Lesson 167: “There is one life, and that I share with God.”

This lesson says, “When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while.”

This lesson also says, “A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of Life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there.”

The Course  reminds us that we all have attraction to death.

We all have moments when we get lost in the drama of the world and we forget that we have desire rather for God’s view and not the ego’s. 

We forget because this is part of how it is to be human.

We have a groove in our minds, and what we need to do, is lay down more tracks, as we dance through our minds deciding where to stop and play. 

We need to, over time- from repetition at choosing God- then, eventually, we make a deeper groove.  We just need to remember that this is part of what we do in the human condition.

It is part of the way we are wired and so we can bless this and learn to forgive it and work with it. 

Whenever we get grumpy and have grievances with ourselves because of our slow pace to evolve spiritually or to achieve whatever our goal, we need to stop and appreciate that it is truly effort to change.  

We are given the tools in the Course but from grasping the philosophy, we also need to make time to properly apply the Course teachings.

We need to keep coming back to making that groove larger and smoother so we do not catch our foot, and then, stumble and fall in our process.

God is so gentle and kind.  

God says that when we go off and try to join with the ego’s plan, and we are invested in giving energy to the ego’s intention, this is our momentary forgetting.  We humans do this because it is one of our challenges.

We stumble and fall when it comes to that moment of truth when we want to choose God only. 

When we do, God says we have fallen asleep. 

There is no punishment, there is no dismay.

God just laughs- in a loving way- and says, “Uh-oh, you did it again,” with the most benevolent and sweet intention. 

God is entirely delicately approaching us and watching us.  God says we are asleep when we have those difficult moments.

We have fallen asleep because we have forgotten to make great use of our minds and be part of the solution.

We seem like we are emerging from a swampy mess in our minds of some pool of algae from which we lift our heads. 

We can’t see anything because we just get lost in the world’s muck.

The Course reminds us that when we do wake, we have the magical homecoming of our trip right back to God’s side. 

Never is a moment lost in the return, when we are up for getting to God.  The Course says that we have times when we are totally stuck in the green algae and we can’t see.  But this is just a temporary state from which we are happily only briefly in.

We are all in the process of waking up in our own individual ways, and this is amazing.

It means that we soon will be right next to God. 

We have the wonderful news that our own perfection is maintained in the Mind and Will of God.  

We don’t have to do anything but just show up and know it and feel it.

The image of the Lord of Life fading into what is reflected there is lovely.

We know that God relishes our union without measure, and He has our Heaven for us perfectly prepared.

This means we can just enjoy the fact that God is our Creator and that we all are exactly like God because God created us that way.