Different

Not to say what everyone else was saying

not to believe what everyone else believed
not to do what everybody did,

then to refute what everyone else was saying
then to disprove what everyone else believed
then to deprecate what everybody did,
was his way to come by understanding
how everyone else was saying the same as he was saying
believing what he believed
and did what doing. 

by Clere Parsons 

Anyone who takes a stance as contrary as the person in the poem is likely to make this same 'everyone else' roll their eyes and count the cost in time, patience and social harmony. Yet who is 'everyone else'? Individuals too, every one. In his or her own way, everyone refutes and disproves and deprecates what others say and do, fighting their own battles against a succession of opponents. 

From the moment we are born, we start to learn who we are by distinguishing ourselves from those we are not. We do not have to contradict or openly disagree with anyone: we assert that we are different with every fingerprint we leave in passing, every time we say or hear our name (Me!) or anyone else's (Not me!). It is by making differences meaningful that we establish separate identities for ourselves and for everything else out of the totality of life: 

You have made up names for everything you see. Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things (W184). 

Consciousness itself depends upon a perception of difference. We could have no awareness of a world of space and time, and no sense of personal self, without comparing differences. The differences already exist, we confidently believe: they are already out there in the world of fact, whether we like them or not. It seems obvious that we do not put them there, we only observe them. We discover that 'you and I are not the same', and all the degrees of difference between one thing and another. Indeed the more exactingly someone can distinguish differences, the more we admire their grasp of reality. Much of our learning involves making ever finer distinctions: we learn to see not just a cloud or an insect but a specific kind of cloud or insect, and even that will have its own special features, different from others even within its own type or family. As in those 'spot the difference' puzzles, when you look closely and carefully past the obvious similarities, the more differences you can find. 

And this is just what the Course tells us our minds are doing continuously. It is not only artists, inventors, gardeners, businessmen, scientists, anyone who develops a product or a process, who want to come up with something  new, original and special. The same impulse prompts anyone who switches on the news to see how today is different from yesterday, or will travel to see unfamiliar places, or buys a novelty because it is different and a 'talking point'; as if your friends may have nothing else to talk about, or as if you would be a nobody without stirring the interest and envy of your neighbours. 

For without differences, we would indeed be nobody. We would not know who we separately were. The point of celebrating birthdays and anniversaries is to emphasize what is special about a particular person or a particular occasion. We like variety. We would be bored if every day were the same. But there is a deeper fear that prompts our insistence on differences. We feel individually invalidated if any other person is too much the same. The need to be special is so powerful, the Course teaches, that it both shapes the world we see and how we react to it. We are not only observers, but inventors of our reality. Just as the dreaming mind sees its own illusions and believes them to be real, we are collectively cooking up the world we see, even as we see it. Believing is seeing, as well as the other way around. We dream up differences so as to forge a sense of separate self. We want to see them, and so we do. 

When an author makes up an assortment of fictional characters, and describes them walking and talking and reacting to situations according to their various points of view, they seem to come alive in the mind of both author and reader. Similarly, the Course tells us, collectively we have made up the characters we believe we are. In one mind, all our individual lives play out simultaneously. We are, as it were, together suffering a multiple personality disorder on a cosmic scale. The sense of disconnect we all feel can only be maintained while each personality believes itself to be different from every other. Hateful and lonely as it may feel, and no matter what we think is the cause for it, the real reason that we react disappointed, bewildered, outraged or upset by something that another person says or does, is that we want to reinforce the belief 'You and I are not the same.' The Course teaches us to see that every angry word and loveless act springs from one root cause: the wish to perceive ourselves as different. 

