Lesson 1: “Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.”

The Course teaches us that we have faulty perception. 

Our egos perceive the world with a lens of darkness and despair.  The ego makes the world problem after problem.

The purpose of the Course is to draw to our attention how quickly we go with the ego’s perspective. 

We believe it because it is familiar and we gravitate toward it because we know it so well.  The Course asks us in the beginning to simply realize that we generally adopt this faulty perception that things are much worse than we think.

The ego likes to complain about everything and decides that everything is stacked against us and, therefore, the ego has reason to attack back. 

The ego likes war so we often just let the ego do its thing.

We have this whole base line of illusion in our experience of the world. 

The problem is that we are so used to the ego’s insanity that we don’t even question it. 

The reason it is so hard to confront the ego in any real way is because we are so busy patting the ego on the back for doing a great job.

We are totally hoodwinked by the ego.  We buy all of its nightmares.  We believe it because it is familiar.  This is where the power lies in the ego’s maintaining itself.

If we believe the ego, we never question it. 

And if we never question it, then we never get to a new and better reality with God.  

The Course is teaching us to live with our eyes open all the time. 

This is a huge, huge departure from the ego’s usual routine.

When we open our eyes, then we start to realize what is truly happening. 

We also start to get glimpses of what life is like with God because we are not simply fooled by the ego into doing nothing.

This is why the Course invites us to wake up little by little with simple awareness of what we are thinking.

Then later, we can work at changing our thinking by choosing something all together different.  

But it is shocking for sure- the process of waking up. 

Therefore, the Course is ever so gentle and slow when guiding us through this process. 

We start with just simply acknowledging that nothing has any meaning. 

This is the best way to start another year of undoing our faulty perception so we can simply invite in God’s reality instead.