[acimlessons_list] Lesson 68 - March 9

[Sue 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.