You might think that, on the contrary, most people try to get on with others and fit in. Rebels against the norm are surely in the minority, by definition. There is a romantic notion that most people are boring and ordinary and cannot understand or tolerate the few passionate, defiant individuals (like oneself) who aspire to adventure or originality. In Jean Richepin's poem, 'Les bourgeois sont troublés De voir passer les gueux': the wild geese breathe a more rarified air than the farmyard birds below, and ruffle the herd mentality of the conforming majority. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zVLjXBqKSU) 

But we all see ourselves as the exception in some way. It is only other people who 'come out the same' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONEYGU_7EqU). Even if in other ways they are similar, it matters to me that my house is pink while everyone else's is green or yellow. We may fit right in to any social group, yet still there is a part of each of us that feels disengaged, false to ourselves, as though we are only playing at being one of the group. And if we do not fit in, that proves we dance to a different drum, come from another planet: are unique. It is as though there is always an outsider within us, a self-inflicted outcast. We think we are despised, when we are the ones who are holding aloof. There is something in us that thinks being 'true to oneself' means contradicting everyone else. So as not to clash outright with others, we may downplay our differences. We can learn to express them diplomatically. We even celebrate them: 'Vive la difference!'...until the next person comes along saying or believing or doing something more different than we are prepared to tolerate. The more obvious rebels are only more dramatic about how they choose to be different. Whatever our style of life, we all find something different to envy or to despise in someone else's.

The purpose of A Course in Miracles is to reverse this perception of otherness. It teaches us to question the illusion of self that we have devoted our lives to establishing, by comparing oneself against others, by judging for and against, by defending what we have decided are our personal interests. What the Course gives us is an understanding we cannot hurry or make happen, but can only 'come by', as the poet puts it. We must each in our own way and our own time 'come by understanding' that every other creature is not only not our enemy, but another aspect of oneself.

But in the meantime, as the Course points out, while you think that part of you is separate, the concept of a Oneness joined as One is meaningless (T25 I 7). It takes much unlearning to recognize with Krishnamurti that 'the observer and the observed are one'. As the poem suggests, the process involves acknowledging our differences, and how important they are to us, before we can see past them. Then we can begin to dismantle the barriers that keep us separate, by honouring our differences - All my brothers are special (T1 V 3.6) - even while remembering always that these differences do not matter (T7 II 5), (T13 IX 8).

In the end, the Course tells us, we will all come by the understanding that transcends our differences. The journey is the same for us all, because there is only one mind making it. Love is not about negotiating or tolerating or reconciling our differences, or compensating for each other's. It is the realization that regardless of apparent differences of form, in truth 'You and I are the same.' 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, 

I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you, 
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, 
so close that your eyes close with my dreams. 

(Pablo Neruda: Love Sonnet XVII, trans Mark Eisner)

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.

There is no order of difficulty in miracles

This is the first and fundamental principle of the course: no difficulty is harder to resolve than any other. No wrong is beyond forgiveness, it is never too late to change your mind, and no one is more or less lovable than anyone else. All these are aspects of the same idea.

How can we possibly apply this in practice? You only have to look around you to see that there is an order of difficulty in everything. Isn't it harder to build a house than to wash the dishes? And what one person can do easily, another may struggle to do at all. Even your own routine activities can seem more difficult some times than at others. We rate what happens to us on a scale between 'good' and 'bad', with infinitesimal shades of in-between. There are welcome events and there are disasters. There are minor illnesses and some you may not survive at all. And you can get on at once and delightfully with some people, while others seem so alien that they might have come a different planet. In the world we live in, some outcomes can be quite effortlessly achieved, while some are downright impossible.

But the whole emphasis of the course is on shifting our focus away from 'the world we live in'. It coaches the reader towards an entirely different experience of reality. The miracle is not bound by any laws of time or space or logic. Only you cannot expect miracles until you understand where they come from and the purpose they serve.

In this workshop we will look at problems and their degrees of difficulty. How effective is your approach to problem solving? Do you tend to adopt a 'fight', 'flight' or 'freeze' position, according to the kind of person you think you are, and the circumstances as you see them? The course gives us an alternative way of resolving conflict, no matter what form it appears. It is a course 'in miracles' - its whole purpose is to enable us to see any problem, all problems, in another light, such that they disappear altogether. The question is, does it work, how does it work, and how do you go about it?

Make this year different by making it all the same (T15 XI 10.8)

Saturday 11^th May 2013, 10.30 am to 2.30 pm at Harrow Way, Andover SP10 3RQ

Contact anna@unlearningschool.com if you would like to join us. You will be welcome.

