Let truth be

'This simple courtesy is all the Holy Spirit asks of you. Let truth be what it is. Do not intrude upon it, do not attack it, do not interrupt its coming. Let it encompass every situation and bring you peace…But rise you not against it, for against your opposition it cannot come.' T17 VIII

The Course in Miracles uses highly abstract language like this, and it is too easy to read it in a trance without paying close attention to what it is saying. And to wake up a few paragraphs later with no idea what you have just read. The Course offers few concrete examples to explain its teachings, because the examples must vary from student to student. All the case histories and anecdotes you need to illustrate its meaning are your own life situations, relationships and dilemmas.

When any problem arises in your day and you do not know what to do, or how to meet it from a specifically Course-related point of view, here is your answer in the quotation above. But what is it telling you to actually do? How can you ‘let truth be what it is’ when you have to make a career decision, or can’t afford to pay the mortgage, or a neighbour is playing their music too loud, too late and too often? What is the ‘truth’ when you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, a medical condition or a deteriorating relationship?

To let truth be is to allow yourself to experience a sense of peace, or at least to want to experience something of the kind, no matter what is going on. The Course is very specific about the ways in which we set obstacles in the way of peace: see the whole section ‘The Obstacles to Peace (T19 IV), and the workbook lesson 185, ‘I want the peace of God’. (No, you don’t, says the Course. If you wanted it, you would have it. No power in heaven or on earth can fog the truth in your mind, except your own fear of it.) And the Course is explicit again in the lines above. Do not intrude upon, attack or interrupt the truth; just let it be. So how does that apply in your own case? Only you can know. but here are some clues:

Do not intrude upon it – You ‘intrude’ upon truth by thinking you know what is best, true and right. You impose opinions, assumptions, expectations, fears, conditions and wishes in the way of truth, rather than pausing to listen or invite it in. You try to organize and control it, by setting up rituals and environments to be conducive to your idea of peace and to establish truth as you want it to be.

Do not attack it – Any form of attack on anyone, such as by disliking, complaining, criticising, judging, blaming, accusing or ridiculing, is an attack on peace. Any kind of attack is an attempt to impose your own version of truth on reality. It is also attacking truth to dismiss it as irrelevant, or to suggest that the truth is different for everyone, or to deny it is true.

Do not interrupt it – We frequently interrupt the entering of truth in our minds, by losing patience, getting distracted, seeking alternative solutions and pleasures, and by imposing limits on it, as if truth were all very nice in theory but not practical when real problems arise. From the Course’s point of view, no problem is ‘real’, every problem can be resolved, and the truth is wholly practical; this is the truth that will enlighten, if we do not throw obstacles in its way.

Let it encompass every situation – The most practical and effective thing you can do in any situation is to be open to the truth: without knowing what that might be, and even if it seems to go against your own interests. By not pre-judging it, or taking sides, or letting your ego muscle in to try to defend its honour and stroke its self esteem, the power of love will guide your choices, and truth will correct all errors.

This simple courtesy is all – The introduction to the workbook makes clear that to learn the Course, to learn peace of mind, we do not need to believe in what it says, or understand it, or even like it. There is no need either to believe in God or to be bothered by the Christian language. All that is asked is that we do not wilfully oppose the truth it offers. The Course requests a little ‘courtesy’, and indeed this is all it ever asks from us, towards every person and every situation; the willingness to respect and pay a modicum of attention to, rather than boorishly dismiss or condemn out of hand; to make room for another’s point of view without shouting them down. Only consent to its presence, and truth will by itself transform your understanding, your relationships, your state of mind.

In the following seventeenth-century poem by George Herbert, he shows Love as the perfect example of a sweetly courteous host, welcoming the poet to a feast. Quick-witted and compassionate, Love just will not take ‘no’ for an answer, brushing aside excuses and evasions and cringing mumblings of shame. Stop faffing about, Love says; come in, sit down, enjoy the feast. This is exactly what the Course is asking us to do in return; simply to welcome truth to come on in and be itself.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here.

Love said, You shall be he.

I, the unkind, ungratefull? Ah my deare,

I can not look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know ye not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?

My deare, then I will serve.

Ye must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat.

So I did sit and eat.

Soul Mates? Forgive the One You Love

In some ways all the workshops in the present series have been leading up to the theme of the next two: the special relationship. The Course distinguishes between the ‘special love relationship’ and the ‘special hate relationship’, and these are the topics of the next two workshops. On Saturday 11^th February the theme of Workshop 6 will be Soul Mates: Forgive the One You Love.

There can’t be many workshop topics that include both sex and Jesus. But don’t get too excited (or worried) – we will also look at loneliness, snoring, a few of your favourite things, and the intricate dance from intimacy to…extimacy. The workshop is about the immense attraction (and pain) of the special love relationship, and its potential to become what the Course calls the ‘holy’ relationship. We can learn to loose the ties that bind and enter the ‘ark of peace’ two by two: that is, you and the Other. You and every other.

All workshops in the present Forgive Your Life for Not Being What You Meant take place on the second Saturday in every month in Andover, Hampshire SP10 3RQ. Numbers are few as space is limited, so advance booking only. Cost: £15. For enquiries, bookings and directions contact anna@unlearningschool.com or phone 01264 395579.

The World in which I Walk: Part One

 

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

by Wallace Stevens

Not less because in purple I descended

The western day through what you called

The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Tea at the Palaz! The quirky spelling tells us we are not talking here about anything so conventional as a Buckingham Palace garden party. I love this evocative poem with its exotic imagery of… what, exactly? The flash of purple and gold, the oil-anointed beard, the chanting of hymns (to what god?) suggest a scene from an ancient civilisation, as seen through the eyes of a god-like king. As if in a dream or a distant memory, he ‘descends’ (implying from on high) with all the solitary majesty of the sun sinking in the west. The poem does not tell us who he is, nor who he means by ‘you’; and is the phrase ‘the loneliest air’ referring to a place, a status, or an attitude?

So what has all this to do with A Course in Miracles? ‘All that I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself’ echoes the Course: Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that… It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition.’ (T21 intr)

The world that seems to be outside and around us – happening to us, existing independently of us – has no reality in itself apart from the mind that reports it. This is not a problem for us to understand in relation to the world in which we walk nightly, in dreams. Every time we wake from dreaming, we experience again a jolt of disorientation as the inner reality is contradicted by waking consciousness. We realise only by that comparison, only with the clarity of hindsight, that all the time we thought we moved through landscapes and conversations in our dreams, we were not there at all, but lying in our beds hallucinating. The same kind of mental process is happening in our waking consciousness, too, the Course tells us; we wake from one kind of dream into another. And everything we see or hear or feel is only happening within the dreaming mind.

How can this help us to lead effective lives? As far as we are concerned, the world is real, and we must relate to it or disintegrate. But it is a way of thinking that unifies all our perceptions and relaxes our many anxieties. If I am the cause or dreamer, and all the figures in my dream are aspects of myself, why would I take sides with one against another? Or fear for my own safety? Or believe one situation has any more to offer me than another? When you know you are dreaming, there is no longer anything to prove, or feel ashamed of, or angry about.

Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. (M12 6.6)

It means your thoughts do make the world what it is, you are responsible for how you think, you can let go of guilt and pain, and there is a sane and compassionate way to live even in this illusory world. To know yourself as a creative mind in communion with all you see – because all you see lives wholly in your mind – frees your thinking of fears, judgements, superstitions. It is a heart-lightening process.

As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. (T21 intr)