God is the Mind with which I think.
1. Today’s idea holds the key to understanding what your real thoughts are.I
²They are nothing you think you think, just as nothing you think you see bears any resemblance to true vision.II
³There is no relationship between what is real and what you think is real.
⁴Nothing you regard as your real thoughts resembles your true thoughts in any way.
⁵Nothing you think you see bears any likeness to what Vision will show you.
2. You think with the Mind of God.
²Therefore, you share your thoughts with Him, just as He shares His with you.
³They are the same thoughts, because they are thought by the same Mind.
⁴To share is to make alike, or to make one.
⁵The thoughts you think with the Mind of God do not leave your mind, because thoughts do not leave their source.III
⁶Therefore, your thoughts are in the Mind of God, just as you are.
⁷Your thoughts are also in your mind, where He is.
⁸As you are part of His Mind, so too are your thoughts part of His Thoughts.
3. Where, then, are your real thoughts?
²Today we will try to reach them.
³We must look for them in your mind, because that is where they are.
⁴They must still be there, for they cannot have left.
⁵What the Mind of God thinks is eternal, for it is part of Creation.
4. Our three five-minute practice sessions today will follow the same general form we used when applying yesterday’s idea.
²Today we will try to leave behind illusions and seek the truth.
³Today we will deny the world in favor of truth.
⁴We will not let the world’s beliefs hold us back or convince us that what God wills is impossible.
5. Instead, we will try to recognize that only what God wills for us is possible.
²We will also try to understand that only what God wills for us is what we truly want to do.
³And we will try to remember that we cannot fail in doing what He wills us to do.
⁴There are many reasons to be confident that today you will succeed.
⁵For that is God’s Will.
6. Begin today’s exercises by repeating the idea silently with your eyes closed.
²Then spend a fairly short time considering a few of your own thoughts that are relevant, holding the idea in your mind as you do so.
³Once you have added four or five of your own thoughts, repeat the idea again and say quietly to yourself:
⁴My real thoughts are in my mind.
⁵I would like to find them.
⁶Then try to go past all meaningless thoughts that cover the truth in your mind, and reach toward the eternal.IV
7. Beneath all the senseless thoughts and mad ideas with which you have filled your mind are the thoughts you thought with God before time began.
²Those thoughts are still in your mind now, completely unchanged.
³They will always be in your mind, exactly as they always were.
⁴Everything you have thought since then will change, but the foundation on which they rest is absolutely unchangeable.
⁵Today’s exercises are aimed at reaching this foundation.
⁶That is where your mind is joined with the Mind of God.
⁷That is where your thoughts are one with His.
8. This type of practice requires only one thing.
²That you approach it as you would an altar dedicated in Heaven itself to God the Father and to God the Son.
³For that is the place you are trying to reach.
⁴You may not yet fully understand how high you are attempting to go.
⁵But even with the little understanding you have already gained, you should be able to realize that this is no idle game, but an exercise in Holiness and a reaching toward the Kingdom of Heaven.
9. In applying today’s idea in the shorter practice periods, try to remember how important it is for you to understand the Holiness of the mind that thinks with God.
²When you repeat the idea throughout the day, take one or two minutes to reflect on the Holiness of your mind.
³Lay aside, if only briefly, all thoughts unworthy of the One of Whom you are the host.
⁴And give thanks for the Thoughts He is thinking with you.
I Today’s practice is an exercise in respect for your own mind. The word respect comes from the Latin respectus, the participle of the verb respicere, formed from the prefix re- and the verb specere, which means “to look.” To respect, in its etymological sense, is to look twice, to look attentively.
That is what this exercise proposes: that you contemplate your mind attentively and become aware of its intrinsic holiness, going beyond what you call “my thoughts,” which are nothing more than the voice of the ego in you.
Here Jesus speaks to us of our “true thoughts,” our “real thoughts,” and tells us that they have nothing to do with what we call “thinking.” The difference between the two is that one is form and the other content, with content understood as the “substance” of reality in its three aspects: love, truth, and creative power.
These concepts are abstract and ungraspable to the egoic human mind, which is illusory, limited, and knows only the concrete. Human thoughts, on the other hand, are insubstantial stories woven from absences of love, which is the substance of Reality. One is the opposite of the other.
To understand this, consider the following allegory: imagine a whiteboard on which something has been written in black ink. When you look at it, your mind focuses exclusively on those symbols and constructs a story. In reality, what you are considering is nothing more than the absence of light that the black ink produces on the surface of your retina, for you disregard the underlying light.
Think of the whiteboard as Reality and that light as the Love of God, your real thoughts. The others—what you call “my thoughts”—are the stories the black ink has led you to construct as you interpret the absences of light caused by its staining of the board.
In truth, all that is there is light; yet what you see are shadows. And that you call “thinking.”
II You believe you see and live in a world of forms, but spiritual vision regards the figures you perceive as symbols of causes manifested to you in that way.
Spiritual vision interprets the “dream of the world” in a manner analogous to Freud’s celebrated work The Interpretation of Dreams. Those figures that make up your perception are symbols, effects whose cause lies in the very nature of the ego within you.
Your fears and your desires appear in that “reality” as forms in a world you imagine, Son of God. The mechanism of that “seeing” is the same as that which produces the scenarios you witness in your nightly dreams.
III This is a fundamental notion in the paradigm of this Course. Ideas do not leave the source that conceived them to become “things” in a “space” external to the mind that thinks them.
Recognize that what you call “things” are nothing but ideas whose content is precisely to appear as something outside you. Those ideas, like everything you believe exists in an imagined outer world, are in your mind. The real thoughts, which are the same as you and whose true nature utterly escapes your present understanding because you do not remember Who you are, also remain in your mind, which is one with the Mind of God.
IV The purpose of this part of the exercise is to make you aware of the contrast between your usual thoughts and your real thoughts, which are perfectly abstract and eternal. Later, these thoughts will be called the “Creations of the Son of God.”
It is important that you realize that what you call “my thoughts” have absolutely nothing to do with you and are not “yours” at all. That is precisely the voice of the ego, which you endorse when, confused, you call them “my thoughts.”
You are merely the witness of the stories that voice tells you, woven from ghosts of old grievances and desires born of the ego’s vocation to feel special and lacking. None of that is yours, but the false identity with which you have identified yourself—the ego as effect—has inherited the greedy character of its progenitor—the ego as cause.