LESSON 221
August 9

"Peace to my mind. Let all my thoughts be still."

PRACTICE SUMMARY

(See Part II Practice Summary, and also Part II Introduction)

The practice instructions are included with these lessons as a separate sheet. Save that sheet, place it at the back of your set of commentaries, and refer to it whenever you need to refresh your memory. Since the instructions are identical through Lesson 360, there is no need to reprint the instructions every day. I suggest as well periodically re-reading the Part II Introduction, or my comments on it, to remotivate yourself.

COMMENTARY

As I emphasized in discussing the Introduction to Part II, a large part of our two longer daily practice times are meant to be spent in wordless quiet. Receiving our healing, listening rather than talking. Today's lesson is a great one for inducing that state of mind. We begin by directing our minds to be peaceful, our thoughts to be still.

The opening prayer in the first paragraph speaks of coming in silence, and in the quiet of our hearts, waiting and listening for God's Voice. The words used--"quiet," "silence" (twice), "the deep recesses of my mind," waiting, listening, coming to hear His Voice--all these words are pointing us in the same direction, fostering the same attitude in us. An attitude of receptivity. A passiveness, we the feminine to God's masculine, the receiver to the Giver of Life. We still our own thoughts, and allow God's thoughts to come to us. We call to Him, and await His answer.

Jesus is with us as we quietly wait. He voices his confidence that God is with us, and that we will hear Him speak if we wait quietly with him. He asks us to accept his own confidence, telling us that his confidence is our own confidence. Often, I have found it helpful to realize that Jesus symbolizes the part of my own mind that is already awake. His confidence really is my confidence, a confidence I have denied so that I see it as outside myself.

We wait with only one goal: to hear His Voice speaking to us of what we are, and revealing Himself to us. In these times of quiet, this is what we are listening for: an awareness of the purity and perfection of our own being as He created us, and an awareness of His Love, His tender care for us, and His peace that He shares with us in these peaceful moments.

How can we hear a message without words? What we listen for is the song of love, eternally sung, forever thrumming its harmony throughout the universe. It is a song we hear wisps of in the eyes of our beloved, in the laughter of children, in the loyalty of a pet, in the expanse of a peaceful lake or the stately flowing of a river, and in the wonder of a well-told fairy tale. It is the song to which our hearts resonate, showing their true nature. It is our eternity calling us to dance. It is the Father sharing His Love with His only Son.

What is Forgiveness? (Part 1)

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