God is in everything I see because God is in my mind.
1. Today’s idea is the stepping stone to Vision.
²Through this idea, the world will open up before you, and as you look upon it, you will see in it something you have never seen before.I
³What you used to see will no longer even be faintly visible to you.II
2. Today we focus on using a new kind of projection.III
²We are not trying to get rid of what we do not like by seeing it outside of us.IV
³Instead, we are trying to see in the world what is in our own mind, and to recognize that it is truly there.V
⁴In this way, we seek to join with what we see, rather than keep it apart from us.VI
⁵This is the fundamental difference between Vision and the way you see now.VII
3. Today’s idea should be practiced as often as possible throughout the day.
²Repeat it slowly to yourself each time you remember, as you look around and try to realize that the idea applies to everything you see now, or could see if it were within your range of sight.
³True Vision is not limited by concepts such as “near” and “far.”
⁴To help you become accustomed to this idea, when applying today’s lesson, try to include both things that are beyond your physical sight and those you can see directly.
4. True Vision is not only unlimited by space or distance; it does not depend at all on the eyes of the body. ²Its only source is the mind.VIII
³To help you adjust to this idea, apply it also with eyes closed, focusing on whatever subject comes to mind and looking inward rather than outward.
⁴Today’s idea is equally applicable in both ways.
I Imagine your mind as a movie theater, a hall where a film is being projected titled “My Personal Life.” In this theater there is a projector with a powerful lamp that emits a light (the Love of God) which passes through a film composed of frames (moments of the present) marked by stains (judgments) that partially block that light. The result is the projection of the movie (my personal life) onto a screen (consciousness), with which I, the spectator seated in the audience (the idea I hold of myself), completely identify. And thus, depending on the scenes of the movie, I sometimes laugh and sometimes cry. In reality, the eyes of the spectator see only a play of light and shadows, absences of light, absences of the Love of God.
Today’s Lesson proposes that we discard (forgive) those absences, which by their very condition of absence have no real entity, and focus only on the Love of God underlying everything we perceive.
Realize that without absences of light, without absences of love, no story appears on the screen; there is no movie. This is what it means that “the world does not exist,” for the world is precisely the story that arises in consciousness when reality’s absences are regarded as real. The “real world,” that happy world Jesus speaks of, which we will see just before awakening to our true identity and which is the result of seeing a forgiven world, appears in our minds when we remove from the story we are interpreting its components of fear and guilt—the “black ink” that darkens the frames of the film we believe we see.
God is in everything I see because God is in my mind, and that is the only real thing to be found there. The rest are only fantasies conceived by regarding as existent what is in fact absence.
II This does not mean that while you believe yourself to be in the world you will cease to see forms—illusions. What it does mean is that you will forgive them and stop interpreting them in the terms you have until now, and then you will see a forgiven world—a world that appears before you barely outlined in a nearly transparent “gray ink,” the “real world.” Now all your attention is on the underlying light, the only real element of that scene.
When you become fully aware of your true identity as the Son of God, you will finally cease to see forms and the world will disappear, for it was only an illusion—the dream that the Son of God could be separate from His Father.
III The ideas presented in the first Lessons have taught us that the world we think we see is nothing but a “projection” of the desires and fears of our mind: none of this is real; nothing we project is real. In this Lesson we are going to attempt to “project” something real for the first time—indeed, the only thing that is truly real: the Love of God.
IV This is an essential formulation of vision: we believe we see outside ourselves what is unworthy of our holy minds—forms—and what, in truth, we do not want. And the proof that we do not want it is precisely that we see it outside. In truth we do not love illusions; we reject them by regarding them as something alien to ourselves when we see them in an imaginary outer realm. We do not even want our own body, which is why we have expelled it from our mind. In truth, we do not want anything from the world of forms.
V There are no words that can describe the experience of holding the idea of God in the mind. Simply, there are no words. It is an experience so deeply comforting and absolute that it dissolves every concern, and even the sense of personal identity: the ego.
VI “Projection” is a device of the mind for separating from something it conceives by assigning it the attribute of being outside itself. Now, however, this new form of projecting recognizes that what we see is real and within us—in fact, that it is what we are. The Course calls this kind of “projection” extension, and it is the dynamic proper to Creation.
VII The vision of the body’s eyes is nothing but the observation that what you see is different from you, but true vision bears witness that everything you see is yourself, and the Course calls this “Knowing”.
VIII What is understood as “seeing” with the body’s eyes is, in reality, nothing more than believing you see, and to believe is to think that what you imagine is real. Today, for the first time, we are going to imagine something that is true because it is real: the presence of God.