ACIM Daily Lesson 231. I will but to remember You.
Father, I will but to remember You.
Lesson 231
Father, I will but to remember You.
1. What can I seek for, Father, but Your Love? ²Perhaps I think I seek for something else; a something I have called by many names. ³Yet is Your Love the only thing I seek, or ever sought. ⁴For there is nothing else that I could ever really want to find. ⁵Let me remember You. ⁶What else could I desire but the truth about myself?
2. This is your will, my brother. ²And you share this will with me, and with the One as well Who is our Father. ³To remember Him is Heaven. ⁴This we seek. ⁵And only this is what it will be given us to find.
I am being reminded that it is my will that I seek my Father’s Love, that there is nothing else worth seeking. In remembering my Father, I will have found the truth about myself. I am not doing this alone; Jesus is with me as we share this will. I feel this desire growing in me all the time. The more ego thinking I release, the more the desire for God grows.
Peace Love and Joy
My website is fairly new. I am still playing catch up, trying to learn a new way of organizing. I’m trying to learn all the rules that get me noticed by Google and then applying them. Besides the daily lesson, I am trying to add to my contemplations of the Manual for Teachers and the Text. I noticed today that I was getting tense as I tried to find time to do all of this.
As soon as I became aware of this, I asked myself what it is that I want. Do I want to hold on to this tension, or do I want the peace of God? The answer to that question is always that I want the peace of God, so I let go of the belief I needed this to be easy and that I need it to be done quickly. I let these thoughts go, and immediately I was at peace. Peace is always waiting for me to notice it. Peace, joy, and love are all the same. They are all words that represent God. This is all I seek.
My Current Practice
My current practice, and maybe the only practice I will ever need, is to remember that the peace of God is everything I want, and it is helping me with this lesson, too. What do I seek? I seek peace and happiness. I seek God. This has always been true. I did not always achieve what I sought because I was looking in the wrong place. I was confused about what would bring me peace and happiness.
When I was unhappy with a relationship, I thought the relationship was the problem, and so I tried to fix it or leave it. I thought the right relationship would bring me peace and happiness. When I was sick, I sought to heal the body. I thought that a properly functioning body would bring me peace and happiness. The list of things I thought were necessary to be peaceful and happy is endless. They are different forms of the same thing, and because they were born of a confused mind, none of them was ever going to get me what I wanted.
When I Am Unhappy
Now when I am not happy, I realize that I have returned to confusion and am looking for happiness where it cannot be found. I am learning to turn from that unhelpful and untrue belief and allow the Holy Spirit to purify my mind. I am learning that all these “fixes” for the unhappy and un-peaceful mind are just distractions that keep me in my suffering.
I do want to join with Jesus and my Father in perfect peace and eternal joy. I will never do this in the world. It is done in my mind because it is only in my mind that we are split from each other. I do it by choosing only the peace of God rather than choosing a new or different, or improved worldly experience.
Here is something that happened one time.
I was not happy. I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. I just wasn’t happy. I couldn’t put my finger on anything particular. It was kind of vague and amorphous, but something was not right. Then last night, as I watched a show, I suddenly felt very emotional. I decided to run with the feeling and began to cry and cry. To resist this and say to myself that I am not going to cry because that is not peaceful would have been dishonest. I felt like crying so I did.
The ego always wants to make a story out of everything, but I resisted that desire. Instead, I asked what this meant and just let it go to Spirit. I didn’t get words, but a feeling that emotional releases happen and that it is nothing to be concerned about. I also felt strongly that while I will feel these things from time to time as I continue to undo the ego, it is important that I not stay in the emotion. I must not deny the emotion but rather allow it and then turn to the Holy Spirit for healing.
Giving It a Story
If I had given the emotion a story, I would have moved away from the peace of God. For instance, the main character in the show I was watching was a father uncertain that he had done a good job raising his son. He was feeling doubts and fears. I could easily have moved into my own story of these same kinds of doubts and fears. That is what the ego wanted to do because it loves its little dramas and because its goal is to keep the guilt stories coming. Feeling regretful about the past was a choice I could have made, but instead, I chose the peace of God.
REGINA’S TIPS
Father, I will but to remember You.
Appearance is full of variety. Therefore, it is tempting to mind and attention. When mind and attention are unleashed, they jump around from one desire to another.
There is nothing wrong with experiencing temporary appearance. Attention was created so that we can experience appearance. However, the grasping energy of desire is a distortion of this ability. I call it a distortion because it is based on a sense of lack. It is based on the idea that I am not fulfilled within my beingness, so I need something else from outside of me to fulfill me.
When we looked at Lesson 185, we looked carefully at our desires. We asked, “Why do I want this thing that I desire? What do I expect to get from it?” We saw that what we really seek is the peace of truth realization. We seek the fulfillment of knowing our Self. That is our true desire.
Today, we remember this again.
If you have 30-minutes for meditation today, and you would like a gentle audio to guide you, I recommend this meditation:
MY THOUGHTS
This phrase from Regina is quite familiar to me.
“…I need something else from outside of me to fulfill me.”
I don’t tend to do this in my actions anymore, but my mind can be a whirlpool of unrelated and useless thoughts. Instead of looking for a new hobby or new friend to fulfill me, my thoughts are my entertainment. I have been practicing changing this by noticing where I have placed attention and directing it back to a restful state or directing it back to the now moment. It feels frustrating sometimes because this crazy jumping around from thought to thought habit is well entrenched, and I have convinced myself that it has some value. But I am educating myself on the value of peace and stillness now.
Contemplation 2025
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