A Meaningless World

A meaningless world: 

lesson 14 in A Course in Miracles workbook states that God did not create a meaningless world -it's been well over a decade since I have given the course any serious consideration and yet this lesson seems to play through my mind more often than all the others, almost an inquiry of its own and often giving cause for me to ponder its implication. These lessons build on one another, a theme, and each one leads to a greater understanding of ourselves, God, and the world as they precede through the workbook. So it may not be helpful to consider one lesson in isolation, without understanding how we've been led to this particular statement, a declaration that God did not create a meaningless world. 

each proceeding lesson builds on this theme, asking us to first consider the room around us, whatever objects catch our eye, briefly studying it before we state that it has no real meaning other than what we assign it. That's the crux, being that any meaning assigned to the world is of our own doing, not of God, but that everything has been given its value through our own thinking. It's a meaningless world, at least in and of itself, without any inherent significance until we've decided so. 

that's the beginning of the lessons, leading us now to number 14 and understanding why God did not create a meaningless world. 

it's because the world is ours, not of God's creation but entirely our own affair. 

in Course understanding it would be because God doesn't create separation, there is nothing outside of love, and that the world we live in is mind-stuff, our creation of meaning and value, having little to do with the way of love. The Course goes on to teach us another way to see the world, or perhaps better said, of seeing through the world to the only meaning God intended. 

only love is real. 

I'm not a real student of the Course, not any longer, although I appreciate the lessons and what the teachings brought me at an important junction of my life. I'm a happier person now because of my years of study. A year ago I reread Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus with his allusion of being stripped of all meaning, of the realization of a meaningless world, we are faced with the absurdity of our situation and left with only two rational options - to take our own lives out of desperation, or complete surrender to the absurd, embracing the world and all it offers without need of meaning or design. 

finding happiness exactly now, however things are...

exactly as they are, 

there are other philosophies that grant us the role of assigning meaning, that we are essential to the world for just this very purpose. We provide meaning to the world through virtue of our existence, by our beingness. It's what we do. It's who we are. 

really, it's all pretty much the same view, or so it seems to me, and in the end the meaning is entirely our own - God did not create a meaningless world, not in the sense implied here. What we see now is of our own creation, values, meaning, its all been assigned by the mind. We've created a world of meaning, not God, and our role is to continue this creation, a cosmology of our own design, realizing that only through love do we reach a true and real understanding of the world. 

and with this I agree complete with the Course...

only love is real. 

~

Peace, Eric