Start the Day 10 I can have what I want. (So what do I want?)

Obviously we don't get what we want, or we would all have villas in Spain or (insert here your personal vision of paradise). We get what we don't want, didn't ask for: shocks and losses, disappointment, boredom. My grandfather had a gaunt old housekeeper - Mabel - who spent her days, and years, alone in the kitchen and scullery. She used to intone mournfully, though there was only my mother as a child to hear her - "I do wish something exciting would happen!"  As far as I know, it never did.

But more of us have learned more since then about the power of making decisions and the freedom of the mind. While you believe that you are a victim of circumstances, that is the reality you will experience. Even when external conditions are difficult, even when you seem to have little choice, still what you make of a situation is up to you. (Many people these days would say 'down to you.' I prefer 'up to you'. See what I mean? You have more choice in how you think than you may have noticed.)

In a world in which everything is limited, everything changes and everything comes to an end sooner or later, as individuals we are not in control of what happens, to us or anyone else. But our thoughts have an immediate effect on how we feel, and how we feel in turn affects how we behave and how we experience events. Imagine saying to yourself over and over, 'I can't have what I want.' How is that likely to make you feel? Discouraged. Compare it with repeatedly saying to yourself, 'I can have what I want.' That will perk you up. Exciting! I would hazard a pretty strong guess that Mabel believed she could not have what she wanted.

I am not talking about looking on the bright side, jollying yourself along, pulling up your socks or whatever else is drooping. It is a fact that you can have what you want, even though admittedly your options may at times reduce you to choosing between a rock and hard place. You can choose to want what you have. Then you have what you want. This is not a wangle, it is the transformative power of willingness. When you decide to embrace rather than reject, your mind somersaults into another point of view entirely. Embrace, not sadly resign yourself. When you begin to believe that you can have what you want, your mind shifts to a new position, and now begins to ask new questions. Instead of 'Why (is this happening to me)?' or 'How (did I get myself into this mess)?' it asks 'So, given the situation as I see it, what do I want?'

It takes great learning to understand that all things, events, encounters and circumstances are helpful. It is only to the extent to which they are helpful that any degree of reality should be accorded them in this world of illusion (M4 1 A 4.5).

What is the opportunity for you in these circumstances or in this relationship? If you believe that fate, or karma, or your genetic makeup, or God has inflicted your experience on you, then you will interpret 'opportunity' as 'some lesson I am being coerced into learning', or in other words, 'I am being punished.' And you will conclude, 'I can't have what I want.' You will know that you have discovered the sense of opportunity, the power of choice, the realisation that you can have what you want, when you feel energy flow in you again, even an uprising of joy.

"Give up what you do not want, and keep what you do." How simple is the obvious! (M4 1 A 6.6)

What you want will always turn out to be something intangible. Very often you can have what you want in material terms, especially in our increasingly wealthy world. We have more choice than ever before, as far as variety of food, clothing, places to live or visit, activities to do, things to possess, people to meet are concerned. But what you truly want is always more than any physical form can supply.

Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?(W122)

Since what you really want is a state of mind and an experience of being, and the mind is unlimited in what it can conceive, you can have what you want. It takes focus. It takes homing in on what feels like peace and joy, love and gratitude, and not settling for less. Resignation, constraint or obligation, or actual dismay are not what you want. Give them up, and keep what you do want. Have I said this already, recently? - in any case, we would do well to keep saying it to ourselves - You do not ask too much of life, but far too little (W133 2)  

Start the Day 9 I will not be afraid of love today

All religions teach that love is happiness, that love is our heart's desire, love is the answer to our manifold problems. But what we hear is that we ought to be loving, that love is an ideal beyond the normal human reach. We see love as an obligation, not a gift; as a sacrifice, not an opportunity. We talk as if all we want is to love and be loved. But we rarely think of love as a decision that is up to us, either to make or avoid making. Least of all do we think of love as a state of mind we are frightened of, and resist. A Course in Miracles is unique among spiritual teachings for emphasizing repeatedly that we are afraid of love, and that it is only when we put aside the fear and allow ourselves to fill with love that we discover who we really are.

The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence...

What blocks love is always some form of fear. The world constantly tells us that love itself is risky. It is liable to complicate matters, and may hurt us. It would have us believe that to be loving is weak. To be seen as tender-hearted implies you are a pushover. To have a 'soft spot' is to have a fatal gap in your armour. To be open and unreserved is asking for trouble. As for 'harmless', it is positively an insult. Yet 'to abstain from doing harm', as the Hippocratic Oath suggests, is not merely passive as a guiding principle. We recognize in environmental terms that there is grace in treading lightly and leaving no footprint, rather than to plunder as we pass; but few of us will put 'harmlessness: to neither harm nor be harmed' at the top of our list of personal ambitions.

Again, in social interactions we disapprove of acts of violence; but we are not really disturbed by our own violent emotions and angry thoughts. We do not make it a priority to stop them at the border, challenge them and refuse them admittance. The world would teach us that life and love are not the same. On the contrary, all nature seems to witness to the idea that life for one organism must always be at the expense of another. These days, the adjective 'aggressive' is used admiringly, especially in sport and business. The message is, you must be ruthless to succeed, not a wholehearted, laughing, loving human being. We are told it is more practical and effective to be 'hard-headed', as if to be 'soft-hearted' is to be spineless. but wouldn't you rather be clear headed, and great hearted?  Then you make room for mutual understanding and fearless compassion, and can work with other people rather than against them.

The world relishes the idea that 'I must be cruel to be kind'. But where does it originate? From muddled Hamlet, trying to justify to himself the fact that he has just murdered someone and feels compelled to murder again. If we are not clear in our own minds that cruelty and love are irreconcilable opposites, and that one can never lead to the other, how can we be sure of anything?

Love and hate are not head and tails of the same coin. Love is the same whichever way you turn it. We confuse the resolute quality of love with its vacillating substitutes - like sentimentality, and anxiety to please - which sometimes, from some angles, look like love. The difference is that love does not select some people or some attributes or appearances to love, and exclude others. It does not waver or change to hate when its ulterior motives are thwarted. Love has no ulterior motives.

Love brings out the best in you because love is the best in you. It is the love in us that finds better solutions, builds bridges, overleaps obstacles, lifts us out of despondency. Yet we are afraid of love, having confounded it with ideas of sacrifice and loss. Or rather, we have subtly distorted our understanding of what love is because we are afraid of it. We are afraid of love because it entirely levels us. Love is a state of mind that makes us all equal, collapses barriers, dissolves the pretences, offences and defences that we depend upon to keep us feeling distinct and important.

We are afraid of love because we cannot control it or know what it might do to us. Love is enlarging. It is too vast to be restricted to a favoured few, or to be put aside as irrelevant while you get on with the 'real' concerns of life. Love is not a smiley face you put on and off according to how you feel or how other people are living up to your expectations. It is hate that narrows our point of view and leaves us petty and isolated, with far fewer options. But there is a familiarity in smallness that we cling to. It feels safer to build fences around ourselves and not to expose ourselves to close encounters of the heart and mind that might make us look foolish and feel vulnerable.

If you are not afraid of love today, what will you do instead? How will you interact with others? What conflicts will you address, what burden will you let go? When you start the day with the thought I will not be afraid of love today (W282), you do not go out to fight dragons or defend the right, nor do you slink evasively through the day hoping that a thunderbolt will not strike you dead. It is a kind and gentle thought that allows the truth in you to rise to the surface and lead the way.

Start the Day 8 See someone differently

Take five minutes longer in bed to start the day with this practice of one of the Course lessons (W78):

...select one person you have used as target for your grievances, and lay the grievances aside and look at him. Someone, perhaps, you fear and even hate; someone you think you love who angered you; someone you call a friend, but whom you see as difficult at times or hard to please, demanding, irritating or untrue to the ideal he should accept as his, according to the role you set for him.

You know the one to choose; his name has crossed your mind already.

(I love that line.)

           

You will review his faults, the difficulties you have had with him, the pain he caused you, his neglect, and all the little and the larger hurts he gave. You will regard his body with its flaws and better points as well, and you will think of his mistakes and even of his "sins."

This is very different from those angry dialogues in your head, or going over and over any point of contention, or picking at your sores. This is time spent differently. Beginning with a conscious decision to look at someone whom events, or emotions, have obscured to you, you choose to see past the grievances or the guilt as you see it (of either of you), you lay down your resistances and objections, and pay full attention to him or her.

What you are looking for is the spark of life and light in them that you have perhaps not wanted to see. What you are offering now is appreciation, respect, compassion, acknowledgement - a willingness, as it were, to hear them out. What you are feeling for is a sense of their presence here with you.

The purpose of this few minutes is to completely suspend judgement, unless it is to judge in favour. Behind the barricade of expectations, accusations, wishes and labels that you have piled up between you, there is someone as much in need of unconditional acceptance, of being loved and delighted in, as you are. If you can allow yourself to even for an instant glimpse what is true in them, you will experience what is true in you. You can only see the light in them with the light in you. You don't even have to like them! As E M Forster said, Only connect.

Start the Day 7 There is no past. There is only now

This time, start the day by waking up in the immediate present. Throw off the weight of the past. When you get up to wash and dress, wash away the past at the same time, and along with your clothes, put on a fresh and open mind. Dwell not upon the past today. Keep a completely open mind, washed of all past ideas and clean of every concept you have made (W75 6).

We let our days usher us along from a past that never happened to a future that does not exist. Each day seems to dawn pre-packaged with its own expectations and limitations, reminding us who we are and how real the world is and chivvying us into another day of role-playing. The sense of loss we feel is not for what was, or was might be, but for what we are neglecting in the present moment.

Time neither takes away nor can restore. And yet you make strange use of it, as if the past had caused the present (T28 I 6) - which is just what we do believe. We may treasure our past because it is our own special story, and tells us who we are and how we got here. Or we may feel cast helplessly into the present by the shipwreck of our past; or stranded by the ever-rolling stream that sooner or later bears all that we love away. In other words, we are always living in one or another metaphor, without really questioning whether the way we see things is helpful or dispiriting.

If who we are and what is happening now has its cause in the past, what hope is there for change? No one can go back to the past to alter anything then. You can't turn off a tap yesterday or twenty years ago. But what is happening now can indeed be changed now, which shows that its cause is not somewhere else or some other time, but active here and now, in your own thinking. Now.

We think what we remember is reality. It happened, we think, and here is the evidence to prove it: my emotional scars and moving pictures in my mind, external records of events, other people's recollections...But our variable collage of the past is incomplete, a selection of snapshots taken through a flawed lens and coloured by wishful thinking, an archive of associations filed haphazardly and ever changing according to personal interpretation. The past as we remember it is an illusion of the past, in which those elements that fit...are retained, and all the rest let go...What is kept but witnesses to the reality of dreams (T17 III 8).

If this seems to pull the rug out from under your feet, the Course tells us in its own way, don't worry, it was an imaginary rug anyway. You will find that the reality of the eternal present is much firmer ground to stand on.

No one really sees anything. He sees only his thoughts projected outward. The mind's preoccupation with the past is the cause of the misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything (W8 1.2). In short, the Course tells us matter-of-factly, everything we think we know is founded on misperception and illusion. Our view of the world, our sense of self, what we think is true or important, have been cobbled together from what we selectively choose to believe. Remember nothing that you taught yourself, for you were badly taught (T28 I 6)

Your past is what you have taught yourself. Let it all go. Do not attempt to understand any event or anything or anyone in its "light," for the darkness in which you try to see can only obscure (T14 XI 3)

There is a purpose behind our insistence on blaming the past for our experience of the present, and our using the past as a guide to present choices. It is a strategy that protects us from our own unreality. Without our past, who are we? Nameless, storyless, no longer an individual, but a vital presence we hardly recognize as ourselves; a mind observing its own impressions, a creative consciousness. Without the past, we are essentially no different from anyone else, and we have no one else to blame. The idea of 'living in the now' sounds nice and spiritual, but there is a reason we keep forgetting to remember to do it. Let me remember that I look on the past to prevent the present from dawning on my mind (W52 3 (8))

But if you do start the day by imagining you could let go of your own past, what a relief! All your investments written off, but also all your guilt, mistakes, wrong turnings and wasted times. There is freedom in letting go of the past: of regrets, grievances, of learned attitudes and opinions. They are an unnecessary burden and bring us no joy in the present. They encumber us with guilt and fear. Amnesty, reprieve, the slate wiped clean, the case against you has been thrown out. You are free to go. The past is over. It can touch me not (W289).

To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present (T13 VI 3).

To start clean of past history is also to release everyone else from your expectations and grudges. What would it mean, to see your brother without his past (T13 VI 5)? It would hardly be practical to pretend that you have never seen your friends before, or to treat members of your family as complete strangers. Though wait, isn't that exactly what many families do? But this is when we hold the past, our version of the past, against each other. We respond to our own judgements, fears and wishes, and do not know who anyone really is, while they do not really see us either.

We can, however, decide to put preconceptions, labels and learned responses aside, and discover each other person we encounter today as if we are both stripped free of who we thought we were, and meeting as we truly are for the first time.

The past is not in you. Your weird associations to it have no meaning in the present. Yet you let them stand between you and your brothers...A minute, even less, will be enough to free you from the past (T13 X 5)

To forget (your version of) the past is not only how you forgive someone else. It releases you from guilt also. We are afraid to do this, for what chaos might be loosed upon the world if we suspend judgement? We think it would be an abdication of responsibility, denying the evidence of everything we know to be true. But the point is that what we 'know to be true' is based on memories of a past that never was:

The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here. To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions (W8 2).

So start the day without it. For what can be forgiven but the past, and if it is forgiven it is gone (W289).

Start the Day 6 Today I will ask for more

As Oliver Twist famously discovered, the world teaches us to limit ourselves. Be content with the little you have, don't be greedy, settle for what you can get, know your place, which is keeping your head below the parapet. Actually, these days we are more likely to hear 'Dream big,' 'More is better,' 'Don't miss out,' 'Must have,' 'Grab it quick, get it now' - but this way of thinking is only the other side of the same coin, not truly inspired by a sense of abundance. It is still motivated by an assumption of relative scarcity and a perceived need to compete for what there is, as if there is only so much to go around and if you don't get it first, someone else will.

The world operates on an either-or principle: either you or me, one or the other, kill or be killed, king of the castle or dirty rascal. We swap roles: you win one, you lose one, as we say: Loser and gainer merely shift about in changing patterns (W153 3.5). You cannot perceive yourself as winning without the guilt of it being at someone else's expense. You cannot lose without experiencing the pain of loss, by definition; which generates either resentment or self-loathing. Neither position leads to peace of mind. If anyone loses, we all lose, because thinking in terms of comparison and opposition must perpetuate division and insecurity.

But you can change your thinking. The reality we think we live in is a belief system, and it changes as we change our minds. We think small because we have lost sight of our true magnitude. We have so shrunk in our estimation of ourselves and of others that we suppose resistance is noble, and aggression is valour: you believe that magnitude lies in defiance, and that attack is grandeur (T13 III 4)

When you think of yourself not as competing, but as completing - as the missing link, as an essential part of the whole - you do not need to elevate yourself at anyone else's expense. The more you allow yourself to be and have, the more you add to the whole. The more you ask of life, the more you have to give. The more you draw on your own capacity for greatness, the more you invite others to do the same.

You do not ask too much of life, but far too little. When you let your mind be drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminence as valued by the world, you ask for sorrow, not for happiness (W133 2)

Be not content with littleness...Everything in this world is little because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness can content you. When you strive for anything in this world in the belief that it will bring you peace, you are belittling yourself and blinding yourself to glory...You will always choose one at the expense of the other (T15 III 1)

Salvation can be thought of as a game that happy children play...there is no loser. Everyone who plays must win, and in his winning is the gain to everyone ensured (W153 12)

It is easy to distinguish grandeur from grandiosity, because love is returned and pride is not. Pride will not produce miracles (T9 VIII 8)

Love is 'returned' in the sense that the more of yourself you give, the more fulfilled you feel, the more rewarding is your experience of life, and the more connected you feel with everyone and everything. Unlike anything in the physical world, the more of love, peace, joy, truth and light you give, the more you have to give. The more you give, the more you get. The more you withhold it, the more deprived you feel. You cannot love too much. Love is unlimited. It is we who try to ration love: bargain with it, restrict it, hijack the word to mean something else, give it grudgingly or with conditions embedded. Start the day, then, by asking for nothing less than everything, and pass it on.

Which reminds me of another poem.

 

Don’t Let That Horse

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

Don’t let that horse

                              eat that violin

    cried Chagall’s mother

                                     But he   

                      kept right on

                                     painting

And became famous

And kept on painting

                              The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it

he jumped up upon the horse

                                        and rode away   

          waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it

to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings   

                                     attached

Start the Day 5 Think about: what makes your heart sing

Another way to start the day is to decide not to take yourself seriously today. There is a difference between respecting and intently living your experience, and getting bogged down in pressures and expectations that you have made unnecessarily important. Anxieties, concerns, self-imposed challenges and behind them all, the ongoing insecurity and guilt that are never far below the surface jollities - and those too, the endless succession of empty amusements and trivialities - become exhausting, because they do not nourish or remind us of what we really are and what love is.

So what's this? Catch yourself starting the day with a sigh or a growl, and consider: do you want to add another burden to your already burdened mind (T14 II 1)? As long as you are striving to live a good life (in the sense of conscientious) or the good life (in the sense of pleasurable), or striving to escape a bad life in either sense, your striving in itself looks to some other time than this. Happiness can only be now. Be not content with future happiness. It has no meaning, and is not your just reward. For you have cause for freedom now (T26 VIII 9).

Students of A Course in Miracles - that hefty, concentrated text, profound, baffling, poetic, uncompromisingly religious in language and imagery - sometimes forget what it is about. It is profoundly serious, but its message is light:

• Be happy, for your only function here is happiness W102 5

• Today we will attempt to understand joy is our function here. If you are sad, your part is unfulfilled, and all the world is thus deprived of joy, along with you (W100 6)

• To heal is to make happy...think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many you have refused... (T5 intr 2)

• ..the function of relationships (is) forever "to make happy." And nothing else (T17 IV 1)

The problem is (the Course tells us), we have learned such contradictory lessons about who we are and what we love and what we are entitled to, that we have to unlearn what we believe we want before we can relearn how to be happy.  I must learn to recognize what makes me happy, if I would find happiness (W83).

The Course is not however among those who carol that the world is wonderful. The message is not that you should be upbeat, positive, appreciating what you can and downplaying the sadness and the disappointments. It is not that you should reframe pain as experience or failures as necessary steps to success; not that you should cheer up, count your blessings and your (small, short-lived) mercies and look on the bright side. The idea is not to hug your advantages and be grateful when the disadvantages happen to someone else.

When the Course talks about happiness, it means the happiness of a freedom of mind that nothing in the world can give. We believe that people, places, things, events have the power to make us feel happy - or something on a scale between happy and unhappy - so we seek them out or avoid them, proving ourselves right. But when you realize the mind works the other way round: that first we choose to be happy or not, and then we see our choice reflected back to us by the people and situations we encounter, then you are released forever from helplessness. The world you see is yourself, a construction within the mind; like a dream, it seems outside, and as when you are dreaming, you seem to be walking about in it. But you, the dreamwalker, and everything around you are part of the dream.

To really get this is what the Course calls the 'happy dream'. Even if only occasionally, in lucid moments, you experience that synchronicity of outside and inside, when your inward thoughts are mirrored in events around you, when you recognize that your state of mind is being played out in your physical experience; or when you are so much 'in the flow' or inspired - in spirit, as the Course puts it - that you forget yourself, you become so much a part of the moment that you hardly know if you are making it up or you are being made up at the same time.

How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there? (T6 II 6)

At the start of the day, you may not have time to muse on such existential principles. Out there are things to be done, responsibilities to honour, the ever-creeping forces of dissolution to counter, and people to share the day with. Whatever your apparent circumstances, however, you might briefly ask yourself: What if I decide not to suffer? What if happiness wells up in me for no special reason, even despite a host of reasons why not? What if I let it carry me through the day?

A flicker of joy across your mind lets everyone off the hook, demonstrates that you are not a victim, dispels any grudge against anyone...witnesses to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt, and points beyond itself to both your innocence and his. Show this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love T27 I 5

What makes your heart sing? The particular moments and things that make you happy are only reminders, symbols, cues, different for everybody. But happiness is the same for everyone. The only reason to be happy when you start the day is not because the day's prospects are good or bad, but because there is something unquenchable in you and you will feel lighter and stronger to remember it.

Some years ago I knew a little girl who made up this chant to sing:
Love is the place to be
It's where you enjoy yourself.
Love is the place to be
It's where you've always been.

Where you enjoy yourself is the place to be. And it is in you, not somewhere else.

Start the Day 4 Start the day right

We know what the opposite of starting the day right is. It is when you get out of bed on the wrong side, or you start off on the wrong foot. But how do you know which is which? The very phrase 'to start off on the wrong foot' derives from the military practice of marching from the left foot first. The right foot, then, is the wrong foot. When is right truly right and not fluctuate according to point of view?

The problem with words is that they can so often serve to mean opposite things. Everyone wants to reserve 'right' for himself and label other people as wrong. 'Right' is for the good guys. As we all know from the TV and films we watch, it seems right when the good guys resort to violence and murder, because they are doing it to put things right. They are forced into wrongness by the wrongness of the bad guys. The moral of these stories is that wrong is more effective, that two wrongs do make a right, that to be right is mightier because you can justify clobbering the other guy in the name of righteousness.

The principle is an ancient and Biblical one. The forces of Good are for ever at war with the army of Evil. It is a popular myth that the wicked have more fun, especially as they have the unfair advantage of being licensed to take unfair advantage of the righteous -

The rain it raineth every day

Upon the just and unjust fella.

But chiefly upon the just, because

The unjust has the just's umbrella.

- but as we all know from our cultural heritage, in the end the good will have the last laugh. Right will rule, and as a bonus the righteous get enjoy the private satisfaction of seeing wrongdoers get their comeuppance.

It is very difficult for us, in this deeply entrenched and hostile, essentially dualistic way of thinking, to reclaim rightness as a reflection of truth and of kindliness, and to let go of its entanglement with guilt and competitiveness. We need to distinguish the judgmental meaning of 'right' - that is, factually or morally right - from its meaning as universally and spiritually true. Rightness in this sense is a property of every mind. You might say it is your God-given right. Every mind is right when it is motivated by love and peace. Every mind is wrong when it is coming from that self-serving delusion we call 'myself', that the Course calls the ego.

So let us be very clear what we mean by starting the day right. Forget morality, with its fearful divisiveness and threatening implications. The Course does not talk about good vs bad, but about true vs illusory, helpful vs unhelpful, kind vs unkind. It speaks of being either in your right mind or in your wrong mind. In the US, there is a road sign that warns you if you are about to turn into a one-way street into the teeth of on-coming traffic: it simply says 'Wrong Way.' This is what the Course means by wrong mindedness. It is not sinful, it does not make you a bad person, but it will not get you where you want to be and the consequences are likely to be painful.

As we all know from experience, to start the day wrong means in an anxious, conflicted or unhappy state of mind. It turns into 'one of those days' when we keep running into setbacks or disagreements and the world at large echoes back at us our disconnectedness from peace and joy. It will not help to confuse starting the day 'right' with being a good person, or being better than anyone else, or setting out to do good in the world. To take a few minutes at the start of the day to first step into your right mind is, rather, to wake up from the insanity of the ego and return to the sanity and freedom of a clear and open mind.

Right mindedness is a temporary solution in a wrong minded world. The first only serves to reverse and cancel out the other. When the mind remembers its wholeness and is wholly at peace, it is not right minded, but one minded. First, then, we learn that the wrong mindedness of ego thinking is not what we want after all. (That might take a few lifetimes.) Then we learn to think with our right minds, to escape from the prison we have cramped ourselves into. Finally we begin to realize that there are no separate, no alternating, no right or wrong minds, above all nothing good or bad; just mind itself, a Oneness joined as One (T25 I 7).

So when you wake still tired, or apprehensive, or with sinking heart, and living the day seems less attractive than pulling the covers back over your head, it can be a revelation to realize that if you are not happy, it is not for any of the reasons you have been listing to yourself, but just a very strong hint that you are not at the moment in your right mind. It only takes a minute to remember to ask yourself, 'What kind of day do I want? What thoughts would I rather think? What feelings would I rather feel?'

I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I want to decide otherwise, because I want to be at peace (T5 VII 6)

To decide otherwise is when you decide to start the day right. Or if you are already hopping on the wrong foot, to start it again. Whatever the weather.

Start the Day 3 Set the direction

When I was two, unknowingly I won the Toddler's Race at my brother's school sports day. As I was lined up alongside the other bewildered tinies, my mother swiftly crouched down beside me and put my father's big leather glove into my hand. She pointed to where I could see my father, far away (as it seemed to me), standing at the finishing post, and at the moment when the starter cried 'Ready!...Steady!...', she said "Run and give this to Daddy." So on 'Go!', as all the confused toddlers surged sideways, backwards, any which way over the race track, I trotted straight for the finishing line, where my father was waiting for me.

The point in starting the day by taking a few minutes to set your inner GPS is that the mind will run unerringly in the direction you have chosen. Whatever the diversions or volume of traffic, sometimes by surprising routes (and not always the most scenic), it will get you there. Sometimes you have forgotten by then that is where you wanted to be. Sometimes you only know what destination you chose when you get there, don't like it, have to reset it and start again. And if you do not set any direction, you will trot any which way, which is ok except that it is confusing, takes much longer, and is not making use of your power to choose.  

The principle is well recognized. As a man thinketh, so is he. Where the mind goes, the energy flows. What you pay attention to you get more of. What you focus on becomes real for you. What the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve. Creatures that we are of habit and conditioning, genetically and educationally modified, motivated far more by unconscious desires and fears than we like to recognize, still we have a power of choice that runs far deeper than the trivial purposes we usually use it for.

I have a kingdom I must rule. At times, it does not seem I am its king at all. It seems to triumph over me, and tell me what to think, and what to do and feel. And yet it has been given me to serve whatever purpose I perceive in it...I thus direct my mind, which I alone can rule (W236)

We have the power - and the responsibility - to choose how we will direct our mind. We cannot not choose: to prevaricate, to deny or avoid, to chop and change, to numb your mind or to perceive yourself as a victim of circumstances is still a choice. But the Course makes choosing easier for us. In a world of multiple, overwhelming variety of choice, it reduces the options to only two. There are only two directions, although there seem to be millions. There are only two emotions. There are only two inner voices to distinguish between: there is the noisy, anxious, blustering, accusing voice of our ego, or self-concept, with its conflicting and changeable ideas of who we are and of what is good for us; and there is the quiet - even silent - voice that reminds us what really matters, recalls us to what is true for us and for everyone.

What makes the choice easier still (though we strongly resist ever seeing this) is that only one of these two is real. There is truth, and there are appearances. There is love, or fear. There is waking, or dreaming. There is oneness, or the illusion of multiplicity, separateness, otherness. There is going home, spiritually and emotionally speaking, or there is being lost.

We may not know how to distinguish between them, or how to get there, but we can keep reminding ourselves to remember to decide which of these two directions we would rather go, and the mind will obligingly take us there. When it occurs to us that we are lost, usually after years of going sideways and backwards, it is up to us to choose again. The process becomes much quicker if you take it a day at a time, and start the day by thinking how you would like to go on.

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)