What Is the Practice and Why Is It So Important?

  • The nature of the practice: applying ideas expressed in words

  • The practice is all about the benefits.

  • He wants you to do the practice but also takes great efforts to make it doable

  • Dealing with missed practice periods

The nature of the practice: applying ideas expressed in words

 With spiritual practice, we tend to expect something that…

  • goes beyond thought and ideas (which are conceived of as chief blocks to awakening)

  • goes beyond words

  • and is instead focused on images, physical sensations, a blank mind, or awareness itself.

We often think of practice as getting us out of our normal verbal, conceptual state of consciousness—getting us out of our head—and into a nonverbal state of pure experience, pure awareness.

 

Workbook practice, however, is about applying ideas, which are expressed in words, to the specifics of our lives.

The Course’s practice is primarily cognitive and verbal. It mainly consists in applying ideas—that are stated in words—to specific people, events, or situations. You see this in the Text:

The prayer for the miracle is:

Jesus, help me see my brother [name] as he really is, and thus release both him and me. (T-3.V.10:12-13)

When anything threatens your peace of mind, ask yourself:

Has God changed His Mind about me? (T-10.I.4:5-6)

And you see this throughout the Workbook:

I am not angry at [name, or specify situation] for the reason I think. (Lesson 5)

God did not create that war in [specify], and so it is not real. (Lesson 14)

Why is it this way? Because of the Course’s view of how the mind works:

Unless we change the first part, the rest won’t change. But when we change what things mean to us, we change our experience of them.

 

Question: What experiences have you had where a profound shift or even a profound spiritual experience was triggered by words and ideas?

 

The Course’s practice is not just “turning it over to the Holy Spirit”

If you listen to Course students, you can get the impression that the sum total of Course practice is “turning it over to the Holy Spirit.” This is a part of Course practice, but making it all of it is problematic for several reasons:

  • There are hundreds of practices we are given to do throughout the Text and Workbook and very few of them look like “turning it over to the Holy Spirit.”

  • An entire volume of the Course is a detailed, integrated, ascending program of spiritual practice, almost none of which looks like “turning it over to the Holy Spirit.”

  • Turning it over to the Holy Spirit may not have the aim of changing how you interpret a given situation. It might just be “Help me feel better about this.”

Thus, treating “turning it over to the Holy Spirit” as the sum total of Course practice is an avoidance of the hundreds of practices given us by the Course, an avoidance of the entire volume devoted to practice, and it can be an avoidance of the core objective of practice: thought change.

Interestingly, the key “turn it over to the Holy Spirit” practice in the Course is specifically about giving it to Him so that He can help us see it/think about it differently:

Give it to Him to judge for you, and say:

Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.

Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction.

Teach me how not to make of it an obstacle to peace, but let You use it for me, to

          facilitate its coming. (T-19.IV.C.13:3-6)

The practice is all about the benefits.

This is how we change our minds and achieve the goal of the Course.

 

We saw earlier that, according to the Workbook’s first paragraph, “it is the exercises that will make the goal of the course possible” (W-In.1:2).

This attitude is everywhere in the Workbook. You can throw a dart and you’ll hit it. I just used a random number generator online to pick a lesson between 1 and 200. It chose 69 (“My grievances hide the light of the world in me”). Unsurprisingly, that lesson has a lot to say about the benefits of practicing it. It even makes dwelling on those benefits part of the practice:

2          Today let us make another real attempt to reach the light in you. Before we undertake this in our more extended practice period today, let us devote several minutes to thinking about what we are trying to do. We are literally attempting to get in touch with the salvation of the world. We are trying to see past the veil of darkness that keeps it concealed. We are trying to let the veil be lifted, and see the tears of God’s Son disappear in the sunlight. 

3          Let us begin our longer practice period today with the full realization of all this, and real determination to reach what is dearer to us than all else. Salvation is our only need. There is no other purpose here and no other function to fulfill. Learning salvation is our only goal. Let us end the ancient search today by finding the light in us and holding it up for everyone who searches with us to look upon and rejoice.

7          If you are doing the exercises properly, you will begin to get a sense of being lifted up and carried ahead. Your little effort and small determination call on the power of the universe to help you, and God Himself will raise you from darkness into light. You are in accord with His will. You cannot fail because your will is His.

9          In the shorter practice periods, which you will want to do as often as possible in view of the importance of today’s idea to you and your happiness, remind yourself that your grievances are hiding the light of the world from your awareness.

 

Question: What benefits of practicing this lesson are either stated or implied?

When we ignore Workbook practice, do you see all that we’re missing?

What I see among Course students is that, even though everyone loves the Workbook…

  • We don’t emphasize the practice, talk about it, stress the benefits of it. And we don’t teach it.

  • We are always asking and searching: “How do we make the Course practical?” We even look to other paths.

  • We hear lots of warnings about the dangers of trying hard to follow the instructions: “Don’t turn it into a ritual.” “The way to do it right is to do it wrong and forgive yourself.”

Where this comes from is no mystery: We don’t want to do it. This collective aversion leads to an unspoken agreement that we can safely ignore the practice. As a result, virtually no one takes it seriously. Yet if “it is the exercises that will make the goal of the course possible,” what does it mean that we have a collective unspoken agreement to overlook the exercises?

 

He wants you to do the practice

but also takes great efforts to make it doable

 

A widespread attitude we have is that surely he doesn’t seriously want us to do all that he says, since it’s clearly impossible to do anyway. The truth is the reverse: He does want us to do what he says, and he carefully designed the practice to be doable.

