Sean Reagan

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].

One can understand Lesson Four of A Course in Miracles as an introductory step to several sustained practices that will – in addition to being the subject of future daily lessons – become essential to our daily practice as course students.

Those principles are:

a) Learning how to separate the meaningless from the meaningful (W-pI.4.3:2);

b) Learning to see the meaningless as external and the meaningful as internal (W-pI.4.3:3); and

c) Learning to recognize what is the same and what is different (W-pI.4.3:4).

The first three lessons direct our attention to a world that is apparently outside of us. Collectively, they challenge our certainty about what we perceive externally, what its meaning is, and the nature and depth of our understanding.

In a sense, they precipitate an existential crisis with respect to our experience of being living human beings in a world.

Lesson four directs our attention to what is apparently inside of us: our thoughts.

The usual admonitions about judgment obtain: we aren’t supposed to judge a given thought as being better than or worse than another. For the purposes of learning, they are all equal. But – in keeping with the overarching principles listed above – the workbook extends this meaning of “equality.”

You will find, if you train yourself to look at your thoughts, that they represent such a mixture that, in a sense, none of them can be called “good” or “bad.” This is why they do not mean anything (W-pI.4.1:6-7).

Thus, our judgment with respect to our thinking is as useless as it is with respect to understanding and perceiving an external world.

In this sense, apparent external objects and our thoughts are the same.

A note later in the lesson lesson suggests that what we consider our thoughts – the very subject of the lesson – are actually not our real thoughts at all (W-4.2:3). If the first three lessons set the stage for the undoing of reliance on our physical senses as producing anything real or true, then ACIM Lesson Four opens the door to the dismantling our current thought system, that seeming stream of words and images passing by the other side of our eyes.

Small wonder the workbook characterizes this as a “major exercise,” one we will repeat over and over, albeit in different form (W-pI.4.3:1).

For some of us, this is a disorienting exercise – even after we’ve done it a few times. I think this happens because it is actually easier to contemplate the tenuous nature of the external world than that of the internal.

That is, it’s easier to question objects than the observer observing them. As Descartes argued long ago – cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. His logic (and the duality it implies) has haunted our western tradition for centuries; this lesson testifies to that.

Still, at least implicitly, the distinction of Descartes makes sense to us. The observer – the narrative I – the interior self watching and judging and directing our living feels so intimate and real that we often don’t even notice it, let alone raise it to inquiry.

Lesson four invites us to do exactly that: notice its function and question its veracity.

This is consistent with characterizing A Course in Miracles as a course in mind training (T-1.VII.4:1). Its objective is to enable us to better relate to our thoughts – to slow and redirect their aimless wandering, to quiet their incessant chatter, to minimize their constant caroms and collisions. In doing so, our experience of a discrete self dissolves, taking with it the illusion of an external objective world.

Taken together, our present thoughts obscure our real thoughts which, the course points out, are those that we think with God (e.g., W-pI.45.2:5). Thus, our remembrance of Heaven is contingent on our willingness and ability to bring the interior chaos of our thinking to light which – by revealing its disorder – allows for stillness and order.

We do not undo our thoughts, but we do consent to their undoing. Lesson 4 is the first step in that offer of consent, a process that feels, appears and unfolds differently for all students.

As I sometimes point out, this lesson exposes a cherished idol for me – my thinking. Language and ideas are dear to me; I did not (and sometimes still do not) easily subject them to the light of love. The first time I heard a Zen teacher say one’s thoughts were unimportant and should be allowed to drift through mind like passing clouds I felt pity. If only Roshi were familiar with the profound and awesome thoughts jangling in *my brain . . .

I had a lot to learn. And I have given good teachers with whom to learn it, thank Christ.

Although the form of application has shifted through the years, I tend to apply this lesson frequently through the day. Indeed, it almost happens on its own, an aspect of the epistemic humility that has become so necessary to my practice.

If you’re new to the lessons, that level of repetition is probably inadvisable. Indeed, we are cautioned against over-indulging it, lest we end up “pointlessly preoccupied” (W-pI.4.5:4). In time you’ll find your own sweet spots, the lessons that are integral to your learning, and the natural way that occur for you.

