So Various, So Beautiful

A Course in Miracles is a great work of poetry, and one way to approach its meaning is through the concentrated language and telling imagery of other poetry. These commentaries are not discussions of the poems themselves except so as to better understand the Course.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(from Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold: find the whole poem here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172844 )

Part 1 On a darkling plain

The lines above from Dover Beach express almost word for word what the Course says too: ‘The world you see…is a world of terror and despair. Nor is there hope of happiness in it. There is no plan for safety you can make that ever will succeed. There is no joy that you can seek for here and hope to find’ (T31 I 7).

   This is sombre talk, and it runs counter to the stridently positive thinking of our culture today. We are indeed surrounded by the various and the beautiful and the endlessly new: daily we are more exposed to more wonders than ever before, and still cannot have enough of them. Unfolding before us through microscope, telescope, camera, or devised by a world of artists and inventors, the various and the beautiful surround us and certainly do delight, astonish, gratify us, mitigate our pain for a while perhaps. But all they can do is seem. Their novelty is short-lived and marvels do curiously little to make us feel better about ourselves.

   The poet recognizes this ultimate futility, but sadly, as one who still hopes to find some value or form of lasting attachment in the world. But the Course teaches that disillusionment is liberating, making way for what we really want: ‘Learn now, without despair, there is no hope of answer in the world…’ ‘Be you deceived no more. The world you see holds nothing that you want (W128 2)’. This is not harking back to the old Biblical idea that for our sins we must suffer a lifetime of thorns and thistles, and postpone all hope of happiness until an imagined heavenly life after death. It is pointing to the mind, not to our variable sensations, as the source of joy, love, light, certitude and peace. It is talking about a real alternative that is invisible to us, but accessible.

   Beauty seems to be here and there outside us because we do not remember it is us. We see variety in everything because we have lost the capacity for a unifying vision that would see all as one. But there is no lasting happiness in fleeting reflections and partial images, and we feel actual pain each time they elude us again. The world that ‘lies before us like a land of dreams’ indeed, like dreams, takes shape only in the mind. We believe in what we perceive, but what we perceive is never the whole truth, always indeed lies before us. ‘The choice is … only if you want to live in dreams or to awaken from them (T29 IV 1).’

Part 2 True to one another

The problem is that we are unaware we have this choice or how to go about such an awakening. The poet seeks consolation in companionship: ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another!’ This is our universal defence against futility and loneliness: to form attachments. In a close relationship we can forget our essential solitariness within the form of a mutual support system. At least we know we exist when someone else reacts to us. But what exactly does the poet mean by suggesting they be ‘true’ to each other? If, like almost all of us, he has in mind a reciprocal commitment, this is no gift of unconditional love; it is bargaining. It paves the way for guilt. What if one does not live up to the other’s concept of ‘true’? Discord and disenchantment must creep into any relationship that each secretly intend to be a safe haven for (and from) oneself. The ambiguity inherent in all special relationships is betrayed in the double meanings of the language of love; we speak of a close ‘bond’, for instance, to express an exclusive and powerful fondness between two people, but the same word implies imprisonment.

   The Course, like the poet, sees relationship as the key to happiness; but the purpose is quite different, neither escape nor refuge. Faithfulness is a state of mind, not a manner of behaviour. It has nothing to do with mutually convenient contracts, or currying favour with anyone else, including any God who might be critically watching. Being ‘true to one another’ in the thinking of the Course means first accepting, and then experiencing, that  although we are separate in form – so very various, individually so beautiful – we are all one: rather as the figures in a dream, or the characters of a novelist, are all aspects of one mind. To be true to one another, then, is to embrace every ‘other’, every creature, every appearance as equally lovable, equally essential to the whole. Challenging; but nothing less will enable us to stop clashing and leave the darkening plain.

   We are far too intricately involved with all that is ‘so various, so beautiful, so new’ to dismiss the world wholesale yet as ‘a land of dreams.’ The Course invites us only to lay aside both wishful thinking and what we think we know, and try its different interpretation for what we perceive. If we explore what it might be to be true to one another without conditions, limits or exceptions, we might wake up to what is unvaryingly true and beautiful in ourselves.

