Lesson5: “I am never upset for the reason i think.” This idea is the beginning of loosening the fixed belief that the cause of any upset, any emotional upset and any degree of upset is being caused by something in the world of time and space, images and appearances. This has been the great addiction of the ego, the belief that there is an external world that is causing fear, guilt, shame, pain, and hurt. The sleeping mind has been tricked, duped into believing that the world is the cause and that the state of mind is the effect. It’s an addiction that all human beings have encountered as their time and space experience.

lesson 6: “I am upset because I see something that is not there.” Today’s Workbook Lesson is giving us the chance to unpin, to unwind from the belief in being trapped in appearances. When our very identity of Love of the Living Christ; a perfect idea in the Mind of God, has been forgotten and completely pushed out of awareness, appearances seem to have come to take the place of love and light. This condition could be called hallucination. It is like when a thirsty traveler walking through a desert, feeling scorched, hot, parched and dry may hallucinate an oasis of shade and water. The sleeping Son of God has believed himself to be bereft of his holy Father, his creator. He finds himself lost and wandering in a desert of images, a desert of perception that God did not create: a fantasy world, a fictitious, linear stream of images that have nothing to do with reality, nothing to do with eternity, divine love and happiness. And so, the first step in healing from this apparent condition of separation is to realize that all upsets experienced are coming from a perception which is not there.

Lesson 7: ” I see only the past.” Now in our Workbook Lessons, we have reached a fundamental, basic idea that Jesus tells us may be particularly difficult to believe at first. “I see only the past.” This idea will be very important in our awakening, because this idea must be first acknowledged before an experience can come that is beyond it. This idea is so important that the first six Lessons of the Workbook are all based on it. You might say it is a very fundamental step on the seeming ladder of awakening.