“The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference — the dominant ideas, wishes, and emotions in our minds. ‘Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that.’ (ACIM Chapter 21, p.445)
We look inside first, decide the kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it. We make it true by our interpretations of what it is we are seeing. If we are using perception to justify our own mistakes — our anger, our impulses to attack, our lack of love in whatever form it may take — we will see a world of evil, destruction, malice, envy, and despair.
All this we must learn to forgive, not because we are being ‘good’ and ‘charitable,’ but because what we are seeing is not true. We have distorted the world by our twisted defenses, and are therefore seeing what is not there. As we learn to recognize our perceptual errors, we also learn to look past them or ‘forgive.’
At the same time, we are forgiving ourselves, looking past our distorted self-concepts to the Self That God created in us and as us.”
A Course In Miracles, Foundation For Inner Peace, Helen Schucman, Preface p.xi.
