Friday, September 25, 2015
Lesson 268: “What is the body?” “Let all things be exactly as they are.”
When we allow ourselves to live in this knowing, we end up being entirely at peace. What happens when we resist against what is happening is that any sense of peace and inner calm disappears. When we are struggling and trying to strongly control, conforming reality into a picture our ego decides is acceptable, any sense of ease is entirely destroyed and withdrawn from the frame from which we are living. When we fight against the reality we see it is because our ego is a judging machine, the ego likes to maintain a judgement about everything.
This is always the source of our suffering. The trying to control what we see always leads us to an experience of distress. When we try to make what we see what our ego thinks it wants, this never results in anything but discomfort.. This is why we are asked to stop the crazy hamster wheel on which we are treading. Get out of the exertion with no movement. This is what our egos are doing. Nothing more. We are just wasting a lot of energy and not enjoying it. We are trying to get out of the incredible race that leads nowhere.
Our insistence on making the picture exactly as our egos want is a way of waging war with the present. When we don’t allow for the experiences of living to be what they are we end up being miserable. We end up putting up our hands and trying to cut off the flow of how things are happening because we have deemed it undesirable. We get so busy trying to hold off what is happening, we can’t enjoy it. When we are resisting it we end up attacking in the battle with it. Then the attack comes back to us because attack never goes just one way; it always ricochets back to us. Therefore, we end up also feeling the attack that we put out.
When the present is deemed unacceptable, we end up not being able to relax in the present as we are all constricted- crunched up in our punching position as response to what is happening. When we are resistant to the moment then we end up being resentful about what is happening. This means there is no way for us to delight in it. We will just put our heals down in the dirt and try to avert the present from happening. We never will feel comfortable if we are busy fighting back.
Jesus teaches us in the Course that our acceptance of the circumstances is necessarily the way to peace. We need to be willing to join energetically with what is happening. When we are accepting it we can then join with it in energy because we are open to it. This is why we absolutely must make it our daily practice to engage with and join what we see through accepting it. This is the way to peace. When we are holding out our hand to connect with what we see, we are open to receiving something new. We want to not first be sitting with our hand already full with what we think we want to have happen. The emptiness within is the way to be present and open to the flow of God’s purpose.