Daily Lesson

  

   L e s s o n  23

I can escape from the world I see
by giving up my attack thoughts.

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¹ The idea for today contains the only way out of fear that will ever succeed. Nothing else will work; everything else is meaningless. But this way cannot fail. Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts, then, that we must work if your perception of the world is to be changed.

² If the cause of the world you see is attack thoughts, you must learn that it is these thoughts which you do not want. There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically.

³ The world you see is a vengeful world, and everything in it is a symbol of vengeance. Each of your perceptions of "external reality" is a pictorial representation of your own attack thoughts. One can well ask if this can be called seeing. Is not fantasy a better word for such a process and hallucination a more appropriate term for the result?

⁴ You see the world which you have made, but you do not see yourself as the image-maker. You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause. This is what salvation means, for where is the world you see when its cause is gone? Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can light your images and so transform them that you will love them even though they were made of hate. For you will not be making them alone.

⁵ The idea for today introduces the thought that you are not trapped in the world you see, because its cause can be changed. This change requires, first, that the cause be identified and then let go, so that it can be replaced. The first two steps in this process require your cooperation. The final one does not. Your images have already been replaced. By taking the first two steps, you will see that this is so.

⁶ Besides using it throughout the day as the need arises, five practice periods are required in applying today's idea. As you look about you, repeat the idea slowly to yourself and then close your eyes and devote about a minute to searching your mind for as many attack thoughts as occur to you. As each one crosses your mind say:

⁷ I can escape from the world by giving up
attack thoughts about _____.

⁸ Hold each attack thought in mind as you say this, and then dismiss that thought and go on to the next.

⁹ In the practice periods, be sure to include both your thoughts of attacking and of being attacked. Their effects are exactly the same because they are exactly the same. You do not yet recognize this, and you are asked at this time only to treat them as the same in today's practice periods. We are still at the stage of identifying the cause of the world you see. When you finally realize that thoughts of attack and of being attacked are not different, you will be ready to let the cause go.

Workbook - Part 1
 Introduction 

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¹ A theoretical foundation such as the text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth.

² The exercises are very simple. They do not require more than a few minutes, and it does not matter where or when you do them. They need no preparation. They are numbered, running from 1 to 365. The training period is one year. Do not undertake more than one exercise a day.

³ The purpose of these exercises is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now and the second with the restoration of sight. It is recommended that each exercise be repeated several times a day, preferably in a different place each time and, if possible, in every situation in which you spend any long period of time. The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another.

⁴ Unless specified to the contrary, the exercise should be practiced with the eyes open, since the aim is to learn how to see. The only rule that should be followed throughout is to practice the exercises with great specificity. Each one applies to every situation in which you find yourself and to everything you see in it. Each day's exercises are planned around one central idea, the exercises themselves consisting of applying that idea to as many specifics as possible. Be sure that you do not decide that there are some things you see to which the idea for the day is inapplicable. The aim of the exercises will always be to increase the application of the idea to everything. This will not require effort. Only be sure that you make no exceptions in applying the idea.

⁵ Some of the ideas you will find hard to believe, and others will seem quite startling. It does not matter. You are merely asked to apply them to what you see. You are not asked to judge them, nor even to believe them. You are asked only to use them. It is their use which will give them meaning to you, and show you they are true. Remember only this-you need not believe them, you need not accept them, and you need not welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter nor decrease their efficacy. But allow yourself to make no exceptions in applying the ideas the exercises contain. Whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than this is required.

ACIM Edmonton - Sarah's Reflections 

Lesson  23 
I can escape the world I see by
giving up my attack thoughts.     

