I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.
This is among the most important lessons in the workbook, providing us with clear statements about the nature of world, and what salvation is and what it is not. Another valuable aspect of this lesson is its simple language, which makes it even more difficult to mistake its message. This certainly does not mean, of course, that people will not try valiantly to overlook it.
The title itself is a blockbuster. The world we see is a world of death: vengeance, violence, pain, and suffering. It might also be described as a world of pleasure and happiness, but no pleasure and happiness in this world lasts. As they begin to fade, our anxiety and anger grow, our specialness feels unfulfilled, and we inevitably experience pain. Jesus is teaching us now that the way to escape from this pain is not by doing anything to the world, but by changing how we look on the world.
(1:1-3) The idea for today contains the only way out of fear that will ever succeed. Nothing else will work; everything else is meaningless. But this way cannot fail.
You do not deal with fear by overcoming it directly, or by changing anything of the world or the body. You can escape from fear only by changing its cause, which is the decision to be separate. Many of the world’s methods will work, but not all the time. In other words, the gains you may receive from following the world’s guidelines will not last – no matter how noble and ideal they might seem – because the cause of the distress is overlooked. This was Jesus’ pointed response to Helen, to which we shall return periodically, when early in the dictation she asked him to remove her fear:
“The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate…. You may still complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful…. If I intervened between your thoughts [cause] and their results [effect], I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect; the most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course. It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully enough (T-2.VI.4:1-4; VII.1:1,4-7).”
Jesus was thus appealing to the power of Helen’s mind to choose to be afraid, directing her attention to the cause of her distress, away from its effect.
(1:4-5) Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts, then, that we must work, if your perception of the world is to be changed.
This is another clear statement of cause and effect, and one that is meant literally. The cause of everything in the world is our thoughts, and the effect is everything we experience in the world. This principle, however, must be understood from the point of view of the mind, otherwise we would be tempted to believe that a particular thought of ours could have a harmful effect on something external. For instance, if you as an individual have an angry thought about someone, and then something unfortunate occurs, you could mistakenly think this lesson means you are responsible for what happened to that person. The intention here is not to induce guilt because something happens to someone with whom you are angry. Jesus is talking about a thought in the mind, which means that if the person falls off a ladder, it is to be viewed as a choice that that person made, perhaps along with you if you react to it — but not the you that you think you are.
It is essential to remember that thoughts are of the mind, not the brain. What we usually identify as our thoughts belong to the brain, which, we are told time and time again, does not truly think. Jesus is speaking to us exclusively about the mind. Remember, the mind is outside time and space, and the world of time and space emanates from the one thought of separation. Once we believe we are here, everything appears to be real and governed by laws we have established. These will always be some expression of cause and effect. For instance, I drink poison and my body experiences the effect: I become ill and may even die. Both the seeming cause – my drinking poison – and the seeming effect – my body’s illness or death – are effects of a larger cause, which is the thought that says: “I am going to prove I am right and God is wrong. I am going to prove separation is real, the body real, and that sin most definitely has an effect: my death.”
This lesson, as is obvious, does not truly discuss these principles; that is the function of the text. But its underlying teachings are certainly reflected here. Jesus is not expecting students at this point to have a thorough understanding of the text’s theoretical principles. He simply asks us to begin practicing the exercises. Consistent practice will eventually lead to an understanding of the deeper metaphysics of A Course in Miracles’ thought system. Recall that the world was made as a defense against getting in touch with the thoughts in our minds.
“It is with your thoughts, then, that we must work” is an extremely important statement. This is a course in mind training, a course in changing your mind and how you perceive. In practice, changing how you think really means changing the teacher from whom you will learn. The bottom line of A Course in Miracles is always: Do I choose my ego to teach me how I should perceive the world, or do I let Jesus or the Holy Spirit be my Teacher? My thoughts – guilt, anger, and suffering; or thoughts of peace and forgiveness – automatically follow from the teacher I have chosen. That is why it is important to understand that an integral part of the Course’s curriculum is developing a personal relationship with Jesus or the Holy Spirit. From that relationship our right-minded thoughts, and therefore our right-minded perceptions and behavior will inevitably follow.
(2) If the cause of the world you see is attack thoughts, you must learn that it is these thoughts which you do not want. There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effect will change automatically.
It is necessary first to accept the premise that the cause of the world is attack thoughts. This is true both on the larger level – that the cause of the entire physical universe is an attack thought – as well as on the personal level – that the individual world of our physical and psychological self is caused by an attack thought, which is the belief that we are separate.
Jesus is telling us that – to express it in a specific example – if you do not like a shadow on a wall, you do not approach it and try to change the shadow, ignoring the object that is casting the shadow. If you do not like what you see on the wall, change the object! To try to peel off the shadow, or modify it in some way is silly. The physical universe can be likened to a shadow, reminiscent of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which is why Jesus says in an oft-quoted line: “Trust not your good intentions. They are not enough” (T-18.IV.2:1-2). It is the well-intentioned people in the world who want to change, fix, or make it better. They may succeed up to a point, but they will ultimately fail if they ignore the world’s underlying cause of separation.
Statements such as the ones expressed here – i.e., “There is no point in trying to change the world” – have frequently been taken out of context by students of A Course in Miracles and wrongly interpreted to mean that we literally are to do nothing: They erroneously think this means that we should let rapists go free, Hitlers invade countries, the environment go to hell, pay no attention to what we put into our stomachs, etc. – because the world and body are illusory and all we need do is change our minds. This, however, is exactly the opposite of what Jesus is teaching us. Ultimately it is true that the universe is illusory and nothing here matters; but as long as we believe we are here, our bodies are symbols, and before we can let them go, we first have to change what they symbolize – from separation to joining, attack to forgiveness.
We thus return to the central point – changing our teacher. If we have chosen Jesus, he will have us act in a loving way, in forms understood by the world. Lesson 184 makes that explicit point. These passages, therefore, should not be used as an excuse for doing nothing about the world, or our or other people’s bodies. Rather, whatever we do about the world or ourselves should be done with Jesus’ guidance instead of the ego’s. As he says later on in the context of perceiving specifics to learn abstraction: “We need to see a little, that we learn a lot” (W-pI.161.4:8 ). Thus we practice on the “little” things of the body, so that we may come to learn about the magnitude of spirit.
It is highly unlikely Jesus would tell you: “Do not do anything because I will bring everything to you, and the world is an illusion.” He will not teach you that because you are still too terrified of understanding and accepting it. As long as you identify with your body (and that includes everyone who studies this course), its meaning for you has to be changed. You do not give up the body; you do not go from the nightmare of the ego to the truth of eternity. Rather, you go from the nightmare dreams of the ego to the happy dreams of the Holy Spirit:
“Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God’s Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself. So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, not to fear, the Voice that calls with love to waken him; a gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed and where his brother was his friend. God willed he waken gently and with joy, and gave him means to waken without fear (T-27.VII.13:3-5).”
This means that the body comes to serve another purpose and has a different meaning: the means for undoing all guilt and hatred of others. With this new purpose in mind, you are free to use your body lovingly, treating yourself and others more kindly. The forms do not matter; the teacher you choose does. Everyone, however, is tempted to skip steps, because the fear of looking at what it truly means to live in the ego’s world is too painful. As a result, A Course in Miracles all too often becomes a way of escaping the pain of our everyday lives, rather than the means of undoing it.
When Jesus talks about changing your thoughts, understand him to mean changing the teacher of your thoughts. Again, if you choose him as your teacher, all your thoughts, perceptions, and behavior will be loving. But be wary of the ego ploy that would have you believe you are choosing Jesus, when you are really choosing the ego itself. You can tell you have chosen the ego when you are caught in a way of thinking that causes you to look different from others, separating yourself in some way – behavior that makes you special. Anything that causes you to deny your body or to live in a way that calls attention to yourself you can bet 99.99 percent of the time is of your ego and not Jesus. The real cause you want to change is your need to prove that you are right and Jesus is wrong, which you do by establishing your personal identity. Remember, this identity is one of specialness, which is a red flag signaling you have chosen the ego as your teacher.
Another expression of the ego’s hidden agenda of specialness is the special focus students of A Course in Miracles place on the effect of the mind’s change. Indeed, very often the physical world will change as our thoughts change, but this means nothing if the world is nothing. The effect that always changes is the inevitable result of our attack thoughts: guilt, anxiety, fear, depression, disease, etc. Peace will always result when these attack thoughts are given up. To place emphasis on the form of the effect is merely to allow the ego thoughts back into our minds. We must always “be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom” (T-6.V-C).
(3:1) The world you see is a vengeful world, and everything in it is a symbol of vengeance.
These are very strong statements, and as uncompromising as any you will come across in the text. Everything in this world is a symbol of vengeance. Why? Because if you believe there is a world, you are saying God no longer exists. If God no longer exists, it is because you killed Him and perforce believe He is justified in taking vengeance on you. You block out that horrendous thought and conflict, project it, and then believe it is the world that will seek its vengeance on you. There is of course another meaning we can give to the symbol of the world – the Holy Spirit’s purpose of forgiveness – but here the focus is on the ego.
(3:2) Each of your perceptions of “external reality” is a pictorial representation of your own attack thoughts.
“External reality” is in quotes because there is no reality outside. This is similar to the idea Jesus presents early in the text: “All thinking produces form at some level” (T- 2.VI.9:14), which appears in the first paragraph of this lesson: “Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see.” By “pictorial representation” Jesus means projection, as we have already seen in this statement that cannot be quoted too often:
“It [the world] is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition (T-21.in.1:5).”
Once again, Jesus refers to the thinking occurring within the ego system, which always reflects some aspect of attack.
(3:3-4) One can well ask if this can be called seeing. Is not fantasy a better word for such a process, and hallucination a more appropriate term for the result?
Fantasy is a psychological term for thoughts that are not real, usually pertaining to bringing you something you want. This means calling upon the ego’s trusted ally: specialness. If you want to defend against your guilt, you invoke fantasies of killing someone or attaining vengeance on another; or if you feel you are in a state of lack, you indulge fantasies of pleasure, of getting what you want. Everything in this world – special hate or special love – comes from a fantasy thought. Thus the world gives me what I want: a haven in which I can hide from God. And since the world is the effect of a thought of fantasy, it exists in the realm of hallucination – the perceptual counterpart of the mind’s delusional thought system of fantasy.
(4:1) You see the world that you have made, but you do not see yourself as the image maker.
This is denial, discussed in detail later in Lesson 136, “Sickness is a defense against the truth,” which instructs us that we make up a sickness, and then forget we did so. It is another way of saying we are the dreamer of the dream, but have forgotten the dream’s source and instead believe the dream is dreaming us. This is a major theme in the text, to which we shall return. For now, note these representative statements that can serve as prelude to the more extensive discussions to come:
“This is how all illusions came about. The one who makes them does not see himself as making them, and their reality does not depend on him. Whatever cause they have is something quite apart from him, and what he sees is separate from his mind. He cannot doubt his dreams’ reality, because he does not see the part he plays in making them and making them seem real…. You are the dreamer of the world of dreams. No other cause it has, nor ever will (T-27.VII.7:6-9; 13:1- 2).”
“Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him (T-27.VIII.6:1).”
“The miracle does not awaken you, but merely shows you who the dreamer is…. He [the dreamer] did not see that he was author of the dream, and not a figure in the dream (T-28.II.4:2; 7:4).”
(4:2-3) You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause. This is what salvation means, for where is the world you see when its cause is gone?
Ultimately you cannot be saved from the world because there is no world. You are saved from your belief system that tells you there is a world. This belief system, as I have been saying, rests on the self-accusation we have killed God so we could exist in His place.
In the real world you are literally outside the dream and totally identified with the Holy Spirit’s Love. You no longer identify with the cause of the world, which is the belief in separation from God. You may appear to be in the world, as Jesus did, but your reality remains outside it, and so for you the world has disappeared.
(4:4-5) Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can light your images, and so transform them that you will love them, even though they were made of hate.
Vision is the Course’s term for right-minded or true perception, identifying with the Holy Spirit’s thought system of Atonement.
This refers back to Lesson 15, “My thoughts are images I have made,” which talked about the sparks of light that creep up around objects. I explained then that the references to light were originally meant for a friend of Helen’s and Bill’s, and not to be taken literally. They are best understood in terms of content, which means we learn to see things differently. This new way of seeing is represented by light: “Loveliness can light your images.” Everything in the world now becomes lovely in our light-filled perception, because its purpose has been changed. We shall return to the important concept of purpose.
Even though our images were made of hate – a stronger word than “attack” – their purpose is now changed. We look at them in love, despite their origin. As the text says of specialness in an important statement we have already quoted: “Such is the Holy Spirit’s kind perception of specialness; His use of what you made, to heal instead of harm” (T-25.VI.4:1). The purpose of our making the world was to protect our individuality and sinful thoughts through projection. With its purpose changed, the world becomes a classroom in which we learn there is no world by reversing the projection, bringing it back to the mind that was its source. This lovely thought frees us, as its loveliness lights up our vision and everything we see.
(4:6) For you will not be making them alone.
This is another expression of the principle that minds are joined. Jesus is not speaking of bodily joining of any kind. We “will not be making them alone” because when we choose to identify with Jesus we are making a distinct choice against separation and for unity. That is the meaning of being with Jesus. If he is the Christ because he is God’s one Son, and I join with him in a holy instant, I am the Christ, too, along with everyone else.
When I choose the unholy instant, since everyone is one with me within the ego thought system as well, I am sending out the message that we are right and God is wrong. We are right in our belief that we are separated; you are right in feeling unfairly treated, and I am right in feeling angry at you. We are thus not alone in experiencing the effects of our wrong-minded or right-minded thoughts, the effects of what we see or Christ’s vision: the mind of God’s Son is one.
This principle has nothing to do with this world or with our experience here, but only with our minds’ thoughts, of which there are two, both perfectly unified: the ego’s thought of separation that we share as one Son, and the Atonement correction for that thought, which we also share.
In the text Jesus says that vision or judgment are our choice, but not both of them (T-20.V.4:7). Vision sees us all as one, reflected in this world through sharing a common purpose. Judgment sees guilt over the sin of murdering God so we could exist; and because of this guilt we try continually to kill another, fulfilling the ego’s principle of one or the other. We thus have the power to reinforce our decision for the ego, or to remind each other there is another choice to be made.
Paragraph 5 is the principal source for the three steps of forgiveness I have taught for so many years:
(5:1-2) The idea for today introduces the thought that you are not trapped in the world you see, because its cause can be changed. This change requires, first, that the cause be identified and then let go, so that it can be replaced.
Identifying the cause is to recognize the problem is not what is in the world; my upset is not caused by what my or someone else’s body does or does not do to me. The cause rests in a decision made in my mind. That is the first step in forgiveness.
Letting go – the second step – means asking Jesus for help to look at my guilt and attack thoughts differently. I realize that as my attack on you was a made-up projection, so was my attack on myself made up, too – I remain as God created me; who I am as God’s Son has not changed. Letting go thus entails looking at my guilt with the love of Jesus beside me. And then the third step:
In the instant in which I ask Jesus for help in looking at my guilt, his shining and forgiving light causes the guilt to disappear. My responsibility is only to bring the guilt to him, the meaning of accepting the Atonement for myself (T-2.V.5:1).
To briefly summarize these steps: 1) I bring back within my mind the guilt I have projected onto you; 2) By looking with Jesus, I bring my mind’s guilt to him; in which instant, 3) the guilt is gone, for I have accepted the love and light that was already present but had been concealed beneath the darkness of my guilt, protected by my attack thoughts.
(5:3-6) The first two steps in this process require your cooperation. The final one does not. Your images have already been replaced. By taking the first two steps, you will see that this is so.
Our job, again, is simply – the reflection of the “little willingness” – to bring to Jesus our ego thoughts; those we projected out, wherein we made the world, and those we made up about ourselves.
Everything we believe in has already gone, as the passage I quoted earlier states: “This world was over long ago” (T-28.I.1:6). We just believe the world is here, which is why Jesus uses the term hallucination to describe it (T-20.VIII.7-8). We come to realize the truth of the Atonement principle by changing our minds about what we were so sure was right: there is an external world that victimizes us and others. Moreover, we unconsciously believe this hostile world is a defense against an inner world of guilt that is even more painful. We were wrong about the world outside and the world inside.
(6:1-2) Besides using it throughout the day as the need arises, five practice periods are required in applying today’s idea. As you look about you, repeat the idea slowly to yourself first, and then close your eyes and devote about a minute to searching your mind for as many attack thoughts as occur to you.
As I have already discussed, “searching your mind” is a prominent theme in A Course in Miracles because our attack thoughts are hidden. Part of the training we undergo as students of the workbook and of the Course itself is to allow ourselves to see the heretofore concealed attack thoughts in our minds.
(6:3-5) As each one crosses your mind say:
I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts about ___________.
Hold each attack thought in mind as you say this, and then dismiss that thought and go on to the next.
These instructions highlight the important process of bringing the darkness of our illusions to the light of truth. These lessons are not meant to be affirmations that simply state this truth. Rather, they are meant to represent the truth, to which we bring our thoughts of attack. Bringing light to illusion merely strengthens the illusion. On the other hand, bringing illusions to the light is what shines them away.
(7) In the practice periods, be sure to include both your thoughts of attacking and of being attacked. Their effects are exactly the same because they are exactly the same. You do not recognize this as yet, and you are asked at this time only to treat them as the same in today’s practice periods. We are still at the stage of identifying the cause of the world you see. When you finally learn that thoughts of attack and of being attacked are not different, you will be ready to let the cause go.
There is no difference between being a victim or a victimizer. Attack is attack is attack. Jesus reiterates that he does not expect us to understand this, let alone identify with, or even believe in it, but he is asking us to practice it, and he tells us precisely how to do so.
As we learn there is no difference between self-attack (guilt) and attack, we realize that being a victim is the most vicious form of attack possible. If we see ourselves as victims, it is clear that someone else will pay the price of punishment for our sin. It is this victimized suffering that points the accusing finger at another (see, e.g., T-27.I.1-4). Giving up our investment in seeing ourselves as victims is the hardest illusion of all to lose; our very existence is based on the idea that we are the victims: We did not choose to come into this world – it was our parents who brought us here; we did not choose to have our bodies, personalities, or problems – it was our genes or environment that were the determining factors. So we believe.
It is very difficult to accept that seeing yourself at the mercy of forces beyond your control is an attack. Yet this is the point of the lesson. Again, Jesus is not asking us to accept it just yet, but he is asking that we hear his words and try to understand them, and thus include thoughts of victimization in our practice periods. Needless to say, we are still in the early stages of our mind training.
