 Hi everyone, welcome again to A Course in Miracles Workbook Lessons Live. We're just going deeper and deeper into the mystical present moment. So, welcome to mysticism. If any of you aren't familiar with mysticism, just Google it. But I think you'll feel it from Jesus and these beautiful lessons. And today it's like we're winding down quite a bit. We're kind of coming toward a pause of a lot of the broadcasting we've been doing in the community. So, we're just savoring the moment and savoring the stillness and the peace. This lesson today is very much an invitation and a permission to just drop into that delicious, delicious stillness of the present moment. Lesson 135. If I defend myself, I am attacked. Who would defend himself unless he thought he were attacked, that the attack were real, and that his own defense could save himself. And herein lies the folly of defense. It gives illusions full reality and then attempts to handle them as real. It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult. And it is this you do when you attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or organize the present as you wish. So that's beautiful. That's a great reminder from Jesus that we need to drop into the stillness of the present moment because, yeah, we're caught up in the egos games of attack and defense if we attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or plan or organize the present as you wish. That's pretty all-encompassing. That's an invitation to be still and know that I am God. You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what must happen, be happening, because it must contain what threatens you. A sense of threat is an acknowledgement of an inherent weakness, a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense. The world is based on this insane belief. In all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions, and its codes, its ethics, and its leaders, and its gods all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart. This is frightening. It stems from fear, increasing fear as each defense is made. You think it offers safety, yet it speaks of fear made real and terror justified. Is it not strange you do not pause to ask as you elaborate your plans and make your armor thicker and your locks more tight? What you defend and how and against what? Let us consider first what you defend. It must be something that is very weak and easily assaulted. It must be something made easy prey, unable to protect itself and needing your defense. What but the body has such frailty that constant care and watchful deep concern are needful to protect its little life. What but the body falters and must fail to serve the Son of God as worthy host. Yet it is not the body that can fear nor be a thing of fear. It has no needs but those which you assign to it. It needs no complicated health structures of defense, no health inducing medicine, no care, and no concern at all. Defend its life or give its gifts to make it beautiful or walls to make it safe. And you but say your home is open to the thief of time. Corruptible and crumbling so unsafe it must be guarded with your very life. Is not this picture fearful? Can you be at peace with such a concept of your home? Yet what endowed the body with the right to serve you thus except your own belief? It is your mind which gave the body all the functions that you see in it and set its value far beyond a little pile of dust and water. Who would make defense of something that he recognized as this? The body is in no need of defense. This cannot be too often emphasized. It will be strong and healthy if the mind does not abuse it by assigning it to roles it cannot fill to purposes beyond its scope and to exalted aims which it cannot accomplish. Such attempts, ridiculous and yet deeply cherished, are the sources for the many mad attacks you make upon it. Where it seems to fail your hopes, your needs, your values and your dreams. So, you know, it's just this body identification and the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers. Valuable for what it does. Valuable for what it is and Jesus is calling it, you know, a little pile of dust and water and he's saying why are you assigning such importance and value and meaning to a little pile of dust and water. Not a, not a, not a description, a little pile of dust and water. The cells, the small cells that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense need merely be perceived as quite apart from you. And it becomes a healthy serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done. Like the body is like a sweater or sweatshirt that you don't need anymore so you just peel it off and lay it aside gently. Defend the body and you have attacked your mind, where you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions, and you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from his source. So what he's saying here at the very end of this paragraph nine is that as long as you believe in private minds and private thoughts, then you will project that distortion to the body and believe that the body is has pain and the body is limited and the body is lacking. And it's all just a belief in private thoughts and private minds when there really is only one mind. There's only one divine mind, and we share that mind we are that idea that is the Christ in an idea in the mind of God, and we never left that source. To believe in private minds and private thoughts that's where the past and future comes in and secrets and hiding and defenses and attack and all kinds of craziness that get projected to the body but the body is not attacking or being attacked it's just being given false meaning by the ego. And when the mind believes this false meaning then it believes itself to be limited and private and separate and lacking. These are the thoughts in need of healing and the body will respond with health and they have been corrected and replaced with truth. This is the body's only real defense, yet is this where you look for its defense. You offer it protection of a kind from which it gains no benefit at all but merely adds to your distress of mind. You do not heal but merely take away the hope of healing for you fail to see where hope must lie if it be meaningful. The mind being gentle being kind being defenseless in the mind resting in the mind. That's where the