I have always believed this in some sense, but around about the time I REALLY had my eyes opened, this book just seemed to fall into my lap.
This morning I was reading about how so often things that were written - in the Bible, say - with good intentions, have become warped and co-opted by egoic forces over time. The author of the material is saying that much of the Bible has been made to sound scary to us, and that is because our own egos have made it that way. For example, the expression, "as ye sow, so shall ye reap," or "you reap what you sow," has come to sound threatening. We look at it and immediately think of all the bad things we've done, and the horrible things we might expect to come back around to us as a result. Why do we do this? There's nothing there that doesn't say that these things we are sowing could - in fact - be amazing. As humans we have this tendency to immediately go negative, and I'm honestly not sure if this is a natural part of the human condition, or if this is cultural programming. But this phrase could just as easily be positive. Sow the seeds of truth, honesty, gratitude and appreciation within your brain on a consistent basis and watch the amazing results you will get. The author of the course says The Holy Spirit reinterprets things in His Own light, if we let Him. According to ACIM, He interprets that particular phrase to mean "what you consider worth cultivating, you will cultivate in yourself. Your judgement of what is worthy makes it worthy for you." That's it. To me, that is a neutral phrase, not a negative one. It is also empowering, because YOU get to decide what to cultivate, and YOU get to be the judge of what is worthy of your cultivation.
In another place in the course, the author (who is widely believed to be Jesus Christ himself - channeled through a scribe named Helen Schucman - but that is another story for another time) says something to the effect of "You can do all that I have done and more, but the only problem is you have an undisciplined mind." And what he is saying above about what we choose to cultivate is referring to what we choose to allow into our awareness. More specifically, what we pay attention to. Most of us don't realize how powerful our attention is. Most of us are swept up in news cycles, television dramas, and the drudgery of our day-to-day lives, mindlessly and needlessly repeating a pattern that we are unhappy with. Our attention and our thoughts are ALWAYS creating things. We have become so used to creating the same things over and over that we accept that's the way it is and we don't even know we are doing it. We are completely and totally undisciplined in the use of our minds. We don't realize that changing things is as easy (or not easy) as training our minds to focus on something better. And if enough of us do this, the world WILL change.
Baby's crying again. Gotta go. I'm afraid this has been a little disjointed, but that's what happens when you have chronic mom-brain (hey, I'm trying!). Here's a little story that reflects all these thoughts perfectly:
xoxo,
erin
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