[acimlessons_list] Lesson 265 - September 22

[Susan Carrier]

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+ COMMENTARIES ON LESSONS FROM THE WORKBOOK OF A COURSE IN MIRACLES
+ by Allen Watson, with Practice Summaries by Robert Perry, 
+ of The Circle of Atonement
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LESSON 265 - September 22

"Creation's gentleness is all I see."

PRACTICE SUMMARY

Purpose: To take the last few steps to God. To wait for Him to take the
final step.

Morning/Evening Quiet Time: as long as needed.

Read the written lesson.

Use idea and prayer to introduce time of quiet. Do not depend on the words.
Use them as a simple invitation to God to come to you.

Sit silently and wait for God. Wait in quiet expectancy for Him to reveal
Himself to you. Seek only direct, deep, wordless experience of Him. Be
certain of His coming, and unafraid. For He has promised that when you
invite Him, He will come. You ask only that He keep His ancient promise,
which He wills to keep. These times are your gift to Him.

Hourly Remembrance: Do not forget.

Give thanks to God that He has remained with you and will always be there to
answer your call to Him.

Frequent Reminder: As often as possible, even every minute.

Remember the idea. Dwell with God, let Him shine on you.

Response To Temptation: When you are tempted to forget your goal.

Use idea as a call to God and all temptation will disappear.

Reading: preceding one of the day's moments of practice.

Slowly read "What is...?" section.

Think about it a while.

Overall Remarks: Now, in this final part of the year that you and Jesus have
spent together, you begin to reach the goal of practicing and of the course.
Jesus is so close that you cannot fail. You have come far along the road. Do
not look back. Fix you eyes on the journey's end. You could not have come
this far without realizing that you want to know God. And this is all He
requires to come to you.

(See also Part II Introduction)

COMMENTARY

This lesson so clearly states how the world comes to be, apparently,
attacking us.

"I have indeed misunderstood the world, because I laid my sins on it and saw
them looking back at me. How fierce they seemed! And how deceived I was to
think that what I feared was in the world, instead of in my mind alone"
(1:1-3).

I feel guilt over some aspect of myself. I project that guilt outward and I
"lay my sins on the world" and then "see them looking back at me."
"Projection makes perception." There is more than one place where the Course
says quite clearly that we never see anyone's sins but our own. The world I
see is the outward reflection of an inward condition. The Song Of Prayer
says:

"It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your own sins you see
in him. You want to see them there, and not in you. That is why the
forgiveness of another is an illusion....Only in someone else can you
forgive yourself, for you have called him guilty of your sins, and in him
must your innocence now be found. Who but the sinful need to be forgiven?
And do not ever think you can see sin in anyone except yourself"
(S-2.I.4:2-8).

"Do not ever think you can see sin in anyone except yourself." Wow! What a
powerful statement. "It is only your own sins you see in him." A lot of
people, including myself, have some trouble with this concept. I really
think our egos fight this, and use every possible way of refusing to accept
it.

A common reaction to statements like this in the Course is, "No way! I never
beat my wife. I never murdered or raped or betrayed the way he did." Where I
think we go off is in looking at particular actions and saying, "They do
that. I don't." and thinking we've proved that the sin we see isn't our own.

The action is not the sin. The guilt is. The principle is much broader than
specific actions. The principle of attack is this: "It is the judgement of
one mind by another as unworthy of love and deserving of punishment."
(T-13.IN.1:2) The action for which we are judging isn't relevant; we are
seeing another person as "unworthy of love and deserving of punishment"
because we see ourselves that way first. We feel our own unworthiness,
dislike the feeling, and project it on to others. We find particular actions
to associate the unworthiness with that we don't perceive as being in
ourselves (although sometimes they are in us, just suppressed or buried);
that's exactly how we try to get rid of the guilt!

Projection and dissociation go on within our own psyche as well as
externally. When I condemn myself for, say, overeating, and think I feel
guilty because I overate, I am doing the same thing as when I condemn a
brother for lying or whatever. I am putting the guilt outside of myself in
one case; in the other case, I am putting the guilt onto a shadow part of
myself which I then disown. "I don't know why I do that; I know better."

When I feel guilty, I am actually disowning a part of my own mind. There is
some part of me that feels a need to overeat, or to be angry at my mother,
or to sabotage my career, or to abuse my body with some drug. I do these
things because I am guilty and think I need punishment. The original guilt
comes not from any of these petty things, but from my deep belief that I
have really succeeded in separating myself from God. I have actually
succeeded at making myself other than a creation of God. I am my own
creator. And since God is good, I must be evil. Deep down we think the evil
is in us, that we are the evil. We can't stand that idea, and so we push
away some part of our mind and our behavior and lay the guilt at its feet.

