Lesson 12. I am upset because I see a meaningless world.
The importance of this idea lies in the fact that it contains a correction for a major perceptual distortion. You think that what upsets you is a frightening world, or a sad world, or a violent world, or an insane world. All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself.
These exercises are done with eyes open. Look around you, this time quite slowly. Try to pace yourself so that the slow shifting of your glance from one thing to another involves a fairly constant time interval. Do not allow the time of the shift to become markedly longer or shorter, but try, instead, to keep a measured, even tempo throughout. What you see does not matter. You teach yourself this as you give whatever your glance rests on equal attention and equal time. This is a beginning step in learning to give them all equal value.
As you look about you, say to yourself:
I think I see a fearful world, a dangerous world, a hostile world, a sad world, a wicked world, a crazy world,
and so on, using whatever descriptive terms happen to occur to you. If terms which seem positive rather than negative occur to you, include them. For example, you might think of "a good world," or "a satisfying world." If such terms occur to you, use them along with the rest. You may not yet understand why these "nice" adjectives belong in these exercises but remember that a "good world" implies a "bad" one, and a "satisfying world" implies an "unsatisfying" one. All terms which cross your mind are suitable subjects for today's exercises. Their seeming quality does not matter.
Be sure that you do not alter the time intervals between applying today's idea to what you think is pleasant and what you think is unpleasant. For the purposes of these exercises, there is no difference between them. At the end of the practice period, add:
But I am upset because I see a meaningless world.
What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth. Beneath your words is written the Word of God. The truth upsets you now, but when your words have been erased, you will see His. That is the ultimate purpose of these exercises.
Three or four times is enough for practicing the idea for today. Nor should the practice periods exceed a minute. You may find even this too long. Terminate the exercises whenever you experience a sense of strain.
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Below, is from Kenneth Wapnick's commentaries on this lesson, from "Journey Through the Workbook of A Course in Miracles," which can be purchased at the following site:??~ M. Street
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Lesson 12. "I am upset because I see a meaningless world."
*Lessons 5 and 6 stated that "I am never upset for the reason I think," and "I am upset because I see something that is not there." This lesson amplifies these ideas. Thus, "I am upset because I see a meaningless world." Jesus now explains why that statement is true:*
(1) "The importance of this idea lies in the fact that it contains a correction for a major perceptual distortion. You think that what upsets you is a frightening world, or a sad world, or a violent world, or an insane world. All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself."
*We perceive violence, hostility, insanity, and a myriad of other conditions. Jesus is not denying what we perceive. He is simply saying that what we perceive is not real. He is not saying, however, that we should deny our experiences (see, e.g., T-2.IV.3:8-11). Rather, he is helping us realize where the experiences are coming from. If I am upset, it is not because of what someone or something in the world has done to me, as we are also taught later in Lesson 31: "I am not the victim of the world I see." This is the central theme throughout A Course in Miracles: the world itself is meaningless because it comes from a meaningless thought. The meaningless thought is that I can be separate from God; in fact, not only <can> I be separate, but I <am> separate. It is meaningless because the thought is a defense against what alone has meaning: God and His unified creation. Thus, when you believe you can separate from the only meaning, everything inevitably becomes meaningless.*
(2:1-2) "These exercises are done with eyes open. Look around you, this time quite slowly."
*Jesus returns to having us focus on what we see, having already taught us there is no difference between what we see and what we think.
Note in the following the focus on all illusions being equal and thus equally illusory:*
(2:3-7) "Try to pace yourself so that the slow shifting of your glance from one thing to another involves a fairly constant time interval. Do not allow the time of the shift to become markedly longer or shorter, but try, instead, to keep a measured, even tempo throughout. What you see does not matter. You teach yourself this as you give whatever your glance rests on equal attention and equal time. This is a beginning step in learning to give them all equal value."
*In introducing Lesson 1 I briefly discussed the ego's first law of chaos -- there is a hierarchy of illusions, which means there are certain things and people that are more important than others. It will be difficult to break that strongly ingrained habit of making distinctions in practicing this idea that "I am upset because I see a meaningless world." Jesus wants us to understand that everything is equally meaningless, because it all comes from the same meaningless thought.
