Saturday, February 28, 2015
Lesson 59: Review: “God goes with me wherever I go.” “God is my strength. Vision is His gift.” “God is my Source. I cannot see apart from Him.” “God is the light in which I see.” “God is the Mind in which I think.”
We want God to be the answer to any question we have. We are asked to strip away from our attachment any worldly agenda. We are asked to go with wholly empty hands to our God and with this sense of emptiness we can then be filled with God entirely. The emptiness here is a wonderful and productive state. Sometimes when we talk about the ego’s emptiness, we find out that this is a vacant feeling, not filled with peaceful presence.
We want to release the ego’s version of “empty” because this is simply the void inside of us that doesn’t feel healthy or good. When I think of the ego’s “emptiness” I equate it with a feeling of neediness. When we feel needy there is a terribly overpowering need to “fill up” on something that isn’t God. This feeling of neediness is almost a desperate attempt to find wholeness through adding something external.
The Course says that we are already perfectly filled with the feelings of plentiful because we never left the channel of God’s love. We don’t have to ever feel “needy” because we are already perfectly filled with the most precious and nurturing love. If we have moments of feeling needy, just know we can instantly shift this by the simple tuning into God’s healing Love.
I don’t think at all of neediness being the same as “empty.” When we get empty it’s like coming to a deeply humble state where we understand fully that God is the perfect provider of all ways we need to live through love. When we feel empty it is because we know our own “plans” are just the direction to our own hell and we have therefore ridden ourselves of them. When we think we have some plan for things it is based on the ego’s attachment to what it believes is good. We are just asked to remove any of our own perception we know how to proceed. When we feel empty, this is a beautiful thing, because we can then be filled completely with God’s Love. Then nothing is already there taking up space.
We have to see that emptiness is desired because this is when we have been willing to give up our own plan. I think neediness occurs when the emptiness is looked at as a bad thing. Then our ego’s are quick to struggle internally that emptiness happened at all.