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.
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.
