From sue at circleofa.org Sat Nov 1 08:25:23 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 08:25:23 -0400 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 306 - November 2 Message-ID: LESSON 306 - NOVEMBER 2 "The gift of Christ is all I seek today." 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: Try to read the first paragraph of this lesson as if it were a diary entry of your own, as if it were a series of your own spontaneous thoughts. See if that doesn't change your experience of this paragraph. For an additional exercise, think of a series of situations in your life right now. With each one, note the main thing(s) you are currently seeking in that situation. Then say to yourself: The gift of Christ is all I seek in this situation. The goal of [specify the goal you are currently seeking] is either secondary or irrelevant. Commentary Often these closing lessons of the Workbook tell me that I can enter the real world today. Today I can forget the world I made. Today I can go past all fear, and be restored to love and holiness and peace. (1:2-3) And it is true. If the "world so like to Heaven" (1:1) is truly real, then it exists now, and can be entered at any instant I am willing to do so. Yet these lessons, to me and to many others, seem to be speaking from a vantage point that is beyond our current reach. Most of the time, I don't feel that I am on the verge of reaching the end of the journey; do you? I may think that I would like to go past all fear, but that hasn't been my general experience to date. Only, perhaps, in a few holy instants. So the lessons, perhaps, seem a little above my head. But really, they aren't. The lesson for today itself implies a less than exalted state; it says that the gift of Christ is all I "seek" today. If I am seeking it, I don't possess it yet in full awareness. Strongly, then, the lesson reminds me that today I can forget the world; today I can go past all fear and be restored to love. It reminds me that, in the core of my being, this is what I want. Aware I am not there, I need to be reminded that the goal I seek is truly possible and not simply an idle dream. More than that, though. One of the means for our salvation the Course propounds is the holy instant. The holy instant is, in simple terms, a brief interval in which I allow my mind to enter the real world, to reach to another state of mind (see T-27.IV.2:1-4) which is, in fact, my natural condition as God created me. I may still have too much fear to let go entirely, but I can come for a few minutes at least and, just for now, forget the world and go past my fear to experience a taste of Heaven's peace, a glimpse of Heaven's light. I can do this repeatedly during the day. Today, then, I really can forget the world and go past fear, even if just for a second or two. I may not be able to sustain that state of mind. Yet I can taste it. I can bring back the vision of what I see there. The Course says that only in rare cases can this state be maintained; even Jesus, early in the Course, says that listening only to the Voice for God was the last lesson he learned, and that only with "effort and great willingness" (T-5.II.3:9-11). We need not despair at this, and should not. The brief instants are all we need to guarantee that eventually, when we are fully prepared, we will make that final decision and choose at last not to draw back from Love. That end is sure. For now we can be content with the fact that we are healing, we are learning, we are nurturing our attraction to God, and that eventually it will carry us all the way home. WHAT IS THE SECOND COMING? Part 6: W-pII.9.3:2 The Second Coming is the time in which all minds are given to the hands of Christ, to be returned to spirit in the name of true creation and the Will of God. 6. The Second Coming is the giving of all minds to Christ (3:2) The Second Coming is a corporate event, in which every mind participates. One by one, in an accelerating profusion, minds enter the realm of true perception and perceive the real world, shown by forgiveness. Each newly restored mind draws all those around it to join in the circle of Atonement until every last fragment of mind has been rejoined to the whole (or more correctly, each fragment recognizes its place as part of the whole). "Salvation.restores to your awareness the wholeness of the fragments you perceive as broken off and separate" (M-19.4:1-2). The Second Coming is the culmination of this process. From suelegal at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 07:00:03 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 07:00:03 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 307 - November 3 Message-ID: LESSON 307 - NOVEMBER 3 "Conflicting wishes cannot be my will." 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: This exercise requires writing, so if you would like to do it, please get out paper and pen. Choose a situation in which you are feeling some degree of unloving feelings toward someone. 1. Put a #1 towards the upper left of your paper, as if starting a list. Label #1 "My will to attack." Under this heading, list all the unloving things you feel an impulse to do in this situation. Be as honest and as uncensored as you can be. 2. After finishing that, put a #2 on the page, and label it "My will to love." Under that heading, list all the loving things you want to do (either mentally or physically), the loving impulses that are somewhere inside you, perhaps obscured by your attacking impulses. 3. Then put a #3 below this, and label it "My feelings of conflict." Under this list the feelings of conflict that are engendered by having both sets of impulses in you. Look back and forth between #1 and #2 and try to get a sense of how you feel about being so divided inside, about both love and attack contending within you. 4. Then put a #4 on the paper and label it "My separation from God." Here, list the sense of conflict with or distance from God that arises in you from the inner conflict between #1 and #2. 5. Then write a #5 and label it "My feelings of peace." Here, imagine that #2 is your only will, the only thing you truly want. #1 is not what you really want, because once you get it you don't feel genuinely happy. You discover that you don't want it as much as you thought. While imagining that #2 represents your one true will, feel the lack of inner conflict, the wholeness, and the peace with yourself implied in that idea. Note what feelings arise in you and write these under #5. Commentary "There is no other will for me to have" (1:2) except the Will of God. No other will exists. The idea that there could be something-the devil, myself, even a part of myself-that is opposed to God is the root idea of separation. Trying to "make another will" (1:3) is futile; nothing exists outside of God, the Ground of all being. Trying to make a will other than God's is the source of pain (1:3); pain is the false witness to the attempt. If no will but God's exists, then "conflicting wishes cannot be my will." The apparent experience of mental conflict I feel, the mental war between the Jekyll and Hyde within myself, must be an illusion and cannot be what I want. I must learn to accept that the desires in me that seem to be in conflict with my true Self are not real, and do not contain any truth about me. They do not mean I am depraved or hopeless. They mean nothing at all. I have no alternative. If I would have what only You can give, I must accept Your Will for me, and enter into peace where conflict is impossible, Your Son is one with You in being and in will, and nothing contradicts the holy truth that I remain as You created me. (1:5) In simple terms, God created me; I did not. What I am is not the result of my independent choice. I am as God created me. I have no choice in the matter. Total peace is impossible until I accept this as the truth, and let myself fall back into what is so, putting an end to my fight with reality. Let me end the war; let me surrender to my Self. WHAT IS THE SECOND COMING? Part 7: W-pII.9.4:1-2 "The Second Coming is the one event in time which time itself can not affect" (4:1). This is true because the Second Coming is merely the remembrance of what is eternal, and can never change. It is an "event in time," that is, it still takes place within the context of time, although it brings an end to time itself. The Second Coming affects time, but time cannot affect it. "For every one who ever came to die, or yet will come or who is present now, is equally released from what he made" (4:2). When we say that in the Second Coming are "given to the hands of Christ" (3:2), the "all" has to include not only the people alive now, but those who lived before and those still yet to come. The Second Coming therefore, although it occurs within time, transcends time. It reaches back into the past to release those who lived before, as well as including those "alive" in bodies at the time. It is a trans-temporal event. No one is excluded. The Text says that miracles "undo the past in the present, and thus release the future" (T-1.I.13:3). The idea that we can literally "undo" the past is astounding, and very reassuring. We are told that the Holy Spirit can "undo all the consequences of [our] wrong decision if [we] will let Him" (T-5.VII.6:10). The Second Coming is the ultimate expression of that, in which everyone, even those in the past, are "released from what [they] made," or freed from the illusions they set up. I don't know how this will happen. When the Course tells us that the Holy Spirit is not limited by time (see T-15.I.2:3-5), I can't say that I understand how He can reach back in time and heal things that have already happened from our perspective. Yet the Course is quite clear that He can do so. In the Second Coming, every false perception from the beginning of time to the end of it will be healed. No condemnation, and no guilt, will remain in any mind, any where, any when. From sue at circleofa.org Mon Nov 3 04:54:28 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 04:54:28 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 308 - November 4 Message-ID: LESSON 308 - NOVEMBER 4 "This instant is the only time there is." 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. Commentary The Course's way of looking at time goes counter to our normal way of thinking. Time is an illusion. It does not really flow from the past, through the present, to the future. All there is, is now. Past and future do not exist in reality, but only in our minds. One of the keys to reaching "past time to timelessness" (1:2) is in learning to experience now as the only time there is. This is one way of describing what the Course refers to as the "holy instant." (The teaching underlying this short lesson can be found in reading "The Two Uses of Time" [T-15.I]. Read especially paragraphs 8 and 9 in regard to practicing the holy instant.) "The only interval in which I can be saved from time is now" (1:4). Think about it. What other time have you ever experienced except now? You can't be saved from time yesterday, and you never experience tomorrow. Right now is the only time you can have this experience of being saved from time; this experience of forgiveness. Forgiveness lets the past go and focuses on the present blessing. So right now, this instant, you can enter the holy instant. It can be any instant, and it can be this very instant if you will receive it. Just for this instant, forget the past. Respond to only now. Forget even five seconds ago, what somebody said, what you were feeling. Just be in the moment. The Course advises us to practice this. I think it means practice in two senses of the word: first, that the holy instant is to be applied, or put into use. Second, the holy instant is to be rehearsed. We are even told to "practice the mechanics of the holy instant" (T-15.II.5:4). The author seems quite aware that we won't get it right the first time, or perhaps not for a long time. So he advises us to practice the mechanics of it, to go through the motions, as it were, until one day our experience will catch up. In other words, rehearse it. The best instructions for rehearsing it are in Section I of Chapter 15, the ninth paragraph. Taking a short time each morning and evening, at least, to think of this moment as all there is of time is a marvelous exercise. It produces a deep sense of peace when I let myself recognize that nothing can reach me here from the past; that I am absolved of any guilt I may feel about the past, along with my brothers and sisters. And nothing can reach me from the future, either. I can simply be in this instant, free of guilt, and free of fear. There is no past. There is no future. There is only now, and in this instant love is ever-present, here and now. Thanks for this instant, Father. It is now I am redeemed. This instant is the time You have appointed for Your Son's release, and for salvation of the world in him. (2:1-3) WHAT IS THE SECOND COMING? Part 8: W-pII.9.4:3-4 Everyone-past, present, and future-is "equally released from what he made" (4:2) in the Second Coming, which is "the willingness to let forgiveness rest upon all things without exception and without reserve" (1:3). The words "In this equality..." (4:3) refer to that equality of forgiveness, that equality of release from guilt and condemnation. "In this equality is Christ restored as one Identity, in Which the Sons of God acknowledge that they all are one" (4:3). We may say we want oneness, but do we want the for oneness? Forgiveness is the means that restores oneness. There is a section of the Text that talks about the fact that we pretend to want a certain goal, and yet we reject the means for reaching that goal. It says that if we hesitate over the means, it really proves we are afraid of the goal. We may say we want oneness, and yet hesitate to offer complete forgiveness; we may complain that total forgiveness is too difficult, too much to ask. The real problem, according to this passage, is that we are afraid of the oneness that forgiveness would bring: To obtain the goal the Holy Spirit indeed asks little. He asks no more to give the means as well. The means are second to the goal. And when you hesitate, it is because the purpose frightens you, and not the means. Remember this, for otherwise you will make the error of believing the means are difficult. (T-20.VII.3:1-5) Am I willing to acknowledge that I am one with "that person" in my life? If I have a problem with forgiveness it is not because forgiveness is too difficult; it is because I do not want the oneness it would bring. Ask only, "Do I really wish to see him sinless?" And as you ask, forget not that his sinlessness is escape from fear. (T-20.VII.9:2-3) Each time I reach that willingness, the Second Coming grows closer. "And God the Father smiles upon His Son, His one creation and His only joy" (4:4). When we are willing to see one another as sinless, and to recognize our oneness, God the Father once again sees His Son and smiles. We are His one creation and His only joy, and only as we lay down the barriers of "sin" and guilt, and forgive one another, is that oneness seen, and the Father's joy expressed in and through us. From sue at circleofa.org Tue Nov 4 05:35:09 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 05:35:09 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 310 - November 6 Message-ID: LESSON 310 - NOVEMBER 6 "In fearlessness and love I spend today." 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 prayer is another of my absolute favorites. We all have a longing for a day that is not of this world, a day spent in quiet communion with God. This prayer captures and kindles that desire. It can be the springboard for a different kind of day. I recommend praying it repeatedly today. You may want to sit down every hour and go through it yet again. To pray these Workbook prayers, I find it helpful to lay out each sentence or phrase on a separate line, as I have done below. And then I will read a line, fix it in my mind, close my eyes, and say it to God with as much sincerity as I can, and then open my eyes and repeat this procedure with the next line. This day, my Father, would I spend with You, As You have chosen all my days should be. And what I will experience is not of time at all. The joy that comes to me is not of days nor hours, for it comes from Heaven to Your Son. This day will be Your sweet reminder to remember You, Your gracious calling to Your holy Son, the sign Your grace has come to me, and that it is Your Will I be set free today. Commentary All my days are meant to be spent with You, Father, in fearlessness and love (1:1). All of them. I seldom spend my day this way, but today, Father, I would do so. I open my heart to give this day to You. Let it be so, as You will. Let me know the joy that comes from Heaven, not from time (1:2-3). Let the interfering voice in my mind be still, and let me hear Heaven's music (2:2). I ask not for ecstatic visions that transport me out of this world forever, but I do ask that today be something new, something higher, a foretaste of what is in store for me at the end of time. Let this day be "Your sweet reminder to remember You" (1:4). Gift me with Your grace, Father. Let me experience something that will serve as a continuing reminder to turn my mind to You again and again. Let this day be "Your gracious calling to Your holy Son" (1:4). Open my ears, and teach me to listen. Let me hear Your calling today. Let me feel the drawing power of Your eternal Love. Let this day be "the sign Your grace has come to me, and that it is Your Will I be set free today" (1:4). May there be a fresh and poignant awareness of Your working in my life, Your touch upon me. May I see signs that my freedom is Your Will. May I find renewed confidence in the certainty of the outcome that awaits me in Your plan. Today let a song of thankfulness rise up within me. Increase my awareness that I am joining an eternal song, sung by every part of Your creation. Let me, as the psalmist said, "Sing unto the Lord a new song." Let me recognize the rejoicing that is life itself, given by God, as all the world joins with us in the song. There is no room in us for fear today, for we have welcomed love into our hearts. (2:4) WHAT IS THE SECOND COMING? Part 10: W-pII.9.5:5-6 The third thing we can do in the light of what the Second Coming is, is to become part of the Atonement ourselves, having received it. Let us rejoice that we can do God's Will, and join together in its holy light. Behold, the Son of God is one in us, and we can reach our Father's Love through Him. (5:5-6) God's Will is Love. God's Will for us is perfect happiness. God's Will is never-ending extension of the radiance of His Being. We can "do" that because He created us to be that. We can reach our Father's Love His Son. It is our choice to join together in that oneness of the Son that is the fulfillment of God's Will. Here, in our relationships within time, we are beginning the process that culminates in the Second Coming, the restoration of the single Identity of Christ. As we join in common purpose, to forgive and to be forgiven, to love and to be loved, we shorten the time until the Sonship is fully one in expression. As we give our relationships to the Holy Spirit, to be used only for His purpose, to be transformed into holy relationships through forgiveness, we are joining together in the fulfillment of God's Will. It is through one another that we reach God's Love. It is in one another that we find God. "The whole reality of your relationship with Him lies in our relationship to one another" (T-17.IV.16:7). From sue at circleofa.org Tue Nov 4 21:40:01 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 21:40:01 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 309 - November 5 Message-ID: LESSON 309 - NOVEMBER 5 "I will not fear to look within today." 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: The following exercise may help you apply the essence of today's lesson. First, get in touch with the part of you that feels you're more or less always right, that you're always justified, always doing your best, that the problem always lies in external forces putting too much pressure on you. Then go the next level down. Try to get in touch with how much you mistrust your own will, how you wish it would naturally and consistently reach for the highest, the most loving, but how instead it often drags you down into the mud. Now try to get in touch with how defiled you believe this wayward will of yours has made you. It has defined you in your eyes as a petty, self-centered, superficial, and ultimately self-destructive person. A medieval mystic spoke of the "foul, stinking lump" of self. Try to get in touch with that kind of self-loathing within you. Then realize that all of the above is the voice of your ego, telling you who you are when it doesn't even know. Accept that God's Voice tells you otherwise. He tells you that you are His holy Son, forever and forever. Place your trust in His Voice, recognizing that He knows who you are even if you don't. Let His view of you sink in. Let it draw you down to that deep place in your mind where God's holiness dwells, and where His holiness is yours. Spend the rest of the time in quiet meditation, abiding in that place of holiness, where you can look on yourself with love, not with fear. Commentary I find that often I am very suspicious of my own motives. I am so aware that in the past I have done a masterful job of hiding my own thoughts and feelings from myself that even when I am not knowingly aware of anything being "off," when my motives on the surface seem pure, I find myself wondering what lurks underneath the rock, and hesitating to look. For example, I have, in the past, distanced myself from a close friend while convinced the whole time that she was distancing herself from me. It took three hours of intense argument-I can't call it anything better than that-before I finally got in touch with my own fear and anger that was causing me to push her away. I denied vehemently that I was doing so; I claimed that I had been longing for more closeness and that she was not responding. When you are conversant with the ego's deceptions it seems hard to trust yourself. It always seems to me as if there might be something sneaky going on in my mind that somehow I have been hiding with denial and dissociation. So, how can I not fear to look within? What ugly, grungy thing will I uncover this time, if I do? "I fear to look within because I think I made another will that is not true, and made it real" (1:5). If I do look within, often the first things I will see are these ugly, grungy things- "another will that is not true." I will see them, but the good news is that they are not true. I did not succeed in making this other will real. All I succeeded in making were illusions. The ugliness is a smoke screen, a mask, a facade the ego has erected over the eternal innocence of my mind. If I will look at those thoughts with the Holy Spirit, I will find that they are not as terrible as I have feared. He will translate them into truth for me; He will help me see in them the call for love, the unconscious affirmation of the love which lies buried beneath them, the distorted reflection of the innocence I have never lost. For instance, in the case I mentioned above, I was pushing my friend away, distancing myself from her. Why? Because I was afraid of losing her love. Because I felt terrified that she did not find me worthy of her time and company, and I was not going to give her the chance to prove my fears correct. I would withdraw before she could push me out. I would punish her for her (imagined) betrayal by taking myself away from her. I was mistaken, both in my own self-evaluation and in my assessment of her evaluation of me. And the Course was demonstrated to me so very clearly that night. She got angry at me. She got furious, and once got up to walk out of the restaurant, saying she would never want anything to do with me again because I was so massively in denial that she couldn't deal with it. It wasn't until a miracle happened that the impasse was resolved. Suddenly my perception of her shifted. I saw her anger as what it actually was-a call for love. She was furious with me because I was withholding my love, and she was in pain over the thought of losing it. Her anger was no longer attack in my perception; it was a cry for help. It was her love for me, mistakenly trying to find what it wanted through anger and attack. And as I forgave her, I saw the same dynamic in myself. In that moment, I was no longer afraid to look within. I saw the twisted motives that had been running me. I saw my fear. I saw my icy distancing. And behind it all I discovered my love and my innocence, waiting to meet hers. We need never fear to look within. All that is there is "my will as God created it, and as it is" (1:4). What I made, all those ugly ego thoughts, had no effects at all. There is no reason to fear them; they are meaningless. I can look at them, with the Holy Spirit beside me, and laugh; I can say, "How foolish! These thoughts do not mean anything." Beneath that is the frightened mind, in pain over what it thinks it has done. And past that, far deeper, is the holiness of God, the memory of God. This beneficent mind, this kind and gentle mind, so spacious and open and magnanimous, so all-encompassing-this is my true Identity. This is Who I am. WHAT IS THE SECOND COMING? Part 9: W-pII.9.5:1-4 What are we to do about the Second Coming? 