Attend This Lesson Well

Make this your battle cry of internal independence as follows,

'I am tired of apologizing my way through life and I am not going to do it anymore. My life has been one weak apology and explanation to everyone and everything that comes along and I now have a very faint but very clear understanding that it was always wrong for me to be in that condition.'

And remember now, you hearing this talk have joined this declaration of independence. Let the liberty bell ring long and hard:

'I have sensed how unnatural it is for me to always be on the defensive and I'm not going to be on the defensive anymore, Which does not mean that I'm going to be on the offensive either because I understand that the two go together.' Vernon Linwood Howard

You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again; attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks, and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus. ACiM Lesson 153 In my defenselessness my safety lies.

 I have forgotten what I really am,

for I mistook my body for myself.

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

But I am not a body. And my mind cannot attack.

So I can not be sick.

ACiM - Workbook Lesson 136

Only salvation can be said to cure. "Cure" is a word that cannot be applied to any remedy the world accepts as beneficial. What the world perceives as therapeutic is but what will make the body "better." When it tries to heal the mind, it sees no separation from the body, where it thinks the mind exists. Its forms of healing thus must substitute illusion for illusion. One belief in sickness takes another form, and so the patient now perceives himself as well.

He is not healed. He merely had a dream that he was sick, and in the dream he found a magic formula to make him well. Yet he has not awakened from the dream, and so his mind remains exactly as it was before. He has not seen the light that would awaken him and end the dream. What difference does the content of a dream make in reality? One either sleeps or wakens. There is nothing in between.

ACiM - Workbook Lesson 140

Healing must be sought but where it is, and then applied to what is sick, so that it can be cured. There is no remedy the world provides that can effect a change in anything. The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. There is no change but this. For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes that have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?

ACiM - Workbook Lesson 140

Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are ~ Brené Brown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bren%C3%A9_Brown

http://brenebrown.com/

Hallucinations disappear when they are recognized for what they are. This is the healing and the remedy. Believe them not and they are gone. And all you need to do is recognize that you did this. Once you accept this simple fact and take unto yourself the power you gave them, you are released from them. One thing is sure; hallucinations serve a purpose, and when that purpose is no longer held they disappear. Therefore, the question never is whether you want them, but always, do you want the purpose that they serve? This world seems to hold out many purposes, each different and with different values. Yet they are all the same. Again there is no order; only a seeming hierarchy of values.

ACiM - Text Chapter Twenty - The Vision of Holiness - Section 8 - The Vision of Sinlessness

Healing must occur in exact proportion to which the valuelessness of sickness is recognized. One need but say, "There is no gain at all to me in this" and he is healed. But to say this, one first must recognize certain facts. First, it is obvious that decisions are of the mind, not of the body. If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it. The resistance to recognizing this is enormous, because the existence of the world as you perceive it depends on the body being the decision maker. Terms like "instincts," "reflexes" and the like represent attempts to endow the body with non-mental motivators. Actually, such terms merely state or describe the problem. They do not answer it.

ACiM - Manual for Teachers - Section 5 - How Is Healing Accomplished?

New Age and the New Thought Movement Excerpts from Chapter 5, "New Thought and New Age," of C. Alan Anderson and Deborah G. Whitehouse, New Thought: A Practical American Spirituality

We will not recognize what we receive until we give it. You have heard this said a hundred ways, a hundred times, and yet belief is lacking still. But this is sure; until belief is given it, you will receive a thousand miracles and then receive a thousand more, but will not know that God Himself has left no gift beyond what you already have; nor has denied the tiniest of blessings to His Son. What can this mean to you, until you have identified with Him and with His Own?

Our lesson for today is stated thus:

I am among the ministers of God, and I am grateful that
I have the means by which to recognize that I am free. Lesson 154

Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple? - Smithsonian

Safety Issues

One point that has to be raised is the matter of safety. Many people are worried that the troubles over the border in Syria are affecting daily life in southeast Turkey. Nothing can be further from the truth. I saw, nor heard, nothing that might cause concern, and can confirm that life continues as normal in this part of the world. There is no trouble whatsoever in southeast Turkey, and nor is any expected. If it was, then there is no way the Turkish Government would be opening a new multi-million dollar archaeological museum in Sanliurfa, and converting Göbekli Tepe into an open-air museum.

What should be remembered is that although Turkey is an Islamic country, its inhabitants universally denounce the warped ideologies of the extremists in Syria and Iraq. Indeed, they look in the main towards Western society for inspiration. Nowhere in southeast Anatolia did I feel any kind of animosity towards either myself or the tour group, nor did we see anything out of the ordinary. Here in southeast Anatolia Turks, Kurds and Arabs live together peacefully, side-by-side, and that same hospitality is extended to all foreign visitors who come to visit their country.

So do not be put off by what you read, hear or see in the news media. It is safe to come to southeast Turkey and visit these most beautiful of places, which are crucial to our understanding of the origins of civilization. Andrew Collins http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/news/GTupdate0515.htm