A Course in Miracles Lesson 144

My mind holds only what I think with God.

There is no love but God’s (Lesson 127).
The world I see holds nothing that I want (Lesson 128).

Our minds hold only what we think with God. Let us imagine that today God wants us to think how there is no Love but God’s and the world that we see holds nothing that we want.

What does it mean that there is no Love but God’s?

It might mean that what we are calling love right now is not love at all but something else. This is hard to think about but doing so can be helpful.

Say that I love my dog very much. My love for my dog is as close to unconditional and perfect as you can get. Very few people rank above my dog in terms of how I love them. This is my truth! I’m not going to pretend otherwise . . .

The first thing God would notice is that we are pretending love has degrees. We are pretending that there is such a thing as a little love and a lot of love, and that we know what the difference is and how to apply it. But there is only love! If it has degrees – if it produces differences that seem to matter – then it’s not love. It’s hate. What else but hate would deny the totality of Love?

That makes sense intellectually but it still feels wrong, doesn’t it. It feels like there’s something good in my love for my dog; it doesn’t feel like hate. It doesn’t feel like something God would condemn. Help me move on from maybe – to greater and greater understanding and expression of love, sure – but not condemn.

And, indeed, that is exactly how my love fro my dog – which is a form of hate so far as the world of form goes – is gently redeemed and brought into such proximate alignment with God’s that it becomes a veritable beacon of holiness unto all to the world.

In other words, since the only Love is God’s Love, then even this little tiny love between Sean and his dog is God’s Love. The beam of light that thought it was separate from the sun is gathered back into all the light there is. “The ripple without the ocean is inconceivable” (T-18.VIII.4:6).

If this true – if all love is God’s Love, and God’s Love does not admit to difference or distinction at all – then what remains but that Love? All the forms dissolve – the dog, the friend, the lover, the child, the blue book named A Course in Miracles. Who needs to limit content to form when they learn they have all the content there is, no form necessary?

The world holds nothing that we want because we already have everything we want, which is God’s Love, which is all the Love there is.

This is the way to peace.

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A Course in Miracles Lesson 157

Into His Presence I would enter now.

Let us take this lesson in two parts, in recognitition of both its simplicity and its depth.

The first part – the part that we practice – is simply to be still, as often as possible, for as long as is feasible, in anticipation of “a touch of Heaven” (W-pI.157.3:1). We do nothing but offer ourselves empty-handed to Creation. We make no demands, refuse all fantasies, and simply wait. Here I am, Lord. Your Will, not mind, be done.

He will direct your practicing today, for what you ask for now is what He wills. And having joined your will with His this day, what you are asking must be given you. Nothing is needed but today’s idea to light your mind, and let it rest in still anticipation and in quiet joy . . . (W-pI.157.4:1-3).

It is hard to do this! And sometimes, that is the lesson. That our anticipation and expectation cloud the openness in which God’s gifts to us are recognized and received. I want my touch of Heaven now! And I want it to look and feel like everything I dream of. These thoughts are not crimes against God or Nature but they do block the gentle flow that is our awareness of Heaven.

That is why we practice often and in a sustained way. We want to become aware of the way in which ego – under the guise of sincerity and enthusiasm – can drown out the Voice for God.

This leads to our second – more metaphysical, more analytical – understanding of this lesson.

Heaven is not of the world. A Course in Miracles is not about refining our experience of being embodied; it is not about perfecting the world by bringing it to some new order. This world is a dream, and like all dreams is gone when the mind that dreams it wakes up.

Thus, awakening is not an actual event, like those that occur in the world. Nor does it happen to anybody – like Sean or whomever. That is why the course teaches us that experiences of Heaven cannot be given directly (W-pI.157.6:2).

And yet.

Something happens that “leaves a vision in our eyes which we can offer everyone, that they may come the sooner to the same experience in which the world is quietly forgot, and Heaven is remembered for a while” (W-pI.157.6:3).

If you ask what the something is, there is no answer. If you covet the something, then there is nothing to be gained. If you fake the something, you refuse the something.

All we can do is be humble and come with empty hands to God, saying – and meaning, with the intensity of one who has learned their will is wholly inadequate to the work of Love – your will, not mine, be done.

In the world – in the body – this will be translated to a happy dream in which the world “becomes a little closer to the end of time; a little more like Heaven in its ways; a little nearer its deliverance” (W-pI.157.7:1). And we, in turn, will learn that we are not bodies, eventually no longer even needing bodies in order to spread the light of Love (e.g., W-pI.157.7:3).

Not needing bodies to communicate is a big leap for most of us . . .

