Lesson 15: “My thoughts are images I have made.”

The Course is teaching us to make peace with ourselves. 

When we are not at peace with ourselves then, we are making ourselves an enemy.

The ego makes us make enemies with ourselves and to make enemies with God and the world. 

The ego is at war with everyone because it is just the nature of the ego to have and exude a disruptive and distressing energy, will and purpose.

The whole purpose of the Course is to make friends with everything.

We are asked to remember that every one and everything is worthy of respect and appreciation. 

Even if we don’t like something in some way or we disagree on a number of fronts, still  all people and things deserve respect. 

The ego is always the one to withhold respect.

We make everyone an enemy because it is an ego habit- not in any way true or valid way of seeing things and of doing things.  We do it like the ego does because we are so used to it.

We just need to get out of that old habit and declare independence to ourselves.  

We declare our liberation and we assert our will which also has to be Gods Will as well because it is the will that makes us happy.

We declare our liberation because we are absolutely free to do so.

We just need to be willing to make the simple conjecture- the possibility of choosing God- to be one of pure substance- where we are truly choosing God.

We don’t want to fight with this liberation in any way when we assert it. 

We want to gently assert our will- that is one with God’s.  We gently assert that we are free to make our lives however we want them to be.  

This is the best news we are ever going to hear.

We have nothing to lose in this process of our liberation because it is one where we simply give everything to God and allow God to show us what kinds of thoughts we want to have in truth. 

When we give God permission to decide what kind of thoughts we want to have, then, we give God the right to take away anything that was not meant specifically for us.  And this is the way to true peace.

When we give God the permission to do His thing then everything becomes easy. 

We just need to remember to surrender that old ego battle within.

We have the thoughts that don’t serve us, we are asked to very delicately surrender them to God. 

Let this be a time that we cherish the thoughts with God and we give them all the respect that they deserve for being what they are, and give the them permission to leave as soon as possible. 

Giving our thoughts respect reminds us to be kind in the process, and be kind to ourselves for having them in the first place. 

Generally we are the ones we do battle with most within. 

We do battle with those thoughts we don’t want to have because that’s what the ego does.

We are just asked in taking notice of them to simply allow them to be what they are- with no judgement and no insult from the ego.

See them with a neutral heart and let them go.