Lesson 67

Read on the ACIM CE App: https://acimce.app/:W-67

Love created me like Itself.

Practice Instructions

Purpose: To experience the blazing light of your changeless reality, if only for a moment. To redefine God as Love and realize you are included in His definition of Himself.

Longer: One time, for ten to fifteen minutes.

Repeat the idea.
Then spend a few minutes adding related thoughts, along the following lines: “Holiness created me holy. Helpfulness created me helpful.” Use only attributes that fit the Course’s teachings about God.
For a brief interval, try to let go of all thoughts.
The remainder is a meditation exercise, using the method you were taught in the 40s:

Reach past the thick cloud of all your self-images to the light of your true Self. Sink past illusions about you and reach down to the truth in you.
When you get distracted, repeat the idea. If this is not enough, add more related thoughts, as in the earlier phase.
Hold in mind the confidence that the light of your true Self is there and can be reached, and that even if you don’t reach it now, you will succeed in bringing that experience closer.

Frequent reminders: Four or five per hour, maybe more.

Repeat the idea. As you do, be aware that this is not your tiny voice telling you this, but the Voice of truth telling you Who you really are. I recommend repeating it once in this fashion now, so you can see the effect it has.

Remarks: The comment in 5:2 is very important. The 60s and 70s really focus on frequency, and this sentence explains why that is so crucial. You need to frequently practice the truth because you so frequently practice illusion. Specifically, “your mind is so preoccupied with false self-images” (5:2). Contained in each normal thought is a false self-image. That is why you need to inject as many thoughts as you can that contain the truth about you.

Commentary

The Course spends a disproportionate amount of space telling us what we are, how we were created like God, Who created us, and how that reality is “wholly unchanged” (2:2). Lesson 229 virtually duplicates today’s thought: “Love, which created me, is what I am.” Review 5 has us repeat, “God is but love, and therefore so am I” every day for ten days. And then there are all the lessons on the theme “I am as God created me.” There are three lessons with that direct topic (the only lesson given more than once in the same words, in 94, 110, and 162); several others in which the idea is repeated (132, 139, 237, and 260); and twenty review lessons (201 to 220) in which we repeat the words “I am still as God created me” daily. Evidently the Course thinks this idea is worth repeating!

In fact, today’s lesson tells us exactly why this thought is so important, and why repetition of it is so necessary:

It will be particularly helpful today to practice the idea for the day as often as you can. You need to hear the truth about yourself as frequently as possible, because your mind is so preoccupied with false self-images. Four or five times an hour, and perhaps even more, it would be most beneficial to remind yourself that Love created you like Itself. Hear the truth about yourself in this. (5:1-4)

We need to hear the truth about ourselves as often as we can because we have taught ourselves a false self-image, and we have taught ourselves very, very well. “Teach only love, for that is what you are” (T-6.I.20:2) is one of the most famous sayings in the Course, and emphasizes the same thing: What we are is Love, because Love created us like Itself.

How many of us, if asked, “What are you?” would find the word “love” springing immediately to our minds? For most of us, to think of ourselves as being love and only love is, to be kind, a stretch. We may think we have some love in us, but to think that Love is what we are? Not hardly. That’s why we need to hear it as often as possible, why we need to repeat the idea today four or five times an hour or more during the day. That’s something like eighty times today, if we are awake sixteen hours.

Love is what I am. That is why I am the light of the world. That is why I am the world’s savior, and why the Christ in everyone looks to me for salvation—because what I am is the salvation of the world (1:2-5). How differently would I live today if I knew this about myself?

Notice that the lesson does not expect us to “get” this idea all at once. If we were expected to grasp it right away, we wouldn’t have to repeat it eighty times. All we are looking for is to “realize fully, if only for a moment, that it is the truth” (2:1, emphasis mine). Love is in us as our true Self, and we are attempting to get in touch with the Love within ourselves (3:2-3). We may not contact It directly today, but even the effort is worth it, although we may not feel we have succeeded: “Be confident, however, that you will do much today to bring that awareness nearer whether you feel you have succeeded or not” (4:4).

Some day, though, some time, we will succeed; perhaps even today. It’s inevitable because we cannot hide forever from what we are, we cannot escape from what is within us. At some point it will happen: “You can succeed in going…through the interval of thoughtlessness, to the awareness of a blazing light in which you recognize yourself as Love created you” (4:3).

“You were created by Love like Itself” (6:4).