Some of you may recall a name from your college philosophy days, Epictetus,
who was a famous Greek philosopher who lived in the 1st Century in Rome.
He was a stoic, which means he was a member of the Stoic Philosophical School
that was started, I think, in the 3rd Century, BC by a Greek named Zeno.
And Stoicism basically taught, and Epictetus' version of it,
basically taught that there's nothing you could do to change the world.
Now he was a very, very wise man, and if you read him
in light of the Course, you'll be astounded.
He said there's nothing you could do to change the world,
but what you can do is change how you react to the world.
Some of the Stoics, actually I'm not sure it was Epictetus himself,
but some of the Stoics taught, or the Greek philosophers taught,
that the world really consisted of atoms, and the atoms kind of fell
and trickled through the universe. And so the ultimate expression
of these falling atoms is the physical universe that we know,
and specifically our own individual lives in bodies.
And basically, again, Epictetus was saying, there's nothing you could do about this.
This is what it is. Someone steals something from you; well, it's been stolen.
The chances are that you won't be able to get it back.
And you have no control over that.
But you do have control over how you perceive it.
And as any good Greek, he talked a great deal about living a life of virtue.
And to the Greeks, virtue meant a life of moderation.
Moderation in all things is the Greek motto.
Which means you recognize that nothing here means anything.
What means something is a life of virtue, which is a life within you.
That you have control over. That was Epictetus' big point.
You can't change the world; you could change how you react to the world.
And the virtuous person was one who acted in that way,
who looked at things in a different way, did not let the world
affect how he or she felt inside. In the Course, Jesus says the same thing to us.
We are the ruler of the universe. We can't change the physical universe,
but we could change how we look at the physical universe.
And since the physical universe is nothing except a projection
of our own thinking, and we can do something about our thinking,
by making a different choice, then we are the ruler of the universe.
No one has that power.
We pretend that other people do because we give them that power.
But if we give the power to others, we're the ones who give the power,
which means we have the power.
I may not have power over your body,
but I have power over how I react to your body.
Your body may be able to do all kinds of things to my body,
but you can do nothing to my mind.
The only one who has power in my mind is me,
Not God, not the Holy Spirit, not Jesus, not the ego.
Only I have the power, the I being the decision-making part of my mind.
That is the power Jesus is reminding us of, over and over again.
But when I become disturbed because of the shadows of limitations
in my body and in the world, I'm giving the power away.
And what's very, very important again is to understand
that we are the ones who chose limitation. We are the only ones who could undo it.
Until we make that choice, this world for us will be a prison.
This is how everybody with half a brain should look at the world.
And only having half a mind, meaning the wrong mind,
that is how you will look at the world. The world is a prison.
It's an awful, awful place. The body is a prison,
because the body is a limitation, just like the bars on a cell in a jail.
The body is a limitation, as long as you think you're a body.
If you're a prisoner, an actual prisoner in a cell, you are in prison.
You are limited by the bars on your cell. You can't get out.
And that's a fact within the world. If you are a prisoner in a death camp,
you are a prisoner by the guards. And there's nothing you can do.
You can't get out, but your mind cannot be imprisoned by the guards.
Your mind cannot be imprisoned by the bars on your jail cell.
Your mind cannot be imprisoned by your limited body, by your faulty body.
Love can't be limited by a diseased organ or a diseased social situation
in which you find yourself, or political situation in which you find yourself.
Your body can be limited, but not your mind. And certainly not love.
The world can do anything at all to your body.
Your genes could do anything in the world to your body, make it whatever it is.
But what difference does any of that make unless you identify with a body?
Then it can make a tremendous difference.
Then you're always obsessed with trying to change your body,
making it better, making it younger, making it look older,
making it healthy, making it unhealthy.
Obsessed -- making it thin, making it heavy.
As long as you're identified with a body,
all these experiences may make perfect sense.
And all the attempts to change the body make perfect sense,
let alone changing the world around you.
But if you identify with a mind instead of the body, everything changes.
And so when you ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help,
the help that they give you is in shifting your perception of your body,
of the limitations of your body, of the limitations of the world in which your body lives,
shifting your interpretation of it from a prison to a classroom.
That's why Jesus says, don't be disturbed by the shadows, that's why you came.
If you're disturbed by the shadows, it's because you believe
the shadows of your limitations and/or the world's limitations imprison you.
They have a deleterious effect on your well being.
They could hurt you. They could stop you from doing what you want,
or they can make you do something you do not want to do.
Then, at that point the perception of your body and the world is a prison
is perfectly appropriate and perfectly reasonable and logical.
But, if you let yourself be taught now by your new teacher,
that your body and your world are simply symptoms, are simply reflections
are simply shadows, are simply projections of a decision
for the limited thought that you are as an ego. And that is the problem.
Then everything now in your world and your life changes because
now you perceive everything as a classroom, in which you're learning
the only lesson that anyone here in the right mind came to learn,
which is that the limitations that we experience here
are the projections of a decision we made to be a limited self,
instead of the unlimited Self that God created.
The world doesn't change. Your body doesn't change.
The imperfections, the defects, the deficiencies of your body don't change.
What changes now is your perception.
Remember, in the Course, perception is interpretation.
It's not what your eyes physically see and report to your brain
that constitutes perception. It's your reaction to what you perceive;
it's your interpretation of what you perceive.
So my physical perception of the world, of my body, doesn't necessarily change.
What changes is through whose eyes do I look at my body?
The ego's eyes would have me make the shadows real,
would have me become upset about them, disturbed by them, despair over them,
ecstatic over them, especially when I see limitations in others instead of me.
Or, if the eyes are Jesus' eyes, then I see that everything out here
is simply a classroom that will help me. Therefore, I'm grateful.
Help me get back to the decision for limitation in my mind.
Everything. Without exception.
Whether we're talking about a little bruise on one's arm, or one is talking about cancer.
It would make no difference, the form of the limitation,
because a big form and a little form,
a big limitation, a little limitation, still is a limitation,
that still comes from the same one decision in my mind
to be with the ego instead of the Holy Spirit.