“Completely at peace with everyone and everything”
Continuing on with the theme of nonjudgment, what I have been doing each morning is going through a list I made a year or two ago. I was on one of my nonjudgment kicks and I pulled out of the Course every good line I could find on the subject, and then converted each one into first-person statements. There are some real gems in there, amazing crystallizations of wisdom that hit you right between the eyes. If you are interested, the document is here.
Going through these statements this morning gave me a feeling of being at peace with everything. While I judge, I am subtly at war. Nothing is fully trusted. Nothing is completely accepted. Everything is strained through my filters. As a result, what doesn’t make it through gets rejected. It really is a state of war. It’s like I am constantly at odds with the world around me, like the teeth in our gears aren’t meshing, but rather constantly grinding. I can almost feel that grinding. It’s like I haven’t fit with my world since day one.
So I went from there into my meditation and felt a really unusual degree of peace. I didn’t want to leave it, and ended up meditating far longer than I realized, so much so that when the clock said 7:30 I was convinced it must really be 6:30 and that I had somehow recently turned the clock forward. I had to check other clocks around the house.
I then looked up a passage from the Course that captured that feeling, so that I could make that the focus of my practice for the day. I looked up the phrase “at peace” in my search program, and came upon a beautiful passage from Lesson 68, which I changed to read in first person:
I am completely at peace with everyone and everything,
safe in a world that protects me and loves me,
and that I love in return.
I feel safety surrounding me,
hovering over me
and holding me up.
I believe, however briefly,
that nothing can harm me in any way.
That feeling of peace from my meditation is already fading, but it comes back briefly when I repeat these lines. It gives me hope that I could get out of that grinding feeling of just not meshing with my world. Normally, I don’t even notice the feeling, I am so used to carrying it around. Now that I do notice it, though, I realize what a constant strain it is. It would be so incredibly nice to get out from under it.