Sunday, June 14, 2015
Lesson 165: “Let my mind not deny the Thought of God.”
The Course uses the word “deny” to help us understand what we do and what is true. The Course teaches us that God is all powerfully supreme with unlimited capabilities and certainty of goodness. God is completely unlimited, has every wonderful trait we could ever want in a parent or certainly in our deity. God is even far beyond our wildest imagination. The Course is teaching us how spectacular that is and little by little we start to have glimpses of how truly extraordinary God is.
Further, the Course wants us to remember without fail and consistently that we are the children of God. We need to accept that we are God’s chosen children and no one else’s. Therefore, we have qualities of God because God is the energetic material from which we have been drawn. The basis for this is that as children we have to have some kind of parent or Creator as this is the general way beings in nature and humans get born in this current Universe. Therefore if we must have a Creator and the Course says that God chose us specifically (and everyone else as well) that makes us definitely the offspring and God-energy-containing beings.
What we want to learn eventually is to have deep faith that God is perfect and we were created in His image. That means our essential nature is also perfect. Therefore all of this is set in our minds and is set in the way the Universe functions because it is unchangeable. The nature of God-energy is unchanging. Therefore, we can be guaranteed at any and every moment that God exists and God is perfect and the ideal Father and deity that will care for us and help us to meet our needs.
And because we are the creations of God, I think of us as the “Thoughts” of God. We are God’s energy, so we are just a drop in God’s infinite ocean. We are individual expressions of God – a momentary thought- while we in our uniqueness never leave the collective energy of God. The Course says that no one is separate from each other or separate from God so we all can thoroughly enjoy how it feels to be simply one expression of God’s energy, while we are all at the same time only one energy. These states exists simultaneously. Jesus wants us to know that we can be one with God all the time and at the same time express our individuality in the world. These are not contrary states, but rather complementary. We just have to hold it in our minds. And eventually it becomes an easily-combined-concept to grasp.
I think other religions or philosophies sometimes try to get students learning about the concepts to accept some new bit of information. People are asked to consider that they don’t know the information yet and then need to put energy into integrating the concept. This sometimes works. But when people are trying to change their minds or their habits, sometimes they struggle intensely because our egos put up every kind of struggle in the book to prevent us from gaining and benefitting from the new ideas.
The Course is far more compassionate I think to use the teaching tools to get us half way there to the result we want- gaining the new information. The Course says- we already know the truth inside- in this example about the nature of us and God. What we did was forgot this information. But since the Course treats us like we already mastered this before- as the information is gathered and completely accessible, then the effort it takes to now use this information is much easier. We are already more than half way there when we realize we just “forgot.”