[acimlessons_list] LESSON 267 - SEPTEMBER 24

[Sue Roth]

LESSON 267 - SEPTEMBER 24

My heart is beating in the peace of God.

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.

Commentary

This is a short Workbook lesson, but very powerful. It is one of those very
positive lessons that say wonderful things about us. If most of you are like
me-and I am certain you all are to some degree-often when you read a lesson
like this, there is a kind of mental filtering going on. The lesson says,
"Now is my mind healed" (1:4), and you instantly edit it. "Well, partly."
"My mind will be healed some day." "My mind is in the process of being
healed." We dilute the meaning. When it says, "Peace fills my heart, and
floods my body with the purpose of forgiveness" (1:3), we are tempted to
deny that it is so and to think, "Peace is not flooding my heart." The ego
is constantly trying to negate the truth about ourselves.

What the Course is saying about us often does not fit the picture of
ourselves we have in our mind. The very low opinion of ourselves that we
constantly maintain is one of our major problems. When we do a Workbook
meditation, we need to practice letting go of that poor self-image for a
while. The Course is constantly saying that we actively block from our
awareness a true picture of who and what we really are. The Workbook
meditations are part of our training in letting go of our self-made picture,
and accepting God's picture instead. Somewhere within each of us there is a
dim flicker of recognition that this paragraph is about us, and not about
some impossibly distant saint. It is that little spark, as the Course calls
it, that the Holy Spirit wants to fan into a flame.

That is the whole point of the Course. We are underestimating ourselves,
undervaluing ourselves. "I am a messenger of God" (1:6). I really am. I may
feel like something much less than that, but I am always that messenger. I
always have all I need to save the world.

As you read this lesson today, attempt not to edit the lesson in your mind.
When it says, "Now is my mind healed," just let that be true for you right
now. Don't worry about how you were all day yesterday. Don't worry about how
your mind will be after the meditation is over. Just for that moment, let it
be so. Agree with the way the vision of Christ sees you, and say in
response, "Yes, now is my mind healed."

Read slowly, to give yourself time to absorb each phrase. We need time,
mostly to spot the negative responses that the ego mind will be throwing up
and to, quite simply, ignore them. Don't fight or argue with the ego. Just
decide, for these few minutes, not to listen. Just decide, for these few
minutes, to listen to the Voice for God.

WHAT IS THE BODY?

Part 7: W-pII.5.4:1-2

What a shift there is as paragraph 4 begins! We have been told the body is a
fence to separate parts of our Self from other parts (1:1); the body is
impermanent (2:1, 3); the "proof" in its death that God's eternal Son can be
destroyed (2:9); and a dream, made of fear, made to be fearful (3:1, 4).
Now, with a change of purpose, everything suddenly changes: "The body is the
means by which God's Son returns to sanity" (4:1).
It's worth stopping and repeating that to myself: "The body is the means by
which God's Son returns to sanity." With all the apparently negative things
the Course says about the body, this is an astonishing statement. Most of
us, certainly myself, could do with a good, solid shot of some positive
thoughts about the body like this. I find that making it personal helps to
bring it home: "My body is the means by which God's Son returns to sanity."

Instead of the negative, almost hateful attitude of some religions towards
the body, attitudes that make a person impatient to get out of the body and
leave it behind, this statement of the Course gives one an affirmative
attitude towards the body. "This body is my way home!" How can the body be
our way back to sanity?

It becomes that when we change its purpose. We substitute "the goal of
Heaven" in place of "the pursuit of hell" (4:2). We begin to use the body to
express and to extend the love that the body was made to shut out, and shut
in. Clearly this implies physical activity in the world, since anything
involving the body is, by definition, physical. 

Remember what Jesus said to us back in Review V:

<For this alone I need; that you will hear the words I speak, and give them
to the world. You are my voice, my eyes, my feet, my hands through which I
save the world.	(W-pI.rV.In.9:2-3)>

This is how the body becomes "the means by which God's Son returns to
sanity." As we give our bodies to serve God's purposes in this world, using
our voices, our eyes, our feet, and our hands to give Jesus' words to the
world (perhaps verbally, or by example, or through physical assistance,
helping and healing), our minds are healed, along with the minds of those
around us. In this physical dream, God needs physical messengers. And you
and I are those messengers.