Lesson 49: God’s Voice speaks to me all through the day.
Several years ago, I owned a house in Atlanta that I rented out. One day, a woman called inquiring about renting the home and in the back of my head, like someone standing behind me, I heard a Voice say, “Tell her it’s rented. Tell her it’s rented.”
“It’s still available,” I heard my voice say into the phone.
“Arrrghh!” the Voice behind me said in frustration.
Several months later I was in a battle to evict this renter and had to repair the damage she had done to the house during her short, but traumatic residency.
Some may say that the voice I heard was “intuition.” Call it what you will, but I say it was the Voice of God trying to save me from a world of hurt. The voice I did listen to was the ego’s, because it wanted the house rented and a steady income from the property. Guess which voice was right?
I suppose I needed to learn that lesson about which voice I should be heeding – the still small Voice of certain knowledge, or the loud ego voice that speaks first and can lead us to make some bad choices – even if they become learning opportunities.
We all have the two voices in our heads. It’s like the old Cherokee story about the two wolves that are fighting within us. One represents all of our ego’s attributes of pride, greed, envy, malice, anger, fear, lies and a feeling of either inferiority or superiority, depending on the circumstances.
The other wolf, of course, represents Spirit’s attributes of love, compassion, joy, peace, humility, generosity, empathy and faith. Of course, as the tale goes, the one you feed will ultimately be victorious.
The story is effective, but it’s not quite what the Course tells us is happening within us. Our ego tells us we are at war with the other Voice in our head. Spirit, however, is never at war with anyone or anything – especially not the ego, which it didn’t create and doesn’t even recognize, since it is an illusion we created for ourselves.
It simply speaks Truth in all situations and invites us to listen. Love is never in a battle with anything. As the Course tells us in Chapter 4, “Love does not conquer all things, but it does set things right.”
“Feeding” the Spirit then is simply a matter of tuning in to its message. It’s always broadcasting at a higher frequency than our ego. If we turn off K-EGO and tune in to K-GOD, we’ll find the strength we need – because Source is our strength – to listen more deeply to this frequency of thought than the lower frequency messages of the ego that drain us of our ability to be a channel of love for the world.
When we tune in to the ego’s frantic ranting about the world around us, we lose our sense of peace, we lose our calm center and are easily swayed by the ego to be defensive, cruel, selfish and fearful. In those moments, when we are caught up feeding the wolf of the ego, we need to take a deep breath, pause, and adjust the dial within our inner communication system.
If we can make it a habit to pause when the ego begins its inevitable rant about the world, then we will find ourselves tuning in more often to the sound of the calm, restful and certain Voice for God. When we do, we find that our ego thoughts dissolve into the nothingness from which they came.
That, Hafiz says, should bring us joy:
“A thousand times I have ascertained and
found it to be true:
“The affairs of this world are really nothing
into nothing.
“Still though, we should dance.”
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