LESSON 181 I trust my brothers, who are one with me.

1. 1Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself. 2When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. 3You do not look beyond his errors. 4Rather, 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.

2. 1Perception has a focus. 2It is this that gives consistency to what you see. 3Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. 4Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before. 5Remove your focus on your brother’s sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. 6This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins. 7For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. 8And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.

3. 1Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become appar­ent. 2We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while. 3We do not care about our future goals. 4And what we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. 5We seek for innocence and nothing else. 6We seek for it with no concern but now.

4. 1A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals. 2You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from those you held before. 3And you have also been dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that, even if you should succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.

5. 1How could this matter? 2For the past is gone; the future but imagined. 3These concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception. 4Nothing more. 5We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. 6We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. 7We enter in the time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.

6. 1We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. 2And 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.” 3So, 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:

4It is not this that I would look upon.

5I trust my brothers, who are one with me.

7. 1And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day. 2We do not seek for long-range goals. 3As 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.

8. 1Nor do we ask for fantasies. 2For what we seek to look upon is really there. 3And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. 4When 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. 5And the Love He feels for us becomes our own as well. 6This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.

9. 1The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless. 2And 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. 3We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. 4We look neither ahead nor backwards. 5We look straight into the present. 6And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. 7Our sinlessness is but the Will of God. 8This instant is our willing one with His.