The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Concerning the existence of the world in time:

1. Is the world eternal?

2. ...or not?

3. ...or both?

4. ...or neither?

Concerning the existence of the world in space:

5. Is the world finite?

6. ...or not?

7. ...or both?

8. ...or neither?

Referring to personal experience:

9. Is the self identical with the body?

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

Referring to life after death:

11. Does the Buddha exist after death?

12. ...or not?

13. ...or both?

14. ...or neither?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

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

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells,

Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;

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

I say móre; the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce; thát keeps all his goings graces;

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

Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

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

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing real can be threatened

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

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

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

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

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

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