Start the Day 19 I trust my brothers

To be trusting is almost a synonym for being gullible, in the world's parlance. It is like wishful thinking; a limp and hazy hoping, rather than an inward resolution. We say 'I trust you' to mean 'I am offloading the responsibility for my happiness on to you, and if you disappoint me it will be your fault.' If I say 'I don't trust you,' it means that you are unreliable, not that I am an uptight, grudging sort of person.

But trust is a decision. When you decide to trust another person, you make a commitment to your own integrity. You are not asking anything from them, but choosing love over fear. You are taking a stand for values that are alien to the world's defensive thinking. For love without trust is impossible, and doubt and trust cannot coexist (M7 4)

We tell ourselves that it is wise to be wary. The world teaches us to look past 'good' appearances to search for the 'bad' that is being kept secret from us. In turn, we keep secrets of our own, for fear of exposing our vulnerability, or of giving someone else an advantage over us, or of being seen for what we fear we really are and despised for it. So we maintain barriers between us that keep us all incomplete, and make us afraid of each other.

There is a distance you would keep apart from your brother, and this space you perceive as time because you still believe you are external to him. This makes trust impossible. And you cannot believe that trust would settle every problem now. Thus do you think it safer to remain a little careful and a little watchful of interests perceived as separate. From this perception you cannot conceive of gaining what forgiveness offers now (T26 VIII 2).

The Course enables us to look past all appearances, 'good' and 'bad' alike, to the unchanging reality beyond; towards the what is, beyond the what seems. Trust involves suspending judgement, in the knowledge that we never know enough to judge anything or anyone without prejudice. Without judgment are all men brothers, for who is there who stands apart? Judgment destroys honesty and shatters trust (M4 III)

What you look for, you will find: this is a key principle of the Course's teaching. Trust is not about trusting the other person to come up trumps after all, for it is certain that their ego (like yours) is neither trustworthy nor loving. Trust is not about hoping that trust in God, or karma, or time will sort out your difficulties for you; many people use the idea of 'handing the problem over to the Holy Spirit' as an excuse to not face up to their own lack of love and their own reluctance to decide anything. To trust, in the Course's sense, is to trust the power of love itself to light up a way through conflict and pain in your own mind, where none seemed possible.  To decide to trust in your 'brothers' is to restore your own mind to peace and remind you of what you value most.

True faithfulness...does not deviate. Being consistent, it is wholly honest. Being unswerving, it is full of trust. Being based on fearlessness, it is gentle. Being certain, it is joyous. And being confident, it is tolerant (M4 IX 2)

Start the Day 18 I can't go wrong today

If you actually knew this for certain, it would wholly change the way you get up and go through the day. But on the contrary, if you think about it at all, you may feel it is very possible you can go wrong in one way or another. No wonder so many people are reluctant to get out of bed in the mornings. 

The most we usually hope for our day is that things will turn out not too bad, if we are careful, lucky, and do not tempt fate by getting cocky. 'I can't go wrong' is so patently contradicted by experience that it jibbers a touch-wood, fingers-crossed fear of come-uppance. We are all familiar with the gremlin inside us, or the rule of Sod's Law, who is roused by any surge of happy confidence as if determined to prove us wrong, to pull the rug out from under our feet and replace it with a banana skin.

When you learn that the gremlin is you, that it is only yourself you are afraid of. and that you wrote the self-undermining rules you live by, you can get up and meet the day without fear. The mad woman in your attic, the alligator in your sewer, the monster you have created are fictions. The world you see through your eyes and through the windows of your laptop or television - yea, the great globe itself - are such stuff as dreams are made on. In short, the reality you see, and how you interpret it, is mediated through your mind, and you can learn to see it differently.

What worries us about anything going 'wrong' is not really that we are afraid of making a mistake. It is not even that we are afraid of the consequences that might result from the mistake. If you are playing a computer game, it is by making mistakes you learn what to do. Like a rat exploring a maze, you try one way, and get the cheese; or you try the wrong way, get no cheese, go back, try another way. Eventually, you know the way and go straight to the cheese without needing to check out the blind alleys. So helpful teachers urge us not to hesitate for fear of making mistakes, but rather, to boldly make as many as we need, so as to distinguish what works from what does not work.  