healing is. And if you don't go and you try to go about healing the body or healing the people places things of the world and that there's no healing there because it's the world's a projection of the sleeping mind of this deceived mind and the answer inner peace is the answer inner peace is health. A healed mind does not plan. It carries out the plans that it receives through listening to wisdom that is not its own. It waits until it has been taught what should be done. And then proceeds to do it. It does not depend upon itself or anything except his adequacy to fulfill the plans assigned to it. It is secure in certainty that obstacles cannot impede its progress to accomplishment of any goal that serves the greater plan established for the good of everyone. A healed mind is relieved of the belief that it must plan. It cannot know the outcome, which is best, the means by which it is achieved, nor how to recognize the problem that the plan is made to solve. Clueless, clueless, clueless, trusting, trusting, trusting. I'll say this again because this is the key to happiness. A healed mind is relieved of the belief that it must plan, although it cannot know the outcome. Which is best cannot know the outcome which is best the means by which it is achieved, nor how to recognize the problem that the plan is made to solve. You can just feel how you can go into that early first work with less than nothing I see means anything because you, you can't know the outcome which is best the means by which it is achieved or how to recognize the problem that the plan is made to solve. It's the opposite of the world view of, of define the problem, gather the means and go for the outcome that you want. Jesus is like, you have no idea. You've made up a world of a complete unreality and now you're striving and planning and trying to acquire means and trying to define something that you don't understand at all. And that's why you feel guilty or afraid or upset as you're trying to achieve healing is if you even know what healing is. And this is clearly saying you don't if you if you knew what healing was you would accept it immediately. And be healed. But this world is a world of falsity of complexity and the more you try to analyze it, fix it, figure it out, change it, shape it. It's madness. It's madness. So, we'll just remember that first part of the sentence a healed mind is relieved of the belief that it must plan. Yeah, you don't need to plan to accept the atonement. You just need to accept the atonement. And it's a big surrender of everything you think you think and think you know, it's it's a letting go and saying I was wrong about everything of linear time and space I was wrong about the cosmos I was wrong about everything and I would now happily heal Holy Spirit heal my mind Holy Spirit show me the way to accept the healing now. It must misuse the body and its plans until it recognizes this is so. When it has accepted this is true. Then is it healed and let's the body go. Enslavement of the body to the plans the unhealed mind sets up to save itself must make the body sick. It is free to be the means of helping in a plan which far exceeds its own protection and which needs its service for a little while in this capacity is health assured for everything the mind employs for this will function flawlessly and with the strength that has been given it and cannot fail. It is perhaps not easy to perceive the self initiated plans are but defenses with the purpose, all of them were made to realize. They are the means by which a frightened mind would undertake its own protection at the cost of truth. It is not difficult to realize in some forms which these self deceptions take where the denial of reality is very obvious. Yet planning is not often recognized as a defense. The mind is engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. It does not think that it will be provided for unless it makes its own provisions. Time becomes a future emphasis to be controlled by learning and experience obtained by past events and previous beliefs. It does not present for it rest on the idea that the past has taught enough to let the mind direct its future course. The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. Change right now. It has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals, its past experience directs its choice of what will happen. And it does not see that here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past, without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs. The anticipation plays no part at all for present confidence directs the way. Defenses are the plans you undertake to make against the truth. Their aim is to select what you approve and disregard what you consider incompatible with your beliefs of your reality. Change is meaningless indeed for it is your reality that is the threat in quotes, which your defenses would attack obscure and take apart and crucify. This is the fear of love, you know, all defenses all planning all analyzing all attempts to fix the world change the world. All attempts to retain the past and traditions and nostalgia or plan the future and future outcomes. All of these are defenses against the holy instant and all of these are defenses against divine love. So it's not the things that could seem to happen to a body like weather conditions or tornadoes or tsunamis or earthquakes. It's not sickness and plagues and disease and so forth. It's not the threat of military invasion. It's not the threat of bombs and guns and missiles. All those relate to the body. The threat is is love. The mind is so afraid of the stillness of God's love that it's invented a world of unreality. An unreal past and an unreal future that deny the reality of love right now. And love is right now. Of course, love is eternal and the present moment is our recognition of eternity. It's our gateway to eternity. What could you not accept if you but knew that everything that happens, all events past, present and to come are gently planned by one whose only purpose is your good. Oh, relief. Let's go through that sentence one more time. Let it rain down on you. Let it rain in your mind. What could you not accept if you but knew that everything that happens, all events past, present and to come are gently planned by one whose purpose is your good. Perhaps you have misunderstood his