Love is what I am

"I always wanted to be somebody," said Lily Tomlin, "But I see that I should have been more specific."

Yet specific is just what we are. The unique identity we each piece together and defend is made of specifics: this height, that colouring, this personality and that upbringing.

The building of a concept of the self is what the learning of the world is for. This is its purpose; that you come without a self, and make one as you go along...A concept of the self is made by you. It bears no likeness to yourself at all (T31 V 2).

Until you change your mind about who you are, you will run into one problem after another, trying to prop up a self concept that is fundamentally unreal. Changing your mind is what the course is for: it offers new ideas to replace your limited and limiting thoughts, and open your mind to a deeper reality.

But there is a part of us that still wants to be a specific somebody and has no intention of changing its mind, and this month's workshop theme is one that can really stick in the craw: I am very holy (W35). The idea has nothing to do with being pious or long suffering, or doing good deeds. It is about becoming free of your sense of self. Here is the same idea in other words:

Love, Which created me, is what I am (W229).

So what does it mean, and how does it change who you think you are and what your life is for?

We meet on Saturday 13th April at Harrow Way, Andover, from 10.30 am to 2.30 pm. You are welcome to join us.

The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

The workbook lessons of A Course in Miracles are so counter-intuitive, training the mind to reverse all its assumptions, that working with the course can feel like being dragged through a hedge backwards. The metaphysical explanation the course gives for who we are, why we are here is particularly thorny: a psychological Theory of Everything, expressed in Christian metaphor and convoluted prose.Try and explain it to someone yourself and see how their eyes instantly glaze over, too.

 

But we do not need to know what it is talking about. We learn the course by reading it, experimenting with its workbook lessons, redirecting our thinking in the way it teaches...and reading it again. The process itself will bring us to understanding. That is what it is for. The language teacher Michel Thomas repeatedly said it was not the pupil's job to learn, only to let the teacher teach. These exercises are concerned with practice, not with understanding...It would indeed be circular to aim at understanding, and assume that you have it already (W9).

The course itself tells us that a good teacher does not overload a child with too much explanation. A simple directive like 'Just do this' (T6 V 3) saves much fear and confusion. So do we need the mind-boggling metaphysics at all?

It is said that the Buddha refused to discuss metaphysical questions. There is a story that illustrates why. A monk comes to the Buddha and challenges him to answer the 'fourteen unanswerable questions' (see below). The Buddha tells him this parable:

"Suppose a man were wounded with a poisoned arrow. Friends are there to help, a surgeon is here to cure him, but the man says, 'Before you remove this arrow, I need to know whether the man who wounded me was a warrior, a priest, a merchant or a worker? What is his name? Where is he from? Is he tall, medium, or short? What is the colour of his skin? Tell me, was the bow that wounded me a long bow or a crossbow? Was the bowstring of bamboo, sinew, hemp, or bark? Were the feathers of the shaft those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird? I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether it is a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed or an oleander arrow...'  While he is still asking questions, the man dies. And his questions remain unanswered." (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poison_Arrow)

So what were the fourteen questions that the Buddha thought so irrelevant and diversionary to the awakened mind that he refused to answer them? Here they are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions). They can be boiled down to just four:

Concerning the existence of the world in time:

1. Is the world eternal?

2. ...or not?

3. ...or both?

4. ...or neither?

Concerning the existence of the world in space:

5. Is the world finite?

6. ...or not?

7. ...or both?

8. ...or neither?

Referring to personal experience:

9. Is the self identical with the body?

10. ...or is it different from the body?

Referring to life after death:

11. Does the Buddha exist after death?

12. ...or not?

13. ...or both?

14. ...or neither?

Unlike the Buddha, A Course in Miracles does address these questions, and many more. It asks for complete open-mindedness, encourages us to question every belief, every value, to not be fobbed off with 'mysteries' (T9 IV 7). Like the Buddha's parable, though, the course points out that many of our questions are really statements in disguise. They are questions-to-refute, questions-to-control, questions to impose a view of reality that precludes any other. This is why they are unanswerable. Our asking them only reinforces our state of unknowing and prolongs our pain.

