Only you can save the world! New workshop series for 2014

January to June 2014: a series of monthly Saturday workshops about YOU.

Who are you (really)? What is your special purpose here?

You are unique, and what is unique about you is exactly what the world needs. If you are not true to yourself, how true can you be to anybody?

But you may be acting a part, making compromises, living for other people, ruled by the dreaded Oughts and Shouldn'ts. Or fighting to be different, reacting against your upbringing and circumstances. Neither of these is truly living from the heart.

When you describe yourself, do the words 'powerful' and 'inspired' leap to mind? Or does that seem over the top? But surely that is exactly how you feel when you are most alive? Perhaps you have been keeping yourself down, trying to find a place in an ungentle world? Perhaps you have lost something or someone (the real you) along the way?

Here are some of the questions these workshops will help you to answer for yourself:

Who are you anyway? ...let's pretend that under all those disguises and party hats there is a 'real' you

Why are you here? ...assuming just hypothetically that you are not a random flash in life's pan

What is the difference between being true to yourself and just being the selfish, defensive, suspicious, secretive, vengeful, unfairly treated person you are afraid you really are?

Where can your inner self, with its loves and its childish innocence, find its place in the brutal and indifferent outer world?

When the genie pops out of your bottle and offers you anything at all, will you have a list ready at hand of exactly what you want?

How can you tap into your sources of inspiration, acquire the tools to resolve problems and upsets where they really are - on the inside - and rediscover the sheer joy of being truly yourself?

Think not you lack a special value here. You wanted it, and it is given you (T25 VI 7)

In these workshops you will become used to turn to your inner resources for problem-solving and for inspiration, and be guided by your true values rather than by other people's rules and expectations. You will be exploring the person you have learned to be, to find the essential being that you are.

Free up your energy and real strengths and begin to live 'from the inside', instead of being stressed out trying to appease everyone else, or to fill your roles as you suppose you should.

I would fullfil my function that I may be happy (W62 5.3)

If any of this sounds like you, come along and join any one of the workshops, or book now for all 6 workshops.

Bring a notebook and something towards a shared lunch. Expect to take part in lively discussions, exercise your mind, listen to stories, draw doodles, laugh, possibly cry, meet like- and unlike-minded people. Go home with new ideas to make your relationships more wholehearted and your whole heart lighter.

Note: although the workshops are inspired by the teaching of A Course in Miracles, this series is not directly teaching the Course itself. It is about reconnecting with your own inner resources and how to live truthfully in a deceitful world. In Course language, it is about self-concept versus Self.

DATES

Saturday 11 January 2014

Saturday 1 February 2014

Saturday 1 March 2014

Saturday 5 April 2014

Saturday 10 May 2014

Saturday 7 June 2014

TIME

10.30 am to 2.30 pm

PLACE

31 Harrow Way, Andover, Hampshire SP10 3RQ.  
Please email anna@unlearningschool.com if you would like directions.

PRICE

£30 for any one workshop
£120 for all 6 workshops

There is an easy-pay button at the top of this page, or to pay by cheque please make it to Anna Powell and send it to 31 Harrow Way, Andover, Hampshire SP10 3RQ.

Interested? Any questions? Email me at anna@unlearningschool.com, I look forward to hearing from you.

Start the Day 21 I am inspired today

Where did A Course in Miracles come from? Helen Schucman dreamed it up, just as composers dream up music, inventors dream up inventions, teachers dream up lesson plans, journalists dream up what we need to know, all of us dream up shopping lists. We think of some people as having creative personalities and others not, but this is just another example of how the world sees differences and inequality everywhere. Every one of us is creating all the time. We dream up who we are; we dream up who we think other people are; we concoct our days' activities and our emotional responses to them. And at night, we go on dreaming up scenarios and talking to ourselves in our sleep.

Look around you; there is nothing your eyes can rest on, or your ears hear, or your body feel, that did not begin as a thought in someone's mind. Even to perceive the grass and the sky sets off a explosion of associated ideas, words, impressions; while the mind picks and chooses among them, which to pay attention to and which to let pass.

