[acimlessons_list] Lesson 307 - November 3

[Sue Roth]

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 <all minds> 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.