Yet I do think it’s okay to take any lesson straight to the edge of our comfort zone. Doing so can keep us in a state of readiness, a state of slight disorientation which can be helpful because it allows a fundamental reorganization and clarification to more efficiently take place.

The real work is interior and we do not do it. Yet we can manifest a willingness that it be done, and this willingness is often an effective and pragmatic trigger.

Note, too, that this lesson helpfully calls to mind an early definition of miracles.

A miracle is a correction introduced into false thinking by [Jesus]. It acts as a catalyst, breaking up erroneous perception and reorganizing it properly. This places you under the Atonement principle, where perception is healed (T-1.I.37:1-3).

Indeed, until this reorganization has taken place, “knowledge of the divine order” remains impossible (T-1.I.37:4).

Lesson 4 is an opportunity to part the heavy curtains that we drew shut to impose against the light of God and love. That light – even the faintest ray of it – acts as an antidote to our habitual confused and irrational thinking.

The resultant changes – unfamiliar, awkward, even frightening shifts in thinking – are what we really want. They presage remembrance of our union with God.

←Lesson 3
Lesson 5 →

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I do not understand anything I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place].

The third lesson of A Course in Miracles directly addresses our misplaced confidence in our perception and cognition. We intuitively accept as real the world our senses reveal. Here, the course states clearly that our intuition in this regard is misguided.

Thus, it is an invitation to look not at our so-called understanding but at our confusion (which so often masquerades as understanding or comprehension).

Lesson three threads neatly back through the previous two lessons, yoking them in a pedagogical triumvirate that aims to undo our reliance on the senses (which, as we will see, includes those ideas that arise so emphatically and persuasively in our thinking).

We can look at this process as undoing the ego. First, we are taught that the world we perceive is meaningless. Then we learn that to the extent we perceive meaning in the external world, it’s only the meaning that we have given it.

And now we’re being told that we don’t have the first clue about what we are perceiving. If lesson two nods at the creative potential of mind (which it does), then this lesson states without qualification that we are all but certain to misuse that power based on our inability to truly comprehend it.

Together, the first three lessons are a call for humility. We don’t know what’s going on, much less how to make sense of it. Any “healing” or “clarity” we might perceive is more likely than not an error. It behooves us to avoid rushing to conclusions and judgments.

This humility becomes the foundation of forgiveness, which is so central to the function of A Course in Miracles. More to the point, this humility is what enables us to accept a teacher or helper who is not our own self, as we understand that self.

That is, when we don’t know, and we know that we don’t know, and we accept our not knowing, then we are less likely to resist the one who comes along and says “I can help. Here’s what we’ll do.”

This helper, in ACIM terms, is the Holy Spirit – that part of our mind that recalls its unfractured, uncontaminated oneness with God, while simultaneously holding in awareness the confused and painful division that made an apparent separate self at war with God and Love.

But note that at this early juncture of the ACIM workbook, we aren’t actually being called to study or partake of the metaphysics or mythos of the course. We aren’t being asked to indulge in complex theological ruminations.

Rather, we are simply being asked to give attention to our living – right here, right now – and to hopefully notice the way it is not as coherent as we tend to believe. It is an invitation to go slowly and to keep our practice simple.

The temptation is to go quickly through these early lessons. I think doing so can actually slow our learning. These early lessons are an essential foundation in terms of creating the willingness and openness to the radical healing offered by A Course in Miracles.

It is relatively easy to say that we don’t understand anything that we see. It is relatively easy to concede briefly that our perception of the world may be askew.

But to truly integrate that confusion – to really accept it – is difficult, if not terrifying. And yet, unless we are truly persuaded that we are both deeply lost and confused and helpless in undoing that condition, then we aren’t going to fully avail ourselves of the help the course offers us.

In a sense, then, lesson 3 of A Course in Miracles is an admission of powerlessness. Concurrent with that admission is a declaration of need – if we are going to renounce the ego and remember that we are one with God, then we are going to have to have some nontrivial degree of help.

And help comes when we acknowledge our need for it.

Thus, lesson three is really our first adventure in forgiveness. From this base we will start to venture out into relationships with people and places, idols both spiritual and otherwise, and a host of related dualistic thought patterns.

Each of these reflects the ego’s death-grip on our thinking, which nearly always arises as certainty that we are right. Our study and practice of A Course in Miracles enables us to release these unhelpful certainties and the internal (and external too) chaos that arises from the confusion they beget.