plan. Or he would never offer pain to you, but your defenses did not let you see his loving blessings shine in every step you took. While you made plans for death. He led you gently to eternal life. Your present trust in him is the defense that promises a future undisturbed, without a trace of sorrow and with joy that constantly increases as this life becomes a holy instant, set in time, but heeding only immortality. No defenses but your present trust direct the future, and this life becomes a meaningful encounter with the truth that only your defenses would conceal. Without defenses you become a light which heaven gratefully acknowledges to be its own. And it will leave you on in ways appointed for your happiness, according to the ancient plan. According to the ancient plan begun when time was born. Oh my gosh. According to the ancient plan. begun when time was born so the Holy Spirit simultaneously gave a plan of awakening from the dream of sickness and suffering and death the instant that it seemed to happen. Your followers were will join their light with yours and it will be increased until the world is lighted up with joy. And gladly where will our brothers lay aside their cumbersome defenses, which availed them nothing and could only terrify. We will anticipate that time today with present confidence, where this is part of what was planned for us by the Holy Spirit. We will be sure that everything we need is given us for our accomplishment of this today. We make no plans for how it will be done, but realize that in our defenselessness is all that is required for the truth to dawn upon our minds with certainty. For 15 minutes twice today we rest from senseless planning and from every thought that blocks the truth from entering our minds. Today we will receive instead of plan that we may give instead of organize and we are given truly as we say, if I defend myself, I am attacked, but in defenselessness I will be strong, and I will learn what my defenses hide. Nothing but that if there are plans to make you will be told of them. They may not be the plans you thought were needed, nor indeed the answers to the problems which you thought confronted you. But they are answers to another kind of question, which remains unanswered yet in need of answering until the answer comes to you at last. All your defenses have been aimed at not receiving what you will receive today. And in the light and joy of simple trust you will but wonder why you ever thought that you must be defended from release. Heaven asks nothing. It is hell that makes extravagant demands for sacrifice. You give up nothing in these times today when undefended you present yourself to your creator as you really are. He has remembered you. Today we will remember him. For this is Easter time in your salvation and you rise again from what was seeming death and hopelessness. Now is the light of hope reborn in you for now you come without defense to learn the part for you within the plan of God. What little plans or magical beliefs can still have value when you have received your function from the voice for God himself. Try not to shape this day as you believe would benefit you most or you cannot conceive of all the happiness that comes to you without your planning. Learn today. And all the world will take this giant stride and celebrate your Easter time with you. Throughout the day as foolish little things appear to raise defensiveness in you and tempt you to engage in weaving plans. Remind yourself. This is a special day for learning and acknowledge it with this. This is my Easter time and I would keep it holy. I will not defend myself because the son of God needs no defense against the truth of his reality. So wow, we are just letting it all go today. And I think we're just letting go all future thoughts and just praying and saying, you know, this holy instant I would give to you be you in charge Holy Spirit. If I need a word if I need a plan if I need anything an instruction you will give it to me. Trust completely in you. I don't need anything from the world. Remember, from the first paragraph I won't attempt to activate the past organize the present or plan the future. I'm just going to let it rain down on me today in this moment. The glory of God, right here right now. And I was praying to Jesus today saying wow this feels like a wrap up this feels like a conclusion this feels like a completion. It really does. And I was praying for a little bit from the text that would really support us in accepting this moment and not attempting to activate the past organize the present or plan the future. So let's, let's jump to chapter 18. Let's go to section seven. And some of you are familiar with this one the section seven and chapter 18 is called. I need do nothing. Here we go. You still have too much faith in the body as a source of strength. What plans do you make that do not involve its comfort or protection or enjoyment in some way. This makes the body and end and not a means in your interpretation. And this always means you still find sin attractive. No one accepts atonement for himself who still accepts sin as his goal. You have not met your one responsibility. Atonement is not welcomed by those who prefer pain and destruction. There is one thing that you have never done. You have not utterly forgotten the body. It has perhaps faded at times from your site, but it has not yet completely disappeared. I will let this happen for more than an instant. Yet it is in this instant that the miracle of atonement happens. Afterwards you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend without awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return. At no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated but never experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely for sin is never holy in the present. In any single instant the attraction of guilt would be experienced as pain and nothing else and would be avoided. It has no attraction now. Its whole attraction is imaginary and therefore must be thought of in the past or in the future. So this is the pain, pleasure, trick. But in any single instant the attraction of guilt would be experienced as pain and nothing else. So you wouldn't be tricked by the pleasure motive. There is no pleasure motive. Joy, present moment is joy. And joy is not pleasure or pain. Joy is