Lesson 116 • April 26

 

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Lesson 116

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Practice Instructions

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Commentary

Somewhere in our collective psyche there is a dark and terrible myth. The myth is that God’s Will means suffering and sacrifice, the loss of all that we love, giving up everything that is dear to us for the sake of His Kingdom. Doing God’s Will in this myth is a dark and cheerless thing. In one of her lectures, Marianne Williamson characterized it as: “I thought I would have to wear gray for the rest of my life.”

God’s Will is happiness. How could Love want anything else for us? Every human being, even the lowest, wants those they love to be happy. How could we have ever imagined that God, the perfect Lover, wanted anything other than perfect happiness for us?

All our suffering, then, must come from a belief that there is some “other” will opposing God’s that wants to ruin our happiness. We secretly suspect, perhaps, that that will is our own. If not, we know “they” are out there someplace, and they have it in for us. Yet there is no “other” will. There is no malevolent power stalking the universe and targeting us for destruction. There is only God.

I share God’s Will for happiness for me. I am not incurably self-destructive, with some dark and unfathomable vein of antipathy towards God, the universe, and myself inescapably driving me to death. My real will is one with God’s, and I will happiness. “I will there be light,” as Lesson 73 said. His Will is really all I want.

The Course talks a great deal about the dark foundations of the ego that drive toward death. Those Stygian currents do flow within our minds, and they do warp and befoul our experience in this world. But the Course does not leave us there, without hope. It bears the message that although the ego seems very real, it is not us. It has no power over us; it is a mistaken fabrication our minds have made. And because we made it, we can unmake it. Because we chose it, we can choose again. If we stop being afraid of those murky corners of our minds and look at them, we will recognize they have no substance. We will see through them to our true Self. We will see what those dark foundations have been hiding all this time: our own intense and burning love for God, and His for us (see T-13.III.3:8). Here, in the real foundation of our being, we want what God wants, we love what God loves, and we will what God wills.

Today, then, I let myself rest in the happy thought that at the root of my being is an irresistible drive towards truth. Perhaps I do not yet experience “perfect happiness,” but I will. I must. Because the heart of my heart wills it, and joins with God in willing it, and there is nothing that stands in the way that has any reality or power to resist.

Nothing can prevent what God would have accomplished from accomplishment. Whatever your reactions to the Holy Spirit’s voice may be, whatever voice you choose to listen to, whatever strange thoughts may occur to you, God’s will is done. (T-13.XII.3:3-4)

There is no chance that Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what He wills is sure as He is. (T-13.XII.7:3)