The Clarification of Terms in The Manual for Teachers
by Tom Baker
The Meaning of Words and the Liberation of Meaning
Lesson: (pp. 77-92)
Date:September 12, 2010
References to the Manual for Teachers will be indicated by the capital letter "M" appearing in parenthesis after the quote along with the page number(s).
p>So often we use large words in a small sense. By large words I do not mean words like polymorphism that are many lettered. I mean words that are large in the way of meaning. Words like life and mind and love and happiness. We speak of life as what our body gives us, as mind as the thoughts our brain is thinking. Love is something we fall in and out of. Happiness is getting what we want or our dreams coming true. A Course In Miracles and the Cayce material both expand these words. Life becomes spiritual and eternal, encompassing the lifetimes of many bodies. Life is never lost. Mind becomes the builder (Cayce) and the activating agent of spirit (the Course). Love is what we are and, as Cayce says "goes far beyond what you call the grave." Happiness is the peace of God, a peace beyond both the dreams we dream and our understanding of those dreams. In the final section of the Teachers Manual the author of the Course clarifies eleven terms, ten of them paired with another and the final one, The Holy Spirit, standing alone. Each term is deepened beyond its popular and historical meaning, sometimes, as in the case of Jesus-Christ, in startling and beautiful ways. I will make a brief comment on each of the paired terms and on the Holy Spirit plus the Epilogue which acts as both a beginning and an ending, an alpha and omega, of A Course in Miracles.Mind-Spirit. As I said above, the mind is the activating agent of spirit. Spirit is our true identity (Workbook, Lesson 97, I am spirit, p. 172). Thus the mind, when we are right-mined or in our right mind, is the activating agent of our true identity. When I am right-minded I am listening to the Holy Spirit, forgiving the world and seeing everything with the eyes of Christ. The "I am" shines out of me and I see the "I am" shining out of you and you and you ad infinitem. However, we tend to experience the mind as split and are wrong-minded, listening to the ego and making illusions; "perceiving sin and justifying anger, and seeing guilt, disease and death as real." (M. p. 79). Cayce puts it this way:
"Spirit is the life, mind is the builder, and the physical is the result."
When we are wrong- minded the builder is crazy, "driven mad by guilt" (Text. Chapter 13, Introduction p. 236), and he builds a house divided against itself in which he thinks he and everyone else is trapped. The Course trains the consciousness, "the receptive mechanism" of mind, to receive messages from the Holy Spirit. This heals the builder and he builds a house united, a house of peace, a true Bethlehem (Hebrew: "House of bread").
The Ego-The Miracle. When Jesus talks about the ego he is careful to never make it real. "Ego" as used in the Course is not your daddy's version of ego, your "daddy" being Sigmund Freud. Freud saw the ego as the part of our minds which mediates between our primitive drives (the id) and our civilized conditioning (the superego). In Freudian psychology mental health is all about having a strong ego. In the Course the ego is all about being spiritually insane. The ego is who we think we are without God which, in effect, means a lie about who we are: "But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not. It is a thing of madness, not reality at all. A name for namelessness is all it is." (M. p.81). In Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, Prospero, the dying wizard proclaims: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." It has been our wish to be a dream version of what we really are. This dream version of ourselves as self made and alone has turned into a nightmare of fear and guilt and death and pain. Jesus brings us the Miracle to wake us up from our agitated dream: "This terrible mistake about yourself the miracle corrects as gently as a loving mother sings her child to rest." (M. p. 82). I think of my own mother singing to me when I was five years old. I had had a nightmare in which I was being attacked and kidnapped by monkeys with big teeth. My mother and father woke me, and both sat on my bed while my mother sang me to rest with the song "Momma's little baby loves shortnin' bread." I was home, I was safe, and I was a part of these two people who were gentle and familiar and humorous. The miracle is a lot like that.
Forgiveness-The Face of Christ: This section begins with a startling qualifying statement about forgiveness: "Forgiveness is for God and toward God but not of Him." (M. p. 83). God is not the one forgiving because God never felt attacked or disappointed nor has God ever condemned others. In other words, God is neither hurt nor angry. It is we who are caught up in condemnation and so need forgiveness, and need it desperately, as a way to remember that there is nothing to forgive. We have projected our attacking and victimized ways upon God and so have theologized God as the eternal judge and Jesus as the constant victim and so have shifted our anger onto God and cry out to heaven: "Lord have mercy!"
