II. SECTION 8. What is the Real World?
Lesson 292. A Happy Outcome To All Things Is Sure
- God’s promises make no exceptions. And He guarantees that only joy can be the final outcome found for everything. Yet it is up to us when this is reached; how long we let an alien will appear to be opposing His. And while we think this will is real, we will not find the end He has appointed as the outcome of all problems we perceive, all trials we see, and every situation that we meet. Yet is the ending certain. For God’s Will is done in earth and Heaven. We will seek and we will find according to His Will, which guarantees that our will is done.
- We thank you, Father, for Your guarantee of only happy outcomes in the end. Help us not interfere, and so delay the happy endings You have promised us for every problem that we can perceive; for every trial we think we still must meet.[1]
During my awakening to the real world, this lesson in particular gave me pause. Last year when I came to this lesson, I was having a struggle making sense of the resistance that my ego-self was putting up against forgiveness. I wanted to forgive but unpleasant thoughts about people who mean next to nothing in my daily life, people from the past, people I went to school with kept coming to my mind. This one had made fun of the secondhand clothes that made up my wardrobe; this one had joined in a stalking incident years ago with a rather creepy neighbor who had developed a crush on me. I felt small inside when I thought of them and they loomed large. Engaging in these unwelcome thoughts and not knowing what to do with them, I made them seem real. I was back in the past, reactivating those painful memories – that futile search for love in all the wrong places; the desire to fit in with people that excluded me, and the ache that accompanies such rejection; the lost and bewildered feeling that I experienced on an almost constant basis in the world of meat and matter.
It was hard to understand why when I asked Holy Spirit to give me love for these particular people, I was instead reminded of even more hurtful instances – the times a loved one betrayed my trust, a particularly trying friend, a beloved relative who had turned on me with vengeance. As increasingly more hurtful memories poured into my mind, I wondered why Holy Spirit would allow me to be tormented by them all over again. I did not want to look at them anymore, I had worked my way through them already. I had forgiven them; I had asked to be infilled with love for those who had hurt me. So why was my mind still full of all that hurt, pain, shame, and blame?
Over the course of the next year, the truth that gradually sank into my consciousness provided the answer to what felt like a contradiction in my path to God. A happy outcome to all things is sure because what happens in ego-world stays in ego-world. When we identify with Holy Spirit instead of unholy ego, we no longer have anything to forgive except being part of and supporting a mass identity crisis. As I learned to find my true identity as a Holy Spirit, nothing that happened in my past can hurt me because no longer do I see through the eyes of that which can be hurt.
Now that I know that all those situations that would tempt me to forget who and what I am in Christ, that would keep me trapped in a go-round of feeling victimized, misunderstood, ashamed, and spiteful, is part of the whole set-up, I can let it all go. I no longer sit about praying and asking God to give me the Holy Spirit and help me to love other people’s egos. Instead I accept that in reality I am a Holy Spirit and not the ego-self. As a Holy Spirit I cannot be hurt by that which is temporal, a fabrication, and ends in death, because it is already over. Accepting my identity in Christ, nothing can hurt me unless I give place to the ego in my mind and thoughts. No longer do I cry out and ask for Holy Spirit to come to me, for now I realize my Holy Spirit has been there all along, waiting for me to accept my truth in Him.
No longer do I allow the ego to oppose God’s Will in my life. Those thoughts that would torment me and cause me to falter have no reality. A happy outcome of all the problems I have ever perceived, all trials I have experienced, and every situation that I have ever met is guaranteed by simply accepting the truth of my Identity in God and the reason for my existence in the world of egos. Nothing goes to waste – my Tuesday Teacher reminds me often. Every word, kind or unkind; every action, right or wrong; every behavior, positive or negative leads me closer to my goal. They are learning tools. They are education experiences. The more we experience of separation and ego, the deeper our longing for that which leads us Home. A happy outcome to all things is sure!
[1] A Course In Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 291. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992). p. 444.
Audio credit: the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com
the friar patch 