It is not unlike clouds parting or a mist being gently burned away by the sun appearing over distant hills. The premise of healing is the insight that that we are not healers but that a healer attends us, when we are ready to be healed. Our readiness brings forth both healer and healing.

It begins with the humility that naturally arises when we see clearly and accept fully that we do not know. We can be grateful for this lesson and the relief it offers. We can – literally now – resign as our teacher and give ourselves wholly to the One who restores us to our Home in Love.

← Lesson 2
Lesson 4 →

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I have given everything I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] all the meaning that it has for me.

A Course in Miracles Daily Lesson Two is an extension of Lesson One. The first teaches us that nothing we perceive means anything; this, the second, allows that while what we perceive might appear to have meaning, that apparent meaning is simply what we gave it.

You might think of this lesson as a response to an objection posed to the first lesson: that dog (or friend or book or painting) sure does seem to mean something. That is, it’s one thing to say a window or a pencil is meaningless. It’s another altogether to say that of a beloved pet or person.

Okay, okay, allows the course. There’s meaning but it’s not inherent. It’s what you project. You put it there; not God.

Thus, this lesson introduces us to the critical ACIM idea that projection makes perception (T-21.In.1:1). We look inside, determine what kind of world we want, and then project that world outside. In that sense, we truly are authors – albeit confused and ineffective ones.

As the lessons progress, we begin to redefine this authorship. We expand our capacity to accept God’s vision in place of our skewed and crazy own. But at this early juncture in the process, the course is simply asking us to consider that the “meaning” we see anywhere is our own doing. We don’t have to fix it or judge it. We don’t have to stop doing it. We just have to recognize it.

I think this lesson allows us to think creatively about two principles that will become increasingly important over the course of our study of A Course in Miracles.

First, it allows us to give attention to the fact that the world that we bring forth is simply “a” world – one that is particular to us and to our structure, but not true in any absolute sense.

Reflect on this for a moment. Imagine sitting in a field. Your dog is beside you. Butterflies float over the goldenrod. In the back of your mind you’re worried about ticks. They love fields like this.

The field that you perceive – and the world that contains it – is emphatically not the field or world that your dog perceives. Your dog sees, hears and smells and thus brings forth an altogether different space. It’s mostly gray; it’s way more aromatic than yours. It’s unaware of ticks. Or butterflies. It doesn’t even have a word for tick. Or butterfly.

And the butterflies bring forth yet another world – one that is differently colored than yours; with more and varied surfaces. And the ticks bring forth a different world too – one that is dark and soundless and comprised of basically a single odor – butyric acid. Blood doesn’t even have a taste to them.

It’s tempting to say that the various animals are just perceiving variations on your world – which is the real world. Of course it’s a field; of course those are butterflies. But it is far more accurate to say that you and those animals bring forth different worlds altogether, and that other animals and beings – sunflowers, earthworms, crickets and streams – bring forth radically different worlds, some of which don’t even contain humans. Do you really think a neutrino is aware of people?

Given this, the ground for arguing that our world is the world – or even an approximation of the world – is thin indeed.

Indeed, even to use language like “in this room, [on this street, from this window, in this place]” (W-pI.2), admits to the underlying chauvinism. No tick would say that. Nor would any dog. Nor would a spider from Mars.

The body’s senses and intelligence bring something forth – “a” world – but it’s relatively to see that this is a far cry from reality or truth. It’s more like a dream that fits the character (who is also a dream, by the way).

How sure are you there is a world – let alone one that means anything?

If you let it, if you give it the space and attention, Lesson Two – in conjunction with Lesson One – will provoke a full-on existential crisis for you.

The second aspect of this lesson that bears reflection is asking where the meaning we give comes from? Who or what gave it to us? We say our dog is special, and that we’d die to protect our daughter, and that car’s political bumper sticker is offensive, and the weather sucks, and . . .

On and on we go, right? How does that happen? How do simple perceptions end up being so significant? If that butterfly is just a pattern of colors in awareness, why does it have a name? Why do I love its yellow so? Why did Emily Dickinson put it in a poem?

That is to say, how do we end up being capable of projecting in the first place? What are we exactly that we should be capable of doing this? What purpose does it serve?

