Your Way Will Be Different

            The title of this article is from the section “I Need Do Nothing” in A Course in Miracles (T-18.VII.1) That title is itself often misused in a classic ego pout, “Well, if ‘I need do nothing’, why am I doing anything at all!” In fact, that section is about the realization you have in a holy instant: You are whole and complete in God now. You do not have to do anything to make yourself so. You do not need time to realize this.

As that section points out (I suggest reading it again if you have not in a while), you do not have to spend years fighting against your experience of the body or in meditation. Those means work because of their goal. (It’s all an expression, after all.) But the Holy Spirit, the holy instant, and its expression, the holy relationship, are the Course’s means to inner peace. And they save time.

The Course is not for contemplatives who go off to live apart from the world and spend their days in meditation. It is meant to be used right where you are in an ordinary life. It does not lay out a hard-set process you should expect, because, unlike contemplatives, you are not living in a defined structure that leads to expected results. Consider this if you read or listen to teachers who have spent their lives in contemplation. Do not expect your mind to go as their minds have gone. The Development of Trust in the Manual for Teachers lays out what you can loosely expect to go through because you are to follow Spirit on your own unique path, not a course laid out by centuries of contemplatives before you.

This is the great freedom of the Course, but also what makes many uncomfortable. You don’t know what to expect! There’s so much doubt: “Am I doing it right?” If you are doing it at all, you can trust you are doing it right.

Some feel the Course is not a short cut because it is so densely written and takes too long to understand. But

 

“This is not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical application.” (T-11.VIII.5)

 

You may want to understand, but you don’t have to understand. You won’t really, anyway, until you put it into practice. Practice, not understanding, yields the peace. Resistance comes first; justification for resistance follows. If you feel you must understand it before you put into practice, that attitude is the effect, not the cause, of resistance.

Another form of resistance is thinking you must be at peace all the time. Do you have any idea how much is accomplished in feeling true peace at all? In just one holy instant? It is ego that makes such a big deal about what is in your conscious awareness every moment. It doesn’t matter! The Truth in you is not affected one iota by what occurs in your conscious awareness. This is what you see in the holy instant.

After the one year of lessons in the Workbook, the only structure the Course offers, you are left with the Holy Spirit to follow your own curriculum. How do you do this? By using the habits the lessons were meant to instill, formal meditation once or twice a day and turning your mind back to Spirit again and again throughout the day. You do not have to force your mind to stay on Spirit, just when you remember, take a moment to be with Spirit. You can trust Spirit is with you when you do not remember It.

The path of the Course is called the Development of Trust because that is all you must develop to play your part perfectly. And it will be a unique part. Your life in the world is a unique expression of the Atonement.  This is part of what you must trust.

 

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If you have a question the answer to which you feel may be helpful to others, send it to Liz@acimmentor.com and I will answer it in this newsletter/blog.