[acimlessons_list] Lesson 221--August 9

Allen Watson allen at circleofa.org
Mon Aug 8 05:55:08 EDT 2005 

Lesson 221 * August 9

"Peace to my mind. Let all my thoughts be still."

Practice instructions

See complete instructions in separate document. A short summary:

* Read the commentary paragraph slowly and personally.

* Pray the prayer, perhaps several times.

* Morning and evening: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open
Mind Meditation.

* Hourly remembrance: Repeat the idea and then spend a quiet moment
in meditation.

* Frequent reminders: Repeat the idea often within each hour.

* Response to temptation: Repeat the idea whenever upset, to restore
peace.

* Read the "What Is" section slowly and thoughtfully once during the
day.

Practice comments: Use the beautiful prayer here as an introduction
to your meditation. With the prayer, you announce your intention to
come to God in wordless silence, waiting for His peace (1:1), waiting
for His Voice to speak (1:3-5), waiting for the revelation of His
Being (2:6). I suggest praying it several times, to draw you into
that deep, silent waiting.

Commentary

As I emphasized in my comments on the introduction to Part II, a
large part of our two longer daily practice times is meant to be
spent in wordless quiet. Receiving our healing, listening rather than
talking. Today's lesson is a great one for inducing that state of
mind. We begin by directing our minds to be peaceful, our thoughts to
be still.

The opening prayer in the first paragraph speaks of coming in
silence, and in the quiet of our hearts, waiting and listening for
God's Voice. The words used--"quiet," "silence" (twice), "the deep
recesses of my mind," waiting, listening, coming to hear His
Voice--all these words are pointing us in the same direction,
fostering the same attitude in us. An attitude of receptivity. A
passiveness, we the feminine to God's masculine, the receiver to the
Giver of Life. We still our own thoughts, and allow God's Thoughts to
come to us. We call to Him, and await His answer.

Jesus is with us as we quietly wait. He voices his confidence that
God is with us, and that we will hear Him speak if we wait quietly
with him. He asks us to accept his own confidence, telling us that
his confidence is our own confidence. Often, I have found it helpful
to realize that Jesus symbolizes the part of my own mind that is
already awake. His confidence really <is> my confidence, a confidence
I have denied so that I see it as outside myself.

We wait with only one goal: to hear His Voice speaking to us of what
we are, and revealing Himself to us. In these times of quiet, this is
what we are listening for: an awareness of the purity and perfection
of our own being as He created us, and an awareness of His Love, His
tender care for us, and His peace that He shares with us in these
peaceful moments.

How can we hear a message without words? What we listen for is the
song of love, eternally sung, forever thrumming its harmony
throughout the universe. It is a song we hear wisps of in the eyes of
our beloved, in the laughter of children, in the loyalty of a pet, in
the expanse of a peaceful lake or the stately flowing of a river, and
in the wonder of a well-told fairy tale. It is the song to which our
hearts resonate, showing their true nature. It is our eternity
calling us to dance. It is the Father sharing His Love with His only
Son.

WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?

Part 1: W-pII.1.1:1

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has
not occurred" (1:1).

Forgiveness is a different way of seeing yourself.

I want to emphasize the words "you thought" and "to you" in that
description of forgiveness. It does not say, "What your brother did
has not occurred," but rather "What <you thought> your brother did
<to you> has not occurred." It is not a denial that an event
happened, but rather a different way of seeing yourself in
relationship to the event. You thought that you were affected by it,
hurt by it, damaged by it, whatever "it" was; in fact you were not
affected by what your brother did at all! You are affected, so the
Course tells us, only by your thoughts.

First and foremost, forgiveness means seeing yourself differently in
relation to an event. It does not begin with seeing an event or
another person differently. When you forgive, what happens first is
that you recognize that you have not lost your peace or your love
because of what happened; you lost it because you chose to lose it.
You decided, at some point, to let go of the peace of God in your
heart. The event then came along to justify your loss of peace. You
projected the loss of peace onto the event and said, "That is why I
am upset."

Therefore, once your thought in regard to yourself has been
corrected, you now can see your brother is innocent in spite of his
action. He may indeed have done something despicable. You don't have
to approve of what he did, or like it, or put up with it like a
doormat. However, his action or words did not hurt you. It was not
what he did that took away your peace. He did not affect you, he did
not injure you. You now can see that "sin" did not occur, and that he
has done nothing that warrants guilt. He has perhaps made a grievous
mistake, but that hurts only himself, not you.

So much of what the Course talks about is implied in this simple
statement, "What you thought your brother did to you has not
occurred." You think he injured you, your self, because you are
identified with your ego feelings, with your body, with your
possessions, with your family members and their bodies and
possessions and feelings. The Course teaches that we have identified
incorrectly. We are not our bodies. We are not our possessions. We
are not the ego with all its hurt feelings. We are something much
grander and vaster than that, something that cannot be touched in any
way by external forces.

To fully forgive, our identification with our bodies has to be
completely over. None of us has attained that, yet. That is why the
Course so confidently implies that not one of us has ever, yet,
completely forgiven anyone! That is why it says that if only one
person completely forgave one sin, the world would be healed (see
M-14.3:7). (That is what Jesus accomplished, and because of it, the
world is already healed. We just haven't been ready yet to receive
it.)

A large part of my dealing with the Course has been in recognizing
that, far from having no one to forgive, I have everyone to forgive.

If, in your picture of any situation, you still see yourself--or
someone close to yourself--as having been in some way injured or hurt
by the situation, you have not yet completely forgiven it in your
mind. The Course teaches that if pain is real in your perception, you
have not yet been completely healed (see W-pI.193.7:1-3).

Now, I haven't gotten past the first line on this page and probably
I've got us all, including myself, feeling a little guilty about the
fact that despite all our study of the Course we haven't yet learned
to forgive. So I have to stop here, back off, and say: This is
completely normal. Don't be surprised. And don't feel guilty about
it! Before we can learn to forgive we have to admit that we are not
forgiving! We need to recognize all the ways we still make pain real
in our experience and belief, and just recognize that we are doing
so. One lesson in forgiveness may be to forgive ourselves for being
unforgiving.

"Forgiveness...is still, and quietly does nothing....It merely looks,
and waits, and judges not" (W-pII.1.4:1, 3). Treat yourself that way!
Get in touch with the part of you that does not want to forgive, that
does not want peace. Look at it, and do nothing, just wait without
judging. It will disappear (in time) and peace will come of itself.


    COMMENTARIES ON LESSONS FROM THE WORKBOOK OF A COURSE IN MIRACLES
    by Allen Watson, with Practice Summaries by Robert Perry
    The Circle of Atonement--Visit our website at <http://www.circleofa.com>

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