This lesson does not sketch an answer (though taken together the Text and Workbook do more than just sketch an answer), but I’d like to offer some thoughts. Projection is basically misapplied creation. That is, we have the ability to bring forth (extend) creative and life-giving love and – because we are confused about what we are – instead bring forth a sterile and twisted form of love, which might better be called guilt and fear. Or hate even.

Thus, the meaning we give reflects a poor and dysfunctional imitation of the meaning God gives, which extends through us by including us as God’s meaning. If you love your spouse dearly, you are not called on to reject that love or judge yourself a spiritual failure for experiencing it.

Rather, you are invited to see it as a dim and poor beginning on an infinitely vaster love that will exclude no body and no thing, a love that will encompass you by teaching you that it is you.

Thus, don’t get hung up on the meaning you’re putting on the world. Don’t even get hung up on the world. Let it be. Notice it being what and how and the way it is, and notice your noticing. As always, it is our showing up in a willing posture – ready to learn, ready to be taught – that matters.

Finally, Lesson Two of A Course in Miracles is an invitation to take responsibility for our perception. This is hard! We might not mind being responsible for moonlight glistening on new-fallen snow. Or chickadees preening in lilac bushes. But suffering children in war-torn Syria? Homeless folks freezing to death?

That’s a lot harder. I’d rather not face that.

A Course in Miracles recognizes our reluctance in this regard. The lesson acknowledges that we will be tempted to discriminate (to welcome the snowy field but look away from the homeless man) but specifically asks us to “not concentrate on anything in particular and do not attempt to include everything you see in a given area” (W-pI.2.1:6).

Don’t be stressed. Do what you can. You aren’t doing it alone.

Whatever we encounter today – apparently good and apparently bad – is meaningless but for the meaning that we give it. With the first lesson, our inclination is to keep our special loves at bay – we exclude our kids or spouses, say, from meaninglessness. With this lesson, our inclination is to do the opposite. We don’t want to be responsible for what’s ugly, broken, cruel, dysfunctional, et cetera. We want to exclude that material.

And over and over – here and in the text – the course reminds us that the external only looks different. In fact, it’s all the same. The apparent competing values and the range of preferences are not the point. The abiding equality – the sameness – is.

All Lesson Two asks is that we take notice of what’s going on. We aren’t supposed to explain anything, fix anything, or render judgment for or against anything. We don’t even have to understand anything. We simply have to allow for the possibility that all meaning – all meaning – is of our own making. Undoing is the work of future lessons.

For now we notice. And we take heart. We always take heart. We are not going anywhere but home, and we are not going alone but together, which is our home.

← Lesson 1
Lesson 3 →

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Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.

Although it is not possible to make a mistake, it is also possible to make a more or less helpful beginning, and so the first lesson of A Course in Miracles deserves our attention. We can choose to see ACIM Lesson one in this way, and we can see what happens when we do.

You and I have the structure of meaning-making beings. We communicate through language and order our experience in ways that we find helpful. This is a house, this is a dog, this is a walking trail . . .

As we name our world, we take possession of it. It is not just a house but my house. It is not a dog, but my dog, or my neighbor’s dog. It is a good walking trail that I walked as a child with my father as we hunted . . . And so forth.

It is helpful to see the way in which this meaning-making happens. It arises on its own, as a function of our structure, and most of the time we are not even aware of it. As you give attention to the sentences I write, you are probably not reflecting on the history of furniture-making even though that is informing your present experience just as this sentence is.

This is the space in which ACIM daily lesson 1 meets us: as meaning-making beings who are largely unaware of meaning-making. We take it for granted; we don’t question either the process or the result. Of course that’s a house and of course it is my house. Intention, choice, decision, alternative . . . none of that enters.

And A Course in Miracles comes along and says that none of what we see means anything.

I want to point out two aspects of that teaching that strike me as radical and necessary, and thus helpful (and thus loving).

First is the lesson’s broad applicability (a function of its specificity).

Second is its unqualified insistence not that we are getting meaning wrong but rather that there is no meaning to be gotten. Right and wrong don’t enter into it.

The first aspect is a bit easier to take, at least initially. The lesson invites us to exclude nothing from its application – thus, a bedpost is as useful for teaching purposes as our spouse is. Or our child.

