There's a criticism that students of the Course frequently make
about A Course in Miracles, saying that it takes all the fun out of their life.
I've been accused of that, actually.
I've been accused of taking Jesus away from people,
of taking God away from people..I gather when that happens
that I'm in good company because, again, that's what people accuse the Course of.
And it all comes down to how you define fun.
To the ego, fun is the fulfillment of our specialness needs.
Fun is when our specialness demands are met.
Fun is when our bodies feel good because of what other bodies do.
Fun is when we win the lottery.
Basically fun is simply when our specialness gets its way.
And in that sense, absolutely, the Course takes all the fun out of life.
It takes all the drama out of life...it takes away the highs
and it takes away the lows. The glorious heights of ecstasy and
the searing depths of depression and despair.
It takes all that away because when you're listening to the Holy Spirit
and you follow Jesus' guidance in the Course, then everything's the same.
Everything is level...everything is equal.
The meaning of the first principle of the Course
that begins the text, is that there's no order of difficulty in miracles,
which means every problem is perceived as the same
and every solution is the same.
The problem is that our decision-making mind chooses the ego
instead of the Holy Spirit as its teacher,
and the solution is that we correct the mistake and simply shift teachers.
And from that simple shift a whole different world arises.
The ego's world of darkness, despair, specialness highs and lows,
a world of differences, a world of good guys and bad guys,
a world of pleasure when our body gets what it wants
whether it's the physical body or the psychological body,
and the pain when the body doesn't get what it wants.
All this is changed in the holy instant when we have Jesus as our teacher
who as us recognize, as he says right at the beginning
of the text near the end of Chapter 1,
all real pleasure comes from doing God's Will.
There can't be any pleasure in the world of illusion.
There can't be any pleasure in a world of bodies
cause there is no world of bodies, so how could there be pleasure there?
The only pleasure comes in recognizing that there's no world of bodies.
There's a passage in the text where Jesus says
How do you find joy in a joyless place
except by realizing you are not there.
That's the real joy. That's the real pleasure, and that joy doesn't change.
And that pleasure doesn't change because it's constant.
Being in ones right mind can be a constant state
if we continually choose it.
And of course that's the key...that we have to continually choose it.
But we don't choose it because we still believe
in our perverse insanity that there's a possibility of having fun here.
There's a possibility of having happiness here.
There's a possibility of having pleasure here.
And so indeed this Course takes all the fun out of life.
But Jesus helps us recognize, in his Course, that there is no fun
in our life here. In fact, there is no life here.
There's no life outside of Heaven.
So life here is not life. LIfe here is simply a charade...
What we call life here is simply a charade...it's an outward manifestation
of the inward condition of believing the ego spoke the truth
and the Holy Spirit was wrong.
How could that be life? How could that be fun?
How could it be fun believing that we are
triumphing over God?
You know there's that line in the text where Jesus says
If you knew your special relationship was a triumph over God, would you want it?
And each time we think that there is something in this world
that gives us pleasure, that makes us happy, gives us something
we could look forward to, we are once again triumphing
over God, saying to Him...Your Love was not enough.
And in this world we tell Jesus...Your love is not enough
What you are teaching me in this Course is not enough...
I want something more. I want fun. I want excitement. I want drama.
And indeed this world is a big drama.
The belief that we seized control of Heaven
that we usurped God's place on the throne of Creation...
that we destroyed God, crucified His Son...that's heavy drama.
And, in distinction, being with Jesus in the holy instant,
which culminates being in the Real World, that's seen as
being dull and boring...to the ego.
What's the fun of everything being the same?
What's the fun of never getting angry, never even getting annoyed
not making any judgments, not trying to indulge our specialness needs?
That's not fun. That's dull and boring.
And that's how the ego sees it. And to the extent
that we identify with the ego...to the extent that we identify
with this distorted thought system of separation, which then
leads to distortions of specialness, to the extent that we do this
to that extent we will believe the Course is taking something away from us.
It's leading us to sacrifice what we want.
There's that wonderful passage that talks about the bridge
to the Real World and says when we finally cross over
we will realize in glad astonishment
that for all this we gave up nothing.
That there's really nothing here as the workbook says...
The world we see holds nothing that we want.
There is no hope for pleasure here, or fun here.
Again, the only real pleasure comes in doing God's Will.