Start the Day 5 Think about: what makes your heart sing

Another way to start the day is to decide not to take yourself seriously today. There is a difference between respecting and intently living your experience, and getting bogged down in pressures and expectations that you have made unnecessarily important. Anxieties, concerns, self-imposed challenges and behind them all, the ongoing insecurity and guilt that are never far below the surface jollities - and those too, the endless succession of empty amusements and trivialities - become exhausting, because they do not nourish or remind us of what we really are and what love is.

So what's this? Catch yourself starting the day with a sigh or a growl, and consider: do you want to add another burden to your already burdened mind (T14 II 1)? As long as you are striving to live a good life (in the sense of conscientious) or the good life (in the sense of pleasurable), or striving to escape a bad life in either sense, your striving in itself looks to some other time than this. Happiness can only be now. Be not content with future happiness. It has no meaning, and is not your just reward. For you have cause for freedom now (T26 VIII 9).

Students of A Course in Miracles - that hefty, concentrated text, profound, baffling, poetic, uncompromisingly religious in language and imagery - sometimes forget what it is about. It is profoundly serious, but its message is light:

• Be happy, for your only function here is happiness W102 5

• Today we will attempt to understand joy is our function here. If you are sad, your part is unfulfilled, and all the world is thus deprived of joy, along with you (W100 6)

• To heal is to make happy...think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many you have refused... (T5 intr 2)

• ..the function of relationships (is) forever "to make happy." And nothing else (T17 IV 1)

The problem is (the Course tells us), we have learned such contradictory lessons about who we are and what we love and what we are entitled to, that we have to unlearn what we believe we want before we can relearn how to be happy.  I must learn to recognize what makes me happy, if I would find happiness (W83).

The Course is not however among those who carol that the world is wonderful. The message is not that you should be upbeat, positive, appreciating what you can and downplaying the sadness and the disappointments. It is not that you should reframe pain as experience or failures as necessary steps to success; not that you should cheer up, count your blessings and your (small, short-lived) mercies and look on the bright side. The idea is not to hug your advantages and be grateful when the disadvantages happen to someone else.

When the Course talks about happiness, it means the happiness of a freedom of mind that nothing in the world can give. We believe that people, places, things, events have the power to make us feel happy - or something on a scale between happy and unhappy - so we seek them out or avoid them, proving ourselves right. But when you realize the mind works the other way round: that first we choose to be happy or not, and then we see our choice reflected back to us by the people and situations we encounter, then you are released forever from helplessness. The world you see is yourself, a construction within the mind; like a dream, it seems outside, and as when you are dreaming, you seem to be walking about in it. But you, the dreamwalker, and everything around you are part of the dream.

To really get this is what the Course calls the 'happy dream'. Even if only occasionally, in lucid moments, you experience that synchronicity of outside and inside, when your inward thoughts are mirrored in events around you, when you recognize that your state of mind is being played out in your physical experience; or when you are so much 'in the flow' or inspired - in spirit, as the Course puts it - that you forget yourself, you become so much a part of the moment that you hardly know if you are making it up or you are being made up at the same time.

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

At the start of the day, you may not have time to muse on such existential principles. Out there are things to be done, responsibilities to honour, the ever-creeping forces of dissolution to counter, and people to share the day with. Whatever your apparent circumstances, however, you might briefly ask yourself: What if I decide not to suffer? What if happiness wells up in me for no special reason, even despite a host of reasons why not? What if I let it carry me through the day?

A flicker of joy across your mind lets everyone off the hook, demonstrates that you are not a victim, dispels any grudge against anyone...witnesses to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt, and points beyond itself to both your innocence and his. Show this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love T27 I 5

What makes your heart sing? The particular moments and things that make you happy are only reminders, symbols, cues, different for everybody. But happiness is the same for everyone. The only reason to be happy when you start the day is not because the day's prospects are good or bad, but because there is something unquenchable in you and you will feel lighter and stronger to remember it.

Some years ago I knew a little girl who made up this chant to sing:
Love is the place to be
It's where you enjoy yourself.
Love is the place to be
It's where you've always been.

Where you enjoy yourself is the place to be. And it is in you, not somewhere else.

