Lesson 61: “I am the light of the world.”

The Course is teaching us that we are so fabulous that we can accurately describe ourselves to ourselves or to other people as something as extraordinary as the light of the world.  I sure remember thinking this was such an arrogant thing to say!  How can we declare ourselves as the light of the world?  I could feel even guilty if I said such a thing before doing the Course at length.  I felt like I was making proclamations that I would never be able to actualize and that people would be irritated at me for making such a statement that would definitely be false in the long run.  Then I would spend my time managing my guilt.

Let’s actualize our inherent greatness.  

Rise to the level our true nature- embody pure light.

When I try to profess to be better or feign to be something that I am but actually am not, then I spend all my time in a darkly lit light in my mind because I feel like I am contradicting myself.  And this necessarily is a dark energy to be saying one thing and actually feeling another.  If I feel like I am not worthy to be the light of the world, then I feel conflicted if I try to say the words that to me are untrue.  This means I will get bound up within because I am not aligning my words with my intention.  This always feels wrong and off.  We feel badly if we try to do this.

We are asked to be an instrument of lightness.  This can be light as- opposite of dark and it can also be lightness- as opposite of heavy.  This is ever so beautiful because the world in fact seems to be sinking.  The world is so dense and dark we can’t even find a moment of light and any spots of light within this dark shroud.  Life feels so difficult and hard and we end up accepting that everything seems like it is on a sinking ship.  We don’t know how to escape in time.  Our lives often just feel so desperate and draining because we always find ourselves in this limited structure of humanity.  We can feel so stuck in repeating our worst nightmare because we don’t even realize that all we have to do is allow the lightness of laughter and giggles.

When we see life with some amount of play everything takes on a new meaning.  Even if we get sad or afraid this is just a temporary block in the flow of love.  What we forgot to do the Course says is laugh about what we see.

Giggles give it all perspective. 

We stop believing in the worst case scenarios because it all seems manageable when laughter keeps us smiling within.  Even if we can’t do it externally, just remember that lightness allows us to get out of perpetuating the problem.  When we sit and take a deep breath as we giggle in the process of shifting our woes then we feel that we are given a steady energy of God’s grace.  This lightness is the way to let the situation be something we play about.

This lesson says, “This statement is the opposite of a statement of pride, arrogance, or of self-deception.”  The ego can certainly have moments where it tells us that we are given the gift of being the light of the world but this also goes along with a sense of arrogance.  Sometimes the ego says that we are in fact the light of the world.  But what happens when the ego gets to agree to such a thing is that the ego often makes this a situation where we feel like we are special and better than other people.  This is a shame for sure because this is a way that we separate ourselves especially from our brothers and sisters who are the people we want to walk hand to hand together to heaven.  God says that when we do something like make ourselves better than other people then we remove our minds from that energy of joining- which is the appropriate energy to get us to heaven.  It also allows us to live life in peace on the earth.

We want to stay clear that we don’t get into situations where we are making ourselves seemingly better than other people because this is the way we end up not being able to come to the glorious position of joining with others.   We reject their energy when we are focused instead on making our egos with the delusional thoughts that we are in any way more worthy than others.  This is always a tragedy when we remove ourselves from the extraordinary act of joining or uniting with those with whom we share the earth.  This joining energy is where we open to the energy of God.  This is why it is our ticket to both heaven and eternal peace.