WEEK 12: PRACTICING THE PRESENCE OF GOD We are in our final week on the topic of Healing. We have been together for 3 months now! Thank you for your commitment. Our lesson this week is called PRACTICING THE PRESENCE OF GOD. This week there are two reading assignments: 1. Workbook Lesson 157: Into His Presence Would I Enter Now 2. This message, along with the story about Joel Goldsmith and the Roosevelt Administration (below) please read it. This week s practice is rising above fear and conflict, training your mind to focus on God, to think with the Mind of God, to know that Light of Christ is dissolving all the errors of the world for every instant you abide in God. You will begin to witness that the world really IS changing, all because of you, because of your dedication to RISE ABOVE all the world s thinking! All because of you! Looking AWAY from all the effects of your world, and looking only at what is true: the Light, the Love, the Peace and Joy of God is the goal. At some point, each one of us has to make A CONSCIOUS COMMITMENT to no longer focus on the problems of the world or the sicknesses of the body.
Emmet Fox, a great spiritual teacher, gives the simplest of all instruction: When you are thinking about your problems, you are not thinking about God. This is the mind-training at its very best! When you can catch when you are thinking about a problem and then deliberately make a decision to start thinking about God instead. You immediately can switch gears, and stop a thought in its tracks. 2
This is the place that everyone must come to eventually to dedicate your life to this work, to be a clear pure channel for God s Love and Peace to pour through into the world. DELIBERATE DECISION, and no other way will do it. You make a choice to focus your mind entirely on Spirit, and nothing else. What is your focus? Bill found a great section in A Course in Miracles: Oneness and sickness cannot co-exist. God s teachers CHOOSE to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams, once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God s teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. A Course in Miracles ; Teachers Manual; How Many Teachers Of God Are Needed To Save The World? Isn t that great; all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. 3
A deliberate decision to live in the Presence of God to live in joy and gratitude will cause you to do a lot of things differently. For me, I stopped reading the news and I stopped watching TV. I stopped engaging in conflict. I stopped talking about people behind their backs. When a problem comes up, I silently send love and blessings to that person. I cancelled a whole lot of websites that I had been visiting daily that were just completely mindless and a waste of time. I don t join in with negativity and complaining when other people are doing it. Why? Because I want LASER BEAM FOCUS FOR GOD. I don t want to use my time or energy anymore thinking about the problems of the world. I want to use my mind WHOLLY for the healing of the world which means that I had to stop doing all the things that were causing me fear and conflict! If you are to bring God s Peace to others, you must emerge from fear and conflict. We have frequently noted that the miracle is a device for shortening but not abolishing time. If a sufficient number of people become truly miracle-minded quickly, the shortening process can be almost immeasurable. But it is essential that these individuals free themselves from fear sooner than would ordinarily be the case, because they MUST emerge from basic conflict it they are to bring peace to the minds of others. A Course in Miracles; Chapter 2: The Meaning Of The Last Judgment I would like to introduce a practice from Joel Goldsmith, along with a really great story of how healing works (a hint: get quiet and abide with God okay, I just gave the whole thing away!) 4
This story comes from the book: The Spiritual Journey of Joel Goldsmith by Lorraine Sinkler: Joel Goldsmith envisioned groups of people all around the world who would dedicate themselves to specific periods of the day for the realization of the Christ in connection with world problems. There was a strong urge within him to introduce this idea on a wider scale to more persons, and on several different occasions he felt that he was ready to begin this work. In fact as early as 1950 Joel wrote, asking me to become part of such a group to carry on daily work TO REALIZE THE ACTIVITY OF CHRIST IN WORLD AFFAIRS. But it was not until January 1956, that he began working with a small group of students in Hawaii along this line. Then in the class in March of that year in New York, some twentyfive persons were invited to meet Joel while he presented this new phase of work to them. He emphasized the principle of secrecy and pointed out very clearly that there would never be any personal glory attached to the work because no one would know it was going on. Later Joel invited all those who were interested in dedicating themselves to world work to participate in it: Are you willing to count yourself among those dedicated and consecrated people who have risen above self-seeking and who think in terms of universality rather than personality? Are you willing to give periods of meditation every day to the dissolving of the material sense, which holds the world in bondage? Joel was an unrelenting adversary of the Roosevelt administration. When the bill to increase the size of the Supreme Court came before Congress, which in the eyes of its opponents meant, packing the Court, his response was immediate action. Only this time it was a different kind of action. The night before the bill was to come up for a vote, the Voice that was always there to impart Itself to him told him not to go to bed but to stay up and pray. 5
