Read on the ACIM CE App: https://acimce.app/:W-304
Lesson 304
Let not my world obscure the sight of Christ.
Practice Instructions
See complete instructions in a separate document. A short summary:
- Read the commentary paragraph slowly and personally.
- Pray the prayer, perhaps several times.
- Morning and evening: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
- Hourly remembrance: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
- Frequent reminders: Repeat the idea and then spend a quiet moment in meditation.
- Response to temptation: Repeat the idea whenever upset, to restore peace.
- Read the “What Is” section slowly and thoughtfully once during the day.
Commentary
“My world” is, of course, the world I made to support my ego; the illusory world of attack and separation. The sight of Christ, or the vision of Christ as it is mostly called in the Text, is a faculty that is native to all of us, part of our created Being. Christ’s vision shows us reality and oneness, not the fragmented chaos we usually see with our eyes. This sight is always available to us, but the world we made “can obscure [our] holy sight” (1:1). So today’s thought is a prayer, or a resolution, not to allow that to happen, not to let what our eyes show us prevent our seeing what the vision of Christ can show us all the time and any time—namely, the real world.
Perception is a mirror, not a fact, and what I look on is my state of mind reflected outward. (1:3)
The same thought is repeated throughout the Course:
Perception can make whatever picture the mind desires to see. Remember this. (M-19.5:2-3)
The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that….It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. (T-21.I.1:1, 4)
The world, then, is only showing us our own minds. Nothing more nor less than our own projections obscure the sight of Christ. Christ is the only reality, the creation of God, and without our superimposed projections this reality is all we would see. But we cannot use our perception to see it; instead, we must use the vision of Christ, a wholly separate faculty or sense (1:2). We need to let the sight of the world fade from our minds; this is why closing our eyes can be helpful at first, when what our eyes show us seems so solid and real.
What we see is determined by what we want to see. Therefore, we are given these words to say: “I would [i.e., I will to] bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ” (1:4). Our perception can become true perception, which sees the world as a reflection of the truth instead of being a mirror of our projections, if truth is what we want to see. “When you want only love you will see nothing else” (T-12.X.10:1).
Today I want to tune in to my natural, God-given desire to bless the world. I want to draw upon that will to bless, which is always in me, and use it to transform my perception of the world around me. I want to see the world as a mirror reflecting the fact that “all my sins have been forgiven me” (1:5). I will see that when I see all the world as forgiven. “Let me forgive, and thus receive salvation for the world” (2:2). This is a gift given me by God that I can offer to His holy Son, of which every person I meet or even think of today is a part. As I forgive those around me, which is my mission today, they will be helped to once again find the memory of God, and of the Christ as their own Self (2:3).