[acimlessons_list] LESSON 309 - NOVEMBER 5

[Sue Roth]

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 <you> that is awakening, it is <the Christ>. He <is> coming
again. He is coming again <in you>.
 
     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.