The mirror rather than the altar is the proper setting for the begging for mercy: "Tom have mercy!" Yet when I look in the mirror I see only the face of one who has suffered, "poor Tom" (victim) and one who has failed, "you idiot" (a good reason to judge myself). If I pray, "Lord, teach me to forgive, help my unforgiveness," then I may begin to see in my face the Face of Christ and the memory of God can return. The final paragraph in this section gives a sense of what that moment at the mirror of glass or the mirror of another face is like when forgiveness illuminates the face of Christ: "How lovely does the world become in just that single instant when you see the truth about yourself reflected there. Now you are sinless and behold your sinlessness. Now you are holy and perceive it so. And now the mind returns to its Creator; the joining of the Father and the Son, the Unity of unities that stands behind all joining but beyond them all. God is not seen but only understood. His Son is not attacked but recognized." (M. p. 84).
True Perception-Knowledge: As a priest I was a popular but largely ineffectual marriage counselor. I was popular because I was free. I was ineffectual because I lacked training and, as a celibate priest, had a theoretical rather than experiential vision of marriage. Couples would come in to my tiny office and argue with each other. I had the naïve idea that they would work it out in the wise and holy ambience of my presence. They never worked it out. They just got worked up. I began to dread witnessing these encounters where sweet people gave each other hell. However, I learned something invaluable. When couples argued, each one was entirely convinced, absolutely sure, that they had the Truth. The madder they got the surer they became. They completely confused their perception with knowledge. I finally developed a little speech that went something like this: "You are both a little right and you are both a whole lot wrong. From your point of view each of you is right, from my point of view neither of you are listening even a little to what the other is saying, and from God's point of view all of us are blind." My speech was a show stopper and gave me a chance to clarify the issues but, as the saying goes, I was the blind leading the blind. I could point out that their little truth was not the big Truth but I could not teach them (or myself) to consistently be obedient to such a humble and holy perspective. That's what the entire Course in Miracles is up to. It teaches the student to free his or her perception of all fear and guilt through forgiveness and then be ready for God to take the final step: "O my brothers [and sisters], if you only knew the peace that will envelop you and hold you safe and pure and lovely in the Mind of God, you could but rush to meet Him where His alter is." (M. p. 86). To quote St. Paul's words so often read at weddings, "Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known." (1 Cor., 13: 12).
Jesus-Christ: Of all the material in the Course this page and a half is the most precious to me. For much of my adult life I have read and listened to what experts have said about Jesus. I have been an avid student of the learned gossip about who Jesus was and is, what His purpose and mission was and is, how that mission should be carried out, and whether or not it has really done any good. Through it all I have often wondered to myself and occasionally I have wondered out loud, "What would Jesus himself say?" If indeed the Course is Jesus' contribution to the "cosmic speed-up", as he told Helen Schucman, then we have in this section what Jesus says about Jesus. In respect to the practice of the Course there are two sentences that I would emphasize: "He [Jesus] will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared." The Course is saving us from a hellish consciousness that we made up. We are not serving out a sentence that God gave us nor are we preparing to meet a heavenly judge who may condemn us to eternal damnation. The only judge we face is ourselves and the only damnation we avoid is self invented. In the Course Jesus offers us salvation by teaching us to see with his eyes and hear with his ears. Jesus is the teaching savior, not the sacrificing savior. In fact, one of the major teachings of the Course is that love is never sacrifice and sacrifice is never love.
The Holy Spirit: In the Course the Holy Spirit understands the human condition and the ego system of thought which sustains that condition. The Holy Spirit knows us in our unknowingness. The Holy Spirit also knows how much Truth we can bear. It knows the way into the defended human heart. In the Course the Holy Spirit is most often referred to as the Voice for God. You and I hear this voice often. Sometimes it is singing, sometimes it is stillness, sometimes it is words on a page, sometimes it is our own voice in our heads, sometimes it is in the eyes of another. There is no limit to the forms it can take. Sometimes it is your cat. Its content is always peace; its feeling is always love.
The Epilogue: The feeling of the epilogue is that of certainty. I often read it to be reassured that I'm going to make it, that all who are willing to begin the journey home to God consciousness will finish that journey. The first step is the last step and all the steps in between are the initial step deepened and the final step celebrated: "Be not afraid. We only start again an ancient journey long ago begun that but seems new. We have begun again upon a road we traveled on before and lost our way a little while. And now we try again. Our new beginning has the certainty the journey lacked till now. Look up and see His Word among the stars, where He has set your Name along with His. Look up and find your certain destiny the world would hide but God would have you see." (M. p. 91).
Workbook: Lessons 8-14
The first six lessons in the Course have their completion in the seventh lesson which gives us the reason why we do not understand anything we see, why nothing has meaning, why we are really upset: why? why? why? Because we see only the past. It seems like we are seeing the present, but we are actually interpreting everything we see in terms of the past. Even when we predict the future we are doing so in terms of the past. That is why we are so often surprised and why, interestingly enough, the future is always different from what we expect since things occur that are not in our past memory, but even those surprises are interpreted by us in terms of what we already know, so we do not allow ourselves to be surprised for long. Reality or "God" exists only in the timeless present or, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, the NOW.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2010