Saturday, August 1, 2015
Lesson 213: Review: “I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.” “All things are lessons God would have me learn.”
This lesson says that God plans everything. We can be disillusioned in the world because we get messages there that everything is all wrong. We hear and learn there that our lives are a serious of random occurrences and it is meaningless for sure. We can end up living through a huge amount of anxiety and frustration because we think the world is the place where we may or may not get what we want. It for sure has no meaning beyond how much beauty we can see physically. This is terribly disheartening because we feel like then life has no purpose.
And there is that part of us that wants to live with purpose so we can claim we are in some way getting to somewhere better. We ideally need to have the experience of meaning or it seems like we are suffering needlessly. We can never be sure what will happen because the world was not created for our positive experience and therefore has nothing to offer us but a hard and very hard time. If life is hard, when we think God has a plan and that we will invariably learn and grow to become a bigger and better person then we can feel satisfied or at least more satisfied with the lives we have on earth. It may be difficult but if we can pin down a sense of meaning, then we can forgive more easily, and then understand that the world’s happenings are justified.
This is why we must be willing to see the world and the scheme of our lives as one that is planned. Then if something difficult and clearly unwanted happens, then we can have compassion for ourselves for struggling over accepting it with gratitude. It’s ok to have whatever feelings come up for us. But what the Course trains us to do is forgive God for giving us the reality if that’s what we are getting. Forgive ourselves for the struggle of not being able to forgive easily.
And if we can’t forgive- meditate on it until we feel an emotional release. Or imagine ourselves putting this desire to change what is happening in the world on God’s altar as the Course says and be willing to let it go, be willing to release it from the rigid mental hold. Know that we must do our part to be willing to forgive but sometimes what we need to do first or throughout forgiving is keep checking into our sense of surrender and notice if it is still blocked in any way from this release. And we can pray until and while God shows us how to handle it.