[acimlessons_list] LESSON 264 - SEPTEMBER 21

[Sue Roth]

LESSON 264 - SEPTEMBER 21

"I AM SURROUNDED BY THE LOVE 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.

Practice suggestion: This is one of my favorite prayers. I recommend praying
it over and over. Give each line your full awareness. Make it a personal
communication from you to God. To aid this process, you might want to insert
the specific comments I've indicated in brackets below:

<Father, You stand before me [in that ______]>

<and behind [in that ______],

beside me [in that ______ on my right and that ______ on my left],

in the place I see myself [on this chair, couch, floor, street, etc.],

and everywhere I go [such as ______, where I am going later].

You are in all the things I look upon [like this ______ and that ______,
which I am seeing right now],

the sounds I hear [like this ______ and this ______, which I am hearing
right now],

and every hand that reaches for my own [such as the hand of ______, who
journeys with me].

In You time disappears [because every moment, being filled with You, is the
same],

and place becomes a meaningless belief [because every place, being filled
with You, is the same].

For what surrounds Your Son, [insert your name],

and keeps him safe is Love Itself [not time, not place].

There is no Source but This, and nothing is [including ______, that
difficult person in my life]

that does not share Its Holiness;

that stands beyond Your one creation,

or without the Love which holds all things within Itself.

Father, Your Son is like Yourself [and Your Son is all of us].

We come to You in Your Own Name today [we are not trespassers; we come at
your invitation],

to be at peace within Your everlasting Love>.

COMMENTARY

The bulk of today's lesson is a beautiful prayer, and my suggestion to us
all is that we take the time not only to read it, but to read it aloud, with
all the expression of which we are capable. Jesus says:

My brothers, join with me in this today. This is salvation's prayer. (2:1-2)

Will you do that? Perhaps we might pause at noon, each in our time zone, and
as we do, realize that others are joining us in that very moment to pray
this same prayer, together. And Jesus joins with us all, every time we
repeat it. "Let all the world be blessed with peace through us"
(W-pII.360.Heading).

(If you can't pause at noon, pause on another hour. Someone, somewhere, will
be joining with you.)

Imagine the effect on yourself if, at least once an hour, and more often if
possible, you simply pause for a moment and silently repeat to yourself,
with conviction, "I am surrounded by the Love of God."

"Love is your safety," says the "What Is the Body?" section (W-pII.5.5:4).
The purpose of these ten lessons is to focus our attention on love, which is
"invisible," rather than on the body, which is visible. A passage in the
Text I happen to be reading today goes right along:

When you made visible what is not true, what <is> true became invisible to
you....It is invisible to you because you are looking at something else.
(T-12.VIII.3:1, 3)

What is not seen is not therefore gone. Love is still in my mind because God
placed it there. Love is still in everything, all around me, and I will see
it if I will but stop looking at something else. Jesus says that if we look
at love enough, what is not there will become invisible to us. That process
is the shift the Course is talking about. As we learn to stop wanting to see
something other than love, we will stop seeing anything but love. That
outcome is inevitable because love is all there is.

We want to see separation, we want to see bodies, because we think somehow
that keeps us safe. It preserves our individuality. Our real safety,
however, lies in love. Our real safety lies in realizing that we are part of
that ocean of love, never ending. Body, ego, and individual consciousness
are not what need to be preserved and adhered to. Rather, we need to adhere
to Universal Consciousness and to playing our part as a synapse in that
Universal Mind, with no purpose that ends in this little cell of self, but
only a purpose that serves the whole.

The way to experience love is to give it. "For if love is sharing, how can
you find it except through itself?" (T-12.VIII.1:5). Let me today open my
heart to love the world. Let me know that this is my function. As I open to
let love out, love will flood in. It always flows both ways. And what I am
loving is myself, not a separate thing or things. I am not simply a cell; I
only exist in relationship to the universe. The whole is in every part.
Everything is related to everything else, and only the whole has meaning. I
am surrounded by the Love of God.

WHAT IS THE BODY?

PART 4: W-PII.5.2:4-9

Our identification with the body seems to protect us from love. The insanity
of the ego believes that death "proves" that we are separate. Yet in reality
there is only our oneness. If we are one, the lesson asks:

Who could attack and who could be attacked? Who could be victor? Who could
be his prey? (2:4-6)

We believe attack is real, that there are really victims and really
murderers. If our oneness remains untouched (2:4), this simply cannot be.
And therefore all such appearances must be illusory, or else the oneness
<has> been destroyed. The horrors of this world are the ego's attempts to
demonstrate the destruction of oneness. Death is the ego's demonstration
that "God's eternal Son can be destroyed" (2:9). As students of the Holy
Spirit, we deny this.

