Friday, June 26, 2015
Lesson 177: Review: “God is but Love, and therefore so am I.” “There is no death. The Son of God is free.” “Now we are one with Him Who is our Source.”
Being free is a state of mind. We often think of freedom as a physical manifestation. Freedom is when we are not bound by chains or residing in a prison. This physical interpretation of what freedom means certainly lands with us clearly. We can understand and relate to the idea of freedom in a physical set up. But the Course asks us to shift our perception just a bit into translating the concept of freedom into a state of mind. The freedom that matters is that of our thinking. When our minds are free we live in the state of peace. We know that we can enjoy everything because there is no way that we will be out of commission in a way that matters. This awareness then gives us constant reason to be joyful and easy as we don’t need to harbor concern.
Once we realize that our minds are the areas we want to remain reliably in a state of outright freedom then we can think very carefully about how the rest of our beliefs affect our system of thinking. When we realize we want to feel free and therefore spacious in our thinking we can look at things like death. Death is the most significant challenge we think is necessarily our destiny. We give death all the reality it needs and more to become born into our lives because we all fear death ever so much in our human existence.
This is why we give the ego so much authorization to create our reality because the ego thinks that death is the inescapable part of our lives. This is the cornerstone of our ego’s thoughts. The ego latches onto death and projects it into each aspect of our lives in various forms. We just have to be willing to look at this as it is is- for sure a sad, sad aspect of how our egos operate. We have to see that we insert death into each little moment. We may even pretend that the ego isn’t making death our reality but this is always the case. This is why we are asked to make it clear within ourselves what is happening and how death magically appears in our days. See it for what it is and then release it from our minds. We have to acknowledge this layer of insanity- death- that we allow to run unchecked in our minds.
Jesus gives us an automatic out. We can stop the death creation in just a heartbeat. All we have to do is see it when we give it life in our moment to moment existence. See it and give it back to God. We are free because God says so. That is the way out of hell, without any hesitation or concern or reservations. All we have to do is be willing to let God’s way shine through the moments when we picture death inside or outside.