Ballad of the Breadman

Mary stood in the kitchen
Baking a loaf of bread.
An angel flew in the window
‘We’ve a job for you,’ he said.

‘God in his big gold heaven
Sitting in his big blue chair,
Wanted a mother for his little son.
Suddenly saw you there.’

Mary shook and trembled,
‘It isn’t true what you say.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said the angel.
‘The baby’s on its way.’

Joseph was in the workshop
Planing a piece of wood.
‘The old man’s past it,’ the neighbours said.
‘That girl’s been up to no good.’

‘And who was that elegant fellow,’
They said, ‘in the shiny gear?’
The things they said about Gabriel
Were hardly fit to hear.

Mary never answered,
Mary never replied.
She kept the information,
Like the baby, safe inside.

It was the election winter.
They went to vote in the town.
When Mary found her time had come
The hotels let her down.

The baby was born in an annexe
Next to the local pub.
At midnight, a delegation
Turned up from the Farmers’ Club.

They talked about an explosion
That made a hole in the sky,
Said they’d been sent to the Lamb and Flag
To see God come down from on high.

A few days later a bishop
And a five-star general were seen
With the head of an African country
In a bullet-proof limousine.

‘We’ve come,’ they said ‘with tokens
For the little boy tochoose.’
Told the tale about war and peace
In the television news.

After them came the soldiers

With rifle and bombs and gun,
Looking for enemies of the state.
The family had packed up and gone.

When they got back to the village
The neighbours said, to a man,
‘That boy will never be one of us,
Though he does what he blessed well can.’

He went round to all the people
A paper crown on his head.
Here is some bread from my father.
Take, eat, he said.

Nobody seemed very hungry.
Nobody seemed to care.
Nobody saw the god in himself
Quietly standing there.

He finished up in the papers.
He came to a very bad end.
He was charged with bringing the living to life.
No man was that prisoner’s friend.

There’s only one kind of punishment
To fit that kind of crime.
They rigged a trial and shot him dead.
They were only just in time.

They lifted the young man by the leg,
Thy lifted him by the arm,
They locked him in a cathedral
In case he came to harm.

They stored him safe as water
Under seven rocks.
One Sunday morning he burst out
Like a jack-in-the-box.

Through the town he went walking.
He showed them the holes in his head.
Now do you want any loaves? He cried.
‘Not today,’ they said.

 Charles Causley

Every call the Church makes for some literal demonstration of ‘faith’ – like wearing crosses, like studying texts in school, like proclaiming belief in a physical resurrection – drives another nail into its own cross, further stamps out the flame of truth that once gave it life. Like a reversal of the Emperor’s New Clothes, it is trying to hang clothes on an emperor who does not exist.

Those who thank God for their ‘daily bread’ and mean the food on their table - even if they are imaginative enough to include the chocolate in their Easter egg, or even have enough grasp of metaphor to mean the earnings that make them a ‘breadwinner’ – have dismally defined themselves as needy, separate creatures in a competitive world of limited resources, and God as something other, somewhere else, of whom we know nothing but that He distributes unevenly and may at any moment take away again even that little we have.

Yet those who dismiss such superstitions as nonsense may suffer from a still greater sense of alienation, having thrown out not only the symbols that speak to our deeper levels of mind, but also what they speak of. Here is some bread from my Father. Take, eat  is a message that cannot be translated in any literal way. Only the god in yourself, quietly standing there can either hear it or say it. If you have shouted that into silence with the persuasions of false gods or with arguments against gods of any breed, you will not hear your own call to your real self, or the certainty of your own reply.

The bread of life has nothing to do with the bodies we suppose we are, and everything to do with the spirit we are, the mind that thinks us. It is never helpful to call for separate groups to cling to what will further separate them, or to try and cast in concrete an ineffable reality. Religious leaders might inspire us, rather, by pointing beyond petty and outworn symbols to their deeper and universal meaning, by shaking new life from them as Charles Causley has done here, or by seeking new metaphors, more relevant to our own times, to reconnect mind with spirit and to reveal the numinous in everyday life.

But even if they did, would we pay attention? We like our religions to be irrelevant, divisive, ranting. We are not ready for ideas that might dissolve the world of specifics and reconnect each with each other, inner with outer, thought with being. Not yet. Not today, thank you.

