Lesson 181

W-pI.181.1. 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. ² When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. ³ You do not look beyond his errors. ⁴ 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.

W-pI.181.2. Perception has a focus. ² It is this that gives consistency to what you see. ³ Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. ⁴ Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before. ⁵ Remove your focus on your brother's sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. ⁶ This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins. ⁷ For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. ⁸ And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.

W-pI.181.3. Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent. ² We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while. ³ We do not care about our future goals. ⁴ And what we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. ⁵ We seek for innocence and nothing else. ⁶ We seek for it with no concern but now.

W-pI.181.4. A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals. ² You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from those you held before. ³ 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.

W-pI.181.5. How could this matter? ² For the past is gone; the future but imagined. ³ These concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception. ⁴ Nothing more. ⁵ We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. ⁶ We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. ⁷ We enter in the time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.

W-pI.181.6. We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. ² 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." ³ 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:

W-pI.181.7. And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day. ² We do not seek for long-range goals. ³ 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.

W-pI.181.8. Nor do we ask for fantasies. ² For what we seek to look upon is really there. ³ And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. ⁴ 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. ⁵ And the Love He feels for us becomes our own as well. ⁶ This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.

W-pI.181.9. The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless. ² 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. ³ We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. ⁴ We look neither ahead nor backwards. ⁵ We look straight into the present. ⁶ And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. ⁷ Our sinlessness is but the Will of God. ⁸ This instant is our willing one with His.