[acimlessons_list] Lesson 286 - October 13

[Sue Roth]

Lesson 286 - October 13

"The hush of Heaven holds my heart today."

PRACTICE INSTRUCTIONS 

See complete Part II practice 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 prayer for this lesson is without doubt one of the
most beautiful prayers in the Course. I call it the "I Need Do Nothing
Prayer." It induces a wonderful state of rest and peace. I recommend taking
a chunk of time today-fifteen to thirty minutes-and praying this prayer over
and over again, slowly and meaningfully, sinking more deeply into it each
time. Don't close your eyes and zone out after the first time; you'll be
grateful for the experience if you stay with it. To aid in this process,
I've broken the prayer into three parts and have put some extra lines after
each line of the prayer, to draw out its meaning.

A Day of Doing Nothing

1. Father, how still today!

          Let me imagine a day of perfect stillness, 
          in which everything is resting, everything is at peace, 
          glowing with a soft radiance.

2. How quietly do all things fall in place! 

          Normally, life seems to be a chaotic jumble of conflicting
elements.
          But today, all things have quietly fallen into their proper place.
          As I look out on the world, everything is exactly where it
belongs.

3. This is the day that has been chosen as the time in which I come to
understand the lesson 
that there is no need that I do anything. 

          This is the day You have appointed for me to finally realize, 
          "I need do nothing."

Rest from Doing

4. In You is every choice already made. 

          This is why I need do nothing.
          In You all those hard choices that face me have already been made.
          Let me feel myself resting in You, no more difficult decisions to
make.

5. In You has every conflict been resolved.

          I feel constantly surrounded by conflict, 
          trying to resolve one while hoping that the others will not spring
out of control.
          But in You, all my conflicts are forever behind me.

6. In You is everything I hope to find already given me. 

          I am always seeking, striving to find the happiness and safety
that I lack.
          But in You, I can rest from seeking, for I have found. In You I
have everything.


The Peace that Is Mine

7. Your peace is mine. 

          You are totally free from choice, conflict, and seeking.
          Your peace must be limitless, unfathomable! 
          Yet because I am in You, Your peace is mine.

8. My heart is quiet, and my mind at rest. 
          In Your peace, with no need to do anything, 
          I am totally at rest, completely filled.

9. Your Love is Heaven, and Your Love is mine. 
          What could be more heavenly than being loved by You?
          And I am loved by You; You love me with all that You are.
          I need only accept Your Love, and Heaven is mine.

COMMENTARY

"How quietly do all things fall in place!" (1:2). I love that line! That is
what realization is like; things just quietly fall into place, and there is
nothing to do.

"This is the day that has been chosen as the time in which I come to
understand the lesson that there is no need that I do anything" (1:3).

Several years ago in a study group, we read a section that described the
state of <knowledge>. Someone asked if it is possible for an individual to
attain this, or do we all have to do it together? "Is everybody waiting for
me? Am I waiting for everybody else?" The leader (I'll call him Ted) began
to discuss Jesus and how we are all in this together.

"Then Jesus isn't in this state of knowledge yet either, is he?" said the
questioner.
I injected myself into the discussion: "Yes, he is. Jesus has passed from
perception to knowledge. <And so have you.">

We are "at home in God, dreaming of exile" (T-10.I.2:1). We are all already
in Heaven. (Actually we never left.) The story is already over! We're at the
end, looking back and remembering. "We're living a rerun," someone said.
"The fact that Jesus has already done it is the guarantee that we all will
do it, we all will experience what he has experienced because we are really
all one mind," Ted said.

This is the reason that "I need do nothing." We all continue to make the
error that we have to accomplish something. We think that there is this
great mountain to climb, the mountain of enlightenment or perfection. We may
believe Jesus has climbed it, along with others like Buddha, but we think
we're still at the bottom looking up. We are intimidated by how hard it is
going to be, awed by all the work that has to be done, discouraged by the
thought of how far we have to go to get there.

