Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Lesson 189: “I feel the Love of God within me now.”
This lesson says, “To feel the Love of God within you is to see the world anew, shining in innocence, alive with hope, and blessed with perfect charity and love.” When Jesus talks about hope here, this is a hope of the plenty. One of the ways the world looks at hope is that whatever is hoped for is not a definite outcome. The world thinks of hope as an outcome unsure. Hope in the world very commonly feels empty because there is no fountain from which to draw from the well.
There is nothing that we can see being made manifest in the world because the world’s hope is usually considered close to if not completely a lost cause. The world’s hope is often a terrible tease and a cruel prospect because it is laced with the impossibility of that coming into fruition. This is a terrible way to live when the world’s hope is all we have to hang onto. This definitely feels like scarcity and we then believe in our personal misfortune. This is why the Course makes such effort to teach us about this notion of rather being alive with hope.
The Course’s hope occurs naturally because it is a typical byproduct of God’s commitment to us and of God’s Will. We can always absolutely lavishly live in this kind of hope that the Course offers because it is sustainable. This hope is based on the bounty and fullness of God’s energy which is ever present. The reason we can hope is that we know that the occurrence of what we hope for is just as real as the hope itself. This means we can relax and enjoy what we see before us because we get to live in the quality of this spectacular feeling of hope within.
This lesson says, “Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.” The Course says, when you finish the book, throw it away. We don’t need it. This speaks to me dramatically. I feel positively that the Course doesn’t want us to create a religion from it nor be given some notoriety. Jesus just wants to correct some errors in our thinking and give us tools to remove the blocks to Love’s presence. But then when we learn from reading, let’s let the words go. God does not want us to overthink. God wants us to let go of the learning. It serves a purpose but then that is finished. Let’s realize that the book isn’t meant to become a god to us. Jesus is trying to help us realize that there is a great deal of ego involvement that usually comes with when we try to set up structures for our learning purposes.
What we are asked to do is empty our minds. The Course asks us to live in the moment and feel and experience. And we can request of God to show us the way. Our lives are meant to be a living prayer. Nothing more than clearing our minds of thoughts all the time. We meet our thoughts, invite them in with welcome and then we let them all go with kindness and forgiveness. Then we aren’t meant to stay focused on the words but rather shift into the experience of our being and humanness.
We are asked as well to forget the world. The Course teaches us to hold this in balance- our understanding of the world being real and also unreal. Jesus says forget the world- it matters that we focus, focus, focus on letting our attachment to the world be nonexistent. This is why we see it as unreal. This sure is difficult. However, if we make this our constant intent, the state of non attachment definitely becomes easier. We just need to stick with it.