Friday, January 23, 2015
Lesson 23: “I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.”
Jesus is teaching us here that we can escape from the world. That means we don’t have some long practice to make it happen. We don’t have to wait until we are enlightened. All we have to do is be in the moment and just cut it out. All we have to do is put up our hand and give a firm NO and it all disappears. All the drama, all the trauma, all the confusion, everything that keeps us in our own private hell simply ceases to exist. Escape is sure and immediate. All we need to do is our part in surrendering what keeps us in the imprisonment in our minds.
Our attack thoughts are the only problem we have. We don’t have to weed through the list of complaints of our ego to try to find out where the problem is. We don’t have to hope we can find some solution. All we have to do is follow God’s instruction here to simply be willing to give up attack thoughts. This single easy thing is all we are asked.
Then the egos says to this simple instruction, “How do we know what an attack thought is?” Great. Now we get even more clear. Let’s thank the ego for giving us food for thought. The attack thought is is simply anything that is not love. When we have loving thoughts, we feel easy, free, comfortable, quiet within, happy to share our good fortune and peace. When we feel attack thoughts we are up in arms with all we see. We want to stay in battle because our feelings of self worth are so low that we feel vulnerable to being wounded by all we see.
Even if it’s not a clear attack on us, we would feel at the mercy of all the people we interact with because we feel no certainty as our emotional armor. Instead, we feel predisposed to seeing and experiencing attack. This is why we must monitor and be willing to cast away any attack thoughts that seem to lingering in our minds or attaching themselves to what we experience.
Our task is to see attack thoughts as not real. Then we are adequately released from them because our mind is not trying to manage them at some level. When we see attack thoughts as real sometimes they have already latched onto our other potentially neutral thoughts. Thus, we need to stay vigilant in watching them and be willing to ask for the Holy Spirit’s help if we aren’t able to give them to God for transformation into something useful and love filled.