Lesson 198: “Only my condemnation injures me.”

This lesson says, “Injury is impossible.”  

The Course can sometimes seem confusing.  For most of us somewhere along the way of studying the Course the idea that the world is not real is hard to understand and integrate into our lives.

Or learning this particular building block becomes one of the later things that people make sense of since it is quite different than the world’s idea that it is very much real.  

The Course wants us to get the full dose of the idea that injury is impossible. 

We must appreciate that in God’s kingdom there is no such thing as a body or the world and that material things do not exist.  They are temporary and error-prone and end at some point.  This explains why they are not of God because all that God creates is made of the same perfect and eternal energy from which God is created.

Therefore these parts of our human reality- the Course reminds us- are not true from the perspective that they are not of God inherently.

This is a tall order to accept but it can be done with practice.

Then, on the other hand, we don’t want to position ourselves as unable or unwilling to engage in the world when necessary to do something to be helpful. 

This could be for our own human experience or to do for others or for the benefit of the world in the grand scheme of the Universal plan.  We are given the body to use as a tool while we are here.

We are meant to learn simply to not be attached to it and use it rather for the greater good.  

The Course teaches- we can live in the body in a totally harmonious way.  Then we get lost not able to understand how to release this attachment to how our bodies function and how they do things.  The Course gives us a purpose to use the body for the purpose of God’s goals.  We must let go of our attachment to making the body any certain way.

The reason injury is impossible is that in God’s Universe the body does not exist; it is unreal.

The Course wants us to understand that in God’s world injury is impossible because we don’t allow any thought that is not of God- like a body- have any negative impact on us. 

It is not of the same energy of God and thus has no validity.

The Course says that our task is to accept both of these philosophies simultaneously. 

We want to accept them both together and equally even though they appear to be contrary to each other.  The Course asks us to get comfortable with these ideas at the same time and not try to resist them because they seem contrary to each other.  We are all learning to make sense of the Course by seeing that these ideas in no way contradict each other.

We must allow them to be acceptable even if it feels weird for a while.

Then we will gradually learn how to make it work for us- accepting both of these ideas as valid- that the world is both unreal and real- and then apply this idea to the way we live.  We want to hold clearly in our minds that something like injury is impossible in Gods Universe because God would have it no other way.

Thus, we can live with increasingly less attachment about the world and our bodies because we remember in the deeper recesses of our minds that the world is not real and our bodies are not real.

It all becomes easier to live in the world fully engaged in what we are doing but at the same time have part of our minds sitting on a cloud with God hand in hand because we know truly that the world is in no way real. 

That is how we stay detached because we keep part of us on that cloud with God knowing nothing but God is real.