The Meaning of All Perception

Today's lesson, #336, is "Forgiveness lets me know that minds are joined." As I read it, it seemed relatively unfamiliar. It is not one of the lessons I've come back to over and over, or that I have chosen to read aloud in my Text class. I was struck by this line: "Sights and sounds, at best, can serve but to recall the memory that lies beyond them all." In poetic form:

…For sights
and sounds, at best, can serve but to recall
the memory that lies beyond them all.

The highest purpose that can be ascribed to everything we see and to everything we hear is to be reminders of the underlying reality of Spirit. What is the purpose of my computer? To call to mind the One Spirit. What is the meaning of beautiful music? To help me remember God. What is the lesson I can learn when I see someone who is crippled or deformed, or find my quiet walk disturbed by blaring rap music from a passing car? That behind that malformed shell, and underneath what I perceive as jarring noise, is the radiant Reality of the Son of God.

A woman named Edith Bernard recently wrote to me about Lesson 28 in the Workbook, which says:

"You could, in fact, gain vision from just that table, if you would withdraw all your own ideas from it, and look upon it with a completely open mind. It has something to show you; something beautiful and clean and of infinite value, full of happiness and hope. Hidden under all your ideas about it is its real purpose, the purpose it shares with all the universe." (T-28.Int.5:1-3)

What is "the purpose [the table] shares with all the universe"? What is the revelation that awaits us behind every object of perception? The answer Edith saw was simple, and consistent with Lesson 336: "one could say the 'seen purpose' of all things is unification." She said, "the unity of mankind can be found within all objects and is, in Truth, the purpose of our seemingly divided universe." Edith is absolutely right!

Today, let everything I see, and everything I hear, serve to remind me of union with God. And when my perception seems to offer me something other than Oneness, let me pray, "Above all else, I want to see this differently."