[acimlessons_list] Lesson 327 - November 23

[Sue Carrier Roth]

LESSON 327 * NOVEMBER 23

"I need but call and You will answer me."

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 suggestion: Today's lesson urges us to test out God's promises;
specifically, the promise that He will answer our calls. This is an
invitation we should not refuse. Think of some question or request for which
you really need a response. Put your question or request to God, with all
the desire you can muster, and expect a response. Try to open your mind
about what the response ought to be. Realize that it may come now, and it
may need to work its way past some obstacles in you before it comes. It may
even show up initially in a form which does not look like a response to your
question, but which makes way for a more direct response later on.

Commentary

This reminds me of a Bible verse in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah
(33:3): "Call unto me, and I will answer thee."

The basic thought of the lesson seems to be: "Here are God's promises; try
them, and prove to yourself that He means what He says." It tells us we can
"learn from.experience that this is true" (1:3). It suggests that we take
God's promises and "test them out" (2:1).

I know that my confidence in the Course has increased over the years and
continues to increase as I continue to test out its promises. It gives us
pretty explicit instructions for Workbook practice, and promises that it
will change the way we think about everyone and everything in the world. It
promises peace of mind. It promises release from guilt. And what I am
finding is that as I make a sincere effort to <do> what it tells me to do, I
experience what it says I will experience. In short: it works.

We can sit around judging the propositions of the Course until we are blue
in the face, discussing whether or not the Course will work as it says, and
we will learn nothing. But if we try it, if we test it out, if we practice
what it says to practice, we will inevitably find out that it <does> work,
and our conviction of its truth will grow unshakable.

WHAT IS CREATION?

Part 7: W-pII.11.4:1-3

	We are creation; we the Sons of God.	(4:1)

We exist. Therefore, since all that exists is God's creation, and creation
is the Son of God (3:2), we must be creation. We must be aspects of the
Whole, "Sons" who are aspects of the Son.

"We seem to be discrete, and unaware of our eternal unity with Him" (4:2).
All of our experience in this world has taught us that we are "discrete,"
separate beings, distinct from and unconnected to one another. We are aware
of our partness to the exclusion of our Wholeness, "our eternal unity with
Him." Yet we only "seem" to be separate beings; in reality we are not. Our
struggle with the Course, our struggle with all true spirituality, is the
struggle of insanely trying to preserve this wholly illusory sense of
separateness. We are trying to make "partness" the only truth about
ourselves, by excluding the awareness of Wholeness. And in so doing we have
cut ourselves off from our Self.

"Yet back of all our doubts, past all our fears, there still is certainty"
(4:3). We doubt the Wholeness because we have made up circumstances (this
whole world) in which "partness" seems to be the only reality. We fear the
Wholeness because it seems to threaten our partness. (It does not, really,
because in the Wholeness there is some kind of partness, but it is a
partness in which every part <contains> the Whole, rather than <excludes>
it.) Despite this insanity of identification only with partness, we are
still the Whole. The Whole is "inviolate." It cannot be divided nor damaged
in any way. So the Wholeness still exists, and still calls to us.

In every part, no matter how strong the illusion of separation, the Whole is
still there. And the Whole, our true Self, is still certain of Itself. It is
only the part, falsely imagined to be separate from the Whole, that doubts
and fears. The Whole has no doubts, and no fears. What I am and what you are
(which is the same) knows Itself with unshakable knowledge. That certainty
which lies in our Wholeness is what we are trying to reconnect with. The
memory of God and of what we are lies within us, in the Wholeness we have
denied and excluded in our mad attempt to be completely separate parts.
Through reconnecting with one another, we reconnect with that Wholeness, and
in so doing, we remember God.