A Course In Miracles Lesson 10

A Course In Miracles Lesson 10 states: 

 My thoughts do not mean anything.

Because my mind is preoccupied with the past and because the past does not exist, my thoughts about the past do not exist or mean anything.  

Your conscious thoughts are not your real thoughts.  By deduction of logic, this means that you have thoughts that you are not consciously aware of which are real.  This means that “conscious” awareness as we currently understand it can be understood best as a lucid dream-like awareness rather than true awareness.  

When we are preoccupied with the past, we are perceiving inside of an illusion, a dream.  My conscious thinking is currently fixated on the past.  This is why what I am aware of myself thinking about can be understood by me as not true thinking.  Since the past is not here, it is not in existence in any literal way.  All thoughts about past events are just not in existence.  They are not real and have no meaning.

This idea can be distressing as we begin to wonder what we can trust if not our own mind.  If fear arises, the Course instructs us to simply put the whole exercise aside and not to strain.  There are many ways we will be reached with the logic of this book.  Some may be distressing and so those will not be as effective as other pathways.  There is never any need for discomfort.  These revelations are not an argument or a fight.  If they should feel like that, we are asked to put them down and return when calm and relaxed.

Today’s lesson shows us how our mind is thinking about nothing in a very detailed and fixated way.  We believe what we are thinking about is real.  Memories feel as real and as solid as furniture.  But we may remember from Lesson 1, not even the furniture is real.  Our bodies are designed to perceive physical objects, but physical objects are all temporary, including the body that has been made to perceive them.  Everything we see around us will eventually break down into nothing.  That is the nature of where we are.  Memories are not real.  They change and break down into nothing and are forgotten.  The true nature of reality is non-physical, energetic awareness, knowing. Reality is not stuff.  Reality is consciousness.

Our thoughts are of a highly unsubstantial quality and it is best not to take them too seriously.  Our thoughts are a boiling pot of content that can not ever really be followed to anything real until we understand the unreal nature of them.

The content of our thoughts will not lead us out of that meaningless content.  We need a new logic for such an endeavor and that is what today’s lesson is offering.  We are learning how to see the content of our thoughts for what it is (nothing) rather than get lost in its eternally temporary conditions.  Let’s look at all of it, all the conscious thinking as a compulsive event.  We do not need to contemplate why such an event would happen. Contemplating that is more of the same fixation with the past.  Wondering why is really a distraction from seeing clearly what is.

In matters of a Spiritual nature, why does not matter and has no answer.  Answers to why only invite us to ask why again.  We can investigate why down to the smallest unit of matter which never arrives at being the smallest unit but instead splits into an even smaller complexity of energy and probability.  

It is enough for us to just remember, My thoughts do not mean anything.  And to recognize we are having experiences of thoughts which are not real.

Most of us do not yet have an “experience” of real thinking or an experience of true vision (real seeing).  Such moments are a nearly psychotropic experience breaking the Newtonian bounds of understood reality.  When we have a moment of making contact with Real thinking, outside of the swirling content of illusion thinking, it is usually impossible to describe or convey to others.  But we know that something real has occurred whenever we leave our preoccupation with the past and dwell in the present moment.

Whenever something real occurs, it does so forever.  Real does not go away.  If it did, it would not be real.  The nature of reality is of an “always there” quality.  When you locate an “always there” dimension in a conscious way, you will have no doubt about the difference between real thoughts vs time-based illusion thoughts.  You will know, even while having time-based thoughts that such thoughts are not real, not permanent, experiential in nature- not a constant knowing of is-ness.  When this understanding of the nature of your current thinking arrives, such strange thoughts will not trouble you.  They will be like clouds in the sky.

In fact, this realization has already happened for you because reading all the way through the logic of today’s lesson and its previous lessons indicates there is a part of you who is following the new logic. 

Time is a convention used to engage the illusion.  When I use the “future” tense in the statement, “… such thoughts will not trouble you.” I am only navigating the logic that is still convinced that time is real and that time ‘takes time” to get out of.  It doesn’t take time to get out of time.  We are already out of it.  We are free to realize this whenever we want.

You have awareness within you now which knows the difference between real and not real.  You know that the content of your thinking brain is not important and need not be focused on.  We can let go of these preoccupations with historical records.   

The nature of our thoughts is ever-shifting and is not a source of security.  Security is a spiritual connection to that which is beyond our ability to think about.  Security is a decision to sense and know without perceptions that an eternal presence is here.

Today’s lesson changes from saying “these thoughts” to saying “my thoughts”.  The language has been changed from previous lessons in order to make a connection between physical objects in the world and the metaphysical nature of your thoughts.

The objects all around you are just like the thought-forms all around you in your mind.  What you are thinking is equally unreal as the table, the lamp, the leaf, the pen…

What you think you think lacks true reality. This lesson is a correction process to how you are thinking.  The first step in integrating the new logic of which A Course In Miracles is presenting is to recognize that my conscious thoughts are meaningless.  What I am aware of is fixated on the past.  I do not see objects outside of the rapid-fire network of contextualized thoughts from my past experiences.  What I see with my eyes is occurring because I am designed biologically to confirm only the past.  I see everything from the context of past experiences and old conclusions are drawn.

Past thoughts are a contemplation of nothingness because the past is not here.  We must first see that we are not seeing.  This is a prerequisite for vision.