Lesson 14: God Did Not Create a Meaningless World

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 25 — "I do not know what anything is for." Marcus opens by proposing they skip straight to the reading, and Sarah collects the homework anyway — he closed yesterday's episode admitting the goals he'd be willing to read aloud were the ones he'd set aside. What he actually wrote down was four demands on his internet provider's billing department, the fourth being their complete corporate humiliation, and it was the one that occurred to him first. Then the Workbook makes its flattest claim yet: purpose is meaning, and you do not know what anything is for. Marcus grants that a pencil is for writing, and gets shown the second question sitting underneath it — not what the telephone is for, but what you want to reach the person for. Today's practice is six periods of two minutes, and the lesson chooses the objects itself: a chair, a pencil, and then your own hand.

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 24 — "I do not perceive my own best interests." Marcus kept the promise he made on air and found a room with people in it: the luggage section in the basement of a department store, where he got four periods done in a chair by the suitcases and abandoned the fifth when a sales associate asked twice whether he was all right. His finding is that thoughts of being attacked don't feel like thoughts at all — they feel like the news. Then the Workbook goes after something we defend much harder than our eyesight: the conviction that we know what we want. Marcus puts a live grievance into the exercise, expecting one simple goal, and finds a second one underneath it that cancels the first. Then he arrives at a sentence on his own, and Sarah shows him the Text says it in those words. Today's practice is five periods of two minutes — the longest this Workbook has asked for yet.

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 23 — "I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts." Sarah reports first this time, from the stoplights she named on air yesterday, and admits she lost an entire practice period to arguing with a car bumper. Marcus took the sink, as advertised — then reported himself for it, having noticed that a kitchen sink at nine at night is the one room in the building containing no bodies at all. Then the Workbook stops describing the vengeful world and names the way out: the world is an effect, and there is no point trying to change an effect. Marcus hears a clean engineering principle, follows it all the way to paragraph seven, and stops dead at the claim that attacking and being attacked are the same thing. Today's practice is five periods, about a minute each, eyes closed, in both directions.

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 22 — "What I see is a form of vengeance." Marcus starts mid-report: the dry cleaner who shrank a wool sweater three years ago beat the landlord to the front of the queue every single time, and he skipped the fifth practice period rather than say the man's name out loud again. Then the Workbook stops describing how we see and describes what we have been doing to the world — projecting our own anger onto it, then calling what comes back self-defense. Sarah lays out the three things the Text says must all be believed before anger is possible, and Marcus pushes back with a leaking pipe that is real no matter what he thinks about it. Today's practice is five times, a full minute each, eyes open and moving slowly.

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 21 — "I am determined to see things differently." Marcus's watch goes off in the middle of Sarah's opening sentence: he took yesterday's schedule home, built it out to thirty-two half-hourly alarms, kept thirty of them, and found out which half of "slowly and positively" actually costs something. Then the Workbook names the thing it has been circling for twenty lessons — anger — and refuses to grade it, telling us that a slight twinge of annoyance is a veil drawn over intense fury. Marcus runs a day by deciding which irritations are worth the energy, and this lesson takes the sorting away from him; Sarah, for her part, declines to hand you a first name to practice on. Today's practice is five periods, a full minute each, with a real name in the blank.