May 8
"The
world I see holds nothing that I want."
PRACTICE
SUMMARY
Longer: 3 times for 10 minutesPause, be still and rest. Let go all the value you have given the world. Hold it in mind as purposeless. Release your mind from the chains of this world and let it seek where it belongs. It knows the way home. Free its wings and it will gratefully fly there to rest safely within its Creator. Open your mind to Him.
Remarks: When you open your eyes you will not value anything here as much as you did before. Every time you practice thus, your whole perspective will shift just a little.
Response To Temptation: protect your mind all day
Whenever you think you see value in something in the world, refuse to chain your mind. Say with quiet certainty: "This will not tempt me to delay myself. The world I see holds nothing that I want."*
COMMENTARY
To the Holy Spirit, the only purpose of this world is the healing of the Son of God. There is nothing in the world worth striving for. "The only purpose worthy of your mind this world contains is that you pass it by, without delaying to perceive some hope where there is none" (2:3). The Holy Spirit appropriates absolutely everything in this world for the purpose of salvation and the healing of our minds. To Him, nothing has any other purpose.Therefore, the world itself holds nothing that we want. All of it is, to borrow the title from the book by Ram Dass, "grist for the mill." All of it becomes means to an end. There is nothing in the world that is an end in itself.
When we place great value on something within the world, we are trying to make it an end worth striving for in itself, something that it is not. "Each thing you value here is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this" (2:1). All our mistaken valuing accomplishes is to tie us to the world and keep us from our final healing.
The lesson is asking us to notice when we think we see some value in the world today, and when we do, to mentally reject the notion:
"This will not tempt me to delay myself. The world I see holds nothing that I want."
Copyright © 1996, The Circle of Atonement, Sedona,
Arizona, USA.
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