Lesson 210: Review: “I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.” “I choose the joy of God instead of pain.”
Lesson 182 says, “The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas.”
The ego is always severe and harsh and depressing.
We totally stress when we hear the ego’s ideas and we end up in that familiar cycle of drama and attack because it seems normal.
We are so hard pressed to get to some other reality.
The ego’s vision is truly a nightmare with all the frilly trimmings.
The ego’s plan is the only place we don’t want to be.
The Course and God says that the ego is good at making itself seem stronger and harder and faster and more powerful.
The ego just frightens us when we really get down to it. We find ourselves in the ego’s projections, and then we realize we made a mistake and we don’t want to be there.
We can forgive that we got sucked into the ego’s reality.
It can be like keeping the bees away from the honey. This is impossible because there is such force in the bees’ persistence.
The ego also gives us that constant push toward our minds and makes joining the ego seem almost impossible to avoid.
We can just forgive this.
The problem is that we get so hard on ourselves and our egos and feel like we have failed.
Then, we feel about a millimeter tall because we think we let someone down.
We feel like our worth is minuscule. We get a large thump on our self-esteem.
Hard to love ourselves when we are in this position of seeming to let God down and then let ourselves down.
The Course reminds us that forgiveness is always called for in every situation but especially when we are deeply steeped in ego land.
We must forgive that we got this wrong.
It turns out that nothing is wrong in truth, because God is the master planner and He is totally steering our ship. We just need to let ourselves off the hook because it is the only way to feel better about ourselves and the situation. Forgiving ourselves can be quite the task.
Sometimes being kind to ourselves seems like the last thing we want to do especially when we feel like we have failed in some way in the first place.
The Course reminds us to laugh about all these errors.