Lesson 3: I do not understand anything I see in this room.
The first year I started doing the workbook, I think it was Lesson 3 that made me question why I was even attempting this crazy thing. First, I have to wrap my mind around the idea that nothing in this room means anything and any meaning that something does have only exists because I gave it that meaning. By day three, I really was ready to simply fling the book across the room.
“What poppycock!” I thought. “Of course, I understand everything in this room! Well, maybe I don’t know exactly how my computer works, but I understand that it does and what its purpose and function is.”
Right there – I did it. I admitted that I didn’t understand something in the room. I don’t understand the minutia of computers and how they work. This, friends, is a miracle – a shift in perception. If I can admit that one thing that I see in this room is beyond my current understanding, then perhaps I could expand that thought and come to not understand everything else in the room.
The lesson isn’t trying to get you to be dumb about things and how they work. I certainly could study computers and then understand how they work. No, the point of the lesson, it says “is to help you clear your mind of all past association, to see things exactly as they appear to you now …”
This is a key component of the Course itself – getting you to let go of the past, since it does not exist in this moment. The past only exists in our minds when we hold preconceived notions about everything in our world. I do not understand computers and that was a choice I made in my past – to not study them. Right now, I still don’t understand computers but if I can enter a true state of bewilderment about them instead of associating them with a past that eschewed that kind of learning, perhaps I will be open to learning more about them in the future.
In other words: If I release my past prejudice about learning about computers, perhaps I could learn more about them right now.
If I release my past prejudice against certain groups of people, or against certain types of experiences, perhaps I could be willing to be more open to the world in the present moment. If I think I understand anyone based on past experience of them, I deny myself – and them – the miracle of a new perspective – and in that new understanding, a chance for love, peace, forgiveness and reconciliation.
To live in the present requires us to let go of the past – the opinions we formed, the beliefs we held, the dogmas we clung to. It is “essential,” the Course says, “that you keep a perfectly open mind, unhampered by judgment …”
That judgment from the past will keep us from fully experiencing the miracle of this moment.
Hafiz writes:
When the sun
within speaks, when love
reaches out its hand and places it upon another,
any power the stars and planets might
have upon us,
any fears
you can muster can become so
rightfully insignificant.
What one
heart can do for another heart,
is there any beauty in the world that can match this?
Brotherhood,
sisterhood, humanity becomes
the joy and the emancipation.
That emancipation is what this lesson is getting at. Until we can approach this moment without judgments formed in the past, we will never understand what one heart can do for another. Releasing our “understanding” of everything around us – our preconceived notions – makes our fears “rightfully insignificant” and opens us up to the true joy of an emancipated humanity.