July 21, 2012 - It's only words

A Course in Miracles Lesson #202 (review)

Central theme

“I am not a body. I am free.

For I am still as God created me.”

Specific review: (182) “I will be still an instant and go home.”

"Top of the Mountain in Mongolia"
photo by Aaron Springston

Many of us feel uncomfortable with traditional Biblical language which may cause us to cling to past beliefs concerning God. Personally, when I hear many of these terms I vacillate between seeing God as a Santa Claus and/or a thunder-bolt throwing Zeus -- and I wasn't even raised to see God in physical ways! But after a lifetime of education, whether collective or individual, it's easy to see God in our mind's-eye as something entirely opposite to what we're learning through this study. So I have become accustomed to changing "Him" to "It" and "His" to "My".  I urge you to use whatever terms feel right to you. I feel absolutely certain it's all right with God! But ultimately, it doesn't matter. What we are trying to do is release all beliefs, and this includes, but is not limited to, the way we perceive the words we read and hear. The spiritual sense we're developing enables us to interpret everything without the material meanings we have developed. In line with our daily review which instructs us to "be still an instant and go home", we allow ourselves to listen rather than immediately think we know what everything is all about. To go home in this way means, to me, to go in thought to the secret place which can only be known when we cease to place learned meaning on everything. The freedom we experience when releasing thought about the meaning of God also allows us to free ourselves from what we believe we are. And knowing ourSelves as the likeness of God then becomes a present reality!

Mary Baker Eddy quote:

“Man in the likeness of God, as revealed in Science, cannot help being immortal. Though the grass seemeth to wither and the flower to fade, they reappear. Erase the figures which express number, silence the tones of music, give to the worms the body called man, and yet the producing, governing, divine Principle lives on,--in the case of man as truly as in the case of numbers and of music,--despite the so-called laws of matter, which define man as mortal. Though the inharmony resulting from material sense hides the harmony of Science, inharmony cannot destroy the divine Principle of Science. In Science, man's immortality depends upon that of God, good, and follows as a necessary consequence of the immortality of good.”

Science & Health Page 81:17-30