BEYOND THIS WORLD

Is a World I Want.

A “Gifts of God: Sunday Talk”

with Markus Ray

“Beyond This World”

Welcome to this Gifts of God Sunday Talk. I’m so happy to have you with us. And this week, we had some… wonderful lessons that we did podcasts on.

This beautiful one, “There is no Love but God’s,” that’s #127, I thought that was very beautiful.

But it was kind of setting us up for something, right?

So, when you see this… love of God, or at least you’re told about it… maybe we don’t fully realize it, but at least we know what’s at stake here. Where it says, “There’s no love but God’s love.” so, this is sort of “Divine Love.” It’s really what we’re all after, as students of the Course in Miracles.

I mean, first of all, we’re open enough to acknowledge there is a Divine Creator. And we’re letting go of our anger at the Divine Creator, [GOD] and then it tells us that the Source of Love is the Divine Creator. It even says, all the forms of love that you dreamt up, that ended in disaster, were not really love in the first place, and… “There is no love but God’s.”

But it also made it clear that that love is within us. It’s… it’s not somewhere out there. It’s not something that you have to achieve. It’s not something that you have to do X, Y, and Z in order to have. It’s already in us. It’s already in the makeup of who we are, as God created us.

So, you are love. “Love which created me is what I am,” it says later on in the lessons. You are that. “Love created me like itself.” I think that’s lesson 67, so we’ve already had that lesson. So, Love is our nature, our true nature, and that is what God created.

And that’s why it could say, “There is no love but God’s,” because that’s the only love there is. That’s in you, and that’s the real thing. So, when we make contact with that, it permeates all of our relationships. It permeates everything that we do in this lifetime.

But today, I wanted to look at these three lessons right after this, “There is no love but God’s.” It says, “The world you see holds nothing that you want.”

“The world I see holds nothing that I want.” That’s lesson 128. And then it says, “Beyond this world, there is a world I want.” And then it says, “It’s impossible to see two worlds.”

So, you’re either seeing one world, or you’re seeing the other world.

You’re seeing the world that it says, this world, there’s nothing you want in there, because it’ll end in disaster if you keep thinking that world. But then beyond that world, there’s this other world where you’re certain that the love of God is in it, and you are aligned with it, and you are expressing that and interacting with that in this world.

That’s… The world beyond the world you saw before. So, I think those are pretty clear lessons.

But then, you know, I think there is a more subtle correction that we run into when we read the next lesson, “It’s impossible to see two worlds.” We see a very wily way that the ego tries to fool us, and that is, “Oh, yeah, I can see that, you know, all these thoughts that you had, dreamed up this sort of a terrible world of war and suffering and pain, and… problems and conflicts and all that. I can see that. And I can even see that my thoughts produce that. And then I can even see that there’s, this world beyond that, right? But I wanna keep… I want the goodies… of the world I see (that also produces pain and suffering, you know?) I want my payoffs to stay intact, in this other world, and so I want to have this sort of God world, and then I want to have this other world, too, you know? I want to maintain both worlds. And that’s a very subtle trick of the ego, and we’ve probably, at some point in our life, noticed that about ourselves.

And then this… Lesson says, “It’s impossible to see two worlds.”

So, if you haven’t fully let go of the ego’s thought system, and you are kind of clinging to parts of it that you like, or at least you say you like, then you’re blocking this vision, of… the world beyond the world you don’t want, right? The world in which you’re absolutely certain “There is no love but God’s,” and you’re immersed in that world, and that’s your only world. And then you have stepped out of this… world that I don’t want… you know, pain, suffering. duality, conflict, inner… inner division, inner fragmentation. You’ve stepped out of that world. You’ve forgiven yourself for all your mistakes. You’ve forgiven yourself for, even all the… thought forms of future dread, you know?

We can be doing pretty well right now, and say, well, “Things are flowing okay, blah blah blah,” but then what about this future, anxiety that…often, we find ourself in. “What’s gonna happen? What’s gonna happen next?”

And then we fear something. Some… catastrophe could… take place. We call that, in our work, catastrophic thinking. You’d be surprised how many people are… engaged in catastrophic thinking that usually concerns the future. You know, “what’s gonna happen to me when? What’s gonna happen to me when I get old? What’s gonna happen to me when… yeah, my parents pass away. You know, all kinds of things. What’s gonna happen to me? … kind of thinking.

So that’s also part of this world that we don’t want.

“The world I see holds nothing that I want.” Well, what would it take for you to have certainty that your future is as good, if not better, than your present, and certainly better than your past, right?