1. Pray for it (5:1) Ask that it be soon. Desire it, yearn for it, be quietly impatient for its coming. 2. Give ourselves to it wholly It needs your eyes and ears and hands and feet. It needs your voice. And most of all it needs your willingness. (5:2-4) We are the means by which the Second Coming will happen. Let us give our eyes to see love everywhere, and give them no longer to find fault or to see guilt. Let us give our ears to hear only the Voice for God and to hear and answer every call for love around us. Let us give our hands to take the hands of those beside us and lead them home. Let us give our feet to go to those in need, and give our voice to speak the words of healing, of forgiveness, and of release. Most of all, let us give our willingness to join in the great crusade to correct the mad error of sin and guilt wherever we encounter it. In other words, we are those who will bring Him back. He has never left, in reality; the return is a return to our consciousness, the return of the memory of our Identity. The work I do on myself is the most potent way to invite the Second Coming. The way in which I affirm my brothers' identity with me and with the Christ, through forgiveness, through true perception, is how the Second Coming comes. Each of us has a vital part in this. "My part is essential to God's plan for salvation" (W-pI.100.Heading). The little shift that occurs in your mind as you practice the Course each day, the seemingly insignificant change of mind that lets you forgive the person who cuts you off in traffic or the friend or relative who acts unlovingly, each little act of kindness, each moment in which you choose to see a call for love rather than an attack, is contributing to the awakening of this Great Mind, the One Being that we are. It is not just that is awakening, it is . He coming again. He is coming again . And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed. (W-pI.137.10:1-4) Each time you practice, awareness is brought a little nearer at least; sometimes a thousand years or more are saved... The Holy Spirit will be glad to take five minutes of each hour from your hands, and carry them around this aching world where pain and misery appear to rule. He will not overlook one open mind that will accept the healing gifts they bring, and He will lay them everywhere He knows they will be welcome. And they will increase in healing power each time someone accepts them as his thoughts, and uses them to heal. Thus will each gift to Him be multiplied a thousandfold and tens of thousands more. And when it is returned to you, it will surpass in might the little gift you gave as much as does the radiance of the sun outshine the tiny gleam a firefly makes an uncertain moment and goes out. The steady brilliance of this light remains and leads you out of darkness, nor will you be able to forget the way again. (W-pI.97.3:2; 5:1-6:3) That is what is happening today. Down through the centuries a few people have remembered. Their light has shone, and apparently, in many cases, gone out. But it has never really gone out. Each flash of light impacted every mind in the world, shifted it that little bit closer to truth, until today, in our lifetimes, we can see the beginnings of a "steady brilliance," a light that is too bright to ever again become obscured. We are seeing the snowball effect of enlightenment. The snowball has become far too big to be ignored. Victor Hugo said, "Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come," and the time for this idea has come. It is here, and we are part of it. From sue at circleofa.org Thu Nov 6 20:10:08 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 20:10:08 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 311 - November 7 Message-ID: LESSON 311 - NOVEMBER 7 "I judge all things as I would have them be." 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: Choose a person you are currently judging, and repeat the following lines: I will accept Your judgment of [name]. I cannot understand [name] apart from his oneness with totality. I do not know [name] and I cannot judge. And so I let Your love decide who [name] is. Commentary The basic lesson of the Course about judgment is that we can't really do it. We simply don't have the equipment. We don't know enough; as this lesson says, our judgment "cannot see totality and therefore judges falsely" (1:4). What our judgment does, then, is to make things into what we want them to be, rather than what they really are. Unfortunately, it does so based upon "the agony of all the judgments we have made against ourselves" (1:6). We project our self-condemnation onto the world, and what we see, as it said back in Lesson 304, is "my state of mind, reflected outward" (W-pII.304.1:4). Instead of attempting to judge anything, we are asked to take judgment and "make a gift of it to Him Who has a different use for it" (1:5). In other words, we let the Holy Spirit judge for us. He always judges according to the truth, the reality of God's creation. "We let Your Love decide what he whom You created as Your Son must be" (2:3). He gives us "God's Judgment of His Son" (1:6). Another way of looking at it is that we allow the Holy Spirit to tell us what we truly want: to see the perfection of God's creation everywhere and in everyone. And then, because that is what we want to see, we "judge all things as [we] would have them be," but now we judge differently because we want something different. Given to the ego, our minds always want to find fault because we are trying to deny and project what we think are our own faults; given to the Holy Spirit, our minds always find love or a call for love. Today, then, Father, I would see Your Son as You created him. I would judge him truly. I would suspend my warped judgment and accept Yours in every way. Today I want to see the truth in everyone. Teach me to relinquish judgment on my own, and to accept the eternal judgment You have made: "You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure" (W-pII.10.5:1). WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 1: W-pII.10.1:1-2 Christ's Second Coming gives the Son of God this gift: To hear the Voice for God proclaim that what is false is false, and what is true has never changed. (1:1) This is one of the great statements of the ultimate message of : "what is false is false, and what is true has never changed." Put into these deceptively simple words, the message almost seems to be trite or tautological, like "Red is red." Of course "what is false is false, and what is true is true." It's obvious. What gives the statement its profundity is the fact that . As we are told in the Text: This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel you need a course which, in the end, teaches that only reality is true. But do you believe it? When you perceive the real world, you will recognize that you did not believe it. (T-11.VIII.1:1-4) All our problems can be summed up in this: We have taught ourselves to believe that what is false is true, and what is true is false. We believe that the body, sin, guilt, fear, suffering, and death are all real. And we do not believe (or at least strongly doubt) that spirit, holiness, innocence, love, and eternal life are real. The perception of the real world shows us that the latter list-what is real-is really real, and the former list-what is false-is really false. And is the Last Judgment. All the learning process we appear to be going through is really teaching us nothing except that one lesson, over and over, in one example after another. Something we thought of as real-our own sin, or sin in a brother, or death, or attack, or separation-is shown to be false, and the love we thought was absent is seen to be present. Where we thought we saw sin we now see innocence. Where we thought we saw an attacker we now see our savior (T-22.VI.8:1). Then will he see each situation that he thought before was means to justify his anger turned to an event which justifies his love. He will hear plainly that the calls to war he heard before are really calls to peace. (T-25.III.6:5-6) Try to imagine what it would be like to have some situation which, right now, seems to justify your anger turned into something that, instead, justifies your love. That is what the miracle does. That is what "what is false is false, and what is true has never changed," really means. The real world is a kind of perception in which you see justifies your love, because nothing exists which does justify love. That is what is "real" about the real world. What is false is that anger is ever justified: "Anger is justified" (T-30.VI.1:1). What is true is that love is justified. God's Love for you, for instance, is always justified. God's Love for your brother is always justified. And therefore, your love for your brother is also always justified. "This the judgment is in which perception ends" (1:2). When we have achieved this final judgment about everything, the purpose of perception is over. There is nothing more to perceive, because all reason for separation is gone, and oneness is once again knowable and known. We no longer perceive one another, which requires separation, subject and object; instead, we each other as parts of ourselves, "wholly lovable and wholly loving" (T-1.III.2:3). From sue at circleofa.org Fri Nov 7 05:53:58 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2008 05:53:58 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 312 - November 8 Message-ID: LESSON 312 - NOVEMBER 8 "I see all things as I would have them be." 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. COMMENTARY This lesson is the second in a pair. The previous lesson told us that we judge all things as we would have them be. This lesson continues: "Perception follows judgment" (1:1). Judgment is, in this context, nearly synonymous with interpretation. We first want a certain thing to be true; we therefore judge or interpret what is around us according to that desire; and having judged (interpreted), we perceive what we wanted. "For sight can merely serve to offer us what we would have" (1:3). The Course's presentation of perception and how it works is consistent and insistent: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there. Perception has no other law than this. (T-25.III.1:3-4) If we want to see the real world, we will see it. If we join with the Holy Spirit in His goal, we "cannot fail to look upon what Christ would have him see, and share Christ's Love for what he looks upon" (1:6). The key is in what we want. It's hard to admit that what we are seeing we must have wanted to see, at some level of our minds. The ego has a sick mind, quite literally; the unrecognized ego thoughts and wishes manifest in the world even though we are not conscious of them. But the world is our mind's mirror; what we see is what we have chosen to see. The world does not change because we are afraid to look within our minds and see the thoughts that caused it. If we will look, He will heal. I recall someone standing during an ACIM workshop, when Ken Wapnick was sharing along these lines, and telling how, during the television reports on a California earthquake, he became aware that there was a part of his mind that was disappointed that the death toll was so low. Something in him wanted it to be more dramatic, wanted to see more death. I remember once realizing quite clearly that I wanted someone dead-someone quite close to me. It was a shock, but when I let myself be aware of it I was also aware that the thought was not new! We need to be willing to find the cause of the world we see within our own minds, so that we can change our minds about the world. With changed thoughts, we will see a changed world. If we will, we can look upon "a liberated world, set free from all the judgments I have made" (2:1). Today we can choose to see the world differently-if we want to. There is no guilt in choosing not to see it differently, but think of how unhappy your perception of the world has made you up till now and ask yourself if you don't want to see it differently. Seeing the real world is your will. It is up to you, and to me, to choose to see it today. Father, this is Your Will for me today, and therefore it must be my goal as well. (2:2) WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 2: W-pII.10.1:3-4 In two sentences we have the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, and the final step: At first you see a world that has accepted this as true [the Second Coming], projected from a now corrected mind. And with this holy sight, perception gives a silent blessing [the Last Judgment] and then disappears [the final step], its goal accomplished and its mission done. (1:3-4) The "this" which we see the world as having accepted is the statement from the previous sentence: "what is false is false, and what is true has never changed." If the has accepted this statement, it indicates to me that this is not simply the real world (the world seen through forgiving eyes) but the Second Coming, in which all minds have been given to Christ. The unified, healed mind of the Sonship is still projecting, but "from a now corrected mind," and therefore what is being projected is a healed world. When we see this "holy sight," we pronounce the Last Judgment, which is a silent blessing, for as the Course says elsewhere, the Last Judgment is not a meting out of punishment but a final healing (T-2.VIII.3:3). With the "final healing," then, the goal and mission of perception itself (as the Holy Spirit sees its purpose) is over, and so perception itself vanishes, no longer needed. Here, perception vanishes; in the next paragraph (2:3) the world itself, which is the object of all our perception, "slips away to nothingness." What's the point of understanding these eschatological events? (Eschatology is "The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind" [American Heritage Dictionary].) They represent the goal towards which the Course is leading us. As the Course itself says, in "Setting the Goal" (T-17.VI), when you accept a certain goal you begin to overlook or discount everything that stands in its way, and start to focus on the things that will bring the goal about. It says: The value of deciding in advance what you want to happen is simply that you will perceive the situation as a means to it happen. You will therefore make every effort to overlook what interferes with the accomplishment of your objective, and concentrate on everything that helps you meet it. (T-17.VI.4:1-2) If we have even some small understanding that the final goal is a silent blessing, a final healing, an overlooking of all error and a recognition of the innocence of all of God's creation, and of all of our own creations, we will begin to perceive our day-to-day situations as "a means to make it happen." We will make every effort to overlook attack thoughts and condemning judgments, whether in our own minds or in others, because we will see them as something that interferes with the goal we are seeking. Another value of this understanding of the Last Judgment is that it eliminates one of the sources of our fear. We'll see more about this further on in this section, but for now, just realizing that God will be running an inquisition and punishing us for every minuscule transgression of His laws will come as a great relief to many of us, influenced by our immersion in a culture where religion is often filled with fear of God's wrath. The idea of a wrathful, vengeful God is something the Course goes out of its way to counteract. From sue at circleofa.org Sat Nov 8 08:58:59 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 08:58:59 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 313 - November 9 Message-ID: LESSON 313 - NOVEMBER 9 "Now let a new perception come to 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: I find that this lesson is more effective if you make it specific: "Now let a new perception of this person (or situation, or event) come to me." Commentary The vision of Christ "beholds all things as sinless" (1:1). This is a new perception that to me. I don't go after it; I receive it. I open to it, and it is given to me: "This vision is Your gift" (1:3). To see all things as sinless is not something that I must strive to do; it is a gift, given to me by God. When I perceive sin, what I can learn to do is to ask for a different perception: "Now let a new perception come to me." I can want this new perception, and wanting is all that is required. The rest is given. "Love will come wherever it is asked" (1:2). Christ-Who is my true Self, eternal, changeless-already "sees no sin in anything He looks upon" (1:5). This is not a vision that my Self has to achieve; it is mine already, in Christ. All I need to do is to allow that new perception to come to me. As I do, as I look out upon the world and see it as forgiven, I will "waken from the dream of sin and look within upon my sinlessness" (1:6). There is the message of the Course in a nutshell: See your own innocence by seeing the world's innocence. Find your forgiveness through forgiving others. Like vision, which has always been a part of my Christ Self, so too sinlessness: it has been kept by God, "completely undefiled upon the altar to Your holy Son, the Self with which I would identify" (1:6). That is all we are doing: identifying with the Christ, with something that already is. "Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all" (W-pI.188.1:4). There is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go; we are already there, and all that is required is the recognition of what is already so, the identification with what has existed forever. We let the new perception come to us, that is all. So, my brothers and sisters, Let us today behold each other in the sight of Christ. How beautiful we are! (2:1-2) WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 3: W-pII.10.2:1-2 The final judgment on the world contains no condemnation. (2:1) No condemnation! It seems to be very hard for us to get beyond the idea of condemnation. We've been taught for generations that in the Last Judgment, God will separate the "sheep" from the "goats," the "wheat" from the "tares," the good guys from the bad guys, and will send the bad guys into everlasting punishment. We rather like the idea of vengeance; it seems like justice to us. We go to movies and we cheer when the bad guys finally get blown away. Of course, when it comes to picturing ourselves standing before God's Final Judgment, we get a little nervous-very nervous, in fact. Because we know we aren't perfect. How can there be no condemnation in the Final Judgment? There can only be one explanation. There is no condemnation because "it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin and wholly purposeless" (2:2). The only way there can be no condemnation is if there is no sin. and is forgiven, totally. And that bugs us. "You mean the bad guys get blown away at the end of the story?" It doesn't seem fair to us, because we believe that sin is real, and deserves punishment. The old-time evangelists of the eighteenth century, like Jonathan Edwards (the author of the famous sermon "Sinners in the hands of an angry God"), had some things right. They taught that sin is sin. There is no order of sin-every sin is infinitely sinful and demands eternal punishment because sin is an attack on an infinite God. As C. S. Lewis put it, the idea of a "little" sin is like a "little" pregnancy. Edwards had people so terrified when he delivered his sermon that people in church were holding on to the pillars of the church in fear that the ground would open and swallow them up into hell. If sin were real at all, he was right. All of us would be infinitely guilty, and all of us would deserve eternal punishment. In this picture, there no "good guys." Therefore, if sin is real at all, and vengeance on is justified, then vengeance is justified on all of us. If the bad guys get blown away at the end of the story, we get blown away. In holding on to the idea of condemnation and punishment, we are condemning ourselves to hell. And somewhere inside we know it-that's why we feel so nervous! The only alternative is condemnation. Total forgiveness. No sin in anyone. And that is the message of the Course: "God's Son is guiltless" (T-14.V.2:1). That will be God's Final Judgment, and that will be judgment when we reach the end of our journey. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin and wholly purposeless. (2:2) The final judgment sees the world, not only as without sin, but without a purpose. This notion cannot be squared with the idea that God created the world; would God create anything without a purpose? The purposelessness of the world, though, goes quite well with the idea that our ego minds have made the world up. Have you ever looked at the world and suspected that it was basically without any purpose or meaning? That the endless progression of birth and death doesn't seem to be going anywhere? We all grow up (some with more difficulty than others, some with more success than others), we struggle through life, we attain what we can, and then-so it seems-it all comes to an end, and everything we have accomplished, and everything we have become, is lost (see T-13.In.2). What is the point? Many, particularly among the younger people today, have accepted this point of view, and have succumbed to despair and apathy. And yet, there is validity to this point of view. In fact, the final judgment will ultimately confirm it! The world no purpose. It is the misbegotten offspring of a mind made mad by guilt (see T-13.In.2:2). The realization, however, need not lead to despair; it can become the springboard to eternal joy. Seen as without purpose, we can at last let it go, and remember that our true home is in God. From suelegal at gmail.com Sat Nov 8 09:01:02 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 09:01:02 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] [RESEND] The Practice Instructions to Part II Message-ID: The Practice instructions to Part II PURPOSE: The introduction to Part II talks as if, in the remaining part of this year, we are trying to reach the end of our spiritual journey: "This year has brought us to eternity" (10:8). However, the Manual, in Section 16 ("How Should the Teacher of God Spend His Day?") implies a more modest goal: to reach a place where we practice because of our own motivation and inspiration, rather than because a book is telling us to. This would transform our practicing from a special assignment into a way of life. Part II of the Workbook, with its absence of daily practice instructions, is an important step in this direction. If here, in the relatively formless landscape of Part II, your practice can blossom, rather than wither, you are close to graduating from the Workbook. I think we need to combine these two goals: We should aim for eternity, realizing that by aiming high we will carry ourselves farther than if we didn't, even though we may only get as far as weaning ourselves from the Workbook's support. In other words, we should aim to graduate from time and space, we can reach the more realistic goal of graduating from the Workbook. Reading the lesson: The lessons in Part II take a very different form than in Part I. After the day's idea, we find just two paragraphs, both worded in the first person, which expand and comment on the idea. This makes the Part II lessons look much like what we see in most of the reviews, where the idea for the day is followed by a series of "related comments" (W-pI.rI.In.2:3; 3:3) which are worded in the first person and expand on the idea. In the reviews, these related comments become part of the exercises. We read them over several times, we think about them, we repeat them to ourselves, we savor each word. We make them our own, which is why they are worded they are our own. We so fully engage them that reading them becomes more like a practice than a simple act of reading. It makes sense that we should use the comments in the Part II lessons in the same way that we used the comments in the reviews, simply because the two are so similar. And the introduction hints at this. For it speaks of our reading of those paragraphs as an "exercise" (2:1) that is meant to induct us (1:4) into "the periods of wordless, deep experience which should come afterwards" (11:2). Let's look at how we can turn the reading of those two paragraphs into a genuine exercise. First, the< commentary paragraphs> (the nonitalicized paragraphs). I recommend that you read these over slowly, perhaps several times, and imagine that these really are your own thoughts (which is how they are worded). To facilitate this, you may want to emphasize words like "I," "me," "my," and "mine." Second, the< prayers>. These read as if you yourself are praying them to God, and I recommend doing just that. Fix one sentence at a time in your mind and then close your eyes and say that sentence to God. Try to really mean it and expect Him to hear you. These appear to be designed to carry you into the meditative state, and many of them virtually say that. Lesson 307 says of its prayer, "And