In taking a closer look at my everyday life, I was shocked to see how automatic my judgments often were. I made gains in observing this knee-jerk tendency, detaching myself from it and taking the charge out of my grievances. That wasn’t all the way to forgiveness, but it helped me become more aware of my ego’s thought patterns. I realized that even in my discussions with Arten and Pursah, my smart-ass defense against shyness would dominate my personality and make me say things I probably wouldn’t say if my ego wasn’t running the show. I wondered if Arten and Pursah were just trying to make me feel comfortable by speaking to me in my own language; I realized that if I changed my style a little, they probably would, too. As I practiced the Course’s Workbook lessons, I was being steadily trained to choose to think with the Holy Spirit in my right mind instead of the ego in my wrong mind. This resulted in some wild and joyous light episodes during the day as well as bloody and horrific nightmares while in bed at night. I would have never believed such ugly images could be in my unconscious. I was sure that such nightmare images didn’t show up for everyone who did the Course, but here they were, reflecting the awful and insane self-image that was buried in the depths of my ego —and now being shown to me in order to be forgiven and released to the Holy Spirit in peace. It was disconcerting to remember that my thinking wasn’t really being done on this level. The mind was signaling to my brain what to see, hear, think, do and experience. My brain was simply the programmed hardware that ran and regulated my body, relaying to me a movie that could be called “Life of Gary.”
It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your “seeing” was made. This is the function you have given your body’s eyes. It is not seeing. It is image making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions. This introductory idea to the process of image making that you call seeing will not have much meaning for you. You will begin to understand it when you have seen little edges of light around the same familiar objects which you see now. That is the beginning of real vision. You can be certain that real vision will come quickly when this has occurred. As we go along, you may have many “light episodes.” They may take many different forms, some of them quite unexpected. Do not be afraid of them. They are signs that you are opening your eyes at last. They will not persist, because they merely symbolize true perception, and they are not related to knowledge. These exercises will not reveal knowledge to you. But they will prepare the way to it.
Gary Renard
The Disappearance
of the Universe