Saturday, June 6, 2015
Lesson 157: “Into His presence would I enter now.”
This lesson says, “This is a day of silence and of trust.” This is a specifically Course related idea. It isn’t saying just sit in silence. If we did that, our egos would be very likely to complain loudly. If our minds are quieted, we release our mental chatter, then our minds are an empty slate. The ego fears this profoundly because the ego is quick to conclude some anxiety and dwell on disconcerting illusions. When our minds are quiet, the ego has its regular stint in creating a feeling of discord and disempowerment. We can feel vulnerable and bound for some misfortune because we are set up and our of our regular accord of being full of content.
Jesus in the Course is telling us- relax, and feel safe. There is NOTHING to worry about. That’s why we must be conscious of the trust part after we put ourselves into quiet. We have to hold our minds in certainty and understand deeply that God loves us so much, He wants us to never have a moment of not feeling safe and perfectly held and healthy. The way this happens is we hold in our minds that trust is the natural outcome of what we feel when we realize that we are on God’s path alone.
This lesson says, “This day is holy, for it ushers in a new experience; a different kind of feeling and awareness.” We are progressively guided to a new way of being in the world. We want to get out of words, stop the incessant mental dance. Then we can allow our feeling and experience to be our every day experience. We don’t have to wallow in our thought. We are asked to let it go. We are asked to stop trying to figure everything out. It means nothing.
When we can stop the thinking, we can usher right out our judgment. This will bring the extraordinary experience of the present. We won’t be thinking about the present by defining the present through the past. All of the problems we have about obsessing on the future or past simply cease to exist when we focus on just the feeling of the moment. All we have to do is sit in gratitude in the expression of the now. All other problems cease to exist as they are necessarily tied to being out of the moment or by being in our own criticism that anything should be different.
The Course gives us a variety of methods to help us undo our thinking when our thinking gets in the way of our experiencing the moment. This way we can have a tool bag of ideas about how to meet our thinking in a way that enables us to let it all go. The goal is to find ourselves living moment to moment in all the authenticity and awareness that is within us. While we do this, we want to just have compassion for the way our egos try to control and get us to return to our addictive thinking. What we need to do is understand how this happens and then gently be firm about letting it go. Feeling and living fully moment to moment is the purpose of God’s gift to us of existing energetically. When we forget to stay centered in our present existence, we can just get ourselves back to the experience of existence as promptly as we are able. This is always our only goal.