If we do not like how we feel about something going on in our lives, or in the lives of those with which we are identifying, A Course in Miracles is teaching us to go to the source of our distress: the decision our minds have made to choose the ego's attack instead of the Holy Spirit's forgiveness. If the ego is our choice, the resultant guilt will be what is projected from the mind onto a world we perceive to be outside the mind and filled inevitably with fear, hopelessness, and despair. If the Holy Spirit is chosen, on the other hand, the resultant peace will be what the mind has extended, and it is this peace and joy that will remain with us regardless of what appears to be external to us. This world, which is experienced without fear and sparkling with hope, is the world the guiltless Son perceives. This is so even if he finds himself in Auschwitz, for the peace comes not from outside the mind in the external world, but from what is certain and stable in the guiltless world within, termed the real world in the Course. It is this reality that envelops the entire Sonship with its love.

Therefore, Jesus is not offering to help us solve our external problems, nor to remove the fears we experience in our everyday lives, but rather he is teaching us how to join with him in undoing the causes of our fear, which lie in the mind's decision to be separate from him and therefore from God. He states in a passage originally meant specifically for Helen Schucman, scribe of A Course in Miracles:

The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate.... If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect; the most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course (T-2.VI.4:1-4; T-2.VII. 1:4-6).

To return to our movie screen analogy and restate this essential point: The fluttering image on the screen is the effect of the malfunction that is located in the projection booth, which is the true cause of the problem. And so Jesus is exhorting his students to pay careful attention to their mind's decision to be unhappy, and to correct that cause, rather than continually seeking his help in remedying the effect, which ultimately makes no sense at all. Thus he is not so much teaching his students what is good about themselves (although certainly many, many beautiful passages in the Course describe this truth), as he is helping them to recognize their own wrong ego choices, so that they can make the correct ones now with him. His repeated plea throughout A Course in Miracles that we choose again reflects the need to choose him as our teacher instead of the ego. And so he urges all his students: "Resign now as your own teacher....for you were badly taught" (T- 12.V.8:3; T-28.1.7: 1).