My Thoughts* on ACIM Lessons 324–332 What Is Freedom to You?
by Debra Yvonne Simmons, Not Ashamed Of Christ
My witness and understanding at this time.
Lesson 324
I merely follow, for I would not lead.
1. Father, You are the One Who gave the plan for my salvation to me. ²You have set the way I am to go, the role to take, and every step in my appointed path. ³I cannot lose the way. ⁴I can but choose to wander off a while, and then return. ⁵Your loving Voice will always call me back, and guide my feet aright. ⁶My brothers all can follow in the way I lead them. ⁷Yet I merely follow in the way to You, as You direct me and would have me go.
2. So let us follow One Who knows the way. ²We need not tarry, and we cannot stray except an instant from His loving Hand. ³We walk together, for we follow Him. ⁴And it is He Who makes the ending sure, and guarantees a safe returning home.
(ACIM, W-324.1:1–2:4)
* I follow God, the Father because I do not know what to do, yet, He watches me and guides me every step in my appointed path. There is a role I have been given to perform.
* We walk with Jesus. We follow the Holy Spirit Who knows how to bring us back to Heaven and God, our Father. This is the universal eperience we each will have.
* And yes, there are any paths to get there but this IS where we are going with Jesus’ help and that that of the Holy Spirit. It is God Who makes that a guarantee.
* There is only the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit shows the Son the way back to the Father’s presence; through the guilt, shame, and fear and back to Father’s Love which is what we are made of and what is the only thing that is real.
Lesson 325
All things I think I see reflect ideas.
1. This is salvation’s keynote: What I see reflects a process in my mind, which starts with my idea of what I want. ²From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires, judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find. ³These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real and guarded as one’s own. ⁴From insane wishes comes an insane world. ⁵From judgment comes a world condemned. ⁶And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth, with mercy for the holy Son of God, to offer him a kindly home where he can rest a while before he journeys on, and help his brothers walk ahead with him, and find the way to Heaven and to God.
2. Our Father, Your ideas reflect the truth, and mine apart from Yours but make up dreams. ²Let me behold what only Yours reflect, for Yours and Yours alone establish truth.
(ACIM, W-325.1:1–2:2)
* “⁶And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth, with mercy for the holy Son of God, to offer him a kindly home where he can rest a while before he journeys on, and help his brothers walk ahead with him, and find the way to Heaven and to God.”
* THIS is what one sees when one has accepted the Atonement. NOT when you look for things to forgive or for things to go well; such as, a body, relationship, or wallet staying healthy to prove you are righteous.
* TRUTH “2. Our Father, (God) Your ideas reflect the truth, and mine apart from Yours but make up dreams.”
* MY PRAYER and goal over six decades with my share of stumbling but a constant witness of this. “²Let me behold what only Yours reflect, for Yours and Yours alone establish truth.”
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* “⁶And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth, with mercy for the holy Son of God, to offer him a kindly home where he can rest a while before he journeys on, and help his brothers walk ahead with him, and find the way to Heaven and to God.” Lesson 325 (tomorrow’s Lesson in the Workbook)
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* THIS is what one sees when one has accepted the Atonement. NOT when you look for things to forgive or for things to go well; such as a body, relationship, or wallet staying healthy to prove you are righteous.
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* You have mercy because you see a son of God confused and struggling.
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* It is possible to enter Heaven now and hold that witness here on earth in the flesh in full communion with God and His complete devotion to His Son.
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* You may not look different or feel the ecstasy that we will feel physiologically in His full presence eventually which is not that far from a full-body orgasm that we could not withstand while in the flesh, but we will have a firm conviction of the truths that the Holy Spirit bears witness of. The first being that God IS.
Lesson 326
I am forever an Effect of God.
1. Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. ²I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. ³As You created me I have remained. ⁴Where You established me I still abide. ⁵And all Your attributes abide in me, because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. ⁶Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. ⁷And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. ⁸Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will vanish, and all separate thoughts unite in glory as the Son of God.
2. Let us today behold earth disappear, at first transformed, and then, forgiven, fade entirely into God’s holy Will.
(ACIM, W-326.1:1–2:1)
* God is my Cause. Not my parents or my children. Not even my partner, God is my Cause.
