Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Lesson 84: Review: “Love created me like Itself.” “Love holds no grievances.”
I believe that the fundamental problem everyone has is low self-esteem. For some reason, it can be profoundly difficult to truly feel positively about ourselves. This is a really essential thing to look at within our minds. The world says if you put the right clothes on or if you vacation on the islands, this is a statement of your positive worth.
We are taught to think if our diamonds are big enough, this is the signifier that we are doing “well” in the world. We get bombarded with messages that our value stems from how many degrees we have in school. We are taught that if we make the worldly picture look good enough, then we can claim that we are valuable.
Jesus teaches us that our worth and self esteem is not based on anything external. This is so wrong when we rely on the ego to keep us in line with a feeling of worth. And this is always changing. The world’s circumstance changes moment to moment, so to rely on this for any kind of consistent identification is surely a desperate task because it will always fall short of expectation.
We are invited to see God instead as the sure sustainer of our value. Because God deems us worthy without fail always, then we can relax into this knowing. We can fully accept it because in its application there is no fear. We don’t ever have to worry God’s view of us will change, because Jesus teaches us in the Course that our value is permanent.
The most important task in the Course I believe is to help us realize that we are perfect as we are. Then, we never have to face a bottoming self esteem as we can always rely on God- whose love is buoyant.
When we sit with the knowing that love must come with no grievances then we can be unified entirely with our brothers and sisters. The ego is terrified of joining truly in mind energy with our beloved brothers and sisters. The Course says that if we want to live in salvation we need to bring our brothers and sisters with us. The energy of true joining is what I think of as the power of God.
When we are gratefully joining with others to meet with God in salvation then we have an energy that opens to the flow of God’s love. This is what I think of as the benefit from this energy. When we hold grievances, this is one of the ways to maintain our separation from others and deny joining. This ends up with our not being joyful troopers in the journey to God. This is the ego’s way to resist the process of getting home.