Look past appearances

“Man’s concept of his world built on the experience of the five senses is no longer adequate and in many cases no longer valid.”— Shafica Karagulla

Right now, the planet you call home is spinning at a rate of roughly 930 miles per hour. It’s orbiting the sun at an astonishing 66,486 miles per hour. But unless you just polished off a couple pitchers of beer, you probably aren’t aware of any such movement. That’s just one tiny example of how we distort reality.

ACIM Lesson 92 tells us that we see what we decide to see—nothing else, more more.

Very early on—say, sometime around birth—our minds establish a pattern of perception and then proceed to filter out everything else. In other words, we only “experience” things that jibe with our very limited perception.

I told the story in E-Squared about a girl from the Philippines who told me that it was weeks, if not months, after she arrived in the United States before she noticed that some people here had red hair, including people she knew and dealt with on a regular basis. Red hair was inconsistent with what she had been conditioned to see and expect. So for several months, she was subjectively blind to red hair, seeing it as the brunette of her culture.

Our brains are designed to be efficient, not accurate. Our brains are designed to show us a hologram of our beliefs and expectations. So we take the 400 billion bits of information that are offered each second and we begin screening. We begin narrowing.

I’ll take that bit of information over there, and let’s see—this one fits nicely with my ongoing soap opera about the opposite sex.

ACIM Lesson 92 tells us that all our concepts and judgment, all things we take for granted are distortions and that TRUE seeing only come through light. This lesson reminds us that we’d all roll over laughing if we really understood the nature and insanity of what passes for thought.

When we see through our eyes (which basically report a likeness of our flesh suits, a carbon copy of our beliefs) we see weakness, lack and division.

But there is another way of seeing. Through the strength of our light.

Today, I’m grateful that as I give up the “hologram” I see with my eyes, I will begin to see the radiance, the brilliance and the love that shows up in light.

Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her new book, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side.