Sarah's Commentary:        

Our teacher starts this lesson with a truly powerful statement that says that the idea of giving up attack thoughts is "the only way out of fear that will ever succeed. Nothing else will work; everything else is meaningless." (1.1-2)   Everything else that we do to try to diminish our fear is totally meaningless. Now that should get our attention! What have you tried to do to reduce your fear? I have tried to build my confidence and self esteem, develop good management skills, become an effective strategist, build up my material resources, have a close circle of friends, become effective in managing the challenges of my life, in addition to avoiding, repressing and denying my fears or finding ways to distract from them. But Jesus says that we will never overcome our fear by changing anything in the world or trying new strategies, only by changing the cause of the fear which is our own attack thoughts.  Everything that we try to do with all of our plans and strategies is to attempt to diminish fear but it is always there.   The only way out of fear is thus to give up our attack thoughts. And he says that "this way cannot fail." (1.3) 

 The choice for healing is the decision to look at these attack thoughts. To deny them is to decide to keep them. It is also valuable to remember that attack thoughts are not what they may seem. Under attack thoughts is the need to be right about the way we see things which justifies our attacks and counterattacks in the name of our defense. Attack thoughts show up in many different forms which may look like hate, worry, pride, shame, concern, frustration, anxiety and murder, if not in form then in our thoughts of vengeance. That is what Jesus is talking about when he talks of fantasies. (3.4) And it is all about feeling victimized by something or someone. So the story behind the world I experience is all about attack thoughts. It is not what the world is because the world is nothing. It is just a reflection of our attack thoughts projected out. "Each of your perceptions of "external reality" is a pictorial representation of your own attack thoughts." (3.2) The mind is the cause, and it is just an effect. There is no external world. The world is just a reflection of our own mind. As he says in Chapter 21.I"the world is an outside picture of an inward condition".That is a concept that is obviously difficult for us but it is important because it is the key to our healing. Otherwise we put all of our attention on the externals hoping that if they can be changed then we will be happy. Jesus is making it clear that this is an impossible goal.

Our belief that if we can somehow manage the externals in our lives that we can then live a better, happier life just keeps us in the cycle of the ego thought system of sin, guilt and fear. Yet we have bought into it and now think that if we can get other people to do or not to do things that bug us; if we can manage the boss; if we can get the kids to behave; if the car doesn't break down; if the landlord doesn't raise the rent; if we get the raise; if we can control our temper; if we can win the argument;  if we can enhance our self esteem; if we can learn better coping mechanisms; then life will be good and we will be happy.  We are constantly working to fix things in the world by controlling, manipulating, managing, or trying to make our lives better through a variety of strategies. But this is like addressing a symptom while the underlying problem still remains unchanged. And thus the problems will simply arise again in another form. Why would that be? Because the thought system in our mind based on the separation and resulting in our belief in sin, guilt and fear is reflected on the screen of this world. If the world is just the images of the thoughts in our minds reflected back at us then to try to change the world changes nothing. Our mind is the cause and the world is the effect. It is our own attack thoughts that make up the world we see. 

We lament so much about the world. We work hard to try to change things in the world. Doesn't it feel like a losing battle? Well, this lesson would tell us that indeed it is! If the world is just the effect of our thoughts, and our thoughts are the cause, then to try to change the effect is like trying to change the image on a movie screen instead of changing that which is projecting the image. It is an exercise in futility. If we change the cause (our minds), the effect changes automatically. (2.7)  What we have a hard time with, is that we are the movie maker. We are seeing only our own thoughts projected onto the world. In other words, we are just hallucinating and not seeing at all. What we call reality is just a projection. But we are so convinced that it is reality, that until we are willing to bring awareness to our attack thoughts, we will not believe in the power of our minds. In fact the world offers us a way to diminish the power of our minds and make us believe that we are, in fact, a victim of what we see and experience, rather than the maker of it. 

"You see the world that you have made, but you do not see yourself as the image maker. 2 You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause.  This is what salvation means, for where is the world you see when its cause is gone?" (4.1-3) So what we are saved from is the belief system of the ego that says that we deserve punishment for what we believe we have done in stealing our identity from God and separating from Him. This belief is projected out resulting in a body and a world that are not real. Now we have our own separate identity, our own separate existence, our self that is unique and seemingly housed in a body but at what expense? Now the ego says we have committed a terrible crime and we have sinned. With it comes guilt which is too much for the mind so it is projected out onto this world of bodies. And if this is real then God is not. He must then just be an illusion. Either we are real or God is. Both can't be true in non duality.  Jesus assures us that our experience here is not real. He tells us that there is no external reality outside of our minds.   And if this is so, then we truly are hallucinating. But when we start to recognize our mind as cause of what we experience, then we have the power to change our minds as to how we see the world. When we increasingly recognize that the world is a reflection of our inward condition then the purpose of everything that we experience becomes one of healing.

