Sunday, September 20, 2015
Lesson 263: “What is the body?” “My holy vision sees all things as pure.”
Usually we equate pureness with the clergy or little children or God. And this is a fabulous practice, to have easy to reach conceptions of these that we can readily associate with pure. We are fortunate our minds can wrap themselves around pureness in some instances.
One of the ego challenges is to change its perception. The ego simply can not just change its mind. When the ego decides something is impure, it has the most difficult time altering this perception. This is part of why living with the ego is what the Course calls insane- because we can’t shift this thinking.
The ego grips tightly to this mind set that only certain things can be pure. The ego is always incredibly limited. Naturally it just has a handful of those in this category. But what Jesus asks us to to in fact change our ego’s perception and at long last to simply decide that pureness can be projected onto all and can be attributed to each item we see. What we can do is notice where we allow the concept of purity into our viewpoint, and use this as an example. We can do this on some occasions- hold purity in the same realm as whatever it is associated with. If we can do this sometimes, then why not all the time? We have to just understand that we are getting a perfect example of how to apply purity to certain people and categories. This is the first step to learning how to do it to all.
All we have to is understand how we make purity part of whatever we see. We just have to practice seeing and knowing purity can in fact be applied to this other new thing. When we already do it in one area, we can simply allow purity to be a part of these other areas.
Jesus asks us to make clear effort about the intention to include everyone in the realm of what we think is pure. We simply need to allow for the possibility we were wrong about not including all things among the pure. This is the way to allow everyone to be included in the purity concept- by simply acknowledging that our exclusion of anything in that realm was simply an error. God simply cares that we correct this error. Just because we haven’t been able to apply purity to all things in the past, doesn’t mean we are destined to keep doing this. We simply need to be willing to be wrong that we decided purity can be applied to only a select few. All we have to do is release this insistence that we cannot deem everyone and everything worthy of being called pure.
This lesson says, “Father, your mind created all that is.” We are reminded here that God is our Creator and is the supremely powerful Being beyond all concept that we can imagine. This is why God can and does create everything. This is why everything is pure because God is the hand behind each creation. This is why we are asked to slowly come to terms with the fact that God is always the Creator of what we see.
The Course says the world isn’t real and thus God is definitely not responsible for creating the insanity we see there. However, on another level the Course helps us to understand that God doesn’t create the suffering of the world and yet God will go with us everywhere. Therefore, the world is also a place we can find God simply because God wants to never leave us stranded alone when we have forgotten God. We just have to see that God is available to give us all the love and teach us forgiveness while we venture through the world. We can be grateful God created every last picture of our dream while we also know God is not of the world.