A meaningless world engenders fear

I missed posting yesterday (although the Liberty won their 10th game in a row). This work is starting to get really annoying now, probably because it's challenging me on some gut level.

The thought for today is that a meaningless world engenders fear. The last lesson asserted that I am upset because I see a meaningless world. While I can accept that the world is meaningless and has only the meaning I attach to it, I don't understand the upset part. I don't understand upset as being unhappy about it, and I don't even understand upset as being off-balance about it. The world is meaningless and has only the meaning I attach to it. I'm OK with that.

So then the thought that a meaningless world engenders fear does not resonate with me. A world without meaning is a world without meaning. There is no fear, there is no response at all -- it's neither good nor bad, it's what it says it is: without meaning. At least that's how I think. What this material says is that I will be likely to think I perceive something that has no meaning, and that "recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego "challenge" each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space that meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own ideas there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own impotence and unreality. And on this alone it is correct."

Not so sure I get that, and maybe that's where I have to do my work. I think I can accept meaningless as just that. The course seems to have as a presupposition that the ego will always attempt to impose meaning on things that appear not to have meaning. OK. I guess more will be revealed.

Now what the course says next is that it is essential for me to learn to recognize the meaningless and to accept it without fear. I have no fear of the meaningless, so perhaps I don't fully recognize it? The course says that people who are fearful will "endow the world with attributes that it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist." OK, but if I'm not fearful, can I just work at perceiving and accepting the meaninglessness of this world?


I'm not going to spend time on this thought, but rather will go ahead with the exercise for today, which is to close my eyes, open them, look around and acknowledge that "I am looking at a meaningless world."

I'm spozed to close my eyes again and acknowledge that "A meaningless world engenders fear because I think I am in competition with God.
" I need to be with that one for a while.

The course actually says that I may be resistant to this last statement (I am), and that I should remind myself that the vengeance of the enemy is what makes me resistant. It says, rightfully so in my case, that "You are not expected to believe the statement at this point, and will probably dismiss it as preposterous. " It also tells me to note carefully any signs of overt or covert fear this may arouse.

So maybe I need to stop kidding myself and dig a little deeper. Or maybe I'm not one of the separated ones.

At any rate, this is supposed to be the beginning of "stating an explicit cause and effect relationship of a kind which you are very inexperienced in recognizing." It's a course, so I'm just gonna run with it. This is challenging, but interesting work....