Monday, October 19, 2015
Lesson 292: “What is the Real World?” “A happy outcome to all things is sure.”
The teaching of the Course is a prescription for happiness. We are learning how to undo the blocks to Love’s presence. Jesus says the Course that we can’t be taught the meaning of Love, because that is an experience and exists already within us. However, we can be taught how to remove the blocks to Love’s presence. This is what we must do- we must understand that love is already within us. Lots of us look for love out there, especially in the worldly agenda, there is a big promise of love. Unfortunately this often arrives with sheer disappointment because the Love in the world never comes, or when it comes it has so many conditions it doesn’t feel free easy and abundant like God’s Love. This is why with the world’s love we feel scarcity and we believe that it doesn’t get any better than that because the world feeds us false information.
The Course says that the true meaning and experience of Love is of God’s energy- from God’s intention. That is why we need to learn specifically what love is and what love is not. When we see the Love of God as the most perfect, happy, full experience of the never-ending Love then this is God’s. What we need to do is understand God’s Love is not the least bit similar from what we are expected to find in the world. We need to give up our old ideas of what we have come to believe Love is. This is what Jesus is teaching us in the Course. First remove all of our attachment to the world’s love and understand that when we will it gone, that’s what happens. The power of our intention is incredible and immediate when we truly aspire for simply that, this is what we get. However, then we can take away the world’s version of Love and replace it with God’s. This is the only one we want.
This then is the way to happiness when we let the world be a non entity in our minds. We must allow the memory of the world’s love to be a memory that actually never existed in the first place. Then we are ready for the version of Love from God. The quality of this is so tremendous and simply out of this world because it is our most ideal love. Then, also it has with additional immeasurable quality and quantity that we in fact can’t imagine at this time in our minds. This is the love that is true. When we allow this love to be our only love, then we can allow it all to be the perfect answer to all of our questions. Then this love reminds us that we are totally lovable ourselves as is everyone else because God’s Love includes all of us.
Therefore, we can simply understand that everything has purpose. Our purpose in the Course is to learn about the nature and quality of God’s Love which is the only true Love anywhere. However, once we get a handle on that, then we can integrate another piece to our general peaceful perspective. Jesus says everything has a happy outcome. This is hard for many of us to swallow. How can all kinds of dramatic, extreme, unfortunate, and often truly tragic circumstances be considered happy? That seems like the Course is teaching us to dissociate from our own personal emotional reactions to the world. When we see the world as unreal, we may have moments when we are prone to having this happen. Dissociating from our feelings is not the ideal for our health or for what Jesus is asking us to do in the Course.
We are learning how to feel our feelings and then allow them to be released. We can stay present with whatever comes up in our consciousness and simply be with it. Breathe through the moment of feeling upset about whatever comes up or do what helps process these feelings through your spirit-mind-body. Then simply allow whatever upset is left over be removed to the altar of God and we can ask God to help us at any step in the process. What the Course says is allow the circumstances to be unreal and our feelings to be unreal because this gives us simply a sense of non attachment about experiencing the feeling. Therefore, when we can approach our emotional world from a state of not rigidly griping and holding onto what feelings come up- and further generally replaying them, then we can feel them adequately and then let them go adequately. Jesus is not saying deny everything in the world in the idea that it is all unreal, rather use this idea to simply allow us to process feelings with more gentleness and compassion while we also allow our minds to be unaffected, or as much so as we possibly can.