Part 3. Above the Battleground

The poem has an inconclusive ending. It leaves us in the deepening dark, stumbling into (or missing?) each other on an interminable battlefield. The poet is relying on his partner to be his one source of comfort, but he recognizes how inevitably, in confusion, fear and ignorance, we must clash.

   The Course, too, uses precisely this metaphor of life as a battleground, but from a different perspective – in fact the perspective is the point. ‘Mistake not truce for peace, nor compromise for the escape from conflict…There is no safety in a battleground’ (T23 III 6). Bargaining with each other, negotiation, all our compromises can at best only secure a temporary lull in hostilities, a semblance of peace that has not really resolved our differences, nor cured our inherent loneliness. As long as we are involved, as long as our identity depends on taking sides and defending our own position, there is no escape from the battleground.

   But we can step right out of the very limited point of view from which each of us sees the world. ‘Be lifted up, and from a higher place look down on it…’ ‘You can look down on it in safety from above and not be touched’… ‘When the temptation to attack rises to make your mind darkened and murderous, remember you can see the battle from above’ (23 IV 6). There are meditation exercises in which in imagination you float up out of your body and look down. To be free of its narrow viewpoint even for a moment is to glimpse what it would be like to be free of its perceived problems. Only comparatively recently we have discovered air and space travel and how to lift up and literally look down from above; it has given us a far more all-inclusive, global perspective. But as long as we depend on our bodies’ eyes, and their extensions – cameras and instruments – with us, we can only see from a restricted point of view. As long as we remain each confined within a bubble of personal interest and anxious to defend it, we take the battleground with us.

   The Course is talking about a change of mind. It is hard to grasp what it means because it is not referring to the brain, or to our emotional state, or our intellectual understanding, though all those reflect the choices of the mind. But it is a simple change it is talking about, from fragmented to whole; from the isolation and defensiveness of being both individual and many, to being indivisible and one. From where we are we cannot see the whole picture. The left hand does not see what the right is doing, to paraphrase the Gospel; we hardly know our own secret purposes. But from ‘above the battleground…will your perspective be quite different.’ The senselessness of all our conflicts and secrets can only be recognised by changing our point of view.

   ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another’ is also the teaching of the Course. But to be true is to be free of personal interest, and to every other. To learn what this means in our own case is how we leave the dark and the battle for the light.

Forgive Your Life...

...for not being what you meant

Life is so unlikely to turn out as we intended, that we may wonder what we did intend exactly as we think: ‘How did I end up like this?’ and ‘What went wrong?’ It is more astonishing really how effective we are, with everyone pulling in different directions in a surge of ever-changing conditions. But even when we think we know what we are doing and where we are going, we find inner forces are at work rearranging our lives in ways we did not mean and often bitterly regret. It is as though someone else were pulling our strings, tripping our switches, moving our goalposts: some god, or leprechaun, or our own genius for self destruction. As St Paul put it, ‘The good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (Romans 7:18-19).

We work as frantically as ants trying to get things to happen or stop happening in the form of external conditions that we think will suit us. What we pay little attention to is our own psychology. We suppose on the one hand that how we think and feel and act is more or less hardwired into our brains, and on the other that any change in our state of mind must be enabled from outside. The insights of Freud and Jung and other early twentieth-century psychologists opened an unnerving view into the complexity and deviousness of our psyche, but that labyrinth is vast and deep, and does not seem to lead to the cheese. It seems simple enough: give me the right conditions and I will be a happier/better/different person. Only the right conditions are difficult to pin down. And this still makes me a product rather than a creator.

There is indeed a brisk movement these days towards making things happen, rather than waiting for someone else - or a miracle - to put your life back on track towards what you might at least settle for. But this is not what I call creative. The bias towards achieving social status and material goals emphasizes rather than relieves our sense of loss and need. The 'right conditions' begin and end with your state of mind.

