Saturday, January 2, 2016
Lesson 2: “I have given everything I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) all the meaning it has for me.”
The text says that a miracle is the way we earn our release from fear. This means we are meant to participate in the miracle. We absolutely are meant to bring our willingness to the situation and then God-directed, take our initiative to see the situation as a call for love. Then once we have this clarity, then the miracle becomes an easy next step. We must understand that all situations are either the expression of love or a call for love. Then we are invited to come and look with clarity on the situation; we sit with it long enough that we see clearly what is happening. This clarity is ever so important.
If we don’t regularly watch our minds or we haven’t asked for God to show us the way to be clear, then we get stuck. Some call for love arises where we can not move forward and bring love as the miracle in order to answer that call for Love with the appropriate answer. We are meant to find what creates the blocks to Love’s presence and find when we can’t identify what we feel because there is too much inner static. This is unfortunate indeed because when we don’t continually unburden our minds with this loud-screeching-inner-noise that impedes our clarity then we can’t proceed to the next step- bringing forth the miracle from our minds to heal the static. We learn in the Course how to have far greater clarity within because we do these tasks which are the most effective ways we give our mind space to be clean and clear- in order to engage in the miracle.
We can continue to watch our minds for our challenges over making our minds a tidy and organized place for the ever important work of bringing miracles to any place needing a boost from Love. We don’t want to be obsessive about or overly focused on watching our minds. The lesson reminds us to not strain because this always puts us in the state of alert where our adrenal system is in a heightened state. We don’t want to do this because when the adrenal system is turned on, our bodies are processing more less helpful hormones.
The body is actually in a state of stress because the body is not cut out for regular stints into obsessive thinking or obsessive behavior. This can occur when our minds overly stress trying to create a situation where everything gets produced with a particular kind of attention or creates a particular kind of outcome. We want to practice all the time forgiving ourselves when we get obsessive, where we stop doing it without getting upset about it. We want to be gentle with ourselves and not overly pushy about accomplishing these things we are learning in the Course.
It is true- the Course’s lessons are typically mental exercises and we may have already chalked up our mental exercises as something that can’t cause strain because it is just a thought. Simply know that our thoughts can be just a stressful as getting clubbed in the head. We can still have this aftermath of the turning on of the adrenal system. This is why we want to simply know that we are wired to experience stress internally and externally when we get obsessive about our mental exercises. Just sit back and approach them all with a developed discipline, as a consistent willingness to stay focused on doing the tasks is always an important part of learning. But we also want to step back and not go to the opposite extreme which is being obsessive about this. We are learning the middle way.