Lesson 95: I am one Self, united with my Creator
“Unless you are reminded of your purpose frequently, you tend to forget about it for long periods of time,” today’s lesson notes. It’s absolutely true. We get so wrapped up in the ego’s direction for our days that we forget who we truly are. The ego tells us we must go into the world and do things, achieve things, buy things, own things, sell things, maneuver around others to get to where we want to go. It’s a world of competition, lack and is simply “a ridiculous parody” of how we’re truly supposed to be living, says this lesson.
The ego has convinced us that all we are is our small “s” self. We see ourselves as “weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable and beset with pain,” this lesson says, divided into many selves and convinced we are separate from God, praying to a “maker” that doesn’t exist, since it is one and the same with our ego.
We want to learn. We want to do better. We employ all the spiritual tricks our ego says will work. We feel like we make progress and then … we forget. The shiny objects of the ego begin to sparkle and we’re back where we started – listening to the ego’s version of reality that tells us all this spiritual stuff is for the birds anyway. Besides, those who reach “enlightenment” either die for their cause or become sequestered gurus. Who wants that, anyway?
When we realize, though, I mean really realize that we ARE one Self – one unified whole in the mind of God – then all those trappings of the ego, all those feelings of separation, competition, greed, hatred and fear dissolve. We don’t have to become secluded gurus or die for the cause. We simply have to recognize who we truly are. We are not our bodies, not our egos, not our need to compete or win.
We are one Self, “complete and healed and whole, with power to lift the veil of darkness from the world,” this lesson says. We do that by letting the “light in you come through to teach the world the truth about yourself.”
All that A Course in Miracles asks of us is to do our “little part” – to be willing to live from our state of true en-light-tened self to bring “happiness to all the world.” When we do this, we “call to all the world to be at one with you,” this lesson says.
We are always in perfect harmony with all that is, the Course tells us, we just tend to forget that when we chase the ego’s minutia of the day and lose sight of the real reason we are existing in these bodies. The signs of who we really are always there, flashing away at us, says Hafiz.
He writes:
When the billboards and neons near God’s
inner kingdom started to read with signs
like this – Piety Not Welcome –
my faith in God increased a bunch. That is,
I felt a reasonable decoding, a translation of
that message was, We need to loosen up.”
And those were always my sentiments …
exactly.
Photo by Wyron A on Unsplash