with this prayer we enter silently into a state where conflict cannot come" (W-pII.307.2:1). To enhance this effect, you may want to pray the prayer several times. Morning/evening quiet time: As long as you need for the effect you want. The longer practice periods are meant to consist of Open Mind Meditation. Begin by repeating the idea for the day, but in a special way: as an invitation to God to come to you. "We say the words of invitation that His Voice suggests, and then we wait for Him to come to us" (4:6). After repeating these words, go into a time of expectant, wordless waiting (the word "wait" here occurs six times). To wait normally means to stay physically still in anticipation of some event. Here it means to stay still in anticipation of a wondrous event: the dawning of God on your mind. Wait as if holding your breath for this event. Wait with an attitude that "the memory of God is shimmering across the wide horizons of our minds" (9:5). Your waiting, then, though motionless, should be very much alive. It should be filled with expectancy: "We...expect our Father to reveal Himself, as He has promised" (3:3). The basis for your expectancy, in other words, is your trust that God will keep His promises. He promised to come to you when you asked. You are asking; He will come. Hold this state without the aid of repeating words. However, whenever your mind wanders, you should use words--repeat the idea to draw yourself back to this nonverbal waiting. "We will use that thought...to calm our minds at need" (3:1). If you find Open Mind Meditation either too challenging or too unrewarding, I would recommend using either of the other two methods the Workbook has taught: Down-and-Inward Meditation or Name of God Meditation. In fact, Lesson 222 clearly instructs you to use Name of God Meditation: <"Father, we have no words except Your Name upon our lips and in our minds, as we come quietly into Your Presence now"> (W-pII.222.2:1). Hourly remembrance: One or two minutes as the hour strikes (reduce if circumstances do not permit). Do a miniature version of the morning practice. Repeat the idea as an invitation to God, and then wait in wordless silence for Him to come to you. Frequent reminder: As often as possible within each hour. "Repeat [the idea], and allow your mind to rest a little time in silence and in peace" (W-pI.rIII.In.10:5). Response to temptation: When you are tempted to let upset cause you to forget your goal. Repeat the idea as a way of calling on God to dispel your upset (see 2:9 and 10:2). Reading the "What Is" section: Before one of the day's practice periods (not necessarily the morning one), read the relevant "What Is" section. Don't just read it casually. Read it slowly and think about it "a little while" (11:4). * * * LET US PRAY What are we supposed to do with the prayers in Part II of the Workbook for ? There are 140 of them, one for each lesson. This has puzzled many a Course student who, upon reaching Part II, finds himself confronted each day with an italicized prayer directed at God. Is this prayer offered by the author of the Course on our behalf? Do we simply read it? Do we actually pray it? If so, why? Actually, I am only that this issue has puzzled Course students. I have never really heard much discussion about these prayers. They sit there on the page, staring at us every day for five straight months, but we don't seem to talk much about them. The only perspective I recall hearing is that they must be metaphorical because God can't hear our prayers. Having done the Workbook several times, I too didn't know what to do with these prayers. Yet, to be honest, I hadn't really confronted the question. I would just dutifully open my book and read the prayer attached to that day's lesson. The prayers generally struck me as being a kind of Course word salad: a series of typical Course words--Christ, peace, joy, Heaven, etc.--tossed together as one would toss a salad. Then one day a few years ago, all that changed for me. I was on a short retreat and, for some reason, the first thing I did was sit down and try to discover what the Course wants us to do with its prayers. Having spent many years studying the Workbook's practice instructions, I had learned that virtually all our questions about practice are answered right in the Workbook, if we pay careful attention. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that this ought to be true for those prayers; we should expect there to be instructions for what to do with them. The logical place for those instructions was the introduction to Part II, since that is where we find the practice instructions for the entirety of Part II, where the prayers are found. Within minutes I found two sentences that ended my search and changed my relationship with the Course and with God. Here they are: We say some simple words of welcome, and expect our Father to reveal Himself, as He has promised. (WpII.In.3:3) We say the words of invitation that His Voice suggests, and then we wait for Him to come to us. (WpII.In.4:6) >From these sentences and the paragraphs around them I obtained the following picture: The Course has given us words (from the Holy Spirit) which we are to say to God as words of invitation and welcome. Once we invite Him with these words, we sit in a state of silent expectancy, waiting for Him to come and reveal Himself to us in direct wordless experience. What are these "words"? In this context, they are definitely the thought for the day, the lesson title. But are they confined to that? Don't these "simple words of welcome" also sound like they could be the prayers? After all, like these words, the prayers are words given us by the Course which are written as if we are saying them to God. So I turned the page and looked at the first prayers in Part II. They resoundingly confirmed what I was thinking. This is how the first prayer begins: . (W-pII.221.1:1-2) Just as the introduction described, in this prayer we state our intention to have an encounter with God in the silence of our minds. The comments that follow this prayer continue along the same lines: "Now [that we have said this prayer] do we wait in quiet....We wait with one intent...[for God] to reveal Himself unto His Son" (W-pII.221.2:1, 6). Here is exactly what the introduction said: Once we say these words of welcome, we wait in silence for God to reveal Himself to us. The next prayer was very similar. In it we state our intention to silently enter into an experience of God's Presence: . (W-pII.222.2:1) This was a very intellectual process of detective work, but its results were extremely practical: At last I felt I knew what to do with those prayers! I am to say them directly to God as preparation for a direct wordless encounter with Him. So I immediately tried this out. I spent the next hour or so going through the first twenty prayers in Part II, praying them as I had just discovered I should. I will never forget that time. It was a pivotal moment in my journey with the Course. Until that moment, I had no idea how much richness was in those prayers. What seemed like word salad when read as information became a wealth of emotional experience when repeated as prayer, when spoken to God. I was astonished by the sense of loving intimacy with God that shone through these prayers. I had never realized that was how the Course wanted me to think about God. God came across not as a remote metaphysical abstraction, an impersonal essence that is completely unaware of us. Instead, He came across as near and dear, as the most attentive, loving Father one could possibly imagine, always there, always listening, always answering, wanting only to lavish all of His Love upon us. "He covers me with kindness and with care" (W-pII.222.1:4), one of the lessons said. And that is exactly how I felt, blanketed in His kindness and care. Since that day, these prayers have become a staple in my daily life. There are few things I enjoy doing more than sitting down and spending time with them. They have literally transformed my relationship with God. My sense of God before was somewhat remote and abstract. Yet increasingly these prayers have implanted in me sense of God, so that my feeling for Him has become a deep well of sustenance and comfort that I draw from daily. As time went on, I fell into the habit of using these prayers before my meditation time, because I found them to be the ideal way to prepare my mind for seeking God in meditation. They gathered the scattered and chaotic threads of my thought into a single desire to be with God. After I had been using them in this way for some time, I remembered something: . This is what the instructions in the Workbook say is their purpose. We are to use the words of these prayers to prepare our minds for a direct, wordless encounter with God. I can attest to the fact that they serve their intended purpose very well indeed. I therefore encourage every student of the Course to avail him- or herself of the great benefit of these prayers. Try them out and see if you are not drawn to return to them. Here are some tips for getting the most out of them: 1. . Dwell on each line and let it sink in before going on to the next. 2. . When the prayer says "Father," have a sense of speaking directly to God, and of Him in some sense hearing you. 3. . When the prayer says "I" or "me," have a sense of you being the one saying the prayer. 4. , as much as you can. Try to make it the prayer of your own heart. 5. . For instance, when the prayer we will use below says "a something I have called by many names," list some of the names you have given what you seek. 6. on the prayer as it evokes additional thoughts and feelings in you. To try out this method of using these prayers, I would like to utilize the following prayer from Lesson 231, "Father, I will but to remember You." My suggestion is for you to repeat each line slowly, with concentration and sincerity. Try to see the fullness of meaning contained in each line. Try also to go through the prayer twice or more. 1. What can I seek for, Father, but Your Love? 2. Perhaps I think I seek for something else; a something I have called by many names. 3. Yet is Your Love the only thing I seek, or ever sought. 4. For there is nothing else that I could ever really want to find. 5. Let me remember You. 6. What else could I desire but the truth about myself? What was your experience in repeating these lines? Was it an experience you want more of? I sincerely hope that the prayers in the Workbook will become the blessing in your life that they continue to be in mine. From sue at circleofa.org Sun Nov 9 07:37:05 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 07:37:05 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 314 - November 10 Message-ID: LESSON 314 - NOVEMBER 10 "I seek a future different from the past." 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: Think of a past mistake, especially a major one such as long-term lovelessness in a relationship. Then repeat the following lines to God, trying to mean them as much as you can: I leave this past mistake behind. I leave the future in Your Hands. I trust Your present promises to guide my future in their holy light. Try to feel the freedom from past and future contained in these words. Let your sense of care drop away. COMMENTARY In the ego's perception, the future is only the result of the past; it is little more than the past itself extended beyond the present. To the ego, the past determines the future. In the perception of the Holy Spirit, "The future now is recognized as but extension of the present" (1:2). What we choose to perceive and to believe in the now determines what the future will be like; the future is not determined by the past. "Past mistakes can cast no shadows on it, so that fear has lost its idols and its images, and being formless, it has no effects" (1:3). By letting go of the past and realizing that it cannot touch me now, I bring into being a future different from the past. My present choice for salvation, my present willingness to accept the Atonement for myself, deprives the past of all its fear. The "idols and images" (1:3) of fear are things such as all the guilt of the past and all the false perceptions of the past. They are no longer available to fear when I have released the past into God's Hands and have accepted forgiveness for myself. I am beginning from this present moment with a clean slate. Without the forms of past idols and images, fear can have no effects. Based on the guilt of the past my future was certain death. But with the past released from "sin," and life now my present goal, death has no claim on me (1:4). My physical body will still "die" most likely (barring some rare miracle of being caught up into heaven in a whirlwind, like Elijah in the Bible, II Kings 2), although the body does not truly die because it never lives; but since I am not my body, I will not die, and I will not fear death. "All the needed means are happily provided" (1:4). When my mind is straightened out and my goal is life, everything I need to reach my goal is provided by the Holy Spirit. "When the present has been freed" from all guilt and all fear, that present will simply extend "its security and peace into a quiet future filled with joy" (1:5). The key is in allowing my mind to be freed from guilt and fear right now. I can practice doing this in the holy instant. I can take a moment and allow the peace and security this lesson speaks of to flood my mind. I can bring my guilt and hurt and pain and anger to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to heal my mind. As I do this more and more the peace will extend itself outward into my day. Perhaps the most common testimony of people who have been studying the Course for some time is, "I am much more peaceful than I ever was before." It works. And as that peace grows in the present, as more and more of our present moments are spent in that peace of mind, the future will more and more be filled with joy. Let me, then, "choose to use the present to be free" (2:1). How many of my present moments are spent grieving or sorrowing about the past, lamenting things lost? How many present moments are spent in fear of something future? Let me choose to use the present differently. Let me choose, every time I am aware of the present, to use that moment for peace and for nothing else. To do so is the way out of hell. Leave the future in God's Hands. Leave past mistakes behind (2:2). Let me lay my life in God's Hands, "sure that You will keep Your present promises, and guide the future in their holy light" (2:2). WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 4: W-pII.10.2:3-6 When all of creation, every mind, has at last accepted the new perception of the world as without sin and without purpose, the world will end. "Without a cause" (2:3), I think, refers to the world's being seen without sin, for sin and its companion, guilt, in the Course's view, caused the world. "Without a function" (2:3) then would mean the same thing as "purposeless" (2:2). To the ego, the purpose of the world is destruction, or punishment. Once the cause and the function of the world have been removed from all minds, the world "merely slips away to nothingness" (2:3). As the Manual for Teachers puts it, "The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed" (M-14.4:1). (You may want to read this entire beautiful section, entitled "How Will the World End?"-particularly its moving final paragraph.) In the vision of the Course, the end of the world is not a cataclysm, nor is it some great triumph by heavenly hosts, but a quiet melting away, merely the disappearance of an illusion whose apparent necessity has ended. "There [in nothingness] it was born, and there it ends as well" (2:4). In other words, the world was made up out of nothing, and nothing will be left when it disappears. Only the thoughts of love expressed are real and eternal. Everything else goes, including "the figures in the dream" (2:5), that is, our bodies, which-with sin gone as cause and death gone as their purpose-will simply "fade away" (2:6). As we have read often before, in earlier "What Is" sections and in the Text, the body was made by the ego for its purposes. The Holy Spirit can, and does, co-opt the body for His purposes as long as we are in the dream. He is leading us to realize that "what is false is false, and what is true has never changed" (1:1), and once that purpose has been achieved by us all, the body no longer has any purpose. It simply fades away. One last phrase is added: "because the Son of God is limitless" (2:6). The body fades away because the Son is limitless, and the body is a limit. When our minds have been returned to Christ, fully, we will no longer have any need of limitation. What we are is limitless, and a limited body would be useless to us. This is the "end of all things" as the Course sees it. How, then, should we live now, still within the dream, but knowing this is its ending? We "need merely learn how to approach it [the ending]; to be willing to go in its direction" (M-14.4:5). We cooperate with the Holy Spirit, today and every day, in learning to look upon the world without condemnation, to see it as totally forgiven. We allow Him to teach us that there is no purpose in the world, and to gradually wean us of our attachment to it. We open ourselves more and more to the vision, growing within us, of the limitless Son of God. From sue at circleofa.org Mon Nov 10 06:00:43 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 06:00:43 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 315 - November 11 Message-ID: LESSON 315 - NOVEMBER 11 "All gifts my brothers give belong to 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. COMMENTARY In Lesson 97 we are told that if we practice with the lesson's idea ("I am spirit") and thus bring reality a little closer to our minds, the Holy Spirit will take the minutes we give to Him in those holy instants "and carry them around this aching world" (W-pI.97.5:1). It says, "He will not overlook one open mind that will accept the healing gifts they [the minutes you give] bring, and He will lay them [the gifts] everywhere He knows they will be welcome" (W-pI.97.5:2). He talks about how "each gift to Him [will] be multiplied a thousandfold and tens of thousands more" (W-pI.97.6:1). Now, one thousand times ten thousand is ten million. So He will multiply our gifts at least ten million times, except it says "tens of thousands," plural tens, so that means as much as ninety million times. Perhaps the numbers are simply symbolic of "an extremely large number," but I'm sure Jesus means, quite literally, that an unimaginably large number of minds will be affected by our choice. Every mind that is open to receive will receive our gift; millions of minds. Now in this lesson we see the opposite side of the coin. For all those millions who are open, and who, like us, give the gift of their mind to God for a moment, we, in turn, receive their gifts. Thus, every moment, thousands of my brothers and sisters find the way to God for a moment and give a gift, which I receive because all minds are joined, as the first paragraph tells us. A smile between brothers or a word of gratitude or mercy, anywhere in the world, offers a gift to my mind. I can receive the certainty of anyone who finds the way to God. All minds are joined. Every moment, a thousand gifts arrive at the portal of my mind, given by other minds. If I am open, I can receive every one of them! In a study group where this concept was discussed, a student remarked, "That sounds like a full-time job!" Indeed. Sounds like my kind of job, too. Ever wonder where some of those blessed thoughts come from? Ever wonder why suddenly, in the midst of a rather blah day, something comes into your mind and gladdens your heart? We usually think, if we think of it at all, that it must be the Holy Spirit. But it could equally well have been your sister whose mind found the way to God at just that moment and smiled at someone, and in so doing sent her gift to you. The Holy Spirit was just the postman. Someone you never knew, halfway around the world, just gave you a blessing! This cosmic exchange of gifts within the greatest "Internet" in the universe is going on all the time. Everyone is wired in; you just have to read your mail. So let us lift our hearts in gratitude and thanks to every Son of God. Let us this morning and this evening spend some time in thanks to our brothers, who are one with us, for all their multitude of gifts, most of which have gone unacknowledged for most of our lives. Let me say to all of you who read this: "Thank you for remembering, my sister or my brother!" Thank you for loving instead of fearing. Thank you for being aware, for being alive. Thank you for smiling, for letting joy through. Thank you for showing mercy. Thank you for forgiving. Thank you for joining with another. Let my meditation today be on all the ways I am constantly being blessed by my brothers and sisters, and on the reality that I gain from each and every one. I thank You, Father, for the many gifts that come to me today and every day from every Son of God. (2:1) WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 5: W-pII.10.3:1 You who believed that God's Last Judgment would condemn the world to hell along with you, accept this holy truth: God's Judgment is the gift of the Correction He bestowed on all your errors, freeing you from them, and all effects they ever seemed to have. Most of us, at least in Western society, have grown up believing in some kind of hell. We say, "God will get you for that." We curse one another with the words, "Go to hell!" Intellectually we may have rejected the idea of a literal hell, with flames and demons with pitchforks, but the notion is woven into our thoughts nevertheless. There is a sort of visceral fear of what may lie after death that gnaws at our guts, denied, repressed, but still...there. If we do believe in God, as many do, the worry about how He will judge us, how He will evaluate our lives in the end, eats at us constantly. To us, then, the Course appeals: "Accept this holy truth!" Judgment is not condemnation but a gift, a gift of Correction. Not a punishment, but a cure. Not "no exit," but a way out. The Last Judgment does not enumerate our every fault and then lock us into their consequences for all eternity. No, it corrects our errors and frees us from them, and not only from the errors themselves but from "all effects they ever seemed to have." Think about it. How would it feel to know beyond any shadow of doubt that you were free from all your errors, and from all their effects? That would be total jubilation! The "Hallelujah Chorus" in spades. But that, the Course is telling us, is the , and it is this truth that "has never changed" (1:1). We are free from our errors and their effects, we always have been, and we always will be. That is what we will all, collectively, come to accept in that moment of Last Judgment. And that is what we are now learning to accept for ourselves, and to teach to all our brothers and sisters. We release each other from our sins, that those we release may in turn release us. From sue at circleofa.org Tue Nov 11 05:43:20 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:43:20 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 316 - November 12 Message-ID: LESSON 316 - NOVEMBER 12 "All gifts I give my brothers are my own." 