Friday I was working on the famous “lilies of the field” discourse, in which Jesus speaks to peasants and beggars who are realistically worried about not having food or clothing. His response is that in the face of these fears, they can be carefree as the lilies of the field or the birds of the air. He asks rhetorical questions which act like there is not a reason in the world to be anxious: “Why are you worried about clothing? Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
That brought to mind a mystical experience that I read thirty years ago and that has remained with me ever since. In it, Arthur Koestler is in prison during the Spanish Civil War, waiting to be executed. To pass the time, he takes a bed spring and scribbles on the wall Euclid’s proof that the number of prime numbers is infinite. He feels a deep enchantment at contemplating this proof, because he sees it as one of the rare times where a meaningful “statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means.” He continues:
The significance of this swept over me like a wave. The wave had originated in an articulate verbal insight; but this evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue. I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that “this is perfect—perfect”; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind—some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment. Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance: I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: “So what? Is that all? Have you got nothing more serious to worry about?”—an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no I. The I had ceased to exist.
What I realized is that Koestler’s experience had the same combination that I was seeing in Jesus’ discourse. Someone in life-threatening circumstances is asked rhetorical questions that imply that there isn’t a reason in the world to be anxious or fearful, or anything but joyous and carefree. And just as Koestler’s questions transported him into a mystical experience, so Jesus’ questions might have had power to transport his listeners into a new reality.
Those rhetorical questions imply there is some larger unseen wonder, some greater joyous reality, in light of which the life-threatening situation seems suddenly small, and fades into insignificance. Whereas before it had seemed like everything, now it has become swallowed up in a vast brightness.
I realized that this idea lies at the heart of the Course. The Course does grant the happenings of this world a kind of provisional reality. They are real to us and others, and so we don’t just ignore them. We deal with them and navigate our way through them as lovingly as possible. But even while we grant them a certain temporary amount of reality, we are meant to see them in light of a much greater, purely positive, reality. And in that light, they lose all their power.
That’s what forgiveness is, isn’t it? Real forgiveness, whether in a Course context or not, essentially says, “I know you did something unloving, but I see something so wonderful in you, and I feel something so sacred between us, that in light of all that, what you did just doesn’t matter. Who cares?”
This is what the practices in Review II in the Workbook always do for me. Before I start going through them, the situation that is upsetting me fills my vision. It seems like everything. But as I go through those sixty practices, it’s like I’m stepping back from that situation, seeing beyond its edges. I finally step back far enough to see that it is surrounded by a radiant reality, in which everything is OK. And in the light of that reality, my little situation looks very different.
Anyway, this had a big effect on me. With a couple of situations that had been seeming really heavy to me, I asked “Is that all? Have you got nothing more serious to worry about?” And I really felt them lift. I felt very different.
So since then I’ve been asking “Is that all?” in relation to anything and everything. It doesn’t mean that a situation is small from a worldly standpoint. It means it is small from the perspective of true reality. When I ask that question, I think of Koeslter in prison awaiting execution, or Jesus’ audience, struggling just for basic food and clothing. And if those problems are ultimately small, then my problems are positively microscopic. When I bear all this in mind, that question “Is that all?” works with everything, no matter how big or small it looks to me at the moment. Suddenly, I am lifted, not as far as Koestler, but certainly in the same direction.