These thoughts are simply the way the ego tries to handle the situation when
you finally get a glimpse of the promised land, of the realm of knowledge
that God intends for you to live in.

The ego can accept the idea that return is necessary because it can so
easily make the idea seem difficult. Yet the Holy Spirit tells you that even
return is unnecessary, because what never happened cannot be difficult.
However, you can make the idea of return both necessary and difficult. Yet
it is surely clear that the perfect need nothing, and you cannot experience
perfection as a difficult accomplishment, because that is what you are.
(T-6.II.11:1 - 4)
The ego tries to convince you that what you have seen is something you lack
instead of something you <already have>. "In You is everything I hope to
find already given me" (1:6). <You are what you have been looking for>.

The Christ-nature is not something you have to develop. You don't have to
slave over the ego trying to change it into a Christ! That simply isn't
possible. If you think you have to <become> the Christ, you have put
yourself in a situation where "You can't get there from here." And that is
exactly where the ego wants you to be.

The Christ-nature is Who you really are! You just don't remember. It is
already inside you. It is you. You think you are something else, but you
aren't. That is the illusion the ego has cast. You think the ego is you! You
think that all this awful stuff, all this miserable little worm nature, this
weakling, this sniveling coward, is what you are. That is not you. The ego
is not you. The ego is not anything, and not anywhere; it is just a thought
you have about yourself, a thought that is wholly false. Christ "is the only
part of you that has reality in truth" (W-pII.6.3:2).

When you feel as if you have to struggle, when you feel as if you have to
make all kinds of difficult choices, then you are seeing yourself as an ego,
at the bottom of the mountain looking up. When you see yourself as the
Christ, there is nothing to do.

Our only problem is thinking we have a problem. The thought that "I don't
have it yet" is the problem. We need to be enlightened from thinking we need
to be enlightened. All that has to change is that thought, and the thought
changes nothing, does nothing, because we are always already enlightened,
always already happy, always already perfect. God created us that way and we
can't change it; all we can do is forget it and pretend we are something
else.

In today's moment of quiet we can taste the flavor of that stillness in
which there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. "The stillness of today will
give us hope that we have found the way, and travelled far along it to a
wholly certain goal" (2:1). We can taste the reality of the end, even in the
midst of our traveling; we can know the goal is "wholly certain," and even
inevitable.

     Today we will not doubt the end which God Himself has promised us. 
     We trust in Him, and in our Self, Who still is one with Him.	(2:2
- 3)

What Is the Holy Spirit?

Part 6: W-pII.7.3:2 - 3

What are "the means you made, by which you would attain what is forever
unattainable" (3:2)? The unattainable is, of course, separation, or life
that is separate from God. The means we made to attain this goal include our
bodies, the illusions of choices (alternatives to God and to love), fear,
attack, conflict, denial, special relationships, sights and sounds, and the
whole phenomenal world of perception. The Holy Spirit understands all of
these things perfectly. He knows exactly what they are, how they work, and
why we made them.
"And if you offer them to Him, He will employ the means you made for exile
to restore your mind to where it truly is at home" (3:3).

This is the miracle. Everything we made to exile ourselves from God can be
used to restore our minds to their real home. But for that to happen we must
"offer them to Him." He is the bridge between what we made and what we are.
He is "the Great Transformer of perception" (T-17.II.5:2). He can completely
reverse the purpose of everything we made in madness, and use it to restore
us to sanity. If we give those things to Him.

And so we need to bring all these things to Him, asking Him to use them for
His purposes, rather than the purpose for which we made them. Give Him our
bodies. Give Him our special relationships. Give Him our power of decision.
Give Him our attack thoughts, our defenses, our very denial. (He can use
even denial to "deny the denial of truth" [T-12.II.1:5].) Give Him our
perceptions, our eyes and ears. Give Him our whole world and everything in
it. He will not take them away from us. He will take them and use them to
restore us to Heaven.