Lesson 122: “Forgiveness offers everything I want.”
The beauty of accepting that forgiveness is the only thing we want dramatically simplifies all of life. The ego loves chaos and getting to make everything bigger. The ego likes to be totally consumed in time by sorting out the infinite drives the ego has and makes us ego suffer in the process.
The ego says always more is better. The ego abhors simplicity.
Simplicity leaves us no time and energy to contemplate whether we are happy as things are. Then we get frustrated over how good things seem to be or not.
The ego thinks simplicity is boring because the ego loves and thrives the busier we are. The ego wants us not connected to God energy and Godly will because this is where we stop listening to the ego. That’s why the ego tries to complicate all that we do. The ego wants us to be so overwhelmed with the basic activities of living because they are so off the charts complex.
Then we can never get to a place of appreciating simplicity because the ego has us believing that we are too overly involved with resolving complexity that we can’t get a clear line on just scaling back so we can be more present in the moment.
Simplicity is what allows us to not be overly invested with the world. We see the activity there and sometimes participate in it, but our minds are quiet because we make conscious decisions to do it with God. Simplicity helps us not get sidelined by what the world shows us.
We keep our minds simple and lives as simple as possible so we hear God through the activity and we remember with space in our uncluttered minds that we are willing to be active participants in God’s plan for our days.
Then we are on track with our forgiveness because we have the energetic space to be present with it through our days.
The Course wants us to simply get to the awareness in our minds where we are flat out done with everything else but forgiveness. The ego likes to pretend that everything in the world has its value and we are not supposed to push the boundaries to say otherwise. The Course teaches us that we can be the makers of our realities, in fact co-creators with God.
Therefore, we have no reason at all not to make a clear decision for more than the ego’s meager amounts of mental freedom.
The Course says that we are the ones who are given the gift from God of being able to make a choice. Thus, we are the ones who have all the opportunities to choose a reality that we actually want.
The Course is simply teaching us to realize that we do want the simplicity of forgiveness. We are learning that even though the ego likes to lead us to believe we have all kinds of other desires, the truth is when it comes down to it we don’t.
We don’t because nothing else is good enough for our minds and nothing else is good enough for our energy.
This is because forgiveness gives us every path to peace internally and it gives us the love and inspiration to join with others enthusiastically because forgiveness heals us from our ego’s rejecting other people.
The good news is that we are so holy and perfectly innocent that we raise the bar always when it comes to deciding how good we are. We just have to do the inner work here. We learn to realize that we are worth this effort to choose God. And we are worthy of choosing forgiveness because no person or worldly item can ever even remotely compare with how worthy we are of making this one choice for ourselves.