June 2, 2015
Appreciation is the only appropriate response to the one we are encountering at any given moment. This may be someone we encounter by “chance” on the street or someone we have been in relationship with for some time. Each one is in our life at any given moment for a reason. That reason is for us to appreciate them. Our gratitude is due them for their loving thoughts and their appeal for help. Both are capable of bringing love into our awareness if we perceive them truly. Reality is revealed in our perceiving them truly. If we feel love and peace as we see this one, we are seeing truly. But if we feel a sense of strain, it comes from our attempts not to perceive truly, to perceive from our egoic thought system made of our desire to be separate. Being in unity and Oneness with one another is our natural state of being and is truly effortless. However, we seem to want to expend great effort to maintain a false sense of separation from our whole Self.
Spirit’s job is to work with us and guide us in correct perception, guiding us in the awareness of the love that we are. When we begin to appreciate our brothers and sisters and are grateful for their presence in our lives, no matter the circumstance, we allow Spirit to shift our perception and see each other more clearly. Truly recognizing a call for help for what it is as Spirit guides us allows us the opportunity to see the healing of not just another, but of ourselves.
Your interpretations of another’s needs are your interpretation of yours. By giving help you are asking for it, and if you perceive but one need in yourself you will be healed. For you will recognize the One’s Answer as you want It to be, and if you want It in truth, It will be truly yours. ACIM T-12.I.7.1-3
Our desire for truth is key. Our desire to appreciate, be grateful and extend love and help are the key intentions that open our minds to Spirit’s guidance. Can we set the intention to be only truly helpful? Yes we can and that is really what we want.
By applying Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, we will gain an increasing awareness that Spirit’s criteria are equally applicable to us. Should we recognize fear? Yes, but simply recognizing it is not enough to escape it. We must open our minds and allow Spirit to correctly translate fear into truth for us. Just recognizing fear leaves us stuck in fear, but accepting Spirit’s translation of fear into truth opens us to the love that lies beyond it. That love is rooted in reality and opens our minds to the awareness of who we really are. We are complete, whole, limitless, and filled with peace. What more could we wish to be? By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, we are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. We have undone the misperception and revealed love in its place. The veil we have drawn across love’s face has now disappeared.
If you would look upon love, which is the world’s reality, how could you do better than to recognize, in every defense against it, the underlying appeal for it? And how could you better learn of its reality than by answering the appeal for it by giving it? Spirit’s interpretation of fear does dispel it, for the awareness of truth cannot be denied. Thus does Spirit replace fear with love and translate error into truth. And thus will you learn of Spirit how to replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity. For the separation is only the denial of union, and correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true. ACIM T-12.I.10.1-6
Our eternal knowledge of our Oneness is within us and has never left us. Waken to that knowledge now and live in the awareness of love and peace. It is our function in this world to be who we really are and share that with each other and all creation. Let it be so.
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