Read on the ACIM CE App: https://acimce.app/:W-227
Lesson 227
This is my holy instant of release.
Practice Instructions
See complete instructions in a separate document. A short summary:
- Read the commentary paragraph slowly and personally.
- Pray the prayer, perhaps several times.
- Morning and evening: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
- Hourly remembrance: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
- Frequent reminders: Repeat the idea and then spend a quiet moment in meditation.
- Response to temptation: Repeat the idea whenever upset, to restore peace.
- Read the “What Is” section slowly and thoughtfully once during the day.
Practice suggestion: To expand on the prayer, you may want to use the following visualization.
You see yourself walking through mist toward a giant pair of feet, the feet of truth.
Visualize these feet however you like. Maybe they are made of stone. Maybe they are luminous and semitransparent.
You are carrying a bundle in your hands which you are planning to lay at these feet as an act of tribute to the truth.
It would be traditional to assume that this bundle is your sins, and that you will be laying them before the truth in an act of giving them up for the sake of truth.
Yet the bundle is not your sins; it is your belief in your sinfulness, your belief that you are defined by your separate will that does not will with God.
Visualize the bundle however you want, but let its appearance and weight reflect the fact that this is your belief that you are sinful, your belief that you possess a wayward, destructive will that has corrupted your innocence.
You reach the feet of truth. See yourself kneel before the feet and humbly lay before them this bundle. Let it be a genuine act of tribute to the truth.
Laying this belief before the feet of truth is your act of giving it up, in tribute to the truth and in acknowledgment of the falsity of this belief.
As you look at the bundle there on the ground, it is shined away in light, and is gone.
Your belief in your sinfulness has been removed forever from your mind.
Feel yourself freed of the heavy burden of feeling like a selfish sinner.
Feel the release as you are lifted into a holy instant.
Feel your right mind restored to you, as if, after a long bout of insanity, you are finally sane again.
You look down at yourself and see that you are clad in robes of holiness; your purity has remained untouched.
You arise, free now to come home, to walk through the door of your Father’s house.
Commentary
Today’s lesson is another reminder that these practice times are meant to be holy instants for us. Not every one will be a dramatic experience of wordless bliss, of course. Remember that simply being willing to turn your mind to God can be considered a holy instant, whether or not you consciously experience anything special. The seminal holy instant, from which the Course sprang, was simply a time when Bill Thetford said, “There must be another way,” and Helen replied that she would help him find it. The mental shift into alignment with God’s purpose is what really counts. If we faithfully practice, the direct experience of truth spoken of in the Workbook will come, not by our efforts, but by God’s grace, when we are ready to receive it.
Consider the effect it has on our mind to focus on today’s idea, “This is my holy instant of release,” and then to sit in quiet stillness, open and receptive to whatever is given to us. We should enter each such time expectantly, waiting to hear what God’s Voice will speak.
I am already free; now, today. My thought of separation had no effect on my reality, so the imprisonment I have imagined never happened. “Nothing that I thought apart from You exists” (1:3). How wonderful to know that the thoughts I believed were apart from God don’t exist! How healing it is to give them up, lay them down at the feet of truth, and to have them “removed forever from my mind” (1:5). This is the healing process of the Course: to take each thought that seems to express a will separate from God’s, and bring it into this Presence to be removed from my mind, with God’s own assurance that it has affected nothing. I am still His Son.
This is how my mind is restored to me. This is how my awareness of my Identity is returned to my awareness.