[acimlessons_list] Lesson 227 - August 15

[Sue Carrier Roth]

Lesson 227 - August 15

"This is my holy instant of release."

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: To expand on the prayer, you may want to use the
following visualization.

You see yourself walking through mist toward a giant pair of feet, the
feet of truth.

Visualize these feet however you like. Maybe they are made of stone.
Maybe they are luminous and semitransparent.

You are carrying a bundle in your hands which you are planning to lay
at these feet as an act of tribute to the truth.

It would be traditional to assume that this bundle is your sins, and
that you will be laying them before the truth in an act of giving them
up for the sake of truth.

Yet the bundle is not your sins; it is your belief in your sinfulness,
your belief that you are defined by your separate will that does not
will with God.

Visualize the bundle however you want, but let its appearance and
weight reflect the fact that this is your belief that you are sinful,
your belief that you possess a wayward, destructive will that has
corrupted your innocence.

You reach the feet of truth. See yourself kneel before the feet and
humbly lay before them this bundle. Let it be a genuine act of tribute
to the truth.

Laying this belief before the feet of truth is your act of giving it
up, in tribute to the truth and in acknowledgment of the falsity of
this belief.

As you look at the bundle there on the ground, it is shined away in
light, and is gone.

Your belief in your sinfulness has been removed forever from your mind.

Feel yourself freed of the heavy burden of feeling like a selfish sinner.

Feel the release as you are lifted into a holy instant.

Feel your right mind restored to you, as if, after a long bout of
insanity, you are finally sane again.

You look down at yourself and see that you are clad in robes of
holiness; your purity has remained untouched.

You arise, free now to come home, to walk through the door of your
Father's house.

COMMENTARY

Today's lesson is another reminder that these practice times are meant
to be holy instants for us. Not every one will be a dramatic
experience of wordless bliss, of course. Remember that simply being
willing to turn your mind to God can be considered a holy instant,
whether or not you consciously experience anything special. The
seminal holy instant, from which the Course sprang, was simply a time
when Bill Thetford said, "There must be another way," and Helen
replied that she would help him find it. The mental shift into
alignment with God's purpose is what really counts. If we faithfully
practice, the direct experience of truth spoken of in the Workbook
will come, not by our efforts, but by God's grace, when we are ready
to receive it.

Consider the effect it has on our mind to focus on today's idea, "This
is my holy instant of release," and then to sit in quiet stillness,
open and receptive to whatever is given to us. We should enter each
such time expectantly, waiting to hear what God's Voice will speak.

I am already free; now, today. My thought of separation had no effect
on my reality, so the imprisonment I have imagined never happened.
"Nothing that I thought apart from You exists" (1:3). How wonderful to
know that the thoughts I believed were apart from God don't exist! How
healing it is to give them up, lay them down at the feet of truth, and
to have them "removed forever from my mind" (1:5). This is the healing
process of the Course: to take each thought that seems to express a
will separate from God's, and bring it into this Presence to be
removed from my mind, with God's own assurance that it has affected
nothing. I am still His Son.

This is how my mind is restored to me. This is how my awareness of my
Identity is returned to my awareness.

WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?

Part 7: W-pII.1.4:1-3

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It
offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it
likes. It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. He who would not
forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he
who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it
is. W-pII.1.4:1-5

"Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing"
(4:1). If we can understand these first few sentences we will have a
clear grasp of what forgiveness really is. The words "on the other
hand" refer to the preceding two paragraphs which described an
unforgiving thought, especially in 3:1, "An unforgiving thought does
many things." Forgiveness, on the other hand, does nothing.
Unforgiveness is highly active, anxiously trying to make things fit
into its picture of reality; forgiveness does nothing. It does not
rush to interpret or to attempt to understand. It lets things be as
they are.

Notice once again the heavy emphasis on stillness and quiet. The
practice of the holy instant, as the practice of forgiveness, is
practice at being still, being quiet, doing nothing. Our usual state
of mind is the product of the ego's training-habitually active,
constantly working. We need practice at being still and doing nothing.
It takes a lot of practice to break the habit of frantic activity and
form a new habit of being still and quiet.

