Lesson 54: Review:  “I have no neutral thoughts.”  “I see no neutral things.”  “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing.”  “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.”  “I am determined to see.”

The ego uses the past as a way to uphold our grievances. 

We use the past to torture us, and it becomes our enemy when we are angry about it. 

The Course gives us a whole other direction.

We are allowing ourselves to wake up to the truth. 

The reality is that we are in a constant attack energy when we allow the ego to interpret the past.

This is the greatest amount of suffering we can give ourselves.

The Course gives us this fresh idea of God’s interceding in the process of interpreting the past.  

When we give God and the Holy Spirit permission to guide us and tell us directly what it is all for, this completely changes the landscape in our minds.

Suddenly the ripples in the lake of our minds becomes calm and placid, and easy, and open, and free. 

We stop this agony.

The Course gives us the clarity that we are always allowing attack energy to come with the ego, and this means that in truth nothing comes completely neutral to us.

We are asked to do our parts and just be willing to catch our thinking when it comes through our minds.

We may be struck at the reality that the Course teaches us that nothing has neutral energy that comes through the ego-mind.

We  are used to accepting our thinking as benign and just part of what happens in life. 

The Course gives us the real truth now that we are the ones responsible for choosing and changing our thinking. 

We are asked to play our parts, and be willing to be vigilant in the process of getting ourselves into thinking that elevates our minds, when we align with God in purpose. 

We all have to play our unique role in God’s plan and God prescribes this for us.

But in the mean time we are reminded that we must do what we can from moment to moment to heal our experience. 

We are given this extraordinary possibility to get to a place of real peace because God shows us the way.

We just need to do that small little thing of choosing again, and be open to a new reality that feels good.

The purpose of the Atonement is to accept a purified past. 

We have the way out of hell at the Hand of God.  We are given the Atonement- for our own healing- from God, and it is simply the reminder to give the past permission to leave our minds.

The ego obsesses about the past and we hear about “our stories” over and over in excess. 

The Course gives us the really simple and effective way of dealing with the past in a new and completely helpful way.

All we have to do is take the lessons from the past- in a clean and clear way.

We must feel fine about releasing the past, while at the same time, we are open to seeing what we learned from the past in a way that is entirely rectified. 

This is the only effective way to not suffer any longer over it.