A Course in Miracles describes itself as a course in mind-training. It is a spiritual teaching, in that it is concerned with abstract realities and values. It is also unnervingly practical, in that it is about how and why we go about everything we do. It is not about being a ‘better person’ or fighting for moral values and goodness or making the world a better place, as taught by traditional religious institutions. It is not about the world at all, except as the world reflects back to us our own thinking. Many New Age thinkers exhort us to use the power of our mind; but to work with the Course is to realise that we cannot not use it, we use it all the time, or are used by it, to our detriment. The difficulty rather is that we are misusing it, and that is why we feel misused. How can  life be anything other than what we intended? We are knitting it into existence, every thought another stitch. But we can discover that our intentions were conflicted, misdirected, mistaken, and learn to think differently.

A new series of 10 one-day workshops on A Course in Miracles begins on September 10^th – see full details under WORKSHOPS

Taking Offence

'I am never upset for the reason I think', the Course invites us to consider (Workbook Lesson 5), every time something happens that arouses in us a flash of irritation, or a tremor of unease, or a sinking of the heart. The reason we think we are upset is usually obvious: someone has done us wrong, or got in our way, threatened our comfort, pride or beliefs.
 

I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts  Workbook Lesson 281

But someone else with a different interpretation of the situation may not find it upsetting; may even be glad of it, since as the proverb says, what is meat to one man is another man's poison. Like beauty, outrage is in the mind of the beholder. If you can be surprised or disturbed by anything that happens, it must be that you already had a model in your mind of how things are or should be, and do not like having to adjust to new developments. You must  want someone to behave in a particular way, if you are shocked or grieved when they do something else. You must have made assumptions about what happiness and safety should look like. First we establish the conditions we want people and events to fulfil, then we compare what seems to be happening with our hopes or expectations, then we react accordingly, plotting our feelings on an imaginary scale between grievance and triumph.

You think you hold against your brother what he has done to you. But what you really blame him for is what you did to him  Text 17 VII 8.2
What you have done to him (or her) is impose your judgements and your wishful thinking as a barrier between you. If you can be disgusted or saddened it must be more important to maintain your ‘standards’ and ‘values’ (read: self-image) than to communicate love to another being. By love I do not necessarily mean indulgence, submission or even agreement. By communicate I do not necessarily mean saying or doing anything. But every impulse of the mind is binary in that it may fork towards either love or fear, appreciation or aversion. Each of us runs a labyrinth of just these two choices every minute of every day.

It is how we adversely interpret people and situations that causes us pain. Resistance to this simple self-awareness is considerable, but the Course points out that this is the shortcut, even the only way, out of frustration and helplessness. While we still seem to have very little control over events and cannot dictate other people’s choices, we can begin by changing our own. No one else can change our minds for us, but by changing our minds we free everyone else along with us; for if no one is offended, no one has offended. 


The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. You can decide to see it right. Text 12 VII 9

Resurrecting Jesus

Easter Sunday 2011

It can come as a shock to the student of the Course when the author of the A Course in Miracles identifies himself as Jesus. The name is not used in the text, but the unmistakable references to the Gospels and to the crucifixion decisively associate the spiritual teachings of the Course with those of the historical Jesus. However, this is not the same Jesus of traditional Christian belief, who we are taught is the only Son of God, sent into this world to pay with his life for the sins of mankind. The Course suggests that the meaning of both the crucifixion and the resurrection has been misrepresented, because Jesus' real message is one we were not ready to take in then and still challenges our beliefs now. The Course may be read as a restatement of what Jesus tried to tell us about the nature of reality two thousand years ago, and as a correction of many of the most misleading or misunderstood aspects of Christianity.