Heaven is beyond our imagination, yet we know it (W-pI.157.8:1). It cannot be taught because it cannot be learned (W-pI.157.9:3). It merely is. We “see” it as a vision – first of Christ’s Face (which we will remember in the world – it is simply the face of your brother or sister), and then of the sweet nothingness that language can neither compass nor encompass.

So Lesson 157 inaugurates a new phase of our study and practice. It emphasizes the radical nature of its metaphysics while simultaneously emphasizing the way in which those metaphsyics are realized. We literally do nothing but make ourselves as empty and open unto God as possible. God does the rest, because it is already done. All our learning – our devotion and intensity, all our discipleship – is but a dream that ended long ago.

←Lesson 156
Lesson 158→

The Mutuality of Prayer

When I was growing up it sometimes seemed as if prayers were offered up to just about anybody, so long as they had some connection to the Christian monotheistic tradition. God, the saints, Mary, dead relatives, Jesus, Jesus’s dog. If you had ears – or had once had ears – then you were a fit object for prayer. I wondered sometimes if it mattered how we directed our prayer. Were prayer requests to Jesus more likely to yield fruit than those offered to our grandparents? Or Saint Jude? I used to pray to trees and flowers. Was that okay, too?

When it comes to prayer – especially prayer that is linked to getting some thing or some result (what is traditionally called petitionary prayer) – we all want the secret sauce. How do you pray to God for help? How do you ensure a response? Are there any guarantees when we pray?

One way to approach prayer is to focus less on results and more on process. We should not come to God and Jesus the way we approach real estate agents or car salesmen. It is not a question of bringing our A game, the better to maximize returns. It is closer to marriage, closer to parenting. It’s closer to a friendship that lasts a lifetime. Sometimes, it is important to ask what we can offer. Sometimes it’s better not to think about our needs and wants but to focus on those of others. It’s not that God is going to turn away from us in anger or disgust. It’s just that we love God, too. Why not act that way?

If we are honest, this makes intuitive sense. God is not in the dark about our lives. It is not like we are filling in the blanks for a boss who only thinks of us when we come in for a raise or to complain about office politics. As Jesus said so long ago, “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”

There is real comfort in that line. If we really give attention to it – if we are open to it – then we see that it calls on us to be faithful. It asks that we take a deep breath and be a little slower to judge what’s going on in what we are calling our lives in what we are calling the world. Behind every plea to God that our lives be changed – whether we’re pulling for more sun during the family vacation or the removal of fatal cancer cells – is the notion that we know better than God what’s right and good and necessary. And we really have to question the wisdom of that conclusion. We have to consider the possibility that we don’t have a clue – or at least that somebody else might have more clues than we do. As Bill Thetford said to Helen Schucman, there must be a better way, right.

Does this mean that prayer is fruitless? Beside the point? Or maybe just a matter of listening rather than talking? Or something else altogether?

Not necessarily. Nor, by the way, are we supposed to play it tough. If we’re scared or in pain, then we should bring it to God. By all means we should talk to God, if talking to God is what works, what resonates, what comforts, what helps. Reach for the hand of Jesus. If your best friend or your child needed you to listen to them, would you turn away? Would you tell them to suck it up?

It’s always okay – it’s more than okay – to turn to God or Jesus (or Buddha or a grandmother or Saint Therese) when we’re in need. Those are important prayers. What I am suggesting – gently, gently – is that we reconsider the nature of our investment in prayer. Are we asking for comfort or are we asking for a specific result that we’ve decided is right? It is another of asking: are we trusting a ay other than our own?

To trust God is to be faithful. To trust God is to see your own self differently. It is to recognize the futility of self-directed and self-obsessed effort. It is to seek a better way. When we are really in that space of trust it helpfully shifts the focus from our own efforts to an effort – a source – that transcends us. It’s a letting go of what is small in favor of what is grand and inclusive and joyful. It’s not academic or intellectual. It can be done in our lives – an embodied experience – and we can feel its effects.

Prayer has its own energy. That’s one of the reasons it can be fruitfully compared to significant relationships. There’s nothing static about it. What works today might not work tomorrow. What worked ten years ago and hasn’t been tried since might make a sudden reappearance. It’s a two way street. It has to be.

That, in the end, is what we can rely on: the mutuality of prayer. Whether we come to the zafu or the prie dieu or the bedroom rocker or a favorite tree in the forest . . . we go there to meet the One who is there because that is where we go to meet them.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 143

My mind holds only what I think with God.

In quiet I receive God’s Word today (Lesson 125).
All that I give is given to myself (Lesson 126).

“Quiet” in this context refers to what is going on in our minds, not what is happening externally. You can practice this lesson on a bench in Times Square or a mountain Zendo equally.