It is like a volunteer at a hypnosis show who has been hypnotized into forgetting the number seven. The number no longer exists for him. He is surprised to find that however often he counts, he now has eleven fingers. He is confused. Do three and four make six? Or eight? No explanation will make sense as long as his puzzlement is based on an illusion. As soon as he comes out of trance, he will know that he has ten fingers, has always had ten fingers, and his temporary confusion was part of a hallucination.           

The purpose of the course is to tell us, while we are still in the trance we call 'life', that it is only a kind of trance. It is like that lucid thought we sometimes have while we are dreaming: 'I'm dreaming!' The course gives us a new answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, in the form of a creation story that is at once entirely new and yet deeply familiar. It frames its teaching as a journey, a journey from being lost to going home. It explains 'where' we have come from and 'where' we are going, although it is talking about a state that is outside of time and space and talking to a mind that neither comes nor goes.

The course does not give us what our limited minds might consider to be satisfactory answers. It gives just enough of a background story - like, 'You are experiencing a kind of tunnel vision, the effects of a hypnotic suggestion - curious, isn't it? - and shortly you will wake up' - to put its mind-training lessons into a meaningful context: A theoretical foundation such as the text provides is necessary as a framework to make the exercises in this workbook meaningful. Yet it is doing the exercises that will make the goal of the course possible (W in).

But its emphasis is always on direct experience, not on intellectual contortions. This is not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical application (T11 VIII 5). ...You are still convinced that your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and makes it what it is. Yet we have emphasized that you need understand nothing. Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing you cannot give right now (T18 IV 7).

What you can give, or give up, or forgive right now is all that matters. There is no need to further clarify what no one in the world can understand. When revelation of your oneness comes, it will be known and fully understood. Now we have work to do, for those in time can speak of things beyond, and listen to words which explain what is to come is past already. Yet what meaning can the words convey to those who count the hours still, and rise and work and go to sleep by them? (W169 10)

As the surgeon might remind the man in the parable of the arrow, The urgency is only in dislodging your mind from its fixed position here (T16 VI 8). And that is done by stopping trying to control the process, stopping trying to second guess where the course might take you. When you shift your focus from your wounds and pondering their causes, healing can unravel whatever problem you thought there was.

Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W189 7).

Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells,

Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;

Crying Whát I dó is me; for that I came.

I say móre; the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce; thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

It is impossible to read this poem in a hurry, once the first flashing images of kingfisher and dragonfly have startled your inner eye. The words insist on being taken one at a time. They sound: each one in turn reverberates like the bell and twang and dropping stones of the first lines.

And so do each of us, and every single thing in this world, the poet is telling us. Our uniqueness sings out. We declare ourselves in every gesture. Every cell in our bodies is stamped with our personal code. Every hair, every freckle, every breath - and leaf, bird, paperclip - says 'Here I am, this is me.' Every separate thing we see expresses its selfhood. It selves, is perfectly itself.

Separately and in an unceasing clamour, everything squeaks 'I am.' For some reason I have for years misread 'squeaks' for 'speaks', as: myself it squeaks and spells. From an A Course in Miracles point of view, I think my mistake improves the poem. For there is something plaintive, paltry as well as wonderful, about the incomparable specialness of every thing that is. We have imputed the infinite and marvellous variety of life forms - like the astonishing blue of a kingfisher wing, like the supple fish he is about to snatch - to the vast creative imagination of the God who we supposed made us, too, all gloriously different. But Richard Dawkins's phrase The Selfish Gene comes closer to describing the mind that the Course tells us made the world we see: our own mind, seeing what it wants to see: its own turmoil and conflict projected outside itself into a seeming universe of differences:

You have made up names for everything you see. Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted by a name.

This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world's perception is achieved. You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will (W184).

But if we can for a moment tune down the cacophony of separate selves, we may hear 'each mortal thing' singing the same song, of life beyond, behind, and within all its special differences. This is the essence of the Course: to use what seems separate, to learn that nothing is separate.  Such is the Holy Spirit's kind perception of specialness; His use of what you made, to heal instead of harm. To each He gives a special function in salvation he alone can fill; a part for only him (T25 VI 4).

