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SearchHow should I practice the Workbook from Lesson 170 forward, and why am I not having the experiences many lessons describe?
Question:
I am not able to understand clearly how I should practice the ACIM Lessons. In some lessons, it is written that we will experience something not of this world. I had no such experience. I think I am doing the lessons diligently. But I have not had one such experience. Did you get those experiences described on the same day that you practiced? Is there something I need to do differently?
It is said that the script is already written. The time when the experience comes has also been decided. This means whatever has to happen happens. But at the same time ACIM says that by practicing some lesson (I do not remember the lesson number), we can save a thousand years or more. If the script is written and the time is already set, how can we save time? Elsewhere in the text it also says "You need do nothing." These seem like contradictions and I am totally confused and in the dark about the meaning of these statements. Would you please enlighten us?
Answer:
Thanks for your sincere questions. The Workbook is designed as a tool to help guide you to an experience that has been called transfer of training. In the Workbook are guided imagery exercises, meditations, visualizations, and very specific instructions to be adhered to as closely as possible. Some will seem to experience the lessons from a verbal predisposition, some from a visual imagery disposition, some from a silent predisposition, and some from a very emotionally sensitive disposition. None of this matters because the Holy Spirit meets the mind wherever and however it perceives itself. The lesson to be grasped is always the lesson of non-judgment: "I do not know." Whenever judgments or comparisons arise, they are suitable opportunities to remember the lesson of the day, release, and re-center on Purpose. The visual imagery used is always symbolic and intended to Guide the mind toward a transcendent experience. As best you can, do not attempt to judge anything which seems to occur, for this Workbook and Course and Manual is a curriculum in the relinquishment of all judgment.
"The script is written" means the cosmos is past. The choice is the miracle, to see the past as over and gone, instead of believing that the future is different from the past. The images are past, and this experience is pointed to in Lesson 7, in which this new "time idea" is introduced. The deceived mind, asleep and dreaming, believes that it lives in the past. Yet Life is Eternal and the closest approximation to Eternity is Now. The Workbook lessons are designed to help release everything you think you think, and everything you think you see, to behold the Light beyond the veil—the Present—and See with the Vision of Christ. Miracles seem to prepare the way for Revelation, Pure Light, the Holy Instant, in which the Great Rays are experienced directly.
Apply each lesson with such overflowing passion, as if there is nothing else but enlightenment to experience this very moment. Desire is the key, and this is the meaning of, "I need do nothing." Doing is always a body thought. As you proceed you will find the lessons are but starting points to go beyond the words to the experience of Divine Silence.
All Glory to the Living God of Pure Light and Love,
David