Lesson 306: “What is the Second Coming?”  “The gift of Christ is all I seek today.”

This lesson says, “Today I am redeemed, and born anew into a world of mercy and of care; of loving kindness and the peace of God.” 

The Course teaches us how to love.

In this passage, the idea of loving kindness is beautifully presented.

Loving kindness is commonly advocated in Buddhist philosophy.  It gives us an understanding of what kind of love to which we are truly referring.  The Course reminds us that we have had an outdated perspective on what is a true nature of love from the world’s doctrine.

The Course teaches us the accurate picture of love.

The ego makes love something that we can buy. 

The world makes love something we use to manipulate others in relationships. 

We use love to get other people to do certain things that we maintain is a bargain.  This offering of our love is always based on lack in this scenario.  We make love something we win and lose.

We also must understand the Course’s teachings of special relationships. 

This is where we use our relationships in such a way we are emotionally and additionally often physically inappropriate. 

The special relationship is where we fail to put God before the person with whom we are in a relationship.

When God is not first in our thinking, then we make inappropriate demands on this person and behave in ways that are not happy or healthy for us. 

Our behavior in these cases is self destructive for us and also destructive to the relationship concerned.

Often, we are obsessive in these relationships and make them more important to us that God.  This alway skews our energy because we are not remembering our connection to God as our source and inspiration so we end up doing things that are unhelpful.

We often end up making these relationships messy emotionally because we don’t have distinct boundaries.

Further, we behave in ways that make us feel disturbed even if we are the ones asserting ourselves in the connection.  We will still feel totally wrong.

We forget to connect with what is good for our authentic self. 

Special love becomes the object of our fixation.  This is what I think as an addiction. 

Special love has a totally stilted perception in the world’s view.