Simplicity

Simplicity is at the very core of the mind-training directive of this Course: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.” lies at the very heart of the understanding that leads to the experience of the peace of God. This is not different from “Only truth is true and nothing else true.” Both are absolute statements that leave no room whatsoever for compromise with the dualistic thinking of the world, human ideas, values or beliefs.

If only the truth is true there is nothing you can say or add to it, or conversely, nothing you can take away from it. Yet to know that directly, what is not true must be denied, just as what is unreal must be seen as meaningless, as nothing, and without existence. This may seem like a great step, a step too far perhaps, yet what it represents for an individual is a great stride out of time to the appreciation of the eternal moment in which true thought, God’s Thoughts are recognized or known. The very nature of human thinking, its conceptualizing, the grasping ego mind, that struggles to process and interpret each moment’s data input, the constant noise of the machine that obscures our real thoughts, is incapable of direct understanding with that familiar “modus operandi” of thinking that has evolved in time.

Do we not need to start with “Nothing I see means anything” (Lesson 1), as the beginning lesson in undoing the fixed obstacle of the twisted nature of the human mind which has so much faith in its own “thoughts” and judgments, and the arrogance of its own learning about the “10,000” things of the phenomenal, objective world? Certainly we do, and it now represents the greatest learning accomplishment of all to realize that what we thought we knew is “not-knowing”. It is the humbling of the intellectual and arrogant ego-identity that believes the “reality” of the unreal; no question, it does indeed exist and we can know something about it, and further, that it can be endowed with meaning and “grasped” with the mind that utilizes the body’s senses in order to “see”!

The complete and absolute simplicity of the reality of Truth cannot not be known by anything that lives; that only truth exists, that nothing unreal exists or can be found if looked for with sincerity. ‘It’ can be known because it is the knowledge by which we ourselves exist at all, the foundation on which we have our being. Everything else is a chaotic complication, an inculcation and diversification of the madness of separation that seems to have taken a powerful hold over the mind and for which previously, there seemed to be no alternative whatsoever.

Now however, we are discovering, through the simple lessons of the Atonement curriculum of this Course in Miracles, that God offers the power and simplicity of Thought that is of a magnitude far beyond the range of mortal mind. In quietness, in the stillness of the mind that leaves the world’s thinking behind, this simplicity can be remembered for there never was a time when it ceased to be. It has always been there waiting for your return to the simple knowledge of Who and What you are as your eternal and immortal identity, wholly beloved of your Creator;, your Source and your Life and your Self.