Introduction: Claudius' Lament

In the third act of Hamlet, King Claudius, the protagonist's uncle—"that incestuous, that adulterate beast"—is praying, ostensibly to be rid of the guilt over the murder of his brother the king, Hamlet's father. Yet the futility of Claudius' efforts is reflected in these words, as he dejectedly rises from his empty prayer:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go (III,iii).

The king's meaning here is that his words of prayer (i.e., forgiveness) are meaningless and will not rise to Heaven if true intention of thought is not there, which was clearly absent in the play.

Claudius' lament is our own, for we are all guilty of the "sin" of not meaning what we say, our apparently right-minded words and wrong-minded thoughts being completely discrepant. Indeed, as long as we are bodies we will never totally mean the words that we say. The protestations of love to our Creator must inevitably belie the hidden hate we keep locked in the vaults of our minds, buried beneath the rubble of guilt and fear that is the foundation of the ego's thought system. At the same time, our expressions of disdain, disappointment, and disbelief are but the cover for the love we most deeply feel for our Source, what the text refers to as the attraction of love for love (T-12.VIII).

These darkened tombs in the mind are what we think of as the unconscious. Interestingly, notions of this vast, unknown reservoir of interred thoughts and feelings existed long before Freud put it on the world's psychological map. The artistic intuition of Shakespeare, for example, probed these mysterious realms, one reason Freud revered the Bard's psychological as well as his literary genius. Indeed, without an understanding of the mind's storehouse of guilt and fear, we could never fathom why our consciously sincere prayers "never to heaven go," why, in the words of St. Paul, "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:19). This is the thought behind Jesus' caution to us that we "Trust not [y]our good intentions. They are not enough" (T-18.IV.2:1-2). In the workbook, Jesus provides a clear description of this contrast between our words and thoughts, echoing Shakespeare's morally-fallen king:

   To say these words ["I want the peace of God."] is nothing. But to mean these words is everything. … But few indeed have meant them. You have but to look upon the world you see around you to be sure how very few they are (W-pI.185.1:1-2; 2:7-8).

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to explore the relationship between our words and thoughts. We begin with the conflict between them that results from the fundamental dishonesty with ourselves, continues with the healing of the conflict that comes through being honest with ourselves (and Jesus), and concludes with the ultimate resolution of all conflict: accepting the One Thought that transcends our little words and thoughts.

Words and Thoughts: Dishonesty and Conflict

Dishonesty is one of the ego's most salient and malevolent characteristics, and so it is small wonder that Jesus makes honesty the second characteristic of God's advanced teachers:

   The peace of mind which the advanced teachers of God experience is largely due to their perfect honesty. It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war. No one at one with himself can even conceive of conflict. Conflict is the inevitable result of self-deception, and self-deception is dishonesty (M-4.II.2:1-4).

Such teachers are conflict free, as we read:

At no level are they in conflict with themselves. Therefore it is impossible for them to be in conflict with anyone or anything (M-4.II.1:8-9).

Yet since very few of us can consider ourselves advanced teachers, Jesus addresses us at the beginner level (the bottom of the ladder [S-1.II]), where we believe we are as bodies living in a material universe. When I have given classes to psychotherapists based upon the pamphlet, Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice, I would often read these humbling and sobering lines, which easily apply to most students of A Course in Miracles as well:

Most professional therapists are still at the very start of the beginning stage of the first journey. Even those who have begun to understand what they must do may still oppose the setting-out (P-3.II.8:5-6).

Therefore, a major part of the teaching of A Course in Miracles is that right from the beginning, a beginning that is always present in what is in truth nonlinear time, God's Son was dishonest, deceiving himself about his identity as a mind, and continuing the deception by believing he is a body. The only workbook lesson that occurs more than once—three times, in fact—is I am as God created me (Lessons 94, 110, 162), and the idea is repeated throughout all three books of the Course. What God created is spirit, the nonspatial and atemporal extension of His non-dualistic Self and Will. If this is true, as Jesus emphatically teaches us it is, all thoughts and experiences of ourselves as bodies—physical and psychological entities that exist in the dualistic world of separation and perception—must perforce be a lie and thus inherently dishonest.

Imagine, then, what our lives in the world are truly like. A part of ourselves, the forgotten decision-making mind, always knows that our experienced self and situation are illusory, and that the truth of our reality is elsewhere ("But you, the holy Son of God Himself, are unaware of your reality" [T-30.III.11; 10]). As Jesus tells us in Lesson 182:

   This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return … you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. … an exile … . No one but knows whereof we speak (W-pI. 182.1:1-5; 2:1; italics mine).

