Lesson 33: “There is another way of looking at the world.”
The Course’s main objective is to help us discover how to open our minds. We usually get so bound internally with what we believe and believe we perceive. The ego brings us to a frustrating position inwardly where we can’t get away and we can’t move in any way. The ego gives us such pressure to follow its guidance that we can often simply recoil over the seeming strength of the ego’s influence. What happens is we get to a place where anything other than the ego’s opinion is not even in the realm of possibility because we lose track of the reality that we can move and change if we so wish.
The ego can not force us to follow. We may just be so drawn to the ego’s message that we can’t believe that we have digested anything else but the ego’s lies of deceit and terror. We can just feel entirely struck and frozen. This is what the ego wishes for us because when we get stuck we can no longer believe we have any other option. Often our coping strategy ends up giving us the worst scenario- in order to tolerate the our frozen being we start to just believe that we have no choice so we don’t feel disempowered in addition to being stuck. We believe the ego’s insanity is unavoidable because we got such sway that the ego is the answer to our prayers.
The Course- at a fundamental level- simply teaches us how to be open to something different. The only problem is when we think that there is nothing to be done but to accept the fate of life at the hands of our egos and just deny any impulse to get up and leave. The Course says we can live an entirely alternate reality. The ego is a fair ruse. We learn that the ego is so good at playing make believe and making our experience of life with the ego as the must that we are destined to live.
Jesus is teaching us here that we don’t have to have everything figured out. All we have to do is simply get out of the way. The problem is when we let the ego rule our minds. God says all we have to do is let in God energy into our minds and any small amount of this healing power is perfectly enough to get us to a place of peace and harmony. We just need to be willing to make space for just the smallest amount of God’s light. When we do- even if it is just the most minute space in the wall of darkness, this is what we need to bring us to the full shift we need. When we let in a little of God, this is enough. God’s world is not quantifiable. We don’t have to think of the usual laws of the world in which we live in to understand this. We can trust that whatever the physical picture is of the light we open our minds to, it is certainly enough to bring us to a full shift in consciousness.
The Course says there is no order of difficulty in miracles. Sometimes when we perceive some huge problem, the ego says that there is no way to fix this because it is such a grand dilemma. We just have to trust that God is powerful enough to bring us to and demonstrate to us that all miracles are not only possible, they are already a done deal. We just have to let our minds catch up to the perfection that abounds. God is generous beyond any scope of our imagination. We just need to be sure we do not limit God’s capacity to demonstrate any miracle.