Day 135

Today's Lesson:

If I defend myself I am attacked.

Defense gives illusions full reality, and then attempts to handle them as real. It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult. And it is this we do when we attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or organize the present as we wish. Who would defend himself unless he thought he were attacked, that the attack were real, and that his own defense could save himself?

We operate from the belief we must protect ourselves from what is happening because it must contain what threatens us. A sense of threat is an acknowledgment of an inherent weakness; a belief that there is danger which has power to call on us to make appropriate defense. The world is based on this insane belief. And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.

Defense is frightening. It stems from fear, increasing fear as each defense is made. We think it offers safety. Yet it speaks of fear made real and terror justified. Is it not strange we do not pause to ask, as we elaborate our plans and make our armor thicker and our locks more tights, what we defend, and how, and against what?

Whatever we defend must be something that is very weak and easily assaulted. It must be something made easy prey, unable to protect itself and needing our defense. What but the body has such frailty that constant care and watchful, deep concern are needful to protect its little life? What but the body falters and must fail to serve the Son of God as worth host?

The body has no needs but those which we assign to it. It needs no complicated structures of defense, no health-inducing medicine, no care and no concern at all. Defend its life, or give it gifts to make it beautiful or walls to make it safe, and we but say our home is open to the thief of time, corruptible and crumbling, so unsafe it must be guarded with our very lives.

The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from us, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?

Defend the body and we have attacked our minds. For we have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which we think the body must be saved. We will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And we will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source.

These are the thoughts in need of healing, and the body will respond with health when they have been corrected and replaced with truth. This is the body's only real defense. Yet is this where we look for its defense? We offer it protection of a kind from which it gains no benefit at all, but merely adds to our distress of mind. We do not heal, but merely take away the hope of healing, for we fail to see where hope must lie if it be meaningful.

A healed mind does not plan. It carries out the plans that it receives through listening to wisdom that is not its own. It waits until it has been taught what should be done, and then proceeds to do it. It does not depend upon itself for anything except its adequacy to fulfill the plans assigned to it. It is secure in certainty that obstacles can not impede its progress to accomplishment of any goal that serves the greater plan established for the good of everyone.

Enslavement of the body to the plans the unhealed mind sets up to save itself must make the body sick. Self-initiated plans are but defenses, with the purpose all of them were made to realize. They are the means by which a frightened mind would undertake its own protection, at the cost of truth. The mind engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. It does not think that it will be provided for, unless it makes its own provisions. The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. What it has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals.

What could we not accept, if we but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is our good? While we are busy making plans for death, He has been leading us gently to eternal life.

Let no defenses but our present trust direct the future, and this life becomes a meaningful encounter with the truth that only our defenses would conceal. Without defenses, we become a light which Heaven gratefully acknowledges to be its own. And it will lead us on it ways appointed for our happiness according to the ancient plan, begun when time was born. Our followers will join their light with ours, and it will be increased until the world is lighted up with joy. And gladly will our brothers lay aside their cumbersome defenses, which availed them nothing and could only terrify.

We will make no plans for how this will be done, but realize that our defenselessness is all that is required for the truth to dawn upon our minds with certainty. For fifteen minutes twice today we rest from senseless planning, and from every thought that blocks the truth from entering our minds. Today we will receive instead of plan, that we may give instead of organize. And we are given truly, as we say:

If I defend myself I am attacked. But in defenselessness I will be strong, and I will learn what my defenses hide.

Nothing but that. If there are plans to make, we will be told of them. They may not be the plans we thought were needed, nor indeed the answers to the problems which we thought confronted us. But they are answers to another kind of question, which remains unanswered yet in need of answering until the Answer comes to us at last.

Try not to shape this day as we believe would benefit us most. For we can not conceive of all the happiness that comes to us without our planning. Learn today. And all the world will take this giant stride, and celebrate with us. Throughout the day, as foolish little things appear to raise defensiveness in us and tempt us to engage in weaving plans, we are to remind ourselves this is a special day for learning, and acknowledge it with this:

This is my Eastertime. And I would keep it holy. I will not defend myself, because the Son of God needs no defense against the truth of his reality.

Miracles I'm noticing:

This is a perfect lesson for me today. I'm getting ready to attend my very first national conference as an exhibitor and I've been a bit apprehensive about what it will be like. I admit I've been planning some defenses - after all, my booth is next to the Wall Street Journal's booth! But I realize that all the planning I've been doing for this show is merely a defense against my own perception. Planning how I will defend myself against all this "bigger" and "more experienced" companies and organizations keeps me from being in the present and just knowing what I know.

I will be who I am and represent my company the best way I know how, and trust that the Answer will be there for me to hear, now that I've got all my attention focused on that instead of my defense.

That is a miracle!