Quote of the Week: March 28th, 2010
Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. But though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but to change your mind about the world. Perception is a result and not a cause. And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no meaning, there is chaos.
ACIM Chapter 21,1
So here is the way to change what we see outside ourselves. Choose to change how we think (and therefore how we feel) about what we see. This is an internal process based upon the understanding that our inner state is the cause for our outer perception. What we perceive outside is a direct reflection of our inner state of being, and that state can be consciously and deliberately modified through our thinking. What we think and believe about the world is what we perceive in the world. The world then, is our projection, it is the 'concrete' expression of our inner state, or a mirror reflection of our mental state, and for this reason, we already have all we need to change it to our liking. No one else but us is responsible for what we see in the world, because it is our own personal projection that determines what we see in the world. This is why no two people can have an identical experience with respect to a particular person, place, object, thought, or feeling. They certainly can have similar experiences, but not identical. What to one may look like a problem to another it looks like an opportunity. So this is how we create our reality, i.e. our own personal experience of the world, we project our inner state onto the outer world. And it is this projection that drives our present moment experiences and future expectations, simply because we usually perceive and evaluate our current experiences with respect to our past experiences, and so set the stage for similar future experiences. Perception then is easily distorted, which can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on whether we enjoyed our disliked our past experiences. In either case the process for change is clear, and totally in our hands, or more correctly, in our minds: 'change your mind about the world' and the world cannot help but change.
If we change our mind about anything, then our experience of that thing must also change to match our inner state of mind. And as we perfect this technique of changing our mind, we will begin to see that we can change anything in our experience, for it is just as easy to change our mind about a cold as it is to change our mind about cancer; in the same way that it is just as easy to cash a check for $10 as it is to cash a check for a million dollars. Thus 'Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy,' without orders of difficulty. This is what is meant by Vision. It is the ability to look clearly at our present perceptions, and if we want to change them, look past them, or more correctly, not mind what we perceive through our senses and instead imagine what we would like to see. This is vision, the act of directing our attention or focus away from what we do not want, and placing it instead only on what we do want. This is the ability to not condemn something we would like to change, and instead visualize it the way we would like it to be.
This is our God given power, our inheritance as children of God. This is the way we can heal any situation, any sickness, and anything else we would like to change, thus 'Nothing perceived without it (vision) means anything.' This does not suggest that we deny the present state of things, or pretend that they are not what we experience them to be. No! That would be disingenuous. It would be a form of Self-denial, or mood-making. We are the creators of our present perceptions, and to deny their existence would be to deny our own. We instead, acknowledge that things are the way they are, but we also and more importantly acknowledge that the most effective way to change what is, is to imagine it--often and consistently--the way we want it to be. In this way we make peace with our past and our present while we visualize or re-create the next grandest version of our future.
