Friday, July 17, 2015
Lesson 198: “ Only my condemnation injures me.”
This lesson says, “Injury is impossible.” This means injury is simply out of the ballpark entirely. It simply is not an option. The possibility of injury is nonexistent. There is no way injury can even squeeze its way into our reality. It can never happen because it is out of the realm of the probable or possible. This way of thinking about injury means that injury has no power to interact with us or control us or impact us in any way because it is non existent in God’s world.
The reality of there being no way to injure us is our first rate ticket out of the hell we believe in. We have a ticket that is good for all time and good without fail. We can always have this freedom from injury because of injury’s non-reality. This means all the ways our bodies and our minds suffer in the world’s display are all just falsities that get undone and then redone.
When we see injury has no way to impact us, then we are totally free to go about our lives without a moment of worry that the axe is about to fall. When we don’t have to wonder about the inevitable injurious attacks toward us then we can use our time making our lives beautiful and a picture of God’s mission, extending Love wherever we turn. When injury ceases to exist we can finally relax because we don’t have to feel like we are living on fleeting time. We then think our end from the source of injury is our immediate downfall and of course death.
The Course teaches us that our minds are susceptible to attack at times but only from our own ideas reflected within. We are not in the line of fire of anyone else in the world because injury never happens anyway in God’s world. Our minds can never be lit with the flames of injurious attack. They instead remain perfectly whole, and nurtured and blessed with all good things. Injury truly never happens. Injury is simply illusion.
However, when we have moments of not remembering our eternal connection with God’s Mind and purpose then we may have moments of mistakenly forgetting that injury is not possible. We may perceive that injury has happened. What we need to do is remember that truly there is never a moment to fret because it is not possible to injure our minds as the direct descendants of God. God is perfect and incorruptible. Nothing can create a violation of our energy because it is unassailable, aligned with God.
The Course says our bodies do not exist. Our bodies are unreal as is the world. Our egos are quick to argue that bodies indeed can be injured. Then our belief in God’s world where we are injure-proof seems fanciful. What is helpful is for us to integrate the Course’s ideas here about the body’s lack of response to the world and to the bodies eventual deterioration as anything but neutral information. It helps when we get out of our own feelings of sureness that the body necessarily will respond in the way that the world dictates it will.
One really helpful thing to understand is that the laws of nature set out by the physical world we live in are definitely not aligned with those in God’s world. When we simply understand this, then it’s a lot easier to not have ourselves wrapped around the idea mentally that our bodies can be attacked for example or our bodies are necessarily going to experience sickness and deterioration. What is very helpful is- seeing the body as unreal- it automatically denies our insistence that the world’s laws are legitimate and necessarily unalterable. What Jesus asks us to do in the Course is not be limited to the narrowness of this mentality. Instead, hold that injury is impossible and that we are perfectly capable as the children of God to maintain a perfectly healthy body as long as God deems our body useful for our purposes. Then carry around this certainty in our minds of our invulnerability as God’s heirs and then hold that there is nothing to fear in the world.