One trick of the ego I notice, frequently, is that it will try to make
me guilty about being still and quiet! When I try to take ten minutes
to sit in stillness, my ego floods my mind with thoughts of what I
ought to be doing instead.

The mental state in which forgiveness occurs is one in which we simply
allow all of reality to be as it is, without judging anything. "It
offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it
likes" (4:2). The appearance my ego usually likes is some form of "I
am right and they are wrong." Or "I am good and they are bad." Or
simply "I am better than he/she is." Even more simply, "I am not like
him/her." All of these thoughts share one theme: I am different from
others, and therefore separate from them. Any such thought is twisting
reality, because the reality is that we are the same, we are equal, we
are one. Forgiveness stills such thoughts and abandons all efforts to
mash reality into a "more desirable" shape.

"It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" (4:3). It does not deny
what it sees, but it puts no interpretation on it. It waits to be told
the meaning by the Holy Spirit. "My mate is having an affair."
Forgiveness looks, and waits, and judges not. "My child is sick."
Forgiveness looks, and waits, and judges not. "My boss just fired me."
Forgiveness looks, and waits, and judges not. We are so quick to think
we know what things mean! And we are wrong. We do not know. We leap to
an understanding based on separation, and such understandings
understand nothing.

The most salutary thing we can do when any such upsetting event occurs
in our lives is-nothing. Simply to let our minds become still and
quiet, and to open ourselves to the healing light of the Holy Spirit.
To seek a holy instant. Let this become the ingrained habit of our
lives, and we will see the world in an entirely different way, and
Love will flow through us to bring healing instead of hurt to every
situation.

In the last two sentences of this paragraph, notice that a contrast is
made between judging and welcoming the truth exactly as it is. The
opposite of judgment is the truth. Judgment, then, must always be a
distortion of the truth. This section has already pointed out that
unforgiveness has distortion as its purpose. If I do not want to
forgive, I must distort the truth; I must judge. Judgment here clearly
carries the meaning of condemnation, of seeing sin, of making
something wrong. Forgiveness does not do that; forgiveness makes right
instead of wrong, because "right" is the truth about all of us.

None of us is guilty. That is the truth. God does not condemn us. If I
do so, I am distorting the truth. Judgment is always a distortion of
the truth of our innocence before God. When I judge another, I do so
because I am trying to justify my unwillingness to forgive. I have
gotten very good at it. I always seem to find some reason that
justifies my unforgiveness. But what I do not realize is that every
such judgment twists the truth, hides it, obscures it. It "makes real"
something that is not real.

Furthermore, in obscuring the truth about my brother or sister, I am
hiding the truth about myself. I am substantiating the basis of my own
self-condemnation. That is why the last sentence of the paragraph
switches from my unforgiveness of another to the forgiveness of
myself: "He who would forgive himself" (4:5). If I want to learn to
forgive myself, I must abandon my judging of others. If their sin is
real, so is mine. Instead I must learn to "welcome truth exactly as it
is" (4:5). Only if I welcome the truth about my brother or sister can
I see it for myself. We stand or fall together. "In him you will find
yourself or lose yourself" (T-8.III.4:5).

To a mind habituated to seeing itself as a separate ego, abandoning
all judgment is frightening. It feels like the rug is being swept out
from under our feet; we don't know where to stand. How can we live in
the world without it? We literally do not know how. Judgment is how we
have ordered our lives; without it, we fear chaos. The Course assures
us this will not happen:

You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego, all
would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be
love. (T-15.V.1:6-7)

When we let go of judgment, when we are willing to welcome the truth
exactly as it is, love rushes in to fill the vacuum left by the
absence of judgment. It has been there all along, but we have blocked
it. We don't know how this happens, but it happens because love is the
reality, love is the truth we are welcoming. Love will show us exactly
what to do when our judgment is gone.