Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Lesson 272: “What is the body?” “How can illusions satisfy God’s Son?”
The Course uses the word “illusions” to refer to our perceptions of the world and our bodies and anything that is not God. The word illusion is a perfect descriptor for this layer of what we think is reality but actually is nothing but a false idea. The word illusion speaks of our mental instance where we think these fantasies to be true. I appreciate the emphasis here on what happens in the mind. When we live in the world the Course says this is all an illusion, but it is in fact from the reflection of what our minds are thinking. There is no true physical reality. What happens in the world’s physical reality is simply a bit of our false thinking.
We need to keep understanding this fully. If our minds and our thinking didn’t exist the world would also not exist. It is the out-picturing of our inner mentality. We are making the world at each moment since we accidentally forgot God. This is ever so important that we don’t start to buy the world’s existence. It is illusory as the Course says. We simply need to come to terms with this and accept it and then eventually forgive it when we can. When we are willing to accept this with no judgment then we can often prevent our getting caught up in the attempt to put forth effort to believe that the world is real and has substance in fact.
When we forget the world is illusory then we get invested in playing our part in the substantiation of the world’s being true. This is an ego tactic to keep us engaged in a hamster wheel kind of existence where we just keep running in the wheel and never move forward. The ego keeps us locked into this insane thinking and insane behavior because it is trying to keep us with in accord with the world’s crazy mentality. We get lost and are fully engaged in trying to make the world have some actual reality. Then in that vein, when our hearts are off the beam we try to prove the world isn’t illusory because our egos don’t like to be wrong. This is a constant battle within.
What Jesus teaches us is to simply stay away from the scraps of the world. Our fantasies there in the form of illusions give us cause to suffer indefinitely. The Course says that we just need to stop looking to the world’s insanity to try to find peace. This never works. Therefore, we can simply remember that illusions never bring any amount of peace. We simply need to forgive our own insanity for looking to the world to fulfill any hope of comfort and joy. All we have to do is look to God where we do find every bit of love and ease and certainty that all is well.