Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Lesson 12: “I am upset because I see a meaningless world.”
The Course teaches us that any time we judge what we see. when we perceive our experience in the world as in some way unpleasant, then we are making the world a source of our upset. When we respond to our lives with anything other than a calm acceptance, then we are in fact upset by the world.. The Course says there are no small upsets, they are all equally disturbing to our minds. This is why we need to understand that anything other than acceptance is a form of upset. We need to take this seriously in terms of identifying this so we don’t let this pass throughout our minds at the ego’s watch and let it slide passed our awareness in a blind moment of unconsciousness. We must learn to pay close attention to this because we don’t want to let those upsets happen without our notice.
We want to see them and attend to them. What Jesus teaches us is that our emotional upsets are a definite response to what is the insanity in the world. The brilliant point Jesus teaches us here is how to see that our thoughts are actually about a meaningless world. The world is meaningless because it is not of the same energy of God. Therefore, it has no reality and no validity. We learn that this in fact means that the world is meaningless. This is the way we then can respond instead to the world with God’s message- that the world has no meaning. Thus, it takes the emotional blow out of the charge that our egos’ absorb when the ego judges the world as hurting us.
The Course teaches us to meet this information in our minds with a simple shrug in the shoulder, and say, “Oh really? Is that what really happened? I have no sense of suffering over that because is is meaningless.” Therefore the world is just a shadow that has no darkness in it. When you realize the shadow means nothing, then we simply turn on the light and the shadow ceases to be. Furthermore, we see that the shadow has no power to affect us. The shadow is a moment of dark, but passes when we simply turn on the light.
What we learn to do here is simply realize that our upset from the world’s woes is actually being upset over nothing in truth. The world’s meaninglessness leaves a question mark in our minds. It’s not the world being bad, as in judging with the ego’s lens. Since it is meaningless, we have no reason to judge it; also, it is a neutral thought in its meaninglessness. This is why the meaningless concept is a huge piece in relieving the strain in our minds about when we make the world real and then get critical about it.