It is exactly the same mechanism at work when I see sin in a brother. But
from the ego's perspective seeing guilt in someone else is much more
attractive and does a better job of concealing the guilt it wants us to
keep; it puts the guilt completely away from myself. In reality, my brother
is a part of my mind just as much as the shadow self is a part of my mind.
The whole world is in my mind; my mind is all there is.

"How deceived I was to think that what I feared was in the world, instead of
in my mind alone" (1:3).

"He [one who identifies with the ego] always perceives this world as outside
himself, for this is crucial to his adjustment. He does not realize that he
makes this world, for there is no world outside of him" (T-12.III.6:7).

"Take off the covers and look at what you are afraid of" (T-12.II.5:2).

We need to look at what we are afraid of until we realize that all of it is
in our own mind. When at last we recognize the truth of that, we will be in
a place where we can do something about it. Until then, we are helpless
victims.

We see sin in others because we think we have a need to see sin in others,
to avoid seeing it in ourselves. We believe in the principle that some
people are unworthy of love and deserving of punishment. Deep down we know
that we are one of the condemned, but the ego tells us that if we can see
the guilt out there in others, see them as worse than ourselves, we may
escape judgment. So we project the guilt.

What this Workbook lesson is saying is that if we lift the blot of our own
guilt off the world, we will see its "celestial gentleness" (1:4). If I can
remember that my thoughts and God's thoughts are the same, I will see no sin
in the world, because I am not seeing it in myself.

The world around us therefore offers us countless opportunities to forgive
ourselves. "Only in someone else can you forgive yourself, for you have
called him guilty of your sins, and in him must your innocence now be found"
(S-2.I.4:6). When someone appears in our life as a sinner, we have a chance
to forgive ourselves in him. We have a chance to let go, a bit more deeply,
of the fixed perception that what this person did makes him guilty of sin.
We have a chance to look past his harmful actions to see the underlying
innocence. We lay aside our conditioned judgment and allow the Holy Spirit
to show us something different.

It seems as if we are working with forgiving another person. In reality we
are always forgiving ourselves. When we find the innocence in that other
person, suddenly we know our own innocence more deeply. When we see what
they did as a call for love, we can more easily see our own misbehavior as
likewise a call for love. We discover a common innocence, a radical
innocence. It is absolute innocence, totally unchanged since the instant God
created us.


What is the Body? (Part 5)

W-pII.5.3:1-3

"The body is a dream" (3:1). This whole melodrama of attacking and being
attacked, victor and prey, murderer and victim, is a dream, with the body
playing the chief role. Think about the implications of my body as a dream.
In a dream, everything seems completely real. I've had some really gross and
terrifying dreams about my body, like once I dreamed that all my teeth were
disintegrating and falling out. But when I woke up, nothing of the kind was
happening. It was all in my mind while I slept.

By calling the body "a dream," the Course is saying that what happens to our
bodies here is really not happening at all; it is happening only within our
minds. It is saying that the body itself is not happening; it is not a real
thing. We are not really here, as we think we are; we are dreaming about
being here. My son, who is working in computers in the field of virtual
reality, was once hooked up to a robot by computer, seeing through its eyes
and touching things with its hand. He had the very weird sensation of
experiencing himself on one side of the computer lab while his body was on
the other side; he even looked across the lab and "saw" his own body,
wearing the VR helmet. Our mind experiences itself as being "here," on
earth, in a body; but it is not here. Here is not here. All of it is within
the mind.

Dreams can picture happiness, and then very suddenly revert to fear; we've
all experienced that in dreams, most likely. And we've experienced it in our
"lives" here in the body. Dreams are born of fear (3:2), and the body, being
a dream, is born of fear also. Love does not create dreams, it "creates in
truth" (3:3). And love did not create the body: "The body was not made by
love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what
the Son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions"
(T-18.VI.4:7,8). The body was made by fear, and the dreams that result will
always end in fear.

The body was made by fear for fear, yet "love can use it lovingly." When we
give our bodies to the Holy Spirit for His use, we change the dream. For now
the body has a different purpose, motivated by love 
 
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+ Commentary by Allen Watson
+ Practice Summary: Robert Perry
+ Available in book format from The Circle
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