Easter Day 2012

Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

In this world, judgment is virtually simultaneous with perception: even as we perceive differences, we are already judging between them. As long as events, and people, seem to happen to us, we will judge them as better or worse. As long as we seem to pace out limited lives in a world of inexhaustible variety, we must make choices. So the power to discriminate is practical and helpful, if we will use it searchingly.

But the impulse to judge does not in itself arise from an honest seeking after truth. We judge so as to find someone else guilty, so that we can preserve a sense of separate self while blaming someone else for the pain this dislocation causes us. We make judgments to define what we are by attacking what we think we are not, and to sustain the hallucination that we are really walking about apart in a kaleidoscopic world of unrelated parts and particles; labelling these people or events as good and those bad, some more important or valuable or despicable than others. The mind judges so as not to know, in the Course sense of knowing; so as not to know itself one with everything, so as not to recognize itself in everything it thinks it sees.

The Course points out that you are in no position to judge at all: not that you should not, but that you cannot. You are never in possession of the full truth about anything. You do not know what you are or what is real, let alone what is in your own best interests or anyone else’s. But in this form that you think of as yourself, you can learn to use the faculty of judgment itself for a different purpose; not to further illusions, but to distinguish when the mind is deluding itself; to choose to forgive instead of condemn. You can learn to recognize when you are judging against another so as to buttress your little sense of self against the immensity of love, truth, peace; and judge when you have had enough of that sorry game.

The Course helps us to detect the many ways we mask the wish to attack by elaborately justifying it to ourselves:

Judgment is interpretation: Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appears as fact (M17 4).

Judgment is projection: Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize. You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own (T31 III 1.4).

Judgment is self-importance: The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. It is curious that an ability so debilitating would be so deeply cherished. Yet if you wish to be the author of reality, you will insist on holding on to judgment….you believe you are the author of yourself and project your delusion onto others.T3 VI 5

Judgement is meaningless: In the end it does not matter whether your judgment is right or wrong. Either way you are placing your belief in the unreal (T3 VI 3).

Judgment is a judgment on yourself: You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment. You do not need judgment to organize your life, and you certainly do not need it to organize yourself. In the presence of knowledge all judgment is automatically suspended… (T3 VI 3).

You imagine that your thoughts are telling you something true, that they are reporting something real. You assume your observations and assessments of people and situations are valid because they seem to come from you, as if that is some guarantee of reliability. The early workbook lessons in the Course begin by freeing you from this personal attachment to the opinions, beliefs and perceptions that stream through ‘your’ mind. They are not true, and you are not their thinker. The same mind that is making up your version of events is also making you up. The same internal commentary that spins you stories and images of other people is as busily accusing you, labelling you, depreciating or exaggerating what you are. The only choice you have is whether to run with your judgments of what is real, or laugh them away and stay with what is real.

Prepare you now for the undoing of what never was…Fortunately for the continuation of this dreaming world, even when it is surprised into silence for a moment the voice for judgment soon rallies, strident and insistent. No happy freedom from judgment, wariness, accusations, expectations and conditions can be forced upon you. Love is the alternative to judging against, and it is an option you can accept or decline. It will never condemn you for preferring to condemn, or not forgive you for not forgiving. What you believe is right or wrong will make not the slightest difference to a reality in which there are no opposites or distinctions and nothing is rejected.

Will you meet yourself and every one, every thing, totally without judgment? What if – even for an instant – you lay down your arsenal of reservations, opinions, assessments, evaluations, recriminations for what is past, apprehensions for the future (that is, judging in advance)? What would be left to say to anyone? What would be left to read in the papers, or watch on the television or discuss on the internet? What left to think, how to relate? What blessed peace! How restful: a world too full to talk about. Here there are no differences to speak of; like the field in Rumi’s poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

And rightdoing there is a field.

I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about. 

Smoke gets in your eyes

One of the most obvious difficulties with the Course for many people is its specifically Christian language. It talks about forgiveness, salvation, the Holy Spirit, the Son of God, God the Father…The teaching speaks to you, the reader, directly and personally as in the voice of Jesus: This course has come from him because his words have reached you in a language you can love and understand (M23 7).

