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July-September, 2022

Foundational Lessons

by Rev. Myron, Jones, Ordained Ministerial Counselor

When I first began studying the workbook of A Course in Miracles, I really disliked doing the first few lessons. I thought they were weird and didn’t make sense to me. Over the years all of that has changed. Now I love those lessons. I recognize that they are the foundation for everything to follow.

I invite you to take a fresh look at three of these lessons with me. I chose these three because I learned something particularly important from them.

Let’s look at Lesson 1 first. “Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything.”  (W-pI.1) How is it that nothing I see means anything?

Jesus doesn’t explain this lesson but we can assume that the reason nothing we see has meaning is because we are using our eyes to see and the body’s eyes don’t actually see. They are image makers and serve only to show us what we want to see not what is actually there.

I also notice that he is being very specific in the practice of the lesson. This reminded me of what he said in the Introduction of the lessons. He said that the exercises should be practiced with great specificity to help us generalize the ideas involved to every situation. Later in the Course he talks about transfer of learning and this is what he is talking about here.

Here is how I have used the idea of transfer of learning. One thing I have learned is that guilt is not real. I started by using these lessons on different instances of guilty thinking. I let the Holy Spirit heal my mind of those specific instances.

For instance, I knew someone who I thought was guilty of being two-faced, talking about her ‘friends’ behind their back. Now it is true that in her story she did do those things, but it was not true that she is guilty. Who she is can never be guilty because she was created by God and there is no guilt in God. I used a forgiveness process on every instance in which I thought someone was guilty or that I was guilty. Any judgment was good to use because judgment assumes guilt.

Eventually, what happened is that I had experienced the miracle healing of my mind about guilt often enough that my mind finally snapped to the truth that all guilt was the same and that there was no instance in which guilt was justified. That was when I realized that guilt itself is not real. That was transfer of learning and when that happened everything changed for me. I shifted permanently into a life of nearly consistent peace and happiness.

Lesson 8

“My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.”

1. “This idea is, of course, the reason why you see only the past. No one really sees anything. He sees only his thoughts projected outward. The mind’s preoccupation with the past is the cause of the misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything.”

If you are a new student, or even if you are not, after reading this, you should be profoundly shaken. Even now, even though I know this is true, reading it stated so directly, shakes me a bit. It is easy to slip into the story of the world and just go with it. But there is no world. It was over long ego. OK then, what are we seeing when we open our eyes? Only the past which is not there. So, we are seeing nothing, just images of our thoughts. Seriously, every time I stop to truly consider this extraordinary truth, I feel like someone just shook me awake. Again. It’s the strangest feeling.

And from paragraph 2 and 4

2. “The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here. ²To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions. ³Very few have realized what is actually entailed in picturing the past or in anticipating the future. ⁴The mind is actually blank when it does this, because it is not really thinking about anything.”

4. “The exercises for today should be done with eyes closed. This is because you actually cannot see anything, and it is easier to recognize that no matter how vividly you may picture a thought, you are not seeing anything.”

When I went to the Van Gough Immersive, I was given VR goggles. When I put them on, I found myself in his paintings, not before them, but in them. I was in a beautiful world, alive with color and movement. It felt as real as sitting at my computer doing this work.

That is what our eyes are, virtual reality equipment. Our mind holds the information that is then transformed by our eyes as a 3D experience. Only instead of just seeing it, we hear it and smell it and taste it. No wonder we get pulled into it. Just moving through Van Gogh’s paintings through the use of the VR equipment, was mesmerizing. I could have stayed there for a long time.

In this virtual reality we call the world, we will forget it’s not real unless we remind ourselves often. When I took off the goggles, the room I was in was still there. My daughters were sitting next to me. Nothing had changed just because I was unaware of it. The world is a representation of our thoughts and our thoughts are not real, so we are deep into an illusion. This is why we need to take the lessons seriously and let them do their job. As we let go of what is not true, our real thoughts will show us reality. It has gone nowhere while we have been lost in our imagination.

Lesson 11

“My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.”

1. “This is the first idea we have had that is related to a major phase of the correction process; the reversal of the thinking of the world. It seems as if the world determines what you perceive. Today’s idea introduces the concept that your thoughts determine the world you see. Be glad indeed to practice the idea in its initial form, for in this idea is your release made sure. The key to forgiveness lies in it.”

I used to go to a lot of workshops and conferences. I met many students as well as teachers of the Course. I remember one teacher in particular that I judged harshly as a fake. Certainly not everyone felt the same way, but in my world, I was certain of this. The thought that the teacher was a fake was a meaningless thought. It was meaningless because it came from the ego.

The world in this case is how I saw this teacher. It seemed to be about the teacher but Jesus tells us that it is our thoughts that determine what we see. The value in noticing this judgment is that it showed me that in my mind is the belief that I could be a fake or be seen as a fake. There was also the fear that I could be fooled and made a fool of by this fake.

The idea of a fake began in my mind and was projected outward and seen in the teacher. I tried to repair the relationship with the teacher by choosing to overlook his errors. But seeing him as guilty and forgiving him anyway is not forgiveness and thus nothing was really healed. And so, the idea of fakes remained in my own mind. That meaningless idea was unhealed and so it happened again and again. It happened until I accepted that the problem was not “out there” but was in my unhealed mind. 

I finally understood that the idea of a fake comes from the ego-mind. It is not a bad thought or a good thought, it is just a meaningless thought as are all ego thoughts. Of course, meaningless or not, they have consequences. Believing this thought disturbed my peace of mind. But since it was my thought, it was mine to heal. 

I did this by recognizing that the meaningless cannot make anyone guilty including the thinker of the thought. The meaningless cannot affect reality. Both the teacher and I are innocent and safe. This invited the Holy Spirit to heal my mind and so it was done. As Jesus says in this lesson, this is major! The work I did with this situation is reversing the thinking of the world.

I am writing about each lesson and recording the lesson on YouTube. I also post them on my website and I invite you to join me in this study.

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