There's an interesting way of looking at Jesus as our teacher that I thought would be a suitable
topic for today, and this is seeing Jesus as a learning theorist; someone who teaches
through rewards and contrasting them with punishments. The term "learning theorist,"
of course, comes from psychology and refers to that branch of psychology (sometimes referred
to as behaviorism), which helps us recognize that our learning comes through rewards and
punishments, and through decades of experimental research we have learned that people learn
much better with...when they are rewarded than when they are punished. That when we
are punished we certainly do learn. Children learn, for example, not to touch a burning
stove or a hot stove because they'll be punished by the pain they will feel. We learn when
we were in school that we'll be "punished" (quote/unquote) by getting a poor grade if
we don't give the proper answers and that therefore that motivates us to learn. But
the problem with learning through punishment is that there's always anxiety, there's fear,
there's guilt. It's never a joyous experience, which of course is one of the major problems
with our educational system, which is another topic. That we do much better when we learn
through rewards, that we will feel better; that's the ultimate reward. We will feel better
when we learn. Education ought to be a joyous experience and certainly a major way of characterizing
A Course in Miracles is that it is an educational system. It comes equipped with a curriculum,
with a Teacher, a text, workbook, manual for teachers; throughout Jesus and the Holy Spirit
are referred to as our teachers and basically we are studying the Course so we could unlearn
the lessons the ego taught us and replace them with the lessons of forgiveness that
Jesus is teaching us. So Jesus tells us that he's trying to have us associate the learning
of the ego with punishments; namely that anything we do that follows the ego's dictates—believing
in the reality of separation, judgment, differentiation, and attack—is going to reinforce our guilt;
ultimately the original guilt over the belief that we separated from God, crucified His
Son, destroyed the Love of Heaven, and everything that has ever seemed to have happened since
then is simply a shadowy fragment of that original thought of what the ego tells us
is sin, and then the guilt which follows from it. And so we then learn how to avoid our
sense of guilt by projecting it out and trying to make other people responsible for it. So
once again Jesus is trying to teach us to associate the pain of guilt and the pain of
separation with what the ego has taught us, and that what the ego has taught us really
ends up as a punishment. That we learn much, much better, however, when we learn through
rewards, and Jesus is trying to help us recognize that when we choose him as our teacher and
forgiveness as our guiding principle that guides us throughout the days to see expressions
of love or calls for love rather than guilt and sin, that as we learn through him we will
be rewarded by this quiet joy, which will begin to fill our very selves. That we will
feel better because we will for the first time really believe that we are making progress
on our journey home, that what greater reward can there be than to know that everything
we have experienced is a lie, is simply a dream, that is gently dissolved in the light
of truth, and the reflection of that truth in our everyday lives is forgiveness? So that...so
Jesus is the learning theorist par excellence because his teachings will bring us joy, while
following the ego will bring us pain, which to the ego is justified punishment for our
sin. But turned over to Jesus (meaning that we look with him at the ego thought system),
that we recognize that looking with him is the reward because that is the undoing of
the ego. And so how much wiser would we be if we learned not through the punishment of
the ego but rather learn through the rewards of Jesus?