Friday, January 1, 2016
Lesson 1: “Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.”
The Course teaches us that everything we learn in it can be applied across the board. Jesus teaches us here at the beginning of the Course how to change and undo our current style of thinking. We are introduced to these multiple steps that result in our pulling out our old thoughts and then shaping the ones we replace so that in time and with enough practice, we will have made the indented path in our thinking and that we can choose what we put in instead. The Course gives us some broad ideas to help us not stay focused on what didn’t serve us before. What the Course says is that this was simply our mistaken thinking because we didn’t know any better.
The beauty of the Course is that its steps are broad and expansive. We may undertake to do just one little mental exercise each day in the workbook lessons but what is extraordinary is that by the end of the workbook our minds are radically different. The Course is giving us clues all the time and instruction about how to do this comprehensive overtaking of our minds so we can wholeheartedly dedicate them to God instead. In this action we give up our belief in our own suffering.
This is the way to simply stop making that war within. This is the way to see that our thinking got us into the ego’s mess in the first place. The Course says repeatedly that the way to undo that mess is to get out of the system of thought that created it in the first place. We can’t get out of our misery with the same tools only operating them differently to get out of it.
This is why we absolutely have to find tools that are entirely different. They are from love and forgiveness, the true feelings of power in the world. This is the way we maintain our sense of inner peace when we focus on these feelings instead of the range of what is the opposite of love- which is some form of fear. This is the way to completely change what we see and feel. This is what the Course is programmed to do and what it does successfully over time if we are willing to make the effort to apply all said lessons to our minds.
This is why we are invited to give our insanity a rest. When we simply stop perpetuating and believing in our nightmare, then everything else will make sense when we convert our minds to hold only God energy. We need to just understand that the larger process of the Course is important because our minds are complicated. The Course exists so we can get out of our minds once and for all, because God shows us here that our experience of the moment and living fully in the now with no attachment is the way to give us peace.
We simply have to forgive our minds for needing the written treasure map of the Course. It may seem a little heady sometimes and we may struggle with the intellectual process of how our minds need to be undone. But when we forgive this, also trust this process. God is giving us this Workbook so we can get out of our dream of hell. The way we do this is to give our minds permission to be undone. And we must bring our willing hearts to sustain our lives in the process of redeeming our sense of identity with God.