Everything we see in the universe of time and space, including ourselves, is nothing more or less than a fragment of the original thought we could be, and are, separate from God and on our own. Every fragment retains the characteristics of that original thought, a "tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh" (T-27.VIII.6:2). Our need is to remember to laugh at it because of its meaninglessness, not because it is funny in the usual sense of the word. We laugh with a gentle smile that says it does not mean anything because it is an impossibility. To use a familiar image, it was as if a huge pane of glass fell, shattering into billions and billions of fragments. Each fragment retains the characteristics of the original pane; each has the chemical composition of glass, for example. Each of us, as well as everything in the world, is but one of those fragments -- all meaningless because they come from a meaningless thought.
The reason I am upset, then, is that the world witnesses to the seeming fact that I am right about the world. Since I believe I exist in a world that is out there, this world reminds me of the original thought that gave rise to it, let alone to my individual existence: I destroyed Heaven and murdered God. This is extremely upsetting because I believe God will now return to punish me for what I did. This concept will be elaborated on in the next two lessons.
Again, Jesus does not ask you, as his student doing the workbook lessons, to understand the full implications of these statements. Such understanding comes from the study of the text. But he does want you to begin the practice of not taking your perceptions all that seriously.
In the next paragraph Jesus asks us to include terms in the exercise that are positive as well as negative:*
(3:1-6) "As you look about you, say to yourself:
I think I see a fearful world, a dangerous world, a hostile world, a sad world, a wicked world, a crazy world, and so on, using whatever descriptive terms happen to occur to you. If terms which seem positive rather than negative occur to you, include them. For example, you might think of "a good world," or "a satisfying world." If such terms occur to you, use them along with the rest. You may not yet understand why these "nice" adjectives belong in these exercises but remember that a "good world" implies a "bad" one, and a "satisfying world" implies an "unsatisfying" one."
*What is implied here without being specifically discussed is that contrasts and opposites root us solidly in the world of dualistic thinking. The text defines Heaven as "an awareness of perfect Oneness," in which there is no duality (T-18.VI.1:6). Thus, there is no good and evil in Heaven -- only God. Learning to recognize this is an important part of our training.*
(3:7-8) "All terms which cross your mind are suitable subjects for today's exercises. Their seeming quality does not matter."
*In other words, it does not matter whether or not the terms are important or holy; everything in the world comes from the one illusory thought; an illusion is an illusion is an illusion.*
(4) "Be sure that you do not alter the time intervals between applying today's idea to what you think is pleasant and what you think is unpleasant. For the purposes of these exercises, there is no difference between them. At the end of the practice period, add:
But I am upset because I see a meaningless world."
*This important point about there being no real distinction between pleasant and unpleasant echoes the discussion in "The Obstacles to Peace," where Jesus states twice that pleasure and pain are the same (T-19.IV-A.17:10-12; IV-B.12). This distinction holds only if there <were> a hierarchy of illusions. Slowly and inevitably we are being taught there is <not>.*
(5:1) "What is meaningless is neither good nor bad."
*When you say something is good or bad you obviously are assigning it a value. At the beginning of Chapter 24 Jesus says that "to learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold" (T-24.in.2:1). The same idea is stated here, although more simply. Having assigned a value to something, I am thereby saying it has a meaning. If it has meaning, I must believe it comes from a meaningful thought, because what I perceive outside can only come from a thought that is within.
What, then, is the "meaningful" thought? It is that distinctions are valid, duality is real, and there is a value in esteeming one thing over another. The core of that thought is that I value my individual identity over the oneness of Christ; my life and my world over Heaven. If this is so, distinctions become all important because they establish me as a dualistic being in a dualistic world. That, then, is the world I perceive and stubbornly insist is real.*
(5:2) "Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you?
*If you are affected by anything in the world, you obviously believe this is not a meaningless place. You would believe that because you think <you> are meaningful. To the ego, what is meaningful is what feeds our specialness; what is meaningless is anything irrelevant to it. Therefore, the ego tells us, we need to focus on what serves our special needs. The next lesson will explain why a meaningless world is upsetting.*
(5:3) "If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy."
