We are at the Movies

We are at the Movies

In previous talks here I have spoken about the nature of reality and how we are caught up in this world as if it was the only version of reality. I don’t want to bore people who heard my previous talks but it might be worthwhile to recap a bit.
Eastern philosophy tells us that this world is maya, an illusion, and that a higher reality is experienced through spiritual development. We are told that we have agreed to spend a small period called a life confined to a body which we have created as a vehicle to evolve. We have agreed to be confined to space and time because in order to change, we have to experience the sequential nature of cause and effect.
Modern physics tells us that everything is just energy and we are merely concentrations of energy in a huge field of all possible energy waves. We use our consciousness to cause this energy field of all possibilities to collapse into one possibility - the reality we experience here and now. We create our reality in our consciousness.
This is fine in theory but I, like most people, have found it hard to see the world this way. We have our daily lives with our ups and downs and it is hard to detach from it and say that it’s all an illusion. However, recently I came across something that I have found helpful and it’s called “A Course in Miracles”. You may have heard of it but I’d like to give you my take on it.
“A Course in Miracles” had its origin with two ordinary and not especially spiritual or religious psychologists. Dr. Helen Schucman was a clinical and research psychologist at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York City and Dr. William Thetford was Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and also worked in the same hospital as Dr. Shucman. Dr. Thetford was Dr. Schucman’s boss. They both agreed that they were fed up with the competition, aggression, and anger which permeated their professional lives, extended into their attitudes and relationships, and pervaded their department. They agreed that their work environment was intolerable and that they should look for a better way to live and do their work. Immediately after this Helen Schucman started to have dreams and visions and to hear a voice that she believed was the voice of Jesus. She was told "This is a course in miracles, please take notes." she called Bill Thetford immediately and he reassured her that she was not going mad. He suggested she write down what was being dictated to her, and that he would look at it with her early the following morning at the office. Thus began their joint work on “A Course in Miracles” which is now available in book form and free of charge on the Internet. It’s easy to remember the address www.acim.org or just put “A Course in Miracles” into Google. It took seven years to write it all down and the work was finished in 1972.
When interviewed later Thetford said
"The material was something that transcended anything that either of us could possibly conceive of. And since the content was quite alien to our backgrounds, interests and training, it was obvious to me that it came from an inspired source. The quality of the material was very compelling, and its poetic beauty added to its impact."
When once asked his definition of “A Course in Miracles”, he replied:
"To help us change our minds about who we are and what God is, and to help us let go, through forgiveness, our belief in the reality of our separation from God. Learning how to forgive ourselves and others is really the fundamental teaching of the Course. The Course teaches us how to know ourselves and how to unlearn all of those things which interfere with our recognition of who we are and always have been."
It’s important to emphasise this point. We have to “unlearn all of those things which interfere with our recognition of who we are and always have been."
So he is saying we have a completely wrong view of who we are. We think that we are just this body and that is the limit of our reality. In fact the course is about changing your view that this world is real. It shows you that you created it yourself and that it contains your own negative thinking based on your past conditioning.
The lessons in the course have statements which you are asked to think about. You get one of these statements per day plus some instruction on how to think about them. The following are examples of some of the statements you get in the first few days:

“Nothing I see in this room means anything.
I have given everything I see in this room all the meaning that it has for me.
I do not understand anything I see in this room.
These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room.
I am never upset for the reason I think.
I am upset because I see something that is not there”.

