Your World and Selective Seeing

         There is a great deal on social media in the A Course in Miracles community about this time of world turmoil, so let me make this clear: The “world” that you live in reflects your mind, yes. This “world”, however, is not the material world, but what your mind chooses to focus on in the material world and the meaning it projects onto what it chooses to focus on.

Last week I wrote about selective seeing. Specifically, I wrote about ego selecting what to focus on to justify the fear it induces in you. But the mind, whether ego, neutral consciousness, or perceptions through the lens of truth, is always looking for itself and always finds itself. Ego always finds justifications for fear in the material world. Neutral consciousness merely observes what appears and sees no meaning in it. And truth, in its teaching capacity in ego-consciousness, will lead you to focus on love and unity in the material world, or if you’re more advanced, to  look past appearances to formless love and oneness.

If you are not emotionally triggered, consciousness is merely observing. If you are triggered, ego is projecting away something about itself that it does not want to see in itself. Its conflict with itself is one of these. So, it projects its conflict away and thinks “I am in conflict because of the conflict I see in the world.” This is why it wants to change the world, to change others. “If the world (or that person, or those people) would just change, I would be so much more comfortable!” Of course, the world does sometimes change, even as ego wants it to, but since ego is a state of conflict its discomfort does not go away, and it blames something or someone else.

Sometimes, ego’s projections are quite specific, making it easier to see what is going on in your mind. It can be something from your personal story. For example, ego emphasizing someone else’s guilt when it is dealing with specific feelings of guilt in its story for the person. Ego thinking everyone else is angry while claiming it is not. Or ego triggered by someone else’s selfishness when it is behaving selfishly itself.

Not all selective seeing is ego, however. Seeing synchronicity, coincidences, metaphors, and patterns is also selective seeing. These are, of course, much more pleasant than projections! But they can be misleading if you don’t realize your mind is picking things out to focus on in the material world and think that the universe or truth is sending you messages or validation through the material world. You may be sending yourself messages or validation, if you interpret them that way.

Try this: Focus the body’s eyes on something, near or far, wherever you are right now. Now consider all the other things you could have chosen to look at. This is what your mind is doing all the time: Focusing on something that reflects it at the moment when it has an almost endless choice of objects or subjects to choose from.

As the Course points out, your mind (consciousness) always looks inward before looking outward. This is how it makes up your “world”. Once you know this, you can change your world by asking the teacher of truth in your mind for another way to perceive a person or situation, or perhaps for what you could focus on instead of the guilt, fear, anger, or conflict that you’re perceiving. You just need to be willing to open your mind. 

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