Sunday, December 6, 2015
Lesson 340: “What is the ego?” “I can be free of suffering today. “ We all have our own personal hell. The ego is the culprit in every case. Our egos are always the ones who tell the sad stories and make it all seem so real it brings us to our knees. This hell is what drives us away from the alignment with God thinking. When the ego is busy declaring war within us and then reflecting this outward we get wrapped up in the intensity of it and crumble within. This suffering seems beyond what we can bear. We have to understand that our egos are always the ones making complaints that we can’t ignore because they have such a potent quality. The suffering is often so painful we find that we try to ignore it and turn it off by engaging in other insane behavior like addictions and terrible drives to behave in ways we don’t want to admit or live through. These then lead us to feeling even worse about the suffering that we are trying to avoid in the first place.
What we need to know that our suffering is enough to drive any one crazy. We can’t cope with this suffering often because we perceive it as bigger than we are. We have a whole range of responses to this suffering. We in the world can spend lifetimes simply trying to cope with this terrible experience and try to get above it.
What the Course teaches us instead is that suffering is absolutely optional. We can simply opt not to do it. How cool is that? The world never arrives with solutions that do away with the suffering so when we look there to try to manage it we always feel desperate and sad because we end up with nothing but how to live best with it. This is the best the world can come up with. It says just hang in there, put on a smiling face and pretend it isn’t happening. Just pretend that you’re happy- grin and bear it because this is the only available option.
The Course says that God has a plan. We are absolutely guaranteed to be free from any illusion that we suffer if we just follow some rules about how to do this process with God. We see it first as not real. We let go of whatever worldly attachment we have to it in the expression of it and the trying to maintain it in the ego style of being with it. What we need to do is understand that we are not bound by whatever the suffering is that we perceive. It doesn’t matter how big or real this suffering seems or how extreme or long lasting; this means nothing.
The Course says there is no order of difficulty in miracles. We don’t assume that because something seems so great it will necessarily be slow to change. What we need to do is see that our mind is open to the possibly this can change and will change the moment we will it so. We need to let go of our worldly concept of how time works. None of that previous perception matters because it is all rewritten in the Course. God can make anything work in any way He chooses because He is God. This is why we simply need to learn how God heals us when we are willing to heal, with no care about how time plays in. Time means nothing. God uses time to teach us. Time definitely does not limit us in the way the world believes time behaves.
This is why we can be absolutely free of our suffering at any instant we put it on God’s altar and allow it to be rewritten for us. Our suffering means nothing as when we understand that nothing is a problem in the world except the fact that we thought we were separate from God. Since that in fact never happened- then we can give what we perceive as our suffering some perspective. We can simply let it go the instant we realize it has no power to injure us. We simply need to gently erase it from our minds because it means nothing in the grand scheme of things. When God reminds us that miracles are our right, we can simply undo our belief that we have suffered.