Lesson: Week 17
by Tom Baker
Lesson 61: I am the light of the world.
After 50 lessons and a review it should not surprise us that the Course now calls us God’s Son. Implicitly we are put on the same plane as Jesus in terms of status but we do not yet have the realization that Jesus had of his true identity as God’s Son. It is at this point that the idea of "the self concept we have made" comes up in the Course. In much of Eastern thought this self-concept is referred to as the false self. It may be a shock to learn that this is not the self that people should love. The false self is the manifestation of the ego and is the major obstacle to God’s love or true love.
Lesson 62: Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world.
We denied our identity "by attacking creation and its Creator." So our forgetting our true self does not come about simply from distraction but by attacking both the world and God. We attack creation through judgment of others and we attack God by insisting we are each someone other than God created joined, eternal, and whole. Instead, we see ourselves and each other as separate, mortal, and fragmented. The image that the Holy Spirit in the Course gives us is the forgiving light of the world. Thus we stop attacking, suspend judgment and shine as an example of loving witness to holiness. Forgiveness is loving witness to holiness
Lesson 63: The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness.
This lesson reinforces the idea that all minds are joined. We usually do not think of our minds as having any effect on other people. This is because the ego only recognizes the body as real and so we see the physical, what is done and said, as impacting others, but not our thoughts. The lesson goes so far as to say that one forgiving mind can bring lots of salvation to the world.
Lesson 64: Let me not forget my function.
The Course regards temptation as forgetting our function of forgiveness, which, as I have said above, is giving loving witness to holiness wherever it appears. Yet what part does the difficult world, our illusions, play in our salvation? "To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where you learn to forgive yourself what you think of as your sins. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation becomes the spiritual recognition of salvation." The promise of the Course is that forgiveness will bring us happiness. Can we say the same for resentment, holding grievances, and hatred?
© Copyright Tom Baker 2014