We do not deny that, within the illusion, victims and murderers exist. We do
not pretend that children have not been blown up with bombs, that genocide
is not practiced, that atrocities do not occur, that wars are not going on,
that lives and families and emotional stability are not being shredded all
over the world. All this is true <within the illusion>. What we deny is the
entirety of the illusion. We deny that this picture represents the truth. We
deny that anything real is threatened. We are aware that what we see is only
a dream. We see the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and
die, but we are not deceived by what we see (see M-12.6:6-8). We bear
witness to reality, invisible to the body's eyes, but seen by the vision of
Christ.

The truth is: Oneness is. The world, the body, and death, all deny this
truth. Our task as miracle workers is to "<deny the denial of truth>"
(T-12.II.1:5). We deny separation, the denial of oneness. We stand, with
hands outstretched to help, and by our words, our actions, our thoughts, and
above all, by our love, we demonstrate the truth of eternal oneness.

* * *

SEEING THE MEANING IN THE IDEA FOR THE DAY

Much of doing the Workbook is repeating the idea for the day, the sentence
at the top of every lesson. Therefore, if this idea falls flat in our mind,
chances are that we will not get much out of that day's practice. We might
as well be repeating some phrase in Latin. At least that is how it feels
sometimes. The remedy to this is understanding the meaning contained in that
brief sentence. This meaning is what makes the practice come alive. The more
meaning we see in those words, the more powerful will be the practice of
them.

This meaning is supplied in large measure by Text study, but also by careful
reading of the lesson. After all, most of the lesson's words are teaching
about what that idea for the day means. Therefore, we should ideally read
each line of the lesson with an eye for what it says about the meaning of
the day's idea. I prefer a kind of mental posture in which I have one eye on
the idea for the day while the other eye is reading the lesson's teaching. I
will read a sentence or paragraph in the lesson and then go back and ask how
this relates to the day's idea. This will often give that idea a different
meaning than I would have otherwise assumed, as well as a deeper and more
multifaceted meaning. In short, it will make the practice of it more
powerful and effective.

Let's see this at work in the case of Lesson 264 and its accompanying
prayer, which provides the teaching for that lesson.

LESSON 264

I AM SURROUNDED BY THE LOVE OF GOD.

When we first read this idea we would probably assume that it means there is
a presence of God that surrounds us, somewhat like an aura, and follows us
wherever we go. This in itself is a comforting thought, but let's see what
meaning the lesson's teaching puts in this idea.

<1. Father, You stand before me and behind, beside me, in the place I see
myself, and everywhere I go>.

This first sentence does not say anything too different from what we would
assume about the day's idea. It does, however, make that idea more concrete
by specifically mentioning "before," "behind" and "beside." It also makes
the idea more absolute. God is not only around me, He is everywhere I go,
and even in the place I see myself. This gives us a hint of what is to come.

<2. You are in all the things I look upon, the sounds I hear, and every hand
that reaches for my own>.

This sentence expands and deepens the idea considerably. God is not merely a
kind of invisible presence that hovers around me in, say, a four-foot
radius. He is in everything I look upon. He is not one invisible item among
a great many more visible things. He is all-pervasive. What's more, He is
even in the <sounds> I hear. Somehow it is much easier to imagine Him being
in physical objects than in sounds. Sounds are not things. They are just
vibrations in the air, just motion. This means that God is not only in
things, but also in processes, in movements. He, of course, is inside those
who walk with me. Yet He is also in their hands that reach for mine, and in
the movement of the hands as they reach, and in the sound of their
footsteps. I am literally surrounded by God, for He dwells in every sight,
sound, person, object, and movement--in everything. We have now come a long
way from God as aura.

<3. In You time disappears, and place becomes a meaningless belief>.

This sentence seems to take off in a new direction, yet it is just the
logical outcome of the previous sentences. If God is in everything, then
every place contains the same thing: God. And if every place contains the
same thing, if all places are the same, then there really is no such thing
as place. The very concept of place implies that one place is different from
another, distant from another. The same with time. If God is in every
moment, then apparently different moments are really the same, which means
that there aren't different moments. Without different moments there can't
be time. Without different places there can't be space. Therefore, "time
disappears, and place becomes a meaningless belief."

