Daily Miracles: Lesson 1

Not that it means anything.

Welcome to Daily Miracles, a running commentary on the 365 lessons of A Course in Miracles, an influential spiritual text from the 1970s. I am James Leroy Wilson and I invite you to join me as I go through this material for the first time.

Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything. (ACIM, W-1)

First day, and this seems hard already. What do you mean this pen doesn’t mean anything? If an object has a name, or is a member of a class that has a name, such as “pens,” that has to mean something. When I see the pen, I know and appreciate that it’s in my immediate vicinity and I can grab it if I want to write something down.

But to play along, I see two possible (and complementary) ways that the pen doesn’t mean anything. (There may be more ways, but these are my thoughts today.)

The first is that the pen is not really real, and nothing is. This is all a dream, an illusion, a simulation, or some other manifestation of the mind.

The second is that the pen means nothing to me. That is, I have no emotional attachment to it. This might be easy enough to say about most things around the home that can be replaced by an equivalent. Lose a book, even a favorite book? That’s alright; you can get…