The Course, even more helpfully, points out that what we are really afraid of is being wrong. The word 'sin' is out of date, but the idea of it still hobbles our minds and inhibits our actions. The concept of sin makes us feel that a mistake is shameful. If so many stories have to be told about innovators like Edison, who had to find 2,998 thousands of ways that would not work before succeeding in giving us the electric light bulb, it is because in our hearts we are not convinced. Perhaps some of us might be prepared to tolerate getting it wrong that often, if we could be guaranteed an eventual success. But we would still prefer the success without the pain of failure.

The point of the Edison story, though, is not that success takes a lot of patience and that you can't have a rose garden without a great many thorns. The point is that the so-called failures were not failures, but valid discoveries in their own right. Most of us experience failure as frustrating: the word originally meant 'whipping', and that's what we do, whip or beat ourselves up over our mistakes. We consider them painful, humiliating, and discouraging. Failure does not feel like an advance in our general understanding. It feels like a punishment in itself for not being good enough.

When you discover at the checkout that you have left your wallet at home, you feel a fool. When you step in the dog mess, you feel personally degraded. You can get 19 out of 20 ticks on a test paper, and berate yourself for the one cross. You can come to a party for fun with friends and be mortified when you forget someone's name, or wear the wrong shoes, or turn up a week too early or too late - the possibilities for embarrassment are endless. These are not just mistakes, as we have judged them. Mistakes call for correction, for doing something differently, for learning something new. They point away from themselves and towards the cheese. But when you make them into sins, they become part of your identity and affect your peace of mind and the confidence of your decision-making.

So if ever you have a day when anything or everything goes wrong, remember first that 'wrong' is a matter of interpretation. Consider the rules you have set in your mind for how things and people ought to be, and how you are using these to set yourself up as a victim, or as a failure: denouncing someone as guilty, and deserving of punishment.

Your insane laws were made to guarantee that you would make mistakes, and give them power over you by accepting their results as your just due (T24 IV 3)

However, if you start the day from the viewpoint that Nothing real can be threatened (T intr) and that The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there (T14 II 3), it is easier to see that you really cannot go wrong. When you are clear that mistakes are only misunderstandings, misjudgements and blind alleys, arising from fear, uncertainty or misinformation, then you will only want to get back on course for the cheese, as quickly and good-humouredly as possible.

Truth will correct all errors in my mind. What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions that remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear (W107)

Start the Day 17 I am not alone

There is a popular line taken by self-help books and personal development gurus, and sometimes by our best friends when we confide in them our problem with someone else: they sagely advise us to avoid 'negative' people. The people who are good for you, they tell us, are enthusiastic, generous, optimistic, rise to a challenge, are big in heart and vision. The complainers, the timidly conventional, the ones who put you down or tell you why your idea will not work, the self-preoccupied and the anxious are not the sort of people you want to know. Popular wisdom tells us that if someone lets you down, you are better off without that person in your life. We like to tell ourselves that we have 'grown out of' a relationship - an idiom we rarely use when we are the ones who have been grown out of. We encourage each other to label other people as immature, inadequate, not quite up to our own higher standards. Dump them, we suggest; an ugly word for an ugly thought.

For you do not respond to what a brother really offers you, but only to the particular perception of his offering by which the ego judges it (T14 X 7)

So we brusquely sever our connections, or wish we could, which amounts to the same thing. Or, 'with the best will in the world' as we like to say, regretfully or otherwise, we drift apart. There are people we avoid because we are embarrassed by our own hostility - no one likes to think of himself as unfriendly - and by our own fears of conflict or rejection. We do not like people who confuse, alarm or remind us of our uncertainties. It feels safer to keep a distance of space, or of time, or both, between us and them. But we are not on separate little rafts with variable compasses. We are all in the same lifeboat.

Everyone is looking for himself and for the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in him because they are yours. The ego tries to find them in yourself alone because it does not know where to look...if you look only at yourself you cannot find yourself, because that is not what you are (T8 III 5)

There are also less welcome gaps, between us and the people we think we would like to see more often, or would like to get to know in the first place. There are all those amazing people we read about who we never get to meet, who seem to have the interesting circle of friends that we are not part of. We joke that we can choose our friends, but not our family; but it does not always feel as though we have chosen our friends, either. And when you do get to know them, you find that those positive, good-for-you friends are as hampered by problems as everyone else. They may have learned better ways of coping and how to be less fearful, but you can be sure that they are as lost as you are, or they would not perceive themselves as here at all. As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived (T15 XI 5).
 

We are as solitary as each other, as long as we believe that we are separate individuals with different agendas. Only the lonely and alone...see their brothers different from themselves (T22 in 2) - that is, all of us, until we learn to see every other being as a 'brother', as an essential part of oneself: one moment of real recognition makes everyone your brother ...Salvation is a collaborative venture (T4 VI 8)

While we perceive ourselves as many instead of one, practically speaking we cannot be friends with everyone at once and all the time. Our existing relationships must change in form and degree of closeness as we follow our various paths, sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent. But in your mind, in the way you think of anyone at any time, whether they are still physically alive or not, still in touch or not, you always have the choice to be open or closed to them, appreciative or irritated, to wish them well or hold a grievance against them. You have the gift of peace to offer or withhold. If you see them as other than you, there will be a distance between you, like it or not. If you see them as the same as you, regardless of the differences in form, you will no longer feel alone. Even if your body is isolated, your mind is still free to bring this peace to everyone who wanders in the world uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear. For it is given you to join with him (T31 VIII7).

The Course does not ask us to try to be more loving. Rather, it teaches us to recognize how much we do not want to, how much we isolate ourselves, in the mistaken conviction that we are bigger and better, or at least safer, on our own. Look fairly at whatever makes you give your brother only partial welcome, or would let you think that you are better off apart. Is it not always your belief your specialness is limited by your relationship? 

...You would oppose this course because it teaches you you and your brother are alike (T24 I 8). You may not welcome the message, but it brings release from your self-inflicted loneliness. You are not alone, when you bring to mind the idea of total connectedness with all those others out there, past present and to come, in this universe or any other. When you listen within yourself for echoes of what the Course calls 'the forgotten song', the stirring of thoughts and feelings that the world never taught you and knows nothing of, you remember compassion, and recognize that your brothers are not out there but in you, and you in them.

Thus they define their life and where they live, adjusting to it as they think they must, afraid to lose the little that they have. And so it is with all who see the body as all they have and all their brothers have. They try to reach each other, and they fail, and fail again. And they adjust to loneliness, believing that to keep the body is to save the little that they have. Listen, and try to think if you remember what we will speak of now.

Listen,–perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten; dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar, like a song whose name is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely unremembered. Not the whole song has stayed with you, but just a little wisp of melody, attached not to a person or a place or anything particular. But you remember, from just this little part, how lovely was the song, how wonderful the setting where you heard it, and how you loved those who were there and listened with you...What is a miracle but this remembering? And who is there in whom this memory lies not? The light in one awakens it in all. And when you see it in your brother, you are remembering for everyone (T21 I 5-10)

Start the Day 16 Because it's not worth it

It is said that people decide in the first three minutes of meeting you whether they are going to like you or not. Instant assessments of non-verbal clues, our appearance, manner, voice - and their own associations to any of those - carry more weight than anything we say or try to put across. And we do the same with them. We navigate the world by a process of continuous evaluation. Where does this person, or this aspect of a person, or this situation, or this item on the supermarket shelf sit on my inner scale between good and bad, between like and not like, between move towards or back away from?

For it is not only people that we judge. Did you ever do those little drawings of amoeba in your biology class at school? That eloquent blob that spreads itself into open arms as it flows towards a speck of food, and then enfolds it into itself; or that recoils from a hostile element and streams away from it? This is how we are too, when out shopping or at a party, or choosing a career or a partner. Some of us are more flexible and ready to fine-tune our initial judgements in the light of further information or experience. Some cling more obstinately to their prejudices and find reasons to justify them. But when we are not set in stream-away-from mode, we are all on the hunt for crumbs to enfold.

The trouble is, the Course tells us, we are not the blobs we think we are, and our lives and happiness do not depend on the crumbs we think we need.

Everything the ego tells you that you need will hurt you...For what you think you need will merely serve to tighten up your world against the light, and render you unwilling to question the value that this world can really hold for you (T13 VII 11)

The media are fascinated with stories of compulsive, extreme hoarders, who have literally tightened up their world against the light with so much clutter that they have to crawl through tunnels of their own junk; or the emergency services are unable to reach or even to find them when they finally suffocate under the piles of their collected stuff. These cases show us a nightmare vision of our own inability to distinguish true worth from imagined worth. We are all attached to things for the sake of whatever we think they can give us, projecting our inner worth outside of us, so that we see value, security, affection out there instead of experiencing it within us. It would be a mistake to suppose that just because you can distinguish a comparative value of a pile of old newspapers and a photograph of someone you love, or between the remains of last month's fish and chips and a gold watch - just because you are more orderly and the amoeba in you can detect more confidently when to enfold and when not to enfold - you are no less bound to the illusions of this world.

Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you, and will do so. Not because it has the power to hurt, but just because you have denied it is but an illusion, and made it real (T26 VI 1)

There is nothing out there that is of more worth than anything else. There is nothing out there. As long as you fail to recognize that you have given to anyone and anything all the meaning it holds for you, you will feel deprived if the person goes away or the thing is stolen, or breaks, or decays.  

It is as if you said, "I have no need of everything. This little thing I want, and it will be as everything to me." And this must fail to satisfy... (T30 III)

"We seek without us the wonders that are within us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us," as Sir Thomas Browne said. By projecting value outside us, and then trying to get it back by possessing the thing that now seems to embody what we think we need, we make ourselves eternally needy. 'Don't miss out!' shout the advertisements. 'Get more for less!' 'Here is what you've been looking for, what you must have, what people who know say is good for you.' The world sees a difference between the child who clings to a bit of rag for comfort while its sucks its thumb, and the millionaire who buys an Old Master painting. There is nothing wrong with either of them, except the intrinsic fear of loss, and the belief that the importance of the thing lies in itself, rather than in the way the mind perceives it.

Recognize what does not matter (T12 III 4), then, and hold to what does: peace, truth, love. This makes it much easier to live in a world of illusions without being either dismayed or entrapped by them. This frees you to enjoy, whether you keep or let go. Relationships between you and another person, or between you and your environment and the many objects in it, are not defined by what they are, but by the quality of your affection and respect for them.

You do not want the world. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it you look upon with love. This gives it the only reality it will ever have. Its value is not in itself, but yours is in you (T12 VI 3)

While you can think of anything or anyone with love, you have it for ever, whether it is there externally for your eyes to look on, or inwardly for you to rejoice with. Everything else is only a semblance, and has no power to make you either happy or unhappy. Today I will remember what I entirely value. I will not value what is valueless (W133).

Start the Day 15 Being grateful is a good Start

'After all I've done for you! You should be grateful,' the world tells us. But it is hard to be grateful when things go wrong all the time, when our hopes are disappointed, when people and events fall short of our expectations or cause us grief. Even when we tolerate people in general -  because they are there and we can't do much about it, like the ones in the queue in front of you or in the traffic jam, or the ones that fill the supermarket or the holiday destination that you would have liked to enjoy in private - we are not often grateful that they are there at all.

It is easier to muster up a little gratitude for advantages you enjoy, when you compare yourself with people who do not have them. Comparative gratitude is of the 'There but for the grace of God go I' mentality, or 'I can't complain (though I should like to), because (I am glad to say) other people have it (even) worse.' In fact, 'Can't complain' is how the English express positive enthusiasm.

So if you were to take a piece of paper and write down what you have to be grateful for - I hope you will take the time to actually do this, for reasons that will become apparent - the list might begin with physical comforts and personal gratifications, such as having a roof over your head, or your equivalent of the villa in Spain I mentioned in a previous post. Often these items represent a source of comfort or at least a reprieve from pain, worry, existential terror. We can be fervently grateful, if not exactly that there are so many people out there suffering unspeakable abuses and deprivations, but that we are not, for the moment, one of them. This is gratitude of the guilty mentality: I may not be wholly free of grievances, and if a genie were to obligingly pop out of the bottle, I could suggest improvements to my lot, but I do not want to seem ungracious, in case fate turn peevish and withdraw such privileges as I have.

Then look around you: there may be things you treasure that serve to remind you of the special people and interests that are part of your personal history and help to make you what you (think you) are. This is gratitude of the 'How nice to be me' mentality. We are grateful for the kindly familiar, for the unchallenging, and for whatever recalls our happy moments; or like a thing of beauty that is a joy forever, brings us happiness every time we see or think of it.

And now we are getting closer to true appreciation. Never mind how partial and disgruntled your gratitude may be, every little helps, as Tesco helpfully would have us keep remembering. Gratitude takes practice - you need to develop your weakened ability to be grateful - for we are so full of fear that we forget to remember how much there is to love. Defensiveness blinds us to the joy that is always quietly hovering in the wings, just waiting to be called into view. You cannot love what you do not appreciate, for fear makes appreciation impossible (T6 I 17)

The more you look at, search your mind for, pay attention to and dwell upon anything and anyone with appreciation - when you acknowledge receipt, as it were, of an unexpected parcel of happiness - you discover that gratitude cannot be demanded, or owed. It is a gift, not from you to someone else, but from you to yourself. Or rather, from your Self to your Self. When your heart and mind fill with gratitude, the more complete you become, overflowing your own boundaries, washing away your petty dissatisfactions in a rising tide of thankfulness. True gratitude is indistinguishable from unconditional love. You feel loved and loving in equal measure, because they are the same.

Start the Day 14 One of me knows

In June this year, Girl Guides dropped their traditional vow "to love my God", replacing it with a more contemporary promise to "be true to myself and develop my beliefs." The problem with being true to 'myself' is that its meaning is just as open to interpretation and ambiguity as the word 'God'. The latter at least has the virtue of setting an absolute standard, symbolizing a purpose and value that transcends the narrowly personal. In a society where personal inclination and 'feelings' are venerated, to the point where personality is the new religion, we seem to consider it 'honest' to be unkind or irritable if we are feeling grouchy, and 'truthful' to attack what we do not like about someone. It is easy to read 'to be true to myself' as 'to do it my way', and 'to develop my beliefs' as 'to develop my own version of the truth.'

The Course, too, would have us drop our superstitious and furtive lip-service to any form of external God. It turns our attention back to what exactly we mean by 'myself', for this is where we need to distinguish between truth and illusions. And it is here that we will come closest to realizing what God is.

The self-concept I hold of myself is a construction in my mind. I perceive it as a body moving in a world of assorted other bodies, which are also a manifestation of my ideas projected outwards. This image of myself is an illusion, ever fluctuating in appearance and character, unified only because I have clapped them all into a mental category labelled 'me.' The Course refers to this as the ego, the "self-concept," or the tendency of the self to make an image of itself...You can perceive yourself as self-creating, but you cannot do more than believe it. You cannot make it true (T3 VII 4.)

A person who has accepted under hypnosis to believe for the moment that he is Elvis Presley will act completely out of character and according to his conception of Elvis Presley instead. In his own mind, for that time he really is Elvis (just as the original Elvis believed and behaved according to his concept of himself for the duration of his earthly life). But even while in trance, there is a part of the mind that remembers who you really are, which returns you to full awareness and back in character at the click of the hypnotist's fingers, or sooner or later at will.

This is something like the way our minds make up the world we live in and the personalities we think we inhabit. On a level that we have shut out of conscious awareness, we know that we are acting a part. We frequently feel alienated, conflicted, sometimes do not know what to do or what to wear or what our priorities are, because we hardly know what we are or what matters. For you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth (W139 5).

You see the flesh or recognize the spirit. There is no compromise between the two. If one is real the other must be false, for what is real denies its opposite...Salvation is undoing (T31 VI 2). To remember what we are in truth means undoing, or letting go of, our misplaced trust in 'the flesh', that is, our perception of an alternative, apparently substantial, physical reality, and becoming aware of a constant, infinite, spiritual reality that is in us and all around us, or rather that we are in and inextricably part of. It is invisible to our physical eyes and brains, because they belong to the self-concept; but its presence can sometimes be intimated, felt, perceived through an experience of revelation, or just in an instant of perfect peace.

So there are two voices in our minds, that claim to be 'myself.' One is loud, insistent, self-important, self-critical, self-conscious, self-is-everything. This aspect is intent on its own survival and advantage, and yet does not know or care about what is really best for us or for anyone else. The other, which the Course distinguishes with capital letters to express its immensity, completeness and integrity, is the Self; which however has no sense of self, and does not see itself as separate from others. This is the part of us that the Course calls the 'One who knows.' Trust in this part of yourself, for it remains real when everything else is in flux. This is the Self to be true to, because it will still be there when all the beliefs and illusions you have developed fall away.

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

I will not lead my life alone today. I do not understand the world, and so to try to lead my life alone must be but foolishness. But there is One Who knows all that is best for me (W242)

The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there (T14 II 3)

Start the Day 13 I will find time to play today

The children's old nursery song 'Boys and girls come out to play' reminds us that play is a purposeful activity in its own right. Just as adults go out to work, children go out to play. Come out, so as to play and for no other reason. Come out, from the confines of the house into the spaciousness of outdoors, where you can expand, explore, let rip. These days, children do not come out to play so freely. 'Up the ladder and down the wall'? - not likely, except as arranged and supervised by adults. They keep indoors, and play with an abundance of toys, or on their electronic devices. Or they are carefully watched at play by their parents or teachers, within the confines of purpose-built playgrounds.

Playfulness is often forgotten by those who devote themselves to spiritual learning. As we learn to put away childish things, too often we do not remember to hold on to the childlike openness and innocence that enables us to learn in the first place. We may be so intent on weeding out our childish fearfulness, pettiness, selfishness and dependency that we trample too hard on our spontaneity, curiosity, capacity for wonder and for taking each moment as it comes.

Or very often people go the other way and sentimentalize childhood. Parents are prone to impose on their children symbols of their own lost playfulness, and to want children to act out their own concept of a happy childhood. Adults buy each other balloons and teddy bears, in recognition of the sense of loss we feel in growing up. But what was precious then is still with you now.

The childhood of your body, and its place of shelter, are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened. Yet there is a Child in you...This childhood is eternal, with an innocence that will endure forever (W182 4)

The inner Child represents your true self, a tiny reminder of something wholly delightful, affectionate and vital somewhere in there behind that adult mask. We are spiritual children, walking around crushed under the heavy atmosphere of an alien world with too much gravity.

This Child needs your protection...He is so little that He seems so easily shut out, His tiny voice so readily obscured, His call for help almost unheard amid the grating sounds and harsh and rasping noises of the world. Yet ...This Child is your defenselessness; your strength (W182 6).

This Child, the Course tells us, longs to go home, to experience from time to time the perfect security and peace that can only be found in a truly free mind, in an unconditionally loving heart. And then, reassured, the child in us comes running out to play. The world is a classroom, as the Course tells us, but it is up to us what we will learn. Until we remember to be 'happy learners' (T14 II) we will learn nothing but weariness and regret. For in truth all the lessons are the same: how to be happy.

There is one thought in particular that should be remembered throughout the day. It is a thought of pure joy (M16 6).

Start the Day 12 Expect a little turbulence

"Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing." (Ben Hogan)

You can't change anything without some upheaval. If you want to anything to be different in yourself, your way of living and your relationships, in the process of adjustment some things seem to get worse at first, instead of better. The bad old ways are at least familiar, while the good to come is still uncertain and indistinct.

A Course in Miracles is a radically transformative way of thinking. Its view of reality contradicts our own entirely. It may not be your conscious intention when you pick it up, but the Course aims for nothing less than to lift your mind free from the hole it has dug itself into. From its perspective, we are living in a state of collective insanity, a world in which everything is backwards and upside down (T18 I 6). We all know we have problems and anxieties, but now we begin to learn that they have their source in our mind only and can only be resolved from the inside out. Your upside-down perception has been ruinous to your peace of mind...Now we are going to try to see this differently (W72 8)

So the whole process is one of undoing, unlearning, a reversal of everything we have learned to believe is true. In the transition there is a period of confusion, in which a sense of actual disorientation may occur. But fear it not, for it means only that you have been willing to let go your hold on the distorted frame of reference that seemed to hold your world together (T16 VI 7).

What is 'backwards and upside-down', then, that needs to be undone, unlearned or reversed, to restore us to peace and freedom of mind?

• You are reluctant to give fully and freely, because in the material world, giving is sacrifice. One person's gain means another person's loss. The reverse position is To have, give all to all (T6 V A). The more freely you give for giving's sake, the freer and more fulfilled you feel.
• Your actions and decisions are motivated far more by fear than by love. You can reverse this by letting go of fear and choosing to be guided by love instead. What is the loving thing to do?
• Instead of thinking of yourself as a vulnerable body, a separate being preoccupied with your own survival and well-being, you begin to think of yourself as a creative mind. Instead of seeing yourself as an individual in competition with everyone else, you see yourself as part of a great unity.
• Instead of looking outside yourself for explanations, answers and comfort, you look inwards to find them in your heart and deeper thoughts.
• You learn to reverse your view of cause and effect. For example, you do not assume that you are upset (or happy) because of what has happened to you. Rather, you accept that you chose to be upset (or happy) and then blamed someone or something outside you. Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize. You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own (T31 III 1). What you see and experience are your own fearful projections reflected back at you. Sickness is not caused by the body, the body can only mirror the decisions of the mind. The world did not make us, we make the world. And so on.

To reinterpret everything like this is mind-boggling at best, and at worst impossible to consistently achieve. It seems to require us to contort our thinking so far from what comes naturally. We think it is natural to be jealous, angry, sick, afraid, to swing from love to hate, to be sad, lonely and in the end to die. The Course tells us, it is not natural, but learned, and mistaken. And we can learn to think differently.

Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more firmly established, it becomes a turning point. This ultimately reawakens spiritual vision, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict, which can become very acute. But the outcome is as certain as God (T2 III 3).

Start the Day 11 I am a mind

The first we tend to do on waking at the start of a new day is to remind ourselves that we are a body. As we float back into waking consciousness, we become aware of the body's physical sensations. We re-familiarize ourselves with its physical environment, and like the quick recap of 'the story so far' that we get at the start of the latest episode in a magazine story or television series, update ourselves by recalling who we are and where we are along the timeline of our life. In this way we use our minds to constantly maintain our self-concept as a unique organism living in a finite world.

But we lose sight of the part consciousness plays in making the body real to itself. We identify with the body, not with the consciousness that perceives it. This is like believing you are the person in your dreams at night, who walks and talks and to whom things happen, but who does not actually exist at all; who is only a projection in the mind of the dreamer.

When you think of yourself not as a body, but as a mind, and everything you see as happening in your mind, like a lucid dreamer you become both observer and creator of your experiences. Everyone you meet is as aspect of yourself. The you who takes part in what happens is only a vehicle for your consciousness, supplies the eyes you look through and the body you walk in. Wherever it goes, whatever may happen to it, you the dreamer are safe in your bed at home. Horrors and delights are equally unreal:

You are at home...dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality. Is it your decision to do so? You recognize from your own experience that what you see in dreams you think is real while you are asleep. Yet the instant you waken you realize that everything that seemed to happen in the dream did not happen at all (T10 I 2)

Think of yourself as a mind, and you see the world differently. You watch your body's impulses and become aware it is not the body that makes mistakes, feels emotions, suffers, interacts with a seeming world. It is not the body that learns. The body embodies the thoughts of the mind and mirrors the mind's dreams back to itself. The body is not the problem. Whatever seems to be troubling you is inside, not outside you. It is in your mind, and can only be resolved there. Think of yourself as a mind, and you reclaim the responsibility for what it experiences.

When you forget that you are a mind, mindlessness takes over. The Course calls this the ego, our body-identification, our self-concept, our dream persona. Have you come across a picture book for small children (by Mo Willems) called 'Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus'? The pigeon wants to drive the bus and tries every trick and wheedle it can think of. The ego, too, wants to drive our lives, out of peace and into confusion and regret. Don't let the ego drive the bus.

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)