I feel the Love of God within me now.
1. There is a light in you the world can not perceive. ²And with its eyes you will not see this light, for you are blinded by the world. ³Yet you have eyes to see it. ⁴It is there for you to look upon. ⁵It was not placed in you to be kept hidden from your sight. ⁶This light is a reflection of the thought we practice now. ⁷To feel the Love of God within you is to see the world anew, shining in innocence, alive with hope, and blessed with perfect charity and love.
2. Who could feel fear in such a world as this? ²It welcomes you, rejoices that you came, and sings your praises as it keeps you safe from every form of danger and of pain. ³It offers you a warm and gentle home in which to stay a while. ⁴It blesses you throughout the day, and watches through the night as silent guardian of your holy sleep. ⁵It sees salvation in you, and protects the light in you, in which it sees its own. ⁶It offers you its flowers and its snow, in thankfulness for your benevolence.
3. This is the world the Love of God reveals. ²It is so different from the world you see through darkened eyes of malice and of fear, that one belies the other. ³Only one can be perceived at all. ⁴The other one is wholly meaningless. ⁵A world in which forgiveness shines on everything, and peace offers its gentle light to everyone, is inconceivable to those who see a world of hatred rising from attack, poised to avenge, to murder and destroy.
4. Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God’s Love in them. ²Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them; the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them; the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within. ³What they have felt in them they look upon, and see its sure reflection everywhere.
5. What would you see? ²The choice is given you. ³But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: You will look upon that which you feel within. ⁴If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death’s sharp-pointed, bony fingers. ⁵If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.
6. Today we pass illusions, as we seek to reach to what is true in us, and feel its all-embracing tenderness, its Love which knows us perfect as itself, its sight which is the gift its Love bestows on us. ²We learn the way today. ³It is as sure as Love itself, to which it carries us. ⁴For its simplicity avoids the snares the foolish convolutions of the world’s apparent reasoning but serve to hide.
7. Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. ²Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. ³Hold onto nothing. ⁴Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. ⁵Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.
8. Is it not He Who knows the way to you? ²You need not know the way to Him. ³Your part is simply to allow all obstacles that you have interposed between the Son and God the Father to be quietly removed forever. ⁴God will do His part in joyful and immediate response. ⁵Ask and receive. ⁶But do not make demands, nor point the road to God by which He should appear to you. ⁷The way to reach Him is merely to let Him be. ⁸For in that way is your reality proclaimed as well.
9. And so today we do not choose the way in which we go to Him. ²But we do choose to let Him come. ³And with this choice we rest. ⁴And in our quiet hearts and open minds, His Love will blaze its pathway of itself. ⁵What has not been denied is surely there, if it be true and can be surely reached. ⁶God knows His Son, and knows the way to him. ⁷He does not need His Son to show Him how to find His way. ⁸Through every opened door His Love shines outward from its home within, and lightens up the world in innocence.
10. Father, we do not know the way to You. ²But we have called, and You have answered us. ³We will not interfere. ⁴Salvation’s ways are not our own, for they belong to You. ⁵And it is unto You we look for them. ⁶Our hands are open to receive Your gifts. ⁷We have no thoughts we think apart from You, and cherish no beliefs of what we are, or Who created us. ⁸Yours is the way that we would find and follow. ⁹And we ask but that Your Will, which is our own as well, be done in us and in the world, that it become a part of Heaven now. ¹⁰Amen. (ACIM, W-189.1:1–10:10)