Lesson 182: “I will be still an instant and go home.”

The Course teaches that we are always in a foreign land when we live in the illusion. 

We are constantly bombarded with the ego’s beliefs and perceptions and the ego masterfully denies that we feel so wrong here.  The ego doesn’t want other people to know that in truth we feel totally distraught living in the world.

The ego wants everyone else to believe we look perfectly at ease here because it is a source of the ego’s self-promotion. 

The ego thinks there is some merit in looking good no matter how we truly feel.  The Course says that the world is a place that is wrong in every way.

We end up feeling totally alone and isolated in the world because we can’t find God. 

This is the problem when we don’t know how to access God.  We feel terribly ashamed of the fact that we feel lonely.  It seems like everyone else is doing fabulously so we don’t want to admit in any way- even in just appearance that this is the case.  The problem is that the ego always looks in the wrong place to get our need for company met.  The ego wants to feel that we have fulfilling relationships so that we will not experience this sense of incredible isolation.  But this never works because we are not correcting that problem with an answer that will work.

We need to understand that our longing for togetherness with other people is one thing that we want to look at. 

Sometimes this is simply the desire for connection.  Sometimes the way to solve this is to make a date with friends or make time for happy connection with our brothers and sisters.

The world would have us believe that this sense of isolation we feel internally can be filled by the world’s answers.   We want to check carefully in our emotional realm and notice if we are truly wanting to join with other people or something else.

It is important to pay attention to what is the true cause of our sense of loneliness. 

We may truly feel called to connect with people.  Then if we do, then invite someone to spend time with us.  We must notice what we truly want.

The Course reminds us that this feeling of isolation may simply mean we miss God. 

We may want to get a clear hit about how to make time to spend with God in meditation or prayer or in some holy activity that allows us to feel close to God.  We need to get practice in knowing what our needs are.  Or, sometimes the problem is that we want to do both greater joining with our brothers and sisters as well as to get more connected with our God- Mind.

The job is to just find out what works for us and do it with love.

God teaches us how to be present with His words in a silent way. 

Being quiet often helps us get beyond words and get into the feeling instead.  Or, allow words to wash away and  then have the experience of knowing our certainty.  This is God and the Course teaches us how to make our practice of meeting with God regularly truly the experience- not just a notch on our wish list.

We feel God’s energy in the experience and we often may not even have words for this joining with God because it feels so good that words fail at describing it adequately. 

We can forgive that words limit God, so we aren’t harboring any resentment about them and simply understand that we are blessed with the gift of feeling God’s Presence.  This is wordless.