Happy New Year!

 May 2013 be all harmony, happiness and prosperity for you

...but just in case anything should happen during the next 365 days (or minutes) to disturb your peace of mind, to irritate, upset or offend you, with this next workshop you will be well prepared to meet whatever comes with equanimity, and whoever comes with compassion...or at least if not, to know why not.

Saturday January 12^th 2013

10.30 am to 2.30 pm

31 Harrow Way SP10 3RQ

The Happy Learner Workshop 5: Anger is never justified (T30 VI)

This is another of those Course in Miracles statements that only seems to put us more in the wrong than we already feel we are, and when the fault is someone else's, too. But as with all these irksome course principles, when you put aside your assumptions of what you suppose it might mean and pay attention to what the idea can offer you personally, the truth is only comforting and liberating.

This workshop looks at provocation and attack, the ancient war of good against evil and what we mean by justice. Why do you get angry? Why do you try not to get angry? How do you deal with violent emotion in yourself or in others? We will explore what the course teaches about correcting error, and how we can find peace even among the endless succession of outrages that people commit against each other.

I look forward to seeing you!

Thank you for being there this past year, and may the next one be full of delights.

Happy Christmas!

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was fill’d with such delight
As prison’d birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun;
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon

A Course in Miracles describes our true nature as like a forgotten song. From time to time, in a moment of peace or reconciliation, we may suddenly experience the sweetness of complete happiness. This is when we come closest to remembering what we are, the course tells us. Truth is always in us, around us, everywhere unchanging and joyous, but it is only in rare instants that we consciously become aware of it. We are not much used to listening for this unceasing song, and even when we do catch a few notes of it we have learned to dismiss it, forget it again, focus on the 'more important' noises of fear and distraction. Even what we do hear is no more than an echo, just a 'wisp' of a reality that seems unreal as we measure reality in this world, but at the same time we know is more true than any of the incomplete satisfactions we pursue here. 

When the world talks of 'being true to yourself' or encourages you to 'take care of yourself' or recommends you allow yourself some 'me-time', it is helpful to ask yourself which self are you being true to? If you think happiness depends on singing from your own songsheet, you will not hear the wordless song that all of us everywhere is singing in harmony, for the most part unknowingly. Listen to everyone you meet or think of today and hear the bird in them that is singing the same song as the bird in you. 

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 (T21 I 6)

To have, give all to all

It’s the time of year when people begin to say “Ready for Christmas, are you?” like the five-minute call before an actor is due on stage; and the Citizen’s Advice Bureau publishes anxious letters saying “I’m starting to worry about how we’re going to pay for Christmas this year. I don’t want to disappoint the kids…”

But the course (of course) has the solution to any harassment you may be feeling about the pressure to give (and to receive).  At some risk of a frosty winter, try announcing these glad tidings to your loved ones: Forgiveness is the only gift I give (W297)…

On a more universal and timeless note, the theme of the upcoming workshop on Saturday week is To have, give all to all (T6 V A). Here is your first decisive step towards freedom from the frustrations, fears and futility of life in this world:This fundamental and very practical lesson begins the shift in how we see ourselves, from apart to united, from impoverished to abundant…

But it is clearly not very practical to ‘give all to all’ in any way that makes sense in the world. The course does not teach any kind of ‘prosperity consciousness’. It is not about attracting abundance from the universe, or tithing, or positive thinking. Nor is it talking about charity, and certainly not self-sacrifice.

So what does the course mean by having, and giving, and how is this relevant to you personally, at any time of year?

Looking forward to seeing you round a warm fire, and even in December we will still end before it gets dark.

Happy Learner Workshop 4

Saturday 15th December

10.30 am to 2.30 pm

 

 

Take me as your model for learning

Saturday November 17^th

Next workshop coming up!

Another major source of discomfort for students of A Course in Miracles can be its uncompromisingly Christian language. ‘This course comes to you in a language you know and love,’ it tells us, but these days in our secular European society few people love this talk of God and all those references to Holy Spirit, Atonement and so on. If the sheer size of the book and the depth of its psychology do not put you off, the embarrassment of studying a mind-training course with Jesus as your personal tutor is too much for most of us would-be sophisticates to know how to deal with.

