Speaker: There’s nothing per se in the world that has any meaning of itself. The Course is saying you’ll see what you want to see. In lesson number 2 which is probably as basic as you can get, it says “I have given everything that I see all the meaning that it has for me.” Like when we go to the movies. We sit there and our emotions seem to go up and down and all around just watching a movie in a movie theater. It’s the meaning that I’m giving to what I’m seeing that’s producing the roller coaster ride – not the light and show figures up on the screen. There aren’t any happy movies. There aren’t any sad movies. No one has ever made us laugh. No one has ever made us cry. Remember that quote we read earlier, I am responsible for what I see. I choose the feelings that I experience…’ so in that sense the world just brings witness to what we want. But, until we get clear on what we want, if the mind is confused, the world will bring a witness of confusion. That seems to be what this world does. It brings a lot of witnesses to confusion. But, it’s only because of our thinking. Our mind is still split and we’re not clear on the thinking.

Participant 1: We’re asking the Holy Spirit to help us detach from all of those old perceptions that made you feel a certain way.

Speaker: Yes, and that means thoughts. Because remember projection makes perception. Projection of what? The early lessons say ‘My thoughts are images that I have made.’ That’s how the world is made. The world is a projection of our attack thoughts so as soon as I detach my mind from the attack thoughts and say, ‘I’m not going to buy these anymore, these aren’t my real thoughts’ then we become very detached about what’s going on the screen.

Like Chauncey Gardener [in the movie Being There], someone could literally come up with a knife and [the response would be] a state of detachment. It’s good news. We have this opportunity to have our perception healed so completely.

Participant 1: And it is always about assigning meaning to what I think I see that keeps me from seeing Christ and only that, isn’t it? That’s what the block is. That is the obstacle to love.

Participant 2: The meaning.

Participant 1: It’s that meaning that I’m giving to everything that I seem to see. Part of that meaning is how I see myself. As Speaker was saying, if you’re identified with something; if you’re identified with being a female, then everything you see will be through that filter. That will color your perception; if you’re identified with being a female; if you’re identified with being a male, a Reds fan, a Course in Miracles student. Anything where you say, ‘That’s who I am. That’s my being-ness. Forget that I’m Christ. Forget about that. I’m a Red’s Fan. I’m a Course student. I’m a woman.’
You’re replacing your true reality with an idea that you’re making up about yourself and that’s what’s always going to interfere with experiencing myself and my brother in the reality of who we are.

Speaker: To give a concrete example; I watched a movie with some friends some time ago. At the end of it we talked about how people reacted and what they saw and this woman kind of stayed back for awhile and waited but then finally she said, ‘The main character, that woman, I’m so angry that all these other characters just took advantage of her. They didn’t listen to her. They just didn’t treat her with respect. They took advantage of her. She wasn’t heard!’ So, then we said, ‘Now take it back to your mind.’ And she said, ‘Well, come to think of it I’m not heard!’ Then she laid out two or three experiences in her life where she had worked at a job and she had left this corporation and she said, ‘My boss did not hear me.’ And then she talked about her relationship she had with her husband and she said, ‘He never heard me.’ And then she said, ‘I just moved to the city and I had some kind of a condition [which required] medication.’ She started getting into the Course and started having mind shifts to the point where she said, ‘I think I can get off this medicine. I don’t think I have to be on this medicine my whole life and I want to go in to my doctor and just talk about it.’ And she went in to this doctor and she talked about it and the doctor looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘You will never get off this medication.’ And she said, ‘I felt I was not heard.’

It’s great because then you can get at the belief if you can take it back first to the character in the movie then to this character [pointing to the body] then to the belief that we can be violated or that there’s something outside of us that we need to be heard by.

Participant 1: The word that kept coming up for her for the character in the movie and then for she saw it for herself was being invalidated.

Speaker: Invalidated. Yes, that’s a good one. Once you can get to that you can trace it back to does the Christ need validation? Does the Christ need external validation from something out there in the world? The Christ is just the Christ. So you can start to bring it back to, ‘Wow, I must have the belief that I need to be validated by these other people in my life.’

She said, ‘Wow! What a great insight!’ Because you could see once you start to get in touch with the belief and question that belief, ‘Do I constantly need to have people out there validating me out there?’ then that’s the first step in completely being released from it. Then it wouldn’t matter one way or the other because you get to a sense of surety and certainty in your own mind.

It’s exciting to be able to take something like that and work it back like that and to start to see the pattern then start to get a little bit of a sense of the thinking that’s behind the pattern.

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