Start the Day 4 Start the day right

We know what the opposite of starting the day right is. It is when you get out of bed on the wrong side, or you start off on the wrong foot. But how do you know which is which? The very phrase 'to start off on the wrong foot' derives from the military practice of marching from the left foot first. The right foot, then, is the wrong foot. When is right truly right and not fluctuate according to point of view?

The problem with words is that they can so often serve to mean opposite things. Everyone wants to reserve 'right' for himself and label other people as wrong. 'Right' is for the good guys. As we all know from the TV and films we watch, it seems right when the good guys resort to violence and murder, because they are doing it to put things right. They are forced into wrongness by the wrongness of the bad guys. The moral of these stories is that wrong is more effective, that two wrongs do make a right, that to be right is mightier because you can justify clobbering the other guy in the name of righteousness.

The principle is an ancient and Biblical one. The forces of Good are for ever at war with the army of Evil. It is a popular myth that the wicked have more fun, especially as they have the unfair advantage of being licensed to take unfair advantage of the righteous -

The rain it raineth every day

Upon the just and unjust fella.

But chiefly upon the just, because

The unjust has the just's umbrella.

- but as we all know from our cultural heritage, in the end the good will have the last laugh. Right will rule, and as a bonus the righteous get enjoy the private satisfaction of seeing wrongdoers get their comeuppance.

It is very difficult for us, in this deeply entrenched and hostile, essentially dualistic way of thinking, to reclaim rightness as a reflection of truth and of kindliness, and to let go of its entanglement with guilt and competitiveness. We need to distinguish the judgmental meaning of 'right' - that is, factually or morally right - from its meaning as universally and spiritually true. Rightness in this sense is a property of every mind. You might say it is your God-given right. Every mind is right when it is motivated by love and peace. Every mind is wrong when it is coming from that self-serving delusion we call 'myself', that the Course calls the ego.

So let us be very clear what we mean by starting the day right. Forget morality, with its fearful divisiveness and threatening implications. The Course does not talk about good vs bad, but about true vs illusory, helpful vs unhelpful, kind vs unkind. It speaks of being either in your right mind or in your wrong mind. In the US, there is a road sign that warns you if you are about to turn into a one-way street into the teeth of on-coming traffic: it simply says 'Wrong Way.' This is what the Course means by wrong mindedness. It is not sinful, it does not make you a bad person, but it will not get you where you want to be and the consequences are likely to be painful.

As we all know from experience, to start the day wrong means in an anxious, conflicted or unhappy state of mind. It turns into 'one of those days' when we keep running into setbacks or disagreements and the world at large echoes back at us our disconnectedness from peace and joy. It will not help to confuse starting the day 'right' with being a good person, or being better than anyone else, or setting out to do good in the world. To take a few minutes at the start of the day to first step into your right mind is, rather, to wake up from the insanity of the ego and return to the sanity and freedom of a clear and open mind.

Right mindedness is a temporary solution in a wrong minded world. The first only serves to reverse and cancel out the other. When the mind remembers its wholeness and is wholly at peace, it is not right minded, but one minded. First, then, we learn that the wrong mindedness of ego thinking is not what we want after all. (That might take a few lifetimes.) Then we learn to think with our right minds, to escape from the prison we have cramped ourselves into. Finally we begin to realize that there are no separate, no alternating, no right or wrong minds, above all nothing good or bad; just mind itself, a Oneness joined as One (T25 I 7).

So when you wake still tired, or apprehensive, or with sinking heart, and living the day seems less attractive than pulling the covers back over your head, it can be a revelation to realize that if you are not happy, it is not for any of the reasons you have been listing to yourself, but just a very strong hint that you are not at the moment in your right mind. It only takes a minute to remember to ask yourself, 'What kind of day do I want? What thoughts would I rather think? What feelings would I rather feel?'

I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I want to decide otherwise, because I want to be at peace (T5 VII 6)

To decide otherwise is when you decide to start the day right. Or if you are already hopping on the wrong foot, to start it again. Whatever the weather.

Start the Day 3 Set the direction

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.

Start the Day 2 I will not be afraid today

To start the day right includes resolving to not be afraid today. This is not a matter of circumstances, personality, mood or luck. To not be afraid is a conscious decision that only you can make for yourself, and if you start the day with it you can give yourself at least five minutes (or with practice, hours) of feeling comparatively calm and confident.

We like to dignify fear as a rational, biologically evolved response to a challenging situation, essential to survival, etc, etc. But the truth is that fear makes you less able to deal with difficulties, not more; more isolated and small, not less. And to be afraid in advance as a form of self-defence against whatever might happen is even more self-undermining.

Feeling afraid is a response to your own expectations and imaginings and to how you have depicted a situation in your mind. You can decide not to be afraid today even if you do not think you are anyway. We avoid the word; are more likely to use words like stressed, tense, anxious, concerned, annoyed, or more likely still to complain that someone else is bugging you or being a pain, or that we are victims of a bad situation, rather than to call ourselves frightened. But the Course suggests that we are more fearful than we realize. Our occupations and entertainments serve the primary - but unrecognized - purpose of diverting our awareness away from a perpetual, profound state of anxiety that we never want to look at, that we deal with only indirectly, piecemeal and by calling it by other names:

The ego can and does allow you to regard yourself as supercilious, unbelieving, "light-hearted", distant, emotionally shallow, callous, uninvolved and even desperate, but not really afraid. Minimizing fear, but not its undoing, is the ego's constant effort, and it is indeed a skill at which it is very ingenious (T11 V 9).

To begin the day by deciding not to be afraid today may sometimes, then, make you uncomfortably aware of how much more apprehensive you are of more people and situations, past, present and to come, than you want to accept. Or it might seem absurd to reflect on anxieties that do not apparently exist at all if you are cheerfully unaware of them. We think it unhealthy to think about fear at all, for fear of scaring ourselves. We may be superstitiously afraid to say, silently, decisively, deep inside, 'I will not be afraid today'. The unconscious does not understand negatives, we are told. Merely by dwelling on the idea 'I will not be afraid,' might we be tempting fate, brainwashing ourselves into fearfulness? But if we are really not afraid, 'I will not be afraid today' happily confirms and celebrates that fact. And if we are, it is time we recognized it so that we can decide otherwise. Not looking at our many, complex, underground insecurities is how we preserve them.

You may still complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful T2 7

You are responsible for your thoughts and their consequences, the Course keeps reminding us. We can conjure up beliefs, fears, experiences, and we can also change them. I will not be afraid today is a reminder that you can choose your response to anything that happens. It is a way to start the day with an open mind, and to go to meet the day's surprises, disappointments, confusions, conflicts, injustices, challenges, dark nights of the soul and sabre-toothed tigers with a clearer mind and no cold shrinking of the heart.

Postscript: Just after I wrote this, I read that the funeral of the poet Seamus Heaney took place today. Apparently his final words to his wife were 'Do not be afraid.' We would all do well to start the day, every day, with the same message to ourselves, to everyone we love. To everyone.

Start the Day 1 Let peace lead the way

Begin each day with time devoted to the preparation of your mind to learn what...that day can offer you in freedom and in peace. Open your mind, and clear it (W140/141, review IV intr 5)

The purpose of this next series of posts (which may never amount to more than this one) is to start the day 'in freedom and in peace'. If your day has already veered off track, it might encourage you to start the day again, now. The idea at this moment is that I will post a daily reminder (or weekly, or whenever I remember) for you and for myself to start the day right. If I forget or chase off after another rabbit, this Start the Day thought will still apply any day or time of day:

Let peace lead the way (W155)

We think of peace as passive. It is avoiding outright confrontation, it is a lull between fighting, it is roll over in submission, it is anything for a quiet life. At best, it may be appeasement, compromise, any negotiation that tentatively bridges our separate interests while we still believe they are separate.

But as the Course teaches it, peace is not a temporary condition of affairs, or even a state of mind. It is the reality that underlies the dream we live in. We can catch a feel of it in the space between thoughts, in the stillness at the heart of movement, in the silence behind sound. It does not exist in the world of form, because form is made up of contrasts and opposites, and there are no such contradictions in peace. Peace is neither 'out there' nor 'in here': it just is. It only seems to exist in relation to ourselves; in truth, when we remember peace, we no longer have selves, we are peace.

So just the thought of peace reorients the mind towards wholeness. When you start the day by looking forward to what it will bring, or by dreading what may happen, you have already started on the wrong foot. You are setting yourself up as an individual to whom things happen, or who makes things happen, whose choices are limited and whose experience of peace depends on circumstances. The moment you wake and remind yourself who you think you are, you are already constraining your mind to run along established paths, hedged by learned limitations, jumping at old fears, straining after imagined desires.

To decide, on waking, to 'let peace lead the way' is a conscious choice not to pre-judge or to narrow your experience of life. It is not the ebullient 'Seize the day!' of the ego seeking to shape life to suit itself. We cannot know what is best for us and for everyone, and the positive go-get-'em attitude that is popularly urged upon us these days is frequently more defiant than enlightened. As Blake said, 'He who bends to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy;' happiness is discovered rather than arranged.

Nor is an inward invitation to peace to lead the way for you today a kind of resignation, or apathy, or abdication of responsibility. On the contrary, it is an act of will. It is a decision to meet whatever the day unfolds, without fear or attack. It is an affirmation of trust. It frees your mind and lets inspiration and energy flow confidently into your thoughts and activities this very day. It makes room for miracles: in the Course's sense of a sudden shift of awareness, an opening up of possibilities, a transcendence of limitations.

To start your day thinking 'Let peace lead the way' is not to devoutly shoehorn yourself into some muted idea of whatever you suppose you ought to be and feel. When peace leads the way, you can scamper through your day like a dog off the leash. It's walkies time! You don't need to know where you are going or what time it is. Even when you digress this way and that way, you are keeping an eye (or nose) on your guide, so that your direction is not as random as it might sometimes look. To let peace lead the way is to imply that while there is a part of you that knows nothing, there is also a part you can rely on that you can trust to bring you safely home together.  

The mind engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. It does not think that it will be provided for, unless it makes its own provisions. Time becomes a future emphasis, to be controlled by learning and experience obtained from past events and previous beliefs. It overlooks the present, for it rests on the idea the past has taught enough to let the mind direct its future course.

The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. What it has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals. Its past experience directs its choice of what will happen. And it does not see that here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past, without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs. Anticipation plays no part at all, for present confidence directs the way (W135 15)

Different

Not to say what everyone else was saying

not to believe what everyone else believed
not to do what everybody did,

then to refute what everyone else was saying
then to disprove what everyone else believed
then to deprecate what everybody did,
was his way to come by understanding
how everyone else was saying the same as he was saying
believing what he believed
and did what doing. 

by Clere Parsons 

Anyone who takes a stance as contrary as the person in the poem is likely to make this same 'everyone else' roll their eyes and count the cost in time, patience and social harmony. Yet who is 'everyone else'? Individuals too, every one. In his or her own way, everyone refutes and disproves and deprecates what others say and do, fighting their own battles against a succession of opponents. 

From the moment we are born, we start to learn who we are by distinguishing ourselves from those we are not. We do not have to contradict or openly disagree with anyone: we assert that we are different with every fingerprint we leave in passing, every time we say or hear our name (Me!) or anyone else's (Not me!). It is by making differences meaningful that we establish separate identities for ourselves and for everything else out of the totality of life: 

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 (W184). 

Consciousness itself depends upon a perception of difference. We could have no awareness of a world of space and time, and no sense of personal self, without comparing differences. The differences already exist, we confidently believe: they are already out there in the world of fact, whether we like them or not. It seems obvious that we do not put them there, we only observe them. We discover that 'you and I are not the same', and all the degrees of difference between one thing and another. Indeed the more exactingly someone can distinguish differences, the more we admire their grasp of reality. Much of our learning involves making ever finer distinctions: we learn to see not just a cloud or an insect but a specific kind of cloud or insect, and even that will have its own special features, different from others even within its own type or family. As in those 'spot the difference' puzzles, when you look closely and carefully past the obvious similarities, the more differences you can find. 

And this is just what the Course tells us our minds are doing continuously. It is not only artists, inventors, gardeners, businessmen, scientists, anyone who develops a product or a process, who want to come up with something  new, original and special. The same impulse prompts anyone who switches on the news to see how today is different from yesterday, or will travel to see unfamiliar places, or buys a novelty because it is different and a 'talking point'; as if your friends may have nothing else to talk about, or as if you would be a nobody without stirring the interest and envy of your neighbours. 

