[acimlessons_list] LESSON 133 - MAY 13

[Sue Roth]

LESSON 133 - MAY 13

"I will not value what is valueless."

PRACTICE INSTRUCTIONS

Purpose: To empty our hands of all the things we value in this world and to
reach the state of Heaven.

Longer: Two times, for fifteen minutes.

Repeat, "I will not value what is valueless, and only what has value do I
seek, for only that do I desire to find." Then try to find the valuable
within yourself. Hold in mind an honest willingness to not deceive yourself
about what is valuable. Refuse to fool yourself into thinking that the
things of this world can bring you real, lasting happiness. Try instead to
value only the eternal, in your brothers and in yourself. Empty your hands
of the treasures of this world. Open your mind and let go of its usual
attachments. In this empty, open state, come before the gate of Heaven
within you, and it will swing open, offering you the gift of everything.

Response to temptation: Whenever you feel burdened or feel confronted with a
difficult decision. 
Immediately respond by repeating, "I will not value what is valueless, for
what is valuable belongs to me." This will remind you that no decision can
be difficult, because you choose between the infinitely valuable and the
totally worthless.

COMMENTARY

The laws that govern choice are two:
*  There are only two alternatives: everything or nothing.
*  There is no compromise; there is no in-between.

The criteria for judging what is worth desiring are:
*  Will it last forever? (If not, it is nothing.)
*  Is it a choice in which no one loses? (If not, you are left with
nothing.)
*  Is the purpose free of the ego's goals? (If not, there is compromise.)
*  Is the choice free of all guilt? (If not, the real alternatives have been
obscured.)
 
These are stringent rules! They are clear, but not easily learned. How can
we know whether or not the ego's goals are intruding, for instance? "Here it
is easiest of all to be deceived" (8:5). The ego masquerades in innocence.
Yet the lesson asserts that the ego's camouflage is only "a thin veneer,
which could deceive but those who are content to be deceived" (9:1). "Its
goals are obvious to anyone who cares to look for them" (9:2). We need only
to be willing to look, and the ego detector is quite simple: guilt. "If you
feel any guilt about your choice, you have allowed the ego's goals to come
between the real alternatives" (11:2).

If I apply these criteria for choice to the decisions in my life, my life
will be constantly revolutionized. The first criterion alone rules out
absolutely every goal involving anything material, including bodies and
ordinary human relationships. Will it last forever? What lasts forever in
this world? Only love. And not all that we call love lasts forever; we've
all demonstrated that for ourselves, in all likelihood, or seen it all
around us. The assertion of the Course, by the way, is that if it doesn't
last, it wasn't love to begin with: 

Where disillusionment is possible, there was not love but hate. For hate is
an illusion, and what can change was never love.	(T-16.IV.4:3-4) 

But there is a love not of this world; a light we cannot find in the world
but which we can give to the world (see T-13.VI.11:1-2). 

As Stephen Levine has written, we cannot own love, but we can be owned by
it. And that is what is being said here.
We may think that most of our choices are not so monumental as all this. But
they are all this very choice. In every moment we are choosing to give
ourselves to love, to be taken over by it and used by it, or we are choosing
to withhold ourselves from it, in fear. To choose love is the only guiltless
choice.

It isn't complex. "Complexity is nothing but a screen of smoke, which hides
the very simple fact that no decision can be difficult" (12:3). It is the
decision: "Let me be love in this situation and nothing else." No, we don't
know how to do that. That is why we must come "with empty hands and open
minds" (13:1). Holding on to nothing, unencumbered (14:1) by any lesser
values. And with no preconceptions about what being love means-open minds.
In the words of a poem by the Christian poetess Amy Carmichael:

Love through me, Love of God. 
Make me like Thy clear air, 
Through which, unhindered, colors pass 
As though it were not there.