Chapter 3, III. Perception vs. Knowledge
by Tom Baker
Lesson: There Are No Strangers In God's Creation
Date: November 8, 2009
A Course In Miracles is concerned mainly with changing how we see and interpret people, events, ourselves and God. In the simplest sense the Course is teaching us to see with the eyes of love, the eyes of blessing, the eyes of forgiveness. It reminds us over and over again that this change is brought about by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, which acts as bridge between the knowing of God and the perceiving of human consciousness. This section begins with reinforcing the difference between perception and knowing. We perceive and God knows. Through the Holy Spirit, God's knowing informs our perception. The dynamic of the Course is concerned almost exclusively with changing our perception from one of fear to one of love. In general this dynamic is called "forgiveness" and is the purpose of the miracle. If I ask a miracle for you I am asking that I see you through the eyes of the Holy Spirit and that you see yourself the same way. This seeing of mine invites you to see yourself as innocent and holy and further invites me to see myself the same way: I forgive you, you accept forgiveness for yourself and then I finally accept forgiveness for myself. Another way to say this is that I recognize you as God created you which in turn invites you to recognize yourself which then invites me to say, "Hey, me too! I'm as holy as I see you!" When I love you I am really recognizing you: "When you love someone you have perceived him as he is, this makes it possible for you to know him. Until you first perceive him as he is you cannot know him." (T. Chap. 3, III. p. 41). The ego has us think in just the opposite way in that it says that we must know a person before we can love them and, in fact, the more we know them the less we might love them. We see this ego principle active in romance in that in the beginning when we know the person almost not at all we are happiest with them and readily admit to loving them. Yet in marriage we become "disillusioned" with the person we thought we knew and often say that we love them but are no longer "in love" with them.
This change into what the Course calls "right perception" or "right thinking" is necessary before God can step toward us and bring us into the original oneness in which we were created and which we remember that we are co-creators with God: "Right perception is necessary before God can communicate directly to His altars, which He established in His Sons". (T. p. 41). As long as our perception is ruled by fear then we will see God as terrifying and we will interpret his communication with us as extremely threatening. As a priest I saw this almost daily as my parishioners, through various rituals and good works, attempted to protect themselves from God's punishments and win His favor.
In the final paragraph the ego's way of knowing a person is exposed as actually attacking them. Attacking another has the effect of making him or her a stranger and then making us afraid of them. In effect, the ego has us de-recognize a person, see them as a stranger and then treat them as an enemy or a potential enemy. God sees no one as a stranger and Jesus continues that vision. In the section entitled "5. Jesus-Christ" which appears in the Clarification of Terms at the end of The Manual for Teachers, Jesus says of himself in the third person: "Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world." (M., Clarification of Terms, 5. Jesus-Christ, p. 88). This brotherhood/sisterhood can be expressed in the smallest ways. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., in her excellent book My Grandfather's Blessings, tells of her meeting the Dali Lama. She had not expected to be moved by the meeting and wasn't in any way she would have expected, that is, by his words, prayers, or guided meditation. She was moved to the depths of her heart by the way His Holiness helped her friend after she had accidentally dropped a string bag at his feet. The Dali Lama had simply bent down and picked up the string bag and helped her put the pictures she had brought to show him back in it. Here how she tells it:
"It was not so much what His Holiness had done but the way in which he had done it. It this tiny interaction I felt something purely joyful in him go forward to meet with her in the problem. In that moment getting three large, stiff pictures into a flexible string bag was not her problem nor his. It was not even a problem. It was an opportunity to meet. Of all those in the world who could have picked up a string bag and held it out, I doubt anyone else could have done it in quite this way. For some inexplicable reason, a place in me that has felt alone and abandoned for all of my life felt deeply comforted, and I had a wildly irrational thought: 'This is my friend.' In that moment it seemed absolutely true. It still does." (Remen, pp. 159-60).
In Dr. Remen's account the Dali Lama was teaching God's greatest truth, that as stated in the Course, "There are no strangers in God's creation." When we see that truth enacted the part of us that feels separate and alone, abandoned and bereft, a part of us that we have mostly become numb to, that part is met with a friend who has news of home. That is why the miracle worker is called the light of the world. He or she might also be called the great friend or neighbor to the world.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2009