Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Lesson 182: “I will be still an instant and go home.”
An instant is all it takes. The Course teaches us that we don’t have to have a drawn out, laborious, formidable task at hand when we are looking to find peace within. The world says that it is an essentially unattainable goal to maintain a sustained peak of peace. This is just inane babble. It has no reality whatsoever. It can seem like achieving peace will be a relentless uphill battle. Our egos sing every song in the book about how many problems we must solve before getting to the peace- our most sought after goal. What the Course says is that this diversion tactic of the ego is incredibly clever, but also entirely false. Our egos just want us to be disheartened by the process and give up. This is why the ego gives us all kinds of rationales to be discouraged.
What we are asked to do is learn fully that our goal is not difficult at all. We can achieve lasting peace this instant because it is the will of God- therefore within the realm of possibility at all as God’s plan. And furthermore, it turns out that we can simply shift our consciousness. All we have to do is have one wish for God and one tiny bit of willingness to choose it. Nothing else.
We don’t have to achieve endless degrees in school or wait until Sunday because it’s a holy day. Every day and every moment is perfect and has perfect potential to maintain our inner quiet. All we have to do is stop our own inner conflict. Just notice when our minds and intentions are contradicting themselves. We just need to have the willingness to be aligned within. Then we aren’t simultaneously counteracting our will for peace. It’s a piece of cake to choose peace. But let it be our only plan and inspiration for how to get to our cherished goal.
The path to God is one of simplicity. Being in the instant and being still is just the beginning we need to get to God. What we need to do is stop this ongoing complication of everything. Our egos like to tell the lurid details of our stories. Our egos excel at being deceitful. The ego makes everything a seat of discord. Our egos preach to us in their loud and continual assigning of way more difficulty to everything than it actually is. The Course says- keep it simple. Make sure that our inner story is of quiet and the rage of the ego is completely undone. All we have to do is get out of the mindset of the ego’s assumption that it is in the right to be utterly out of control.