Lesson 131
No one can fail who asks to reach the truth.
Practice Instructions
Purpose: God made an ancient promise to you, and you did to Him, that you would one day go beyond the door in your mind and find the real world. Today that promise will be fulfilled.
Longer: Three times, for ten minutes.
The instructions in paragraphs 12-14 are so clear that I have merely laid the sentences out on separate lines:
Begin with this:
I ask to see a different world and think
a different kind of thought from those I made.
The world I seek I did not make alone;
the thoughts I want to think are not my own.
For several minutes watch your mind and see, although your eyes are closed, the senseless world you think is real. Review the thoughts as well which are compatible with such a world, and which you think are true. Then let them go, and sink below them to the holy place where they can enter not. There is a door beneath them in your mind which you could not completely lock to hide what lies beyond.
Seek for that door and find it. But before you try to open it, remind yourself no one can fail who asks to reach the truth, and it is this request you make today. Nothing but this has any meaning now; no other goal is valued now nor sought; nothing before this door you really want, and only what lies past it do you seek.
Put out your hand and see how easily the door swings open with your one intent to go beyond it. Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see. A tiny moment of surprise, perhaps, will make you pause before you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams. (W-131.12:2-14:3)
Shorter: Often.
Repeat the idea, while keeping in mind that today you will go beyond the door and find the truth, and that today is therefore a day of grace, a time for gladness and celebration. I highly recommend really reminding yourself of this latter fact. It will change your mood during the day if you remember.
Response to temptation: If you forget what a special day it is and fall into depression or complaining.
Remind yourself of the true nature of this day by repeating, “Today I seek and find all that I want. My single purpose promises it to me. No one can fail who asks to reach the truth.” How can you feel dismal when you realize that you are finding all you ever wanted? I recommend either writing down those lines on a card and keeping them handy or, better yet, memorizing them.
Commentary
At times it seems to nearly everyone that the search for truth is one that will never succeed. It seems that we seek, and seek, and seek some more, and never arrive at certainty. Today’s lesson comes as a welcome reassurance that the search for truth is the only search that will inevitably succeed.
“Searching is inevitable here” (4:1). It’s the nature of the world, the nature of the predicament we’ve put ourselves into. Searching is why we came here, and so “you will surely do the thing you came for” (4:2). If we’re going to search, then, we may as well search for something worth finding: “a goal that lies beyond the world and every worldly thought…an echo of a heritage forgot” (4:4). What we are searching for is Heaven, “a heritage forgot.” What we are searching for is the home we left behind and almost put out of our minds, although to do so entirely is impossible. That’s why we are driven to search. “Behind the search for every idol lies the yearning for completion” (T-30.III.3:1).
What we are seeking for is what we are; that is why finding it is inevitable. “No one can fail to want this goal, and reach it in the end” (5:3).
Sometimes it may seem as though truth has deserted you. I think some experience of that is almost inescapable for all of us, a last-ditch effort of the ego to dissuade us from the search when we are getting too close. I know it has happened to me, and all I can tell you is, “Hang in there.” Your search cannot fail, even though you may think it has already failed. I know I came through that dark period of my life. I don’t know how I did because I didn’t seem to have anything to do with it, which is part of what convinces me that my “coming out of it” is real and lasting. I still dip into despair from time to time, but I will never again live there. “No one can fail who asks to reach the truth.”
What we are looking for, and perhaps can find today, is something that is beneath all the thoughts in our minds that are compatible with this senseless world—”a door beneath them in your mind” (12:8). A door in our minds! Past that door is “a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see” (14:2). Today’s exercise is wonderful for visualization, actually picturing that door, seeing ourselves standing before it, and with one intent, pushing it open to pass through, out of this world and into another, like the wardrobe doorway into Narnia in C. S. Lewis’s fantasy books. These exercises are like rehearsals, and as we repeat them, they grow more and more real to us, engaging our minds and training them in a pattern that leads to real discovery of the real door, within our minds, to Heaven.