But many people do not love or understand this language. On the contrary, Christian terms are so tainted with concepts of sin and sacrifice, judgement and joylessness; and so associated with a long history of emotional, intellectual and physical violence, that the Course’s use of them puts people off at least as much as it reassures. But for a course in forgiveness to be written in the language we most need to forgive has a teasing pertinence.

And meanwhile, those who do love and understand the language soon find that it is charged with such different meaning that old ways of thinking dissolve within it. Like it or not, wherever you come from in background or belief, you will start the Course with a set of preconceptions, and they will be wholly overturned as you continue with it.

For the whole point is that all forms, all appearances, all experiences, all words have no intrinsic or final reality in themselves. They have no power but that you give them. The meaning you read into them is in the mind of you, the thinker. They are ultimately unreal because they only exist in relation to a separate somebody – you or me; and the ‘you’ or ‘me’ that we think we see are not real either. The mind chooses either to look upon a dream world of its own constructing, or awakens to absolute reality. Within the dream, it uses language – any language – to spin a point of view, or to remind itself of the truth it can never completely forget.

So it is that the Course can use a language that is controversial, emotive, confusing, open to differing interpretations, often misleading and often inconsistent – in places so dense, convoluted and abstract that you hardly know what it is talking about – and still transmit to you, through you, passing your understanding, a joyous, liberating vision of a wholly different reality. For the language is of this world, but the meaning comes to us from within our own mind, an echo of a knowledge that is in us, around us, right here, right now, everywhere, always.

Repeatedly the Course reminds us not to confuse form with content; or we will not be able to look past all the forms of this world to see the reality that is beyond language and image altogether. If you read the symbolic language too concretely, or use the Course’s vocabulary jargon-style without questioning what it really means, you will not make the shift from false to true perception, just fall back into old habits of guilt, fear and self-absorption. You will try to bend the Course to your ego purposes rather than let the Course free you from them. The ego blows smoke in our eyes so that we see only pictures in the smoke and not what is really there; and it is part of the smoky magic that we do not see we are blowing the smoke in our own eyes. The ego is a choice the mind makes, that you the thinker makes, minute by minute

This course has come from him…but not from a separate, superior ‘him’; it comes from you, from what you really are, from where you already are, from where you are not you at all, but only everything and everyone. ‘This course’ has not come into this world at all. What is true about it is here now and always has been. It is this world that is not here. This personal person whose eyes you think you are looking through is barely a curl of smoke: not there!

His words have reached you…that is, something in you that is not you-the-thinker has for an instant seen through the smoke and caught a glimpse of the knowledge you tried to haze out of awareness. These words are not ‘sent’ by a Someone to ‘us’; but how else can we, who think in disconnected words, who picture ourselves as separate from each other and experience totality in bits, understand that there is only one Word and it is absolute silence – and that this is what we are?

God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality (M21 1.7).

Since we live in a divided state of mind looking out on a world that mirrors division back to us, we can only learn of oneness in a dualistic language that must contradict itself in the attempt. But we can remember that this is only a mirror, and a cracked one at that; that truth is wordless but unmistakable, and when it touches you on the quick, not to jump for safety back to the familiar nothings of the dream. Like any teaching, the Course can be helpful, or misleading, according to your wish. It may be, for you, the special form in which the fact that God is not insane appears most sensible and meaningful to you…The form is suited to your special needs, and to the special time and place in which you think you find yourself (T25 VII 7). But the form is still only smoke. The reality is what you see through it, past it, in it, free of it.

The Devil You Know: forgive the one you hate

Saturday 10th March Workshop 7

I look forward to seeing everyone who plans to come tomorrow. After two weeks of thinking murder, grief and devastation - for nothing is a coincidence - I have almost lost my voice today and may be unusually speechless. So you may even get a word in edgeways this time...

This workshop is about the dark side of the 'special relationship' - of all of us - and it shows the Course at its most unique: it is those people we find most difficult who offer us the fastest route to peace and joy, just when they seem to demolish both. Your purpose here is to save the world, the Course tells us, and this is what it means: let go of judgement, repair the breach; undo, undo the harm you do not know you do.

