[acimlessons_list] Lesson 221 - August 9

[Sue Roth]

Lesson 221 - August 9

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

PRACTICE INSTRUCTIONS

See complete instructions on page XXX. 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.