PART I
LESSON 181.
I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
W-181.1. Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself. 2 When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. 3 You do not look beyond his errors. 4 Rather, they are magnified, becoming blocks to your awareness of the Self that lies beyond your own mistakes, and past his seeming sins as well as yours.
W-181.2. Perception has a focus. 2 It is this that gives consistency to what you see. 3 Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. 4 Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before. 5 Remove your focus on your brother's sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. 6 This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins. 7 For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. 8 And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.
W-181.3. Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent. 2 We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while. 3 We do not care about our future goals. 4 And what we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. 5 We seek for innocence and nothing else. 6 We seek for it with no concern but now.
W-181.4. A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals. 2 You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from those you held before. 3 And you have also been dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that, even if you should succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.
W-181.5. How could this matter? 2 For the past is gone; the future but imagined. 3 These concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception. 4 Nothing more. 5 We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. 6 We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. 7 We enter in the time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.
W-181.6. We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. 2 And if a brother's sins occur to us, our narrowed focus will restrict our sight, and turn our eyes upon our own mistakes, which we will magnify and call our "sins." 3 So, for a little while, without regard to past or future, should such blocks arise we will transcend them with instructions to our minds to change their focus, as we say:
4 It is not this that I would look upon.
5 I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
W-181.7. And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day. 2 We do not seek for long-range goals. 3 As each obstruction seems to block the vision of our sinlessness, we seek but for surcease an instant from the misery the focus upon sin will bring, and uncorrected will remain.
W-181.8. Nor do we ask for fantasies. 2 For what we seek to look upon is really there. 3 And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. 4 When seeing this is all we want to see, when this is all we seek for in the name of true perception, are the eyes of Christ inevitably ours. 5 And the Love He feels for us becomes our own as well. 6 This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.
W-181.9. The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless. 2 And our love for everyone we look upon attests to our remembrance of the holy Self which knows no sin, and never could conceive of anything without Its sinlessness. 3 We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. 4 We look neither ahead nor backwards. 5 We look straight into the present. 6 And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. 7 Our sinlessness is but the Will of God. 8 This instant is our willing one with His.