Finding the Place Where Light and Strength are One
Foreword: A Course in Miracles is a personal course of study and this blog on experiencing personal peace is inspired by it. The Course is written for those interested in becoming students of its curriculum and practicing what it teaches as a spiritual path to remembering their true nature as pure Love. This blog is written for a wider audience, namely anyone interested in personal peace. One of the aims of A Course in Miracles is to help each student cultivate a relationship with their internal Teacher or Guide. This blog shares this aim, and I encourage you to choose whatever designation makes sense to you in referring to the maximal wisdom, love, and peace that is present in your—and everyone’s—mind.
Today’s post on light and strength draws heavily from Workbook Lesson 92 of A Course in Miracles, “Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one.” Like the rest of this blog, this post does not assume familiarity with the Text or the Workbook of A Course in Miracles, nor even a commitment to any sort of regular spiritual practice. All that it assumes is an interest in experiencing personal peace. Today’s post characterizes both light and strength, particularly as highlighted in the instructions for Lesson 92. The post then ends with the meditation on the place where light and strength are one taken from the end of the instructions for Lesson 92. To anticipate, because the place where light and strength are one is found in each of our minds, the meditation on this place is one that anybody can do.
At this time of year in various countries around the world, many homes are lit up on the outside with decorations on the theme of winter or Christmas. Outside my own home there are large and small lighted snowflakes and twinkling string lights. As happens every year in the Northern Hemisphere as the year draws to a close, the daylight hours become fewer and fewer. This year has been a very difficult year with the global pandemic’s onset and then the second and even third waves of infection and illness. Various leaders and authorities have warned of an especially “dark winter” due to the pandemic’s impact. Looking around my neighborhood, it seems to me that this year my neighbors started decorating their homes with lights earlier than in the past. My husband and I got started decorating early ourselves. The lights of the season break through the darkness, symbolizing hope and bringing us joy.
Although I have been a student of A Course in Miracles for almost a decade now, I still grapple at times with the relationship of the dark and the light. In the physical world, it’s a “no brainer” that we need light to see. This makes darkness the “ground” and light the “figure” against the ground. While darkness can have positive associations, it is often associated with negative things. For example, it is associated with a cluster of fears. The idea of total blindness is frightening for many, even terrifying. It is not unusual for children and even adults to be afraid of the dark itself or afraid at night-time when it is dark. Many people fear dark, enclosed spaces. A Course in Miracles, by contrast, explains that this familiar figure-ground relationship between dark and light is actually upside down, just as the whole world of form is. It teaches that our everyday dark-themed fears are powered by the great, existential fear that darkness is eternal reality. This enormous fear gave rise the world of form itself. In reality, light is the ground and dark is the illusory figure; light, not darkness, is real and eternal. In the real world, there is no darkness at all, neither literal, nor figurative; there is no blindness, only spiritual sight; there are no enclosed spaces, only expansion.
As this difficult year draws to a close, it seems to me a good time to focus on the light of the real world and of our true nature, which is pure Love. A Course in Miracles tells us unambiguously that we were as a unity “created of light and in light” (T.11.III.4), saying:
The Great Light always surrounds you and shines out from you. How can you see the dark companions in a light such as this? If you see them, it is only because you are denying the light. But deny them instead, for the light is here and the way is clear. (T.11.III.4)
The “dark companions” of fear, anger, sadness, and guilt are easy to find in the world—or certainly find us easily enough. To help center our attention on light and strength instead, this post highlights Workbook Lesson 92, “Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one.” Much of this post shares ideas about strength found in the instructions for Lesson 92. Towards the end of the post, I share the Lesson 92 meditation on the place where light and strength are one.
