Good Morning!
This lesson begins to reveal some of the mystery of the first 6 lessons. It provides the "why" to many of our questions. The why is because we see only the past. At the beginning of paragraph two, we are told that "Old ideas about time are very difficult to change" and that the purpose of these lessons is to learn new ideas about time. We won't learn all those ideas in this particular lesson; however, so go slow and try on this idea for today. What does it mean to you that everything you see contains only the past? Be willing to examine what comes up. You may even become irritated by this lesson as we have been conditioned to believe in a firmly set system of past, present and future. Our language even depends on time for its structure.
The text of A Course in Miracles provides a great section on time in Chapter 13, Section IV, called The Function of Time. One of the sentences in that section says: "The ego invests heavily in the past, and in the end believes that the past is the only aspect of time that is meaningful."
Being stuck in the past prevents us from experiencing the "now" at all. Even the future is ruined for us, as we use our thoughts of the past to predict what is going to happen based on what has happened before. Thus, the "present" is often completely bypassed altogether! We are either living in the past or in the future, neither of which exists at all.
How powerful is this mind of ours? I think we know the answer. While we grapple with this concept of time, remember why we have undertaken these Workbook lessons. It is because we want a new way of seeing and we want to heal our pain, all of which is being offered to us as we heal our minds first.
Joan