The mind is very powerful, and never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains. There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level (T2 VI 9)

Where our thoughts come from, however, depends on whether the mind chooses to be a channel for truth or to make up its own version of reality. It is like a radio that is either tuned so that it can clearly transmit, or not tuned, so that all you get is static, discordant noise, confusing messages.

Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual  (T1 I 12)

The mind that is enthralled with the idea of living in a little autonomous world of its own making has tuned out the clear resonance of what is true. It hears what it tells itself, believes what its body's senses tell it. It no longer knows it is a mind, because the body's senses only talk about the body. Its power to choose between reality and illusions is now taken up with choosing between a million illusions - what to eat, what to do, where to go, how to compete with a million other separate bodies. Its creativity finds expression in a million degrees and forms of cleverness, talent, skill, productivity and resourcefulness; but as long as these are directed toward glorifying the ego and its world, the mind is still only dreaming up possibilities, instead of reflecting truth.

Your mind may have become very ingenious, but ...Ingenious thinking is not the truth that shall set you free (T3 V 5)

We are making up and making believe all the time, but for most of us life is sadly lacking in inspiration. The very word conveys vitality, joy, interest - literally, a breathing in, a filling up, a breath of life.

To be egocentric is to be dis-spirited, but to be Self-centered in the right sense is to be inspired or in spirit. The truly inspired are enlightened and cannot abide in darkness (T4 in 1.7)

In the Course's sense of the word, to be inspired is to attune yourself to a reality beyond the limited awareness and anxious concerns of the body. Helen Schucman seems to have had the scrupulous integrity to scribe the Course without interfering or letting her ego's fears and opinions get in the way of the process. Any invention or revelation may be inspired, when we do not block that flow of calm, joy and certainty that is always on tap.

Let us today be neither arrogant nor falsely humble. We have gone beyond such foolishness. We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. These are but attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function. It is not our part to judge our worth, nor can we know what role is best for us; what we can do within a larger plan we cannot see in its entirety...And what we think is weakness can be strength; what we believe to be our strength is often arrogance (W154)

Inspiration means being true to the spirit in yourself and recognizing it in others. It is not a gift that some are blessed with and others not: it is a choice for each one of us to make in our own time. "Many are called but few are chosen" should be, "All are called but few choose to listen" (T3 IV 7). Inspiration in this sense is not scarce, or to be forced, like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, or a means to an end, like trying to think of a quick way to make another million. It is what happens when you align yourself with something greater than the ego, and more constant than the world. Even when all you are letting come through you is today's shopping list. Truth and order will leak into the world, despite our attempts to keep it out.

 

This is the last of this series of Start the Day reminders. Thank you for joining me, and until the next series, have a good day again whenever you remember.

Start the Day 20 Make this day different

If these daily reminders of some of the Course's fundamental principles sound much the same as each other, then you have got the point. The Course's workbook lessons reinforce its whole teaching with 365 different lessons, but the message is the same in all of them. If we could consistently think along the lines of just one of them, there would be no need for the rest:

Each contains the whole curriculum if understood, practiced, accepted, and applied to all the seeming happenings throughout the day. One is enough. But from that one, there must be no exceptions made. And so we need to use them all and let them blend as one, as each contributes to the whole we learn (WrVI in 2).

The Course teaches one message, aims to bring about a consistent state of mind, unifies our purposes, helps us to single-mindedly hold to what is true. But we learn it piecemeal, if at all. The ideas are too much to take in at once, too contrary to our experience and beliefs. We might try out some of the ideas, but not consistently, and then complain that it doesn't work, or is too difficult to learn. We might forgive one person for one injury; but not if they do it again, and not someone else on another occasion. The Course keeps repeating this proviso: don't make exceptions. If you make exceptions, you will not get the whole picture; and the wholeness of the picture is what we need to learn. Learning how not make exceptions is what the Course is for.