Manley Hopkins's own religion did not distinguish, as the Course does, between the

apparent world of separate bodies and shifting forms, and the real world of spirit and changelessness. But he did perceive what the Course would have us see: that the multitude of different masks hide a single identity. The kingfisher and the dragonfly, you and I, everything have one reality in common. Christ plays in ten thousand places. Not one of us alone is either whole or true, but the whole truth is in each of us, for us to see in each other and allow to find expression in ourselves.

Nothing real can be threatened

Next workshop in the Happy Learner series: Saturday March 9^th 10.30 am to 2.30 pm

'Fear is not justified in any form' (W240)

We hardly realise how fearful we are, always afraid of something. We are nervous of each other and ever concerned about what might or might not happen. We spend a great deal of time, money and anxious energy insuring and defending ourselves against every imaginable form of attack and against all sorts and degrees of hurt and loss, past, present and to come.

And we even fear that to have nothing to fear would be very boring.

But peace is fearless. And true peace is not a pose - it is founded on reason, though hardly what the world thinks of as reasonable. The whole teaching of the course is summed up in this one idea: Nothing real can be threatened. What does it mean? It is not talking about recklessness, nor bravado, nor even courage. Is it humanly possible to experience that kind of unquivering defencelessness for ourselves, in all circumstances? And - given that we might hardly recognize ourselves without our fears - do we dare to let them go?

You are welcome to join us. Contact anna@unlearningschool.com or phone 01264 395579

The purpose of sickness

Saturday February 9^th 2013: The Happy Learner, Workshop 6. 

Sickness is a defence against the truth (W136)

It is a fact of the world we live in that our bodies repeatedly fail us, and eventually will stop working altogether. Few people are as well as they might be, and 'health' and 'sickness' represent opposite ends of the same scale, with most of us swinging somewhere between the two. But we like to perceive average health as normal and sickness as a collapse from the condition our bodies should be in. In other words, we take sickness personally.

Sickness can feel like a failure, a punishment, or an attack. We want to know why, or why me, how to stop it, how to fix it. It is a time when we want - even more than usual - comfort, kindness and some kind of outside help that will do for us what we are frightened or ashamed or angry to find we cannot do for ourselves. And yet it is when we are sick that often others cannot or will not understand, when they become frightened or ashamed or angry themselves. In a world which glorifies a healthy body, sickness is an embarrassment, a nuisance, a burden, a cause for pity at best, and at worst actual hostility: like animals who turn on the weak and wounded of their own species.

In this workshop we will consider the many disorders and forms of distress that make us sick. We will be looking at what the course says about suffering, healing, helping ourselves and others, and what it calls magic: the many means we use to make ourselves better. To understand healing, the course teaches, we must recognize that sickness - and health too - are purposeful. Well or unwell, the question is, who does the body serve?

10.30 am to 2.30 pm. If you would like to come and join us, I look forward to seeing you.

I am not I

Yo no soy yo.
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo;
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces, olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedara en pie cuando yo muero.

(Juan Ramón Jiménez)

[approximate translation:

I am not I.
I am the one
Who walks invisibly by my side;
Whom sometimes I make an effort to see,
And whom sometimes I forget.
One who stays silent while I talk,
One who is forgiving, gentle, while I hate,
One who can get to where I am not,
One who will still be standing when I die.]

 

The course teaches that we are not what we think we are. We live according to an internal image of ourselves, acting and reacting, liking and disliking, succeeding and failing in accordance with a self concept that is learned, constructed and reshaped minute by minute, year by year. The body we inhabit - which we believe we are - embodies the unique personality, the story-so-far, the sense of a separate self that we believe is the hub of our reality.

 

As long as we think this physical, emotional, intellectual, multifaceted self is really who we are, we must suffer from its frailties and frustrations. Its understanding of reality is selective, variable, relative to what seems to be so at any one minute: this little self can never be entirely sure of anything. The cost of being an individual is that you can only see through a minutely limited point of view. The cost of believing you are a body is that you feel constantly vulnerable to attack from both within and without, motivated by need and by fear of loss.