For without differences, we would indeed be nobody. We would not know who we separately were. The point of celebrating birthdays and anniversaries is to emphasize what is special about a particular person or a particular occasion. We like variety. We would be bored if every day were the same. But there is a deeper fear that prompts our insistence on differences. We feel individually invalidated if any other person is too much the same. The need to be special is so powerful, the Course teaches, that it both shapes the world we see and how we react to it. We are not only observers, but inventors of our reality. Just as the dreaming mind sees its own illusions and believes them to be real, we are collectively cooking up the world we see, even as we see it. Believing is seeing, as well as the other way around. We dream up differences so as to forge a sense of separate self. We want to see them, and so we do. 

When an author makes up an assortment of fictional characters, and describes them walking and talking and reacting to situations according to their various points of view, they seem to come alive in the mind of both author and reader. Similarly, the Course tells us, collectively we have made up the characters we believe we are. In one mind, all our individual lives play out simultaneously. We are, as it were, together suffering a multiple personality disorder on a cosmic scale. The sense of disconnect we all feel can only be maintained while each personality believes itself to be different from every other. Hateful and lonely as it may feel, and no matter what we think is the cause for it, the real reason that we react disappointed, bewildered, outraged or upset by something that another person says or does, is that we want to reinforce the belief 'You and I are not the same.' The Course teaches us to see that every angry word and loveless act springs from one root cause: the wish to perceive ourselves as different. 

You might think that, on the contrary, most people try to get on with others and fit in. Rebels against the norm are surely in the minority, by definition. There is a romantic notion that most people are boring and ordinary and cannot understand or tolerate the few passionate, defiant individuals (like oneself) who aspire to adventure or originality. In Jean Richepin's poem, 'Les bourgeois sont troublés De voir passer les gueux': the wild geese breathe a more rarified air than the farmyard birds below, and ruffle the herd mentality of the conforming majority. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zVLjXBqKSU) 

But we all see ourselves as the exception in some way. It is only other people who 'come out the same' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONEYGU_7EqU). Even if in other ways they are similar, it matters to me that my house is pink while everyone else's is green or yellow. We may fit right in to any social group, yet still there is a part of each of us that feels disengaged, false to ourselves, as though we are only playing at being one of the group. And if we do not fit in, that proves we dance to a different drum, come from another planet: are unique. It is as though there is always an outsider within us, a self-inflicted outcast. We think we are despised, when we are the ones who are holding aloof. There is something in us that thinks being 'true to oneself' means contradicting everyone else. So as not to clash outright with others, we may downplay our differences. We can learn to express them diplomatically. We even celebrate them: 'Vive la difference!'...until the next person comes along saying or believing or doing something more different than we are prepared to tolerate. The more obvious rebels are only more dramatic about how they choose to be different. Whatever our style of life, we all find something different to envy or to despise in someone else's.

The purpose of A Course in Miracles is to reverse this perception of otherness. It teaches us to question the illusion of self that we have devoted our lives to establishing, by comparing oneself against others, by judging for and against, by defending what we have decided are our personal interests. What the Course gives us is an understanding we cannot hurry or make happen, but can only 'come by', as the poet puts it. We must each in our own way and our own time 'come by understanding' that every other creature is not only not our enemy, but another aspect of oneself.

But in the meantime, as the Course points out, while you think that part of you is separate, the concept of a Oneness joined as One is meaningless (T25 I 7). It takes much unlearning to recognize with Krishnamurti that 'the observer and the observed are one'. As the poem suggests, the process involves acknowledging our differences, and how important they are to us, before we can see past them. Then we can begin to dismantle the barriers that keep us separate, by honouring our differences - All my brothers are special (T1 V 3.6) - even while remembering always that these differences do not matter (T7 II 5), (T13 IX 8).

In the end, the Course tells us, we will all come by the understanding that transcends our differences. The journey is the same for us all, because there is only one mind making it. Love is not about negotiating or tolerating or reconciling our differences, or compensating for each other's. It is the realization that regardless of apparent differences of form, in truth 'You and I are the same.' 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, 

I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you, 
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, 
so close that your eyes close with my dreams. 