You may believe that this position is extreme - as indeed anyone who has studied the Course is bound to feel. It is so all-inclusive and uncompromising that it hardly seems possible to live a normal life in this world and still to think in the way the Course urges us to do. Yet can truth have exceptions? ...Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all (W155 2)...What we want is to keep some aspects of the dream, and not the more uncomfortable ones. But then you are choosing to carry on dreaming, and dreams cannot satisfy you. For no one can make one illusion real, and still escape the rest (T26 VI 1).

Our reluctance to accept the Course's teaching unequivocally is why it can take so long to learn. It is difficult to be consistent in applying the ideas when we can hardly understand them, let alone believe anything so opposed to our habitual way of thinking. It is only by being willing enough to keep reading it, to follow the lessons, whether we believe them or not, or like them or not; and to increasingly accept that the principles are the same in every situation, that we can discover by experience that they work, they do enlighten our perception of everything, they do unravel conflict, they do make life less fearful and more loving. This is the truth, at first to be but said and then repeated many times; and next to be accepted as but partly true, with many reservations. Then to be considered seriously more and more, and finally accepted as the truth. (W284).

Here are some of the fundamental truths to which the Course teaches there are no exceptions:

1. There is no world. What we see is what the mind shows us. We are continuously conjuring up the reality we think we see, and making it real by reacting to it as if it were. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact. Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false (W16 1)

2. I can be hurt by nothing but my belief that I can be hurt. Loss is not loss when properly perceived. Pain is impossible. There is no grief with any cause at all. And suffering of any kind is nothing but a dream (W284). I could not be tired or stressed, and external conditions could have no effect on my body, except that I believe this is my reality. But I can learn that truth is otherwise.

3. Love is not partial, or variable: it is a constant. I cannot love some people and not others. I can only choose whether to love, or to withhold love. Love is incapable of any exceptions (T7 V 5). Love is nothing less than the willingness to let forgiveness rest upon all things without exception and without reserve (WpII 9)

4. Happiness is not earned, or caused by anything, or endangered by anything. It is always present, always accessible when I know where to look for it and drop my guard against it. The constancy of happiness has no exceptions; no change of any kind. It is unshakable (T21 VIII 2)

Start the day with any one of these in mind, or remember to remember them at any time, and if only for curiosity's sake, try applying them consistently to the most mundane as well as more difficult situations in which you find yourself. None of them makes sense unless you apply them equally and without distinction. Then you may begin to glimpse the immensity and transformational power of this way of thinking. There are no exceptions to this lesson, because the lack of exceptions is the lesson (T7 IX 4)]

Make this (day) different by making it all the same (T15 IX 10).

Start the Day 19 I trust my brothers

To be trusting is almost a synonym for being gullible, in the world's parlance. It is like wishful thinking; a limp and hazy hoping, rather than an inward resolution. We say 'I trust you' to mean 'I am offloading the responsibility for my happiness on to you, and if you disappoint me it will be your fault.' If I say 'I don't trust you,' it means that you are unreliable, not that I am an uptight, grudging sort of person.

But trust is a decision. When you decide to trust another person, you make a commitment to your own integrity. You are not asking anything from them, but choosing love over fear. You are taking a stand for values that are alien to the world's defensive thinking. For love without trust is impossible, and doubt and trust cannot coexist (M7 4)

We tell ourselves that it is wise to be wary. The world teaches us to look past 'good' appearances to search for the 'bad' that is being kept secret from us. In turn, we keep secrets of our own, for fear of exposing our vulnerability, or of giving someone else an advantage over us, or of being seen for what we fear we really are and despised for it. So we maintain barriers between us that keep us all incomplete, and make us afraid of each other.

There is a distance you would keep apart from your brother, and this space you perceive as time because you still believe you are external to him. This makes trust impossible. And you cannot believe that trust would settle every problem now. Thus do you think it safer to remain a little careful and a little watchful of interests perceived as separate. From this perception you cannot conceive of gaining what forgiveness offers now (T26 VIII 2).

