I do not know what anything is for.
This lesson directly discusses the theme of purpose, so crucial in A Course in Miracles. Indeed, one could say that purpose alone helps us understand the ego’s thought system, the world’s role within it, and how through shifting the world’s purpose the Holy Spirit uses the ego’s plan to undo it.
(1) Purpose is meaning. Today’s idea explains why nothing you see means anything. You do not know what it is for. Therefore, it is meaningless to you. Everything is for your own best interests. That is what it is for; that is its purpose; that is what it means. It is in recognizing this that your goals become unified. It is in recognizing this that what you see is given meaning.
Jesus is picking up from the early lessons, including the preceding one, by helping us realize why nothing here means anything. Something has meaning for us only because we do not understand what it is for, which comes from not knowing our own best interests. We think these have to do with satisfying our specialness needs, whether physical or emotional, while what is truly in our interest is learning to forgive. That is why everything in this world is for our own best interests, if we choose the right Teacher. Every situation or relationship can become a classroom in which we are helped to understand that the world we made comes from our attack thoughts, and everything we see, given to the Holy Spirit to reinterpret for us, can be a reminder that we can choose to look at the world differently. This process, as we have already seen, and shall see many times still, involves shifting our perception of the problem, and therefore our understanding of our best interests, from the body to the mind. To accomplish such a perceptual shift is the main goal of these lessons, not to mention A Course in Miracles itself.
The ego sees the meaning and purpose of everything in the world as an opportunity to satisfy its specialness needs. Jesus, on the other hand, sees opportunities, after our first making the ego mistake, to turn to him for help and be taught there is another way of looking at everything. This other way of looking, summarized in the three steps of forgiveness in Lesson 23, is realizing that what we see outside is a projection of what we have first seen within. Once again, Jesus is teaching us to shift our attention from the body to the mind.
We learn that our perceptions, and the way we organize our personal world and relate to others, are based on the premise that we have an ego that has to be treated a certain way; that we have definite needs based on our separated existence that dictate how we must see our world, especially the people in it. Now that we have a teacher who shows us what we perceive outside is a projection of an inner thought, we can change this thought by having changed teachers. The world now has great meaning for us, for its new purpose has become our classroom, in which we learn from our new teacher his lessons of forgiveness.
When Jesus says purpose is everything, he means there are two: the ego’s purpose of rooting us in this world so that our individuality – located in the mind – is safe; and the Holy Spirit’s purpose of our realizing there is no world, for there is nothing in us that needs defense. Thus it is the world’s new purpose to help us learn that happy fact, which is our salvation from our belief in guilt. “Perception and Choice” in the text summarizes the dual purpose of our split mind:
“But this world has two who made it, and they do not see it as the same. To each it has a different purpose, and to each it is a perfect means to serve the goal for which it is perceived There is another purpose in the world that error made, because it has another Maker Who can reconcile its goal with His Creator’s purpose. In His perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness (T-25.III.3:3-4; 5:1-2).”
Thus is the real world of forgiveness made by the Holy Spirit as correction and substitute for the ego’s error-filled world of guilt and hate.
(2:1) You perceive the world and everything in it as meaningful in terms of ego goals.
This idea could not have been stated more clearly. The “ego goals,” as we have seen, are some expression of the need to preserve your own identity, individuality, and specialness. Through the mind-searching exercises you need to realize how true that is. Watch the way you think about things throughout the day – not necessarily your whole life, just your day; how everything is organized around what will meet your needs, what will make you feel good physically and emotionally. Then see how those needs distort how you perceive the world. In fact, it is those very specialness needs that cause you to believe you are perceiving the world at all!
(2:2-4) These goals have nothing to do with your own best interests, because the ego is not you. This false identification makes you incapable of understanding what anything is for. As a result, you are bound to misuse it.
This is an extremely important statement. The you of which Jesus speaks is not the ego – the physical or psychological self; it is what we have referred to as the decision maker. Jesus makes the same point in the text, as we have already seen, when he asks rhetorically: “Who is the ‘you’ who are living in this world?” (T-4.II.11:8 ). This early lesson is the beginning stage in having us dis-identify or disassociate from this ego self and realize that the you Jesus is addressing is in the mind.
By virtue of our having chosen the wrong teacher we have made the wrong identification. Consequently, we shall misunderstand, misinterpret, and distort everything that goes on around us because our perceptions will be geared toward fulfilling the purpose of preserving that identification. The guilt associated with our special relationships is thus reinforced, because we are misusing everyone and everything. This guilt seems so enormous that we can never let ourselves look at what we are doing. That is why it is so important to change teachers and allow Jesus to look at our guilt with us. Let him look with us at our misperceptions, misuse, distortions, and attacks, and he will help us realize they come from one mistake. In our joining with him is that mistake of separating from love undone.
(2:5) When you believe this, you will try to withdraw the goals you have assigned to the world, instead of attempting to reinforce them.
