Ch. 12. V. 3 – 6. Jesus: “You will never realize the utter uselessness of attack except by recognizing that you are still as God created you and your original attack upon yourself, establishing the idea of attack in your mind, has had no real effects! But if you are still projecting your self-attack onto others, you will be unable to avoid interpreting their reactions to you as reinforcement of the original error. Others do react to attack if they perceive it directed onto them.
Therefore, the only place you can cancel out all such reinforcement is in your own mind. For you are always the first object of your attack and if it has no consequences, it has effectively never been. The Holy Spirit’s Love is your strength, for yours as you perceive yourself, is divided, and has lost its reality!
Because you are still attacking your reality, you cannot trust in your own love. And you cannot learn of perfect love with a split mind, because a split mind, denying reality, has made itself a poor learner. In your mis-creating you tried to make the separation eternal, because you wanted to retain the characteristics of creation, but with your ego’s own special content!
Yet Creation is not of you, and poor learners do need special teaching! You have learning handicaps in a very literal sense. There are areas in your learning skills that are so impaired that you can progress only under constant, clear-cut direction, provided by a Teacher Who can transcend your limited resources. You need Him to become your one Resource now, because of yourself alone, you cannot learn.
The learning situation in which you have placed yourself is itself impossible! As long as you believe you are in this situation it should be clear that you require a special Teacher and a special curriculum. Poor learners are not good choices as teachers, either, not for themselves or for anyone else. You would hardly turn to them to establish the curriculum by which they can escape from their self-imposed limitations. If they understood what is beyond their limitations, they would not be handicapped!
You do not know the meaning of love, and that is your primary handicap. Do not attempt to teach yourself what you do not understand, and do not try to set up curriculum goals where yours have clearly failed. Your learning goal has actually been ‘not to learn,’ and this cannot lead to successful learning.
You cannot transfer to all situations what you have not learned, and the impairment of the ability to generalize is a crucial learning failure. Would you ask those who have failed to learn what learning aids are for? They do not know. If they could interpret the learning aids correctly, they would have learned from them!”
Note: These guided reflections on the Course materials are in no way intended to alter the content. They are but my way of seeking to understand while asking for guidance from the Holy Spirit. The Voice has instructed me to share them.