The Course enables us to look past all appearances, 'good' and 'bad' alike, to the unchanging reality beyond; towards the what is, beyond the what seems. Trust involves suspending judgement, in the knowledge that we never know enough to judge anything or anyone without prejudice. Without judgment are all men brothers, for who is there who stands apart? Judgment destroys honesty and shatters trust (M4 III)

What you look for, you will find: this is a key principle of the Course's teaching. Trust is not about trusting the other person to come up trumps after all, for it is certain that their ego (like yours) is neither trustworthy nor loving. Trust is not about hoping that trust in God, or karma, or time will sort out your difficulties for you; many people use the idea of 'handing the problem over to the Holy Spirit' as an excuse to not face up to their own lack of love and their own reluctance to decide anything. To trust, in the Course's sense, is to trust the power of love itself to light up a way through conflict and pain in your own mind, where none seemed possible.  To decide to trust in your 'brothers' is to restore your own mind to peace and remind you of what you value most.

True faithfulness...does not deviate. Being consistent, it is wholly honest. Being unswerving, it is full of trust. Being based on fearlessness, it is gentle. Being certain, it is joyous. And being confident, it is tolerant (M4 IX 2)

Start the Day 18 I can't go wrong today

If you actually knew this for certain, it would wholly change the way you get up and go through the day. But on the contrary, if you think about it at all, you may feel it is very possible you can go wrong in one way or another. No wonder so many people are reluctant to get out of bed in the mornings. 

The most we usually hope for our day is that things will turn out not too bad, if we are careful, lucky, and do not tempt fate by getting cocky. 'I can't go wrong' is so patently contradicted by experience that it jibbers a touch-wood, fingers-crossed fear of come-uppance. We are all familiar with the gremlin inside us, or the rule of Sod's Law, who is roused by any surge of happy confidence as if determined to prove us wrong, to pull the rug out from under our feet and replace it with a banana skin.

When you learn that the gremlin is you, that it is only yourself you are afraid of. and that you wrote the self-undermining rules you live by, you can get up and meet the day without fear. The mad woman in your attic, the alligator in your sewer, the monster you have created are fictions. The world you see through your eyes and through the windows of your laptop or television - yea, the great globe itself - are such stuff as dreams are made on. In short, the reality you see, and how you interpret it, is mediated through your mind, and you can learn to see it differently.

What worries us about anything going 'wrong' is not really that we are afraid of making a mistake. It is not even that we are afraid of the consequences that might result from the mistake. If you are playing a computer game, it is by making mistakes you learn what to do. Like a rat exploring a maze, you try one way, and get the cheese; or you try the wrong way, get no cheese, go back, try another way. Eventually, you know the way and go straight to the cheese without needing to check out the blind alleys. So helpful teachers urge us not to hesitate for fear of making mistakes, but rather, to boldly make as many as we need, so as to distinguish what works from what does not work.  

The Course, even more helpfully, points out that what we are really afraid of is being wrong. The word 'sin' is out of date, but the idea of it still hobbles our minds and inhibits our actions. The concept of sin makes us feel that a mistake is shameful. If so many stories have to be told about innovators like Edison, who had to find 2,998 thousands of ways that would not work before succeeding in giving us the electric light bulb, it is because in our hearts we are not convinced. Perhaps some of us might be prepared to tolerate getting it wrong that often, if we could be guaranteed an eventual success. But we would still prefer the success without the pain of failure.

The point of the Edison story, though, is not that success takes a lot of patience and that you can't have a rose garden without a great many thorns. The point is that the so-called failures were not failures, but valid discoveries in their own right. Most of us experience failure as frustrating: the word originally meant 'whipping', and that's what we do, whip or beat ourselves up over our mistakes. We consider them painful, humiliating, and discouraging. Failure does not feel like an advance in our general understanding. It feels like a punishment in itself for not being good enough.

When you discover at the checkout that you have left your wallet at home, you feel a fool. When you step in the dog mess, you feel personally degraded. You can get 19 out of 20 ticks on a test paper, and berate yourself for the one cross. You can come to a party for fun with friends and be mortified when you forget someone's name, or wear the wrong shoes, or turn up a week too early or too late - the possibilities for embarrassment are endless. These are not just mistakes, as we have judged them. Mistakes call for correction, for doing something differently, for learning something new. They point away from themselves and towards the cheese. But when you make them into sins, they become part of your identity and affect your peace of mind and the confidence of your decision-making.