 

All this is no more than a construct in the mind, the course reminds us. It is like the character or avatar that you assume when you play a computer game. You choose it, adopt its special characteristics and goals, and thereafter see through its eyes, advance as if in its body through an external environment, deal with the situations in which it finds itself, negotiate or fight with the other figures it perceives. And for the duration of the game, you really may imagine that this is who you are.

 

But it is not who you are. Like the player of the game, you can pretend for a while, knowing you are pretending, and free to stop at any moment; or you can become so enthralled - in thrall, enslaved - that you no longer remember who you really are, and neglect real life for the sake of a virtual one. But even then, the real you does not disappear. It is only temporarily forgotten.

 

This is analogous to what the course teaches about our real nature. It would have us first only be willing to suspend disbelief long enough to consider what it says as a theoretical possibility. Then it shows us how to try out the idea as if it were true. For we can only be convinced by discovering for ourselves that it is true. But long before we are convinced, most of us have already experienced some feeling of unreality, or some sense that we are faking it, putting on an act; or the fearful insecurity of not knowing who we are or what we are doing, or why, or whom we can trust. No wonder, the course tells us, and quite right: we are fooling ourselves, and nothing and no one in the game is real.

 

But beyond this fluctuating idea of the self there is also an unchanging part in each of us that knows what is true and who we really are. There are always two of us, one imaginary self and one real. The problem - any problem - is that we are convinced that the fabricated version is who we really are, while the real Self barely impinges on our awareness at all. As the poem puts it, I am not myself, yet I am always with me.

 

Knowledge, as the course uses the word, is nothing to do with information, or with anything the body’s senses can perceive or brain can rationalize. This part-that-knows does not know about something: it is what it knows. It is like consciousness, but not the consciousness of being anything or anyone in particular, not the consciousness of ‘self’ as distinct from ‘other’. It is a state of mind such as Krishnamurti meant when he said ‘the observer and the observed are one;’ or what the course calls a oneness joined as one (T25 I 7). From the perspective of the true Self, there is no inner and outer, no here and there, no you and me. There is only what is.

 

There is a part of our mind, then, that remains for ever in touch with infinite reality, while the part that perceives and lives in the world of form is entirely preoccupied with what only seems real. They are mutually exclusive. The moment you give your mind over to one or the other and experience its effects, the other vanishes from your awareness. While you are busily identifying with your physical and psychological self and its apparent needs and interests, you think you or someone else is the one who knows, and the deeper part of your mind is switched off: your Self seems to sleep, while the part of your mind that weaves illusions in its sleep appears to be awake (W68). But when we let the ego and its elaborate fantasies fade away, what remains is our reality: selflessness is Self (S1 V 2).

 

This emphasis on a mind that is divided, not between good and evil, but between reality and illusions, helps us to move on from the idea of supernatural beings in an endless tussle for our souls between Hell and Heaven, like the little angel and devil we picture in cartoons. It also frees us from the limiting concept of ourselves as merely physical bodies, or brain-directed organisms. You are responsible for what you think (T2 VI 2), and what you think makes up the reality you see. There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level (T2 VI 13).

 

There is a technique in psychotherapy which helps you to better understand aspects of your personality or your problems by imagining them as ‘sub-personalities’ or ‘parts’ of yourself. In much the same way, the course personifies the ego as if it were an obstructive or undermining force, and the Self as if it were a loving presence that reliably heals even as the ego harms, and knits back whatever the ego unravels. But the ego and the Self, or Christ, or Holy Spirit, or whatever words you prefer, are only symbols that express how we choose to use our minds: to dream, or to wake up. To believe in a false concept of the self, or know yourself as mind, not body; one, not separate. The Self or 'One Who knows', by any name or symbol is not an entity but a choice that we make.

 

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

 

…there is a Child in you Who… knows that He is alien here (W182 4

 

…there is One Who knows all that is best for me (W242)

 

…let the darkness be dispelled by Him Who knows the light (T22 VI 9)

 

It does not matter what name or form or symbol you give this ‘One Who knows’, this Self in you that is not your physical or psychological self. But it stands for love that is not of this world (M23 4). It walks with us, whether we acknowledge it or not. As Jung put it: 'Called or not called, the god is present.'