Sunday, January 3, 2016
Lesson 3: “I do not understand anything I see in this room, (on this street, from this window, in this place.)
The Course is teaching us to release our identity. We are learning to release everything, to become an empty slate upon which we can add and transform then into the person we truly want to be here. This sacred reality at the end of our mind’s undoing is the union with God, the memory of our true worth and the memory of our identity as God’s beloved and gifted children. The Course says that all that we gleaned from the world’s experience is actually false and in fact causes us real grief and pain when we take it in deeply and then believe in it because we decide it is true. We are in the position of needing to completely reorient our minds because what we have filled our minds with thus far is infinitely fallible. It has no truth and no substance because it is not real in any way. This Course is giving us the opportunity to change our minds.
What is extraordinary is that we aren’t simply changing from one thought to the other thought without going through a comprehensive reorientation. What is amazing about that is- it is a full overworking. What we do in the ego’s world is we substitute one insane idea with another. We never get to get out of the problem because we try to find the solution in the same energy and reality that created the problem in the first place. This is necessarily flawed because it is not of God energy. Therefore it doesn’t matter how many times we move it around and try to shape it manually into something that is more appealing and seemingly helpful. The truth is that this is not actually possible to change when we use the exact tools from the origin of our attempt to try to recreate the outcome.
We need to understand that what the ego did before in trying to master some outcome that was positive and helpful never worked because our ego can’t be anything other than our separated selves which inherently are not of God. When we try to do anything with out God the result is disastrous. What we are learning to do here is stop just settling for recreating the nightmare in form and substance. What we want to do is just be open to something totally new and unknown to us. We may not know how to do the solving in God’s terms in the world because we don’t have so much experience.
Trust that this is easy when we simply get on our knees and pray. We sit with our open heart and offer our will to God and ask for the guidance about how to accept God’s answer and be open to a reality that is yet unknown. And we hold compassion for our hearts because we may have a hint of anxiety about approaching the unknown. Keep returning to our faith and eventually that anxiety becomes a forgotten memory.