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: You may want to try the following visualization. It will probably work better if someone reads it to you, or if you read it onto a tape and play the tape back to guide you through it. Begin by repeating this line from the Urtext: "Help me to perform whatever miracles you want of me today." Then ask the Holy Spirit to whom he wants you to give a miracle today. For this exercise, we'll focus on just one person. Once you have a person in mind, then ask the Holy Spirit what form this miracle should take. It might be sitting down and forgiving this person. It might be a kind word or some outer gesture. Ask Him, "What form should this miracle take?" Now visualize actually giving this miracle to this person, at whatever time of day you expect this to occur. See the scene unfold in your mind. Now, in your mind's eye, look off in the distance a bit. There you see a temple-like structure. Its two magnificent doors are open wide, and on either side of the massive doorway an angel is standing. You see people from all directions walking towards this building, carrying treasures into it. These treasures are the gifts that these people have been given by others. One person has been given the precious gift of forgiveness and is carrying that into the building. Another has been healed by a miracle worker, and is carrying in this gift of healing. Another has received unconditional love from a friend and is carrying that in. As you look, you begin to see specific people that you have given to, carrying into the building the treasures you have given them. See one person after another that you have given gifts to, walking inside to deposit their gifts. You see recent people you've given to, and those you gave to a long time ago. You see people you gave some particular thing to, and people you gave to continually over years. Note each person specifically. Seeing these people, you realize that this is your treasure house. Even though you experience yourself as being outside the building, everything on the inside belongs to you. It's all yours. And after seeing so many people carrying inside the gifts you have given them, you begin to get a sense of just how many treasures you have stored up. The person you are giving to today is beside you. This person looks at you and says, "Come with me." See this person take you by the hand and walk you towards your treasure house. He or she is your escort into the building. You see the treasure house looming closer. You see the doors open wide in welcome. As you approach, the angels greet you and say, "Welcome. Your house has been waiting for you. Enter in where you are truly welcome and at home, among the gifts that God has given you." Walk in through the doors and see the dazzling splendor that awaits you. Feel the holiness that pervades the place. Feel the peace and the sense of home. As you look at the treasures, feel a sense of ownership. Feel the abundance that comes from all these treasures being yours. This is your new home, the home in which your mind will live from now on. Sit down in this home and spend some time just soaking in the holiness, peace, and abundance. COMMENTARY This lesson is obviously a companion to yesterday's, "All gifts my brothers give belong to me." We receive all the gifts our brothers give, and we also receive all the gifts we give. Of course the reverse is true as well: Everything any brother or sister gives, they also receive, and they receive all the gifts we give as well. Everyone receives everything. It must be so because we are all one. "Each one allows a past mistake to go, and leave no shadow on the holy mind my Father loves" (1:2). The gifts we are speaking of are gifts of forgiveness in which we let a past mistake go, instead of holding on in unforgiving grievance about it. When I give such a gift, I am blessed because the shadows of that past mistake are removed from my mind. The shadows no longer obscure the truth about my brother; my forgiveness shows me Christ in him. Therefore, we not only receive a gift every time one is given by someone else-a smile, a word of mercy, an act of love-but also, we receive a gift each time anyone else receives a gift! "His grace is given me in every gift a brother has received throughout all time, and past all time as well" (1:3). When Jesus looked at the woman caught in adultery and said, "Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more," and she received his gift of forgiveness, I received a gift as well as she. Our treasure house is full, says the lesson (1:4). "Angels watch its open doors that not one gift is lost, and only more are added" (1:4). The fact that we may not be aware of these gifts makes no difference; they can't be lost. Every loving thought is treasured up and kept for us; not one is lost. The treasure of love just keeps growing, just as God keeps eternally expanding and extending. You know, if we could really get a grasp on these thoughts our lives would be transformed. We are being showered, deluged, with gifts of love in every moment. We have the rich inheritance of all the love for all of time, "and past all time as well" (1:3), to draw upon. Our perspective is so horribly constrained by our self-inflicted isolation! We have no idea how rich we are. But I can come now, today, this moment, into my treasure house. I can "come to where my treasures are, and enter in where I am truly welcome and at home, among the gifts that God has given me" (1:5). I can remember all the gifts I have and guarantee them to myself by giving them away, as Lesson 159 instructs us: There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away. (W-159.2:4-5) The treasure house is in my mind; the gifts are all there. I can recognize I have them by giving them away. It's like keeping the circulation going. And since all the gifts I give my brothers are my own, giving them is how I know I have them, and how I keep them. That's another way to understand the lesson theme: . So let me today give love to my brothers, give joy to my brothers. Let me offer peace of mind to everyone. As I do, the gifts will be mine. If we feel uncertain how to go about claiming and recognizing all these treasures, this deluge of blessing, we can join in the prayer that closes this lesson, phrased to recognize the fact that we do not, as yet, recognize all these gifts, and asking for instruction in doing so: Father, I would accept Your gifts today. I do not recognize them. Yet I trust that You Who gave them will provide the means by which I can behold them, see their worth, and cherish only them as what I want. (2:1-3) WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 6: W-pII.10.3:2 To fear God's saving grace is but to fear complete release from suffering, return to peace, security and happiness, and union with your own Identity. If the Last Judgment contains no condemnation, if we are, all of us, free from our errors and every effect they ever seemed to have, how foolish to fear it! Street evangelists with their placards proclaiming, "Prepare to meet thy God!" are offering a message of fear: "Look out! Soon you will stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and if you are not ready, you will be damned." Jesus, in the Course, is telling us that there is no reason to fear. Fearing God's judgment is fearing the very thing we all want: complete release from suffering. The judgment of God does not damn, it redeems. We suffer because of our guilt; forgiveness releases us. We are in distress because of our fear; forgiveness returns us to peace, security, and happiness. We are estranged from our own Identity by our belief in sin, but forgiveness brings back union with our Self. Our fear of God is deeply ingrained. When God approaches we react like a trapped wild animal, feral, vicious and terrified. Oh, my soul! He comes only with healing! He comes only to bring us everything we have ever truly wanted, and more. "Fear not!" the angels announced at Jesus' birth, "For behold! I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people" (Lk 2:10). That is what we are being asked to believe, that underneath all the appearance of terror, death and vengeance we have overlaid on it, God's creation consists of pure joy, pure love, pure peace, pure safety. God waits for us, not to punish, but to fold us forever in His everlasting Arms. From sue at circleofa.org Wed Nov 12 05:54:04 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:54:04 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 317 - November 13 Message-ID: LESSON 317 - NOVEMBER 13 "I follow in the way appointed 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. COMMENTARY "I have a special place to fill; a role for me alone" (1:1). There is a place for me in the plan of Atonement. There is something that is meant specially for me to do, and until I find and fulfill my part, "salvation waits" (1:2). My particular twist on the insanity of separation needs to be healed before healing is complete. I do believe we each have a particular part to play in the drama of salvation. We each have a "special function" to fulfill, and part of following the Holy Spirit is learning to discover what that role is. It may not be anything grand or large in the public eye. It may be the healing of one particular relationship. It might be, as it was with Helen Schucman, bringing some message from God into this world. It might be raising children and bringing them up from the perspective of a healed mind. It might be tending bar and listening to the patrons with forgiveness. But we do have a function, and we need to find and fill it. Whatever it is, it will be some aspect of healing, some aspect of alleviating guilt, some way of recognizing the Christ in those around us. It will be a function which, in some way, gives and brings grace into the world, for all functions within the plan of God fall into this general category. Healing is our function here. When I find my function I will find my happiness, for happiness is my function. This is what I choose today. Today, Father, I pray: "I'll go where You would have me go; I'll do what You would have me do. I'll be forever in love with You."** All my sorrows end in Your embrace. (2:5) WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 7: W-pII.10.4:1 God's Final Judgment is as merciful as every step in His appointed plan to bless His Son, and call him to return to the eternal peace He shares with him. The plan of God and its ending are characterized by one thing: mercy. The final outcome will be mercy, and every step along the way to our learning that will be merciful. God has a plan, and that plan is to call us "to return to the eternal peace He shares" with us. No part of that plan is anything but merciful. Sometimes, even though we may believe that the ending will be merciful, we think that harshness, pain, and suffering are necessary along the way. I don't think so. I believe that the merciful nature of the outcome permeates the entire pathway. Every bit of it is aimed at release from suffering. "There is no need to learn through pain" (T-21.I.3:1). When we have already, in our blindness, chosen pain, it can be used to teach us; but there is no need for it to be that way. God's only desire is to release us from our suffering. And in the end, He will. In the end, we will know the fullness of His mercy, the consistency of His Love, and the shining radiance of His joy. At the heart of the universe, God is an infinite expanse of welcome. * * * ALL MY SORROWS END IN YOUR EMBRACE In a couple of articles for A Better Way, I have shared my love for the prayers in Part II of the Workbook. They are a wonderful way to prepare one's mind to enter into quiet communion with God, which is exactly what the Workbook says they are for (I make this claim based on a careful examination of the introduction to Part II, especially 3:3 and 4:6). To encourage their actual use for this purpose, I would like to comment on the prayer for Lesson 317, "I follow in the way appointed me": Father, Your way is what I choose today. Where it would lead me do I choose to go; what it would have me do I choose to do. Your way is certain, and the end secure. The memory of You awaits me there. And all my sorrows end in Your embrace, which You have promised to Your Son, who thought mistakenly that he had wandered My comments take the form of suggestions for how one might pray this prayer, and so I suggest that you may want to do just that. One way to do this is to read a line from the prayer and my commentary on it, and then pause and spend a minute or two focusing on that line, actually praying it, before going on to reading the next part. This prayer opens (as do more than half of the prayers in Part II of the Workbook) by having you address God as "Father." Rather than speaking into empty space, or beseeching some remote and fearful deity, you begin this prayer by speaking directly to your Father. The word "Father" here is meant to call upon our image of the ideal father, the perfect dad. What is the perfect dad like? He is near, available, accessible. He is a source of safety and protection, a place of refuge. He provides for all your needs, making sure you are not lacking. All he wants is your happiness. He regards you as a part of himself, a continuation of his line, an extension of his very identity. And so he gives you all of his love and plans to pass on to you all that he has, including his name, his station in life, and his fortune. In addressing God as "Father," try to hold this image of fatherhood in mind. And try to make it a personal address, so that you are really speaking directly to your Father. Expect Him to hear you. This first sentence makes a powerful declaration. You are telling God that His way is what you are choosing today. What is His way? You might try filling in things you associate with God's way. You might say, "Your way of forgiveness (or peace, or love, or salvation) is what I choose today." You might even have specific things that choosing God's way today will entail. It may come to your mind that choosing His way means forgiving your coworker or giving up some fear you are hanging onto. But to make this prayer meaningful, you have to mean it. As much as you can, endeavor to genuinely view today as a day in which you choose God's way. This may mean reflecting on some questions: How much have you chosen His way as yours? How much are you still holding out, so that His way is only one option among many for you? How much do you still see your happiness as coming from your ability to control external events and situations and people? Based on your experience thus far, which way seems to promise you more: yours or His? To the extent that you can honestly answer "His," then put that feeling into the saying of this line. See this day as one you will look back on and say to yourself, "That was the day when I chose God's way." To make this more real, when you come to the word "today," you might even want to fill in the day of the week and the date. When you enlist in God's way you are agreeing to all that goes with it, which includes going wherever He sends you. You are placing no limits on this agreement. It is a blanket commitment, covering all possibilities. This not because you have some sense of blind allegiance or slavish duty, but because you trust that God knows better than you what will make you happy. So as you speak this line try to evoke a feeling of trust, knowing that your Father would not lead you to your doom. You might even add, "because I trust You." You might also want to think of some of the places where His way might lead you. "Where" in this line specifically refers to places in this world you would go as part of fulfilling your special function; this lesson begins by saying, "I have a special place to fill; a role for me alone." Yet it can also refer to more abstract "places" like peace or salvation or Heaven. Try taking whatever places come to mind in terms of where His way might lead you and then add them onto the end of the above line: "to my in-laws' house, to move to Maine, to peace, to Heaven." This line is, of course, very much like the previous one. Again, you may want to remind yourself that you can trust your Father's way to lead you to peace, not death. You also might want to listen for things He specifically wants you to do today. Perhaps you can sense that He wants you to call someone, do a favor for someone, or take care of something you have been putting off. You have now said three times in different ways that you are choosing His way. This is no trivial statement. Remember the power your choosing has. What the Course says about your learning power also applies to your power of choice: "There is no greater power in the world. The world was made by it, and even now depends on nothing else" (T-31.I.3:2-3). If you say, "Your way is what I choose today" and it, your whole life could change. Once again the word "way" is used. In addition to being the focus of every line of the prayer so far, it also crops up in the lesson's title ("I follow in the way appointed me") and in the paragraph before the prayer ("when I willingly and gladly go the way my Father's plan appointed me to go"). These two references tell us something about this way. This is a way we can "follow in" and a way we can "go." Clearly, this way is a sort of roadway, pathway, or highway. It is a path that one travels on. What does it mean, then, to say that this "way is certain"? For this, we can turn to clues in nearby lessons. Lesson 321 tells us that God's way is the certain way to finding our . Lesson 331 tells us that it is the certain way to our . So, "Your way is certain" means "Your way will work. It will take me where it promises. It will lead me to freedom, to release, to my home." Try to say this with real conviction. To gather this conviction, you may want to reflect on where way has led you. Has it worked? A recurrent theme in the Course is that our roads, though they promise to lead us to freedom, end up leading us nowhere. Only God's road brings us to the destination we truly desire. This leads right into the second part of the above line, for it too refers to the destination of this way or path. We now affirm that the end, the goal, the destination of God's way is secure. This means that we will get there for sure. We will reach the destination, for God has guaranteed it. So when you say this line, "Your way is certain, and the end secure," try to envision your own journey home. You have walked down many dead-end roads in the past, roads which started with high hopes, yet got increasingly bumpy and futile the further you traveled. Yet when you truly set your feet on God's way, you will be walking on a smooth road straight to your destination. It may seem thorny and twisted at first, but this is only because you will frequently leave His road in search of your old pathways. Yet the further you travel on God's way, the more committed to it you will be, and so the easier it will become, until the day comes when you reach its very end. And that day come for you. Now the prayer directly speaks of the end of the road. We have been journeying since time immemorial, through countless experiences and untold difficulties. What has it all been for? What wondrous destination awaits us at the end of the journey? "The memory of You"-the memory of God. To appreciate what this memory is, we must first discuss the preseparation state. Before the separation, we lived in a state of knowledge. We knew God face to face. This knowing was so immediate, so total, that there was no separation between our knowing of God and God Himself. The two were one and the same. God was directly present in our minds, and this Presence was our knowing of Him. He was our Love, and knowing Him was our whole existence and unending joy. This is the knowledge we forgot in the separation, leaving us in a state of chronic lack and loneliness. This is what we have been blindly searching for through all our wandering. This is what we head straight toward as we follow in God's way. This is the sweet reward that awaits us at the end of the road. Our Love Himself awaits us with Open Arms. There, we will remember Him, the One Who was everything to us, the One we loved with our whole being, the One we have searched for through all the ages. Choosing God's way means that you see this one event as what your journey is for. You see your entire passage through time as an arrow shot at this one event. You see every day, every hour, every situation, every relationship, every event, every lifetime as having a single purpose-to bring you to the event which infinitely dwarfs the entire journey and everything in it: the memory of your Love. What a beautiful line! Our Love has been waiting for us with Open Arms, and now that we reach the end of the road, now that we remember Him, He wraps us in His embrace. In the total love of this embrace, nothing else matters. All the pain of the journey vanishes. All the sorrows of the human condition, the sorrows we have carried since the world began, are gone. The sorrows were the journey, and both they the journey end together, here in His embrace. Why? Because at the root of each sorrow was the feeling of being separated from Him. Now that we are with Him, as the Course says, "where is sorrow now?" (M-15.1:12). This poignant line reminds me of two other lines from the Course that express the exact same sentiment: The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense of pain and loss with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love. (T-14.IX.4:3) I need but turn to Him, and every sorrow melts away, as I accept His boundless Love for me. (W-pI.207.1:3) I suggest that you really spend some time with the above line. To help make it more meaningful to you, you may think of a particular person's embrace that was so loving it made your sorrows melt away. Then imagine that embrace being multiplied an infinite number of times. And you also might want to detail some of your sorrows. List all of the sorrows you can think of, all those sorrows that will one day end in His embrace. Can you ascertain exactly what God has promised to His Son, according to this line? It is His embrace. God's promise to you is that, after all your journeying, you will end up in His embrace forever. How sure do you think a promise from God is? You might even imagine that you have an actual promissory note from Him, for is this not what A Course in Miracles is? In fact, you might try this: Take the Course in your hands and while looking at it, think of its origins, how it says it comes from God's Own Voice through Jesus to you. Then dwell on this line: "This is the promissory note You sent to me, Your Son, promising that I will end up in Your embrace forever." Up until now the prayer has said that God's embrace waits for us at the end of the journey and that God has promised us this embrace. Now the conclusion of the prayer puts a whole new spin on things. Do you see what that spin is? It is that we never left His embrace. We are still there. That is why the end is so secure. That is why He can promise that we will end up in His Arms. We are there right now and always have been. Imagine the following scenario: You are within the sure protection of God's loving Arms. In these Arms, you fall asleep and start to dream. And in this dream you "wake up" and leave His embrace. You wander off, and as you wander, a growing sense of lack and loneliness opens up within you. Yet this just provokes more wandering, for now you must find the special thing out there that will fill this gnawing hole in you. By the time you suspect that only God can fill this hole, it is too late; He is out of sight and you are not sure that you can ever get back. And this brings us more or less to where you are right now in the dream of your life, as you read this sentence of this essay. For this story is no metaphor. It is the literal story of your existence. But remember: You never woke up. You are still dreaming. And so you are still lying asleep in the sure protection of His loving Arms. You are still in the safety of His fatherly embrace, merely dreaming that you are on a journey that is soaked with the sorrow of being separate from Him. Let this idea into your mind as deeply as you can while praying this line. You might want to use this version: "I, Your Son, thought that I had wandered from the sure protection of Your Loving Arms. But I am still there. I am still there. I am still there." __ **If you have not heard the wonderful tape album (or CD) by Donna Marie Carey, Real Love, which contains a song with the words I have just quoted, all songs based on ACIM, I highly recommend it. Available from Interfaith Fellowship, 1-800-275-4809. From suelegal at gmail.com Thu Nov 13 05:00:41 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:00:41 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] LESSON 318 - NOVEMBER 14 Message-ID: LESSON 318 - NOVEMBER 14 "In me salvation's means and end are one." 