This Week in Course Companions: What are we thinking?

The following is from the weekly message by Circle founder, Robert Perry, delivered each Thursday to Course Companions members. Course Companions is our global community of students and teachers walking through the Course, section-by-section and lesson-by-lesson, together as friends. For access to any classes, handouts, and additional commentaries referenced in these posts, we invite you to join Course Companions by visiting CourseCompanions.com. Please note that partial and full scholarships are available and no one is turned away from Circle of Atonement programming for an inability to pay. 

__________________________________

May 28, 2020

Another week has passed by in Course Companions. For those of you who are in the classes or watching the recordings, you are probably noticing the same thing I am. There is a growing sense of community, as many of us are seeing others so often these days. Seeing the same faces and hearing the same voices, with all of us joined in seeking to understand and live the same teachings—how can it not draw us together into a sense of joining?

We had two classes this week that converged on a single idea. Our Workbook class covered the Introduction to Review 4. There, we are asked to spend five minutes in the morning with the central idea: “My mind holds only what I think with God.” The idea is that if we can clear our mind of all normal thoughts “and let this thought alone engage it fully and remove the rest” (W-Re.4.In.5:2), then we can have a day in which all our thoughts come from God.

Our Text class covered “The Dark Companions” (T-11.III). This section says that we face a fundamental choice of who will be our companion on the journey: the Comforter God sent us, the Holy Spirit, or the dark comforters—fear and grief. And we make the choice between them by what we allow into our minds. Do we invite fear and grief in or do we “guard carefully” the temple of our minds?

This is an issue we face throughout the Course and throughout life. What thoughts do we allow into our minds? We probably tell ourselves that we can’t control what comes in, or that it’s important to let in the full range of thoughts and emotions. Think, however, about moments of peak performance. You don’t hit the game-winning shot if you let doubt or distraction enter your mind.

In the end, we are in control of what we put into our minds. We have tried to abdicate that control, and this, says the Course, is why we are unhappy. Lesson 20 says that you do not have peace and happiness now “because your mind is totally undisciplined” (W-20.2:6). It’s not a matter of rigidly shutting out all negative thoughts. It’s a matter of learning the thoughts that are reasonable, healthy, and true and choosing to stick with them. That’s not unhealthy denial. It’s simple sanity. May we increasingly embrace that sanity and find the peace and happiness that inevitably come from it.

With love,

Robert