Lesson 102: I share God’s will for happiness for me
There’s an old adage that goes: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” There are many who agree and those who pooh-pooh the idea out of hand, pointing out that all of life is suffering since we will never be successful at fully loving one another, no matter how much we try.
In the world of the ego, I suppose both views could be right. The ego likes to keep us in these kinds of competitive thought experiments. If we’re trying to hold on to the cognitive dissonance it creates, we’ll be debating both sides of the issue until the cows come home. This lesson doesn’t try to settle the argument. Instead, it seeks to show us the ultimate futility of the argument.
“You do not want to suffer,” this lesson says. “You may think it buys you something, and may still believe a little that it buys you what you want. Yet this belief is surely shaken now, at least enough to let you question it, and to suspect it really makes no sense. It has not gone as yet, but lacks the roots that once secured it tightly to the dark and hidden secret places of your mind.”
Is suffering really optional? Only if you fully believe it exists and we can make a choice about it, sure. The Course says, however, that the ideas of pain and suffering are of this bodily world and are completely unknown in God’s realm. There’s no choice to even make there.
Ah, but we don’t live there, right? That’s the ego’s comeback to all the ideas raised in the Course. “That’s nice, but we live in the real world,” the ego says snidely. But, that’s the thing. We don’t live in the real world. We live in the ego’s world and that’s not where our home ultimately lies. Yes, while we’re bodies, we have to pay attention to the bodily world, but it doesn’t mean we have to live by its dictates.
Will we have pain and will we experience suffering? Most certainly. All bodies do. Do we have to let it rule our lives and take over our minds? Not at all. We can see the suffering of the world, we can acknowledge that it exists in the bodily realm, but our joy never depends on what’s happening around us. Joy is freely available in all moments. Our choice is not between suffering and pain, our choice is whether we’ll allow pain and suffering to smother our joy.
Our choice is this: Will we share in God’s Will for happiness for us and accept that as our function, or won’t we?
Hafiz warns us to never fall for “a preacher [who] stoops to scare tactics.” When we encounter one, he says, “it is often wise to stand aloof,
“for some gods may lose their patience
and start to throw their shoes at him.”
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash