Being on our toes all the time

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Helen’s original dictation, material that got edited out of the published Course. Through it all, there is one message that is coming through loud and clear. That is the need to stay on top of it all the time. Let me try to explain what I mean by this.

We are generally in this mode in which we respond from our current state of mind to the events outside of us. Circumstances (the Course would say “appearances”) impinge on us, hit up against our current state, and trigger a reaction. We express that reaction, causing appearances to reconfigure. Then this new configuration impinges on us, hits our current state, and triggers a new reaction. And on it goes.

I think we vaguely hope that through this process, we are learning our lessons. We are being seasoned by life experience and are slowly evolving. If we just show up in the classroom and let the lessons rub up against us, while we hold good intentions, it happens. We learn. We awaken.

I think that some learning happens this way, but it is very slow. I think the main thing that happens is we stay in our larger rut. The appearances that impinge on us and the current state of mind that reacts are two sides of the same coin. And those two sides just reinforce each other. Then we wonder why, twenty years down the road, little change has taken place. We have just been circling around in a closed loop.

When Jesus speaks with Helen you can tell that he wants us in a whole different mode. In that mode, we are on our toes applying his teaching all the time. We are watching our thoughts and responding with his teaching. We are asking what to do on the outside and then carrying that out. In other words, we have essentially injected a whole new third party into that process I mentioned before, a third party that now becomes the real actor. Appearances still constantly impinge on us. Our current state of mind still reacts to those appearances. But into that closed loop has entered something new, and that new thing is us being constantly on our toes applying Jesus’ teaching.

Now when an appearance confronts us, we try to remind ourselves that there is a different way to see it. When our mind is triggered and upset by an appearance, we respond internally by reminding ourselves of some idea Jesus gave us. When we face the question of what to do, we ask for guidance from the Holy Spirit, and thus find ourselves doing things that we wouldn’t have before. When we move among other people, we are constantly aware that we are on the job, that those people have needs for help and healing, and that we have been sent among them as an instrument of the divine to meet those needs.

Our internal reactions and external behavior are thus coming out of that third party. We are living from a different place. We are no longer living from that eternally reinforcing closed loop. We are no longer stuck on that stationary ping pong table, while the ball bounces back and forth between appearances and our mindset. We are living from a different place because we have realized that life is a different enterprise than we had thought. We thought it was about getting through the difficulties with a modicum of safety, comfort, and pleasure for this separate self and its “loved” ones. Now we realize it is about waking up and playing our part to help others wake up.

Just like the care and maintenance of the separate self was a job from which we never clocked out, now we realize that the job of waking up and helping others awaken is that sort of job, too. A job from which we never clock out. Because that is what life is really about. And so we are always on the job—not the old one, but the new one.

Anyway, I probably ought to provide specific examples of where I see this idea in the early dictation. I need to go now, so maybe I will in a subsequent post. But this sense comes through in everything Jesus says. He basically sees us going through every moment as if life is a whole other sort of enterprise, a whole other kind of job, and we are on that job 24/7.