So there’s a lesson that says, “I seek a future different than my past.” (ACIM; Workbook; Lesson #314) Different. I think we would all probably agree with that. We have in our past things that went terribly wrong, you know? That were painful, that were not comfortable, that were, problems we had to solve, and weren’t always that easy to solve. So to have this notion of a future that… that doesn’t have problems, or doesn’t have Leela’s, is what we seek.

So… so either… either we get to the point where there are no Leelas, which I don’t know if that’s possible, or lessons, let’s just call them, or we get to the point where the lessons don’t bother us. We see the higher purpose of the lesson. We see the… the jump in our evolution as a result of going through the lesson.

I was sharing a little bit before we started this talk about this student we had who went on the India Quest. And then he left, not even in the middle, he left before even being there half the time, right? And he gave certain reasons, oh, his finances needed attention back home, and then, oh, he didn’t like the… conditions of the bathrooms in Herakhan, etc., etc. And… so, he left.

Alright. So, that was that.

And, okay. But then a month later, he asked for his money back, and then that was a bit of a stress on us, figuring out what to do with it, with his request. And we consulted higher-up forces, including the chairman of the Samaj in India, and the consensus was no money back, which made him get very angry, and attack us, and so forth. All right, well, that was a lesson, right?

It was uncomfortable, and I didn’t really want to go through that, but there we were, going through it.

Well, what… what did I learn from that? You know, if you learn the lesson, it’s, like, not so bad; but if it plagues you, and you don’t learn the lesson, and then it happens again, and again, and again, and it keeps repeating itself, then that’s… well, you didn’t get the Leela, you didn’t get the lesson.

So I was looking at all that, and I was saying, well, “I could have been clearer. I could have been clearer, I could have been more… with it in the moment. So, when this gentleman said he wanted to leave the India Quest, I could have said, “Well, that’s all well and good, and… you have free will to do that, and you’re welcome to do that.” But then, at that very moment… I should have said, “and there’s no refund of your money.”

I should have said it right in that instant. And I didn’t… I didn’t. And then, therefore, I get this a month later. Then the other thing I can do, which I will do on futyure India Quests, is have a disclaimer, you know? Just have something people sign saying once they sign up for the India Quest, once they’re on the India Quest and it’s started, there’s no refund of funds, no matter what, you know?

I mean, if somebody breaks their leg and they have to be airlifted out of Harrakhan, then that’s a different story. But, in their own free will to leave when there’s really nothing, no reason for them to… that would be a no-refund situation, and that would be in writing, and people would sign for that. So, I learned a lesson. I learned a lesson, and I think I went through enough inner turmoil to learn it. I mean, you always want people to be happy, right? You want people to be happy with their results and with working with you, and you try to give them a reasonable experience so they’re not upset and then attacking you in the future. But in this case, I couldn’t avoid it. I had to give the decision, and it wasn’t liked, and then I had to field the attacks as a result of that, and it’s all okay now.

And it was ‘A lesson God would have me learn” (Lesson #193) to just be clearer. Clear about business arrangements and agreements with people and so forth. So that’s the lesson I learned this week, and that was a little piece of the world I did not want.

“The world you see holds nothing that you want.” Of course, I didn’t want that. But then I saw my part in the unclarity of creating such a situation.

And it just could have been all very simple if I would have just said in that moment, “That’s fine if you want to leave, but there will be no refund.” I could have just said it simply as that, one sentence.

And that would have avoided this.

Or I would have worked it out right in that moment. He might have disagreed there, but I would have just said, “Well, it’s your decision to leave, you know?”

Or I might have said, “Okay, if it’s really the bathrooms, let’s see if there’s…another room at the ashram we can move you to.” I could have done some little inquiry, you know?

So, it was a “Lesson God would have me learn.”

And it was a piece of my world that I don’t want anymore.

So, we’re all gonna be given those trials, “challenges,” tests, so to speak. Yeah, it’s… it’s interesting that test came… right in the middle of these lessons, like, you know, “There’s no love but God’s,” and “The world you see holds nothing that you want.” And then, boom, this guy attacking me, wanting his money back, you know? It was, like, uncanny, like, how fast… how fast my, my, my lesson was. Are you gonna really bring this into application or not?

So that was my week.

So I wanted to just look at this one lesson. “Beyond this world, there is a world we want.” I think we all know the world we don’t want, right? I don’t have to go over that.

HI Friends. Below lives the rest of this Article “Beyond This World” AND… the Video of the SUNDAY TALK in its entirety. The SUNDAY TALK and the MANTRA BREATHING TALK are often put on Substack for Paid Subscribers.