When I was two, unknowingly I won the Toddler's Race at my
brother's school sports day. As I was lined up alongside the other bewildered
tinies, my mother swiftly crouched down beside me and put my father's big
leather glove into my hand. She pointed to where I could see my father, far
away (as it seemed to me), standing at the finishing post, and at the moment
when the starter cried 'Ready!...Steady!...', she said "Run and give this
to Daddy." So on 'Go!', as all the confused toddlers surged sideways,
backwards, any which way over the race track, I trotted straight for the
finishing line, where my father was waiting for me.
The point in starting the day by taking a few minutes to set
your inner GPS is that the mind will run unerringly in the direction you have
chosen. Whatever the diversions or volume of traffic, sometimes by surprising
routes (and not always the most scenic), it will get you there. Sometimes you
have forgotten by then that is where you wanted to be. Sometimes you only know
what destination you chose when you get there, don't like it, have to reset it
and start again. And if you do not set any direction, you will trot any which
way, which is ok except that it is confusing, takes much longer, and is not
making use of your power to choose.
The principle is well recognized. As a man thinketh, so is
he. Where the mind goes, the energy flows. What you pay attention to you get
more of. What you focus on becomes real for you. What the mind can conceive,
the mind can achieve. Creatures that we are of habit and conditioning,
genetically and educationally modified, motivated far more by unconscious desires
and fears than we like to recognize, still we have a power of choice that runs
far deeper than the trivial purposes we usually use it for.
I have a kingdom I
must rule. At times, it does not seem I am its king at all. It seems to triumph
over me, and tell me what to think, and what to do and feel. And yet it has
been given me to serve whatever purpose I perceive in it...I thus direct my
mind, which I alone can rule (W236)
We have the power - and the responsibility - to choose how
we will direct our mind. We cannot not choose:
to prevaricate, to deny or avoid, to chop and change, to numb your mind or to perceive
yourself as a victim of circumstances is still a choice. But the Course makes choosing
easier for us. In a world of multiple, overwhelming variety of choice, it
reduces the options to only two. There are only two directions, although there
seem to be millions. There are only two emotions. There are only two inner
voices to distinguish between: there is the noisy, anxious, blustering,
accusing voice of our ego, or self-concept, with its conflicting and changeable
ideas of who we are and of what is good for us; and there is the quiet - even
silent - voice that reminds us what really matters, recalls us to what is true
for us and for everyone.
What makes the choice easier still (though we strongly
resist ever seeing this) is that only one of these two is real. There is truth,
and there are appearances. There is love, or fear. There is waking, or
dreaming. There is oneness, or the illusion of multiplicity, separateness,
otherness. There is going home, spiritually and emotionally speaking, or there
is being lost.
We may not know how to distinguish between them, or how to
get there, but we can keep reminding ourselves to remember to decide which of
these two directions we would rather go, and the mind will obligingly take us
there. When it occurs to us that we are lost, usually after years of going
sideways and backwards, it is up to us to choose again. The process becomes
much quicker if you take it a day at a time, and start the day by thinking how
you would like to go on.
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