When we realize what we are doing, we will inevitably change the goal. In the text Jesus reflects this change as the shift from the unholy to the holy relationship; a relationship whose purpose was guilt or illusion becoming one whose purpose is forgiveness or truth – the letting go of guilt:
“And as the unholy relationship is a continuing hymn of hate in praise of its maker, so is the holy relationship a happy song of praise to the Redeemer of relationships.
The holy relationship… is the old, unholy relationship, transformed and seen anew (T-17.V.1:7-2:2).”
(3) Another way of describing the goals you now perceive is to say that they are all concerned with “personal” interests. Since you have no personal interests, your goals are really concerned with nothing. In cherishing them, therefore, you have no goals at all. And thus you do not know what anything is for.
“Personal” is in quotes because there is no “personal.” Within the dream, having personal interests means I have interests that are separate from yours. This can be true only if the separation were real. However, if minds are joined, there can be no personal interests; only the single interest we share as one Son to awaken from this dream and return home.
A careful and thoughtful reading of these lines is bound to engender tremendous anxiety – and that is certainly a mild understatement. Jesus is saying you have no personal interests, and where does that leave you but nowhere? In essence this means you do not even exist. Incidentally, personal in this context has the same meaning as special.
Again, Jesus is not asking you to accept his words and live as if they were true; he is asking you only to begin to understand the insanity of your thinking and distorted perceptions because you are literally believing and seeing what is not there. If you do not question these beliefs and perceptions, if only intellectually, you will never be open to receive the answer that is waiting for you. Thus, you need to observe your everyday thoughts, moment to moment, and realize how they come from everything Jesus is speaking about. They are all based on preserving an ego goal, which is your own identity. This means that you do not care about anyone or anything else, but only having your needs met and goals fulfilled.
(4) Before you can make any sense out of the exercises for today, one more thought is necessary. At the most superficial levels, you do recognize purpose. Yet purpose cannot be understood at these levels. For example, you do understand that a telephone is for the purpose of talking to someone who is not physically in your immediate vicinity. What you do not understand is what you want to reach him for. And it is this that makes your contact with him meaningful or not.
We all are aware of superficial purposes, but we are not aware of the true purposes underlying them. Using the example of the telephone, the real purpose of the call is to provide an opportunity for us to reconsider the ego’s goal of separate interests in favor of the Holy Spirit’s goal of shared or common interests. Therefore, what makes A Course in Miracles so simple is that it teaches us there are only two purposes we ever need consider, as we have already discussed: the ego’s purpose, which is to retain individuality and separation, make the world real, and prove Jesus wrong; and Jesus’ purpose, which is to unlearn everything we had learned before, and finally accept with humility that he was right and we were wrong – the separation from God was a dream that never happened in reality.
(5:1) It is crucial to your learning to be willing to give up the goals you have established for everything.
Remember, because the goal you have established for everything is the preservation of your individuality, Jesus is asking that you abandon this purpose. That is why these lessons are so difficult, and must be perceived by our egos as extremely threatening.
The rest of the lesson underscores a point we have already seen: illusions remain illusions, regardless of the attributes we project onto them. From the ego’s point of view, all illusions – good or bad, important or unimportant, human or nonhuman – serve the single purpose of convincing us that they are what they are not. That is why we do not know what they are for. These ostensibly simple sentences continue Jesus’ training of our minds not to make distinctions among illusions, learning instead to make the only distinction that is valid – between the purposes of the ego and the Holy Spirit:
(5:2-6:8 ) The recognition that they [our goals] are meaningless, rather than “good” or “bad,” is the only way to accomplish this. The idea for today is a step in this direction.
Six practice periods, each of two-minutes duration, are required. Each practice period should begin with a slow repetition of the idea for today, followed by looking about you and letting your glance rest on whatever happens to catch your eye, near or far, “important” or “unimportant,” “human” or “non-human.” With your eyes resting on each subject you so select, say, for example:
I do not know what this chair is for.
I do not know what this pencil is for.
I do not know what this hand is for.
Say this quite slowly, without shifting your eyes from the subject until you have completed the statement about it. Then move on to the next subject, and apply today’s idea as before.
A more sophisticated statement of this teaching of the illusory nature of everything is found in the following passage from the text, which describes the shared insanity of our special relationships – our “little, senseless substitutions”:
“Your little, senseless substitutions, touched with insanity and swirling lightly off on a mad course like feathers dancing insanely in the wind, have no substance. They fuse and merge and separate, in shifting and totally meaningless patterns that need not be judged at all. To judge them individually is pointless. Their tiny differences in form are no real differences at all. None of them matters. That they have in common and nothing else. Yet what else is necessary to make them all the same? (T-18.I.7:6-12)”
Recognizing the inherent meaninglessness of everything allows us to accept the Holy Spirit’s purpose of making room for His truth as replacement for the ego’s illusions.
We are ready now to move to the next segment of our training: understanding the relationship between our attack thoughts and our perceptions of attack.