(Pablo Neruda: Love Sonnet XVII, trans Mark Eisner)

I need do nothing

Saturday June 8^th 2013  Workshop 10: I need do nothing (T18 VII and W337)

Wake up, the Course tells us. There is much to do, and we have been long delayed (T15 XI 10). To help arouse us from the stupor of self-delusion, it gives us over a thousand pages of mind-changing ideas, including a workbook of 365 specific lessons to do, tells us exactly how to go about it, and urges us to get on with it. This is not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical application (T11 VIII 5).

And all this, the whole Course itself, is only a nudge in the right direction, it tells us, just a beginning. From here on, the Course assures us repeatedly, you will be told exactly what to do (T9 V 8, W47 3, SII 3.5); for there is so much that must be done before the way to peace is open (T20 IV 8). Why waste any more time being unsure, unhappy, prejudiced, fearful and aggrieved, when there is a better use for time?

Yet even as the Course encourages us to ask what to do, and tells us what to do, and keeps reminding us to do it, it also reassures. Time is kind. Forgive your limitations. You need do nothing...But surely this contradicts its whole teaching. Do nothing? Only remember to remember a given lesson, every fifteen minutes of the day. Only love the person you can't stand. Only be content when everything goes wrong. On the one hand the Course is so demanding that it seems impossible to do what it asks of us, and then it tells us there is nothing to do.

So how does I need do nothing help us to pay the bills and meet all the other practical and emotional needs that arise?

This is the last workshop in this present series. We will be looking at what we have (not) done over the past year and what we are (not) going to do in the coming months. If you can join us, I look forward to seeing you. Either way, have a happy summer.

Saturday 8th June, 10.30 am - 2.30 pm, Harrow Way, Andover SP10 3RQ. £15 Contact anna@unlearningschool.com

Our opposition to love

 

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
   I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
   I am the captain but you will not obey.

 

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
   I am the city where you will not stay.
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
   I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you will not hear me,
   I am your lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
   I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
   Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

 

(by Charles Causley: from a Normandy crucifix of 1632)

 

 

As far as I know, A Course in Miracles is unique among spiritual and philosophical thought systems for teaching that we are not entirely keen to be enlightened. We are truth-seekers, but with the brakes on. Mottoes that celebrate the journey rather than the destination, or the seeking rather than the finding, are popular because we are afraid that the journey's end is death and nothingness. The reason that peace and happiness are so elusive, and even when we catch them, so brief, is not that they are difficult to attain, or strictly rationed, or must be earned, as so many other thought systems imply. It is because we rightly suspect they will be the end of life as we know it. 

 

So we fight against our own yearning for an experience of a reality beyond this one. We cannot not love, because love is too essential to us to ever be wholly denied. But every one of us who feels the presence of love in their heart will also repeatedly swerve away, back off, find a reason to shut love out again. We alternate between choosing to love and refusing to love. These are the only two choices we ever have, the Course tells us. 

 

You…decided that your brother is your enemy. Sometimes a friend, perhaps, provided that your separate interests made your friendship possible a little while. But…Let him come close to you, and you jumped back; as you approached, did he but instantly withdraw…Thus you and your brother but shared a qualified entente, in which a clause of separation was a point you both agreed to keep intact…Thus is love seen as treacherous, because it seems to come and go uncertainly, and offer no stability to you. You do not see how limited and weak is your allegiance, and how frequently you have demanded that love go away, and leave you quietly alone in "peace" (T29 I 3).

 

The poem above catalogues some of the many ways we deny love to ourselves, by denying it to something perceived as other than ourselves. Our lives are a succession of missed opportunities, refusals, betrayals, rejections, attacks and avoidances. In a million different ways we attempt to wall ourselves into our own little corner of selfhood. For if we did not defend it against love, our individuality, our personal point of view, everything that is special and different about us would fade into insignificance. Love enlarges us and makes us whole, but at the cost of self-interest. And obstinately we cling to the narrow familiarity of self-interest, for fear of the immensity and intensity that might - that would - sweep us right off our anxious little standpoints.