But if we are being honest, that is a dramatic and possibly even offensive statement. Is the course really and truly implying that our beloved is tantamount to a piece of furniture?

Actually, the course isn’t saying that. In this lesson, it’s simply saying that we can’t exclude anything from our experience of meaning-making. Whatever we notice is utterly equal in terms of its meaninglessness. It’s not that our spouse is as insignificant as a scratched up bed post; it’s that neither spouse nor bed post has any meaning in the first place.

Value judgments rest on meaning. “Spouse” means something that “bed post” does not; thus we value it differently. Given meaning, that value judgment makes sense. But the course is asking us here to look into meaning itself, not the judgments that arise from them.

Thus, we include everything that appears, without exception.

As I pointed out, our difficulty with applying the lesson to everything we see rests on our belief that somethings are more valuable than others, which in turn rests on the meaning we give them. Most of us can conceive of a shift in meaning: with respect to spouses, divorce rates attest to this! But meaninglessness is another leap, one that we actively resist.

Thus, A Course in Miracles is not inviting or preparing us to simply shift the meanings we’ve assigned to our various perceptions. We’re not swapping out “good” for “bad.” Rather, the course is brushing them all aside; they have no meaning. Not a single of them has any meaning.

And for beings whose living is predicated on meaning that is . . . disconcerting at best. For most of us it’s a full-on existential crisis.

That is why I think a lot of us go too quickly with this lesson. A lot of us overlook its subtle but utterly unconditional dressing down of how we live. If everything is meaningless . . . what then? How do we live? What are we to do? We don’t want to consider that possibility, much less find out what it actually feels like in our day-to-day living. It’s easier to intellectualize it. Or only apply it to things we don’t care about, like spiders and bed posts and fallen leaves.

Lifetimes pass in such fear-based study, in such half-hearted measures.

Each lesson of A Course in Miracles has the potential to undo the entirety of our belief system and reveal the love that is our actual inheritance and essence. Depending on our willingness and vigilance, any one lesson can show us the face of God which – with all due respect to the authors of Exodus – is life, is how we live.

But of course, I am getting ahead of myself here, and we are getting ahead of our learning if we try to do more with a single lesson than what appears to us in a given moment.

My suggestion is to consider and practice the first lesson of A Course in Miracles as a radical beginning. It addresses the very heart of our living, the very core of our belief system, and it does so in an unconditional and non-dramatic way, as befits the course.

The opportunity in this lesson is to begin to apply forgiveness in specific ways. The text is given to big ideas – forgiveness, oneness with God, the undoing of separation. But the lessons are given to specificity. They meet us where we are.

Our calling as students of A Course in Miracles is to forgive. We practice forgiveness in specific and meaningful ways. We have to do this – it is literally how the world appears to us. It is not especially difficult to say the whole world is an illusion; that’s just an opinion. But to say that our beloved cat or spouse is an illusion? That’s exponentially harder because it brings us closer to the problem: our propensity to to make meaning and then invest in it.

So lesson one – again, without making a big deal about it – is actually training us for that deep-rooted experience of forgiveness. We’re going to take a big abstract idea – illusion, say – and we’re going to apply to the specific details of our lives, even those that we’d very much prefer to exclude.

Don’t freak out about that! Noticing what we want to exclude from our practice is a gift. It’s a clue pointing out our special relationships, whether they’re with pets, people, objects or ideologies. And those relationships are special forgiveness opportunities. In them lies our apparent separation from God and so in them is our unity with God. The problem and the solution go hand in hand.

The course is always pointing in the direction of healing, even when the experience is unsettling or unclear.

ACIM Lesson one is not taxing in terms of application. A minute at the beginning of the day; a minute at the end. As our experience of being students deepens, it can be brought into application throughout the day. It is a bedrock of A Course in Miracles – this world brought forth by our perception does not mean anything. It is a dream, an illusion drafted by a fragmented mind that cannot bear its proximity and likeness to God.

We don’t have to get this lesson all at once. Indeed, for most of us, we can’t. Rather, we take it as far as we can. We give attention to as much of the darkness as we can bear. Our little willingness is what matters. We just have to heft the lamp a little – the light will do the rest. Lesson one is the beginning of the end of fear.

Lesson 2→

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