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You can learn more about Nirmala and his teachings on his website, which contains several free ebooks, articles, videos and audios.
A universal assembly for true discernment
Listen to this recording
You can learn more about Nirmala and his teachings on his website, which contains several free ebooks, articles, videos and audios.
Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself. When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. You do not look beyond his errors. Rather, they are magnified, becoming blocks to your awareness of the Self that lies beyond your own mistakes, and past his seeming sins as well as yours.
Perception has a focus. It is this that gives consistency to what you see. Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before. Remove your focus on your brother’s sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins. For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.
Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent. We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while. We do not care about our future goals. And what we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. We seek for innocence and nothing else. We seek for it with no concern but now.
A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals. You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from those you held before. And you have also been dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that, even if you should succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.
How could this matter? For the past is gone; the future but imagined. These concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception. Nothing more. We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. We enter in the time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.
We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. And if a brother’s sins occur to us, our narrowed focus will restrict our sight, and turn our eyes upon our own mistakes, which we will magnify and call our “sins.” So, for a little while, without regard to past or future, should such blocks arise we will transcend them with instructions to our minds to change their focus, as we say:
It is not this that I would look upon.
I trust my brothers, who are one with me.
And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day. We do not seek for long-range goals. As each obstruction seems to block the vision of our sinlessness, we seek but for surcease an instant from the misery the focus upon sin will bring, and uncorrected will remain.
Nor do we ask for fantasies. For what we seek to look upon is really there. And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. When seeing this is all we want to see, when this is all we seek for in the name of true perception, are the eyes of Christ inevitably ours. And the Love He feels for us becomes our own as well. This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.
The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless. And our love for everyone we look upon attests to our remembrance of the holy Self which knows no sin, and never could conceive of anything without Its sinlessness. We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. We look neither ahead nor backwards. We look straight into the present. And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. Our sinlessness is but the Will of God. This instant is our willing one with His.
The introduction to lessons 181 – 200 setup our goals for the next 20 days.
It is good to pause before beginning lesson 181 to ask ourselves if we will accept these goals as our goals. We are not asked to add these goals to the list of goals that we have already set for ourselves. We are asked to change our minds about our goals. Are we willing to see the goals we had previously set for ourselves as unimportant, and adopt these goals as our only goals now?
[Please pause to contemplate before continuing.]
Lesson 181 focuses on the first goal, widening the horizons of our vision. It says, “Perception has a focus. It is this that gives consistency to what you see. Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly.”
We have all experienced how this works in the most benign of ways. For example, recently I bought a Toyota 4Runner. One week before buying a Toyota 4Runner, I had never heard of them. I told my boyfriend what I wanted in my next car. He did some research and selected the 4Runner as the car that was best for me. Since buying a 4Runner, I notice them everywhere. It seems like 4Runners are one of the most popular cars in Colorado, yet I never saw them before. It is as if they did not exist at all, and now they are everywhere. What changed?
The focus of my perception changed. That’s all.
Lesson 181 asks us to let go of seeing the faults in others, as well as their mistakes, and focus on awareness-life-presence as what they are. It says, “We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while.”
Let me demonstrate how this might work:
Imagine I am talking to my boyfriend, and he tells me that he just sent a large amount of money to his sister to help her out of a financial challenge. Let’s imagine that I have a similar financial challenge, but he has not offered to help me. An upset begins to arise in me. It feels like jealousy, unfairness, rejection and anger all rolled into one. I project it out onto him in this way:
“He doesn’t care about me. Why have I wasted 25 years of my life with him?”
And then I remember to practice today’s lesson. I pause for a moment and remember my goal to widen the horizon of what I see. I notice awareness-life-presence in me first. I notice it is fine, still being aware, still living, and still present in me. It has not been affected by what was just said or thought.
Next, I look at him. I notice he is also awareness-life-presence. He is being aware. He is living. He is present here now. I see us as joined in our basic essence, awareness-life-presence, and I let my attention rest there.
Lesson 181 says, “A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals.” This is why it is important to replace the goals we set for ourselves with the goals set in the introduction to this section of the Course.
In the scenario above, I could have two goals that would interfere with effective practice of today’s lesson. One goal might be to feel financially secure. The other goal might be for my boyfriend to behave the way I want him to behave. If I keep either goal, it will interfere with my practice. But if I am willing to drop both goals and genuinely replace them with “widen the horizon of my vision”, this practice becomes easy because it is what I want. In fact, the degree to which this practice is difficult for me is the degree to which I cling to the goals I had previously set.
Today’s lesson says, “We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form.” It also tells us, “And if a brother’s sins occur to us, our narrowed focus will restrict our sight, and turn our eyes upon our own mistakes, which we will magnify and call our ‘sins.’”
In other words, just as I see 4Runners everywhere, if we let our vision narrow, we will see faults, mistakes, sins, guilt, blame and unworthiness everywhere, including in ourselves. Our narrowed vision blocks our own freedom.
The lesson reminds us, “So, for a little while, without regard to past or future, should such blocks arise we will transcend them with instructions to our minds. … As our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. When seeing this is all we want to see, when this is all we seek for in the name of true perception, are the eyes of Christ inevitably ours. … We look neither ahead nor backwards. We look straight into the present. And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now.”
We look neither ahead nor backwards, because there we will find the goals we had previously set. We look straight into the present, because that is where we find awareness-life-presence. It is here right now.
Regina Dawn Akers guides a group of committed students who would like to make consistent, gentle progress toward genuine peace, joy and love. This group meets weekly and all members are committed to specific assignments and practices between group meetings. Everyone who is willing to make a commitment to healing/awakening is invited to join this group.
Homework for the upcoming week:
Homework Assignment A: Workbook lessons 181-187. Practice daily awareness-watching-awareness meditation for 15-20 minutes each day. Practice the “Loving All” Method.
Homework Assignment B:Read NTI John, Chapters 1-7, pages 187-197.
Homework Assignment C: Practice the 30-minute ‘Introduction to Loving Consciousness Meditation’ at least once. You will find it at www.awakening-together.org under Audios & Videos, Meditation Audios, Devotional Meditation, Scroll down in that list until you find the meditation we are practicing this week.
or click on the player below
Steady our feet, our Father. Let our doubts be quiet and our holy minds be still, and speak to us. We have no words to give to You. We would but listen to Your Word, and make it ours. Lead our practicing as does a father lead a little child along a way he does not understand. Yet does he follow, sure that he is safe because his father leads the way for him.
So do we bring our practicing to You. And if we stumble, You will raise us up. If we forget the way, we count upon Your sure remembering. We wander off, but You will not forget to call us back. Quicken our footsteps now, that we may walk more certainly and quickly unto You. And we accept the Word You offer us to unify our practicing, as we review the thoughts that You have given us.
Review Lesson 180:
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
(169) By grace I live. By grace I am released.
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
(170) There is no cruelty in God and none in me.
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
Click the link below to read the minutes from this meeting.
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