Throughout the hours of the night he meditated, read, meditated and read, not praying for the defeat of the bill, spending hours waiting for something to come through, and at four o clock in the morning the answer came that the work had been done and he could go to bed. The following morning, newspapers came out with the headline that if the bill passed if would mean the end of freedom in the United States. The bill did not pass, and years later the editor of a chain of newspapers told he had been awakened at four o clock on that particular morning by a voice in his ear, saying that the bill must be stopped. He sent out word to all his newspapers to enlist public opinion against the bill, with the result that the nation was so aroused that the bill was defeated. The Christ is hidden inside of you, but you must release that Christ into the world. Be willing to sit in the silence until you have a conscious feeling that God is on the field. Then the Christ is functioning. This is the secret of meditation. In meditation we unite with God, and in uniting with God, we find ourselves united with all mankind receptive and responsive to the spiritual urge. After you have achieved the awareness of the Christ, realize that this Christ is dissolving the errors of this world dissolving material sense and that that realization of the Christ is opening human consciousness to a receptivity to Truth. Just to make the statement that human consciousness is being opened to truth is a waste of time, but to have realized the Christ and then to know that this realization of the Christ is operating in human consciousness to make it receptive to Truth will be effective. In this meditation you are not criticizing or condemning anybody, you are not judging as to whether material sense is operating in this one or in that one: You are realizing that wherever material sense raises its head, this realized Christ is dispelling it. Give three periods out of every 24 hours to the world. This is your contribution to world freedom. Therefore, three times each day open out a way for the Spirit of the Lord God which is upon you to escape into the world. 6
Let your first meditation period be only for the purpose of feeling a consciousness of God s presence. When that has been achieved, that is the end of that period of meditation for the world. In your second meditation dedicated to world freedom, again achieve a consciousness of God s presence and realize that this realization of the Christ is dispelling material sense in the human consciousness. Begin your third meditation once again with a realization of the Christ and then recognize that the realization of the Christ is dispelling material sense and opening human consciousness human consciousness to receptivity to Truth. This is your gift to the world little enough to give for the priceless gift you have received. The Spiritual Journey of Joel Goldsmith by Lorraine Sinkler Perception has a focus. It is this, which gives consistency to what you see. Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. Your vision now will shift to give support to the intent, which has replaced the one you held before. Remove your focus on your brother s sins (and world problems and the body s sicknesses and serial adventures ), and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. A Course in Miracles ; Lesson 181 I Trust My Brothers, Who Are One With Me 7
WEEK 12 PRACTICES: Read ACIM ; Workbook Lesson 157: Into His Presence Would I Enter Now Read the story about Joel Goldsmith (above). Devote 3 periods out of every 24-hours to realizing Christ, rising above all your perceived problems to abide in God. Practice living in the Presence of God. At the beginning of each day, make a decision to focus on extending love to the world, to every one you meet. At the end of each day, write in your journal what you focused on for the day. Did you focus on your problems or did you focus on Christ realization? How well did you do in extending love and light, and only that. 8
WEEK 12 REFLECTIONS: 1. Pay attention every day to what you are focusing on. Are you focusing on your problem or are you focusing on God? 2. Describe the feeling that occurs when you shift gears from thinking about your problem to that instant when you enter into the Presence of God. www.teachersofgod.org 9