April 26
"God's
Will for me is perfect happiness."
"I
share God's Will for happiness for me."
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
Somewhere in our collective psyche there is a dark and terrible myth. The myth is that God's Will means suffering and sacrifice, the loss of all that we love, giving up everything that is dear to us for the sake of His Kingdom. Doing God's Will in this myth is a dark and cheerless thing. In one of her books or lectures, Marianne Williamson characterized it as, "I thought I would have to wear grey for the rest of my life."God's Will is happiness. How could Love want anything else for us? Every human being, even the lowest, wants those they love to be happy. How could we have ever imagined that God, the perfect Lover, wanted anything other than perfect happiness for us?
All our suffering, then, must come from a belief that there is some "other" will opposing God's that wants to ruin our happiness. We secretly suspect, perhaps, that that will is our own. If not, we know "they" are out there someplace, and they have it in for us. Yet there is no "other" will. There is no malevolent power stalking the universe and targeting us for destruction. There is only God.
I share God's Will for happiness for me. I am not incurably self-destructive, with some dark and unfathomable vein of antipathy towards God, the universe, and myself inescapably driving me to death. My real will is one with God's, and I will happiness. "I will there be light," as an earlier lesson said. His Will is really all I want.
The Course talks a great deal about the dark foundations of the ego that drive toward death. Those stygian currents do flow within our minds, and they do warp and befoul our experience in this world. But the Course does not leave us there, without hope. It bears the message that although the ego seems very real, it is not us. It has no power over us; it is a mistaken fabrication our minds have made. And because we made it, we can unmake it. Because we chose it, we can choose again. If we stop being afraid of those murky corners of our minds and look at them, we will recognize they have no substance. We will see through them to our true Self. We will see what those dark foundations have been hiding all this time: our own intense and burning love for God, and His for us (T-13.III.2:8). Here, in the real foundation of our being, we want what God wants, we love what God loves, and we will what God wills.
Today, then, I let myself rest in the happy thought that at the root of my being is an irresistable drive towards truth. Perhaps I do not yet experience "perfect happiness," but I will. I must. Because the heart of my heart wills it, and joins with God in willing it, and there is nothing that stands in the way that has any reality or power to resist.
"Nothing can prevent what God would have accomplished from accomplishment. Whatever your reactions to the Holy Spirit's Voice may be, whatever voice you choose to listen to, whatever strange thoughts may occur to you, God's Will is done" (T-13.XI.5:3,4).
"There is no chance that Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what He wills is as sure as He is" (T-13.XI.8:9).
Copyright © 1996, The Circle of Atonement, Sedona,
Arizona, USA.
All rights reserved.