Friday, June 19, 2015
Lesson 170: “There is no cruelty in God and there is none in me.”
It’s interesting how something like cruelty could go unnoticed and completely under the radar. Cruelty sounds severe and painful so we might assume it will be obvious. But even something as plain sounding as cruelty can just slip by without our even paying attention. The ego is masterful at making these kinds of things subtle and hidden. Our insides are a place that we don’t listen to very often or sometimes with the greatest amount of clarity that identifying these kinds of mind states necessarily requires.
Sometimes we simply function on automatic because we are doing many things at once, and therefore we aren’t tuned in. Then we can surely miss this feeling that is so central to our level of peace inside. We have to know that this kind of inner dialogue is not just unpleasant, very often it goes to the length of being cruel. Let’s not underestimate our ego’s insane agenda. It is indeed unsound. We don’t need to deny to ourselves the level of craziness. It is this way all the time. This is why we are asked to pay a good notice when our minds are filled with anything that isn’t God. Anything that isn’t God is necessarily a spot of cruelty. Let’s not act surprised. See it for what it is.
What is amazing too is that there is no cruelty in God. Almost everyone has heard regularly or sometimes outright believes that God is entirely cruel in terms of our punishment and or at least in part cruel when reacting to our perceived sin. When we associate God with cruelty we definitely get on the wrong perception about the nature of God. We may then harbor real feelings of fear and anxiety about God because we might feel like God is going to get us whenever we fail, which is frequent.
This is why we must learn and understand that God is never cruel in any way. We must be committed to discarding any former and incorrect belief about God. When this is the reality we believe in, we must certainly suffer. When we think God is our enemy then our peace is gone and surely our joy. Then we become slave or prisoner to God because we think God is out to get us and will be angry at us no matter what we do.
It’s imperative that we understand that God is simply not cruel but also that God is all generous and loving and compassionate as in expressed in the Course’s teaching. When we let go of our past wrong thinking about God then we can have an accurate and wholly loving God from Whom we can project out into our world. We need to have this benevolent God with Whom to associate and identify. In the world, we need a model for how to be so we can truly be at peace. When we understand that God is the best parent and deity we could ever hope for, then we can know we can see God as the one to emulate. And the practice of our peace will be possible because we can follow the demonstration of God- specifically this God of goodwill.