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: In repeating today's idea, I have found it helpful to reword it slightly: "I am the means of salvation and I am the end." COMMENTARY In other words, putting it very simply, the goal of salvation is what I already am, and the vehicle for bringing about salvation is also what I am. I am what salvation is, and I am the way to get there. Salvation is the recognition of oneness; how, then, could there be any single part that stands alone, or that is more or less important than the rest? (1:2-3). The means of salvation is not in some other part of creation, upon which I am dependent. The wholeness is what it is all about; therefore the means of getting there and the "there" we are getting to must be all the same thing, and therefore must be within me. "I am the means by which God's Son is saved, because salvation's purpose is to find the sinlessness that God has placed in me" (1:4). The sinlessness is already there, in me, placed there by God. So since the purpose of salvation is finding that sinlessness, I must be the means by which salvation happens. I carry the Answer within myself. I absolutely love these next few sentences. To me, if I can allow my disbelief to be suspended just for a moment, just long enough to feel the import of these words, I will "get" what they are saying: I was created as the thing I seek. I am the goal the world is searching for. I am God's Son, His one eternal Love. I am salvation's means and end as well. (1:5-8) I am the thing I seek because I have been It since I was created. I am seeking only for my Self, and where can my Self be but in me? This is a search that is guaranteed to succeed because I already am what I am seeking for. The only reason there appears to be a journey of seeking is because I have forgotten what I already am. There is really nowhere to go. Try repeating to yourself, several times, "I am the goal the world is searching for." Just try it and see how it feels. Notice the thoughts that come up in denial of what you are saying, and take a good look at them. Notice what it is you are believing about yourself that keeps you from saying these words and meaning them with all your heart, and without reservation. We think we have a disease of sin that we are seeking to cure. A disease of guilt and of separation. But the seeking is part of the disease! In fact, there is no disease, and only the seeking makes it seem as if there is. If we can, for a moment, stop presupposing that we are separate, we will simply realize that we are not. Truth will dawn upon us of itself. Relax; you're okay. We have no need but to accept the Atonement, to accept our oneness with God, to realize that enlightenment is only a recognition, and not a change at all. We don't need to change; we need to accept what we have always been. Let me today, my Father, take the role You offer me in Your request that I accept Atonement for myself. For thus does what is thereby reconciled in me become as surely reconciled to You. (2:1-2) WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 8: W-pII.10.4:2-6 In the final evaluation, the Last Judgment is really just love. It is God, acknowledging His Son as His Son (4:3). God's Love for us, in the last analysis, is the thing that will "heal all sorrow, wipe away all tears, and gently waken" us from our dream of pain (4:3). We may think-and indeed, we think-that something other than God's Love will be able to do that for us. We must think so, or else why would we spend so much time looking for it? Yet love stands, waiting for us to receive it. We keep looking elsewhere because, in our insanity, we are afraid of the love being offered to us. Our egos have taught us to be afraid of God, and afraid of His Love. We are afraid it will somehow swallow us up and make us disappear. But would love do that, and still be love? Twice (4:2; 4:4) we are told not to be afraid of love. That is one way of looking at the whole of what we are learning: to not be afraid of love. Instead, we are asked to "give it welcome" (4:5). And it is your acceptance of love, and mine, that will save the world and set it free. We are so afraid that, by really opening to love, we will be hurt. Taking the path of love so often seems to us to be taking the path of weakness. There is so much emphasis on watching out for Number One, on setting our boundaries, on keeping our distance, on avoiding being victimized. Those things have their place, to be sure, and yet sometimes I think they are excuses for separation, excuses for remaining isolated, excuses for avoiding love. Giving love seems difficult, and receiving it even more difficult. Yet in the end, opening to both giving and receiving love, which are the same in reality, is all that is needed. We are love, and only in opening to love fully will we discover that truth of our own Being. From sue at circleofa.org Fri Nov 14 05:57:26 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:57:26 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 319 - November 15 Message-ID: LESSON 319 - NOVEMBER 15 "I came for the salvation of the world." 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. COMMENTARY The Course is quite clear that our purpose here, every one of us, is the salvation of the world. This is quite different from the purpose for which the ego came to the world, which was to find a place where God could not enter; to hide from God, so to speak, and eventually, to die. But the Holy Spirit has a different purpose for everything the ego made for its nefarious purposes. Our purpose here is to bring the world back to light by allowing ourselves to be transformed, becoming God's extensions in the dream to awaken all our brothers along with ourselves. To say, "I am here to save the world," which is just a slight paraphrase of the lesson title, sounds very arrogant to us. But "here is a thought from which all arrogance has been removed" (1:1). It is not arrogant because it is the truth; this is what God created us for, and the function He has assigned to us. To say otherwise is arrogance because it opposes the truth and tries to make for ourselves a role we do not have. When our arrogance is removed, "truth will come immediately" (1:3) to fill up the empty spot left by it. Our self-appointed roles are blocking and interfering with the function given to us by God. The reason thinking that we are here to save the world is not arrogant is that "what one gains is given unto all" (1:6). So accepting our function as saviors means that we accept it for all; our brothers become our saviors just as we become theirs. If the Will of God is total (2:1), then the goal of God must be total; it must be the salvation of the entire world (2:3), not just of me and you and our sister Sue. To bring the world home to oneness is God's Will, and therefore it is "the Will my Self has shared with" Him (2:4). It is my will as well. We are here for the healing of all minds. Our will is that everyone awaken to love, and that is our only purpose in being here. "I came for the salvation of the world." Repeating this to myself, reminding myself of this, is an interesting exercise. Another way of saying it is, "I am here only to be truly helpful" (T-2.V(A).18:2). Let me remind myself of this today. I am not here to make a name for myself, to make money, or to achieve the temporal and temporary things I think of as my goals. I am here to help. I am here to heal. I am here to bless. I am here to save the world. WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 9: W-pII.10.5:1 This is God's Final Judgment: "You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure." I find myself reading this sentence over and over; I feel that I need to hear it often, because I am aware of the part of my mind that does not believe it. I am forever innocent. And yet I still feel guilty at times. I have done things, in my life, that I am certainly not proud of. I have let others down. I've failed to be there for them when they expected me to be there. I've given up on love. I have said things calculated to hurt. I have been deceitful. Like everyone, I carry a certain amount of regret for some things in my past. But God sees me as forever innocent. To me, one of the most poignant lines in the Course is, "You have not lost your innocence" (W-pI.182.12:1). Sometimes I think that the best definition of "miracle" is the shift in perception that allows us to see ourselves as completely innocent. It is extremely difficult for us to see this about ourselves; to me, that is one of the prime values of a holy relationship. The Course tells us we cannot, alone, see ourselves as totally innocent; we need another with whom we can learn this together. I am forever loving. Again, there seems to be evidence in my past to contradict this. The Course would say the evidence is false, that we are not seeing the whole picture, and that what appeared to be unloving was really our own fear and call for love. We are in pain over what we think we have done, but the Final Judgment will free us of that pain forever, and we will be able to see that we have always been loving, and are forever. Nothing we have done has changed this. I am forever loved. Ah! This one is often hard to believe, and for all the same reasons; we do not feel loveable, and we sometimes do not love ourselves. I recall taking part in a guided meditation in which I was directed to extend love, blessing, and compassionate understanding to everyone else in the room, and then to the neighborhood, and finally to the world. And then, imagining myself looking down on the world from above, to see myself, sitting there, and to extend that same love, blessing, and compassionate understanding to myself. I felt a deep melting inside of me, the hardness of self-judgment giving way to compassion, and I wept. How hard we are on ourselves! And how seldom we realize just how tightly we hold ourselves in the vise of judgment. I am as limitless as my Creator. That stretches my credibility and my comprehension. The place to which the Course is taking us, where this is understood and known as true, is far beyond what we even imagine. I am completely changeless. The experience of constant change, of mood swings, of up and down, of high and low, is not who I really am. The Course tells me, "It is not who is so vulnerable and open to attack that just a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world, and hurls it into chaos" (T-24.III.3:1). That may be who I I am, but that is not me, not my Self. I am forever pure. Pure means unmixed, unadulterated. I often experience myself as an unwholesome mixture of good, bad, and indifferent. That is not who I am. I am pure; without mixture. And in God's Final Judgment, I will know all of this. I can know it now. I can hear His Word to me today, in the holy instant. This message is what is communicated to me, wordlessly, each time I enter His Presence. This message is what is given to me, and to you, to share with the world. From sue at circleofa.org Sat Nov 15 11:40:45 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:40:45 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 320 - November 16 Message-ID: LESSON 320 - NOVEMBER 16 "My Father gives all power unto 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: Take a few moments and reflect on the following three questions, one at a time, using the questions beneath each one to guide your reflection. You may even want to write down your reflections. Can His Will do all things in me? If not, doesn't that mean that I am not His creation? If I am not His creation, where did I come from? Did I spring out of nowhere? Can His Will reach through me to all the world? If not, doesn't that mean there are some places He cannot go? Does that make sense? Is there any limit on His Will? Could God's Will possibly be limited? Just one more limited will among many? Reflecting on these questions has prepared you to fully accept today's idea. Now repeat that idea in a special way: Imagine that you are the risen Jesus speaking those words. As Allen points out in his commentary today, today's idea is an allusion to Jesus' statement in the final scene of Matthew. There, Jesus appears to his disciples to send them out to "teach all nations," and declares to them, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" (Mt 28:18). So, as you repeat today's idea, imagine that you are the risen Christ. Feel the exaltation. Feel the power you possess to illumine the entire world. COMMENTARY Those of us who have not studied the Bible, or the Gospels in particular, may not recognize these words as a paraphrase of words spoken by Jesus shortly after the resurrection: "All power is given unto me" (Mt 28:18). I find it significant that the Course puts these words into our mouths. It is an indication of the equal plane on which the Course places us, with Jesus. He was not anything we are not; all of us, along with him, are equal sons of God. He's just a little further along in time (or perhaps out of time), but with the same raw material. We are all the Son of God, together, as God created us. This lesson expands on the idea of the limitlessness of the Son of God that is mentioned in "What Is the Last Judgment?" There, God says, "You are still My holy Son.as limitless as your Creator" (W-pII.10.5:1). Here we are told we (as the Son of God) are "limitless" (1:1); without limit on any of our attributes, whether strength, peace, joy, or whatever. Limitless strength, limitless peace, limitless joy. To be honest, I can't even conceive of what joy without limits is like, and yet this lesson says it is mine. I know joy. I know a great deal of joy. Sometimes, I am so joyful I can scarcely contain it. But joy with no limit at all? What must that be like? I think we all put mental limits on our strength, our peace, and our joy. And our happiness, for that matter. Haven't you ever had the feeling that it is somehow dangerous to get happy? (What a strange juxtaposition of words is that phrase, "too happy!") "Watch out!" we think. "We don't want to become 'bliss ninnies.'" Yet the characteristic of the Son of God is limitless joy. How will we ever come to know that as our own while we place limits on our joy? Our egos act like governors on the inner engine of happiness and joy; we can get just so happy, and then the power seems to cut out. We need to cut loose from the governor. Do I really believe that what I will with my Creator "must be done" (1:3)? Do I believe that my holy will cannot be denied (1:4)? There are those who catch a glimpse of this, and they are those who seem to accomplish so much in their lives, refusing to believe that what they envision cannot come to pass. Instead they realize it come to pass. Of course, we are not speaking here in earthly terms alone. This isn't the message of mastery of will, of the dominance of our environment by sheer force of will. This speaks of our "holy" will, joined with God's Will, which is expressed in the extension of His Being. Here, we have unlimited power. In this, "Your Will can do all things in me, and then extend to all the world as well through me" (2:1). Each of us can be an unlimited force for good and for God in this world if we transcend our beliefs in limitations. The power of love, for instance, is without limit, because there is nothing real to oppose it. Let me examine my thoughts today, my Father, for the beliefs in limits that hold back Your power working in me and through me. Let me recognize them as false, and open myself to Your great power, working through me, to extend into all the world. WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? Part 10: W-pII.10.5:2-3 "Therefore awaken and return to Me. I am Your Father and you are My Son." The Final Judgment of God ends with this, completing the statement we covered yesterday. All of the things God is here quoted as saying of us are things we have difficulty accepting about ourselves. We need to awaken from the dream in which their opposite seems true, and return to the Father Who has never ceased loving us with an everlasting love. "You are My Son." That is what we all long to hear, and all of us, like the prodigal son in the Bible, fear that we have lost the right to hear them. The prodigal was so filled with guilt that he went back to his father hoping, at best, to be taken in and treated as the hired help. Instead, he was welcomed with a banquet. His father met him on the road. Do we fear to approach God? Do we hesitate to turn to Him? Do we feel ashamed of how we have lived, and of what we have done with the gifts He has given us? He is not angry. He is not ashamed of us. He only knows that we are His children, His beloved. And He is forever calling to us to return to Him, out of the nightmare in which we have lost ourselves, waiting to welcome us once again into His loving arms. From sue at circleofa.org Sun Nov 16 07:43:32 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 07:43:32 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 321 - November 17 Message-ID: LESSON 321 - NOVEMBER 17 "Father, my freedom is in You alone." 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. COMMENTARY This lesson, like many in this last part of the Workbook, is written from the perspective of a person who is entering the last stages of the journey home. Here is the song of one whose uncertainty has ended, whose decision for the Kingdom of God is strong and clear. In the words of "Development of Trust" in the Manual for Teachers: The teacher of God is now at the point in his progress at which he sees in it his whole way out. "Give up what you do not want, and keep what you do." How simple is the obvious! And how easy to do! (M-4(A).6:5-8) These are the words of someone who has realized that the peace of God is all that he wants. "I did not understand what made me free, nor what my freedom was" (1:1). Our freedom is in God alone. At the start we believed the opposite. Being free seems to mean being independent. How could freedom be found in acceptance of God's Will? Isn't that enslavement? Only as we realize that our will is God's Will, that our will and His are one and the same, can we realize that to do the Will of God is perfect freedom because it is what we truly want, and what we were created for. "Father, it is my will that I return" (1:9). Not knowing what freedom was we have looked for it where it could not be found: in the exercise of our independent will in this world. Until we hear the Voice for God directing us, and respond, we cannot find freedom. "Now I would guide myself no more" (1:3). Our freedom is found in accepting a new Guide. It is found in resigning as our own teacher (see T-12.V.8:3) and accepting another Teacher. It is found in letting go of our independent goals and accepting the one goal we all share together. Freedom is the liberty to be all that I am. Freedom is the liberty to express my nature without any hindrance. My nature is love; my nature is the holiness of God Himself. My only freedom is in being that which I am because God created me. To attempt to be something else is to enslave myself, to constrict my soul into a shape not its own. Freedom is to teach and offer only love, because that is what I am. Let me, then, today, gladly surrender my opinions about what I am, and accept what God tells me I am. Let me readily relinquish the false and illusory freedom I have thought to pursue, and accept the only freedom that is real, in glad capitulation to my own nature. There is no surrender but to my Self. There is no sacrifice but of illusion. When I have reached the point of being willing to hear only the Voice for God, I will be able to say: The way to You is opening and clear to me at last. (1:7) WHAT IS CREATION? Part 1: W-pII.11.1:1-2 The question itself is one that often comes up for Course students. The Course speaks often of "your creations," and yet never seems to clearly say exactly what those creations are. It tells us that our creation process continues unabated despite our unawareness of our creations, and that they are all saved for us by the Holy Spirit. There is an image of us entering Heaven and being greeted by all our creations, as if they were living beings. We have a fundamental misconception that makes it difficult for us to understand what creations are. For instance, we think God created this world. When we think of creation, therefore, we think of something physical and material. We think our creations must be something in this world. Yet the Course clearly tells us this entire world is an illusion, a miscreation of our mind. How could our creations be here? My creations, then, cannot be something like a book I write, a relationship I form, a family, or a business. My creations are not objects at all. They must be thoughts. Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit. (1:1) "Thoughts" is capitalized, so we know this refers to God's Son. The Christ. Again, we are not used to equating thoughts and living beings. We do not think of thoughts as beings who are alive; we do not think of living beings as "only" thoughts. The Course teaches us that we are only Thoughts in God's Mind. We automatically assume some kind of material existence when we think of a living being. The Course, all through, is trying to teach us that living beings are indeed thoughts, or spirits, and not material at all. "You are not a body" (W-pI.91.5:2), means more than just an admonition not to be limited by our body; it means that we are something wholly other than material. The essential part of us is not material at all. We are spirit. We are thought. Only Love creates, and only like itself. (1:2) >From just this much it should be clear that "creations" are "thoughts of love." If only Love creates, creations must be the effects of Love. If creations are thoughts, then they must be thoughts of love. "Only Love creates, and only like itself." Love always creates more love. Creation, it seems to me, is a circular thing, like a self-sustaining energy field, each part of which is upholding the other part, an endless cycle of creation. The Text teaches us that God, being Love, has no need except to extend Himself. Since we are extensions of His Being, we have a similar unique need: "With love in you, you have no need except to extend it" (T-15.V.11:3). Like your Father, you are an idea. And like Him, you can give yourself completely, wholly without loss and only with gain. (T-15.VI.4:5-6) This is what we learn through the experience of a holy instant. We are Thoughts of Love, with no need except to extend love. In our relationships, we are learning to let go of our imagined "personal" needs, and to dedicate our relationships to "the only need the Sons of God share equally" (T-15.VI.6:10)-the extension of love. Through this reflection of love here on earth, we learn to take our place again in the eternal creation of Heaven. From sue at circleofa.org Mon Nov 17 05:57:41 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:57:41 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 322 - November 18 Message-ID: LESSON 322 - NOVEMBER 18 "I can give up but what was never real." 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: * Spend a moment imagining that you give your life, whole and complete, to God today, holding nothing back. * As you imagine this, ask yourself what you fear you will have to give up, either outer or inner. * With each thing, ask yourself, "Is this truly real?" * Then repeat the idea. COMMENTARY I cannot give up anything real: "As You created me, I can give up nothing You gave me" (2:3). The whole idea of sacrifice is alien to God and to the thought system of the Course. Oh, we are asked to give up things! The Course even asks us to give up the entire world-but "not to sacrifice" (T-30.V.9:5). The whole point of this lesson is quite simple. It is that nothing that I can give up was ever real in the first place. "I sacrifice illusions; nothing more" (1:1). I remember once in a relationship in which I wanted marriage, and the lady in question did not, that I felt as if I were losing and sacrificing something by letting go of my dream. Then I realized that I was only giving up something I never had in the first place. It brought home with vivid force the familiar "wall plaque" saying that runs something like this: "If you love something, let it go. If it returns to you then it was truly yours, and if it does not, it was never yours at all." In that circumstance I was able to give up the illusion, and in so doing, retain the reality of a profoundly loving relationship that was not meant to end in marriage, a relationship that lasted for years and brought me more true satisfaction than any marriage relationship I ever saw among my friends. The illusions we hold on to are hiding the true gifts of God. The idea that we can find our happiness in a romantic relationship, for instance, is one of the ego's substitutes for the reality of our relationship with God and with all living things. A close, loving relationship is a wonderful thing, but it can be an obstacle to our peace if we make an idol of it, expecting it to give us everything, or insisting that we know the form it must take to please us. "And as illusions go I find the gifts illusions tried to hide, awaiting me in shining welcome, and in readiness to give God's ancient messages to me" (1:2). We not only lose nothing in giving up illusions; we actually gain the reality of what the illusions were substituting for. This is a win-win situation! The fear of sacrifice and loss is one of the greatest obstacles to our spiritual progress. And as long as we think we are losing something real, we will drag our feet. If this [relinquishment] is interpreted as giving up the desirable, it will engender enormous conflict. Few teachers of God escape this distress entirely. (M-4.I(A).5:2-3) The idea of sacrifice makes it impossible for us to make sensible judgments about what we do and do not want. That is why it is so important for us to refer all our decisions to the Holy Spirit. And when we do, often it will seem to us as if we are being asked to sacrifice something we value. What we do not realize is that the Holy Spirit is only teaching us that we do not really want what we think we want; He is only clarifying the intentions of our own right mind, which already knows there is no value in what we have been holding on to. "And every dream serves only to conceal the Self Which is God's only Son" (1:4). The gift behind every dream is the memory of Who I really am. Attachment to the ego's "gifts" only serves to diminish my awareness of that Self. I am asking, not for too much, but for far too little. These gifts are not worthy of my Self. What God did not give has no reality (2:4). And so, today, let us give up every thought that anticipates any kind of loss, and recognize that, as God's Sons, we cannot lose. What loss can I anticipate except the loss of fear, and the return of love into my mind? (2:5) WHAT IS CREATION? Part 2: W-pII.11.1:3-5 There was no time when all that [love] created was not there. Nor will there be a time when anything that It created suffers any loss. (1:3-4) It is very difficult, if not impossible, for our minds to comprehend something that is . We can conceive of the idea, but to actually conceptualize it or to feel it is beyond minds that think solely in terms of time. The creations of Love are beyond time; they have always been, and they always will be. There is no before or after with Love and Its creations; it is an eternal . We think of creation as bringing into existence something that never was. But the Course's conception of creation is something that is always complete, and that always exists . All of creation has always been there, and always will be, and yet creation is continuous. Creation is a constant upsurge of beingness, never less, never more, never old, and always fresh. "Forever and forever are God's Thoughts exactly as they were and as they are, unchanged through time and after time is done" (1:5). God's creations are unaffected by time. Time is part of our illusion, a way of making lack seem real by having things be "in the future," and not now; or to make loss real by seeing them as "past." When the lesson speaks of "God's Thoughts" it is speaking of us. "We are creation; we the Sons of God" (4:1). It is saying, in other words, "I am as God created me" (Lessons 94, 110, 162). You and I are those creations, "unchanged through time and after time is done." We are not beings under construction, with our reality still in the future, nor are we beings of corruption, with our purity past and gone. What we are is now, was before time, and will be when time is done. What changes is not me. To see ourselves as God's creations is thus to free ourselves from the tyranny of time. Father, I seek the peace You gave as mine in my creation. What was given then must be here now, for my creation was apart from time, and still remains beyond all change. The peace in which Your Son was born into Your Mind is shining there unchanged. I am as You created me. (W-pII.230.2:1-4) From sue at circleofa.org Tue Nov 18 05:35:34 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:35:34 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 323 - November 19 Message-ID: LESSON 323 - NOVEMBER 19 "I gladly make the 'sacrifice' of fear." 