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ACIM Lesson 23 2025

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

Jesus is perfectly clear as he reminds us that we make the world we see with our thoughts, and it is a vengeful world because our thoughts are of attacking and being attacked. He tells us that it will do no good to try to change the world. Our thoughts are the cause, and the world is its effect.

You cannot fix something by starting with the effect.

I was thinking about this, and I remember one time I made a cake from scratch. Yeah, I don’t know why I did this either, when you can buy perfectly good cake mixes at any grocery store. When the cake came out of the oven, it looked great. But when I tasted it, I realized I had dipped from the salt canister rather than the sugar canister. It was inedible. But it was so lovely, and I had worked so hard at it. Still, the cooking error was the cause, and the cake was the effect. Trying to fix the effect of the error would be a waste of time and energy.

Trying to fix the world, which is an effect of our thoughts, is the same error. It is a waste of time and energy and causes more suffering in the attempt. Just as I had to bite the bullet and toss the cake, it is time to do the same with the world we made of our attack thoughts. But unlike my cake, which would have to be cooked by me again to correct the problems with the world, I only need to identify the cause and then let it go. Vision will show us the real world that exists right now, unseen by us who are fixated on the world of our vengeance.

Looking at my attack thoughts this morning, I see that I did not agree with a decision of President Trump’s yesterday. I felt anger, contempt for the choice he made, and frustration that I could do nothing about it. All of those are attack thoughts. I won’t write him a letter about it or even talk about it with others, except as an example of this lesson. That would have been trying to change the effect without changing its cause.

But in my mind, I attacked and felt attacked. My angry thoughts were the cause of the world I was seeing. This is not, of course, the first time I have attacked someone, but this time, I recognized the error and happily let it go so that I could go back to seeing what stands in the place of our thought errors. As it happens, it is love and peace of mind. I will not spend my time here defending what I think should happen. I came for greater things. I came to heal the mind so that we can have an experience of a healed world rather than a world built on vengeance.

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ACIM Lesson 22 2025

What I see is a form of vengeance.

In this lesson, Jesus is introducing us to the fact that the world we see does not actually exist. It is fiction written by us and maintained by us. Our stories make us feel like victims and so we defend ourselves. In our fear, we attack others. These ‘others’ are not really separate from us, so in attacking them, we are attacking ourselves. It seems like we are trapped in our own web of self-deceit. But we are not.

As we read these lessons and study the Text, we discover our way out. We have a choice now. Of course, we cannot gain our freedom from reading no matter how elevated the material. We must practice what we read until it is what we believe and so experience. Our experience of freedom will awaken us to reality.

When I first started these lessons, I did as Jesus asked. I looked at everything around me and admitted that it was a lie. More than that, it was a form of vengeance. It didn’t make me feel any better. ~smile~ But, eventually, the truth that none of it is real and that I am responsible for its being in my awareness sunk in. If I made it, I can choose to release it. I can choose to accept that it doesn’t actually exist.

Freedom from pain, suffering, and death is available to me, and all I have to do is suspend my ego judgment long enough for the Holy Spirit to heal my mind. I didn’t even have to fully accept any of this. I just had to trust my Brother’s words enough to do the little asked of me. Eventually, I accepted His help, and everything changed. I can still get pulled into a story briefly, and I am still aware of the ego’s thoughts, but I don’t believe them, and that is absolutely a miracle.

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ACIM Lesson 21 2025

I am determined to see things differently.

I am determined to see my son’s impatience differently. I know this is not typical of him and is a result of his depression and anxiety, nevertheless, I judged him for it and felt irritated. I call it irritation because I tamped it down so that it didn’t reach the level of what I think of as anger.

But as Jesus tells us in this lesson, ⁵You will become increasingly aware that a slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury. I may as well say that I was enraged by his impatience, which is just insane.

That I remembered it so quickly from yesterday must mean that some of that repressed rage was seeping out. This is the problem of repressing rather than forgiving. It is not really gone because we pushed it away. To be free, we must forgive it and thus let it go.

And remember, we do this for all of us and thus free us all. Or we keep it and imprison ourselves (all of ourselves) in the world.

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ACIM Lesson 20 2025

I am determined to see.

Something I noticed about this lesson is that Jesus explained why it is so simple and so short, and he explained what it would do for us. But he doesn’t tell us how to achieve what we are determined to do. I think this is because the ‘how’ is inferred. What is needed to achieve the outcome of truly seeing is the firm decision to do so. That is all.

