A major theme of A Course in Miracles in terms of our practice is the asking of the Holy
Spirit for help. In another video, I discussed who the Holy Spirit was, namely that He is
a symbol of our right-minded self. He's described in the Course as "the Voice that speaks for
God." He also is described throughout as being our teacher, the one to whom we go for help
when we feel ourselves caught by the ego. Therefore I thought it would be important
to discuss what does it mean in A Course in Miracles to ask the Holy Spirit for help?
What does it mean to pray to Him? As many of you might know, the second pamphlet that
Helen Schucman had taken down or had scribed was "The Song of Prayer," the first being
"Psychotherapy." And "The Song of Prayer" was actually taken down by Helen a year after
the Course was published. So the Course was published in 1976 and the pamphlet was taken
down in the Fall of 1977. It was originally written by Helen, or written down by Helen,
as a response to what was already occurring throughout other A Course in Miracles circles,
namely students becoming confused about three essential areas of the Course's teaching:
prayer, forgiveness, and healing. I will just discuss prayer in this video. One of the major
themes of that first chapter of "The Song of Prayer" pamphlet was again what does it
mean to pray to the Holy Spirit or ask for help? Typically what seems to occur with students
of A Course in Miracles usually early on in their work with the Course, although it can
actually...that early stage can go on and on, is asking the Holy Spirit for specific
help, namely what job should I take, should I enter into this relationship, should I change
the relationship, should I leave the relationship, should I kill off the relationship? It even
reaches a point of sometimes where do I go to park my car? What clothing should I wear?
What should I order from a menu at a restaurant, etc.? And the point of this pamphlet was Jesus'
way to correct this misunderstanding of what the Course means by asking the Holy Spirit.
In the second chapter of "The Song of Prayer," Jesus talks about the mistakes of forgiveness
and he called them forgiveness-to-destroy. While he does not use that specific phrase
for asking for help or praying, one can say as is clearly implied in the early pages of
that pamphlet, that asking the Holy Spirit for specific help or asking Jesus for specific
help, is asking-to-destroy or praying-to-destroy...meaning that the whole idea of asking for specific
help is reinforcing the very ego thought system that we are trying to undo through asking
for help. Namely when we decide that there is a specific problem we have and therefore
we need a specific answer from the Holy Spirit, what we are really doing is number one, arrogantly
thinking that we know what the problem is which will always be some expression of the
physical world and our bodily or psychological experiences in the physical world and then
demanding that the Holy Spirit answer us in the form that we have just now established
or set up. As Jesus told Helen once in a personal message to her, such asking is really trying
to make his love more manageable, manage his love by giving it a specific form. And so
what the Course really means by asking the Holy Spirit for help is that we ask for help
to undo the true problem which is our mind's decision to join with the ego rather than
with Him. The mind's decision to identify with the ego thought system of separation,
guilt, judgment, attack, rather than the Holy Spirit's thought system of forgiveness, the
miracle, and healing. So what asking really means is as we become aware of our judgmental
thoughts, as we become aware of becoming anxious of anything in this world, of becoming afraid
of anything in this world, of finding ourselves once again ensnared in the ego's webs of specialness,
that we as quickly as we can go back to our decision-making mind, recognize that our feelings
of disquiet and upset are coming from our wrong-minded choice and choose again. And
so asking the Holy Spirit or asking Jesus for help means asking for help that we remember
who we are, that we remember who the true Teacher is, that we remember what the thought
system is that would save us rather than root us still further in the ego's thought system
of hell. In other words, when early on in the text, in the context of prayer, Jesus
says the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness because we have everything. What he is referring
to is that we don't have to ask for anything. We don't even have to ask for specific help
about specific problems because we already have everything we need. We have the Love
of God after all. And so asking for help is asking to be reminded of the everything we
have and to call upon the Teacher Who does teach us that there is nothing further to
ask because His Love is everything we would ever want or need or desire.