So if ever you have a day when anything or everything goes wrong, remember first that 'wrong' is a matter of interpretation. Consider the rules you have set in your mind for how things and people ought to be, and how you are using these to set yourself up as a victim, or as a failure: denouncing someone as guilty, and deserving of punishment.

Your insane laws were made to guarantee that you would make mistakes, and give them power over you by accepting their results as your just due (T24 IV 3)

However, if you start the day from the viewpoint that Nothing real can be threatened (T intr) and that The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there (T14 II 3), it is easier to see that you really cannot go wrong. When you are clear that mistakes are only misunderstandings, misjudgements and blind alleys, arising from fear, uncertainty or misinformation, then you will only want to get back on course for the cheese, as quickly and good-humouredly as possible.

Truth will correct all errors in my mind. What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions that remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear (W107)

Start the Day 17 I am not alone

There is a popular line taken by self-help books and personal development gurus, and sometimes by our best friends when we confide in them our problem with someone else: they sagely advise us to avoid 'negative' people. The people who are good for you, they tell us, are enthusiastic, generous, optimistic, rise to a challenge, are big in heart and vision. The complainers, the timidly conventional, the ones who put you down or tell you why your idea will not work, the self-preoccupied and the anxious are not the sort of people you want to know. Popular wisdom tells us that if someone lets you down, you are better off without that person in your life. We like to tell ourselves that we have 'grown out of' a relationship - an idiom we rarely use when we are the ones who have been grown out of. We encourage each other to label other people as immature, inadequate, not quite up to our own higher standards. Dump them, we suggest; an ugly word for an ugly thought.

For you do not respond to what a brother really offers you, but only to the particular perception of his offering by which the ego judges it (T14 X 7)

So we brusquely sever our connections, or wish we could, which amounts to the same thing. Or, 'with the best will in the world' as we like to say, regretfully or otherwise, we drift apart. There are people we avoid because we are embarrassed by our own hostility - no one likes to think of himself as unfriendly - and by our own fears of conflict or rejection. We do not like people who confuse, alarm or remind us of our uncertainties. It feels safer to keep a distance of space, or of time, or both, between us and them. But we are not on separate little rafts with variable compasses. We are all in the same lifeboat.

Everyone is looking for himself and for the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in him because they are yours. The ego tries to find them in yourself alone because it does not know where to look...if you look only at yourself you cannot find yourself, because that is not what you are (T8 III 5)

There are also less welcome gaps, between us and the people we think we would like to see more often, or would like to get to know in the first place. There are all those amazing people we read about who we never get to meet, who seem to have the interesting circle of friends that we are not part of. We joke that we can choose our friends, but not our family; but it does not always feel as though we have chosen our friends, either. And when you do get to know them, you find that those positive, good-for-you friends are as hampered by problems as everyone else. They may have learned better ways of coping and how to be less fearful, but you can be sure that they are as lost as you are, or they would not perceive themselves as here at all. As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived (T15 XI 5).
 

We are as solitary as each other, as long as we believe that we are separate individuals with different agendas. Only the lonely and alone...see their brothers different from themselves (T22 in 2) - that is, all of us, until we learn to see every other being as a 'brother', as an essential part of oneself: one moment of real recognition makes everyone your brother ...Salvation is a collaborative venture (T4 VI 8)

While we perceive ourselves as many instead of one, practically speaking we cannot be friends with everyone at once and all the time. Our existing relationships must change in form and degree of closeness as we follow our various paths, sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent. But in your mind, in the way you think of anyone at any time, whether they are still physically alive or not, still in touch or not, you always have the choice to be open or closed to them, appreciative or irritated, to wish them well or hold a grievance against them. You have the gift of peace to offer or withhold. If you see them as other than you, there will be a distance between you, like it or not. If you see them as the same as you, regardless of the differences in form, you will no longer feel alone. Even if your body is isolated, your mind is still free to bring this peace to everyone who wanders in the world uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear. For it is given you to join with him (T31 VIII7).

