The following is from the weekly message by Circle founder, Robert Perry, delivered each Thursday to Course Companions members. Course Companions is our global community of students and teachers walking through the Course, section-by-section and lesson-by-lesson, together as friends.For access to any classes, handouts, and additional commentaries referenced in these posts, we invite you to join Course Companions by visiting CourseCompanions.com. Please note that partial and full scholarships are available and no one is turned away from Circle of Atonement programming for an inability to pay.
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May 21, 2020
As I think about our classes this week, what comes to mind is that we just don’t realize how much our dukes are up as our response to life.
Our Text class was about “The Will to Remember God” (T-10.II). This section says that whenever we attack, we are teaching ourselves that we are not the ray of light in God’s Mind that we really are. In the concluding exercise, I took us through a process of getting in touch with a relatively current attack of ours, and I think we were all struck by how much attack we engage in. For the fact is that attack takes many forms, including avoiding others, neglecting them, overlooking them, and speaking ill of them when they aren’t around.
Our Workbook class was about Lesson 138: “Heaven is the decision I must make.” This lesson contains a fascinating teaching, which says that we have a deep unconscious belief that life is a battleground. This belief then propels us into a myriad of ways to protect ourselves. But if life is assumed to be a battleground, then you can guess how we are prone to protect ourselves. It is going to involve attack. I encourage you to read my class notes, as I have filled them out with a two-page essay at the beginning on this concept. I was trying in class to get a handle on it and I’ve been reflecting on it since, which is why I wrote that little essay.
These two classes together raise a sobering question: Could it be that attack is our predominant way of life? If that is true, we certainly don’t recognize it. We narrow our definition of attack down to obvious hurtful behaviors, thereby excluding the majority of it. And we are driven by unconscious fears to incessantly do things in the name of safety that essentially amount to attack. So, much like a person who is drinking himself to death while ignoring that fact, we don’t really see what we are doing throughout each day. It’s right there, but we don’t see it.
I realize this can sound depressing. But it can also be liberating. According to the Course, attack is not a sin, it’s just a mistake. It is simply an impractical happiness strategy, for it teaches us that we are not the divine beings we are, and it reinforces our terrifying assumption that life is a hellish battleground.
Rather than feeling guilty about it, could we just decide to kick the habit?
