Lesson 13: “A meaningless world engenders fear.”
The natural response of what we encounter in the meaningless world is fear. Fear is the instinctual response because it is something we don’t recognize. The Course teaches us to learn about the connection from what is our perception. Given what we choose to see, we then have some appropriate response. This is the basic response of humans. We all find ourselves necessarily engaging in some reaction to what we see. This is our basic human nature.
The Course is teaching us how to first recognize our part in our emotional response. We want to see clearly that we and our choosing is at the origin of the immediate response to what happens in our observation. The ego is quick to react because the ego thinks this reaction of fear is justified. The ego goes to a reaction of fear and deep upset because the ego is always quick to judge what we see. This is why we are learning how to catch ourselves, or catch our ego-selves when we respond with fear.
The Course teaches us there is nothing to be afraid of because all that happens is expressly a result of God’s choosing. God absolutely has a plan and we all are the star of every flick we see. We are the true artists in God’s play and we act out God’s perfect plan. We never have to worry about the part we find ourselves acting in. This is exactly what God gives us as our role. We are a perfect fit for the role God chooses for us because God wrote the play of our lives for us.
God wrote it for us as an exact replica of what will serve us because God thinks we are perfectly suited to learn the lessens within that play. God gives us the perfect role for us because God loves our acting style and wants to give us the gift of the perfect fit in our extraordinary acting career. We can trust that we do the absolute best job that we could ever expect for in the role God chooses for us because God is demonstrating for us the whole way what is the most effective acting style. Also, God gives us every little bit of feedback about how we can grow into our role as the one chosen for this superb task of acting our part.
We just want to stay clearly focused on identifying our feelings when we feel something like fear. We can stop and listen. We can hold our hearts when we see that we need to give our fear some attention. When fear comes, sit down or lay down and hug ourselves if that helps. Know that when fear comes through us we may need to sit quietly with it and honor it by simply giving it space in our minds. If it helps talk to the fear, ask it what it is trying to communicate to us.
The fear may simply be old buried feelings that are now coming to the surface. Just have a compassionate heart for ourselves because all humans have occasional repressed emotions. Thank the fear for coming to show itself to us. Hold the fear in our minds and allow it time to unwind. Then we can feel it in our bodies. Allow the fear to be expressed in feeling and then once we feel it, it often will be comfortable moving away from the forefront of our minds.
We are invited to feel fear when it comes up for us. It helps to not deny any authentic feeling that arises. However, just also keep fear in perspective. We just learned that the world is meaningless and this engenders fear. Appreciate that the world is meaningless- meaning it has no weight to impact us in any way as it is. This means that we can hold this fear lightly and release it easily because the world as a whole is meaningless. It has no power to affect us negatively. Therefore, we can let the fear go as an easy exhale because it has no validity.