Lesson 53: Review of Lessons 11-15
“I am grateful that this world is not real, and that I need not see it at all unless I choose to value it,” today’s lesson states. This is one of those lines that gets tossed around by those who see the A Course in Miracles as some form of spiritual bypass.
“All you ‘New Thought’ people just put your fingers in your ears and close your eyes and say, ‘this world is not real,’ and absolve yourself from all responsibility to change it,” they say. It would be a fair cop, of course, if that was what the Course taught. But, that’s not what it teaches.
When it says “this world is not real,” it means that Reality, with a capital “R,” has no suffering, no strife, no duality and no fear. There is only Love – which is the only thing that is real – so there is only joy and a peace that surpasses the understanding of this world. It’s a place we can get to in this world, not by fighting or resisting this world, but by looking more deeply at it – looking beyond its egoic constructs into the very heart of the beings that created it.
We are real – not in our bodily form, but in spirit. We are thoughts in the mind of God who have forgotten to laugh – we have forgotten that we were brought forth in pure joy and Love. As such, we created this bodily world with its ideas of death, suffering, greed, hatred, fear and finally death. We created this dream world because we have forgotten who we truly are. This is now our classroom – a place for us to remember who we are by remembering our function in this bodily world – to be instruments of God’s love, peace and forgiveness.
This is far from a call to abandon the world. Instead, it is a call to save the world, to accept the Atonement for ourselves – to forgive ourselves and in doing so, forgive the entire world and bring it home to the unity from which we have chosen to separate ourselves.
Let’s review the main ideas of Lessons 11 -15:
11. My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.
12. I am upset because I see a meaningless world.
13. A meaningless world engenders fear.
14. God did not create a meaningless world.
15. My thoughts are images I have made.
The good news is, if God did not create a meaningless world that means we created it, so that means, we can recreate it. We can, by using Christ’s vision to see the innocence and good in the world, recreate the reality we see outside of ourselves. Yes, that’s another point the ego wants to call “woo woo” ridiculousness, but it’s not.
We have chosen to think the ego’s thoughts, which want to keep us in bondage to the world of suffering, fear and despair we have created together. If we begin to think the thoughts of God – thoughts centered on the Reality of Love – then we can recreate this world to reflect nothing but Love back to us. The fact that we still see a world of strife and fear is proof that we have yet to master the lessons we have been learning.
The Course is a mind-training program – not a religion or a dogma. It doesn’t need anyone to defend it from naysayers who call it spiritual bypass or other names. It needs your commitment to its lessons – your willingness to see things differently so that the world around us can be saved from its separation and brought back into its unity with God.
God will never coerce us into believing any of this is true. We are free to explore all the nooks and crannies of the ego’s world if we so choose. But, as Hafiz asks, “What is the value of putting your faith into practice and concluding there really is something to all this … God stuff?
“Well, for openers,” he continues, “It can become a solid wooden bench you can stand on to see over a hedge that now keeps your awareness so limited you sometimes feel hog-tied and wish you were dead.”
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