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* This IS all acheivable on this side of the veil.
Lesson 327
I need but call and You will answer me.
1. I am not asked to take salvation on the basis of an unsupported faith. ²For God has promised He will hear my call, and answer me Himself. ³Let me but learn from my experience that this is true, and faith in Him must surely come to me. ⁴This is the faith that will endure, and take me farther and still farther on the road that leads to Him. ⁵For thus I will be sure that He has not abandoned me and loves me still, awaiting but my call to give me all the help I need to come to Him.
2. Father, I thank You that Your promises will never fail in my experience, if I but test them out. ²Let me attempt therefore to try them, and to judge them not. ³Your Word is one with You. ⁴You give the means whereby conviction comes, and surety of Your abiding Love is gained at last.
(ACIM, W-327.1:1–2:4)
* Journaling has allowed me to see the Hand of God in my life. Answered prayers and unanswered ones show me His Love. “²For God has promised He will hear my call, and answer me Himself.”
* “Let me but learn from my experience that this is true …” Do not cut out God because of what some person has done or said. Look at your own life and ask to see Him there. He will reveal Himself to you.
* “… I will be sure that He has not abandoned me and loves me still, awaiting but my call to give me all the help I need to come to Him.” He is there for you. I know this because He has proven over and over that He is there for me.
* “if I but test them out …” IF. IF. IF.
* You have to make the effort to know that God is there. You have to be willing to have God there for you. It will not be forced on you even though NOTHING that you could do or say could or would remove Him from you.
Lesson 328
I choose the second place to gain the first.
1. What seems to be the second place is first, for all things we perceive are upside down until we listen to the Voice for God. ²It seems that we will gain autonomy but by our striving to be separate, and that our independence from the rest of God’s creation is the way in which salvation is obtained. ³Yet all we find is sickness, suffering and loss and death. ⁴This is not what our Father wills for us, nor is there any second to His Will. ⁵To join with His is but to find our own. ⁶And since our will is His, it is to Him that we must go to recognize our will.
2. There is no will but Yours. ²And I am glad that nothing I imagine contradicts what You would have me be. ³It is Your Will that I be wholly safe, eternally at peace. ⁴And happily I share that Will which You, my Father, gave as part of me.
(ACIM, W-328.1:1–2:4)
* I personally am very autonomous but that is not because I deny God but because I lean on Him and have continued to do so more and more these 60 some years. It aggrivates others at times but I believe it has served me and the Bible says to trust not in the arm of flesh but in God, the Father. This is what I have tried to do even though I fell very short of it over the years.
* I think that this is a confusing issue because of our refusal to accept the Atonement that would give us our freedom while giving us our oneness as well.
* “There is no will but Yours.” I find this powerful! I want to plant this seed in my thought garden and watch it grow.
* “³It is Your Will that I be wholly safe, eternally at peace.”
* This is the witness that I want to remind myself of when things seem challenging so that I understand that nothing outside of this could be real to begin with. As I do this often other things just fall away.
* However, we are in a Universal Plan and I may have committed to a role that would benefit others that might seem outside of this truth. That does not need to break my confidence in His Will being for my good.
* Instead, I want to practice gratitude in all things KNOWING that whatever is going on serves my highest good and that of my brethren.
Lesson 329
I have already chosen what You will.
1. Father, I thought I wandered from Your Will, defied it, broke its laws, and interposed a second will more powerful than Yours. ²Yet what I am in truth is but Your Will, extended and extending. ³This am I, and this will never change. ⁴As You are One, so am I one with You. ⁵And this I chose in my creation, where my will became forever one with Yours. ⁶That choice was made for all eternity. ⁷It cannot change, and be in opposition to itself. ⁸Father, my will is Yours. ⁹And I am safe, untroubled and serene, in endless joy, because it is Your Will that it be so.
2. Today we will accept our union with each other and our Source. ²We have no will apart from His, and all of us are one because His Will is shared by all of us. ³Through it we recognize that we are one. ⁴Through it we find our way at last to God.
(ACIM, W-329.1:1–2:4)
* I am one with God, the Father. Through Him I know myself as ALL of creation. This I will remember NOW.
Lesson 330
I will not hurt myself again today.
1. Let us this day accept forgiveness as our only function. ²Why should we attack our minds, and give them images of pain? ³Why should we teach them they are powerless, when God holds out His power and His Love, and bids them take what is already theirs? ⁴The mind that is made willing to accept God’s gifts has been restored to spirit, and extends its freedom and its joy, as is the Will of God united with its own. ⁵The Self which God created cannot sin, and therefore cannot suffer. ⁶Let us choose today that He be our Identity, and thus escape forever from all things the dream of fear appears to offer us.
2. Father, Your Son can not be hurt. ²And if we think we suffer, we but fail to know our one Identity we share with You. ³We would return to It today, to be made free forever from all our mistakes, and to be saved from what we thought we were.
(ACIM, W-330.1:1–2:3)
* The Holy Spirit brings these words alive in our hearts. They are not words that can be understood intellectually alone.
Lesson 331
My thoughts* on ACIM Lesson 131:
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There is no conflict, for my will is Yours.
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1. How foolish, Father, to believe Your Son could cause himself to suffer! ²Could he make a plan for his damnation, and be left without a certain way to his release? ³You love me, Father. ⁴You could never leave me desolate, to die within a world of pain and cruelty. ⁵How could I think that Love has left Itself? ⁶There is no will except the Will of Love. ⁷Fear is a dream, and has no will that can conflict with Yours. ⁸Conflict is sleep, and peace awakening. ⁹Death is illusion; life, eternal truth. ¹⁰There is no opposition to Your Will. ¹¹There is no conflict, for my will is Yours.
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2. Forgiveness shows us that God’s Will is One, and that we share it. ²Let us look upon the holy sights forgiveness shows today, that we may find the peace of God. ³Amen.
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(ACIM, W-331.1:1–2:3)
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* Love and peace. These are our core realities. Only inside will they be found even though the world currently teaches that they are to be found outside ourselves.
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* Life is eternal truth. In our addictions and familiarity to chaos it may be difficult to think of a life without fear, without conflict so we have that inner guidance of the Holy Spirit that shares with us inside the feeling of the truthfulness of these words. Only this miracle of God’s Love could touch us here.
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* Forgiveness, as understood by the Atonement, which is an understanding that the belief in separation from God was a temporary mistake opens the way for the human mind to begin to accept that God’s Love could be real and that His Son is safe within the Mind of the Father.
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* This is what offers us peace and joy that cannot be touched by the circumstances or events of the world we think we are living in.
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* To God I give all glory, in the Name of Christ, with gratitude to Jesus who led me to this place of understanding with the helping hands of so many throughout my life powered by the Grace of God, Amen.
Lesson 332
Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free.
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1. The ego makes illusions. ²Truth undoes its evil dreams by shining them away. ³Truth never makes attack. ⁴It merely is. ⁵And by its presence is the mind recalled from fantasies, awaking to the real. ⁶Forgiveness bids this presence enter in, and take its rightful place within the mind. ⁷Without forgiveness is the mind in chains, believing in its own futility. ⁸Yet with forgiveness does the light shine through the dream of darkness, offering it hope, and giving it the means to realize the freedom that is its inheritance.
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2. We would not bind the world again today. ²Fear holds it prisoner. ³And yet Your Love has given us the means to set it free. ⁴Father, we would release it now. ⁵For as we offer freedom, it is given us. ⁶And we would not remain as prisoners, while You are holding freedom out to us.
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(ACIM, W-332.1:1–2:6)
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* It is curious how the Course lessons are written to a collective that has accepted what is shared as if it were completed.
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* At the same time, there is an interesting revealing that comes into the consciousness of the individual who lives day to day with the companionship of the Holy Spirit and the teachings of A Course In Miracles.
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* Forgiveness of the original error of the belief in separation from God loosens the mind from the constraints of obligation and responsibility for others as well as guilt for one’s own behavior. That does not mean that you do not try to do your best. It means that you understand that there is no way for you to understand where others are and the best that you can do is listen to the Holy Spirit and trust that all is being done for the highest good and that if mistakes are made they are forgiven in this place of confusion.
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* At this point, to me, that is freedom.
Thank you for sharing this reading with me. debi.
