LESSON 84
March 25
"Love
created me like Itself."
"Love
holds no grievances."
Practice
Summary:
LONGER: 1 time for about 15 minutes
- For 3 or 4 minutes, read over the ideas and comments slowly (repeatedly if
you wish) and think about them.
- Close your eyes and spend the remainder of the time listening quietly and
attentively. There is a message for you. Be confident you will receive it, for
it belongs to you and you want it. If you have distracting thoughts realize
they have no meaning or power. Replace them with your will to succeed. Trust it
to carry you past distractions. If your mind still wanders, repeat first phase
of exercise.
Shorter: Frequent
First half of day: "Love created me like Itself." Second half of day: "Love holds no grievances."
Response To Temptation: You may use these specific forms or your own words:
First half of day: "Let me not see an illusion of myself in this." "As I look on this, let me remember my Creator." "My Creator did not create this as I see it."
Second half of the day: "This is no justification for denying my Self." "I will not use this to attack love." "Let this not tempt me to attack myself."
COMMENTARY
If I am created in the likeness of my Creator, then "I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss and I cannot die. I am not a body" (1:3-4). That just makes sense. God cannot suffer, experience loss or die, and He is not a body. He created me like Himself (1:7); therefore these things must be true of me. My reality is completely unlike what I believe about myself, for assuredly I have believed that I can suffer, experience loss and die, and I have identified almost entirely with my body.What is it that makes and reinforces this illusion about myself? Grievances. "Love holds no grievances" (3:1). I am love, in the likeness of Love which created me, but when I choose to hold a grievance I am denying my own reality, I am affirming I am not love, because "grievances are completely alien to love" (3:2). In so doing, I am re-affirming that I am what I think I have made of myself, and I am choosing, without conscious awareness, to suffer, lose, and die. The only way I can rediscover my own reality is to stop holding grievances. A grievance is an attack on my Self (3:6, 4:4). It affirms that I am something I am not.
If I see ugliness, unloveliness or evil in my brothers I am attacking myself. Deny what they are and I am denying what I am. Today I choose to see others as I would see myself, and as I would have God see me. I have the power to make this choice. I see what I desire to see, and today I desire to see my Self, in myself and in everyone.
Copyright © 1996, The Circle of Atonement, Sedona,
Arizona, USA.
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