The particular significance of Jesus is discussed only towards the end of the Course: 'The Name of Jesus as such is but a symbol. But it stands for love that is not of this world' (Manual 23.4). Yet the presence and authority of this symbol informs the entire Course.
Whatever religious or irreligious belief, background or philosophy of life a student may bring to the Course, he or she will have to recognize the central importance of the voice of the Course, and the very personal relationship with it that the student can hardly help but develop with it while learning the Course. It is just a book talking; but the aim of the Course is for the student to internalize the voice until it becomes indistinguishable from the voice of the student's own heart, an inner guide that remains when the book is put down. The name of this inner self is not important in itself. It is only a reminder or symbol of a nameless reality beyond words altogether.

Quite specifically, in the Course Jesus refutes the idea that he suffered and died for anyone's sins: 'I was persecuted as the world judges, and did not share this evaluation for myself...You are not persecuted, nor was I' (Text 6 I 5.3 & 11). Death, sin and sacrifice are concepts entirely alien to his thinking. He could not die because he never mistook the body for life. It was only a means of communication with those who see form and nothing else. He never came into the world, he never left it: it is as though for a moment we opened our eyes and then closed them, and not seeing him any more supposed him gone. His reality was (and is) not affected by dreams, by appearances however extreme they are, by shifting perceptions. It is spirit, free, whole, everywhere.'How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there?' (Text 6 II 6)

Bodies do not suffer, nor feel anything. It is the mind that experiences what it judges to be real. When the Course speaks of mind it does not mean any activity of the brain, but a much wider field of consciousness, which projects its fears and desires into bodily form, as a puppeteer creates the illusion of life through the movements of his puppet. Collectively, we are the puppeteer; not God, not nature. We use those terms rather than admit the power of our minds to dream up and maintain the illusion of a whole virtual reality. Individually, we escape responsibility for our thoughts by identifying with those helpless puppets, our bodies. We react to our thoughts and feelings as if they showed us something true, forgetting that we conjured them up in the first place. 

But Jesus does not share in our illusions of life: he is life. And, the Course teaches, his message always was, and still is, that our reality is the same as his. The only difference between us is that he knows what he is and knows what is real and from what is unreal, while we remain ambivalent. 

When the Course talks about what Jesus is and knows, it is talking about an aspect of you and me. We made up the name of Jesus, and the image of a man with a story to go with it, as if he were a someone apart. We have made a freak of him, a fearful and bloodied figure to perpetually remind us, like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, of our imagined sinfulness and of our own needy stories. Throughout A Course in Miracles he denies this view of himself and more especially of us. Since we have made an outsider of him, he invites us to befriend him twice over: in our thoughts and inward dialogue, and outwardly in all our relationships. By thinking of Jesus as a presence in our mind, we establish a standard by which to unmask our illusions and associate him with the true, unchanging part of us. By seeing his presence in others, we see past our own projections and defences, and find that what is true and unchanging in ourselves is the same true and unchanging reality in everyone else as well. 

In an increasingly secular society, when religious traditions are falling rapidly out of use and religious ideas arouse contempt and hostility on one side and zealous , often equally intolerant affiliations on the other, the Course student has to come to terms with the Course's uncompromising use of names like God, Holy Spirit and Jesus. They are already quite archaic terms that resonate with centuries of ambiguous and divisive feeling and implication; but they do make the student think far more carefully and deeply about aspects of guilt, superstitious fear and prejudice than safely impersonal terms or less specific symbols would do.

How could the Course more dramatically teach that the body is an illusion of the mind; that sacrifice is a form of attack, not of love; that sin is a misunderstanding; and above all that 'nothing real can be threatened', than by presenting the old Easter story from a quite new perspective that entirely changes its meaning? For the point is that this is not the story of a man from Nazareth some hundreds of years ago: this is our story. We all believe we are unfairly treated, and suffer for the sins we see in others. 'You have probably reacted for years as if you were being crucified' Text 6 I 3). Now the Course gives us a new model for how to interpret what happens to us and a new logic to guide our decisions. It gives each of us, in the words of the song, our own personal Jesus: a bridge from illusions to reality, a reminder of what matters, an inner compass; an image of one Self.

You will awaken to your own call, for the Call to awake is within you. ACIM T11 VI 9