Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Lesson 308: “What is the Second Coming?” “This instant is the only time there is.”
The beauty of the Course is that it teaches us that we exist only in the present moment. The Course says the past and future are simply unreal. They have no reality truly in God’s world which is our best option- as the happy dream. What we must do is see that the future and past have no validity so they in no way are involved in affecting the moment. We are asked to come to this present moment with wholly empty hands. When we accept the past as not real then it has no power to affect us or our present moment.
This is the way in our minds to get to the actual experience of living wholly in the moment that has in no way been impacted by the past or future. Many of us have spent lots of time weighing the past and future and wondering how they will affect what we see before us. Then we end up repeating the past most definitely if we do something as insane as seeing the past as real. Furthermore, whatever happened in the past by which we were quite moved, then we can’t let it go with a sense of non attachment. We were so upset by what happened we just linger in those feelings around our suffering. When we accept that the past was really unfortunate and painful then we can’t just let go of the memory of it because we believe it has power to carry over the upset feeling into the present and future. When we don’t make a clear decision to remember the past and future are not real, then we end up repeating what was unpleasant in the past.
We are asked to not let the past have any weight on the lightness of the present moment. When we give it reality, it has this bearing weight about it and then we start to carry it. The past is a lead foot in the river. When we are convinced that the past is part of what makes our present then we get extracted from the flow of God’s Love. The Course teaches us the positive form of denial. What we are meant to do is deny the past is real and deny that the future is real. The word denial can actually leave us with a sense of lack when we use it in certain ways to describe how we relate to something. However the Course uses this positive form of denial. It says use the idea of denial- the absolute refusal to engage in allowing something to have validity or making something real. This is positive because when we deny certain things like the past and the future, this means it is our firm decision to do nothing of the sort. We refuse to allow the past and future to be real. Nothing will get in our way of accomplishing this because it is the most important way we can create a positive reality for us that is centered in the Purpose of God.
When we allow our entire commitment to this principle we remove ourselves from the nightmare where we are engrossed in perpetuating what didn’t work about the past. This is why this is the way to ultimate peace, when we are firm in our denial then the past ceases to exist. It is simply something we learn from if we are called to do so, and then we allow it to have no power over our mentality. This is the way we let it go so we can show up to the present without one foot always in the past.