But first, a few words of background. As previous posts have explained, the miracle in A Course in Miracles is a choice in the mind to think with the infinite Love that is our Source. I call the practice of miracles, “Course-style forgiveness,” and I refer to the Guide in our minds that speaks to each and every one of us of infinite Love, as “the Holy Spirit.” In the language of light and dark, the miracle is the choice for light (i.e., the Holy Spirit’s thought system of love and peace), and simultaneously the choice against dark (i.e., the thought system of the ego, which is the belief in separation from our Source that engenders enormous fear and guilt). The practice of looking at any person or situation without judgment is the practice of letting the Holy Spirit guide us in making ‘right side up’ choices in our lives. This regular practice of miracles helps us to remember the primacy of light—another word for “spirit,” “love,” and “peace”—out of which we were collectively created. The experience that follows our making a “miracle-minded” choice is an experience of the light and peace of our divine essence, described, for example, in Lesson 93, “Light and joy and peace abide in me.”
The reason light and strength are found together inside our minds is that neither is physical in nature. As the instructions for Lesson 92 explain:
The light of strength is not the light you see. It does not change and flicker and go out. It does not shift from night to day, and back to darkness till the morning comes again. (Paragraph 7)
Instead, the light of strength is the light of spiritual sight, which comes from God:
It is God’s strength in you that is the light in which you see, as it is His Mind with which you think. (Paragraph 3)
God’s strength, which is also our own strength, since we are all in reality one with God, sees only itself. Turning within and meditating on this strength helps to dispel the mistaken understanding we each have that we are small, flawed, individual selves:
[Strength] sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there. Strength is the truth about you; (Paragraph 4)
The meditation on strength and light found in the instructions for Lesson 92 is one of many meditations found in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles. The mind-training program of the Course, like the contemplative and meditation practices of all major spiritual traditions, including Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim, helps students to turn away from their vastly diminished, false sense of themselves. These practices simultaneously help the student to connect instead with the magnificent and immutable Self of their true nature. (For more on the profoundly mistaken view of ourselves as fundamentally unworthy see, for example, the post, “You Don’t have to Go it Alone,” published April 14th, 2020).
The meditation on the place where light and strength are one given in the Lesson 92 instructions (also shared below), is one that anyone can do because this limitless strength is available to everyone. As paragraph 5 of the instructions explain:
Strength comes from truth, and shines with light its Source has given it… Truth is a savior and can only will for happiness and peace for everyone. It gives its strength to everyone who asks, in limitless supply. It sees that lack in anyone would be a lack in all. And so it gives its light that all may see and benefit as one. Its strength is shared, that it may bring to all the miracle in which they will unite in purpose and forgiveness and in love.
And as paragraph 8 further adds:
The light of strength is constant, sure as love, forever glad to give itself away, because it cannot give but to itself. No one can ask in vain to share its sight, and none who enters its abode can leave without a miracle before his eyes, and strength and light abiding in his heart.
Anyone who asks to share in the light of strength will be able to do so because this light and strength is already in their minds. A little willingness is all that is needed to find the place where light and strength are one. As paragraph 9 explains:
Strength and light unite in you, and where they meet, your Self stands ready to embrace you as Its Own. Such is the meeting place we try today to find and rest in, for the peace of God is where your Self, His Son, is waiting now to meet Itself again, and be as One.
For students of A Course in Miracles working through the Workbook, the practice period for the meditation in Lesson 92 is twenty minutes twice in the day. For our more general purpose here, namely to cultivate personal peace by connecting with the light and strength within, the duration of the meditation is however long suits you. Perhaps you wish to try this out for just a minute or two, perhaps for fifteen to twenty minutes, or perhaps even longer.
The instructions for the meditation go as follows:
Let yourself be brought unto your Self. Its strength will be the light in which the gift of sight is given you. Leave, then, the dark a little while today, and we will practice seeing in the light, closing the body’s eyes and asking truth to show us how to find the meeting place of self and Self, where light and strength are one. (Paragraph 10)
So go ahead, make yourself comfortable, close your eyes, and ask your inner Guide to show you how to find the place where self and Self meet, the place where light and strength are one. See you there.
One of the silver linings of the 2020 pandemic is being able to live stream the Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Boston, MA. The Feast of the Nativity yesterday was presided over by Father Frank Sevola. The message of his homily had some uncanny resonances with this blog post. He talked, for example, about the light within and the living presence of God in our lives. The recording of the Mass can be found on the St. Anthony’s Shrine Facebook page.
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.