Review instructions: Spend at least 15 minutes in the morning and at least 15 minutes in the evening contemplating the lesson for the day. (You might use that time to review the original lesson in the Course, to review the original tip, to write in your journal or to move into awareness-watching-awareness meditation using the idea for the day as your ‘anchor thought,’ a thought that helps you transition from attention on thinking to attention on awareness.)
To keep your mind focused on today’s idea and to help absorb the idea fully, repeat it to yourself at least once hourly.
In addition, use today’s idea as much as is needed as a transition from ego thinking to spiritual intuition. For example, you can say, “This thought I do not want. I choose instead ______. And then repeat the idea for the day, and let it take the place of what you thought.” Next, ask spiritual intuition for guidance that suits the moment.
Today’s review idea:
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.
I call upon God’s Name and on my own.
Repeat God’s Name slowly again and still again. The mantra is a means of removing attention from thought and returns it to awareness of one’s true nature. We are asked to spend today repeating the Name of God, remembering that His Name is our own. Choose a mantra that will bring your attention back to stillness within, if only for a moment.
“Become oblivious to every name but His. Hear nothing else. Let all your thought become anchored on this. God’s Name becomes our only thought, our only word, the only thing that occupies our minds, the only wish we have, the only sound with any meaning, and the only Name of everything that we desire to see, of everything that we would call our own.”
To have a single unified point in mind like this announces that our desire is single pointed and that we want only God and nothing else. NTI John Chapter 1 tells us, “God is welcomed into the presence of man by the desire to know God before man.” The mind has to willingly empty itself. Bentinho Massaro says, “As soon as you relax your thinking mind for even as much as two to five seconds, a window of consciousness becomes aware of the essence that remains when we are not over laying it with thoughts.”
Today’s review says, “The Name of God is my deliverance from every thought of evil and of sin, because it is my own as well as His.” Every thought has a source. Ego thoughts, chattering thoughts are certainly not coming from God, but real thoughts must come from God. The eternal comes from the eternal. ACIM Teachers Manual says, “It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound.”
Today we use the idea for the day followed by a Name of God mantra to gently replace all frivolous mind wandering. Use any Name of God mantra that opens your heart, quiets your mind, and places attention on awareness.
Click here to review “Instructions for Using the Mantra” from The Teachings of Inner Ramana
