[acimlessons_list] Lesson 314 - November 10

Tue Nov 9 06:26:45 EST 2004

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+ COMMENTARIES ON LESSONS FROM THE WORKBOOK OF A COURSE IN MIRACLES
+ by Allen Watson, with Practice Summaries by Robert Perry, 
+ of The Circle of Atonement
+ Visit our website at <http://www.circleofa.com <http://www.circleofa.com/>
>
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Lesson 314 - November 10

"I seek a future different from the past."

PRACTICE SUMMARY

Purpose: To take the last few steps to God. To wait for Him to take the
final step.

Morning/Evening Quiet Time: as long as needed.

Read the written lesson.

Use idea and prayer to introduce time of quiet. Do not depend on the words.
Use them as a simple invitation to God to come to you.

Sit silently and wait for God. Wait in quiet expectancy for Him to reveal
Himself to you. Seek only direct, deep, wordless experience of Him. Be
certain of His coming, and unafraid. For He has promised that when you
invite Him, He will come. You ask only that He keep His ancient promise,
which He wills to keep. These times are your gift to Him.

Hourly Remembrance: Do not forget.

Give thanks to God that He has remained with you and will always be there to
answer your call to Him.

Frequent Reminder: As often as possible, even every minute.

Remember the idea. Dwell with God, let Him shine on you.

Response To Temptation: When you are tempted to forget your goal.

Use idea as a call to God and all temptation will disappear.

Reading: preceding one of the day's moments of practice.

Slowly read "What is...?" section.

Think about it a while.

Overall Remarks: Now, in this final part of the year that you and Jesus have
spent together, you begin to reach the goal of practicing and of the course.
Jesus is so close that you cannot fail. You have come far along the road. Do
not look back. Fix you eyes on the journey's end. You could not have come
this far without realizing that you want to know God. And this is all He
requires to come to you.

(See also Part II Introduction)

COMMENTARY

In the ego's perception, the future is only the result of the past; it is
little more than the past itself extended beyond the present. To the ego,
the past determines the future. In the perception of the Holy Spirit, "The
future now is recognized as but extension of the present" (1:2). What we
choose to perceive and to believe in the now determines what the future will
be like; the future is not determined by the past. "Past mistakes can cast
no shadows on it, so that fear has lost its idols and its images, and being
formless, it has no effects" (1:3).

By letting go of the past and realizing that it cannot touch me now, I bring
into being a future different from the past. My present choice for
salvation, my present willingness to accept the Atonement for myself,
deprives the past of all its fear. The "idols and images" (1:3) of fear are
things such as all the guilt of the past and all the false perceptions of
the past. They are no longer available to fear when I have released the past
into God's hands and have accepted forgiveness for myself. I am beginning
from this present moment with a clean slate. Without the forms of past idols
and images, fear can have no effects.

Based on the guilt of the past my future was certain death. But with the
past released from "sin," and life now my present goal, death has no claim
on me (1:4). My physical body will still "die" most likely (barring some
rare miracle of being caught up into heaven in a whirlwind, like Elijah in
the Bible, II Kings 2), although the body does not truly die because it
never lives; but since I am not my body, I will not die, and I will not fear
death. "All the needed means are happily provided" (1:4). When my mind is
straightened out and my goal is life, everything I need to reach my goal is
provided by the Holy Spirit. "When the present has been freed" from all
guilt and all fear, that present will simply extend "its security and peace
into a quiet future filled with joy" (1:5).

The key is in allowing my mind to be freed from guilt and fear right now. I
can practice doing this in the holy instant. I can take a moment and allow
the peace and security this lesson speaks of to flood my mind. I can bring
my guilt and hurt and pain and anger to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to
heal my mind. As I do this more and more the peace will extend itself
outward into my day. Perhaps the most common testimony of people who have
been studying the Course for some time is, "I am much more peaceful than I
ever was before." It works. And as that peace grows in the present, as more
and more of our present moments are spent in that peace of mind, the future
will more and more be filled with joy.

Let me, then, "choose to use the present to be free." How many of my present
moments are spent grieving or sorrowing about the past, lamenting things
lost? How many present moments are spent in fear of something future? Let me
choose to use the present differently. Let me choose, every time I am aware
of the present, to use that moment for peace and for nothing else. To do so
is the way out of hell. Leave the future in God's Hands. Leave past mistakes
behind (2:2). Let me lay my life in God's Hands, "sure that You will keep
Your present promises, and guide the future in their holy light" (2:2).

WHAT IS THE LAST JUDGMENT? (Part 4)

W-pII.10.2:3-6

When all of creation, every mind, has at last accepted the new perception of
the world as without sin and without purpose, the world will end. "Without a
cause" (2:3), I think, refers to the world's being seen without sin, for sin
and its companion, guilt, in the Course's view, caused the world. "Without a
function" (2:3) then would mean the same thing as "purposeless" (2:2). To
the ego, the purpose of the world is destruction, or punishment. Once the
cause and the function of the world have been removed from all minds, the
world "merely slips away to nothingness" (2:3).

As the Manual for Teachers puts  it, "The world will end when its thought
system has been completely reversed" (M-14.4:1). (You may want to read this
entire, beautiful section ("How Will the World End?"), particularly its
moving final paragraph.) In the vision of the Course, the end of the world
is not a cataclysm, nor is it some great triumph by heavenly hosts, but a
quiet melting away, merely the disappearance of an illusion whose apparent
necessity has ended.

"There [in nothingness] it was born, and there it ends as well" (2:4). In
other words, the world was made up out of nothing, and nothing will be left
when it disappears. Only the thoughts of love expressed are real and
eternal. Everything else goes, including "the figures in the dream," that
is, our bodies, which--with sin gone as cause and death gone as their
purpose--will simply "fade away" (2:5-6). As we have read often before, in
earlier "What is" sections and in the Text, the body was made by the ego for
its purposes. The Holy Spirit can, and does, co-opt the body for His
purposes as long as we are in the dream. He is leading us to realize that
"what is false is false, and what is true has never changed" (1:1), and once
that purpose has been achieved by us all, the body no longer has any
purpose. It simply fades away.

One last phrase is added: "...because the Son of God is limitless" (2:6).
The body fades away <because> the Son is limitless, and the body is a limit.
When our minds have been returned to Christ, fully, we will no longer have
any need of limitation. What we are is limitless, and a limited body would
be useless to us.

This is the "end of all things" as the Course sees it. How, then, should we
live now, still within the dream, but knowing this is its ending? We "need
merely learn how to approach it [the ending]; to be willing to go in its
direction" (M-14.4:5). We cooperate with the Holy Spirit, today and every
day, in learning to look upon the world without condemnation, to see it as
totally forgiven. We allow Him to teach us that there is no purpose <in the
world>, and to gradually wean us of our attachment to it. We open ourselves
more and more to the vision, growing within us, of the limitless Son of God.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+ Commentary by Allen Watson
+ Practice Summary: Robert Perry
+ Available in book format from The Circle
+ of Atonement (Vol. 1 reprint due by end of 2004, write us for info)
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