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ACIM Lesson 17 2025

I see no neutral things

The point of this exercise and the ones before it is to be sure we understand cause and effect and get the order correct. Thought comes first, always, with no exceptions. From thought comes the illusory world I used to believe in. Now, I sometimes believe in it briefly, and then I go back to remembering that the world is the effect of thought. Also, how I see it, that is, my perception of it, is the effect of my thoughts.

This is a very different way of looking at things. Even noticing that nothing I looked at was neutral was interesting, not having thought about that since I last did this lesson. But the most important thing to remember all the time is that thought came before what I see or experience in the world.

For a while, like many people, I got caught up in politics. I would read about some politician and judge his or her behavior. But here’s the thing. Whether I thought they were wonderful or awful, those judgments came before I saw them in the person.

I wasn’t seeing a politician and deciding who it was. I was looking for guilt or innocence and found what I was looking for. No wonder we are told that we shouldn’t judge. We don’t even admit to ourselves that we decided what we would see before we saw it. Clearly, with such a fundamental error, we don’t know or understand anything.

People want the world to be a better place. In other words, we want other people to do better, so we like our world better. Now that we have cause and effect in the right order, there is only one effective thing we can do. We can look within for the source of the problem and let the Holy Spirit correct our thoughts.

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