Lesson 128: The world I see holds nothing that I want.
As a Southern Baptist child, I was raised constantly hearing the slogan: “This world is not my home.”
While A Course in Miracles would agree with that sentiment, it would not agree with the particular construction of the concept as practiced in the religion of my youth. You see, we would declare that we were strangers in this strange land, but the place we called our home was simply a more glorified version of the same world, except we all lived in mansions just off of streets of gold.
The social and class systems of my inherited religion’s heaven were the same as the egoic social and class systems here on earth. There were neighborhoods in this heavenly realm that you could aspire to if you lived a good earthly life – even as a stranger in a strange land. If you lived by all the Bible’s precepts and kept your nose clean, you could enter the gated heaven’s most elegant gated communities. If you didn’t do you best here, you might end up in heaven’s suburbs, but you were careful to avoid heaven’s slums.
This is not what today’s lesson is getting at. There is no order of difficulty in miracles, we are taught, and there is no order of society or class within the true realm of the Holy. Oh, and there are no mansions – there is just unity, a oneness that is what we really yearn for when we realize that what we’ve created here in this plane with our egos will never satisfy us.
That’s what this world can never offer us – that true sense of unity, that knowledge that we are already one and there truly is only one of us here. We’ve never left the mind of God – we are still at home within that “heaven” of nonduality. However, we have this “crazy, mad idea,” as the Course calls it, that we are somehow separate from one another – and our ego uses individual bodies to prove it.
It’s not that this world is to be rejected to the point that we withdraw. While we are in these bodies, we have a responsibility to be God’s open channel for love and peace to flow outward from us. This is simply a call to realize that this world is an illusion – it’s something we’ve dreamed up together with our egos. When we can realize this in each moment, then we know there is something beyond whatever is happening right now.
When we experience chaos, sadness, illness, or even happiness, we have to remember that if it comes to us through this world, it will be fleeting. All things in this reality do, indeed, pass. Nothing here ever lasts, because it’s not designed to last. Only true lasting joy and happiness can be found in the realm we’ve never left – that oneness with our Creator and those our ego calls “others.”
If we offer a little time to the Holy during our day to remind ourselves that we want eternal peace and joy, not the fleeting counterfeit versions the ego cooks up, then we’ll be more prone to live in that eternal place, even as we pass through this impermanent one. We’re not being asked to withdraw from this world, but to bring our oneness into every encounter we have in this world.
This is the “joyful work” Hafiz says the Holy has decreed for us all.
“Last night God posted on the tavern wall a
hard decree for all of love’s inmates which
read:
“If your heart cannot find joyful work,
then the jaws of this world will probably
grab hold of your – sweet ass.”
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash