Sunday, January 4, 2015
Lesson 4: “These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place).
The Course is training us ultimately to not be attached to our thoughts. The previous lessons used our awareness that we actually know not what is the meaning of what we see. All of this defining is simply our old ideas of what we know. We are asked to first allow this to make sense within us that things are just our collected ideas from the past and then we make what we see. This is the first step in undoing our belief in the notion that we know what is the nature of things. Once we begin to realize that this way of defining things has no basis in truth, it’s just old labeling that we have done while having too little information.
First, we must realize that our relationship with things is based on false information as we have faulty perception and faulty interpretation of what we see. Then the second step is to let us move this process to our thoughts as well. We have to air our thoughts readily because they are the real truth of the substance upon which we live.
We need to know these thoughts are also based on false preconceived notions. And the Course teaches us to let go of those areas of automatic judgement where we think we have a correct perception but then realize it is all wrong. We have to deeply realize this is wrong view of reality. Our first task is to realize first we were in error in thinking. Then when we acknowledge our error, we can bring it to the light of God, and need to maintain it no further as it has no validity.
This lesson says, “If you train yourself to look at your thoughts, you will find that they represent such a mixture that in a sense , none of them can be called ‘good’ or ‘bad.’” We are learning to let go of our judgement. It is always wrong. We are taught in the world to give everything some degree of goodness. We end up totally in the wrong because we miss somethings or we judge things wrong. Everything seems like a mishmash of happy and sad elements. Nothing in reality is wholly one or the other.
This further confuses the issue because we feel like we must make sure of the amount of goodness that a thing contains. We end up when trying to classify things, we end up in turmoil because nothing is an easy decision. The only way to escape this dilemma of getting to the bottom of our reality accurately is to give it to God and ask God to be the judge and then arrange accordingly. We have to get out of the way to get this accomplished.
The only harmonious outcome is if we let go of our attachment to the judgement of these things. We have to let this go or there will be no happy ending for us, or happy middle or start either.