Saturday, July 4, 2015
Lesson 185: “I want the peace of God.”
This lesson says, “To say these words is nothing. But to mean these words is everything.” I think there are but few people you could approach on the street and everyone would likely say peace is preferable than lack of peace. But what Jesus asks us to do is get deeply in touch with that desire for peace. Let’s make it the only thing we make motion to achieve and receive. When our hearts are open and available we are free to receive the extraordinary gift of peace. But when our hearts are faltering and our hearts are stuck in a mode of rejecting then we are not game for meeting with peace.
It doesn’t matter how easy God makes the process of receiving His perfect peace. If our hearts are hard and we are unable or unwilling to soften them enough to open space for the influx of peace then we remain at square one. We will never reach peace if we aren’t invested and connected to our desire to have nothing other than peace. We will remain in the starting booth and never receive this sought after reality if we are shy of being open to it and simply welcoming it.
This lesson says, “Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God.” We have this extraordinary gift of sharing the world and this life with our brothers and sisters. The ego seems to hold firmly that other humans are those with whom we have conflict and evermore competition and resentment and guilt over when we think we do errors. But Jesus teaches us that our brothers and sisters are our most treasured companions.
What often happens with other people is our egos are quick to see them as sinful and we forget that every interaction with them is the possibility of living out love. We often instantly decide that they are just further problems. When we let our egos run wild with stories about our brothers and sisters then we end up avoiding them at best or battling with them at worst. The Course teaches us that our viewpoint of them being the sole cause of our upset is simply an error. This is never the case.
What we learn from Jesus here is that our brothers and sisters are not the ones to take away our sense of peace or take away our well being. Our brothers and sisters are just as powerful energetically as we are. When they are willing to join their intent with ours, this automatically results in profoundly progressive results. What happens is that we can then join all our intent with God’s. We end up having an amazing experience of affecting the world because we can implement God’s Will into the worldly events.
This lesson says, “Minds cannot unite in dreams. They merely bargain.” Bargaining is such a great word. When we bargain it’s because we don’t feel like we have enough so we want to offer the lowest amount possible to get something we want. Bargaining is always in the form of trying to pay as little as possible. What Jesus teaches us in the Course is that we never have to bargain for anything. We always have abundant supplies of God’s love and forgiveness and anything that we need to live.
This is an entirely different foundation because it is built on ideas of the plenty. This lesson is reminding us that what we want only and truly is the quality and action of joining or uniting. This is the energy of and the words Jesus uses to describe what it is like in Heaven or in the Universe with God. We are uniting with God and our brothers and sisters because uniting is holy and it is the only thing we were meant to do with our human companions and God. We are reminded that the world is a dream and temporary. The world is not a place for us to unite our minds because it is simply an illusion and unreal. This is why we are asked to just understand that the world is not the place where we will find the most awesome joining with God and others because it is a nonentity.