Gentle Healing Year 1 Tip For Lesson 14

Yesterday’s workbook lesson said:

“Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego ‘challenge’ each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space that meaninglessness provides.”

That paragraph makes a useful point, but it isn’t wholly true. You aren’t actually separated from God—separation is an illusion—so it isn’t correct to refer to you as a separated one. Also, God does not object to the ego’s way of seeing—God allows it—so God does not challenge the ego. However, as we saw yesterday, it is true that the ego feels threatened by meaninglessness, because the false self maintains its identity and its seeming reality by giving value to thought.

It is also true that as long as the ego’s meaning is believed, God’s reality is hidden. In order to see the world as God created it, the ego’s meaning must be thoroughly denied.

That brings us to today’s workbook lesson:

God did not create a meaningless world.

When you deny the world’s horrors as you practice today’s workbook lesson, it might be helpful to realize you aren’t denying that ‘horrors’ are experienced in the world, because they are. You are denying that they are reality.

There’s a difference between experience (or appearance) and reality. For example, you experience your nighttime dreams, but they aren’t reality.

Spiritual awakening is recognizing the difference between experience and reality in a deeply meaningful and abiding way.

As you do today’s practice, give willingness to see through the experience of the world to reality. Be curious to know, “What is real?” Be willing for that curiosity to grow in you until it becomes a force that is so motivating, it drives you to drop the ego fantasy and realize truth.