The mind, mind has mountains

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Even if you find the compacted words and tortuous sentences difficult to understand, you will grasp that this poem is a cry of extreme mental anguish. The poet's own pain extends to include all the suffering in the universe, the 'world-sorrow' that holds every living creature in its vice. If happiness is random (see Happiness, my post for December 2013), suffering is not particular either, and is more certain. Every one of us goes through its wringer at some time.

The mind that can conceive of great things, like mountains and heavens, also plunges us the other way, into the abyss. Stories of Satan's fall from heaven into the hell of perpetual rejection, of Adam and Eve's original Fall from Grace and expulsion from paradise, are metaphors for profound emotional distress when whatever you thought was holding you up or holding you together turns out to be not there, or not enough.

The poem hints at an even more ancient story: of Prometheus, who knew what it was to hang staring into the depths of suffering. Prometheus is chained to a mountainside as a punishment by the gods. Every day an eagle comes to tear out and eat his liver, which is nightly renewed so that the torture can begin again the next day. 'In ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions,' Wikipedia tells us, and the image of an eagle ripping into our innards is an apt one for expressing our experience of inner suffering. When we are in great emotional pain, we feel almost physically tortured, or as if literally hammered on that ancient anvil. All the cheery business of life and stream of distractions that serve to keep our lives bobbing along, all the wonders and beauties of the world that we tell ourselves should make us grateful and happy, cannot save us from those moments when we see past them into the pit of futility, shame, helplessness, loneliness.

A Course in Miracles echoes Manley Hopkins in its perception of our lives as essentially painful. It is not among those religions and philosophies which urge us to look at the marvels of the universe and rejoice. It would have us see that our efforts to 'look on the bright side' and to 'think positively' only postpone true awareness; much as the father of the Buddha built walls around his paradise palace gardens to shield his son from all knowledge of poverty, sickness, old age and death. Look, the Course tells us, look, as the Buddha did, and see what the mind has made. Until we accept the power of our minds to create our experience, we will not realise our power to choose again.

At least, the poet observes, there is a limit to suffering. We can endure only so much. It may be 'fell', devastating, while it lasts, but pain must either ease eventually, or kill us. The Course, too, says that suffering must finally extinguish itself. 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 (T2 III 3).

This phrase without limit recurs frequently throughout the Course. Truth, love and joy are without limit in their nature and their effects, and there is always room for more patience, more trust, more forgiveness. But pain is, in every sense, a dead end.

So is the poet's despairing conclusion. He admits it is a wretched cop-out, but when our appeals to symbols of spiritual help and guidance, such as the Comforter (Holy Spirit) and Mary, or whatever God you pray to, are met by the silence of an indifferent universe, the only comfort we can hope for are moments of blackout when we sleep, and when we finally die.

But the Course dismisses the tempting idea that death, or sleep, or any retreat into denial and unconsciousness, offers anything more than the illusion of escape: There is a risk of thinking death is peace... death is opposite to peace, because it is the opposite of life. And life is peace (T27 VII 10.2).

'Life' here does not refer to physical life, but to the indestructible life of the spirit. When the mind is directed by the spirit, it is in a state of peace, it is fully alive and well. It is not torn between opposites, it does not swing between extremes, it knows neither mountains nor pits. Peace, truth, love are everywhere at once; there is nowhere to aspire to or fall from. Real freedom for Prometheus - that is, for each one of us - does not depend on the whim of the gods, but on his own change of mind. When he wakes to the realisation that his whole story of defiance of the gods, of individual heroism, of prolonged and repeated agony, and even his eventual reprieve, is just that, a story, a way of seeing, a dream of suffering, a construction in the mind in which he is at once the god, the victim, the eagle - then his imagined chains can fall away.

How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there?(T6 II 6). 

Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and the Course too uses Christian language, but the radical difference between the teachings of Christianity and of the Course is this emphasis on the psychological. Pain is not punishment, except in the sense that it is a form of self-inflicted punishment, of the mind, by the mind. It is an effect of the divided perception that sees you as other than me, this as different from that, conscious as apart from unconscious. Pain in any form is the pain of loss, a reminder of our lost completeness. There is no Comforter who can step in and make all well. The Comfort is that individually and collectively we can at times step out of the perceptions that are causing us pain, until we can see again, with a whole vision. The mind can move mountains, because the mind put them there.


...Which amounts to our purpose in this life. Next workshop, Your Special Purpose, Saturday 1st March 2014. See details under Workshops, also on www.annapowell.com.