Read on the ACIM CE App: https://acimce.app/:W-299
Lesson 299
Eternal holiness abides in me.
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: This is another favorite prayer of mine. I recommend praying it very slowly and intentionally, making it a genuine communication from you to God. Expect Him to hear you. Let the prayer draw you into a state of rest and quiet, in which you relax in the happy awareness that nothing you can do can change your original holiness. Let it draw you into a deep meditation, which will be far richer for having been introduced by this lovely prayer.
Commentary
This is the sort of lesson that always brings awareness of my split mind to me. One part is sighing, blissfully, “Ah! How wonderful to know that God’s creation rests intact in me.” The other part is looking around and over my shoulder while saying, “You talkin’ to me?”
Sometimes, Father, I can accept the idea that there is holiness in me. I want to accept it more often, and more deeply. I want to know that holiness is all that I am. I can relate to the first line, that “my holiness is far beyond my own ability to understand or know” (1:1). At least the “beyond my ability” part. Yet there is some part of me that knows the holiness is there; perhaps unknown, perhaps not yet understood, but still…there.
When I am aware of my union with God; when I allow that realization to leak through into my consciousness; then, together with Him, I know that it is so, that holiness abides in me.
The Course belabors this point, repeating it so frequently that I have to realize that there is enormous resistance in me to getting it:
My holiness…is not mine to be destroyed by sin. It is not mine to suffer from attack. Illusions can obscure it, but cannot put out its radiance nor dim its light. (2:1-4)
I can alter my behavior, I can hallucinate and believe I have changed my essential nature, but I cannot in reality change what I am, I cannot change what God created as me. My attack on myself didn’t work, and never will. I remain as God created me: the holy Son of God Himself. Anything which seems to say otherwise is an illusion, a fabrication of my mind, desperately striving to hold on to its ego identification. Guilt is such a fabrication. No one who is holy could be guilty; therefore, if I am guilty I must not be holy. This is how the ego mind tries to prove its reality to me.
This day, I affirm that my holiness is not of me (2:1). I’m not responsible for creating it, nor can anything I do, think, or say affect it. God wills that I know it and so it will be known. I lay my cynicism aside. I allow the thought to lodge in my mind:
Eternal holiness abides in me.