A Course In Miracles Lesson 102

A Course In Miracles lesson 102 states: I want my own joy.

After a while, we can not help but observe that suffering is unproductive.  Suffering does not lead to improvement.  It wallows in pain. The only productive response to have with suffering is to turn away, walk away, place attention on a different quality of experience.  Find something colorful in the room that feels like relief. Find observations that lead to relaxation.  Legalize relaxation.  Remove yourself from the suffer cycle.  As soon as you notice that your pain is not going away, say to yourself and to that pain, “That’s enough. I’ve heard enough of that.” And then unplug yourself from that energy field.  You might feel a bit dazed and a bit “dumb” When you unplug yourself from a suffer cycle.  But that’s better than suffering and it won’t last long. 

Pain is not the same thing as suffering. Pain is a response when something has gone wrong.  When something goes wrong, we are inherently motivated to correct and realign into rightness (no pain).  When pain continues on and on without end it becomes suffering.  While pain in life is unavoidable, suffering is very avoidable.  

We may believe that suffering brings a certain meaning or value to our being.  “No pain, no gain.” Is a core belief in Western culture.  What A Course In Miracles Lesson 102 invites us to consider is the idea that we do not need to gain one more single thing.  To seek to gain more is to forget what we really are.  We are complete.  Nothing else need be added to us.  And we certainly do not need to suffer to gain something we do not really need.  No pain, no pain.

This new idea about the futility of pain has already started to take hold in your mind.  You are beginning to recognize that suffering makes no sense and is not needed in order to learn what you desire most to learn.  You want to learn how to return to peace more and more quickly after life’s daily blows.  You want resilience and freedom from suffering.  You want autonomy, self empowerment, and sovereignty.  You want to feel good in your own company.

You want this for yourself and God wants this for you too.  What God wants is wanted by all that God created.  You do not want pain.  When you experience a longing for the opposite of peace, it can only be because a confused logic has led you to believe that pain will bring you peace.  It is this logic this course is correcting.

To grow this newly sprouted awareness about the futility of suffering, we want to understand that a belief exists in our mind in a network of thoughts and memories.  Any belief, (true or false) is made of thoughts and memories and conclusions based on experiences.  Unconscious beliefs are beliefs we formed in childhood and have forgotten how or why we believe them.  They are unexamined and they run our life experience from a forgotten control panel governed by suffering.

We spend five minutes every hour with these ideas because we want their logic to sink down into the bedrock of our understanding of life.  Today’s new thought is the consideration that we want what God wants for us.  God is not angry, God is not vengeful.  God is not toying with us for sadistic pleasure.  We are confused about the nature of reality.  Reality is love.

We have taken a journey through profound darkness and baffling violence.  We believed there would be value found in agony.  We were mistaken and it is time to correct our course of action.  Let it be understood that we no longer need to go on journeys of suffering.  Let what we have gone through be enough.  The story of Christ’s crucifixion is a story asking humanity, “How bad does it need to get? Can this demonstration of outrageous suffering awaken the awareness that agony is not needed?  Can you stop crucifying yourself and let this example be enough to remind you that agony is unhelpful? The message of the crucifixion is a request to release the need for crucifixion all together by showing that pain can be overcome.  

Put down the cross.  The “second coming of Christ” is not the arrival of another person on earth to revere.  It is the realization of peace as a collective, peace within yourself connected to the peace within others.  

The “last judgement” is not the time where we will stand before a judge and be evaluated for our good or bad behavior.  The last judgement is the end of judging all together.  Creation is not judging us.  We are the only ones holding ourselves in condemnation.  Let us hold ourselves in joy. There is so much more we can be doing if we put down the fixation with pain.  Do not seek loving connection in the emptiness of suffering. Be at peace with what you are, where you are, what you achieved and did not achieve.

Today’s hourly practice sessions of five minutes are devoted to locating a sense of wellbeing within today.  Look around or close your eyes and find some small thing that pleases you.  A color, a memory… what in your world, (inside or out) feels like peace?  Set a gentle alarm to remind you at the top of every hour that you want the joy that life wants for you.  Put a small effort into pausing whatever you are doing and remember, “I want my joy.”