April 25
"Salvation
is my only function here."
"My
part is essential to God's plan for salvation."
PRACTICE
SUMMARY
REVIEW IIIPurpose: A second chance at the last 20 lessons, a chance to face how little you have learned and learn greatly by applying idea to everything in your life. You will gain such large advances that you will continue more firmly and solidly.
Overall Remarks: Please follow this format as closely as you can. If you miss a practice period because it was impossible to do at the appointed time, learning is not hindered. You need not make these practice periods up. If instead you missed because of unwillingness to give the time, learning will be hindered, and those practice periods should be made up. Be very honest with yourself. Do not camouflage your unwillingness with situations seemingly beyond your control. Learn to discern between this kind of situation and situations that are truly unsuited to practicing. Your unwillingness comes from choosing other goals over salvation. As soon as you choose salvation again, do your make-up practice periods as a replacement for your devotion to other goals.
Longer: 2--in morning and in last hour before sleep (ideally first and last 5 minutes of your waking day) 5 minutes (longer if you prefer)
* Read over the day's ideas and comments.
* Then lean back in faith and let your mind use them as it chooses. Let it think about them and relate them to your needs, problems and concerns. Trust your mind to do this wisely and to be guided by the Holy Spirit, for He has chosen your mind as His means for saving you. He has given these ideas to you in perfect faith you will use them well. Give them to your mind in the same perfect faith.
Shorter: at the beginning of every half hour for a moment
* Repeat applicable idea (on the hour, the first idea; on the half hour, the second idea).
* Allow your mind to rest in silence and peace for a moment.
Remarks: These shorter practice periods are at least as important as the longer. Do not forget them. You have tended to skip these and not apply the idea to all that you encounter. Your learning has thus been limited and its gifts weak.
Shorter/Response To Temptation: in between the half hour marks
Do not lay the idea down after the half hour reviews. Take it with you into your affairs and apply it to them, making them holy. If you forget or your peace is shaken, think of it again.
Remarks: The practice periods are meant to teach you the habit of applying idea to everything you do. The idea is meant to serve you with unlimited usefulness at all times and places and whenever you need any kind of help.
COMMENTARY
My job is to forgive the world for all of my mistakes (1:2). Unless I have some idea of the Text's teaching about projection I won't have clue as to what this means. Every "sin" I see out there in the world (even things like terrorist bombings) is, in some way, a projection of a judgment I have made on myself. My reluctance to forgive anything or to see it as a call for love which merits a response of healing love is a reflection of the degree to which I haven't forgiven myself. The form I perceive "out there" may be shifted, altered and transmogrified from my own form of "sin" so that I don't recognize it. In fact, so far as the ego is concerned, the more unrecognizable the better. But the content is always the same. I may not blow up children but if I judge those who do as unforgivable I am harboring a belief in vengeance that I haven't forgiven in myself, and my judgment of the bombers is my judgment of myself.Therefore, when I release the world from guilt I have released myself.
My only function is to forgive. Not to be a success in the world, not to change anything, just to forgive. It's only when I accept this that I come to real inner peace.
My doing this--my part in forgiveness--is essential to the whole process. For the world to find its complete guiltlessness I must stop laying guilt on it. There are people around me today who need guilt lifted from their shoulders, and doing that is why I meet them. It may look like I'm doing business, buying and selling, teaching, mending broken bones or programming computers, but the real reason I am here is to save the world, to forgive, and to release from guilt.
Copyright © 1996, The Circle of Atonement, Sedona,
Arizona, USA.
All rights reserved.