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: Think of some resentment you are holding about someone. Because you find it hard to let go of this resentment, there must be some perceived payoff in it. Perhaps you think it buys you a sense of righteousness or a sense of entitlement, but if you didn't see some sort of payoff in it, you'd easily and quickly let it go. Now realize that the real result of this resentment is fear. That is its real "payoff." As you consider letting your resentment go, repeat these lines: I gladly make the "sacrifice" of fear. I freely let Your Love come streaming in. COMMENTARY Yesterday's lesson ended with the thought "What loss can I anticipate except the loss of fear?" and today's lesson picks up on that idea. So I'm going to lose, but all I will lose is fear? I can live with that! Losing fear is no sacrifice. I will lose my fear with pleasure. It may seem as if I am being asked to give up some pleasant and valuable things. All I am really being asked to give up is "all suffering, all sense of loss and sadness, all anxiety and doubt" (1:1). Attachment to things in this world, things that are fragile and that will not last, always brings with it suffering, loss, and anxiety. I may not realize it but the ego's secret attraction to all such things is not the pleasure they bring me, but the pain. When I recognize that ego motivation, surely I will wisely and sanely let my attachment go. And when I let go, God's Love comes "streaming in to [my] awareness" (1:1). Do I want that today? God's Love streaming in to my awareness? Do I perhaps, this morning, long for such an experience? Then let me gladly sacrifice my fear. Let me simply give it up. Let me recognize that in clinging to anything besides the goal of God I am clinging to fear, and let it go. Yes, my Father: today I am willing to make this "sacrifice." Today I am willing to stop being afraid of Love. I feel as though I need to remind myself that in letting go of these things I am not letting go of anything real. I am not really letting go at all. I am having an illusion of giving something up, but I never had anything real in the first place. All I am doing is "letting go of self-deceptions and of images [I] worshipped falsely" (2:1). This is just "a debt we owe to truth" (2:1). It is just being honest! And as I acquiesce to truth, truth returns to me "in wholeness and in joy" (2:1). The deception has ended and Love returns to my awareness. The fullness of the gift that is eternally mine-love-resurfaces in my memory. It makes a kind of natural sense that when I pay my debt to truth, truth returns to me. When "fear has gone...only love remains" (2:4). "I gladly make the 'sacrifice' of fear." WHAT IS CREATION? Part 3: W-pII.11.2:1-3 "God's Thoughts" refers to us, the Thoughts of God. Creation is "the sum of all God's Thoughts" (1:1), the sum total of all beings of all time. The Course makes an amazing assertion here: "God's Thoughts are given all the power that their own Creator has" (2:1). In the Bible it is recorded that Jesus said, toward the end of his life, "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth" (Mt 28:18). The Course says all power is given to us as the Sonship, not just to Jesus. What this is saying is that what God can do, we can do. We are simply His extensions. Therefore, as He creates, we create also. The reason God shares His power with us is that "He would add to Love by its extension" (2:2). In other words, we have power in order to extend love. One short definition of creation might be the extension of love. But the form of love we share in this world is not Love's reality; it is only a reflection of Heaven's love. Our earthly experience of love is always in the context of separate beings exchanging love; in Heaven is only the awareness of perfect oneness. We can only imagine what love is like in that context. We can have glimpses of it in a holy instant, when the barriers between minds seem to disappear. In that moment, there is an awareness that the other person is you and you are the other person. You are the love in "you" extending to them; you are the love in "the other person" extending towards "you"; and you are the love in yourself loving yourself. It can be a disorienting experience because you literally start to lose track of who you are, in the context of individuals, while simultaneously you become aware of something much larger and more all-inclusive that is what you really are. Those experiences are wonderful, and asking for them is not discouraged in the Course. But the main thing to realize here is that creation, as the Course talks about it, is not an experience on earth; it is an experience in Heaven. It is something that is always going on, and our dream of separation has not interrupted creation at all. Nothing has been lost or stopped by our illusion of separation. That is why the Course can tell us, as in last week's topic (the Last Judgment), that the final judgment on this world is: It is wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness. (W-pII.10.2:2-3) If creation in Heaven means the extension of love, what is its parallel in our earthly experience? The Course says that the parallel to the extension of love is forgiveness. I think of forgiveness as recognizing creation, rather than actually creating. From sue at circleofa.org Wed Nov 19 05:41:45 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:41:45 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 324 - November 20 Message-ID: LESSON 324 - NOVEMBER 20 "I merely follow, for I would not lead." 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. COMMENTARY Learning to follow my inner guidance is a big part of doing the Course. That guidance is the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit. It is part of me and part of God. In the end all is one, but while I think of myself as separate I will experience that Voice as a separate voice, calling me back home: "Your loving Voice will always call me back, and guide my feet aright" (1:5). Father, I need to learn that I am not on my own, and that Something or Someone has planned "the way I am to go, the role to take, and every step in my appointed path" (1:2). As Lesson 321 reminded me: "I have neither made nor understood the way to find my freedom" (W-pII.321.1:4). In fact, You have set the way, and the Holy Spirit is simply the Voice that speaks for You. So, then, let me follow "One Who knows the way" (2:1). What a relief it is to have this One to trust! When walking through a dark jungle with twisted and confusing pathways, what a comfort to know I have a Guide Who knows every detail of the path. Because of Him, "I cannot lose the way" (1:3). Today let me remember that every step of my journey has been set by You. As I look back with You, I know that this is true: nothing I have ever done has ever been anything but for my own good; it has all worked together perfectly to get me exactly where I am now. Even my wanderings were perfectly designed to teach me the falsity of the illusions I was following. What I thought were detours away from You were really lessons bringing me closer to home, and I am grateful for them all. Let me now look to the future with the confidence imparted by that knowledge: I cannot lose the way. Every person, every event, and every circumstance of my life today can be, if seen with vision, a step towards home, a means of finding my way back to You. If I wander today, Father, bring me back. I thank You for the blessed relief of knowing that I do not have to figure it all out. It's been figured out for me. I can let the day unroll in whatever way it does, trusting that it is all perfectly planned by You to bring the memory of You most rapidly to my mind. "I would not lead." I don't want to be known as a leader of others. I don't know the way for myself; how can I know for anyone else? Some of my brothers may follow me; in fact You will bring them to me for that purpose. But all I am doing is following Your Voice; if anyone follows me in this path they are not following me, but You. Let me always remind them of that and never make anyone dependent upon me. "We cannot stray except an instant from His loving Hand" (2:2). To Jesus, six billion years is "a tiny tick of time" (T-26.V.3:5) that is nothing in comparison to eternity, so small that "not one note in Heaven's song was missed" (T-26.V.5:4). To us it seems we stray much longer than an instant. A mathematical example that comes to mind is this: When we divide one number by another, we are, in a sense, comparing them. One hundred divided by ten is ten; that means that compared to ten, one hundred is ten times bigger. The interesting thing about the number zero is that any number, compared to it mathematically, is infinite. If you imagine being able to divide a line into points with zero width, there are an infinite number of such points in the line, whether it is an inch long or a mile long. The "tiny tick of time" is like zero. Eternity is infinite, and compared to it, all of time is literally nothing. There is no comparison. The time we spend in wandering, which seems so long to us, is nothing more than an instant, an infinitesimal piece of nothing, a fragment of a dream. We've all experienced dreams that seemed to last for hours or days, yet happened in a few seconds of "real" time. And that is all this time is: Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic. Yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. The script is written. (W-pI.158.4:1-3) There is a plan behind the appearances, and that is what I can rely upon today. Following the Holy Spirit, I know that the ending is sure. He "guarantees a safe returning home" (2:4). I may feel really messed up and confused, but I just can't really blow it! I've got a perfect Guide, and He is going to stick with me until I reach the end and fall once again into my Father's Arms. I merely follow, for I would not lead. WHAT IS CREATION? Part 4: W-pII.11.2:4 What God has willed to be forever One will still be One when time is over; and will not be changed throughout the course of time, remaining as it was before the thought of time began. God has willed all Creation to be One. Therefore it is One. Time cannot change what God created in any way. Time and change seem inextricably related: change is what signifies the passage of time, and it seems impossible that time should pass without change. It is impossible that God's creation should change. God's creation is outside of the realm of time entirely, and time is simply an illusion, a dream in which change is possible. What we are, together, as the one Son of God, existed before time was thought of, still exists during the apparent course of time, and will exist, still One, when time is over. The Son of God is as unaffected by what seems to occur during time as the sun is unaffected by my passing a few of its rays through a magnifying glass, and deflecting their path, or as the ocean is unaffected by a child who throws a stick into the water. In other words, not at all. That is the power of creation. It is immutable. Therefore, when I recognize my Creator. Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable, forever and forever. (W-pI.190.6:5) From sue at circleofa.org Thu Nov 20 05:55:19 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:55:19 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 325 - November 21 Message-ID: LESSON 325 - NOVEMBER 21 "All things I think I see reflect ideas." 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: I find it helpful to make this idea more specific. Think of a situation you are seeing that is causing you discomfort. Then say: This thing I think I see reflects ideas. I am seeing only the projection of my judgmental thoughts. Father, let me see the reflection of Your Thoughts. COMMENTARY This lesson is probably the best single summary of the Course's theory of perception: What I see reflects a process in my mind, which starts with my idea of what I want. From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires, judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find. These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real and guarded as one's own.(1:1-3) Everything I see is a projection. By this analysis of perception, we see absolutely nothing real with our physical eyes. All of it "reflects a process in my mind" and nothing more than that. What we see are all projected images. As an early lesson in the Workbook says, "I have given everything I see.all the meaning that it has for me" (W-pI.2.Heading). As we choose what we want to see, the world arises in our sight. If we choose judgment we see a world condemned; if we choose forgiveness we see "a gentle world" (1:5-6). This is why the Course focuses entirely on healing the mind and not on changing the world. To change the world is not necessary; it will change with our thoughts. As Ken Wapnick points out, trying to fix things in the world is like trying to fix things in a movie by doing things to the screen. The only way you can change the movie is to change what is in the projector (or to fix the projector). The mind is the projector of the world. When we accept forgiving thoughts in our minds, the world becomes "a kindly home where [we] can rest a while before [we journey] on" (1:6). It becomes a place where we can "help [our] brothers walk ahead with [us], and find the way to Heaven and to God" (1:6). That is what we do in this world when we have had our minds healed: help others do the same. What we want is the ideas of God reflected in the world, rather than our own ideas. Apart from God's ideas, our ideas only "make up dreams" (2:1). Today I do not want dreams; I want reality reflected in my world. It all starts from my idea of what I want. Therefore, Father, I ask help in wanting only the truth, only peace, and only what is loving. I want union, not separation. I want healing, not conflict. I want peace, not war. Help me to recognize it whenever I think I want anything else, or anything besides the truth; to recognize it, bring it into Your light for healing, and let it go. WHAT IS CREATION? Part 5: W-pII.11.3:1-2 Creation is the opposite of all illusions, for creation is the truth. (3:1) The Course's general theory about creation holds certain facts as fundamental: only what is created by God is real or true; all that God creates is real, true, and eternal. Therefore, anything that is not eternal and changeless is not real, and not true. Based on these assumptions, the Course concludes that all things of this world-the earth itself, the entire physical universe, and especially our bodies and our apparent "life" here on earth, cannot be God's creations because they are not eternal and changeless. Everything we can see with our eyes, even the seemingly ageless stars, has an end. What ends is simply not real, in the Course's sense of the word. All of it, every bit of it, falls into the category of "illusions." Furthermore, God's creation is holographic: "every part container of the Whole" (3:2). This is a concept that defies matter-based logic. The nearest analog I know of is the hologram. Once a holographic image has been captured on a photographic plate, light shined on the plate will produce a three-dimensional image of the hologram. If it is a picture of an apple, it will be a 3-D apple, and you can view different angles of the apple by moving the angle of light shining into the image. Now, if that holographic plate is broken into four pieces, you do not end up with four images of of an apple; instead, you have four images of the entire apple. The whole is in every part. That is what God's creation is like. Fragment it as you will, and the Whole of creation is still reflected in every tiny part. All of creation is in you, and in me. The "wholly whole" creation is what the Course refers to as "the holy Son of God" (3:2). God's Will is complete in every aspect (another word for "part"; the Course will often use different words for "part" such as "aspect" or "fragment," but the unspoken assumption is always that every aspect contains the Whole. The word refers to what we think of as "individuals" or "persons"). You are an or of the Son of God, and yet somehow, at the same time, you are also the Whole. One symptom of our mistaken belief in separation is that we have over-identified with our "partness," and have lost touch with our Wholeness. For instance, I tend to think of myself primarily as Allen Watson. You tend to think of yourself as your individuality. In fact, our primary reality is a shared Self, a Wholeness. Much of the learning process through which the Course is leading us is to change that primary sense of identification from "partness" to Wholeness. The learning environment of the holy relationship is designed to break down our sense of isolation, or "partness," and to strengthen our identification with the Whole by demonstrating to us that what we think of as "the other person" in the relationship is, in fact, a part of our shared Self. We experience the same thoughts. What affects one affects the other. What I think affects you, and vice versa. What I give to you is given to myself. When I forgive you, I am released. As this breakdown of "partness" and realization of Wholeness is learned in the holy relationship, it begins to be generalized and transferred to all the other "aspects" of creation, all that we have thought of as "not me." From sue at circleofa.org Fri Nov 21 05:59:08 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:59:08 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 326 - November 22 Message-ID: LESSON 326 - NOVEMBER 22 "I am forever an Effect of God." 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 prayer is another favorite of mine. Do yourself a favor and spend some time with it today. COMMENTARY Any effect is made what it is by its cause. The cause what the effect is. If I strike a billiard ball with my cue stick, the ball has no say in where it goes. The effect of the ball's motion is entirely determined by the stroke of the cue (plus other causative things like the state of the table surface, etc.). So if I am "an Effect of God" I don't really have any say in determining what I am; that is determined by my Cause, God. This is why it must be true that "as You created me I have remained" (1:3). I cannot change what I am; God "forever and forever [is] my Cause" (1:2). Does this seem to preclude free will? Yes, it does, insofar as actually determining what my nature is. And God it does! Otherwise, we would have irretrievably damaged ourselves and made sin and hell into realities. Free will, as the Course says in its introduction, does not grant us the right to "establish the curriculum" (T-In.1:4), that is, to decide we must learn; it only grants us the freedom to choose we learn it. And what we are learning is what we are, as God created us. That cannot change. God's Will is "to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable" (1:5). What an amazing statement! Indistinguishable from God! Wow! That borders on heresy or incredible hubris, doesn't it? And yet that is what the Course is telling us about ourselves; that what we are is the same stuff of which God is made. If God is Love, so is His Son. "God is but Love, and therefore, so am I" (Lessons 171 to 180). WHAT IS CREATION? Part 6: W-pII.11.3:3 Its [creation's] oneness is forever guaranteed inviolate; forever held within His holy Will, beyond all possibility of harm, of separation, imperfection and of any spot upon its sinlessness. To put this in a short, simple sentence: Separation is impossible. What God created One cannot ever become separate parts; only in mad illusions can this seem to occur. The Wholeness or Oneness is the expression of God's Will, and that cannot be opposed because there is nothing to oppose it. Everything that exists is part of this Oneness, part of this single expression of God's Will. There is no other, no opponent, no enemy, no contrary will. God would not and did not create something opposite to Himself. How could God will something opposite to His own will? All that is truly real, therefore, must be an expression of His Will. The Wholeness is "beyond all possibility of harm" because nothing outside it exists to oppose it. This is one of the characteristics of what is referred to as "nondual" cosmology. "Nondual" means, simply, not two; only one. There is no opposite to God, and no opposite to God's one creation. The Course often says that if an opposite to God exists, if sin (opposing God's Will) is truly possible, then God must have created His own opposite, which makes Him insane. If we think that, we must be insane. Either God is insane, or we are. And of the two, which is more likely? From sue at circleofa.org Sat Nov 22 12:16:03 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:16:03 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 327 - November 23 Message-ID: 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 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 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 the Whole, rather than 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. From sue at circleofa.org Sun Nov 23 09:50:18 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:50:18 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] LESSON 328 - NOVEMBER 24 Message-ID: LESSON 328 - NOVEMBER 24 "I choose the second place to gain the first." 