The Course does not ask us to try to be more loving. Rather, it teaches us to recognize how much we do not want to, how much we isolate ourselves, in the mistaken conviction that we are bigger and better, or at least safer, on our own. Look fairly at whatever makes you give your brother only partial welcome, or would let you think that you are better off apart. Is it not always your belief your specialness is limited by your relationship? 

...You would oppose this course because it teaches you you and your brother are alike (T24 I 8). You may not welcome the message, but it brings release from your self-inflicted loneliness. You are not alone, when you bring to mind the idea of total connectedness with all those others out there, past present and to come, in this universe or any other. When you listen within yourself for echoes of what the Course calls 'the forgotten song', the stirring of thoughts and feelings that the world never taught you and knows nothing of, you remember compassion, and recognize that your brothers are not out there but in you, and you in them.

Thus they define their life and where they live, adjusting to it as they think they must, afraid to lose the little that they have. And so it is with all who see the body as all they have and all their brothers have. They try to reach each other, and they fail, and fail again. And they adjust to loneliness, believing that to keep the body is to save the little that they have. Listen, and try to think if you remember what we will speak of now.

Listen,–perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten; dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar, like a song whose name is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely unremembered. Not the whole song has stayed with you, but just a little wisp of melody, attached not to a person or a place or anything particular. But you remember, from just this little part, how lovely was the song, how wonderful the setting where you heard it, and how you loved those who were there and listened with you...What is a miracle but this remembering? And who is there in whom this memory lies not? The light in one awakens it in all. And when you see it in your brother, you are remembering for everyone (T21 I 5-10)

Start the Day 16 Because it's not worth it

It is said that people decide in the first three minutes of meeting you whether they are going to like you or not. Instant assessments of non-verbal clues, our appearance, manner, voice - and their own associations to any of those - carry more weight than anything we say or try to put across. And we do the same with them. We navigate the world by a process of continuous evaluation. Where does this person, or this aspect of a person, or this situation, or this item on the supermarket shelf sit on my inner scale between good and bad, between like and not like, between move towards or back away from?

For it is not only people that we judge. Did you ever do those little drawings of amoeba in your biology class at school? That eloquent blob that spreads itself into open arms as it flows towards a speck of food, and then enfolds it into itself; or that recoils from a hostile element and streams away from it? This is how we are too, when out shopping or at a party, or choosing a career or a partner. Some of us are more flexible and ready to fine-tune our initial judgements in the light of further information or experience. Some cling more obstinately to their prejudices and find reasons to justify them. But when we are not set in stream-away-from mode, we are all on the hunt for crumbs to enfold.

The trouble is, the Course tells us, we are not the blobs we think we are, and our lives and happiness do not depend on the crumbs we think we need.

Everything the ego tells you that you need will hurt you...For what you think you need will merely serve to tighten up your world against the light, and render you unwilling to question the value that this world can really hold for you (T13 VII 11)

The media are fascinated with stories of compulsive, extreme hoarders, who have literally tightened up their world against the light with so much clutter that they have to crawl through tunnels of their own junk; or the emergency services are unable to reach or even to find them when they finally suffocate under the piles of their collected stuff. These cases show us a nightmare vision of our own inability to distinguish true worth from imagined worth. We are all attached to things for the sake of whatever we think they can give us, projecting our inner worth outside of us, so that we see value, security, affection out there instead of experiencing it within us. It would be a mistake to suppose that just because you can distinguish a comparative value of a pile of old newspapers and a photograph of someone you love, or between the remains of last month's fish and chips and a gold watch - just because you are more orderly and the amoeba in you can detect more confidently when to enfold and when not to enfold - you are no less bound to the illusions of this world.

Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you, and will do so. Not because it has the power to hurt, but just because you have denied it is but an illusion, and made it real (T26 VI 1)

There is nothing out there that is of more worth than anything else. There is nothing out there. As long as you fail to recognize that you have given to anyone and anything all the meaning it holds for you, you will feel deprived if the person goes away or the thing is stolen, or breaks, or decays.  

