The Power of Doing Nothing

This is perhaps my favorite entry in A Course in Miracles (ACIM), maybe because it was the hardest for me to learn (and I’m still learning it). Doing nothing was so completely foreign to the way I lived my life. A few years ago, I was a workaholic and overachiever. I had to-do lists and goals, and I was always wondering … what do I need to do to get the result I want?

And now … more often than not, I’m doing nothing. It feels … like bliss. Like surrender. I turn my “problems” over, and more often than not, they are solved for me.

Do I need to decide what to do about sex? Do I need to find my Divine Partner? No, the plan was written at the beginning of time. There is absolutely nothing I can do to make it happen faster and nothing I can do to screw it up. If I have a Divine Partner, if I am meant ever to have sex again, it is inevitable. The best I can do is become still and “tune in” for moment-by-moment instructions, it seems to be the only way to stay anywhere close to being in alignment and at peace with the inevitable.

I need do nothing.

You still have too much faith in the body as a source of strength. What plans do you make that do not involve its comfort or protection or enjoyment in some way? This makes the body an end and not a means in your interpretation, and this always means you still find sin attractive. No one accepts Atonement for himself who still accepts sin as his goal. You have thus not met your one responsibility. Atonement is not welcomed by those who prefer pain and destruction.

There is one thing that you have never done; you have not utterly forgotten the body. It has perhaps faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet completely disappeared. You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, yet it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend without awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return. …

It is impossible to accept the holy instant without reservation unless, just for an instant, you are willing to see no past or future. You cannot prepare for it without placing it in the future. Release is given you the instant you desire it. Many have spent a lifetime in preparation, and have indeed achieved their instants of success. This course does not attempt to teach more than they learned in time, but it does aim at saving time. You may be attempting to follow a very long road to the goal you have accepted. It is extremely difficult to reach Atonement by fighting against sin. Nor is a lifetime of contemplation and long periods of meditation aimed at detachment from the body necessary. All such attempts will ultimately succeed because of their purpose. Yet the means are tedious and very time consuming, for all of them look to the future for release from a state of present unworthiness and inadequacy.

Your way will be different, not in purpose but in means. … You are prepared. Now you need but to remember you need do nothing. It would be far more profitable now merely to concentrate on this than to consider what you should do. When peace comes at last to those who wrestle with temptation and fight against the giving in to sin; when the light comes at last into the mind given to contemplation; or when the goal is finally achieved by anyone, it always comes with just one happy realization; “I need do nothing.”

Here is the ultimate release which everyone will one day find in his own way, at his own time. You do not need this time. … “I need do nothing” is a statement of allegiance, a truly undivided loyalty. Believe it for just one instant, and you will accomplish more than is given to a century of contemplation, or of struggle against temptation.

To do anything involves the body. And if you recognize you need do nothing, you have withdrawn the body’s value from your mind. Here is the quick and open door through which you slip past centuries of effort, and escape from time. This is the way in which sin loses all attraction right now. For here is time denied, and past and future gone. Who needs do nothing has no need for time. To do nothing is to rest, and make a place within you where the activity of the body ceases to demand attention. Into this place the Holy Spirit comes, and there abides. He will remain when you forget, and the body’s activities return to occupy your conscious mind.

Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity. This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent. For from this center will you be directed how to use the body sinlessly. It is this center, from which the body is absent, that will keep it so in your awareness of it.

– A Course in Miracles

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Postscript: I don’t believe we only live once. I believe we live forever. And I’d rather have sex only once, ever again — in a situation where both of us are fully alive and connected — and have it feel 100%, than ever have hollow aluminum unconnected sex ever ever again.

Thank you, HotBox, for helping me clarify that. :-)

One of the things I love about RSD Nation is that, despite the fact that a lot of them are troublemakers, there are a lot of very alive, connected guys over there. ;-) You can feel the energy all over the board.

Love,