 Anna

Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and He shall say, ‘Here I am.’

And thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. And they that be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. 

(Psalm 58.9)


There are new postings on this site under 'Conversations and Questions', for your interest.

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)

Illusions: How to Live in a World that is Not There

If the world is only a dream, what’s the point in having breakfast? When A Course in Miracles says ‘There is no world!’ what does it mean, and how does it help us to deal better with our relationships, problems and all the necessities of life…that are not really there?

The language of the Course may at times sound archaic to modern ears, perhaps, or embarrassingly religious to our secular assumptions - certainly it is not like any other self-study course we might embark on - but that is not why it is mind-boggling to read. It is way ahead of us with its lucid understanding of the tricks the mind plays on itself; much further ahead than we may be ready to accept, with its point that there is nothing here or anywhere but the mind. Yet its lessons are practical. We are steeped in illusions, we live and breathe them as unquestioningly and as self-detrimentally as fish who pollute the very water they eat and swim in... The Course clears our murky thinking, shows us that reality is at once far beyond our little private universes, and yet always right here with us and within us.

This is the theme of my talk at the Miracle Cafe in London on Thursday 26th January 2012 at the new venue (full details below, or from the Miracle Network - just click on the title above). If you can be there I look forward to meeting you.

Price: In advance, before the day: £15 with vegetarian meal, £12 without. (£3 extra if you pay on the day)
 
Time: 7 to 9.30pm (doors open 6.45pm).

Venue: St. Mary Abbots Centre, Vicarage Gate, London W8 4HN. Location map  

Tube: High Street Kensington, Notting Hill Gate. 

Buses: 9, 10, 27, 28, 31, 49, 52, 70, 94, 148, 328, 390, 452, C1. 

Street parking from 6.30pm.

So Various, So Beautiful

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.

(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.

Forgive Your Life...

...for not being what you meant

Life is so unlikely to turn out as we intended, that we may wonder what we did intend exactly as we think: ‘How did I end up like this?’ and ‘What went wrong?’ It is more astonishing really how effective we are, with everyone pulling in different directions in a surge of ever-changing conditions. But even when we think we know what we are doing and where we are going, we find inner forces are at work rearranging our lives in ways we did not mean and often bitterly regret. It is as though someone else were pulling our strings, tripping our switches, moving our goalposts: some god, or leprechaun, or our own genius for self destruction. As St Paul put it, ‘The good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (Romans 7:18-19).

We work as frantically as ants trying to get things to happen or stop happening in the form of external conditions that we think will suit us. What we pay little attention to is our own psychology. We suppose on the one hand that how we think and feel and act is more or less hardwired into our brains, and on the other that any change in our state of mind must be enabled from outside. The insights of Freud and Jung and other early twentieth-century psychologists opened an unnerving view into the complexity and deviousness of our psyche, but that labyrinth is vast and deep, and does not seem to lead to the cheese. It seems simple enough: give me the right conditions and I will be a happier/better/different person. Only the right conditions are difficult to pin down. And this still makes me a product rather than a creator.

There is indeed a brisk movement these days towards making things happen, rather than waiting for someone else - or a miracle - to put your life back on track towards what you might at least settle for. But this is not what I call creative. The bias towards achieving social status and material goals emphasizes rather than relieves our sense of loss and need. The 'right conditions' begin and end with your state of mind.

A Course in Miracles describes itself as a course in mind-training. It is a spiritual teaching, in that it is concerned with abstract realities and values. It is also unnervingly practical, in that it is about how and why we go about everything we do. It is not about being a ‘better person’ or fighting for moral values and goodness or making the world a better place, as taught by traditional religious institutions. It is not about the world at all, except as the world reflects back to us our own thinking. Many New Age thinkers exhort us to use the power of our mind; but to work with the Course is to realise that we cannot not use it, we use it all the time, or are used by it, to our detriment. The difficulty rather is that we are misusing it, and that is why we feel misused. How can  life be anything other than what we intended? We are knitting it into existence, every thought another stitch. But we can discover that our intentions were conflicted, misdirected, mistaken, and learn to think differently.

A new series of 10 one-day workshops on A Course in Miracles begins on September 10^th – see full details under WORKSHOPS