 

...think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many you have refused. This is the same as telling you that you have refused to heal yourself (T5 in 1)

 

Only the last line of the poem is at odds with the Course's teaching, if it is read as a threat or a judgement. Our opposition to love is the cause of all suffering, in the sense that if you shut out the light you will find yourself in the dark, and if you refuse to be happy you are choosing to be unhappy. It is a 'refusal to heal yourself', and we do not even know we are doing it. We justify our withholding of love by blaming someone else and feeling hard done by. And those we need to forgive most are those we have most wronged.

 

You think you hold against your brother what he has done to you. But what you really blame him for is what you did to him (T7 VII 8)

 

We are afraid of the ‘great sun’ within us and will not love or honour it. This core of truth in us, this Self that has no sense of self, this part of us that is not individual but the same in all - this spring of Life in us - is a direct threat to our trivial self-concepts and excitingly dangerous world. For they would fizzle away like dew in the sun, if we were to let the great sun shine on them. So we shut out the greatness in us, and defend our grandiosity instead. To quote again another Causley poem (see my post for April 2012), each one of us is afraid to see the god in himself, quietly standing there.

 

But at any instant, we can drop our defences. The truth in us is so lovely and so still in loving gentleness, were you aware of it you would forget defensiveness entirely, and rush to its embrace (T18 III 3). We become aware of it when we stop opposing it. Opposition is exhausting, and futile anyway. Love already has us in its arms. We can struggle against it, or pretend it is not there; or decide I will not be afraid of love today (W282) - and love it back.

There is no order of difficulty in miracles

This is the first and fundamental principle of the course: no difficulty is harder to resolve than any other. No wrong is beyond forgiveness, it is never too late to change your mind, and no one is more or less lovable than anyone else. All these are aspects of the same idea.

How can we possibly apply this in practice? You only have to look around you to see that there is an order of difficulty in everything. Isn't it harder to build a house than to wash the dishes? And what one person can do easily, another may struggle to do at all. Even your own routine activities can seem more difficult some times than at others. We rate what happens to us on a scale between 'good' and 'bad', with infinitesimal shades of in-between. There are welcome events and there are disasters. There are minor illnesses and some you may not survive at all. And you can get on at once and delightfully with some people, while others seem so alien that they might have come a different planet. In the world we live in, some outcomes can be quite effortlessly achieved, while some are downright impossible.

But the whole emphasis of the course is on shifting our focus away from 'the world we live in'. It coaches the reader towards an entirely different experience of reality. The miracle is not bound by any laws of time or space or logic. Only you cannot expect miracles until you understand where they come from and the purpose they serve.

In this workshop we will look at problems and their degrees of difficulty. How effective is your approach to problem solving? Do you tend to adopt a 'fight', 'flight' or 'freeze' position, according to the kind of person you think you are, and the circumstances as you see them? The course gives us an alternative way of resolving conflict, no matter what form it appears. It is a course 'in miracles' - its whole purpose is to enable us to see any problem, all problems, in another light, such that they disappear altogether. The question is, does it work, how does it work, and how do you go about it?

Make this year different by making it all the same (T15 XI 10.8)

Saturday 11^th May 2013, 10.30 am to 2.30 pm at Harrow Way, Andover SP10 3RQ

Contact anna@unlearningschool.com if you would like to join us. You will be welcome.

Love is what I am

"I always wanted to be somebody," said Lily Tomlin, "But I see that I should have been more specific."

Yet specific is just what we are. The unique identity we each piece together and defend is made of specifics: this height, that colouring, this personality and that upbringing.

The building of a concept of the self is what the learning of the world is for. This is its purpose; that you come without a self, and make one as you go along...A concept of the self is made by you. It bears no likeness to yourself at all (T31 V 2).

Until you change your mind about who you are, you will run into one problem after another, trying to prop up a self concept that is fundamentally unreal. Changing your mind is what the course is for: it offers new ideas to replace your limited and limiting thoughts, and open your mind to a deeper reality.

But there is a part of us that still wants to be a specific somebody and has no intention of changing its mind, and this month's workshop theme is one that can really stick in the craw: I am very holy (W35). The idea has nothing to do with being pious or long suffering, or doing good deeds. It is about becoming free of your sense of self. Here is the same idea in other words:

Love, Which created me, is what I am (W229).

So what does it mean, and how does it change who you think you are and what your life is for?

We meet on Saturday 13th April at Harrow Way, Andover, from 10.30 am to 2.30 pm. You are welcome to join us.