ACIM Chapter 14. The Conditions of Learning P 3-5

ACIM Chapter 14. I. The Conditions of Learning P 3-5

I. The Conditions of Learning, P 3

3. Seeing is always outward. ²Were your thoughts wholly of you, the thought system you made would be forever dark. ³The thoughts the mind of God’s Son projects or extends have all the power that he gives to them. ⁴The thoughts he shares with God are beyond his belief, but those he made are his beliefs. ⁵And it is these, and not the truth, that he has chosen to defend and love. ⁶They will not be taken from him. ⁷But they can be given up by him, for the Source of their undoing is in him. ⁸There is nothing in the world to teach him that the logic of the world is totally insane and leads to nothing. ⁹Yet in him who made this insane logic there is One Who knows it leads to nothing, for He knows everything.

There is a difference between believing and knowing. I believe everything Jesus tells me, but I do not know everything he says. Thus, I study the Course to change my beliefs, and I practice what I learn so that it becomes what I know to be true as it becomes experientially known. Part of this practice is to pay attention to my thoughts so that I am aware when I am believing the thoughts I made up as opposed to the thoughts I think with God. As I let go of the untrue thoughts that I have believed to be true, what is actually true becomes apparent to me.

The world isn’t going to help me with this.

The world says I have a lot to worry about. It says that I don’t have enough and I am not enough. It says that guilt is real, and so is fear in all its forms. The world says that I am justified in my judgments and in my anger. If I simply accept this, my life will be a roller coaster of emotions. I will suffer. I do suffer. But not as much as I used to, and that is because I don’t believe my thoughts like I used to. And when I do believe something that is not true, I know what to do about it.

⁸That is why God placed the Holy Spirit in you, where you placed the dream.

I give the wrong-minded thought to the Holy Spirit to be corrected or removed. I absolutely know that this is what I will do, and I will accept His solution as well as I can and as quickly as I can. If I cannot accept His healing now, I know that I will get another opportunity to choose again. This is the reason I don’t worry about it if the same situation pops up again. I don’t make myself guilty for not accepting the healing. Instead, I just ask again and do my best to accept the Holy Spirit’s healing this time. I know from long practice that, at some point, the healing is accepted.

4 I. The Conditions of Learning, P 4

4. Any direction that would lead you where the Holy Spirit leads you not, goes nowhere. ²Anything you deny that He knows to be true you have denied yourself, and He must therefore teach you not to deny it. ³Undoing is indirect, as doing is. ⁴You were created only to create, neither to see nor do. ⁵These are but indirect expressions of the will to live, which has been blocked by the capricious and unholy whim of death and murder that your Father does not share with you. ⁶You have set yourself the task of sharing what cannot be shared. ⁷And while you think it possible to learn to do this, you will not believe all that is possible to learn to do.

We are Creation, an extension of God, eternal and powerful creators. But we have forgotten all of that because we chose to experience ourselves as separate and different from our Creator. We cannot know ourselves as our wish to be different, to be frail and mortal bodies, and still know ourselves as our reality, which is the Sons of God. The Holy Spirit has the task of redirecting us so that what we have done is undone.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t make this an easy task.

Even now, when I accept that I don’t remember what I am and that I do want that memory, I still balk at giving up what I made. It is total insanity. I see that as I judge someone, I only hurt myself, and yet, I do it anyway. My saving grace is that I understand that going against the Holy Spirit is going against myself. I do have grievances. I just have none I would keep. So, I generally notice these judgments pretty quickly and as quickly choose again.

⁴You were created only to create, neither to see nor do.

Yikes! I was not created to see? I’m not sure how to think of that. If he means seeing with eyes, then yes, I get it. In reality, I don’t have eyes. That would not mean that I was blind, though. Looking with eyes that do not actually exist as images that do not exist, well, that is not really seeing. I suppose you could say I am blind now. I like the world aware. Perhaps in my natural state, I am simply aware. But really, I can’t sustain a knowing of this because my mind keeps making images of what that would be like, and I am right back to ‘seeing.’ I will just take his word for this since there doesn’t seem to be anything for me to do about it other than to realize that I don’t really see now

The second part of that sentence, though…

I was not created to do, and I have always been a doer. I am not comfortable in stillness. If I find myself with five free minutes in a day, I will use those five minutes to do something. I was created to create, he says. This translates into doing in my mind and yet it must not be doing in the sense I have of it. This is the kind of thing that used to drive me to distraction about the Course. I wanted to understand, but there is much I cannot understand. I’ve since learned to be comfortable with that. I remind myself that I know all of this and will remember it when I am ready.

Jesus says that seeing and doing are indirect expressions of the will to live. We have twisted this around so much that it has made our goal impossible. How can murder and death express life? It doesn’t even make sense. I murder myself every day as I continue to judge, defend, attack, and, in other ways, be something I am not. I am practicing forgiveness for these choices, and it is working. So I am moving toward my reality even if some days it feels like I am moving at a crawl as I oppose the Holy Spirit’s guidance and healing. I am so very grateful. I am grateful to Jesus for his Course and his help. And I am grateful to myself for my willingness.

I. The Conditions of Learning, P 5

5. The Holy Spirit, therefore, must begin His teaching by showing you what you can never learn. ²His message is not indirect, but He must introduce the simple truth into a thought system which has become so twisted and so complex you cannot see that it means nothing. ³He merely looks at its foundation and dismisses it. ⁴But you who cannot undo what you have made, nor escape the heavy burden of its dullness that lies upon your mind, cannot see through it. ⁵It deceives you, because you chose to deceive yourself. ⁶Those who choose to be deceived will merely attack direct approaches, because they seem to encroach upon deception and strike at it.

The reason I still struggle at times to let go of what is clearly hurting me is that I have made a world so twisted and also complex that I am lost in it. I wonder at Jesus having extricated himself from this, and I am amazed. Even with all the Helpers provided for me, it still feels like a struggle at times. I do accept, though, that I did this to myself. We did this to ourselves. And the power that it took to do this can undo it.

⁶Those who choose to be deceived will merely attack direct approaches…

I get this. When I first started this study, I felt like my free will was being encroached upon. I resisted that. Even as it started to make sense to me, I resisted. My resistance showed up as “not understanding,” “it’s too hard,” and “I forgot.” I couldn’t even admit I was resisting. It is only in retrospect I see how enraged I was that God was trying to take my power away.

Or at least, that was how I saw it. But the Holy Spirit kept gently guiding me into the truth by approaching this transformation indirectly. How He does this becomes clear as we read the next section, and now that we know this, we will see it in His teaching from now on. Jesus will teach through contrast, showing us how we feel now and how we feel after we follow his lead. He will teach us the difference between pain and pleasure. And if we apply what willingness we have, we will begin to gladly accept the Holy Spirit’s gentle guidance.

Contemplation of P 3-5 from 2026

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