 Today, we continue on with the last section of Chapter 1, Distortions of Miracle Impulses. Your distorted perceptions produce a dense cover over miracle impulses, making it hard for them to reach your own awareness. The confusion of miracle impulses with physical impulses is a major perceptual distortion. Miracle impulses are misdirected miracle impulses. All real pleasure comes from doing God's will. This is because not doing it is a denial of self. Denial of self results in illusions, while correction of the error brings release from it. Do not deceive yourself into believing that you can relate in peace to God or to your brothers with anything external. Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not forget this. The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another because vision is still so dim. You can use your body best to help you enlarge your perception so you can achieve real vision, of which the physical eye is incapable. Everything to do this is the body's only true usefulness. Fantasy is a distorted form of vision. Fantasies of any kind are distortions because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Actions that stem from distortions are literally the reactions of those who know not what they do. Fantasy is an attempt to control reality according to false needs. Twist reality in any way and you are perceiving destructively. Fantasies are a means of making false associations and attempting to obtain pleasure from them. But although you can perceive false associations, you can never make them real except to yourself. You believe in what you make. If you offer miracles, you will be equally strong in your belief in them. The strength of your conviction will then sustain the belief of the miracle receiver. Reality is, quote, lost through usurpation, which produces tyranny. As long as a single, quote, slave remains to walk the earth, your release is not complete. Great restoration of the sunship is the only goal of the miracle minded. This is a course in mind training. All learning involves attention and study at some level. Some of the later parts of the course rest too heavily on these earlier sections not to require their careful study. You will also need them for preparation. Without this, you may become much too fearful of what is to come to make constructive use of it. However, as you study these earlier sections, you will begin to see some of the implications that will be amplified later on. A solid foundation is necessary because of the confusion between fear and awe to which I have already referred and which is often made. I have said that awe is inappropriate in connection with the sons of God because you should not experience awe in the presence of your equals. However, it was also emphasized that awe is proper in the presence of your Creator. I have been careful to clarify my role in the atonement without either over or understating it. I am also trying to do the same with yours. I have stressed that awe is not an appropriate reaction to me because of our inherent equality. Some of the later steps in this course, however, involve a more direct approach to God Himself. It would be unwise to start on these steps without careful preparation or awe will be confused with fear and the experience will be more traumatic than beatific. Healing is of God in the end. The means are being carefully explained to you. Education may occasionally reveal the end to you, but to reach it, the means are needed. And from the workbook for teachers, lesson number 6, I am upset because I see something that is not there. The exercises with this idea are very similar to the preceding ones. Again, it is necessary to name both the form of the upset, anger, fear, worry, depression, and so on, and the perceived source very specifically for any application of the idea. For example, I am angry at blank because I see something that is not there. I am worried about blank because I see something that is not there. Today's idea is useful for application to anything that seems to upset you and can profitably be used throughout the day for that purpose. However, the three or four practice periods which are required should be preceded by a minute or so of mind searching, as before, and the application of the idea to each upsetting thought uncovered in the search. Again, if you resist applying the idea to some upsetting thoughts more than to others, remind yourself of the two cautions stated in the previous lesson. There are no small upsets. They are all equally disturbing to my peace of mind, and I cannot keep this form of upset and let the others go. For the purposes of these exercises, then, I will regard them all as the same. 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, has been completely pushed out of awareness, and now appearances seem to have come to take the place of love and light. This condition could be called hallucination, just like a dry and thirsty traveler walking through a desert feeling scorched and hot and 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 holy creator, and now 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, all upsets experienced, are coming because there is a perception and that perception is not there, and the ego may ask, but why is it there? But remember the ego is the denial of God, the denial of love, the denial of eternity. The ego is a death wish, and if you give your mind to a death wish, if you give your attention to a death wish, your focus, what else could you expect but a hallucination? Death and hallucination go together, life, eternal life and happiness go together. In this world we get apples from apple trees and oranges from orange trees and grapes from grape vines. Why would it be possible to get perception, temporary fleeting images from an eternal creator? God has absolutely nothing to do with the perceptual world and God is reality. And so hallucinations cannot exist, cannot have reality. You don't get images from something that's abstract and eternal. You don't get a linear stream of symbols on a timeline from that which has no beginning and no end, that which is infinite. Now earlier in the text we were talking about distorted miracle impulses, misdirected miracle impulses. What is a miracle impulse but a call to remember God, to forgive the world and accept the truth of abstract reality, to forget the images, to release the image maker and accept reality exactly as it is. There are some new age teachings that teach you can create your own reality and there are some that will say a course in miracles is simply a new age teaching. But I tell you this, Jesus in the course is teaching the exact opposite of you create your own reality. Jesus is teaching us that God is the creator of reality and even as a child of God you can only accept reality exactly as it is. You can accept reality and he gives us the means to accept reality. He says you must accept the atonement for the error of ego, accept the correction for the belief in separation, accept. So this lesson I am upset because I see something that is not there, gives a hint of going way, way beyond the law of attraction, way beyond the belief in manifestation. It's being humble, humble enough in your mind to begin to see that it's only an upset when because I believe that there's something that's not there. Because I'm seeing, perceiving something that's not there. You might rephrase the lesson is I'm upset because I seem to be hallucinating and the only way that you can be open to another way of seeing Christ vision, light, an experience of vision that is not involving the body, the body's eyes, a vision that does not involve perception, revelation, the great race, knowledge, reality. I must first be open to the idea that what I seem to see, what I seem to perceive through consciousness and the five senses is actually not there and it's not there because God didn't create it. So the text said we may get glimpses of the end, which Jesus calls revelation, but we must take every small step that is asked of us, we must progressively prepare our mind for the direct approach to God that is coming in these later workbook lessons. Because without this attention, this care, this willingness to follow every step, then the remembrance of God will still seem frightening. It will still seem fearful. It will generate fear instead of the awe that is the appropriate experience with regard to the Creator. The Bible is very famous for saying, fear God and keep His commandments and I will simply reinterpret that right now as be an awe of God the Creator and come to know this awe by forgiving the world, forgiving the ego, forgiving the belief that one could ever be separate from a loving God and loving Creator. Today we are happy to behold and acknowledge first that there seems to be a hallucination in front of us and that I am never upset because of what seems to be the hallucination. Simply stated, I am upset because I see something that is not there.