Journal for Day 23
LESSON 23
I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.
This is one of the lessons I live by, one that I consider essential to my awakening. To say that I give up attack thoughts is the same as saying that I will hold no grievances and that I will make no one guilty, including myself. It is the return to innocence and the return to peace. I woke up at 3:00 this morning and when I tried to go back to sleep, the ego mind thought this would be a good time to review all fears in my mind, the old ones I thought were gone as well as the recent ones.
Just because a fear thought shows up doesn’t mean I still believe it, but if it causes me distress, I am not done with it. Sometimes I can just look at an old thought and ignore it and sometimes I can see that it is still relevant to me today and I can change my mind about that. Last night, the thoughts were coming so fast and so hard that I couldn’t use my usual process.
What I did instead was to look for the opposite and true thought and I started trying to place my focus there. That helped but did not end the barrage of thoughts. I finally used a guided meditation and doing that helped to break the cycle of thinking. I went back to sleep and when I woke up the whole thing felt ridiculous to me.
There are some ideas in this lesson that I am paying attention to.
“The idea for today contains the only way out of fear that will ever succeed.”
This is why I treasure this lesson. It is the only way out of fear. Nothing else will work. It is simple and straightforward. I only need to be aware of what is an attack thought. It would seem that this is easy to spot but I realize that sometimes we don’t recognize a thought as being an attack. Jesus mentions some of them in the book, In the World but Not of It.
Judgments are attacks.
Examples of the ego’s judgments disguised as questions or observations:
He sure likes to eat! (implying he eats too much)
I don’t understand why she does that. (implying her behavior is abnormal or strange)
What is going on with that? (implying something is silly or stupid)
He’s being so nice today. (implying that is unusual)
I like these examples because it reminds me that there are many ways to attack without seeming to be doing that. It helps me to be honest in my vigilance.
“There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect.”
The world is an effect of our thoughts. As Jesus says, all thought produces form at some level. So thinking the change needs to occur in the world is like believing I need to fix my lipstick smudge by smoothing it out on the mirror. It won’t work. What can change the world is to change what caused it. This is why I am vigilant in my thinking. What am I thinking and what effect does this thinking cause. Change the cause and the effect automatically changes.
“The idea for today introduces the thought that you are not trapped in the world you see because its cause can be changed.“
We are never the victim of the world. We are the maker of the world and we can change what we made. Here is the way it is done.
Step 1. The cause must be identified. We must realize what it is that we believe that caused the effect we are seeing in the world.
Step 2. We must let that belief go. This can feel hard if we still think it has value. When we decide that we don’t know what is valuable but we do know that we want to be free of our hallucination, we gladly surrender to purification and we let that belief go, trusting it is the right thing to do to achieve our goal of freedom.
Step 3. Let it be replaced. This is the only step that is not our responsibility. I can help myself stay the course by focusing on the truth. What this does is it keeps me from falling back into the ego beliefs. But, “our images have already been replaced. By taking the first two steps, we will see that this is so.” What we seek is already within us, or put another way, Heaven is within.
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