If these daily
reminders of some of the Course's fundamental principles sound much the same as
each other, then you have got the point. The Course's workbook lessons reinforce
its whole teaching with 365 different lessons, but the message is the same in all of
them. If we could consistently think along the lines of just one of them, there
would be no need for the rest:
Each contains the whole curriculum if
understood, practiced, accepted, and applied to all the seeming happenings
throughout the day. One is enough. But from that one, there must be no
exceptions made. And so we need to use them all and let them blend as one, as
each contributes to the whole we learn (WrVI in 2).
The Course
teaches one message, aims to bring about a consistent state of mind, unifies
our purposes, helps us to single-mindedly hold to what is true. But we learn it piecemeal,
if at all. The ideas are too much to take in at once, too contrary to our
experience and beliefs. We might try out some of the ideas, but not consistently, and then complain that it doesn't work, or is too difficult to learn. We might forgive one person for one injury; but not if they do
it again, and not someone else on another occasion. The Course keeps repeating
this proviso: don't make exceptions.
If you make exceptions, you will not get the whole picture; and the wholeness of the picture is what we need to learn. Learning
how not make exceptions is what the Course is for.
You may believe that this position is extreme
- as indeed anyone who has studied the Course is bound to feel. It is so
all-inclusive and uncompromising that it hardly seems possible to live a normal
life in this world and still to think in the way the Course urges us to do. Yet can truth have exceptions? ...Truth must
be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all (W155 2)...What we want is to
keep some aspects of the dream, and not the more uncomfortable ones. But then
you are choosing to carry on dreaming, and dreams cannot satisfy you. For
no one can make one illusion real, and still escape the rest (T26 VI 1).
Our reluctance to accept the Course's teaching unequivocally
is why it can take so long to learn. It is difficult to be consistent in
applying the ideas when we can hardly understand them, let alone believe
anything so opposed to our habitual way of thinking. It is only by being
willing enough to keep reading it, to follow the lessons, whether we believe them or not, or like them or not; and to increasingly accept
that the principles are the same in every
situation, that we can discover by experience that they work, they do
enlighten our perception of everything, they do unravel conflict, they do make life
less fearful and more loving. This is the
truth, at first to be but said and then repeated many times; and next to be
accepted as but partly true, with many reservations. Then to be considered
seriously more and more, and finally accepted as the truth. (W284).
Here are some of the fundamental truths to which the Course teaches there are
no exceptions:
1. There is no world. What we see is what the mind shows us. We are continuously conjuring up the reality we think we see, and making it real by reacting to it as if it were.
Everything you see is the result of your
thoughts. There is no exception to this fact. Thoughts are not big or little;
powerful or weak. They are merely true or false (W16 1)
2. I can be hurt
by nothing but my belief that I can be hurt. Loss is not loss when properly perceived. Pain is impossible. There is
no grief with any cause at all. And suffering of any kind is nothing but a
dream (W284). I could not be tired or stressed, and external conditions could have no effect on my body, except that I believe this is my reality. But I can learn that truth is otherwise.
3. Love is not partial, or variable: it is a constant. I cannot love some people and not others. I can only choose whether to love, or to withhold love. Love is incapable of any exceptions (T7
V 5). Love is nothing less than the
willingness to let forgiveness rest upon all things without exception and
without reserve (WpII 9)
4. Happiness is not earned, or caused by anything, or
endangered by anything. It is always present, always accessible when I know
where to look for it and drop my guard against it. The constancy of happiness has no exceptions; no change of any kind. It
is unshakable (T21 VIII 2)
Start the day with any one of these in mind, or remember to
remember them at any time, and if only for curiosity's sake, try applying them
consistently to the most mundane as well as more difficult situations in which
you find yourself. None of them makes sense unless
you apply them equally and without distinction. Then you may begin to
glimpse the immensity and transformational power of this way of thinking. There are no exceptions to this lesson,
because the lack of exceptions is the
lesson (T7 IX 4)]
Make this (day) different by making it all
the same (T15 IX 10).
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