It’s true setting up a space in which to pray can be helpful. It’s true waking a little earlier in order to be alone is often helpful. Those conditions can help our as yet-untrained minds settle.

But they are not necessary. They are not required. What is necessary is to give attention to what is happening in our minds. What are we thinking about? What can we not help but think about? What should we think more about and who decided? How do thoughts drive feelings and vice-versa? Isn’t everything we do an effect of thought? Isn’t the world just a thought upon a thought upon a thought?

When we see the tangled skein these questions weave and never quite leave behind via that elusive thought named “answer,” we might get curious if there is anything beyond or outside thought. If thought doesn’t know, what does? We might look into this nonconceptual awareness we hear about. We might discover what Tara Singh called the space between thoughts.

When we do this over and over – this is a very rigorous process until it’s not – we might find a kindness and an intelligence that is not of thought and not of the body either. What is it? Can we be in dialogue with it? Does it know us? How?

The answers to these questions are subsumed by what A Course in Miracles calls “God’s Word.” It doesn’t matter what we call it. What matter is our willingness to listen and to understand. Our willingness is our declaration that there must be another way.

When we make this declaration we do not make it alone. We make it for all our brothers and sisters, from the dust motes to tiger sharks to quasars. And some of them – channeling Helen Schucman unto Bill Thetford – will answer us. They will say: yes, I will help you find this other way. Let’s begin right now.

Does it make sense? You are not sitting quietly alone today – you are sitting with everyone, and everyone is sitting with you. Everything you give is given to yourself and all I can say is thank you. Thank you.

←Lesson 142
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A Course in Miracles Lesson 142

My mind holds only what I think with God.

I thank my Father for His gifts to me (Lesson 123).
Let me remember I am one with God (Lesson 124).

Tara Singh said that when he worked closely with Helen Schucman at the beginning of his ACIM study and practice, she encouraged him write a daily gratitude journal. For what was he thankful each day? It was at least for a time a staple of his spiritual life.

Gratitude cannot be alien to our practice of A Course in Miracles. It is a means by which our heart and mind are purified of sorrow and confusion, and are thus prepared to give attention to fear, which – regardless of its many forms – is the sole block to our remembrance of Love as our inheritance in Creation.

Thus, today’s summary of Lessons 123 and 124 neatly encapsulates our spiritual awakening: we are thankful for the gift of life through which we can remember that we are one with God, and thus beyond the reach of death and loss. This is happy news!

To know this is to know also that our mind can hold only what we think with God. Everything else is an illusion; everything else is a dream. Our honesty in this regard aligns us with the Truth as God created it, which undoes our mistaken belief in separation as a real event with real effects. Even our mere willingness to be honest undoes the ego’s deception.

Perhaps we begin our morning contemplation with a brief recognition of all that for which we are grateful today, and then offer that thankfulness to our Creator. The One who has blessed us will not fail to bless us now, nor hide from us the truth that blessings are made to reveal. What else could Love do or be?

In gratitude, we remember God, and for this we are more thankful than words can say. In this way, we enter silent communion with all life, lifting in shared praise our hearts to Heaven.

←Lesson 141
Lesson 143→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 141

My mind holds only what I think with God.

Forgiveness is the key to happiness (Lesson 121).
Forgiveness offers everything I want (Lesson 122).

The happiness envisioned by A Course in Miracles is not the happiness of getting what we want and getting rid of what we don’t want. Rather, it is the quiet and sustainable contentment of one who know they cannot be apart from Creation, much less their Creator.

Confident in the knowledge that they are wholly innocent and can only create in the image of their Creator, miracle workers rest easily in imperturbable joy. Their happiness is immune to the comings and goings of the world, and it cannot be contained by – though it can be expressed through – a body.

Forgiveness – which is seeing clearly the innocence of all Creation, and knowing that sin is impossible – is the foundation upon which this natural happiness is built. Forgiveness reflects a mind that does not seek conflict but the end of conflict, and that wants to serve its brothers and sisters, not defeat or neutralize them.

For those still in the thrall of ego, this would be impossible. Therefore, the Holy Spirit becomes our indispensable ally, teaching us how to recognize thoughts which bring happiness and peace, and listening only to them.

This is easy when we remember that our minds in truth are not apart from God’s Mind, and therefore hold only the thoughts that we think with God.

Our learning process then must include contemplative silences in which we listen to the Holy Spirit, and are led by its gentle clarity to the thoughts we think with God in the Mind we share with all life, beyond the constraints of time and space.

Today, we offer that silence and contemplation to our brothers and sisters, that we might remember together the happiness that God promises us through Forgiveness, which is the great expediter of salvation.

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