Lesson 26: My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability.
As I write today’s lesson, there is a political firestorm raging in Washington, D.C., as the US Senate considers impeachment of the president – and a common belief in a foregone conclusion. There is a deadly virus spreading around the world from China. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter were killed in a helicopter crash in California. Australia is still recovering from devastating wildfires.
People are suffering. Political turmoil has torn the country – and families and friends – apart. Our world of separation seems to get worse by the second.
We have several choices, of course. For those of us still in the middle class, we can check out, ignore the news. Try to stay relatively informed while remaining sane – or what passes for sane in this insane world. We can take to the streets and protest and fight back and resist – which is great if we undertake such things from a spirit of love and compassion – but most often we’re marching in a spirit of rage and cynicism, which breeds more of both.
Or, we can realize that the only thing causing all this suffering is us – namely the thoughts we think – and the effects they cause in this world. The suffering is certainly felt here in this world – the grieving families, the warring factions, the animals and humans killed and displaced by fire. We must cope with the events that happen in our world – but don’t have to be overcome by them.
When we understand that this world is created by our attack thoughts – which are simply any thoughts generated by fear, guilt, anger, worry or any thought not centered in love – then we can begin to watch our thoughts more closely.
This lesson isn’t a call to retreat from the world – it is a call to become an open creator of more love in the world. We do that by harnessing our thoughts and focusing them on love – and answering all the calls for love around us that take the form of attack thoughts – with that love.
The first thing we have to realize is that we always attack ourselves first. We look at the world and fear that it will harm us in some way by taking away our political power, our safety or our very lives. These fearful thoughts make us feel insecure and we forget that, on the level of spirit – we are invincible. We have no bodies to die. We have nothing to fear because fear isn’t real in God’s realm. Only love is real.
Today’s lesson tells us: “If attack thoughts must entail the belief that you are vulnerable, their effect is to weaken you in your own eyes. Thus, they have attacked your perception of yourself. And because you believe in them, you can no longer believe in yourself. A false image of yourself has come to take the place of what you are.”
That false image is the ego that assures you that it will protect you. But, it’s protection mechanisms are fear-based and consist of increasing the separation you feel between yourself and others whether it’s political, personal, spiritual or physical. The ego is always a divider and never a uniter.
What we see happening in the world is the effect of our belief in separation. All those egos running around clashing and seeking to further separate themselves from others. They speak in important places like the well of the Senate. They rail against climate change as their homes burn around them. They create disease and spread it like wildfire around the world.
The Course is insistent that this all springs from our thoughts – our fearful thoughts create a fearful world. When we realize we are not our bodies – we are not our egos – and finally see that we are here to learn that we are truly invulnerable to things of this world – even death of the body – we will finally see who we really are – God’s indestructible children.
The ego, of course, believes the body is paramount and must be protected at all times. Everything in this bodily world shows us every day that nothing can protect the body. It is always vulnerable to disease, accidents, injury and death. Protecting the body simply perpetuates the separation we feel from God and those around us and sets us on a futile path of competition, comparison and tribalism.
The Course tells us to look at the crucifixion but not to dwell on it. That means that we have to clearly see the suffering of the world before we can hope to embody the love that helps restore it. In these turbulent times (and what times have never been turbulent) it’s up to those of us who understand that our thoughts have created this world to remember who we are.
This is not a call to complacency – or a call to unconscious action. It’s a call to go within – to sit with the Holy and contemplate what we are called to do to bring love into the world.
Catholic priest and author Richard Rohr writes: “Our egos will always be on the lookout for a quick fix and immediate satisfaction, which too often leads to a deeply flawed solution. But the gift of contemplative practice is the ability to remain humble and hold the tension between the rightness and wrongness on each side of the issue until the Spirit moves in and offers us a wiser course of action.”
Alleviating the suffering of the world is about taking the wisest action, not the “right” one or the “wrong” one. We can only know that wise move when we can drop all of our thoughts of attack and focus our thoughts on how to bring more love, peace, joy and compassion into the world.
We do that by first realizing any fearful thought is first an attack upon ourselves, which will lead us to see a world of attack and fear. When those fearful thoughts arise, don’t act in your fear. Instead, take time to question those thoughts – they’re not real anyway – and as we do these exercises we will arrive in that field – that holy place Muslim mystic poet Rumi says is “out beyond all ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing.”
I’ll meet you there.
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You make me want to shout “Amen, sister!” So… hear me.
Thank you!