Day 132

Today's Lesson:

I loose the world from all I thought it was.

Our beliefs are what keep the world in chains for us. What can save the world? Our Selves. Belief is very powerful; the thoughts we hold are mighty and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth. Yet many times we don't see that questioning our thoughts and reframing them can have new effects. When the source of the effects is questioned, then can the hope of freedom come at last.

Salvation is easily achieved, for anyone is free to change his mind, and all his thoughts change with it. To change your mind means you have to change the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think. We will free the past from what we thought before. We will free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what we do not want to find.

Therefore all we have is the present. Here in the present is the world set free. For as we let the past be lifted and release the future from our ancient fears, we find escape and give it to the world. Instead of holding the world prisoner to the way we see it, we can free it from the effects of our thoughts.

The world is nothing in itself. Our minds give it meaning. And what we behold upon it are our wishes, acted out so we can look on them and think they are real. Perhaps we think we did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for our thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth we found exactly what we looked for when we came.

There is no world apart from what we wish, and herein lies our ultimate release. If we change our minds about what we want to see, all the world must change accordingly. Ideas do not leave their source. It is not pride which tells us we made the world we see, and that it changes as we change our minds.

But it is pride that argues we have come into a world quite separate from ourselves, impervious to what we think, and quite apart from what we think it is. There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again.

But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world.

And some will find it in this course, and in the exercises that we do today. Today's idea is true because the world does not exist. And if it is indeed our own imagining, then we can loose it from all things we ever thought it was by merely changing all the thoughts that gave it these appearances. The sick are healed as we let go all thoughts of sickness, and the dead arise when we let thoughts of life replace all thoughts we ever held of death.

We are as God created us. There is no place where we can suffer, and no time that can bring change to our eternal state. How can a world of time and place exist, if we remain as God created us? If we are as God created us, we cannot think apart from Him, nor make what does not share His timelessness and Love. Are these inherent in the world we see? Does it create like Him? Unless it does, it is not real, for God's creation is unlike the world in every way. And as it was His Thought by which we were created, so it is our thoughts which made it and must set it free, that we may know the Thoughts we share with God.

Today our purpose is to free the world from all the idle thoughts we ever held about it, and all living things we see upon it. They can not be there. No more can we. For we are in the home our Father set for us, along with them. And we who are as He created us would loose the world this day from every one of our illusions, that we may be free.

The fifteen minute periods which we practice twice today begin with this:

I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was. For I am real because the world is not, and I would know my own reality.

Then merely rest, alert but with no strain, and let your mind in quietness be changed so that the world is freed, along with you.

Miracles I'm noticing:

I know I've been through this course twice before, but it seems like the first time I've read this lesson. Today's lesson is so profound in so many ways - and it all comes down to changing my own mind. I think about the ties that I have allowed my mind to be bound by in the past, believing that those thoughts were real. I see now that just releasing any thoughts I have about the reality of the world can be released, and I can allow God to shape the present. When I connect with my Self, I know that I am not alone in creating the world I see.

I'm also reminded of a book I read last year called The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard. I remember reading there (and it's in this course as well) that God did not make the world or the universe. That sounds a bit like blasphemy, but when you read that in the context of today's lesson it makes perfect sense. God did not MAKE the world we see. God CREATED the universe outside of the meaning we have MADE. Nothing in itself means anything - it just is. Yet we have attached meaning and judgment to everything we see, including religion. When we can free ourselves from all that meaning and attachment and just be awake and alert and mindful of what we are seeing in the present, that's when we can see what God has created, not what we have made.

This is very enlightening for me and will allow me, today, to see the world in a whole new light.

I'm blessed and grateful for everything I have and everything I am!! That's a miracle!