Our role in this process is essential. We think we can turn to Jesus or the Holy Spirit and ask that they take away our fear. But Jesus says that that is not helpful because we are the ones that made it in the first place. If the fear is to be undone, then we have to bring attention to it. We have kept it mostly hidden from our awareness. We have been in denial about the origin of this fear which is the choice to separate from Love. But now, with our willingness to look at our fear thoughts we can start the process of bringing them to the light. There is no other way to our spiritual awakening except to look at our fear thoughts. There is no spiritual bypass to the truth without going through the undoing process. But we are not alone in this. 

Very early on in the Text in Chapter 2 Jesus says "The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask instead for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate." (2.VI.4).  And later in this section he says, "You may still complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful. I have already indicated to you that you cannot ask me to release you from fear. I know it does not exist but you do not. If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect; the most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking." (2.VII.1)

So to give up our attack thoughts mean that we first look at them. Mind watching is such an important part of the process of healing in this world. This requires that we first have to see our minds as the cause of what we see. The second is that we have to let go of the cause by determining that we no longer want these attack thoughts.  It is not a matter of willpower but a matter of willingness. Now we must give the Holy Spirit permission to replace the images we have made. But He tells us that they have already been replaced!! If we remove the blocks in our own mind then we will no longer see a world of vengeance because the thoughts of love and peace are already in our minds. It is who we really are as we were created but hidden from us by the ego which is made of fear. So we need to cooperate in this process in the first part only. We need to be very honest with ourselves, take responsibility for our thoughts and agree to let them go. 

We hang onto our grievances so tenaciously though. The ego does not want to let go of them. You will notice how stubbornly we will resist letting go of our attack thoughts. How we nourish our concerns and our anxieties. The ego is invested in holding onto grievances. So... simple as this sounds, it takes a lot of determination just to keep doing this work. It takes even more determination when we see that we are to include "both your thoughts of attacking and of being attacked. Their effects are exactly the same because they are exactly the same." (7.1-2)  This is not readily recognized, as the lesson acknowledges, but we don't have to understand this in order to do the practice as prescribed here. We just need to cooperate in this process of taking responsibility for our fear thoughts in order to escape from this world that we see.

This escape is one of releasing our anxieties. It is an "escape" into peace, into confidence; into our invulnerability, into feeling the safety of our Being in His Hands, into a deep sense of knowing that we are One and we are perfect in that Oneness with each other and that the truth is that there is no separation. Under our fears, grievances, anger, frustration, we are all created as beautiful, sparkling clear lights. We don't experience this as the truth about ourselves as a constant in our lives, so we clearly have healing work to do in undoing the fear thoughts which block the truth about ourselves. And if we see ourselves here in this body and in this seeming world of pain, suffering and death with intermittent periods of happiness and pleasure, we are not alone.  It is the same thing for all of us.

Being willing to look at our dark thoughts which are the blocks to the presence of Love, is our responsibility. No one will do it for us. Jesus said that he cannot do it because we are the ones who made the choice to separate and we are the ones that give power to our thoughts. And now we can make the choice for truth. The Power of the Holy Spirit is always available to shine away the darkness once we bring our thoughts forward for healing. He waits patiently for us to do our part. He waits patiently for us to identify our defenses that we hold like armor against the truth. We see these defenses as our protection but in fact they are our fear thoughts held like a shield against the light. So our part is to bring our own guilt that we have projected out back into our own minds, look at it honestly and bring it to the light of Truth where it is healed.