This thought is somewhat different than what I have encountered in some
spiritual teachings. I have heard many times that God is in everything, but
the impression I usually got was that those things were therefore real. By
the act of God dwelling in a rock, for instance, He is sanctioning the
rock's reality. That rock must be real, or God would not bother to be inside
of it. In fact, in these thought systems, God Himself gave birth to the rock
and dwells inside the house He created.

The Course is doing something very different with the idea. It is implying
that God is the only thing real in that rock. The form of the rock, its
physical substance, is not real at all. The form is not a manifestation of
God. It is just an illusory picture of the crazy thought that God is absent.
Thus, the rock is not really there at all. Only God is.

<4. For what surrounds Your Son and keeps him safe is Love Itself>.

This sentence takes things even further. We seem to be surrounded by time
and space. Enveloping us is space; behind us is the past; ahead of us, the
future. That is what it means to be in this world--being surrounded by time
and space. Yet the lesson has told us that what is behind and before us is
God, not past and future, not physical space. If that is really true, then
<we are not in this world at all>. We are really in God's Love, in Heaven.
If we could only see, if the scales could fall off our eyes, we would
realize that right now we are standing not in this world but in Heaven,
enveloped by His Love. We have now come very far indeed from God's Love as
four-foot aura.

<5. There is no Source but This, and nothing is that does not share Its
holiness; that stands beyond Your one creation, or without the Love Which
holds all things within Itself>.

The scope of God's Love continues to expand. Now we are not only surrounded
by God's Love, we <came> from that Love. It is our Source; what gave birth
to our being. Further, this total relationship with God's Love is now
extended to cover everyone and everything. Not just us but <everything>
comes from that Love and is made of It, sharing Its holiness. And <nothing>
has been left outside Its eternal embrace. Everything is held within It, not
within time and space. How can there be a world of time and space when there
is only Love creating more of Itself?

<6. Father, Your Son is like Yourself>.

Sentence 5 was a longer, more philosophical statement about the relationship
of the Source to everything else. Now we take those ideas and, in sentence
6, compress them into a brief, direct, and intimate statement from a Son to
his Father. "This is the only Source and everything shares Its attributes"
becomes "Father, we are all like You, because we are all Your Son." This Son
is us individually, but (given the context of the previous sentence) it is
also everyone and everything.

With this direct, intimate statement, the prayer is beginning to wrap up and
lead us into the place it has been talking about. The implied "we" of
sentence 6 continues into the prayer's concluding line.

<7. We come to You in Your Own Name today, to be at peace within Your
everlasting Love>.

The ideas the prayer has described are a kind of red carpet it has laid out
before us. Now, with this concluding line, we are meant to walk that carpet
straight into the reality of what has been discussed, the reality of God's
Love. We know that in doing so we are not just acting on our own. We are not
trespassing. We walk up to God's front door holding in our hand an
invitation from the Lord of the house Himself. We come to Him in His Own
Name. He Himself has rolled out the red carpet. How do we know this? As the
rest of the prayer says, He has already placed us forever within Himself. If
His Love is what created us and what surrounds us, and indeed is all there
is, where else would we go?

The situation we may have initially read into the idea for the day has now
been completely reversed. God's Love is not merely an aura that surrounds
us, a silent ghost we take with us on our busy tour through the world of
separate things. The world is the ghost; God's Love is the only reality
there is. It is the all-pervasive realm that beckons us beyond this shadow
world and into Itself. And not just us--It beckons everyone and everything;
all the countless minds that comprise the one Son of God.

Thus, rather than, "How nice of You, God, to come with me on my errands," we
conclude by saying, "<We> (the entire world and all living things) come to
<You>." We come to Him, to rest from our busy doings and nervous plans, to
be free of the endless parade of little objects scurrying through frantic
days. We come to Him, to leave behind the thousands of shadows that haunt
this unreal place and pass forever into the light of Heaven. As one Son, we
come to Him to forget all anxious separate identities as together we find
eternal rest in His boundless Arms. We come to Him to be at peace within His
everlasting Love.

"I am surrounded by the Love of God" means so much more than we ever would
have guessed at first. Holding in mind this deeper, broader, expanded
meaning, do you think that practicing this lesson would be any different?