I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.
I have been studying and practicing ACIM for over 43 years. I have read these lessons many times. I have done them as Jesus asks, or as close to it as I could, many times. But even so, sometimes, as I contemplate one I can still understand it differently than I did before. Or notice that I overlooked something before.
When reading about private thoughts in the Text, I identified these private thoughts as ego thoughts. And yes, that is true, but this morning, I am seeing it a little differently. The point Jesus makes is that we want to believe that we have a private mind. We want to think that our thoughts belong to us and only us, and that what we think is a secret and has no effects outside our mind.
That is our error; it is not that we have private thoughts because we don’t, but that we believe we do. Our thoughts, all of them, affect all of us because our minds are joined.
The implications of this are enormous. We are in this together, literally. The idea of a world, of bodies, of the pretense of separation, all of it. It was once strange enough to think that what I did could affect people across the world. Nowadays, this is easy to believe. A disease starts in one country and quickly spreads to all countries. But to realize that what I think affects everybody everywhere.
I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing or my thoughts because the only thing remotely real about me is my mind, and it is joined with everyone else’s mind. How on earth did I ever believe that I was not my brother’s keeper? I keep him imprisoned within this ridiculous dream of separation, or I save him from this. And he, me.
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