Read on the ACIM CE App: https://acimce.app/:W-277
Lesson 277
Let me not bind Your Son with laws I made.
Practice Instructions
See complete instructions in a separate document. A short summary:
- Read the commentary paragraph slowly and personally.
- Pray the prayer, perhaps several times.
- Morning and evening: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
- Hourly remembrance: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
- Frequent reminders: Repeat the idea and then spend a quiet moment in meditation.
- Response to temptation: Repeat the idea whenever upset, to restore peace.
- Read the “What Is” section slowly and thoughtfully once during the day.
Commentary
When the Course uses the term “Son” in this context, with me addressing God concerning His Son, the term usually refers to the whole Sonship, which includes all of my sisters and brothers as well as myself. “Your Son,” in other words, can be anybody on whom my mind focuses. So when I pray, “Let me not bind Your Son,” I am referring to my boss, my spouse, my friends, my family, or whomever I might encounter today. It’s a good prayer to repeat often as we interact with people today.
In our local study group the other night, one woman shared an insight she had. She said that she had realized that whenever she placed a limit on anyone else within her mind, if that person already was accepting such a limit within their own mind, she was reinforcing it. And as well, she was placing the same limit on herself. We can see this dynamic very strikingly in a situation involving parents or teachers and young children. It manifests quite vividly. The child will often manifest the limits that the adult “sees” in them, whether those limits are real or not. The fact that we do not see it so plainly with adults, however, does not mean that it is not happening all the time. When we limit someone in our minds, we can be literally binding them with laws that we made up.
“Your Son is free, my Father” (1:1). And each person we encounter today is that Son, equally free. We have all read stories of how the refusal of a parent, partner, or friend to accept the “normal” limits on someone else has enabled them to transcend those limits—stories of “impossible” healings, and so on. These are but elementary demonstrations of the power of today’s idea. The limits the Course has in mind are not so much physical ones, or even intellectual ones, but limits such as guilt and sin. When we believe a person is beyond help or beyond hope, we bind them with laws we have made. We imagine an order of difficulty in miracles and impose it on those around us. “There is no order of difficulty among them” (T-1.1:1) is the first principle of miracles.
He [whoever he or she may be] is not changed by what is changeable. (1:4)
He is still the perfect Son of God, as God created him. He has not been marred or scarred by anything in this world because everything in this world is changeable. The Son of God has not been changed by anything that has happened to his body, which is changeable. A feather cannot scratch a diamond, not even a pile of feathers, not even an ostrich plume. We are being asked to remember this about all our brothers; they have not been changed by what appears to be their sins or mistakes. Nor are they slaves “to any laws of time” (1:5); this covers our persistent belief that a healing may take a very long time, for instance. They are subject only to one law: the law of love (1:6).
Our brothers are not bound by anything except their own beliefs (2:2). And what they really are is “far beyond [their] faith in slavery or freedom” (2:3). Their bound appearance is a flimsy thing, barely covering the solid reality of holiness and love that lies beneath it. They cannot be bound “unless God’s truth could lie and God could will that He deceive Himself” (2:4). What kind of God would that be?
What if, today, I looked upon everyone around me from this frame of reference? What miracles might happen? What chains might fall away? What blind person might see again? What long-standing wound of the heart might be healed? Exactly that is our function here as workers of miracles.