 Today, we continue on with the text of A Course in Miracles, followed by the workbook Lesson No. 3 and commentary. The Escape from Darkness The escape from darkness involves two stages. First, the recognition that darkness cannot hide. This step usually entails fear. Second, the recognition that there is nothing you want to hide even if you could. This step brings escape from fear. When you have become willing to hide nothing, you will not only be willing to enter into communion, but will also understand peace and joy. Holiness can never be really hidden in darkness, but you can deceive yourself about it. This deception makes you fearful because you realize in your heart it is deception, and you exert enormous efforts to establish its reality. The miracle sets reality where it belongs. Reality belongs only to spirit, and the miracle acknowledges only truth. It thus dispels illusions about yourself and puts you in communion with yourself and God. The miracle joins in the atonement by placing the mind in the service of the Holy Spirit. This establishes the proper function of the mind and corrects its errors, which are merely lacks of love. Your mind can be possessed by illusions, but spirit is eternally free. If a mind perceives without love, it perceives an empty shell and is unaware of the spirit within. But the atonement restores spirit to its proper place. The mind that serves spirit is invulnerable. Darkness is lack of sight as sin is lack of love. It has no unique properties of its own. It is an example of the scarcity belief from which only error can proceed. Truth is always abundant. Those who perceive and acknowledge that they have everything have no needs of any kind. The purpose of the atonement is to restore everything to you, or rather to restore it to your awareness. You were given everything when you were created, just as everyone was. The emptiness engendered by fear must be replaced by forgiveness. That is what the Bible means by there is no death, and why I could demonstrate that death does not exist. I came to fulfill the law by reinterpreting it. The law itself, if properly understood, offers only protection. It is those who have not yet changed their minds who brought the Hellfire concept into it. I assure you that I will witness for anyone who lets me, and to whatever extent he permits it. Your witnessing demonstrates your belief and thus strengthens it. Those who witness for me are expressing, through their miracles, that they have abandoned the belief in deprivation in favor of the abundance they have learned belongs to them. And now from the workbook. Lesson 3. I do not understand anything I see in this room on this street, from this window in this place. Apply this idea in the same way as the previous ones, without making distinctions of any kind. Whatever you see becomes a proper subject for applying the idea. Be sure that you do not question the suitability of anything for application of the idea. These are not exercises in judgment. Anything is suitable if you see it. Some of the things you see may have emotionally charged meaning for you. Try to lay such feelings aside and merely use these things exactly as you would anything else. The point of the exercises is to help you clear your mind of all past associations, to see things exactly as they appear to you now. And to realize how little you really understand about them. It is therefore essential that you keep a perfectly open mind, unhampered by judgment, in selecting the things to which the idea for the day is to be applied. For this purpose, one thing is like another. Equally suitable and therefore equally useful. I do not understand anything I see. This is the great emptying of the mind that is required for healing to occur. As we practiced yesterday, all the meaning of all the images, of all the appearances, is given solely by the ego, which generated a world of opposites, a world of multiplicity, a world of many images that each seems to have an existence in and of itself as a separate object. The mind needs to heal and to know the meaning of love, to know itself as love, a creation of divine love. And in order to heal, I must begin to be open to the idea that I do not understand anything I perceive. I cannot be open to a new perception of everything I perceive, unless I am willing to let go of all past associations. As the exercise said, it's designed to help clear the mind of all past associations, the basic building blocks of this illusory world. And this is why it's so important to be all-inclusive as you glance around at the world, opening wide, letting go of all understandings that weren't really understandings at all. They were just past associations. They were actually blocks to Christ's vision. Now the ego may say that this lesson seems to be pointing to gullibility, like if you truly release everything that you seem to understand about this world of time and space, if you release this linear perception that you would be gullible and therefore vulnerable, it is actually releasing these false meanings that brings the mind back to its true state of peace and invulnerability, strength, certainty. This is very precious because all these false associations from the past have never brought a feeling of peace or strength or stability, except you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And the emphasis of this teaching from Jesus, from the Bible, is that little children, infants, are completely dependent on their parents and likewise, the sleeping mind must learn to be completely dependent on the Holy Spirit, on the Holy Spirit's instructions, on the Holy Spirit's presence, to know its life, to wake up to eternal life. So this is not a small lesson today. This lesson is very important in clearing away the debris of what the sleeping mind thinks it already knows it's clueless, to have a truly happy, joyful, flowing day sink into this cluelessness and be cared for lovingly by the Holy Spirit and feel the result a carefree life of listening and loving. Remember today's lesson as you move through the day. I do not understand anything I see.