The process we are talking about here is summarized in paragraph 5 where Jesus tells us that "The idea for today introduces the thought that you are not trapped in the world you see, because its cause can be changed. This change requires, first, that the cause be identified and then let go, so that it can be replaced.  The first two steps in this process require your cooperation.  The final one does not.   Your images have already been replaced.   By taking the first two steps, you will see that this is so." (5.1-6) 

 Today throughout the day  we remember that  "I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts" whenever we are feeling out of peace. Then for 5 practice periods in the day, look about you, repeat the idea slowly to yourself  first, and then close your eyes and devote about a minute to searching your mind for your attack thoughts (meaning fear, worry, sadness, anger, anxiety, depression, grievances, concerns, frustrations, expectations etc) Mind searching is required because our we defend against our own attack thoughts and thus we are not aware of what we are keeping hidden from ourselves. Hold each attack thought in mind as you say "I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts about_____________. Then dismiss that thought and go on to the next".

Remember to include both your thoughts of attacking and of being attacked. They are the same. We think that we are angry because someone caused us pain. But just as the lesson yesterday affirmed, everything coming at us from outside of us is just a counterattack for our own attack thoughts. We may feel like a victim in someone's attack, but, in fact, the victim makes a powerful victimizer. I experienced that in a demonstration where I was asked to be a victim by lying on the floor and having someone responsible for getting me back on my feet. Of course I made it impossible to be helped and thus my helper was soon victimized by me in their defeat. This is very much like what is being illustrated here where the victim holds all the power.

Love and blessings, Sarah

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A Course in Miracles   
TEXT  

Chapter Two   

The Illusion of Separation

V. The Correction for Lack of Love     

⁸¹ The first corrective step is know first that this is an expression of fear. Then say to yourself that you must somehow have willed not to love or that the fear which arises from behavior-will conflict could not have arisen, then the whole process is nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the Atonement as the remedy. These steps can be summarized as follows:

1.   ⁸² Know first that this is fear.

2.   ⁸³ Fear arises from lack of love.

3.   ⁸⁴ The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.

4.   ⁸⁵ Perfect love is the Atonement.

⁸⁶ We have emphasized that the miracle, or the expression of the Atonement, is always a sign of real respect from the worthy to the worthy.  This worth is re-established by the Atonement. It is obvious then that when you are afraid, you have placed yourself in a position where you need Atonement because you have done something loveless, having willed without love. This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was offered. The need for the remedy inspired its creation. As long as you recognize only the need for the remedy, you will remain fearful. However, as soon as you remedy it, you have also abolished the fear. This is how true healing occurs.

⁸⁷ Everyone experiences fear, and no one enjoys it. Yet it would take very little right-thinking to realize why fear occurs. Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind, and no one remains fully aware of it all the time. However, if anyone hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize and realize fully. The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating and always as you will. Many of your ordinary expressions reflect this. For example, when you say, "Don't give it a thought," you imply that if you do not think about something, it will have no effect on you. And this is true enough.

⁸⁸ On the other hand, many other expressions clearly illustrate the prevailing lack of awareness of thought-power. For example, you say, "Just an idle thought," and mean that the thought has no effect. You also speak of some actions as "thoughtless," implying that if the person had thought, he would not behave as he did. While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it because you do not really think that you will.

⁸⁹ It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you do not believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally afraid of them. Many psychotherapists attempt to help people who are afraid, say, of their death wishes by depreciating the power of the wish. They even try to "free" the patient by persuading him that he can think whatever he wants without any real effect at all.

⁹⁰ There is a real dilemma here which only the truly right-minded can escape. Death wishes do not kill in the physical sense, but they do kill spiritual awareness. All destructive thinking is dangerous. Given a death wish, a man has no choice except to act upon the thought or behave contrary to it. He thus chooses only between homicide and fear. The other possibility is that he depreciates the power of his thought. This is the usual psychoanalytic approach. It does allay guilt but at the cost of rendering thinking impotent. If you believe that what you think is ineffectual you may cease to be overly afraid of it, but you are hardly likely to respect it.

⁹¹ The world is full of examples of how man has depreciated himself because he is afraid of his own thoughts. In some forms of insanity, thoughts are glorified, but this is only because the underlying depreciation was too effective for tolerance. The truth is that there are no "idle" thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level. The reason people are afraid of ESP and so often react against it is because they know that thoughts can hurt them. Their own thoughts have made them vulnerable.