But ‘words are but symbols of symbols’, and it is their meaning, not the names that matter. The course is for people of all religions or no religion. Although it uses the word more often than any other, you need not believe in God to learn the peace of mind and the altered viewpoint that the course offers.

In this workshop we will explore what this kind of language means to us, and look at how the course frees us from the emotional inheritance of two thousand years of Christianity. It teaches us to use whatever symbols we need until we can see beyond all symbols. It only asks us to question every value that we hold, to set judgement aside, and learn to trust our own inner teacher.

Where? 31 Harrow Way Andover SP10 3RQ

When? Saturday 17th November, 10 am to 2.30 pm

How much? £15

Enquiries and booking: 01264 395579 or email anna@unlearningschool.com

Symbol and Reality

A talk for the Woking Astrology Group

Friday 2nd November 2012, 8-10 pm

The Maybury Centre, Board School Road, Woking GU21 5HD

Enquiries and bookings: b.mcauliffe@ntlworld.com 

or telephone 07954384023

Symbol and Reality: an introduction to A Course in Miracles

We like to know what is unique about us, not what we have in common with the universe. But just as every combination lock is based on only ten digits from 0 to 9, all birth charts consist of the same symbols in different arrangements. All meaning, we think, lies in the differences. But symbols point away from what is separate and particular, to what is universal.

As Maya Angelou said, "Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere." When I am most true to myself and you are most true to yourself, we are the same.

Symbols help us see connections instead of differences, and to communicate what words cannot express. Symbols are only gestures, intimations, approximations, but they serve to remind us of a reality beyond all symbols.

Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. Yet accept them not as your reality (W184 11)

Are We Nearly There Yet?

A one-day workshop for students of A Course in Miracles

Saturday 10^th November 2012

Ruskin Hall, Dunstan Road, Oxford OX3 9BZ

10 am – 5 pm

If you feel different, if you feel lost, or even if you don't, you are an alien here, the Course tells us: This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And a very juvenile alien, too, afraid, homesick, and with its head under the blanket – until we learn otherwise.

The cure for alienation is not a journey home through space but an awakening in time. To wake up is to grow up, pack up the game of fear, put away the toys of guilt; to see not through a glass darkly, but face to face. But it can seem a long process, for children believe in magic and in make-believe, and are afraid that growing up will be the end of fun and games. We do not want to come home yet when we are called. So the Course gives us all the time we want, and introduces a game that happy children play in which everyone who plays must win; in which even while we keep turning backwards and downwards, the escalator is still carrying us forward and up. 

In this workshop we will explore what the themes of childhood, growing up and alienation mean to us personally, and what difference the Course’s unique perspective can make to our lives and relationships. By means of group discussion and individual meditative exercises the aim is to further our understanding of the Course, so as to travel the journey without distance more swiftly and light of heart.

 

A Miracle Network Event

£60

Booking: 0844 567 0209 or admin@miracles.org.uk

Enquiries: 0207 262 0209 or info@miracles.org.uk

No Thorns, No Strangers

 The new Oxford Miracle Café opens with its first meeting on Wednesday. The evening begins with a vegetarian meal and live music, and then Anna will talk about the vision of the Course as an invitation to further discussion and questions.

No Thorns, No Strangers, No Obstacles to Peace:

the radical vision of A Course in Miracles

A talk by Anna Powell

Wednesday 12th September 2012

What does the Course mean by ‘seeing differently’? How do you see the invisible, and how do you not see the thorns and strangers and obstacles that are only too obvious? There is always a better way, the Course reminds us, a better way of relating, of dealing with problems. And it begins with seeing everything with a clearer eye.

Price: £8 on door, plus £5 for food

Time: 7 to 9pm (doors open 6.45pm)

Place: The Magic Cafe, 110 Magdalen Road, Oxford OX4 1RQ Location map 

(Buses: 5 from station, 1, 3, 5 from city centre. Get off at Magdalen Road stop. Street parking is likely to be difficult.)

Let us know if you plan to come so we can make sure there is sufficient food, or for more information, call Steve Clarke on 07970 789259 or email spc@steve-clarke.co.uk

The Happy Learner...and other upcoming events

A new series of Saturday workshops on A Course in Miracles begins Saturday 15th September.

The Happy Learner workshops offer an introduction to and exploration of some of the ‘quite startling’ ideas of A Course in Miracles. What do they mean, what do they not mean, and how do they apply to the specific situations and relationships that concern us? What does the course mean by the ‘real’ or ‘forgiven’ world - and how can we get there from here?

Saturday 15th September

Forgiveness offers everything I want (W122)

Forgiveness sounds magnanimous and we would expect it to figure in a course in spiritual philosophy; but who would go so far as to say that to forgive and to be forgiven offers everything I want? Would you rather forgive the person who has caused you some grievance, than have anything else you might really, really want? We need to completely rethink the meaning of the word before we can discover for ourselves that forgiveness really is the key to (our own) happiness.

For details of the complete series see Workshops: www.unlearningschool.com/p/workshops.html

Saturday 29th September

Illusions: How to live in a world that is not there

Day workshop hosted by Miracles Southwest
Breathing space Centre, Exmouth, Devon

10.30am - 4.30pm

£35

Enquiries and Bookings: Susan Gibson suegibson33@gmail.com

Friday 2nd November

Talk hosted by Woking Astrology Group
The Maybury Centre, Board school Road, Woking GU21 5HD

8 - 10pm

Symbol and Reality: an introduction to A Course in Miracles

'Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. Yet accept them not as your reality' (A Course in Miracles, Workbook 184 11)

We want to know what is particular about us, not what we have in common with the universe. But all birth charts consist of the same symbols in different arrangements, just as every combination lock is based on only ten digits from 0 to 9. All meaning, we think, lies in the differences. But as Maya Angelou said, "Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere."

In 1976 a unique manuscript was brought out of hiding, and quietly became a worldwide bestseller. Whatever your spiritual beliefs or disbeliefs may be, A Course in Miracles speaks to you personally of what is true always and everywhere, and offers you a leap forward in your journey towards revelation and inner peace.

Enquiries and bookings: Beryl McAuliffe b.mcauliffe@ntlworld.com

Saturday 10th November

Day workshop hosted by the Miracle Network 

http://www.miracles.org.uk/events/event_page.php?event=343

Are We Nearly There Yet?

If you feel different, if you feel lost, or even if you don't, you are an alien here, the Course tells us: "This world you seem to live in is not home to you." ( W 339) And a very juvenile alien, too, afraid, homesick, and with its head under the blanket; and so are we all.

The cure for alienation is not a journey home through space but an awakening in time. To wake up is to grow up, pack up the game of fear, put away the toys of guilt; to see not through a glass darkly, but face to face. But it can seem a long process, for "children believe in magic" (T 104) and in make-believe, and think growing up will be the end of fun and games, and we do not want to come home yet when we are called. So the Course gives us all the time we want, and introduces "a game that happy children play" (W 286) in which "everyone who plays must win" (W 286); in which even while we keep turning backwards and downwards, the escalator is still carrying us forward and up.

In this workshop we will explore what the themes of childhood, growing up and alienation mean to us personally, and what difference the Course’s unique perspective can make to our lives and relationships. With group discussion and meditative exercises we will work individually and co-operatively to further our understanding of the Course, so as to travel the journey without distance more swiftly and light of heart.

No Sense of Direction

The poem (below) by Vernon Scannell does not tell you where it is going until you get there – for uncertainty is what it is about. It loses you on the battleground and again in peace time, only to suddenly arrive somewhere entirely unexpected. It turns out to have, after all, an unerring sense of direction. And so do we all, the course tells us, if only we will step back and let it lead the way.

From the point of view of our own secret doubts and fears, it does appear, as the poem suggests, that some people unswervingly go through life succeeding at this or dealing effectively with that, finding their way into jobs and relationships and enriching experiences that we have somehow missed or mismanaged.

Yet in truth there is almost no one here who is really sure which direction to take. Some may fancy they ‘need no guide’, but everyone is guided by some idea, has some purpose in mind. The question is, what is the purpose underlying what you think is your purpose? Are you being misdirected by your own fantasies and isolated sense of self; or allowing yourself to be led by an impulse from beyond your own limited viewpoint, to reach across the obstacles between us and inside us, so as to reconnect? In the language of the course, are you guided by the ego, or by the Holy Spirit?

There are two teachers only, who point in different ways. And you will go along the way your chosen teacher leads. There are but two directions you can take, while time remains and choice is meaningful. For never will another road be made except the way to Heaven. You but choose whether to go toward Heaven, or away to nowhere. There is nothing else to choose (T26 V 1).

The road that you think will take you to where you want to be is an illusion, for you are mistaken about who you are and what will bring you joy. If you start from the standpoint of a separate individual whose chief purpose is to take care of your body’s comforts and interests, you may forge confidently ahead and seem to know where you are going and what you are doing, and sometimes achieve comparative success and short-lived gratifications. Or you may be humiliated by failure, the failure to grasp what was only ever a chimera. Either way, the course tells us, this is how you make yourself blind and deaf to the only part of your mind which can lead you to real peace and lasting happiness, because when you identify with your body and not with your mind you are losing touch with your own reality.

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).            

To be guided by your individual needs, as you perceive them, is not independence, but slavery to illusions. To base your purposes on the world’s values is to have ‘eyes chained by the night’: you may not seem lost, but you will only find your way back to the too familiar territory of disappointment and the same old mistakes. Uncertainty is hardly a reliable guide in itself, but at least it can make room for humility and patience; for the willingness to give up striving to arrange life to suit yourself, and to give way to the power of love that is in you but not of you.

Your function here is only to decide against deciding what you want, in recognition that you do not know. How, then, can you decide what you should do? Leave all decisions to the One Who speaks for God (T14 IV 5).

What does this mean in practice? How do you know it is not still your self-deceiving self posing as the whisper of God? Practising a shrewd self-awareness will help to distinguish between your lucid mind and further fantasy, but the best reassurance that you have turned away from illusions and invited love to be your guide is simply that you feel relief and peace again:

When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer (T14 IV 6).

These are poetical images, because there are no words that can speak of oneness or adequately express the experience of becoming whole. The course describes itself as a journey, a way home for the lost and the lonely; but also reminds us that this is just a way of speaking. In truth, you are not lost, you are never alone; there is nowhere to go, nothing to prove; there is no journey, but only an awakening (T13 I 7). 
The battles we seem to fight, the seeming choice of paths before us, the seeming differences between us are not real but a delusion that we share. You do not leave insanity by going somewhere else. You leave it simply by accepting reason where madness was (T21 VI 3). There are not many directions to choose between, but only one. There is only one ‘lucky path’, and we must all stumble upon it - realise we are already on it - once we give up our own obstinate sense of direction.

Everyone has experienced what he would call a sense of being transported beyond himself… And while this lasts you are not uncertain of your Identity, and would not limit It. You have escaped from fear to peace, asking no questions of reality, but merely accepting it…Come to this place of refuge, where you can be yourself in peace. Not through destruction, not through a breaking out, but merely by a quiet melting in. For peace will join you there, simply because you have been willing to let go the limits you have placed upon love, and joined it where it is and where it led you, in answer to its gentle call to be at peace (T18 VI 1-14)

No Sense of Direction

I have always admired
Those who are sure
Which turning to take,
Who need no guide
Even in war
When thunders shake
The torn terrain,
When battalions of shrill
Stars all desert
And the derelict moon
Goes over the hill:
Eyes chained by the night
They find their way back
As if it were daylight.
Then, on peaceful walks
Over strange wooded ground,
They will find the right track,
Know which of the forks
Will lead to the inn
I would never have found;
For I lack their gift,
Possess almost no
Sense of direction.
And yet I owe
a debt to this lack,
A debt so vast
No reparation
Can ever be made,
For it led me away
From the road I sought
Which would carry me to –
I mistakenly thought –
My true destination:
It made me stray
To this lucky path
That ran like a fuse
And brought me to you

And love's bright, soundless
Detonation.

