Thursday, January 1, 2015
Lesson 1: “Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.”
I think reading the Introduction right before the first lesson helps give us a format about how the lessons will proceed. Doing this mind training of the Course is such a big project, it helps to read up on how to manage the time and effort needed. It requires us to give ourselves space and time to do this and integrate it further. If it is the first time doing the lessons or the 20th, it’s still a deeper awakening. Let’s be gentle with ourselves in meeting the challenge of what this philosophy asks of us. Let’s be gentle and also willing to offer our own concerted effort to include ourselves in making effort to change our minds.
The Introduction tells us “Yet it is doing the exercises that will make the goal of the course possible.” This Course helps us systematically sharpen our minds and gives us a way to approach our daily lives in a way that is peaceful and joyful. The Course workbook is set up to systematically undo our old way of thinking. And then it replaces that empty space with the truth of God’s reality- that we are totally lovable, holy beings taking a walk on the earth temporarily.
We just forgot the true nature of ourselves. The Course teaches us how to make this knowing evident in our hearts. Then, it is reflected in the way we feel about life and the way we participate fully and lovingly in all of our relationships and activities.
The Course is a very efficient and effective tool. We just need to be patient with the process of integrating this. Sometimes we get frustrated because we might not understand initially what the goal is for certain lessons. Our only need is to trust that God and Jesus have a plan to get our minds back to the memory of our perfection. When we trust this, then we can let go of our attachment to our resistance of applying the lessons of the workbook. Forgive this frustration and send it back to God’s altar. We can leave it for God’s keeping and resolving. Just give it right to our Source.
It helps very much if we understand we may feel resistant to something like what the lesson says. Thinking nothing means anything is the exact opposite we have been taught. Since the start of our lives, we were taught language and we through this, learned a certain identification system regarding what we perceive. The rest of our thinking is based on all this language acquisition. It seems far fetched to make this supposition that is the exact opposite from our current method of categorizing life’s components. Let’s let ourselves buck a little inside. On some level we squirm around because this is a deeply seated belief about how everything is.
Let’s give our mind the space to surrender this limited way of seeing things. It is functional in the world to think this way, but ultimately it doesn’t serve us in the broader perspective. As we grow in understanding of the Course, we will succeed at being functional in the world’s view while we simultaneously holding that everything also contains far greater purpose that comes with a sense of non-attachment. The realization that nothing means anything is the beginning of that undoing of our unhelpful attachment to what we see.