transcendent. Joy reaches, comes all the way from eternity and extends in through as the Holy Son of God, joy. It is impossible to accept the holy instant without reservation unless just for an instant you are willing to see no past or future. You cannot prepare for it without placing it in the future. Release is giving you the instant you desire it. Many have spent a lifetime in preparation and have indeed achieved their instance of success. This course does not attempt to teach more than they learned in time. But it does aim at saving time. You may be attempting to follow a very long road to the goal you have accepted. It is extremely difficult to reach atonement by fighting against sin, nor is a lifetime of contemplation and long periods of meditation aimed at detachment from the body necessary. All such attempts will ultimately succeed because of their purpose. Yet the means are tedious and very time consuming for all of them look to the future for release from a state of present unworthiness and inadequacy. Your way will be different. Not in purpose, but in means. A holy relationship is a means of saving time. One instance spent together restores the universe to both of you. You are prepared. Now you need but to remember you need do nothing. It would be far more profitable now merely to concentrate on this than to consider what you should do. When peace comes at last to those who wrestle with temptation and fight against the giving into sin. It comes at last into the mind given to contemplation or when the goal is finally achieved by anyone. It always comes with just one happy realization. I need do nothing. Here is the ultimate release which everyone will fund will one day find in his own way at his own time. You do not need this time. Time has been saved for you because you and your brother are together. One mind. This is the special means this course is using to save you time. You are not making use of the course if you insist on using means which have served others well, neglecting what was made for you. Save time for me by only this one preparation and practice doing nothing else. I need do nothing is a statement of allegiance. It says of allegiance and true loyalty. Whoo. True, a truly undivided loyalty. You can leave it for just one instant and you will accomplish more than is given to a century of contemplation or of struggle against temptation. It's a time saver. It's the present moment the holy is that is the ultimate time saver. Being present. It involves the body. And if you recognize you need do nothing you have withdrawn the body's value from your mind. Here is the quick and open door through which you slip past century centuries of effort. And escape from time. This is the way in which sin loses all attraction right now. It's time denied and past and future gone. Who needs do nothing has no need for time to do nothing is to rest and make a place within you, where the activity of the body ceases to demand attention. To this place the Holy Spirit comes and there abides. He will remain when you forget and the body's activities returned to occupy your conscious mind. Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm that all is raging activity. The exact center in which you do nothing will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent. For from this center you will be directed how to use the body sinlessly. It is, it is this center from which the body is absent. That will keep it so in your awareness of it. So this is a call into the present moment. This is a call to devote your whole heart and mind to God. This is a call into what the world calls mysticism, not some kind of a box of doings are not doings but just of the willingness to be still. The willingness to do nothing and to, if there's anything that you're guided to things say or do, it will be given you. You don't have to come up with it. It's just given. It's just given naturally. And he says, you know, from this place of rest you will be sent on many busy doings. I've seen that. Lots of rest, revelation, revelation, revelation and then many busy doings seemingly in many countries, many places, many towns, many houses, many different people. Lots of different holy encounters but, but always from this place of rest, place of joy, place of happiness. You're, you're here to be the light of the world and you're happy to be the light of the world. So, it feels like we are wrapping things up here with time and space. I might say that the mysticism that deep, deep, deep devotion to God calls very strongly and what we seem to have been up to in terms of actions or things that we've shared and extended in form are just very peripheral and awareness now and and it's just this deep digging into the silence, the reverence of devotion to God of acceptance of identity that I am as God created me that indeed I am not a body, I am free, I am still as God created me. So, this week we're winding down winding down of broadcast broadcast of all kinds of, of course America's live workbook lessons of Saturday online movie workshops, we're winding down, we're coming to a pause. We've come to a pause with the online monthly retreats and we're just resting in a deep stillness and radiating that, that rest to, to everything and everyone in this moment, everything is perfect. Everything is fulfilled. All contentment, all rest is in this moment. So, thank you for being with me on the ride. I, I say as they say in French are of law, I, I, I really have enjoyed these broadcast and this these extensions that seem to have gone on for many years but we're winding down now. So, if you want to come for a final Saturday movie workshop then mark your calendar for this Saturday. There will be a brief, one more I think in, in June, June 24, because we are launching a new platform, lots of new things but but it's. Yeah, it's for the mystic it's, it's done, it is complete. And we'll have some announcements there on the, on the movie gathering on the 24th after our month long past, and it'll just be some sprinklings of, yeah, some things that you may, may enjoy hearing about and may enjoy participating in. So, I send you my love I blow you all my heart kisses. I send you all my happiness and joy. What a ride what a fun ride. This has been. We wake up in gladness and joy and happiness and that is for sure. So thank you everyone. God bless you.