A Course in Miracles.
Lesson 181.
I trust my brothers and sisters who are one with me.
Trusting your brothers and sisters is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt,
In your ability to transcend your lack of sure conviction in yourself.
When you attack a sister or a brother,
You proclaim that they are limited by what you have perceived in them.
You do not look beyond their errors.
Rather,
Their errors are magnified,
Becoming blocks to your awareness of your higher self that lies beyond your own mistakes and lies beyond their seeming sins,
As well as your sins.
Perception has a focus.
It is this focus that gives consistency to what you see.
Change this focus and what you behold will change accordingly.
Your vision now will shift to give support to the intent which has replaced the intention you held before.
Remove your focus on your brothers' or sisters' sins and you experience the peace that comes from faith and sinlessness.
This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins,
For their mistakes focused on are witnesses to sins in you and you will not transcend the sight of sins and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.
In practicing today,
We first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent.
We instruct our minds that it is this looking past sins we seek and only this for just a little while.
We do not care about our future goals.
What we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time,
Wherein we practice changing our intent.
We seek for innocence and nothing else.
We seek for it with no concern but for now.
A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals.
You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating.
How extremely different are the goals you held before.
You have also been dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that even if you should succeed you will inevitably lose your way again.
How could this matter?
The past is gone.
The future is only imagined.
These concerns are defenses against the present change of focus and perception.
Nothing more.
So,
As we practice,
We lay these pointless limitations aside for a little while.
We do not look to past beliefs.
What we will believe will not intrude upon us now.
We enter in the time of practicing with one intent to look upon the sinlessness within us.
We recognize that we have lost this goal.
If anger blocks our way in any form,
We have lost the goal if the sins of a brother or sister occur to us.
This narrowed focus will restrict our sight.
It will turn our eyes upon our own mistakes which we will magnify and call our sins.
Now,
For a little while,
Without regard to the past or future,
Should such blocks arise,
We will transcend them with instructions to our minds to change their focus.
As we say to ourself,
Repeat,
In your mind,
After me,
It is not their sins that I would look upon.
I trust my sisters and brothers who are one with me.
If blocks arise,
Repeat to yourself again,
I trust my sisters and brothers who are one with me.
It is not their sins that I would look upon.
We will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day.
We do not seek for long-range goals.
Each one of our obstructions seems to block the vision of our sinlessness.
We seek,
Just for an instant,
Relief from the misery that the focus upon sin will bring,
And if uncorrected,
Will remain.
We do not ask for fantasies,
For what we seek to look upon is really there.
As our focus goes beyond mistakes,
We will behold a holy,
Sinless world.
A sinless world is all we want to see.
A sinless world is all we seek for in the name of true perception.
The eyes of Christ are inevitably ours,
And the love Christ feels for us becomes our own love as well.
Love will become the only thing we see,
Reflected in the world and in ourselves.
The world,
Which once proclaimed our sins,
Becomes the proof that we are sinless.
Our love for everyone we look upon attests to our remembrance of the Holy Higher Self,
Which knows no sin,
And never could conceive of anything without its sinlessness.
We seek to remember this as we turn our minds to practicing.
We don't look ahead to the future,
And we don't look back to the past.
We look into the present.
We give our trust to the experience we ask for now.
Our sinlessness truly is the will of God.
In this instant,
Our will is one with God's.
I trust my brothers and sisters who are one with me.
It is not their sins that I would look upon.
Ponder on this.
I trust my brothers and sisters who are one with me.
It is not their sins that I would look upon.
I trust my brothers and sisters who are one with me.
It is not their sins that I would look upon.
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
