Out of Sight

“Out of sight, out of mind.” The familiar adage suggests that what we stop seeing eventually fades from awareness. But what if we’ve got the causality reversed?

Consider this twist: Out of mind, out of sight.

The conventional wisdom has it backwards, which we touched on in a prior article. We don’t cease thinking about things because they’ve left our view. Things leave our view because we’ve ceased thinking about them. It always starts in the mind. As A Course in Miracles clarifies, “Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that.”

This revelation might seem to suggest a solution: simply stop thinking about troublesome things and they’ll vanish from experience. Push away disturbing thoughts. Erase uncomfortable memories. Deny what distresses us.

But that’s not the pathway at all.

Here’s the paradox: the only way to truly release something is by looking at it. Not living it, but looking at it. There’s a profound difference.

Most of the time, we don’t actually look at our thoughts. Instead, we become them. We’re so thoroughly enmeshed in the mental narrative that there’s no separation between thinker and thought. The anxious thought becomes “I am anxious.” The angry thought transforms into “I am angry.”

But when we genuinely look at a thought—when we observe it rather than inhabit it—something shifts. Attention moves out of the character drowning in drama and into the awareness that witnesses the entire production.

This is what the Course means when it says we must work with our thoughts. Not erase them. Not repress them. Not pretend they don’t exist. Simply look at them with gentleness, from a place that remains untouched by their content.

In that space of nonjudgmental observation, what once seemed so solid and real begins to dissolve. Not through force, but through the light of awareness itself.

Join me in Thursday’s class where we’ll explore this liberating shift from living our thoughts to looking at them, and discover the peace that emerges when we finally see clearly. I look forward to seeing you then.