A Course In Miracles from My Perspective

May 29th 2014  Lesson 28

Above all else, I want to see things differently.

Today's idea provides specific applications to yesterday's idea.  When you say, "Above all else I want to see this table differently," you are making a commitment to withdraw your preconceived ideas about the table, and open your mind to what it is, and what it is for.  You are not defining it in past terms.  You are not binding its meaning to your tiny experience of tables, nor are you limiting its purpose to your little personal thoughts.  You will not question what you have already defined.  And the purpose of these exercises is to ask questions and receive the answers.  In saying today's idea, you are committing yourself to seeing.  It is not an exclusive commitment.  It is a commitment that applies to the table just as much as to anything else, neither more nor less. 

You could, in fact gain vision from just that table, if you would withdraw all your own ideas from it, and look upon it with a completely open mind.  It has something to show you; something beautiful and clean and of infinite value, full of happiness and hope.  Hidden under all your ideas about it is its real purpose, the purpose it shares with all the universe.  In using the table as a subject for applying the idea for today, you are therefore really asking to see the purpose of the universe.  You will be making this same request of each subject that you use in the practice periods.  And you are making a commitment to each of them to let its purpose be revealed to you, instead of placing your own judgment upon it.

• Intention:  Six two-minute practice periods are required, in which today's idea is stated first, then applied to whatever you see about you.      
        
• Practice:  As usual, each application should be done slowly and include the name of the subject your eyes happen to light on.  And you should rest your eyes on it while saying:
  
  Above all else I want to see this __________ differently.
   
• Application:  Choose each subject randomly, and with equal sincerity as you apply today's idea to it, in an attempt to acknowledge the equal value of them all in their contribution to your seeing.
     

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Insights/comments:

• Realizing that we have been superimposing our own personal meaning on what we see, we are now ready to ask to see things differently.  This is a commitment to reserve judgment on what we see, realizing that we have not been seeing at all, but only dreaming, and are now ready, willing and open seeing with new eyes what is truly there.  By seeing only the differences in things we are lost to their true relationship with all things and with ourselves.  This is why we do not know what anything means and why we do not know what is in our own best interests.  If we could see the common relationship or source of everything we would much better understand what each thing means in relation to us, and thereby gain greater self-knowledge.  The technique is simply to ask:  "Ask and it shall be given; seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you."--Matthew 7.7.   And keep asking, until it is given!
      

I and my Creator are One.