1.    He wants you to follow the instructions

Jesus always acts like he wants you to follow his instructions. This pattern is never broken. There are literally no passages that speak otherwise—not a single one. For instance: 

Once every ten minutes would be highly desirable, and you are urged to attempt this and to adhere to this frequency whenever possible. (Lesson 40)

We will therefore keep to the five-minutes-an-hour practice periods for a while, and urge you to omit as few as possible. (Lesson 95)

We will observe a special format for these practice periods, which you are urged to follow just as closely as you can. (Review 3)

  • He never says that following the instructions is ritualistic. Rather, what he calls ritualistic is trying to include literally everything in your visual field (Lesson 1) or trying to make up even the practice periods that your schedule didn’t permit you to do (Review 3).

  • He often speaks of requirements: “Three to five minutes are recommended, with not fewer than three required” (Lesson 32).

  • He speaks of the importance of structure: “Structure, then, is necessary for you at this time, planned to include frequent reminders of your goal and regular attempts to reach it” (Lesson 95).

 

2.    He tries to make the instructions doable

The attempt to make the practice truly doable shines through everywhere:

 

He asks virtually nothing at the start and gradually asks more as you see the benefits

  • The Introduction says, “You need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not welcome them”(W-In.8:1). But later on, once the ideas have earned your belief, he asks you to practice them with “quiet certainty” (W-73.10:1; W-128.8:2).

  • The first lessons require two minutes a day, but the instructions slowly build to the point where you can easily spend an hour and a half a day (divided into many chunks).

  • He waits until Lesson 20 to ask for practice every half hour. Why? “You will not succeed if you regard yourself as being coerced, and if you give in to resentment and opposition.”

The practice is carefully designed to fit into a busy day

  • The heavy blocks are shortly after waking and shortly before sleep, outside the busy parts of the day.

  • The practice in the middle of the day takes little time, and all of it can flex.

The practice is designed to be flexible according to your schedule and even your discomfort

  • With morning practice, “select a time when few distractions are anticipated and when you yourself feel reasonably ready” (Lesson 32).

  • With the hourly practices, based on the needs of your schedule you can shorten them or skip them altogether. You can even shorten them due to your unwillingness (see W-93.10:1-3)!

  • With the frequent practice in between the hours, if you can’t close your eyes and take a moment, just practice briefly with eyes open. “You can still repeat one short sentence to yourself without disturbing anything that is going on” (Lesson 27).

  • You should shorten practice periods or do fewer if you are irritated or uncomfortable: “It should be reduced to half a minute or even less if you experience discomfort” (Lesson 10).

You are given freedom to set the timing, frequency, and even content of practice periods

  • You set the time of day for a stretch of longer practice periods: “Try also to determine this time today in advance, and then adhere to it as closely as possible” (Lesson 65).

  • You set the frequency on certain days: “It is recommended that you set a definite time interval for using the idea when you wake or shortly afterwards, and attempt to adhere to it throughout the day” (Lesson 27).

  • Starting with Lesson 124, you increasingly decide what to do in your longer practice periods: “This is our first attempt at an extended period for which we give no rules nor special words to guide your meditation.”

 

The more he asks of you, the more he gives you motivational talk

You see this especially in Lessons 93-110, where he asks you to practice for the first five minutes of every waking hour. Here is one example of this motivational talk:

            Is it not worth five minutes of your time each hour to be able to accept the happiness which God has given you? Is it not worth five minutes hourly to recognize your special function here? Is not five minutes but a small request to make in terms of gaining a reward so great it has no measure? You have made a thousand losing bargains at the least.

            Here is an offer guaranteeing you your full release from pain of every kind, and joy the world does not contain. You can exchange a little of your time for peace of mind and certainty of purpose, with the promise of complete success. And since time has no meaning, you are being asked for nothing in return for everything. Here is a bargain where you cannot lose. And what you gain is limitless indeed! (Lesson 98)

Dealing with missed practice periods

 

Perhaps the place where his efforts to make the practice doable most shine through is in his instructions for dealing with missed practice periods. These instructions reveal a single principle:

He knows full well that “You will probably miss several applications, and perhaps quite a number” (Lesson 27), but he gives you practical instructions for getting back to practicing.

In other words, the practice is doable because there’s room for you to have lots and lots of failure while still staying completely within the program. Here are the main instructions for dealing with missed practice periods:

 

Don’t be disturbed by missing, but try to keep to your schedule going forward

You will probably miss several applications, and perhaps quite a number. Do not be disturbed by this, but do try to keep on your schedule from then on. (Lesson 27)

Rather than letting one lapse turn into many, forgive yourself for the lapse and then correct your mistake by getting immediately back to the practice

This is the counsel in an important four-paragraph discussion in Lesson 95, which says, “Do not, however, use your lapses from this schedule as an excuse not to return to it again as soon as you can.”

 

Honestly discern which practice periods you missed because you didn’t want to do them and which you missed because your schedule did not permit. Then make up the first ones, but not the second.

This is the counsel in an important three-paragraph discussion in Review 3.

 

The summary idea: “Try again”

The phrase “try again” is used ten times in the Course in relation to doing the practice. As simple and common as the idea is, it makes a statement about how to deal with failure in practice:

·      The past: Yes, you fell down, but don’t be disturbed by that or let it wreck your practice.

·      The present: Just try again.

If you forget, try again. If there are long interruptions, try again. Whenever you remember, try again. (Lesson 40)

 

Conclusion

1.     The practice offers you everything: “Your practice periods offer you everything” (Review 3).

2.     The practice is light enough and has enough flexibility and freedom to be completely doable.

3.     There is room for you to fail repeatedly while still staying within the program.

 

The conclusion is that we have every reason to do it and no excuse not to.