Workshop 8: Saturday 2nd
May
Remember the old riddle about the two doors guarded by two
guardians? One door is the way to happiness, the other to hell, only you don't
know which is which. One guardian always speaks the truth, the other always
lies, but you don't know which is which. They will answer just one question.
How can you find out which door to go through?
For centuries Christianity has told us that we must choose
between the road to heaven and the road to hell. The Course uses the same metaphor to say the same thing, but with a crucial difference. Religion presents
heaven and hell as equally real. Heaven is a promise of future rewards for good
behaviour, while hell threatens a terrible retribution for our sins. The
Course, however, tells us that good behaviour is nothing to do with true
happiness, and that sin and hell do not exist except in our frightened and
childish imagination. The only real choice we have is between freedom from
illusions or a self-inflicted suffering. That is, you can use your mind lucidly
and focus on what is only true, life-giving and loving; or you can use it fearfully
to disconnect, to perceive yourself as attacked or justified in attacking. The
first is creative and enduring, a 'journey home' to completion. The second is a
painful and ultimately self-defeating process of disintegration. It is a 'useless
journey' because it is a mistake, a mirage, a dead end.
There are two teachers
only, who point in different ways. And you will go along the way your chosen
teacher leads. There are but two directions you can take, while time remains
and choice is meaningful. For never will another road be made except the way to
Heaven. You but choose whether to go toward Heaven, or away to nowhere. There
is nothing else to choose. (T26 V 1)
The trouble is that from where we stand, there seem to be a
million directions. Our self-appointed 'teacher' is the slippery ego with its
one agenda: to keep us disconnected, deluded and in denial.
Its dictates, then,
can be summed up simply as: "Seek and do not find." This is the one promise the ego holds out to you, and the
one promise it will keep (T12 IV 1)
Do you realize that
the ego must set you on a journey which cannot but lead to a sense of futility
and depression? To seek and not to find is hardly joyous.
The 'useless journey' is the life spent seeking for
happiness where it cannot be found. We each think our life story is unique, but
the blueprint is the same for all. To live in the ego's world is to repeatedly act
out the ego's drama of alienation, guilt, regret and finally death.
The dreaming of the
world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to prove it is
autonomous and real. It puts things on itself that it has bought with little
metal discs or paper strips the world proclaims as valuable and real. It works
to get them, doing senseless things, and tosses them away for senseless things
it does not need and does not even want. It hires other bodies, that they may
protect it and collect more senseless things that it can call its own. It looks
about for special bodies that can share its dream. Sometimes it dreams it is a
conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the dream, it is
the slave of bodies that would hurt and torture it.
The body's serial
adventures, from the time of birth to dying are the theme of every dream the
world has ever had (T27 VIII).
There is another use for the body,
though, and for its life in this apparent world. The mind can escape its own
illusions by waking up to reality. But first it must want to. It must become aware that it is asleep and chasing dreams and
being chased by them, before it can decide it has had enough futility and grief,
and wake up. The Course is only another dream, but it is a dream that prepares
us for waking. It represents one of 'many thousands' of such processes of inner
change, like a lucid dream that introduces a dawning awareness into the
dreaming mind. This process is the 'journey home'. There is nowhere to go except
to stop going nowhere. There is no
journey, only an awakening (T13 I 7).
The journey to God is
merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you
are forever. It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed.
Truth can only be experienced. It cannot be described and it cannot be
explained...Together we can meet its conditions, but truth will dawn upon you
of itself (T8 VI 9).
This will be the last in this present series of workshops The Two Uses of Time. For details and
bookings, email anna@unlearningschool.com.
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