Today’s workbook lesson is giving us the chance to unpin, to unwind from the belief
in being trapped in appearances.
When our very identity of Love of the Living Christ, a perfect idea in the Mind of God,
has been forgotten and completely pushed out of awareness, appearances seem to have come
to take the place of love and light.
This condition could be called hallucination.
It is like when a dry and thirsty traveler walking through a desert, feeling scorched, hot, parched
and dry may hallucinate an oasis of shade and water.
The sleeping Son of God has believed himself to be bereft of his holy Father, his creator.
He finds himself lost and wandering in a desert of images, a desert of perception that God
did not create: a fantasy world, a fictitious, linear stream of images that have nothing
to do with reality, nothing to do with eternity, divine love and happiness.
And so, the first step in healing from this apparent condition of separation is to realize
that all upsets experienced are coming because there is a perception, and that perception is not there.
The ego may ask, “But why is it there?”
But remember, the ego is the denial of God, the denial of love, the denial of eternity.
The ego is a death wish.
If you give your mind to a death wish, if you give your attention to a death wish, your
focus, what else could you expect but a hallucination?
Death and hallucination go together.
Life, eternal life and happiness go together.
In this world, we get apples from apple trees, oranges from orange trees and grapes from
grape vines.
Why would it be possible to get perception, temporary fleeting images, from an eternal
creator?
God has absolutely nothing to do with the perceptual world.
God is reality and so, hallucinations cannot exist, cannot have reality.
You don’t get images from something that is abstract and eternal.
You don’t get a linear stream of symbols on a timeline from that which has no beginning
and no end, that which is infinite.
Earlier in the text, we were talking about distorted miracle impulses, misdirected miracle
impulses.
What is a miracle impulse but a call to remember God, to forgive the world, and to accept the
truth of abstract reality, to forget the images, to release the image maker and accept reality
exactly as it is?
There are some new age teachings that say you can create your own reality.
There are some that say A Course in Miracles is simply a new age teaching.
But I will tell you this, Jesus in the Course is teaching the exact opposite of you create your own
reality.
Jesus is teaching us that God is the Creator of reality.
Even as a child of God, you can only accept reality as it is.
You can accept reality, and He gives us the means to accept reality.
He says you must accept the Atonement for the error of ego; accept the correction for
the belief in separation.
Accept.
So this lesson, “I am upset because I see something that is not there”, gives a hint
at going way, way beyond the law of attraction, way beyond the belief in manifestation.
It’s about being humble, humble enough in your mind to begin to see that it’s only
an upset, because I believe that there is something that is not there.
I’m seeing, perceiving something that's not there.
You might rephrase the lesson as, “I am upset because I seem to be hallucinating.”
And the only way that you can be open to another way of seeing, Christ Vision, light, an experience
of vision that is not involving the body, the bodies eyes, is through a vision that
does not involve perception, revelation, the great rays, knowledge, reality.
I must first be open to the idea that what I seem to see, what I seem to perceive through
consciousness and the five senses, is actually not there.
It’s not there, because God did not create it.
So the text said we may get glimpses of the end, which Jesus calls revelation, but we
must take every small step that is asked of us.
We must progressively prepare our mind for the direct approach to God that is coming
in these later workbook lessons.
Because without this attention, this care, this willingness to follow every step, then
remembrance of God will still seem frightening.
It will still seem fearful.
It will generate fear instead of the awe that is the appropriate experience with regard
to the Creator.
The Bible is very famous for saying “fear God and keep his commandments.”
I will simply reinterpret that right now as be in awe of God the Creator, and come to
know this awe by forgiving the world, forgiving the ego, forgiving the belief that one could
ever be separate from a loving God, from a loving creator.
Today, we are happy to behold and to acknowledge first that there seems to be a hallucination
in front of us, and that I am never upset because of what seems to be the hallucination.
Simply stated, “I am upset because I see something that is not there."