I need do nothing

Saturday June 8^th 2013  Workshop 10: I need do nothing (T18 VII and W337)

Wake up, the Course tells us. There is much to do, and we have been long delayed (T15 XI 10). To help arouse us from the stupor of self-delusion, it gives us over a thousand pages of mind-changing ideas, including a workbook of 365 specific lessons to do, tells us exactly how to go about it, and urges us to get on with it. This is not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical application (T11 VIII 5).

And all this, the whole Course itself, is only a nudge in the right direction, it tells us, just a beginning. From here on, the Course assures us repeatedly, you will be told exactly what to do (T9 V 8, W47 3, SII 3.5); for there is so much that must be done before the way to peace is open (T20 IV 8). Why waste any more time being unsure, unhappy, prejudiced, fearful and aggrieved, when there is a better use for time?

Yet even as the Course encourages us to ask what to do, and tells us what to do, and keeps reminding us to do it, it also reassures. Time is kind. Forgive your limitations. You need do nothing...But surely this contradicts its whole teaching. Do nothing? Only remember to remember a given lesson, every fifteen minutes of the day. Only love the person you can't stand. Only be content when everything goes wrong. On the one hand the Course is so demanding that it seems impossible to do what it asks of us, and then it tells us there is nothing to do.

So how does I need do nothing help us to pay the bills and meet all the other practical and emotional needs that arise?

This is the last workshop in this present series. We will be looking at what we have (not) done over the past year and what we are (not) going to do in the coming months. If you can join us, I look forward to seeing you. Either way, have a happy summer.

Saturday 8th June, 10.30 am - 2.30 pm, Harrow Way, Andover SP10 3RQ. £15 Contact anna@unlearningschool.com

Our opposition to love

 

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
   I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
   I am the captain but you will not obey.

 

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
   I am the city where you will not stay.
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
   I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you will not hear me,
   I am your lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
   I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
   Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

 

(by Charles Causley: from a Normandy crucifix of 1632)

 

 

As far as I know, A Course in Miracles is unique among spiritual and philosophical thought systems for teaching that we are not entirely keen to be enlightened. We are truth-seekers, but with the brakes on. Mottoes that celebrate the journey rather than the destination, or the seeking rather than the finding, are popular because we are afraid that the journey's end is death and nothingness. The reason that peace and happiness are so elusive, and even when we catch them, so brief, is not that they are difficult to attain, or strictly rationed, or must be earned, as so many other thought systems imply. It is because we rightly suspect they will be the end of life as we know it. 

 

So we fight against our own yearning for an experience of a reality beyond this one. We cannot not love, because love is too essential to us to ever be wholly denied. But every one of us who feels the presence of love in their heart will also repeatedly swerve away, back off, find a reason to shut love out again. We alternate between choosing to love and refusing to love. These are the only two choices we ever have, the Course tells us. 

 

You…decided that your brother is your enemy. Sometimes a friend, perhaps, provided that your separate interests made your friendship possible a little while. But…Let him come close to you, and you jumped back; as you approached, did he but instantly withdraw…Thus you and your brother but shared a qualified entente, in which a clause of separation was a point you both agreed to keep intact…Thus is love seen as treacherous, because it seems to come and go uncertainly, and offer no stability to you. You do not see how limited and weak is your allegiance, and how frequently you have demanded that love go away, and leave you quietly alone in "peace" (T29 I 3).

 

The poem above catalogues some of the many ways we deny love to ourselves, by denying it to something perceived as other than ourselves. Our lives are a succession of missed opportunities, refusals, betrayals, rejections, attacks and avoidances. In a million different ways we attempt to wall ourselves into our own little corner of selfhood. For if we did not defend it against love, our individuality, our personal point of view, everything that is special and different about us would fade into insignificance. Love enlarges us and makes us whole, but at the cost of self-interest. And obstinately we cling to the narrow familiarity of self-interest, for fear of the immensity and intensity that might - that would - sweep us right off our anxious little standpoints.

 

...think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many you have refused. This is the same as telling you that you have refused to heal yourself (T5 in 1)

 

Only the last line of the poem is at odds with the Course's teaching, if it is read as a threat or a judgement. Our opposition to love is the cause of all suffering, in the sense that if you shut out the light you will find yourself in the dark, and if you refuse to be happy you are choosing to be unhappy. It is a 'refusal to heal yourself', and we do not even know we are doing it. We justify our withholding of love by blaming someone else and feeling hard done by. And those we need to forgive most are those we have most wronged.

 

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 (T7 VII 8)

 

We are afraid of the ‘great sun’ within us and will not love or honour it. This core of truth in us, this Self that has no sense of self, this part of us that is not individual but the same in all - this spring of Life in us - is a direct threat to our trivial self-concepts and excitingly dangerous world. For they would fizzle away like dew in the sun, if we were to let the great sun shine on them. So we shut out the greatness in us, and defend our grandiosity instead. To quote again another Causley poem (see my post for April 2012), each one of us is afraid to see the god in himself, quietly standing there.

 

But at any instant, we can drop our defences. The truth in us is so lovely and so still in loving gentleness, were you aware of it you would forget defensiveness entirely, and rush to its embrace (T18 III 3). We become aware of it when we stop opposing it. Opposition is exhausting, and futile anyway. Love already has us in its arms. We can struggle against it, or pretend it is not there; or decide I will not be afraid of love today (W282) - and love it back.