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: Ask for guidance about some situation facing you today. Listen with a quiet, receptive, open mind. You may find that what you hear feels different from your will, from what you want in this situation. If so, try to consider that perhaps what you heard is your will. Consider that this is your true will, which you have lost touch with, coming to you in a particular form. COMMENTARY The lesson is saying that when we consider choosing to join our will to God's Will (1:5), it seems like some kind of loss, a submission to something outside of ourselves. It seems like taking "second place." It seems subservient, or submissive. And in our mistaken identity as egos, we feel that the only way to have autonomy is to make ourselves independent from God and from the rest of His creation. We are seeing things upside down (1:1). All that we find by asserting our independence is "sickness, suffering and loss and death" (1:3). We are like a branch trying to become independent of the vine. If we are cut off from the vine, we die. Our identity is not lost by joining with the vine; it is found, because we are not something separate. We are part of God and part of His creation, and only in joining with that willingly can we discover our true Identity. "Our will is His" (1:6). We choose to "submit" to God's Will (which seems like taking second place) because, in joining with Him, we arrive in first place: one with the Will of the Creator of all things. WHAT IS CREATION? Part 8: W-pII.4:4-6 Love created us like Itself. As parts, each of which contains the Whole, we are Thoughts of Love. And "Love remains with all Its Thoughts, Its sureness being theirs" (4:4). The certainty of God is our certainty. It was given us in creation and is still there within us; it has never left us, although we have obscured it. God's memory is in our minds (4:5). Although we seem to be separate parts we are not; we are parts, but not separate, like droplets of water in the ocean. So we still contain all that was in the original creation. What belongs to the ocean belongs to each drop. Each of us still retains our oneness and our unity with our Creator (4:5). Let our function be only to let this memory return, only to let God's Will be done on earth, only to be restored to sanity, and to be but as God created us. (4:6) Our whole purpose in life is to be nothing but this, nothing but the restoration to our awareness of our Wholeness, and our partness-in-Wholeness. This is why we are here. This is the purpose behind every direction taken by the Holy Spirit's guidance in our lives. We are not here to bolster our partness, to meet goals belonging only to the part. We are here to let the memory of God return to our conscious minds, and to fulfill our purpose as the extensions of the Will of Love. From sue at circleofa.org Sun Nov 23 09:50:23 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:50:23 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] [RESEND] The Practice Instructions to Part II Message-ID: The Practice instructions to Part II PURPOSE: The introduction to Part II talks as if, in the remaining part of this year, we are trying to reach the end of our spiritual journey: "This year has brought us to eternity" (10:8). However, the Manual, in Section 16 ("How Should the Teacher of God Spend His Day?") implies a more modest goal: to reach a place where we practice because of our own motivation and inspiration, rather than because a book is telling us to. This would transform our practicing from a special assignment into a way of life. Part II of the Workbook, with its absence of daily practice instructions, is an important step in this direction. If here, in the relatively formless landscape of Part II, your practice can blossom, rather than wither, you are close to graduating from the Workbook. I think we need to combine these two goals: We should aim for eternity, realizing that by aiming high we will carry ourselves farther than if we didn't, even though we may only get as far as weaning ourselves from the Workbook's support. In other words, we should aim to graduate from time and space, we can reach the more realistic goal of graduating from the Workbook. Reading the lesson: The lessons in Part II take a very different form than in Part I. After the day's idea, we find just two paragraphs, both worded in the first person, which expand and comment on the idea. This makes the Part II lessons look much like what we see in most of the reviews, where the idea for the day is followed by a series of "related comments" (W-pI.rI.In.2:3; 3:3) which are worded in the first person and expand on the idea. In the reviews, these related comments become part of the exercises. We read them over several times, we think about them, we repeat them to ourselves, we savor each word. We make them our own, which is why they are worded they are our own. We so fully engage them that reading them becomes more like a practice than a simple act of reading. It makes sense that we should use the comments in the Part II lessons in the same way that we used the comments in the reviews, simply because the two are so similar. And the introduction hints at this. For it speaks of our reading of those paragraphs as an "exercise" (2:1) that is meant to induct us (1:4) into "the periods of wordless, deep experience which should come afterwards" (11:2). Let's look at how we can turn the reading of those two paragraphs into a genuine exercise. First, the< commentary paragraphs> (the nonitalicized paragraphs). I recommend that you read these over slowly, perhaps several times, and imagine that these really are your own thoughts (which is how they are worded). To facilitate this, you may want to emphasize words like "I," "me," "my," and "mine." Second, the< prayers>. These read as if you yourself are praying them to God, and I recommend doing just that. Fix one sentence at a time in your mind and then close your eyes and say that sentence to God. Try to really mean it and expect Him to hear you. These appear to be designed to carry you into the meditative state, and many of them virtually say that. Lesson 307 says of its prayer, "And with this prayer we enter silently into a state where conflict cannot come" (W-pII.307.2:1). To enhance this effect, you may want to pray the prayer several times. Morning/evening quiet time: As long as you need for the effect you want. The longer practice periods are meant to consist of Open Mind Meditation. Begin by repeating the idea for the day, but in a special way: as an invitation to God to come to you. "We say the words of invitation that His Voice suggests, and then we wait for Him to come to us" (4:6). After repeating these words, go into a time of expectant, wordless waiting (the word "wait" here occurs six times). To wait normally means to stay physically still in anticipation of some event. Here it means to stay still in anticipation of a wondrous event: the dawning of God on your mind. Wait as if holding your breath for this event. Wait with an attitude that "the memory of God is shimmering across the wide horizons of our minds" (9:5). Your waiting, then, though motionless, should be very much alive. It should be filled with expectancy: "We...expect our Father to reveal Himself, as He has promised" (3:3). The basis for your expectancy, in other words, is your trust that God will keep His promises. He promised to come to you when you asked. You are asking; He will come. Hold this state without the aid of repeating words. However, whenever your mind wanders, you should use words--repeat the idea to draw yourself back to this nonverbal waiting. "We will use that thought...to calm our minds at need" (3:1). If you find Open Mind Meditation either too challenging or too unrewarding, I would recommend using either of the other two methods the Workbook has taught: Down-and-Inward Meditation or Name of God Meditation. In fact, Lesson 222 clearly instructs you to use Name of God Meditation: <"Father, we have no words except Your Name upon our lips and in our minds, as we come quietly into Your Presence now"> (W-pII.222.2:1). Hourly remembrance: One or two minutes as the hour strikes (reduce if circumstances do not permit). Do a miniature version of the morning practice. Repeat the idea as an invitation to God, and then wait in wordless silence for Him to come to you. Frequent reminder: As often as possible within each hour. "Repeat [the idea], and allow your mind to rest a little time in silence and in peace" (W-pI.rIII.In.10:5). Response to temptation: When you are tempted to let upset cause you to forget your goal. Repeat the idea as a way of calling on God to dispel your upset (see 2:9 and 10:2). Reading the "What Is" section: Before one of the day's practice periods (not necessarily the morning one), read the relevant "What Is" section. Don't just read it casually. Read it slowly and think about it "a little while" (11:4). * * * LET US PRAY What are we supposed to do with the prayers in Part II of the Workbook for ? There are 140 of them, one for each lesson. This has puzzled many a Course student who, upon reaching Part II, finds himself confronted each day with an italicized prayer directed at God. Is this prayer offered by the author of the Course on our behalf? Do we simply read it? Do we actually pray it? If so, why? Actually, I am only that this issue has puzzled Course students. I have never really heard much discussion about these prayers. They sit there on the page, staring at us every day for five straight months, but we don't seem to talk much about them. The only perspective I recall hearing is that they must be metaphorical because God can't hear our prayers. Having done the Workbook several times, I too didn't know what to do with these prayers. Yet, to be honest, I hadn't really confronted the question. I would just dutifully open my book and read the prayer attached to that day's lesson. The prayers generally struck me as being a kind of Course word salad: a series of typical Course words--Christ, peace, joy, Heaven, etc.--tossed together as one would toss a salad. Then one day a few years ago, all that changed for me. I was on a short retreat and, for some reason, the first thing I did was sit down and try to discover what the Course wants us to do with its prayers. Having spent many years studying the Workbook's practice instructions, I had learned that virtually all our questions about practice are answered right in the Workbook, if we pay careful attention. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that this ought to be true for those prayers; we should expect there to be instructions for what to do with them. The logical place for those instructions was the introduction to Part II, since that is where we find the practice instructions for the entirety of Part II, where the prayers are found. Within minutes I found two sentences that ended my search and changed my relationship with the Course and with God. Here they are: We say some simple words of welcome, and expect our Father to reveal Himself, as He has promised. (WpII.In.3:3) We say the words of invitation that His Voice suggests, and then we wait for Him to come to us. (WpII.In.4:6) >From these sentences and the paragraphs around them I obtained the following picture: The Course has given us words (from the Holy Spirit) which we are to say to God as words of invitation and welcome. Once we invite Him with these words, we sit in a state of silent expectancy, waiting for Him to come and reveal Himself to us in direct wordless experience. What are these "words"? In this context, they are definitely the thought for the day, the lesson title. But are they confined to that? Don't these "simple words of welcome" also sound like they could be the prayers? After all, like these words, the prayers are words given us by the Course which are written as if we are saying them to God. So I turned the page and looked at the first prayers in Part II. They resoundingly confirmed what I was thinking. This is how the first prayer begins: . (W-pII.221.1:1-2) Just as the introduction described, in this prayer we state our intention to have an encounter with God in the silence of our minds. The comments that follow this prayer continue along the same lines: "Now [that we have said this prayer] do we wait in quiet....We wait with one intent...[for God] to reveal Himself unto His Son" (W-pII.221.2:1, 6). Here is exactly what the introduction said: Once we say these words of welcome, we wait in silence for God to reveal Himself to us. The next prayer was very similar. In it we state our intention to silently enter into an experience of God's Presence: . (W-pII.222.2:1) This was a very intellectual process of detective work, but its results were extremely practical: At last I felt I knew what to do with those prayers! I am to say them directly to God as preparation for a direct wordless encounter with Him. So I immediately tried this out. I spent the next hour or so going through the first twenty prayers in Part II, praying them as I had just discovered I should. I will never forget that time. It was a pivotal moment in my journey with the Course. Until that moment, I had no idea how much richness was in those prayers. What seemed like word salad when read as information became a wealth of emotional experience when repeated as prayer, when spoken to God. I was astonished by the sense of loving intimacy with God that shone through these prayers. I had never realized that was how the Course wanted me to think about God. God came across not as a remote metaphysical abstraction, an impersonal essence that is completely unaware of us. Instead, He came across as near and dear, as the most attentive, loving Father one could possibly imagine, always there, always listening, always answering, wanting only to lavish all of His Love upon us. "He covers me with kindness and with care" (W-pII.222.1:4), one of the lessons said. And that is exactly how I felt, blanketed in His kindness and care. Since that day, these prayers have become a staple in my daily life. There are few things I enjoy doing more than sitting down and spending time with them. They have literally transformed my relationship with God. My sense of God before was somewhat remote and abstract. Yet increasingly these prayers have implanted in me sense of God, so that my feeling for Him has become a deep well of sustenance and comfort that I draw from daily. As time went on, I fell into the habit of using these prayers before my meditation time, because I found them to be the ideal way to prepare my mind for seeking God in meditation. They gathered the scattered and chaotic threads of my thought into a single desire to be with God. After I had been using them in this way for some time, I remembered something: . This is what the instructions in the Workbook say is their purpose. We are to use the words of these prayers to prepare our minds for a direct, wordless encounter with God. I can attest to the fact that they serve their intended purpose very well indeed. I therefore encourage every student of the Course to avail him- or herself of the great benefit of these prayers. Try them out and see if you are not drawn to return to them. Here are some tips for getting the most out of them: 1. . Dwell on each line and let it sink in before going on to the next. 2. . When the prayer says "Father," have a sense of speaking directly to God, and of Him in some sense hearing you. 3. . When the prayer says "I" or "me," have a sense of you being the one saying the prayer. 4. , as much as you can. Try to make it the prayer of your own heart. 5. . For instance, when the prayer we will use below says "a something I have called by many names," list some of the names you have given what you seek. 6. on the prayer as it evokes additional thoughts and feelings in you. To try out this method of using these prayers, I would like to utilize the following prayer from Lesson 231, "Father, I will but to remember You." My suggestion is for you to repeat each line slowly, with concentration and sincerity. Try to see the fullness of meaning contained in each line. Try also to go through the prayer twice or more. 1. What can I seek for, Father, but Your Love? 2. Perhaps I think I seek for something else; a something I have called by many names. 3. Yet is Your Love the only thing I seek, or ever sought. 4. For there is nothing else that I could ever really want to find. 5. Let me remember You. 6. What else could I desire but the truth about myself? What was your experience in repeating these lines? Was it an experience you want more of? I sincerely hope that the prayers in the Workbook will become the blessing in your life that they continue to be in mine. From sue at circleofa.org Mon Nov 24 05:53:14 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:53:14 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lessons 329 - November 25 Message-ID: LESSON 329 - NOVEMBER 25 "I have already chosen what You will." 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. COMMENTARY It is difficult for us to realize that we have already chosen God's Will. Not only is choosing His Will the only way to find our true autonomy (yesterday's lesson), . We may we have wandered away from God's Will, defied it, and broken its laws (1:1), but we have not. We cannot. Because the Will of God, "extended and extending" (1:2). When did we make this choice that we seem so unaware of? In the very instant of our creation (1:5). God created us by extending His Will; when we came into being we were the extension of His Will. Our choice was already made, and "made for all eternity" (1:6). We cannot change that. We can make up an illusion in which we appear to have a separate will from God's, but we cannot make it real. Illusion is all we can make if what we make contradicts God's Will. This fact is our safety. It is our salvation as well, for it means that we have not done what we thought we did; we have not defied God's Will, we have only it, only dreamed about it. The oneness of God and His creation is unbroken, and it is this we can celebrate today. WHAT IS CREATION? Part 9: W-pII.11.5:1 Our Father calls to us. "Father" is a personal synonym for "Creator," the One Who gave us being. Perhaps, after this time thinking about what creation is, the word "Father" may have a little more meaning for us. Our Father is the One Who thought us into existence. "Only Love creates" (1:2), and so our Father is Love Itself, Which has created us like Itself. This One desired to add to Love by Its extension, and so, out of that desire, we were created, to be held forever in His holy Will. That immortal desire of God still stands! With all that infinite desire of His Will, He calls to us to be what He created us to be: the extension of His Love, creating as He does through extending love, forever one with His holy Will, sharing in it, glorying in it, exuding it from every pore of our being. God's Love remains with us. Our minds remember Him, remember our function. From within our minds He calls to us, drawing us with His Love to be the very Love that draws us. He is our Father, our Creator. We cannot escape that fact, nor can we escape the fact of what we are. "I am as God created me" (W-pI.110.Heading). He calls to us constantly, continually, patiently, unceasingly, and until we end our mad attempt to be "something else," something other than Love, and respond to His call, we can only delay our happiness and postpone our joy. Father, let me hear Your call today, and answer. From sue at circleofa.org Tue Nov 25 05:51:12 2008 From: sue at circleofa.org (Sue Roth) Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:51:12 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 330 - November 26 Message-ID: LESSON 330 - NOVEMBER 26 "I will not hurt myself again today." 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: Think of your judgments toward another person. Realize that these judgments hurt . Then say: I will not hurt myself again today. I will not teach myself that I am a sinner. Let my forgiveness teach me that I am God's Son. COMMENTARY Whenever I think I am less than what God created, I hurt myself. And only myself. I do no real damage, but I have the entirely realistic illusion of pain, sacrifice, and suffering. All my physical and emotional senses confirm its reality; only the vision of Christ sees past the illusion. There is a strong passage in the Text that tells how important it is not to depend on what our eyes and ears tell us, to know that it is only the projection of our own thoughts: The secret of salvation is but this: That you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this still is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true.. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream. (T-27.VIII.10:1-6) The evil dream results from a false picture of myself as something less than the Self which God created. I still believe myself to be capable of sin and capable of suffering. Because I believe that of myself, I believe it of others, and I project my belief onto them. I project my sin and my guilt onto them. Every time I see sin or weakness in a brother, it is only a reflection of my own thoughts about myself. "It is your dream" that you are seeing. You are not seeing something real, but a masterful, near-perfect illusion, projected from your incredibly powerful mind. It is the projected image of your own thoughts about yourself that is "hurting" you. If I think I am weak, if I think my life is in a mess, I am not seeing my true Identity. None of this is really happening. I am living a bad dream, a dream about myself. From a metaphysical standpoint, nothing happening in my life really matters at all. It is just a bad dream. (It matter as a reflection of my state of mind, however.) We are being "saved from what we thought we were" (2:3), and the way toward that deliverance is to understand that "life is but a dream," as the old round says. The way of deliverance is to forgive. To understand when I think I see something worthy of my judgment and condemnation that somehow, in some twisted way, all I am seeing is my own thoughts projected outward. And to choose, in that moment, to think differently. To see the situation which I thought justified my anger turned into a situation that justifies my love. "Here is a poor, confused brother, just like me, who has lost track of his true Identity with God. I am seeing him as guilty only because I am projecting my own guilt. I choose not to add to his illusion by broadcasting guilt onto him. I choose instead to direct my love to him that he may begin to awaken, as I have begun." And I know, in so doing, that I am giving that love to myself, I am contributing to my own awakening. More to the point for me personally are these lines: Why should we attack our minds, and give them images of pain? Why should we teach them they are powerless? (1:2-3) What am I teaching my mind by the thoughts I am thinking? What am I teaching my mind by feeling guilty? I'm a man under reconstruction, I'm not finished yet. If I didn't need rehabilitation I wouldn't be here! Let me observe my thoughts today and see how they attack me if I choose to listen to the ego, and how they build me up when I listen to the Holy Spirit. WHAT IS CREATION? Part 10: W-pII.11.5:2 We hear His Voice, and we forgive creation in the Name of its Creator, Holiness Itself, Whose holiness His Own creation shares; Whose holiness is still a part of us. His Voice is calling us to "forgive creation." We have looked on God's creation-ourselves, our brothers and sisters, and all the rest that makes up creation-and we have pronounced judgment on it. We have seen guilt and ugliness where God created only beauty and holiness. In this world, we cannot truly create nor extend love in the purity that belongs only to Heaven, but we can forgive. We can end our fault-finding, and lift our judgment and condemnation from everything we see. Every moment offers us an opportunity to do this; every encounter is a chance to practice forgiveness. Whatever we look upon without seeing the holiness of God in it, we need to forgive. To see anything other than God's holiness reflected everywhere is an act of unforgiveness, a condemnation of God's creation. When something appears unholy, we need to ask the help of the Holy Spirit to see past appearances to the truth of God's holiness those appearances are hiding. Sin is an illusion, and only holiness is true. In a sense, then, all that the Course is teaching us is to acknowledge God's creation everywhere, in everything, and above all, in ourselves. Our Creator's "holiness is still a part of us." Let us say to everyone we meet (in our thoughts, our words, and our actions): I would behold you with the eyes of Christ, and see my perfect sinlessness in you. (W-pI.161.11:8) From suelegal at gmail.com Wed Nov 26 05:00:13 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:00:13 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 331 - November 27 Message-ID: LESSON 331 - NOVEMBER 27 "There is no conflict, for my will is Yours." 