Lesson 59
The following ideas are for review today:
W-pI.59.1. (41) God goes with me wherever I go.
2 How can I be alone when God always goes with me? 3 How can I be doubtful and unsure of myself when perfect certainty abides in Him? 4 How can I be disturbed by anything when He rests in me in absolute peace? 5 How can I suffer when love and joy surround me through Him? 6 Let me not cherish illusions about myself. 7 I am perfect because God goes with me wherever I go.
God goes with me wherever I go is a prayer I often use when I am uncertain or upset. It is a reminder of the truth. The world is not the truth and my experience of it is a dream memory. God is not part of the experience of the world because then it would be real and would never end, but He foresaw our need for the truth to be with us always and so He placed His Voice in our minds so that He would always be with us.
With God comes His peace, love, and joy and so that is always with me as well and I can be aware of it simply by remembering that God goes with me wherever I go. I think of it in this way. When I was a child, I would sometimes have bad dreams and would call out in my sleep. My mom wasn’t in my dream with me, but she was, never the less always with me, answering my call and comforting me, reminding me that dreams are not real. It is not a perfect metaphor but helpful anyway.
In the dream, my mom was a different person so not with me in the way God is with me. God is in me and I am in Him and this is true even as I dream of being separate from God as I dreamed of being separate from my mom. God is All That Is and so that means God is me as well. In one place in the Course, God calls us God the Son. There is no separating my Self from God. Separation is an illusion that I believe in for a while and then release and return my awareness to my true Divine Self.
W-pI.59.2. (42) God is my strength. 2 Vision is His gift.
3 Let me not look to my own eyes to see today. 4 Let me be willing to exchange my pitiful illusion of seeing for the vision that is given by God. 5 Christ’s vision is His gift, and He has given it to me. 6 Let me call upon this gift today, so that this day may help me to understand eternity.
I do want to see the world differently. I want to see with Christ’s vision. It is my gift and so I can have it simply by asking for it. There is a prayer I use each time I open one of my Pathways of Light courses. It begins by saying that I am willing to be mindful of my thoughts without judgment. Our thoughts are the source of the world. My thoughts are the source of everything I think I know about the world. I can see the world differently if I am willing to look at my thoughts with the Holy Spirit and let Him heal my mind, but I will be reluctant to do so if I judge myself for the thoughts I find there. So, this part of the prayer is very important to me. The ego looks with judgment; I want vision and vision is not judgmental.
W-pI.59.3. (43) God is my Source. 2 I cannot see apart from Him.
3 I can see what God wants me to see. 4 I cannot see anything else. 5 Beyond His Will lie only illusions. 6 It is these I choose when I think I can see apart from Him. 7 It is these I choose when I try to see through the body’s eyes. 8 Yet the vision of Christ has been given me to replace them. 9 It is through this vision that I choose to see.
Jesus says, 3 I can see what God wants me to see. 4 I cannot see anything else. And yet, I think I see all sorts of things that are clearly not what God wants me to see. This is because we made the eyes for the express purpose of showing us illusions. The next sentence I like in the Opening Preparation to my Pathways courses says this. I am willing to look at how I view all my life circumstances as helpful feedback that shows me where there is still a need to heal my mind.
This is a far better way to see the world, rather than imagining that I could overcome creation and make my own world or that I could be guilty for what I see, I can just use it as helpful feedback. What I see with my eyes shows me an illusion that reflects ideas that are not true and are hurting me. Then, with the Holy spirit’s help, I can do something about it.
W-pI.59.4. (44) God is the light in which I see.
2 I cannot see in darkness. 3 God is the only light. 4 Therefore, if I am to see, it must be through Him. 5 I have tried to define what seeing is, and I have been wrong. 6 Now it is given me to understand that God is the light in which I see. 7 Let me welcome vision and the happy world it will show me.
The world we made is dark. There are sickness and pain and suffering and it will inevitably end in death only to be repeated over and over with little change until we wake up to what we are doing and make a different choice. Even when things are going well, we know it is only temporary and we consciously or unconsciously wait for the other shoe to drop.
There is only one way to see this world in light and that is through God. When we tire of asking the ego what it all means and what it is for, we will start asking the Holy Spirit for another way to see. This is when the mind begins to be enlightened. I really feels like the world is being seen through a fog that blinds us to what is really there. It is just that we are so used to this dim sight that we don’t notice it anymore. But once we let the Holy Spirit start healing our thoughts, we begin to see clearly and we notice how dark our world was before.
W-pI.59.5. (45) God is the Mind with which I think.
2 I have no thoughts I do not share with God. 3 I have no thoughts apart from Him, because I have no mind apart from His. 4 As part of His Mind, my thoughts are His and His Thoughts are mine.
It makes my heart sing to think of sharing the Mind of God. All these thoughts that clutter my mind are not my thoughts; they are the ego’s thoughts. The ego says that they are a great gift. You no longer have to settle for the Thoughts you think with God; you can have your very own thoughts. So, we give up perfection, eternity, love, joy, bliss, and we accept the ego thoughts of sin, pain, suffering, guilt, hatred, and death. “There, we showed you, God! We can, too, have our own thoughts.” But they are not our thoughts. They are the ego’s thoughts and we are not the ego. When I think with the ego, it is just a dream, not reality. As we awaken, we remember that we are the eternal Divine Child of God.