Lesson 242: “What is the world?”  “This day is God’s.  It is my gift to Him.”

This lesson says, “I do not understand the world, and so to try to lead my life alone must be but foolishness.” 

The Course’s teaching is meant to set us straight.

We sit with these illusions- our inner ego dialogue that makes no sense. 

The ego- that is that little voice inside our minds that is distinctly not God, because all of the ego’s proposals are insane.  This is how we learn to tell the difference between what is the ego and what is God. What God says always makes sense, at least in the long run.

God gives us instruction that serves who we are and serves our lives. 

And God does this instruction in a clear, gentle, warm and loving way.  

God gives us instruction so we don’t end up in some crazy predicament where we really suffer over the theme of the message or suffer over the elements of the occurrence.  The way we know the ego is not God is because the ego suggests strategies that actually end up causing us great grief.

We must recognize the ego is consistently tries to persuade us to do things that will drag out our unhappiness. 

The ego does this in a way that makes us also feel unworthy and doubt our healthy self confidence.  

We learn to listen to that the inner voice, and over time, we will become practiced at deciphering it.  Sometimes we make mistakes because we can’t tell the difference between what is that God centered voice in our minds, which the Course calls the Holy Spirit, or the ego’s voice.

The ego is really excellent at being convincing it is God.  We must forgive ourselves when we take the wrong path.  The Course says that God never, ever judges us and therefore, we learn from God’s example to do the same.

The Course says, bottom line- to forgive ourselves when we have lost our way. 

Then, as we forgive ourselves, we step right up and also change our minds and reconnect with God. 

Both are necessary for peace and both are fun when we get the hang of them.

Learning the process of discovering how to recognize God’s voice is important.   Another important point the Course teaches is how to recognize that we have no idea what the world is.  The world is the ego’s voice in the Course’s terms.

The Course teaches us to see that we perceive the world wrongly. 

The Course teaches us that the world seems to have purpose in the ego perspective.  It appears to be the place where we have bodies and we live in houses and we have cars and families.

We have certain assumptions about what the world entails. 

This is something we are wrong about in the Course’s eyes.  Jesus says that the ego’s perspective of the world is flawed and based on error.

We tend to believe in the world’s appearance because we think it looks an feels so real.

The Course asks us to simply take another look. 

When we use God as our lens the world actually has a view that is definitely totally different from the one we see with the ego’s eyes.

This simply means we are meant to hold on very lightly to what we think the ego tells us is true. 

We are learning to replace our ego- thinking and perspectives with God’s instead.  Therefore, we just let our opinion of the world be something that we hold up for God to take and reshape it.  The ego likes to grab hold tightly to what the ego thinks especially about the world.

The Course says, just allow this to be gently replaced with God’s view.

When we allow our minds to be rewritten we actually achieve peace and happiness because this is what God asks for. 

God says hold space in our minds for something new to be written and appreciate that our role is to surrender the ego’s clutch on our attachment- to be undone by God’s perfect Will and purpose.