It is as if you said, "I have no need of everything. This little thing I want, and it will be as everything to me." And this must fail to satisfy... (T30 III)

"We seek without us the wonders that are within us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us," as Sir Thomas Browne said. By projecting value outside us, and then trying to get it back by possessing the thing that now seems to embody what we think we need, we make ourselves eternally needy. 'Don't miss out!' shout the advertisements. 'Get more for less!' 'Here is what you've been looking for, what you must have, what people who know say is good for you.' The world sees a difference between the child who clings to a bit of rag for comfort while its sucks its thumb, and the millionaire who buys an Old Master painting. There is nothing wrong with either of them, except the intrinsic fear of loss, and the belief that the importance of the thing lies in itself, rather than in the way the mind perceives it.

Recognize what does not matter (T12 III 4), then, and hold to what does: peace, truth, love. This makes it much easier to live in a world of illusions without being either dismayed or entrapped by them. This frees you to enjoy, whether you keep or let go. Relationships between you and another person, or between you and your environment and the many objects in it, are not defined by what they are, but by the quality of your affection and respect for them.

You do not want the world. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it you look upon with love. This gives it the only reality it will ever have. Its value is not in itself, but yours is in you (T12 VI 3)

While you can think of anything or anyone with love, you have it for ever, whether it is there externally for your eyes to look on, or inwardly for you to rejoice with. Everything else is only a semblance, and has no power to make you either happy or unhappy. Today I will remember what I entirely value. I will not value what is valueless (W133).

Start the Day 15 Being grateful is a good Start

'After all I've done for you! You should be grateful,' the world tells us. But it is hard to be grateful when things go wrong all the time, when our hopes are disappointed, when people and events fall short of our expectations or cause us grief. Even when we tolerate people in general -  because they are there and we can't do much about it, like the ones in the queue in front of you or in the traffic jam, or the ones that fill the supermarket or the holiday destination that you would have liked to enjoy in private - we are not often grateful that they are there at all.

It is easier to muster up a little gratitude for advantages you enjoy, when you compare yourself with people who do not have them. Comparative gratitude is of the 'There but for the grace of God go I' mentality, or 'I can't complain (though I should like to), because (I am glad to say) other people have it (even) worse.' In fact, 'Can't complain' is how the English express positive enthusiasm.

So if you were to take a piece of paper and write down what you have to be grateful for - I hope you will take the time to actually do this, for reasons that will become apparent - the list might begin with physical comforts and personal gratifications, such as having a roof over your head, or your equivalent of the villa in Spain I mentioned in a previous post. Often these items represent a source of comfort or at least a reprieve from pain, worry, existential terror. We can be fervently grateful, if not exactly that there are so many people out there suffering unspeakable abuses and deprivations, but that we are not, for the moment, one of them. This is gratitude of the guilty mentality: I may not be wholly free of grievances, and if a genie were to obligingly pop out of the bottle, I could suggest improvements to my lot, but I do not want to seem ungracious, in case fate turn peevish and withdraw such privileges as I have.

Then look around you: there may be things you treasure that serve to remind you of the special people and interests that are part of your personal history and help to make you what you (think you) are. This is gratitude of the 'How nice to be me' mentality. We are grateful for the kindly familiar, for the unchallenging, and for whatever recalls our happy moments; or like a thing of beauty that is a joy forever, brings us happiness every time we see or think of it.

And now we are getting closer to true appreciation. Never mind how partial and disgruntled your gratitude may be, every little helps, as Tesco helpfully would have us keep remembering. Gratitude takes practice - you need to develop your weakened ability to be grateful - for we are so full of fear that we forget to remember how much there is to love. Defensiveness blinds us to the joy that is always quietly hovering in the wings, just waiting to be called into view. You cannot love what you do not appreciate, for fear makes appreciation impossible (T6 I 17)

The more you look at, search your mind for, pay attention to and dwell upon anything and anyone with appreciation - when you acknowledge receipt, as it were, of an unexpected parcel of happiness - you discover that gratitude cannot be demanded, or owed. It is a gift, not from you to someone else, but from you to yourself. Or rather, from your Self to your Self. When your heart and mind fill with gratitude, the more complete you become, overflowing your own boundaries, washing away your petty dissatisfactions in a rising tide of thankfulness. True gratitude is indistinguishable from unconditional love. You feel loved and loving in equal measure, because they are the same.

