Library of Christ Mind Teachings
ACIM Original Edition
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1 Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and
holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of
sure conviction in yourself. When you attack a brother, you proclaim
that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. You do not look
beyond his errors. Rather, they are magnified, becoming blocks to your
awareness of the Self that lies beyond your own mistakes and past his
seeming sins as well as yours.
2 Perception has a focus. It is this which gives consistency
to what you see. Change but this focus, and what you behold will change
accordingly. Your vision now will shift to give support to the intent
which has replaced the one you held before. Remove your focus on your
brother’s sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in
sinlessness. This faith receives its only sure support from what you see
in others past their sins. For their mistakes, if focused on, are
witnesses to sins in you. And you will not transcend their sight and see
the sinlessness that lies beyond.
3 Therefore 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 we seek and only this,
for just a little while. We do not care about our future goals, and 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 now.
4 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 are from those
you held before. And 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? For the past is
gone, the future but imagined. These concerns are but defenses against
present change of focus in perception. Nothing more.
5 We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. We do
not look to past beliefs, and 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. We recognize that we have lost this goal if
anger blocks our way in any form. And if a brother’s sins occur to us,
our narrowed focus will restrict our sight and turn our eyes upon our
own mistakes, which we will magnify and call our “sins.”
6 So, for a little while, without regard to past or future,
should such blocks arise, we will transcend them with instructions to
our minds to change their focus, as we say:
7 It is not this that I would look upon.
I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
8 And we will also use these thoughts to keep us safe
throughout the day. We do not seek for long range goals. As each
obstruction seems to block the vision of our sinlessness, we seek but
for surcease an instant from the misery the focus upon sin will bring
and, uncorrected, will remain.
9 Nor do we ask for fantasies. For what we seek to look upon
is really there. And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a
wholly sinless world. When seeing this is all we want to see, when this
is all we seek for in the name of true perception, are the eyes of
Christ inevitably ours. And the love He feels for us becomes our own as
well. This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and
in ourselves.
10 The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof
that we are sinless. And our love for everyone we look upon attests to
our remembrance of the holy Self Which knows no sin and never could
conceive of anything without Its sinlessness. We seek for this
remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. We look neither
ahead nor backwards. We look straight into the present. And we give our
trust to the experience we ask for now. Our sinlessness is but the Will
of God. This instant is our willing one with His.