Lesson 313

Now let a new perception come to me.

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.

Practice suggestion: I find that this lesson is more effective if you make it specific: “Now let a new perception of this person (or situation, or event) come to me.”

Commentary

The vision of Christ “beholds all things as sinless” (1:1). This is a new perception that comes to me. I don’t go after it; I receive it. I open to it, and it is given to me: “This vision is Your gift” (1:3). To see all things as sinless is not something that I must strive to do; it is a gift, given to me by God. When I perceive sin, what I can learn to do is to ask for a different perception: “Now let a new perception come to me.” I can want this new perception, and wanting is all that is required. The rest is given. “Love will come wherever it is asked” (1:2).

Christ—Who is my true Self, eternal, changeless—already “sees no sin in anything He looks upon” (1:5). This is not a vision that my Self has to achieve; it is mine already, in Christ. All I need to do is to allow that new perception to come to me. As I do, as I look out upon the world and see it as forgiven, I will “waken from the dream of sin and look within upon my sinlessness” (1:6). There is the message of the Course in a nutshell: See your own innocence by seeing the world’s innocence. Find your forgiveness through forgiving others.

Like vision, which has always been a part of my Christ Self, so too sinlessness: it has been kept by God, “completely undefiled upon the altar to Your holy Son, the Self with Which I would identify” (1:6). That is all we are doing: identifying with the Christ, with something that already is. “Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all” (W-188.1:4). There is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go; we are already there, and all that is required is the recognition of what is already so, the identification with what has existed forever. We let the new perception come to us, that is all.

So, my brothers and sisters,

Let us today behold each other in the sight of Christ. How beautiful we are! (2:1-2)