*If we accepted the world as meaningless we would be saying: "My mind is a blank." That would allow the Holy Spirit's Atonement principle to shine through and have Jesus' love become our only reality. That is the truth, which would make us "indescribably happy." Since this is a self that is no longer identified with the thought system of separation and guilt, what makes us indescribably happy is finally realizing we were wrong and Jesus was right. However, as long as we identify with a separated and special self we will fear the truth that all this is a dream. Thus we are continually choosing <not> to be indescribably happy, because to cite the well-known line, we prefer to be right than happy (T-29.VII.1:9). To be sure, the thought of non-existence would not be very happy making, to say the very least. That is why Jesus continually urges us to take "little steps" (W-p1.193.13:7); otherwise our fear of being "abruptly lifted up and hurled into reality" (T-16.VI.8:1) would be to overwhelming. The happy and gentle dreams of forgiveness are the transition from our nightmare ego world to awakening in God (T-27.VII.13:4-5).*
(5:4-6) "But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth."
*Because the world is meaningless in itself I have to give it a meaning. Similarly, because the world is nothing and *I* am nothing, I have to pretend I am something. Indeed, we all think we are something -- wonderful or wretched. The ego does not care how the specialness game is played, whether we are God's gift or Satan's gift, as long as we are a special gift. The one thing we do not want is to be nothing. Near the end of "The Anti-Christ" Jesus speaks of the ego as always wanting more of something -- it does not matter whether it is more pleasure or more pain, it just wants <more> (T-29.VIII.8:6-12).
We are terrified of the possibility that we do not exist. This needs frequent repeating since it is the underlying assumption to these lessons, not to mention A Course in Miracles itself. This thought is the source of the resistance to the Course in general, and to the workbook specifically. I have to pretend I exist, and so quickly make up a thought system that I then project, thereby making up a world -- cosmically, (as we are all part of the one Son) as well as individuality. The point is that we always seek to impose meaning, because otherwise we will be confronted by the inherent meaninglessness of our thinking, not to mention our separate self. This takes place on the metaphysical level of the mind, where it is a question of <existence> or <being>, as discussed earlier. However, on the level of our personal experience, as bodies living in the world, we fear losing our problems and grievances -- all of which establish the self we believe ourselves to be, what the end of the text refers to as our face of innocence (T-31.V.1-3).
The real fear, as we shall see in the next lesson, is that if I do not put <my> meaning on the world, Jesus will put <his>. And so I have to beat him to the punch. This helps explain why being really quiet tends to make us anxious, and why we experience difficulty in meditating or praying: If we quiet our minds, Jesus will get there first -- "The memory of God comes to the quiet mind" (T-23.1.1:1) -- and if he does, our ego is out of business, as is our thought system of separation and specialness. This is why we end up, as we shall see in the next lesson, believing we are in competition with God, and also with Jesus and his course. As a result, before these ideas can penetrate our minds, giving us an opportunity to choose them, we quickly have to substitute our own. Finally, this is also why practically everyone attempts to change A Course in Miracles in some way or another -- to write a better or simpler one, for example. We are terrified at what this course really says. Thus, before we would ever let its words and thoughts affect us, we will change them to suit our own special needs.*
(5:7) "Beneath your words is written the Word of God."
*The "Word of God" in A Course in Miracles is almost always used as a synonym for the principle of the Atonement, or the Holy Spirit. It can also be understood as forgiveness, the correction for the ego's word of separation, which we chose to keep God's Word hidden.*
(5:8-9) "The truth upsets you now, but when your words have been erased, you will see His. That is the ultimate purpose of these exercises."
*Now you know why you do not want to do these exercises: if your words are erased, then the thought system -- the source of your words -- is erased as well. Jesus will expand on this in Lesson 14.
The lesson closes with the now familiar expression of Jesus' gentle understanding of our resistance to his teaching:*
(6) "Three or four times is enough for practicing the idea for today. Nor should the practice periods exceed a minute. You may find even this too long. Terminate the exercises whenever you experience a sense of strain."
*No imposition, no bullying, no guilt-inducing demands to be disciplined, let alone spiritual. Who would not have wished for teachers like this when we were growing up?*
