Lesson 351:  “What am I?”  “My sinless brother is my guide to peace.  My sinful brother is my guide to pain.  And which I choose to see I will behold.”

When we think our brothers and sisters have sinned, then we have judged them and declared that they are worthy of punishment and attack thoughts and energy. 

When we see them as having sinned, then we have decided that they are not worthy of our kind thoughts or of God’s Love.  When we do this, and we have attack energy in our minds in response to thinking they are sinners, then we necessarily have no peace within.

Attack thoughts always throw a pebble into that placid water in our minds where we could have peace instead. 

This is why we want to not judge our brothers and sisters because when we do, we lose the inner quiet that feeds us on the deeper level.  

The Course says that no one sins and that God loves all of us equally.

No one does anything so grave as sin, and therefore, we are all worthy of God’s Love. 

No one is excluded from receiving God’s Love because we are all equal in God’s eyes.  Therefore, it matters if we see our brothers and sisters as sinless, because even if they are out there (we might think because they are in their own bodies), if we feel they are sinful, then we disturb our own minds in the process of what we think should be their punishment.

Our peace is totally determined by whether we can forgive them and realize that we are all interconnected at an energetic level. 

This is why how we feel about them impacts our own peace of mind.

 Our brother’s and sister’s sinlessness is our guide to peace because they show us the way to peace. 

When we believe in their sinlessness, we have a direct route to our peace because we are not blocking the flow of our own inner Love of God with the attack thoughts that they deserve to be punished.  

The Course reminds us that we get to choose whether we will be attached to peace or to pain.  

The beauty is that we are the ones who get to enjoy what makes us happy in a deep way, our peace, or we get to endure something that makes us miserable. 

The Course reminds us that the only place where there is any battle is in our minds and that is why we must be willing to make the effort to make a clear and firm decision that we truly want to see and feel God in our minds.

We get to decide how we see the world. 

Our perception is the gateway to our joy or our pain, and the beauty is that we are totally in charge of selecting which we want to pursue and invite into our worlds.