LESSON 3
January 3

"I do not understand anything I see..."

PRACTICE SUMMARY

Purpose: To help you clear your mind of past associations, open your mind to how things appear now and to how little you understand them.

Exercise: Twice--morning and evening, for 1 minute.

Glance easily and fairly quickly about you and apply idea indiscriminately to whatever your eyes light on. Say, for example, "I do not understand this hand." Begin near to you, then expand outward, looking side to side and even behind.

COMMENTARY

If nothing I see means anything, and I have given everything I see all the meaning that it has for me, then obviously I do not understand anything I see. The Workbook is laying the groundwork for our learning. To learn a new understanding of anything we must let go our belief that we already understand it.

I find this lesson useful in many situations. When something happens that I interpret as unpleasant or upsetting, I can realize that my judgment of "unpleasant" or my upset comes, not from the thing or person or situation, but from my imagined understanding of it. By repeating, "I do not understand anything I see," I open my mind to a new understanding from the Holy Spirit. I use variants of the idea at times, such as, "I don't know what this means" or "I have no idea what this is all about."

In the Course, the beginning of understanding is understanding that I don't understand anything.

Remember this is an exercise. Don't expect to perform it perfectly! You are practicing the realization that you don't understand, which means you are coming from a state of mind that believes it does understand. That's okay.