Lesson 11: My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.
I guess I can understand when the critics of A Course in Miracles call it “spiritual bypass.” On the surface, it would appear that the Course is teaching an exquisite kind of apathy. Our thoughts have no meaning, the world isn’t real and even if it were it’s all meaningless anyway. At some point, if you just did a surface reading of the Course, I suppose you could dismiss it as happy-slappy just think positive thoughts and gaze at your navel kind of spirituality.
That was the thought that I had, even in my first year of reading the text and doing the workbook. It all sort of felt like a course that encouraged you to retreat from the world, because it’s all an illusion anyway, right?
That kind of thinking misses the entire point. If you stop at Lesson 11 because you’re convinced the Course is bullshit, the Course would be fine with that. There are many other ways of thinking and believing in the world that can bring enlightenment. Truth is truth, no matter where you encounter it.
But, if you persist in this lesson and the ones to come throughout the year, an interesting thing begins to happen – your perspective begins to shift and you understand that the reason you are here is to be actively engaged in this world – not to run from it or ignore its suffering. Today’s lesson – indeed all of them – are meant to teach you how to be present in the world as one of God’s teachers. The best teachers are those who often confuse and confound us the most. Ask any Zen student and they probably would agree.
Approach today’s lesson then, as a Zen koan – ponder the sound of one hand clapping – and how meaningless the question really is. The exercise is designed to blow your mind – to evict the ego’s certainty from your thoughts – to make space for a new, divine vision to take hold in your heart and mind.
If our thoughts are meaningless, the Course says, then the world we create with those thoughts are just as meaningless. We give meaning to everything we see or think – that is the way of the ego’s judgment system. We can’t help ourselves. We’re meaning-making machines. By pondering the world as meaningless – as deriving it’s only meaning from our passing and cloud-like thoughts – invites us to see the world with a deeper vision – one that knows only LOVE is real.
Chapter 1 of the text tells us our purpose here: “Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful and the holy. Do not forget this.”
We can only create the good in the world when we have first grappled with the meaninglessness we have created with our collective ego – the wars, the suffering, the greed, the fear, the hunger, the anger.
What, really, does any of that mean? What is it good for? As the song says: Absolutely nothing.
When we grasp that our collective egos – our collective meaningless thoughts – have created a meaningless world where we all needlessly suffer and die – then we can begin to allow our frantic thoughts to pass by – to become quiet. When that happens, we begin to understand that to create a meaningful world, we must become channels of a Holy vision. Only the Holy can create the Holy – and we are here as channels for the good.
“A divine treasury awaits each soul,” Hafiz writes. “It is the INFINITE, infinite possibilities, that you can really borrow from any moment, right now.”
Today’s lesson invites us to ponder those infinite possibilities available in every moment and how we can develop the Holy vision needed to see through our meaningless ego-created world and become co-creators with God “of the good, the beautiful and the holy.”