These thoughts do not mean anything.
1. These thoughts do not mean anything; they are like the things I see in this room, on this street, from this window, in this place.I
2. Unlike the previous exercises, these do not begin with the idea for the day.
²In today’s practice, begin by observing the thoughts that pass through your mind for about one minute.
³Then apply the idea to them.
⁴If you are experiencing unhappy thoughts, use them with this idea.
⁵But do not choose only the thoughts you consider to be “bad.”
⁶If you train yourself to look at your thoughts, you will see that they are such a mixture that, in a real sense, none of them can truly be called either “good” or “bad.”
⁷That is why they do not mean anything.
3. In selecting the thoughts to which you will apply today’s idea, it is necessary to be very specific, as always.
²Do not be afraid to use both “good” and “bad” thoughts. ³Neither of them are your real thoughts, which are being covered up precisely by the ones you now believe you have.II
⁴The “good” thoughts you are aware of are only shadows of what lies beyond, and shadows always obscure Vision.
⁵The “bad” thoughts, on the other hand, are blocks to Vision and make it impossible.
⁶That is why you do not want them either.
4. This is an important exercise and will be repeated from time to time in a slightly different form.III
²The goal of this lesson is to train you in the first steps toward the aim of distinguishing between the meaningless and the meaningful.
³It is a first attempt at the long-range goal of learning to see the meaningless as outside you, and the meaningful as within.IV
⁴It is also the beginning of training your mind to recognize what is the same and what is different.
5. When using your thoughts as subjects for applying today’s idea, identify each one by the central figure or event it contains. For example:
²This thought about ____ does not mean anything.
³It is like the things I see in this room (on this street, etc.).
6. You may also use the idea for a specific thought that you recognize as harmful. ²This kind of application is useful, but it should not replace the random selection process to be followed in the exercises.V
³However, do not examine your mind for more than a minute or so.
⁴You are not yet sufficiently experienced to avoid a tendency to become needlessly preoccupied.
⁵Also, since these exercises are the first of their kind, it is quite likely that you will find it especially difficult not to judge your thoughts.
⁶Do not repeat these exercises more than three or four times today.
⁷We will return to them again.
I Pay close attention to this Lesson, for it is one of the most liberating in this Workbook. To recognize that your own thoughts mean nothing is the epitome of humility and the purest expression of the Socratic truth: “I know only that I know nothing.” The sincere practice of this Lesson heals the mind instantly, for it prevents it from clinging to ideas that are not true but arbitrary.
The thoughts that arise in your mind are the manifestation of egoic dynamics born of fear and desire, the inevitable consequence of harboring a spurious idea of your own identity. Your thoughts are whimsical stories constructed around your longings and fears.
Try to realize that what you think is not in any sense “yours.” Certainly you are the “witness” of these thoughts, but you are not their cause. Notice that you have done nothing to think the way you think; there is no volitional participation on your part prior to the “fact” of thinking. Your thoughts occur in the mind, and you carelessly endorse them and call them “yours.”
You may rightly call these thoughts “the voice of the ego,” and you can—and must—dismiss them with complete calm. In fact, that is what you will learn to do throughout this mental training you have just begun.
Try to understand well what follows, for on it depends your grasp of what is happening in your mind when you say you “think.” What you call “my thoughts” are narratives: stories you tell yourself about things or circumstances that your mind considers after fragmenting Reality into discrete elements.
Take any thought that arises, and you will see that what you are considering is not the thing itself, but a description of it that, moreover, you take as true. You do not know the thing (or the circumstance); you know its description. You confuse the thing itself with the story you have built about it. It is as if a child, hearing his father say he needs a new car, tries to help by handing him a clumsy drawing of a car freshly painted on a sheet of paper. It is a childish confusion. Humanity is in its infancy.
To confuse what something is with its description is humanity’s tragedy, and it becomes especially grave when it concerns what you are. You confuse what you are with what you tell yourself about yourself. You confuse your Being with your own opinions.
In truth, it should suffice to recognize that your shifting opinions about your reality cannot be true precisely because of their mutability. But that all-too-“human” arrogance of continually believing you are “right” prevents you from knowing your true Identity.
Do not be concerned: this Course you are beginning is specifically designed to heal this fateful cognitive bias. Take it very seriously, for your happiness depends on it.
II Your true thoughts as the Son of God—not as a person—are the thoughts you think with your Father and Creator. These Thoughts are unlimited, eternal, perfectly abstract, and infinitely loving; that is, they are real, and in the Text they are called the Creations of the Son of God. They are the opposite of what you now consider your thoughts, which are limited, fleeting, concrete, and— even the most benevolent among them—still harbor some element of fear.
III Indeed, it is. Keep this in mind at all times. It is one of the most healing ideas that exist, and you will repeat it in Lesson 10. To fully accept the lack of meaning, relevance, and importance of what you call “my thoughts” is crucial for achieving dissociation from the egoic idea of an independent, separate, exclusive, and limited identity.
IV This Lesson, in a sense, explains the preceding ones. What you believe you see outside yourself means nothing because, in reality, they are your projected thoughts, devoid of intrinsic meaning. The forms you see outside yourself are projections—effects of underlying inner causes. They are like the figures in nighttime dreams: symbols manifesting fears and desires.
Yet you are real, you do not change, you are always yourself. You are indeed “meaningful,” even though you do not yet fully know what that meaning is.
V That is to say, the rule for these early exercises is to apply the daily idea to any object or thought. This Lesson makes clear that any thought you choose loses its emotional charge if you cease to give it importance, precisely because it has no real meaning. Its meaning is entirely personal and arbitrary, and the emotion the thought provokes comes solely from the importance you assign to it.
By now, after having studied the Text well, you will have realized that ceasing to give importance to what you call “my thoughts” is what true forgiveness, as this Course teaches, actually is. In this world, the only thing you can and must forgive are “your” own thoughts.