lNTRODUCTION
Do you ever feel there is something wrong with the world in which we live? Do you and your friends make fun of others? Do others make fun of you? Do you feel upset frequently by parents, friends, and enemies in your school and home?
This is the way most of us view the world in which we live at least some of the time. There always seems to be people fighting with one another, we never seem to have enough of the things we all need to live, our safety is threatened by the weather, the pollution of our air, water and earth. We are threatened by each other. It is as if all sorts of unknown creatures and monsters are lurking and waiting to catch us off guard, threatening to devour us.. Yet we have a longing for peace, safety and love.
The intention behind this book is to teach us how to honestly look at how this world doesn’t work and then learn together to make it work for us all, with no one left out. Our goal becomes to experience a world characterized by well-being, abundance, safety, joy and peace.
The form of these lessons is very simple. The words are as basic as they are practical. The message is profound:
We are asleep to our own insanity.
We need to unlearn all that we have learned about being happy.
The simple path to this happiness is through learning forgiveness.
The way to learn forgiveness is through teaching forgiveness.
The best way to teach is by example.
This book is a training manual for forgiveness. You will be asked “to become like little children,” not knowing anything for sure and eager to learn with complete confidence and certainty.
Many of the teaching methods and examples used for this book come directly from the author’s experience and training as a school psychologist and his work with thousand of young people and their parents and teachers. His inspiration comes from his willingness to learn as he writes and teaches, not knowing how or what is going to come out, but sure of his purpose and intention.
The content of the lessons is modeled on the content of the lessons in the workbook of A Course in Miracles. No claim is made, however, that this material is channeled or that all the concepts are the same as those in ACIM.
The first two sections are mostly a simple walk through what I am calling the “unholy trio,” our ego/mind, our perceptions and our belief systems. Don’t hurry through the walk. Take your time to smell the flowers and also to notice the rot that exists all around them.
Lesson Three
Judgment and Understanding
It is obvious that we place value in things and find meaning in them by judging and evaluating them. Can you, on the other hand, see that we can not make judgments and evaluations about things without putting meaning into them? It’s something like the chicken and the egg dilemma. It’s hard to see which comes first.
Understanding is also connected to judgments and evaluations. My understanding is sometimes clearer when I see the meaning and value I have placed in these things. Meaning, value and understanding seem to go together. Things mean something to me when I have put value into them. I only put value into them when I have judged them. So without judgment I would not be able to see meaning in anything, and without meaning there is no understanding. All of these mental activities go together.
Judging often involves understanding things as good or bad, right or wrong. This is the way most of us think when we are making judgments. We are often upset when we have judged things in our life to be bad or wrong. It is painful for us to be upset. Therefore, when we judge things as bad and wrong our peace is gone, and we become preoccupied with fixing what appears to us to be bad and wrong. If it is something we have done or a way we are being, this also results in guilt and sadness.
This is the only way we seem to understand what our life means.. Not a very pretty picture of life, is it? Thank God, there is another way to come to finding meaning in our life. This course, I am leading you through, will teach you that other way to use your mental activities so that you do not have to use dualistic thinking, like right and wrong, good and bad, to come to meaning for your life. This may sound strange to you now, but I promise it will become clear if you are willing to live with a bit of discomfort. Not knowing and not understanding sometimes brings a great deal of uneasiness and discomfort. Don’t deny this discomfort. Just let it be. It will pass as you do the lessons faithfully.
The kind of learning about your mental activity that you will get by doing this course will bring you meaning for your life and a peace that surpasses the understanding of life based on judgmental thinking.
You will not be asked to believe anything without the experience of knowing it to be true. You are only being asked to follow the reasoning and do the exercises and processes suggested in this course. The only judgment you will be asked to make will be to examine your feelings as you go through the course. Are you feeling happier, more peaceful, and more certain of life’s purpose? Never will you be asked to blindly agree or believe what is said. Always you will be asked to check with your own feelings.
For now, I ask you to be like a true scientist and make no pre-judgments as to what your results will be. Simply follow the suggested reasoning and exercises to the best of your ability. It is your willingness to do this that will give you the results I promise.
Throughout the day say the following whenever you feel upset or unhappy:
“The pain I experience is connected to my way of judging, and my way of understanding. I am willing to have peace in my life. I am willing to see things differently.”
Stay with this lesson until you feel urged to go on to the next.
Lesson Four
Love
If things don’t have any meaning in and of themselves, how can we really understand anything? How could what has no meaning be understood?
We know that we can put meaning into things; therefore, meaning, understanding and value are possible. We also know that meaning and understanding come from the way we judge. What would happen if we no longer used our familiar way of judging? This can be a frightening thought. It seems as though all meaning would go out of our life, therefore, all reason to live would be gone.
This despair overcomes us because our identity is tied to the process we use for valuing and understanding our world. If our world is meaningless, we must be as well. Our special personality and our rugged individualism must stand alone. It must stand against this hostile and meaningless world if we are to survive. If not, then we feel we will be swallowed up by the meaningless of what is going on all about us. We frequently will fight and even die to preserve this separate and special identity. In a general sense we call this specialness our ego. It is that part of our mind that we think defines us and our relationship to the “real world.”
Do you think you understand what is meant by ego? Most people have some idea of what this term means, but nobody has a clear idea. This is because ego is a mind construct based on confusion, uncertainty and fear. Ego is a hard character to pin down. The way I am using it here is what you generally think yourself to be. It is your sense of being a separate and distinct individual. This ego is a result of a thought I have that I can exist and act as an individual thing or individual in a world separate from me.
You will discover as you go through these lessons that it is impossible to separate yourself from other things and other people in your world. We will discover that we are related to all living and non-living things in our world. We will further discover that there is a power in the universe out of which we are created. By giving up knowing what is right or wrong, good or bad we will give up our identification with this ego and allow this creative power to flow through us.
Love is the name I am giving this creative power. Here is a drawing to illustrate how this relationship to the power of love’s creative force might influence us.
Now I would like you to invent and create other ways to illustrate what I presented to you in this lesson. Share these drawings in your notebook and with others if you feel comfortable sharing. Tell us in your notebook what it is you are feeling as you do this or tell us why you do not fell comfortable sharing about the power of love
