This is not a journey for the faint of heart. It will take patience and persistence.
The journey will introduce the journier to a whole new metaphysics - a whole new way of thinking about their life.
It will require that the journier give up their usually way of thinking about their perceptions of things in the world of the ego. It will require that we examine our projections, our interpretations, our beliefs, our intentions, and our behavior. This is not small requirement.
It helps on the journey to have an attitude of curiosity, bravery, and humor.
We will relate the workbook lessons to the theology and principles of Unitarian Universalism as appropriate and relevant.
You can follow along in the workbook section of A Course In Miracles.
Welcome fellow traveler.
Lesson # 1 Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.
Look at things and say this for a minute or two.
In everyday language, everything you see is bull shit. We make stuff up. We have expectations, requirements, generalizations formed from past experience and so our experience of the world is what the philosophers and psychologists call "constructed reality."
The first way we construct reality is by naming things. The second way is by telling stories about those things we named so that the names have meaning. What we wind up with is what Holden Caulfield called in J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher In The Rye, the "big lie."
In the introduction to the workbook exercises it says you don't have to believe the lesson, you don't have to like it, you have to agree with it, just do it. It takes a while to train the mind to think in new ways about the world we experience.
As the bumper sticker says, "Don't believe everything you think."
In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. All too often we search in the world of the ego and don't find. The Course says one of the tricks of the ego is to encourage us to search and don't find. We don't find because we are searching in the wrong place.
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