Peace comes dropping slow

I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there,
For peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning
To where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer,
And noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now,
For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
Or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Lake Isle of Inisfree, by William Butler Yeats

Trouble is, it won't work. The glee of eating your home-produced beans all by yourself is a lonely triumph. There will be midges biting and the toilet paper will run out. The bees are dying out these days, too, and anyway you can’t live on honey for ever. Time and weather will undermine the solitary cabin – in short, the poet will soon miss the madness and convenience of city life. Indeed he never left it, except in his nostalgic imagination.

In this holiday season, it is useful to remember that there is no earthly paradise. There is no escape within the world from the world we have made. There is nowhere we can go that does not have a dark side - we carry it with us. The best that seclusion can offer is a temporary respite; a defence from the challenge of other people’s differences and demands, an attempt to protect our self-image, do things our own way, and find a relative but disconnected peace on our own terms. It takes more than a change of scenery to quiet the buzzing of doubt and self-loathing that is the underside of the separate self; it takes a change of mind.

Conflict must be resolved. It cannot be evaded, set aside, denied, disguised, seen somewhere else, called by another name, or hidden by deceit of any kind, if it would be escaped. It must be seen exactly as it is, where it is thought to be, in the reality which has been given it, and with the purpose that the mind accorded it. For only then are its defenses lifted, and the truth can shine upon it as it disappears (W333).

Peace is not there, wherever we think there may be. It is already here. It is always with us, as present on the pavements grey as where the cricket sings. Our images of favourite places at best reflect back to us the love and peace that we truly are. At worst, we cherish the forms of things for their own special sake, instead of what those forms remind us of; losing ourselves in dreams.

But read the poem without confusing image with reality, and then it says, like the Course in Workbook Lesson 182, I will be still an instant and go home. At any moment, especially at any moment of weariness or hurt or upset, we can think, like the poet, ‘I will arise and go now’: I will be still an instant. I will change my mind, forget my grievances, drop my accusations, stop wallowing in my shame, and go back to the stillness within. Now, on the roadway or wherever I outwardly seem to be, whatever I seem to be outwardly doing, I can stop being driven by the noise in my mind and listen only to the peace that always, night and day whispers in the deep heart’s core.

The Remains of the Day: forgive the passing of time

This Saturday June 9^th we have Workshop 10: The Remains of the Day – forgive the passing of time. This will be the last workshop of the present series, so we will not only look at the meaning of time and how to use it, but also review the whole theme of the past ten months, and how and why to Forgive your Life for not being what you meant.

Forgive the passing of time and your wasting of it, or its wasting of you. A Course in Miracles frees us from the burden of the past, from present problems and from fears for the future by clarifying two very different ways to understand and make use of time. What does boredom – having ‘too much’ time, or not knowing what to do with it – have in common with never having enough time; and what is the real alternative to both? You can use any moment either to destroy, or heal: and it is never too late to be still an instant and be free of the constraints of time altogether.  

Save time, my brother; learn what time is for T29 VII 9

See you on Saturday for a good time!

The Alien in the Mirror

This Saturday 12^th May the next workshop is The Alien in the Mirror: forgive your self. 

Look again at the person you seem to be. Who is the ‘you’ in the mirror, in the photo album, in other people’s image of you? Why are we so prickly about offences to our pride, so anxious about appearances, so mortified by our mistakes?  Forgive your failures and your limitations, your insidious self-centredness and the person you wish you were or were not. 

It is not you who are so vulnerable and open to attack that just a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world, and hurls it into chaos (T24 III). So who are you, who is the ‘you’ the Course is talking to?

This workshop will be more hands-on than usual, so bring your notebook and be prepared to leave your past behind…as, by the way, two of you did with your umbrellas last month. You must have been missing them!

See you soon.

Ballad of the Breadman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After them came the soldiers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Charles Causley

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

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

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

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

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

Easter Day 2012

Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

And rightdoing there is a field.

I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about. 

Smoke gets in your eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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