Start the Day 14 One of me knows

In June this year, Girl Guides dropped their traditional vow "to love my God", replacing it with a more contemporary promise to "be true to myself and develop my beliefs." The problem with being true to 'myself' is that its meaning is just as open to interpretation and ambiguity as the word 'God'. The latter at least has the virtue of setting an absolute standard, symbolizing a purpose and value that transcends the narrowly personal. In a society where personal inclination and 'feelings' are venerated, to the point where personality is the new religion, we seem to consider it 'honest' to be unkind or irritable if we are feeling grouchy, and 'truthful' to attack what we do not like about someone. It is easy to read 'to be true to myself' as 'to do it my way', and 'to develop my beliefs' as 'to develop my own version of the truth.'

The Course, too, would have us drop our superstitious and furtive lip-service to any form of external God. It turns our attention back to what exactly we mean by 'myself', for this is where we need to distinguish between truth and illusions. And it is here that we will come closest to realizing what God is.

The self-concept I hold of myself is a construction in my mind. I perceive it as a body moving in a world of assorted other bodies, which are also a manifestation of my ideas projected outwards. This image of myself is an illusion, ever fluctuating in appearance and character, unified only because I have clapped them all into a mental category labelled 'me.' The Course refers to this as the ego, the "self-concept," or the tendency of the self to make an image of itself...You can perceive yourself as self-creating, but you cannot do more than believe it. You cannot make it true (T3 VII 4.)

A person who has accepted under hypnosis to believe for the moment that he is Elvis Presley will act completely out of character and according to his conception of Elvis Presley instead. In his own mind, for that time he really is Elvis (just as the original Elvis believed and behaved according to his concept of himself for the duration of his earthly life). But even while in trance, there is a part of the mind that remembers who you really are, which returns you to full awareness and back in character at the click of the hypnotist's fingers, or sooner or later at will.

This is something like the way our minds make up the world we live in and the personalities we think we inhabit. On a level that we have shut out of conscious awareness, we know that we are acting a part. We frequently feel alienated, conflicted, sometimes do not know what to do or what to wear or what our priorities are, because we hardly know what we are or what matters. For you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth (W139 5).

You see the flesh or recognize the spirit. There is no compromise between the two. If one is real the other must be false, for what is real denies its opposite...Salvation is undoing (T31 VI 2). To remember what we are in truth means undoing, or letting go of, our misplaced trust in 'the flesh', that is, our perception of an alternative, apparently substantial, physical reality, and becoming aware of a constant, infinite, spiritual reality that is in us and all around us, or rather that we are in and inextricably part of. It is invisible to our physical eyes and brains, because they belong to the self-concept; but its presence can sometimes be intimated, felt, perceived through an experience of revelation, or just in an instant of perfect peace.

So there are two voices in our minds, that claim to be 'myself.' One is loud, insistent, self-important, self-critical, self-conscious, self-is-everything. This aspect is intent on its own survival and advantage, and yet does not know or care about what is really best for us or for anyone else. The other, which the Course distinguishes with capital letters to express its immensity, completeness and integrity, is the Self; which however has no sense of self, and does not see itself as separate from others. This is the part of us that the Course calls the 'One who knows.' Trust in this part of yourself, for it remains real when everything else is in flux. This is the Self to be true to, because it will still be there when all the beliefs and illusions you have developed fall away.

You know not where you go. But One Who knows goes with you (W155 10).

I will not lead my life alone today. I do not understand the world, and so to try to lead my life alone must be but foolishness. But there is One Who knows all that is best for me (W242)

The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there (T14 II 3)