Day 14

Today's Lesson:

God did not create a meaningless world.

This idea is a little more difficult for me to grasp, but the logic that surrounds it is pretty indisputable. What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world I see has nothing to do with reality. It is of my own making, and it does not exist.

For example, I went to the movie Children of Men last night and there were times I really found myself affected by the movie. It was grim and depressing and, at times, difficult for me to watch. The movie is set in 2027, and the world has fallen into anarchy, battle and hopelessness. Global infertility means a slow march to an inevitable end -- there have been no human births in 19 years. England is the only country that has survived, if you can call it survival - by putting all refugees into camps and deporting them. London is torn apart by violence and warring nationalistic sects. Disillusioned bureaucrat Theo becomes an unlikely champion of Earth's survival as he is forced to face his own demons and protect the planet's last remaining hope: a lone pregnant woman named Kee.

If God did not create a meaningless world, then the world of this movie could not exist. God does not create wars or famines or sicknesses. And what God did not create can only be in my own mind separate from His.

As I said earlier in this post, this could be tough to understand. But, as the Course continues to stress - "you do not have to believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy. But do not allow yourself to make exceptions in applying the ideas" from the lessons.

Now, in my third year of study, I understand much more about these lessons, but at first blush it's not as easy to grasp.

Miracles I've noticed:

Even my perception of the movie last night was different because of what I'm studying. I'm a person who needs to see complex movies more than once because it just takes me a while to get all the connections. But this one had moments for me when things really made a lot of sense. There was a point in the movie when the last baby is born and the wars stop and there is peace - for the briefest moment. I believe all of us have in us the capacity to change the world one person at a time by the way we think about it, and that's what I'm learning from this Course. Our cynicism and resignation may rear their heads, but if we know they are there and are awake to what is happening, we have the power to change it. For me, it's needing to be right. Whenever I sense a "yeah, but..." in my mind, I can trace it to my lack of openness to what another person is saying. I don't have to agree with someone else, but it doesn't mean they have to be wrong so I can be right. I can see the world not in black and white, and not even in gray ... but, as Tom Peters says, in Technicolor.