Lesson 52: Review: “I am upset because I see what is not there.”  “I see only the past.”  “My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.”  “I see nothing as it is now.”  “My thoughts do not mean anything.”  

The Course is teaching us to have a healthy relationship with our thinking.  We aren’t judging our thinking in a way that starts our own inner attack but simply acknowledging that our thinking is what makes the quality in the rest of our lives.  The Course is teaching us how to understand that we have this relationship to our minds and our thinking- and in this, we are learning how to be kind and careful with it.  Meanwhile, we gently remind it that there is no room for our lack of enthusiasm in our vigilance of watching the type of thinking that we have.
Jesus wants us to learn to sit in an honest acknowledgement of what is at the root of our thinking.  Sometimes when we think in words our perception is that we are having the same intention underneath our thinking that is stated in the word.  But we are learning in the Course that this is often not the case.  What we are learning to do is notice when this happens.  We don’t judge it because when we start to judge we lose our connection with the acceptance of the now.  But we can see when we are thinking in ways that doesn’t support the content of the way we most want to live.

It means we can change this- this is the beauty of doing something like the Course- it is teaching us how to change our minds when we choose wrongly.  What we want to do is not judge what we see; we want to step aside from our ego’s pull toward accelerating the drama we find within.  We want to just be present with this and notice it.  We can give it space to express if we feel so called.  But then what is most helpful is we simply allow for the fact that we made a wrong choice in thinking.

The Course is teaching us to be empowered in this process.  For a lot of us, changing our day to day thinking can seem like a monumental task.  This can make our ego scream out and disrupt us internally to

lose our momentum. 

But the lovely thing is that this process- changing the way we think- is really a pretty easy process when we allow ourselves to get excited about it.  When we love something and we are excited about it, then because we love it, it’s easy to spend time in the process.  Further, we do it as completely as we can because it feels like a gift.  The key of the Course is teaching us how to learn to do everything with love.  Then this process seems manageable and like an awesome prospect not like an impossible chore.  We can’t wait to get to the book and go when we remember to get inspired about it and love it.
Just appreciate that the Course is giving us the tools to learn to change our mind.  When we get stuck in the past then we can’t connect with our enthusiasm.

Love is in the present.

Our inspiration is in the present too because it is another form of Love.  This is why we are learning to release our minds from locking itself downinto a block to love’s presence.  We just have to just release our mind from the belief that the past can even exist in the first place.  All we have to is allow it to be helpful for the information it shares, and then completely remember it never happened.  Allow ourselves to allow that past to be unreal because then we don’t insist on reliving it in the now.