[acimlessons_list] Lesson 68 - March 9

[Sue Carrier Roth]

Lesson 68 - March 9

"Love holds no grievances."

PRACTICE SUMMARY:

Purpose: to feel the profound sense of peace and safety that comes
from being free of grievances. This will provide the motivation you
need to free yourself of them more and more.

Longer: 1 time, for 10-15 minutes

*	Search your mind for those you hold major grievances against, then
for those you hold seemingly minor grievances against. Notice how no
one is completely exempt, and how alone this has made you feel.

*	Resolve to see them all as friends. Say to each one in turn: "I
would see you as my friend, that I may remember you are part of me and
come to know myself." Note the progression through three stages
(friend / part of me / know myself). Try to mean each stage.

*	For the remainder, think of yourself as being at peace with a world
that is truly your friend, a world that loves and protects you, and
that you love in return. Try to actually feel safety surrounding you
like a blanket, hovering over you like wings of an angel, and holding
you up like solid rock beneath your feet.

*	Conclude by saying: "Love holds no grievances. When I let all my
grievances go I will know I am perfectly safe."

Frequent reminders: several (at least three) per hour

Say, "Love holds no grievances. I would wake to my Self by laying all
my grievances aside and wakening in Him."

Response to temptation: whenever you feel a grievance against anyone

Quickly apply the idea in this form: "Love holds no grievances. Let me
not betray my Self." The idea, of course, is that, because your Self
is love, holding grievances is an act of Self-betrayal. Think about
that.

COMMENTARY

This lesson is a powerful teaching on the effect that holding
grievances has on our minds and our thinking.

To hold a grievance is to wish harm on someone; it is, whether we
think of it that way or not, to "dream of hatred" (2:5). Some of
us--perhaps most of us--have, at times, literally dreamed of revenge
on someone we perceive as a victimizer. We have, possibly, consciously
wished someone were dead. Probably, however, we have repressed
conscious awareness of such thoughts and have deliberately forgotten
we had them. Yet even "minor" grievances are the same thing, just in
milder form. To hold a grievance is to feel you have been wronged, and
the victimizer deserves to be punished for his or her wrong-doing. To
wish someone would "get what s/he deserves" is no less hatred than to
wish them dead.

"Love holds no grievances." Holding a grievance is the converse of
love; love and grievances are mutually exclusive. Yesterday's lesson
taught us that "Love created me like Itself." To hold a grievance,
then, is to *deny* that truth; it is an assertion that I am something
other than love. We cannot know our Self as Love if we hold any
grievances because holding a grievance is teaching us the exact
opposite.

"Perhaps you do not yet fully realize just what holding grievances
does to your mind" (1:5). The teaching in the next several lines is
meaty. Our Source is Love, and we are created like that Source. When
we hold a grievance, we *seem* to be different from our Source, and
therefore seem to be cut off from Him (1:6). We are not Love, and God
is; we *must* be separate.

However, the mind cannot quite conceive of a source and its effect as
being totally different; therefore, to cope with the logical dilemma,
our mind conceives of God in our own imagined image: "It makes you
believe that He is like what you think you have become" (1:7). We
think God holds grievances, and dream up religions that speak of
"sinners in the hands of an angry God." We make an image of a
vengeful, punitive God, and cower in terror away from His presence,
fearful of our very existance.

The effects of grievances do not stop with seeming to split us off
from God, making us different and separate, and then remaking God
Himself into a terrifying, vindictive demon. Within us, our true Self
seems to fall asleep and thus to disappear from active participation,
while the part of us that "weaves illusions in its sleep appears to be
awake." We lose sight of our Self and imagine we are something else, a
grievance-holding, petty "self," angry at the world.

"Can all this arise from holding grievances? Oh, yes!" (2:2,3) We have
redefined God in our own image. We suffer guilt. We have forgotten who
we are. All this was inevitable for those that hold grievances.

We have not realized what damage we are doing to our own minds by
holding grievances. This is why the Course teaches that forgiveness is
not something we do for the sake of others; we do it for our own
well-being.

It may not seem possible to give up all grievances; that's understood
by the lesson (4:2). It isn't really a matter of possible or
impossible, however; it's just a matter of motivation. We *can* give
up any grievance; the question is, do we *want* to? So this lesson
sets out to increase our motivation by asking us to perform an
experiment. Basically, it asks us to "try to find out how you would
feel without them." The idea is, quite simply, that if we can get a
taste of what it feels like to be *without* grievances, we will prefer
the new feeling. "Try it; you'll like it!" as the commercial says. And
once we are motivated, once we *want* to let grievances go--we will.
Our minds have that much power.

Notice the use of the words "trying" and "try" in paragraph 6. We are
basically doing an exercise in imagination here. Imagine being at
peace with everyone. Imagine feeling completely safe, surrounded by
love and loving all that surrounds you. Imagine--even just for an
instant--that nothing can harm you; that you are invulnerable and
totally secure, and that what's more, there is nothing that wants to
harm you even if it could. If you can "succeed even by ever so little,
there will never be a problem in motivation ever again" (4:5).

Once you get a taste of what this state of mind feels like you are
going to *want* it. Because it feels *really* good! You are going to
become willing to do whatever it takes to experience this more and
more, for longer and longer, until it becomes permanent.

I want to emphasize that today's lesson isn't telling us, "Get rid of
all your grievances." It isn't laying down a law and making us guilty
for having grievances. It is simply trying to *motivate* us to *want*
to let them go, first by showing us how much pain (illusory harm, but
real in our experience) our grievances are bringing to our minds, and
then by getting us to experience what a mind without grievances feels
like. It is getting us to recognize that holding a grievance is a
betrayal--not of God, not of anyone else, but a betrayal of
*ourselves* as Love. Grievances make us believe we are something we
are not, and that we are not what we really are.