be done in just one instant by the grace of God.
The dreary, hopeless thought that you can make attacks on others and escape yourself has nailed you to the cross. Who could believe his Father is his deadly enemy, separate from him, and waiting to destroy his life and blot him from the universe, without the fear of hell upon his heart?
The fear of God is real to anyone who thinks this thought is true. He will not perceive its foolishness, or even see that it is there, so that it would be possible to question it. You can not perceive that it is but your thoughts that bring you fear, and your deliverance depends on you.
Once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear. And God, Whom you had thought to banish, can be welcomed back within the holy mind He never left.
There is an instant in which terror seems to grip your mind so wholly that escape appears quite hopeless. When you realize that it is you you fear, the mind perceives itself as split. It seemed to be an enemy outside you had to fear. Thus a god outside yourself became your mortal enemy; the source of fear.
Now, for an instant, is a murderer perceived within you, eager for your death, intent on plotting punishment for you until the time when it can kill at last. Yet in this instant is the time as well in which salvation comes. For fear of God has disappeared. You can call on Him to save you from illusions by His Love, calling Him Father and yourself His Son. Step back from fear, and make advance to love.
When the fear of God is gone, there are no obstacles that still remain between you and the holy peace of God. It is indeed but you your mind can try to crucify. Yet your redemption, too, will come from you. [Lesson 198.]
