Lesson 8: “My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.”
God is preparing our path to miracle mindedness!
The Course here shows us how to emphasize the fact that our minds are what houses our thinking. When we are not as aware of this fact that our minds are what harbors and houses our thoughts, we often give something else external to our minds the credit of creating, the origin of our thoughts. This results in a loss of awareness of our own sense of power when we make our thinking a result of some exterior force- often which we always can’t identify readily. Also, we generally assume our thinking comes from out there somewhere- when we have no idea what is the source of our thoughts.
The ego’s loudly hinting that we always get our thoughts from something that is presumably a factor we can not reach to change is a tragedy. The ego says we are the ones who react to the thoughts once we have them because these are simply part of what the world gives us. The ego says change is not part of our mental potential. We have nothing but a shadow of power because the ego says there is nothing we can do in the situation. We are the victims of the ego and the ego says that we have to just sit and tolerate. We sit and suffer over our thinking because this is the nature of life. This is a terribly disempowered way to live. The Course is the best teacher I have found about how to be empowered. We actually get a totally different message in Jesus’s teaching here. We learn that we are given the most extraordinary of possibilities of strength and power. We do it in our minds. We don’t need to look outside to find something to make us feel powerful. The power is in our thinking and in our minds. When we think only God thoughts- in terms of love and forgiveness- then our minds resonate with the highest elevated energy. This is the only way to be truly powerful.
When we feel this Godly energy within us we realize and we feel a graced with the gifts of kindness and gentleness. Also, we want to approach the world with an acceptance that always holds the hint and full force of forgiveness. We learn in the Course that the connection between our thinking and our full mind is always intact. We learn that the reason we can have any sense of true power it is because we feel peaceful and good with our clear God mind. Consequently, we can live in the world with a heart and mind of total Love because we are in the present with a clear purpose of forgiveness of the past.
We can understand that that the past is just part of what the ego does to try to paralyze us. We get so preoccupied with the past because this is what our minds do. Our minds often just keep regurgitating the past because the ego only knows pain. We just have to release our attachment to the past to be fully in the present. We need to forgive the past. This is the only way to get out of our continual focus on the past. We need to stand up and give the past to God and offer a prayer of forgiveness in our hearts. This is the way to stand up in our strength of conviction and gently give the past permission to be undone.