Well, how hard can that be? I will state my intention and repeat it a few times and that will be that. I will have traded my belief in what my eyes show me for real vision. Why do I need all those other lessons? Actually, I know why. After all these years of practice, I can still become confused about what I want to see.

First, let me be clear. When we see something in a particular way, it is because we want that perception of it. We want the emotional charge that goes with it. Or we want to prove something. For instance, last night, I had a frightening thought of something awful happening to my son. It seemed to come out of the blue, and once it was there, I found myself focused on it as if I could not look away.

All of this was for something that was not happening. There was no reason to expect it to happen. I was scaring myself for reasons I didn’t care to examine. But this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how this goes, and I am not as ignorant of why as I used to be. It is simple. I wanted to be afraid, as strange as that sounds.

Well, maybe not so strange. After all, people go to scary movies and ride roller coasters. They parachute out of perfectly good planes and rappel up mountains for no good reason. And most of us are perfectly willing to sit around with friends and share our personal everyday fears.

I may run out of money, and then what will I do? What if this politician gets elected, or that one? I wonder if my husband/wife is cheating on me? I had weird pains in my chest. When absolutely nothing is going wrong at that moment, we are willing to project fear into an unknown future. In other words, we are afraid because we want to be afraid. Anticipating the worst can become a bad habit.

But knowing this is true, I can now watch my feelings and my thoughts, and when I see this happening as it did last night, I can choose again. I can choose to forgive the former choice for fear and simply be in the moment where nothing is happening. Even if it seems I must drag my reluctant mind into the present, I will do it as I turn to the Holy Spirit for another way to see. I am determined to release the imagined horrors. I am determined to see.

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ACIM Lesson 19 2025

I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.

I have been studying and practicing ACIM for over 43 years. I have read these lessons many times. I have done them as Jesus asks, or as close to it as I could, many times. But even so, sometimes, as I contemplate one I can still understand it differently than I did before. Or notice that I overlooked something before.

When reading about private thoughts in the Text, I identified these private thoughts as ego thoughts. And yes, that is true, but this morning, I am seeing it a little differently. The point Jesus makes is that we want to believe that we have a private mind. We want to think that our thoughts belong to us and only us, and that what we think is a secret and has no effects outside our mind.

That is our error; it is not that we have private thoughts because we don’t, but that we believe we do. Our thoughts, all of them, affect all of us because our minds are joined.
The implications of this are enormous. We are in this together, literally. The idea of a world, of bodies, of the pretense of separation, all of it. It was once strange enough to think that what I did could affect people across the world. Nowadays, this is easy to believe. A disease starts in one country and quickly spreads to all countries. But to realize that what I think affects everybody everywhere.

I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing or my thoughts because the only thing remotely real about me is my mind, and it is joined with everyone else’s mind. How on earth did I ever believe that I was not my brother’s keeper? I keep him imprisoned within this ridiculous dream of separation, or I save him from this. And he, me.

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ACIM Lesson 18 2025

I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing.

Our thoughts are projected outward, and our eyes show us these thoughts. Our mind then interprets the thoughts to give meaning to them, which is referred to as our perception of what is happening. Add to that the new fact that our minds are joined, and it is clear that our thoughts are never neutral or unimportant. I learned to watch my thoughts carefully, choosing to keep those that reflected love and release those that reflected fear. As a result, I am far more peaceful than I used to be, and I have put less darkness into the mind we share.

I always assumed that everyone saw objects in the same way. But this isn’t true. I looked at my computer this morning and realized that my history with computers is different than some people’s. I love my computer because it keeps me in touch with other ACIM friends. Otherwise, I would be alone in my study and joining with others has been so very beneficial for me. Others may perceive the computer as a handy tool. I know some who perceive it as the bane of their existence because it causes more problems than solutions for them.

Because I perceive my computer as something I love and appreciate, each time I sit down to it, I settle into a peaceful state and am generally productive in whatever I am doing. I use a Mac, but when I was working, we had PCs. I did not feel the same way about this computer. I perceived the PC to be a problem, and so it was. Apple and Apple users convinced me that this brand was much better, and so it was. Our minds are very powerful.
Our thoughts determine our experience. What happens in our lives is not the sole determiner of our emotional reaction to it. How we perceive what is happening can change everything for us. And although we are not aware of this as it happens, how we experience the world affects others, and how they experience the world affects us because our minds are joined. We will learn more about this later.

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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.

© 2025, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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