Start the Day 2 I will not be afraid today

To start the day right includes resolving to not be afraid today. This is not a matter of circumstances, personality, mood or luck. To not be afraid is a conscious decision that only you can make for yourself, and if you start the day with it you can give yourself at least five minutes (or with practice, hours) of feeling comparatively calm and confident.

We like to dignify fear as a rational, biologically evolved response to a challenging situation, essential to survival, etc, etc. But the truth is that fear makes you less able to deal with difficulties, not more; more isolated and small, not less. And to be afraid in advance as a form of self-defence against whatever might happen is even more self-undermining.

Feeling afraid is a response to your own expectations and imaginings and to how you have depicted a situation in your mind. You can decide not to be afraid today even if you do not think you are anyway. We avoid the word; are more likely to use words like stressed, tense, anxious, concerned, annoyed, or more likely still to complain that someone else is bugging you or being a pain, or that we are victims of a bad situation, rather than to call ourselves frightened. But the Course suggests that we are more fearful than we realize. Our occupations and entertainments serve the primary - but unrecognized - purpose of diverting our awareness away from a perpetual, profound state of anxiety that we never want to look at, that we deal with only indirectly, piecemeal and by calling it by other names:

The ego can and does allow you to regard yourself as supercilious, unbelieving, "light-hearted", distant, emotionally shallow, callous, uninvolved and even desperate, but not really afraid. Minimizing fear, but not its undoing, is the ego's constant effort, and it is indeed a skill at which it is very ingenious (T11 V 9).

To begin the day by deciding not to be afraid today may sometimes, then, make you uncomfortably aware of how much more apprehensive you are of more people and situations, past, present and to come, than you want to accept. Or it might seem absurd to reflect on anxieties that do not apparently exist at all if you are cheerfully unaware of them. We think it unhealthy to think about fear at all, for fear of scaring ourselves. We may be superstitiously afraid to say, silently, decisively, deep inside, 'I will not be afraid today'. The unconscious does not understand negatives, we are told. Merely by dwelling on the idea 'I will not be afraid,' might we be tempting fate, brainwashing ourselves into fearfulness? But if we are really not afraid, 'I will not be afraid today' happily confirms and celebrates that fact. And if we are, it is time we recognized it so that we can decide otherwise. Not looking at our many, complex, underground insecurities is how we preserve them.

You may still complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful T2 7

You are responsible for your thoughts and their consequences, the Course keeps reminding us. We can conjure up beliefs, fears, experiences, and we can also change them. I will not be afraid today is a reminder that you can choose your response to anything that happens. It is a way to start the day with an open mind, and to go to meet the day's surprises, disappointments, confusions, conflicts, injustices, challenges, dark nights of the soul and sabre-toothed tigers with a clearer mind and no cold shrinking of the heart.

Postscript: Just after I wrote this, I read that the funeral of the poet Seamus Heaney took place today. Apparently his final words to his wife were 'Do not be afraid.' We would all do well to start the day, every day, with the same message to ourselves, to everyone we love. To everyone.

Start the Day 1 Let peace lead the way

Begin each day with time devoted to the preparation of your mind to learn what...that day can offer you in freedom and in peace. Open your mind, and clear it (W140/141, review IV intr 5)

The purpose of this next series of posts (which may never amount to more than this one) is to start the day 'in freedom and in peace'. If your day has already veered off track, it might encourage you to start the day again, now. The idea at this moment is that I will post a daily reminder (or weekly, or whenever I remember) for you and for myself to start the day right. If I forget or chase off after another rabbit, this Start the Day thought will still apply any day or time of day:

Let peace lead the way (W155)

We think of peace as passive. It is avoiding outright confrontation, it is a lull between fighting, it is roll over in submission, it is anything for a quiet life. At best, it may be appeasement, compromise, any negotiation that tentatively bridges our separate interests while we still believe they are separate.

But as the Course teaches it, peace is not a temporary condition of affairs, or even a state of mind. It is the reality that underlies the dream we live in. We can catch a feel of it in the space between thoughts, in the stillness at the heart of movement, in the silence behind sound. It does not exist in the world of form, because form is made up of contrasts and opposites, and there are no such contradictions in peace. Peace is neither 'out there' nor 'in here': it just is. It only seems to exist in relation to ourselves; in truth, when we remember peace, we no longer have selves, we are peace.

So just the thought of peace reorients the mind towards wholeness. When you start the day by looking forward to what it will bring, or by dreading what may happen, you have already started on the wrong foot. You are setting yourself up as an individual to whom things happen, or who makes things happen, whose choices are limited and whose experience of peace depends on circumstances. The moment you wake and remind yourself who you think you are, you are already constraining your mind to run along established paths, hedged by learned limitations, jumping at old fears, straining after imagined desires.

To decide, on waking, to 'let peace lead the way' is a conscious choice not to pre-judge or to narrow your experience of life. It is not the ebullient 'Seize the day!' of the ego seeking to shape life to suit itself. We cannot know what is best for us and for everyone, and the positive go-get-'em attitude that is popularly urged upon us these days is frequently more defiant than enlightened. As Blake said, 'He who bends to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy;' happiness is discovered rather than arranged.

Nor is an inward invitation to peace to lead the way for you today a kind of resignation, or apathy, or abdication of responsibility. On the contrary, it is an act of will. It is a decision to meet whatever the day unfolds, without fear or attack. It is an affirmation of trust. It frees your mind and lets inspiration and energy flow confidently into your thoughts and activities this very day. It makes room for miracles: in the Course's sense of a sudden shift of awareness, an opening up of possibilities, a transcendence of limitations.

To start your day thinking 'Let peace lead the way' is not to devoutly shoehorn yourself into some muted idea of whatever you suppose you ought to be and feel. When peace leads the way, you can scamper through your day like a dog off the leash. It's walkies time! You don't need to know where you are going or what time it is. Even when you digress this way and that way, you are keeping an eye (or nose) on your guide, so that your direction is not as random as it might sometimes look. To let peace lead the way is to imply that while there is a part of you that knows nothing, there is also a part you can rely on that you can trust to bring you safely home together.  

The mind engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. It does not think that it will be provided for, unless it makes its own provisions. Time becomes a future emphasis, to be controlled by learning and experience obtained from past events and previous beliefs. It overlooks the present, for it rests on the idea the past has taught enough to let the mind direct its future course.

The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. What it has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals. Its past experience directs its choice of what will happen. And it does not see that here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past, without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs. Anticipation plays no part at all, for present confidence directs the way (W135 15)

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