When I started the course I saw the parallel with the ideas on the nature of reality that I had been struggling with. Many people will find these ideas hard to accept. I found it particularly hard to accept the following idea:
“My thoughts do not mean anything”.
This, for me, as a person who enjoys analysing things to death, was a bit hard to take. I then read some of the instructions which said:
"Some of the ideas the workbook presents you will find hard to believe, and others may seem to be quite startling. This does not matter. You are merely asked to apply the ideas as you are directed to do. You are not asked to judge them at all. You are asked only to use them. It is their use that will give them meaning to you, and will show you that they are true.
"Remember only this; you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy. But do not allow yourself to make exceptions in applying the ideas the workbook contains, and whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than that is required."
The course is a counter-conditioning exercise - sometimes repetitious, sometimes a bit quaint, but after you have been doing it for a few months you begin to see changes in the way you view problems, attitudes and fears. Good things begin to happen and you begin to become much more optimistic about your life.
This led me to start thinking about all the problems in the world today and asking myself if they were real. Is there really a war in Afghanistan? Are we really in financial meltdown? By a coincidence I re-read my favourite book “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Yogananda. This book, published in 1946, remains a bestseller. In it he recounts visiting a cinema and seeing newsreel footage of the terrible carnage in the First World War. He prayed to God and asked why He allowed such suffering to happen. A voice told him “Look intently and you will see that these scenes now being enacted in France are but a play of chiaroscuro. They are the cosmic motion picture. As real and unreal as the theatre newsreel you have just seen – a play within a play”. Yogananda was still not convinced and the voice went on “Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible. The good and evil of maya must alternate in supremacy. If joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever desire another? Without suffering, he scarcely cares to recall that he has forsaken his eternal home. Pain is a prod to remembrance.”
So we must have the bad to appreciate the good but are they real or not? If the bad is not real, then neither is the good.
In a lecture given by Ram Dass in Devon in 1984, he said that you can have both unity and duality but once you operate at the level of duality you must have two of everything, good and evil, pleasure and pain, riches and poverty. The trick according to Ram Dass is to experience the unity which overshadows the duality.
So we are at the movies! We have to remind ourselves that this is a virtual reality that we have created. It is a 3D Movie and we are so convinced by it that we forget that it is only part of who we are. We are on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise. The Trekkies among you will remember that in this TV series Captain Picard and his crew entertained themselves on long space voyages by creating a 3D virtual world, but they knew that they could switch it off. We find it a bit harder. We don’t know where the switch is.
Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor is a Harvard trained neuro-anatomist. She found the switch in a most unusual way – by having a stroke! The left side of her brain, the rational side shut down leaving her operating only through the right side of her brain, the intuitive or as she found out, the spiritual side. The stroke left her in a state of bliss. She transcended the boundaries of her body and felt herself to be an infinite being. She saw her body and her life and career as a miniscule part of her existence. It took her eight years to recover from the stroke. As a neuro-anatomist she was able to document and explain the experience in her book “My Stroke of Insight”.
So where does this leave us? Well I can tell you where it leaves me. I now know for definite that I am a complete idiot! I have studied this subject for years. I have learned how it is dealt with in Eastern philosophy and modern physics. I know that this reality is one that I have created all by myself and yet I can’t let go of it. When things go wrong my mind still goes over and over it looking for some resolution. I know, as Buddha told us, that this clinging of the mind is the cause of suffering. I know that this behaviour is really stupid!
I know now that this is because of past conditioning. Painful experiences can leave deep scars. I was listening to the radio a few weeks ago and a man who had been caught up in the Dublin bombing in 1974 was relating his experiences. He said that, since 1974, he had not been able to walk down the street where the bomb went off. We all have these aversions built into our behaviour even if we don’t realise it. Negative interpretations of past events have convinced us that we have to work everything out - to engage in endless internal dialogue. We have lost touch with our divine selves. We have forgotten that we are more than just this body – this identity.
But there are ways out of it. You can get a sudden and very painful bolt of enlightenment as did Eckhart Tolle, the author of “The Power of Now”, when he realised that he could not live with himself any longer. He suddenly knew that his higher self was being sabotaged by his lower self. Alternatively, and less painfully, you can counter the conditioning by meditation which connects you to a greater reality. And you can take “A Course in Miracles”. This reminds you on a daily basis to change the way you think. If you do it on the Internet you will be presented with one lesson each day and the next time you access the website, it will remember where you were and present you with the next lesson.
I will remind you again of the quote from, Bill Thetford who said “The Course teaches us how to know ourselves and how to unlearn all of those things which interfere with our recognition of who we are and always have been."

Remember you made the movie so you can give it a happy ending.

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