Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Lesson 76: “I am under no laws but God’s.”
A law is a structure created by society. From the moment we get to earth from birthing we are subsumed with laws. Our society has neatly “figured out” all kinds of laws. Laws of nature, laws of mathematics, laws of medicine. The list goes on and on. We have to live within the structure of laws because this is part of what it means to be human at this time on earth.
Laws often bring a sense of superiority. People often have this funny way of relating to laws. They have their egos go wild! People’s egos often act conceited and arrogant because they argue that their law is superior to every one else’s law. This is an act of separation from other people because our egos just get a feeling of being “holier than thou.” The ego always likes to shove it in people’s faces that the ego has the correct answer and no one else has it.
We have to understand the attitude of the ego when it perceives and uses something like laws. The ego can hold laws against everyone, putting people down for not living up to the law. The ego uses laws to burn people at the stake because the ego says these laws are the dictate for how we must live. If we don’t, we are surely inferior and not worthy of a fruitful and peaceful life.
Laws are often a way to keep people into some kind of structure. We want to understand that laws have purpose because they can help to support our life- giving us a frame work of how to live. Just a small boundary is good to keep us healthy and safe. But what often happens is this ends us getting taken to the wrong context. Instead, we get limited and bound inside when we try to live within boundaries of laws.
We are asked in the Course to operate within laws with wisdom. We can celebrate the form that laws give us to hold us up in certain ways. Then we just have to see them also as unreal. Don’t buckle under the weight of the laws of the world. Know if they prevent us from living in our truth, which is in the joy and certainty of God, then we have to delicately let them go. Or, we can simply engage with them very gently so we gain their support but we aren’t bound by their borders.
We can live in the world this way remembering to be certain that we are in fact under no laws but God’s. While we live in the world, the above few paragraphs teaches us how to do that. But what we are asked to hold deeply in our hearts is that the laws of the world simply don’t exist in truth. We need to deeply understand that the only direction and structure we ever want to have is that of God’s. Lovingly throw away any other mistaken perception.