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"God created only the eternal and everything you see is perishable, therefore there is another world you do not see." ––Text 210

The process of seeing with the human eye is an intriguing study. The significance of light becomes an essential component to understanding "vision" in general. If you've ever arrived late in a movie theater, you know what it's like to stand in total darkness and feel physically frozen, with no sense of freedom to move forward. The proverbial statement "you can't see the hand in front of your face" resonates for us with sympathetic acceptance––the hand might as well not exist in such darkness.

Don Miguel Ruiz, in his companion book to The Four Agreements, has a lovely illustration of the value of light and our ability to see. He explains that the reality of what we see inside our mind is created by images of light. Light reproduces every image we look at. The retina inside the eye is just like a perfect mirror. "Everything you see right now is an image created in the retina of your eye. The difference between the mirror and your eye is that behind the eye is the nervous system that analyzes and interprets everything we perceive. The eye, the brain, the mind work so perfectly together that we can swear the image is real. But what we see inside our mind is a virtual reality created by images of light." What we see, quite frankly, is more illusion than truth.

Notice how unbounded your nighttime dreams can be. Have you ever had the ability to fly in a dream? Our reasoning mind keeps us grounded and on the straight and narrow. But that dream state gives us wings and unbridled possibility. The reasoning mind sees form and time and space. Ruiz says that "thinking is dreaming with a language; It is nothing but the effort of the mind to justify the dream."

Whoa! Perhaps these are harsh words for the ego. Spiritually speaking, the ego prefers to experience the world, the body, things and even events as very real. But A Course in Miracles is pretty straight-forward in asserting that the world you see is but a reflection of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your perceptions. Though we identify people and things to be pretty specific in the way we recognize them, their meaning to us continues to be interpreted from what we believe them to be and how we believe that we see them. The Course states, "Your concept of the world depends upon the concept of the self…what you see reflects the state of the perceiver's mind." (T658)

Most of us believe there is life beyond this world of form that we live in. Yet we don't seem to be able to live in the freedom of that knowing. Everything in the world of form is perishable. The human body begins to die the day it is born. Time feels like an enemy through much of life. But beyond time there is the eternal. There is another world that we do not see with the human eye but we sense with our heart. There is another way of seeing when we look through the illumination of Divine Light.