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. COMMENTARY In a study group recently, I said that our fundamental problem is that we really believe that we are terrible people. We don't trust our own love. A fellow was expressing his concern that the material of the Course could be used to justify just about any behavior. "I could go rob a liquor store because the world is just illusion and nobody would really be hurt except in the illusion. Nothing I do affects my relationship to God negatively." The direct answer to that question is that you only do such things in the world when you believe the world is real. If you believed that the world is an illusion, you could not be doing such things and would have no desire to do them. The fear that he would do terrible things if he believed no one would really be hurt belied a belief that he could not be trusted with the truth. The Course is saying that we don't believe that what we truly want is good. The truth is, we can trust ourselves. Even if we are still confused and bemused by illusion, we are not going to make terrible mistakes. It is safe to let go of the constraints of guilt because we truly are extensions of God. We think we need the guilt to restrain the monster within us; A Course in Miracles is saying guilt serves no useful function (see T-14.III.1:4), and in fact keeps us locked into the illusion of our sinfulness. That illusion about ourselves is the fundamental error. And it goes on to say that thinking the self has usurped the throne of God is nothing to be guilty about: Seek not to appraise the worth of God's Son whom He created holy, for to do so is to evaluate his Father and judge against Him. And you feel guilty for this imagined crime, which no one in this world or Heaven could possibly commit. The Holy Spirit teaches only that the "sin" of self-replacement on the throne of God is not a source of guilt. (T-14.III.15:1-3) It is just a "trivial mistake" (W-pI.138.11:5). Love has not left Itself. I share God's nature as Love. I could not leave Him, nor He me (1:5). It is "foolish" (1:1) to believe that I could in reality oppose the Will of God, and corrupt myself. Any apparent corruption or conflict between me and God must be an illusion, evidence of nothing except that I am asleep and dreaming of the impossible (1:7-8). "To know reality is not to see the ego" (W-pII.12.4:1). Yet paradoxically we must see the ego first in order to overlook it. It operates in a hidden fashion, secretly, stealthily. It hides behind all kinds of cover. We must unmask it, see it for what it is, and then overlook it, ignore it. As long as we don't know what our imagined enemy is we will be run by fear. We have to get to the place where we can see clearly, "Oh! It's just the ego, it's just me thinking I'm separate." Then we can let it go. When you have at last looked at the ego's foundation without shrinking, you will have also looked upon ours. (T-11.In.4:2) Let us look at our ego, then, without shrinking, without being afraid of it, able to see that it is just a "trivial mistake." WHAT IS THE EGO? Part 1: W-pII.12.1:1-2 "The ego is idolatry" (1:1). Idolatry is the worship of an idol, a false god. That is what the ego is; the insane attempt to make real an identity that is apart from God, and intended to replace Him in our awareness. The ego is "the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death" (1:1). Let's pay attention here. The ego is not some "thing" inside of us, some sort of evil twin, the dark side of our soul. The ego the whole concept of a separated self that is set apart from "other selves." Isn't that exactly what we think we are? A distinct soul, born in a body, struggling through this life and sure to end this life in death? Doesn't that describe what we think we are? In other words, the "me" that I think I am, a thing separate from and different from you, is the ego! Changing our self-concept from ego to spirit doesn't just mean that this separate self, which was black, becomes white. It means that this separated self is completely replaced by something far more inclusive, in fact, by something all-inclusive. I cease to be "I" in the way I thought I was. The ego "is the 'will' that sees the Will of God as enemy, and takes a form in which it is denied" (1:2). If what I think of as "I" is to be separate and independent, it cannot be united with the Will of God. The ego see God's Will as enemy because, to the ego, God is "other," something different from and separate from itself. Since God is a very powerful "other," His Will represents a threat, a challenge to the ego's "will." Therefore, the form the "will" of the ego takes will always be some form of denial of God's Will. For instance, you know that a child is beginning to develop a psychological ego when he or she begins to say "no" every time you say "yes" (otherwise known as "the terrible two's"). The ego is a big "no" to God and His Will. This ego is precisely what we are . "You are not an ego" (T-14.X.5:5). As we look at what the ego is (or appears to be), let us not be discouraged or depressed by the picture. What we are looking at is not what we are; in fact, it is what we are . This imagined self is the source of all our guilt-and it is unreal, and does not exist. From suelegal at gmail.com Thu Nov 27 05:00:56 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:00:56 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 332 - November 28 Message-ID: LESSON 332 - NOVEMBER 28 "Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free." 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: Choose a situation in which you are experiencing fear. Then say: My fears about [person, situation, or event] bind [people involved]. My forgiveness of [people doing the screwing up] will set [people involved] free, And will set me free, too. COMMENTARY Fear and unforgiveness are very closely related. Our fear, in the Course's understanding, is rooted in our guilt. Our primal fear is of punishment for what we believe we have done wrong. Our belief in our sin produces guilt, and that guilt produces fear. The fear "binds" us. It is a restrictive emotion. Forgiveness, which undoes guilt, thus sets us free. The belief in sin is the ego's foundational illusion. All that the ego makes is illusion (1:1), and not reality. Truth, by its mere presence, evaporates the illusions of the ego (1:2-5). If there is an illusion of a wall in front of us, knowing the truth (in this case, there is no wall) enables us to "walk through" the wall. There is no need to attack the wall to tear it down; we just shine it away with the truth. The truth about us is that we are guiltless. Forgiveness does not attack sin and guilt. It doesn't have to. It just shines them away. Forgiveness invites truth to enter the mind "and take its rightful place within the mind" (1:6). "Without forgiveness is the mind in chains, believing in its own futility" (1:7). When I am entrenched in my own guilt my mind seems impotent, unable to accomplish anything at all. I cannot believe in my own power because I am believing in my own weakness. The power of God, given to me in creation, seems non-existent. I seem to be frail, blown about by circumstances beyond my control. But when I am forgiven, I once again realize the power of my own mind. By owning my guilt and taking responsibility for it (realizing that I made the illusion of guilt and sin), I reawaken to the inherent power of my mind to choose, and I realize that I can choose again. And choose differently, if I wish. When I forgiveness, the realization of my mind's freedom and power comes even more quickly. When I realize that the picture of sin I am seeing in my brother is of my own making, and that I can choose to see him differently-that this is entirely within my power, and not at all dependent on anything outside of me-I am reclaiming my inheritance as God's Son. By my forgiveness I release the world from guilt. I have the power to forgive sins! I have the power to free the world from its chains, and that power is the power of forgiveness. WHAT IS THE EGO? Part 2: W-pII.12.1:3 The ego is the "proof" that strength is weak and love is fearful, life is really death, and what opposes God alone is true. To find its illusory independence, the ego simply negates God and everything about God. The strength of innocence, gentleness, and love is seen as "weak" and is shunned. Attack is seen instead as strong. "Standing on your own feet" and being "independent" is seen as maturity and strength, and union with others and dependence on God is seen as weakness. The ultimate image of a mighty ego is a lone individual screaming defiance at the entire universe. The ego cannot see nor understand that this lone, limited, and separated self is the very symbol of weakness. In speaking of this choice we have made to become egos (a choice we can realize only in dreams, never in reality), the Course says: Here does the Son of God ask not too much, but far too little. He would sacrifice his own identity with everything, to find a little treasure of his own. (T-26.VII.11:7-8) To learn to listen to the Voice for God instead of the ego means far more than just listening to the little angel on our right shoulder instead of the devil on our left. That concept of things leaves the "me" who listens unchanged, still the same identity, a separated self. To listen to God instead of the ego means letting go entirely of that "little treasure of [my] own," which is my entire conception of what I am as something apart from God, and instead affirming my "identity with everything" (T-26.VII.11:8). I was mistaken when I thought I lived apart from God, a separate entity that moved in isolation, unattached, and housed within a body. Now I know my life is God's, I have no other home, and I do not exist apart from Him. He has no Thoughts that are not part of me, and I have none but those which are of Him. (W-pII.223.1:1-3) From suelegal at gmail.com Fri Nov 28 05:00:28 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:00:28 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 333 - November 29 Message-ID: LESSON 333 - NOVEMBER 29 "Forgiveness ends the dream of conflict here." 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: Pick a situation in which you are experiencing conflict. Say: I perceive conflict in this situation. This is my dream of conflict. Forgiveness ends the dream of conflict here. COMMENTARY This is a magnificent lesson! It states unmistakably, in very certain terms, that we cannot dodge correcting our mistaken thoughts of conflict. Each one must be faced squarely and forgiveness applied. Our thoughts of conflict "must be resolved" (1:1). They will not simply go away. We cannot bury our heads in the sand. Consider the list of defensive tactics that our egos persuade us to use. Conflict is (1:2): Evaded: We sidestep the issue. When we sense a loss of peace, we watch TV or go shopping. When we become aware of a wall between us and a brother or sister, we walk away, or make ourselves very busy. We avoid facing the conflict in our minds. Set aside: We shelve the issue "for later consideration," a later that never seems to come. Denied: We pretend it isn't there. "Me, angry? No, I'm fine; no problem." Disguised: We blame our upset on a bad mood, hormones, a headache, or a bad day at the office. We paint over our inner rage with "pink paint," as Marianne Williamson so colorfully puts it (pun intended). We smile and choke down the anger or pain. Whatever we are feeling, it cannot be a thought of murder. Seen somewhere else: "It's not my problem! It's all her fault." "I wouldn't be feeling these awful feelings if he wasn't being so damned selfish." Called by another name: We deny that what we are feeling is attack or hatred; perhaps we call it "righteous indignation" or "setting my boundaries" or "standing for the truth." If the conflict in our minds is to be resolved, it cannot be "hidden by deceit of any kind" (1:2). That is the summation of all these tactics. We are trying to hide the fact that thoughts of hatred, rage, or murder have actually entered our minds. This ingrained habit of hiding our egos, pushing them into the closet when company comes, has to end if the conflict is to be escaped. This doesn't mean that, instead of hiding our egos, we should flaunt them and indulge them. The purpose is not to express the ego but to expel it. But we cannot do that if we continue to hide it, and sometimes the process of ripping the mask off the ego will mean that, for a short time at least, we will give vent to the ego instead of covering it up. Sometimes the rage must be expressed before we realize how deep-seated it really is. Yet this is only a transitional phase; there is a healing that we seek. By contrast with the cover-up, our intent should be: To see the ego conflict exactly as it is: In other words, to recognize hatred, attack, self-isolation, grandiosity, anger, and the desire to kill for exactly what they are. To stop playing innocent. Where it is thought to be: This means getting in touch with the situation as your ego sees it. Admitting, for instance, that you really believe your spouse is sadistic, or that you actually do see yourself as unlovable. In the reality which has been given it: Here we recognize just exactly what we think the situation is, as egos. We understand that we see ourselves as alone in the universe, clawing our way through life and barely surviving. We admit that the conflict seems really real to us. If we are not perfectly peaceful and constantly joyful, there is a reason, and the reason is always some aspect of ego we are clinging to, but simultaneously denying. We have to see the reality we have given to it. With the purpose that the mind accorded it: This one takes real discernment. The conflicts we experience exist for a purpose, a purpose given to them by our minds. The purpose is always to support our own egos, always some form of ego autonomy, some illusion of independent, separate existence. Whatever the conflict, we give it its reality, and we do so for some hidden, insane reason of the ego. Here is where we uncover our fear of love, our fear of joining, our addiction to separation. Here is where we discover our hidden belief in guilt and the desire to punish ourselves. Only when we are willing to go through this kind of ruthless self-examination, taking total responsibility for our own thoughts, will the defenses of the ego be lifted, and the truth be free to shine away the ego. The truth is forgiveness (1:4 and 2:1); it is forgiveness that shines away all conflict and all doubt. When I have uncovered my own ego in this way, forgiving others is the most natural and the easiest thing in the world, because I have admitted that my ego is self-generated, and the other person had nothing to do with it. I have been acting for insane reasons which I no longer accept nor want. But if this is true of me, it must be true of everyone. The conflict has been unreal, illusion fighting illusion, fear reacting to fear. And with that realization, my own guilt melts, and the way of return to God is open. WHAT IS THE EGO? Part 3: W-pII.12.2:1-3 "The ego is insane" (2:1). To the degree we identify with our egos, we are insane as well, as the Course so often tells us. And we all identify with our egos far more than we realize; indeed, identification with the ego is almost total. The ego is our fundamental assumption, the basis from which we operate all the time. We all see ourselves as limited, separate selves, living in a body, doomed to die with it. This insanity is not our reality, however; our true, shared Self remains sane, and that is our salvation and the ego's doom. The ego "stands [in fear] beyond the Everywhere" (2:2). God, and His creation, is all there is. But the ego thinks it is somehow beyond all of that; it rejects God as Creator and tries to imagine itself as something outside of God and His creation. The ego "stands.apart from All" (2:2). How can you be apart from All? All is All. It includes everything. And the ego stands "in separation from the Infinite" (2:2). Same idea. All of these stances are, obviously, wholly imaginary. It is not possible to be separate from the Infinite. But the ego defiantly, and insanely, believes that this is its condition. That is the very definition of the ego. In this light, to believe that one is damned is the height of egoity. "In its insanity it thinks it has become a victor over God Himself" (2:3). That is what damnation is: it is the assertion, "I have succeeded in thwarting the Will of God." Guilt is an egoic denial of the power of God's Love. The thought "I will never learn this Course, I will never become enlightened" is an assertion that your will is more powerful than God's. If God's Will is your happiness, then sadness is a proclamation of victory over God. The Course is telling us that it is insane to think such things are possible. It does not condemn us for thinking them. Rather, it tells us to stop listening to such thoughts. The ego is an impossibility: "The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is unbelievable and will forever be unbelievable" (T-7.VIII.7:1). God is infinite; He is Everywhere; He is All. If the ego is a thought that stands beyond God, separate and apart, then the ego is unbelievable. Such a thing cannot be. From suelegal at gmail.com Sat Nov 29 05:00:52 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:00:52 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 334 - November 30 Message-ID: LESSON 334 - NOVEMBER 30 "Today I claim the gifts forgiveness gives." 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. COMMENTARY "I seek but the eternal" (2:1). This lesson is about deciding not to waste any more time going after the supposed gifts of the ego. "I will not wait another day to find the treasures that my Father offers me" (1:1). The primary use we are making of our free will is to delay our acceptance of our divine inheritance. We are holding on like crazy to our illusion of independence, and denying ourselves the only thing that will ever content us (2:2), like a homeless person stupidly clinging to his rags while being offered brand new clothing. Let me keep in mind today that nothing in this world is of lasting value. "Illusions are all vain, and dreams are gone even while they are woven out of thoughts that rest on false perceptions" (1:2). This reminds me of the verse in Ecclesiastes that says all our seeking is like trying to hold on to the wind. The illusions of the ego are so evanescent; they can never satisfy a Son of God. Only that which is eternal can satisfy me. A Christian hero of mine, Jim Elliot, once said, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." Let me remember that what I truly want is God and His peace in my heart. When I think I want something else, Holy Spirit, please help me to translate that desire into what it truly is, a symbol of my longing for the Father and for Home. God's Voice is offering peace; let that be my only aim, and let everything else fall by the wayside. "The gifts forgiveness gives": What has all this got to do with forgiveness? Simply this: Every goal other than peace generates unforgiveness, putting me in competition with someone or something for that thing, whatever it is. Peace comes through forgiveness. If peace is my only goal, I will not judge my brothers because a mind in judgment is not a mind at peace. Only a mind free of lesser goals, free of desire for ephemeral things, can see his brothers as sinless. Every encounter today offers me a chance at Heaven. There does not need to be any great crisis. All the world is my classroom, and every instant is a moment of choice. Today, let me choose peace. WHAT IS THE EGO? (PART 4) Part 4: W-pII.12.2:4-5 And in its [the ego's] terrible autonomy it "sees" the Will of God has been destroyed. (2:5) This illusion of separation we call the ego, this "terrible autonomy," seems to show us that we have triumphed over God's Will for union. What a terrible thing it would be if this were reality! The ego's very being, if it were real, would be evidence of the most awful guilt imaginable. If I am the ego, then what I am, my very being, is an accusation of murder most foul, for I have wrested my very existence from the destruction of God's Will. And this is just what we believe in identifying with the ego. This is the primal guilt beneath all our vague, uneasy feelings, all our sense of unworthiness. It dreams of punishment, and trembles at the figures in its dreams; its enemies, who seek to murder it before it can ensure its safety by attacking them. (2:4) In the "terrible autonomy" of our identification with the ego, we have placed ourselves at odds with God and the universe. Everyone and everything else is a threat to our autonomy. Our dreams are filled with nightmarish punishment for our "crime." The ego state is one of acute paranoia; we are afraid of everything. We expect the executioner's axe to fall at any moment. No one can be trusted. Every figure in our dream is an enemy, and the only option for survival is to kill them before they kill us. The only safety is in attack. This paranoid frame of mind is inevitable, given the ego's premise of autonomy. We all experience it to greater or lesser degree; some of us merely hide it better than others. When we get down to it, each of us feels unbearably alone, an outsider, crouched in the shadows of the woods while the rest of the world holds hands and sings around the campfire. That is the inescapable result of the premise of ego autonomy. It is the outcome of what we mistakenly presume ourselves to be. The good news is that this is not what we are; the aloneness is an illusion, an outrageous impossibility. The ego is forever unbelievable. We are no more apart from God and His creation than a cell in my body is apart from the body itself. We live in God; we move and have our being in God. We are, all of us, making this incredible transition from ego autonomy to a transpersonal unity, the recognition of a higher Whole to which we all belong, intrinsically, a Whole which exists in every part-in you, in me. Nothing can stop this transition, because it is simply the recognition of what has always been so. From suelegal at gmail.com Sun Nov 30 05:00:42 2008 From: suelegal at gmail.com (Sue Roth) Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 05:00:42 -0500 Subject: [acimlessons_list] Lesson 335 - December 1 Message-ID: LESSON 335 - DECEMBER 1 "I choose to see my brother's sinlessness." 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: The practice I will suggest now is a very powerful one, which I have used many times. I recommend using it with a number of people who come to mind. The idea behind it is that we see sinfulness in another that will make us see sinfulness in ourselves, and that, crazily enough, is what we are after, what our ego wants. Just let one person after another come to mind, and apply the following lines to each one: I chose to see [name's] sinfulness Because I wanted to see my own. I choose to see [name's] sinlessness Because I want to see my own. COMMENTARY This continues the thought from yesterday's lesson about decision and choice. Yesterday we read about choosing to follow God's Voice, and beholding our brother as sinless. Today we read: Forgiveness is a choice. I never see my brother as he is, for this is far beyond perception. What I see in him is merely what I wish to see, because it stands for what I want to be the truth. (1:1-3) In other words, what we see results from choices we have made about what we want to see. The Text speaks about "the decision for guiltlessness" (T-14.III). It says (see the fourth paragraph in that section) that we need to make the choice to see innocence and not to see guilt. If we make that decision, that is what we will see. It is startling to be told that we see our brothers as they are (1:2). Seeing, or perception (which is a dualistic form of knowing, requiring a seer separate from what is being seen), simply cannot apprehend the reality of what we are. What we are seeing is always a symbol, an imperfect representation. No wonder it is so easy for perception to be perception. Misperception in terms of guilt and innocence happens like this: I see guilt in myself. I want to get rid of it, so I project it onto a brother. I see him as guilty because I want to, I have chosen to. I think this will get rid of my guilt. Correction of perception happens in reverse: I realize that I am not at peace and therefore I must have decided wrongly. I decide to see my brother as innocent. When I have truly made that choice, I will see his innocence. That is a law: "You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there" (T-25.III.1:3). When you want only love, love is all you will see (T-12.VII.8:1). What we are seeing is always what we to see because we want to see it. "It is to this alone that I respond, however much I seem to be impelled by outside happenings" (1:4). The Course is obviously aware that the way it describes perception is definitely not how it seems to us. We are utterly convinced that we are seeing what we are seeing because . We believe it is the happenings outside of us that are forcing this perception upon us. When we see someone as guilty, it isn't because we are choosing to see them that way-they guilty! We think we are just seeing what is the truth. The Course hears our objections and replies, "No matter how much it seems that way to you, I am telling you, you are wrong; you are responding to what you want to see, not what is really there." "Forgiveness is a choice" (1:1). We can see our brother as guilty, or as innocent, and the choice is one hundred percent up to us; it has nothing to do with what he did or did not do. My willingness to see my brother as innocent is the harbinger of my willingness to see myself as innocent (1:6-7). When I am ready to choose to see my brother as innocent, it shows that I have begun to let go of the guilt in my mind that caused me to desire to see him as guilty. Seeing one another as innocent, seeing one another as sinless, restores the memory of God to us (2:1). There is a formula that runs through the Course: First, we see the face of Christ in one another; then we remember God. "In him I find my Self, and in Your Son I find the memory of You as well" (2:3). So if I want to remember God, what can I do? to see my brother as innocent instead of guilty. We find our way to God through our brothers. WHAT IS THE EGO? Part 5: W-pII.12.3:1-3 The Son of God is egoless. (3:1) This begins a contrast between the ego and the Son of God, our true Identity. The Son of God, which is what I really am, has no ego! The ego is the sign of a limited and separated self. The Son of God is not limited or separated from God. The Son is unlimited, and coextensive with the Father; wherever God is, the Son is. They are One. There is no ego; no self that is apart from, and held distinct from, God. Our true Self does not know the madness of the ego; the concept of the death of God (or victory over Him) is inconceivable because the Son lives (abides) in God (3:2). He lives in eternal joy, and does not know sorrow or suffering. Insanity, God as enemy, sorrow, and suffering are all consequences of the ego delusion. They are as delusional, and as unreal, as the ego itself. Having been locked in this delusion of a separate self for so long, we can barely begin to imagine a state of mind in which these things simply do not exist. Yet that is where the Course is taking us: beyond the ego, beyond the madness, back into the oneness that has always been and will always be. This is our true state of mind, and it calls to us in our isolation, drawing us to return.