Despite this inner remembrance of our Identity, held for us by the Holy Spirit in the right mind, our separated lives reflect the exact opposite of what the mind knows to be true. We live here as bodies in the strange and even perverse comfort of specialness, having adjusted to a self, world, and reality that is not our home. What greater conflict could there ever be, wherein our very words and behavior, especially when they seem to reflect an authentic spiritual striving, contradict what our thoughts tell us is the truth about ourselves?

Thus do we all walk the world in conflict that is inevitable, for our conscious words or behavior (in our special love or hate relationships) are not in harmony with our unconscious thoughts, be they wrong- or right-minded. The ego is hellbent (literally!) on convincing us that we are bodies and not minds, whether the latter are filled with guilt over the separation, or the innocence of Atonement. Such conflict must always engender fear as it opposes truth, which leads to guilt, for it reminds us of our original opposition to truth when we told God that His Love was not enough. And then the terrifying thought follows that He will retaliate in wrathful vengeance. Thus we read the following passage from the manual, in which I substitute "external conflicts" for "magic thoughts" in the first sentence:

   But what will now be your reaction to all external conflicts? They can but reawaken sleeping guilt, which you have hidden but have not let go. Each one says clearly to your frightened mind, "You have usurped the place of God. Think not He has forgotten." … And now there is no hope. … An angry father pursues his guilty son. Kill or be killed, for here alone is choice. Beyond this there is none, for what was done cannot be done without. The stain of blood can never be removed, and anyone who bears this stain on him must meet with death (M-17.7:1-4,7,10-13).

Every one who comes into this "dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die" (W-pII.13:5:1) carries the above horrific thought (the stain of sin) within, and each of us first denies it, and then devises a unique way of expressing it outwardly in the world of special bodies. We magically believe that the problem of guilt has been eliminated through projecting it onto others and attacking them. Yet projection does not work since ideas leave not their source. What is inside the mind remains inside the mind:

Ideas leave not their source, and their effects but seem to be apart from them. Ideas are of the mind. What is projected out, and seems to be external to the mind, is not outside at all, but an effect of what is in, and has not left its source (T-26.VII.4:7-9).

Consequently, we are stuck with the problem, which means we are "possessed" by this irreconcilable conflict between "God" and the ego, as we just read in the passage from the manual for teachers. Since projection makes perception, the corollary to ideas leave not their source, we will believe that what we have projected is really outside us, and since we cannot see what is in the mind, we are perpetually living out as bodies the conflict that rages within. How could we not then walk the world in a state of absolute terror? Our vulnerable bodies—physically and psychologically—are prey to all manner of dark forces beyond our control that could extinguish our "living" light at any instant, literally and figuratively.

One of the manifestations of this conflict between our thoughts and words or behavior is where we may consciously think, feel, or desire something, but unconsciously want the opposite, an example of the Pauline syndrome cited above. We read early on in the text:

   Fear is always a sign of strain, arising whenever what you want conflicts with what you do. … you can behave as you think you should, but without entirely wanting to do so. This produces consistent behavior, but entails great strain. … the mind and the behavior are out of accord, resulting in a situation in which you are doing what you do not wholly want to do (T-2.VI.5:1,4-6).

A clear and obviously relevant example would be students' approach to, and practice of A Course in Miracles. It goes to the heart of the important theme of form and content, the core of the special relationship. The Course tells us:

   Whenever any form of special relationship tempts you to seek for love in ritual, remember love is content, and not form of any kind. The special relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at raising the form to take the place of God at the expense of content. There is no meaning in the form, and there will never be (T-16.V.12:1-3).

If we students of A Course in Miracles were honest, we would recognize that behind the forms of our work with the Course—studying the text, practicing the workbook lessons, attending workshops and classes, leading or joining groups, etc.—often lie the content of our resistance. Recall this earlier quote from the Psychotherapy pamphlet: "Even those who have begun to understand what they must do may still oppose the setting-out" (P-3.II.8:6). In other words, very often the words that protest our love for the Course "fly up," but our thoughts of fear "remain below." This cannot help but reinforce guilt and conflict, the hallmark of the special relationship, thereby interfering with our progress on the journey.

For example, I sometimes tell students attending classes at our Foundation about a strange phenomenon that seems to occur when they are here. They will sit for hours in classes, dutifully listening, faithfully taking notes, and diligently studying recommended readings from the Course. No one could doubt their sincerity in learning the lessons of forgiveness: giving up judgments and seeing everyone as the same. And yet as they leave the auditorium at the end of a session, it is as if a huge vacuum cleaner embedded in the beam over the doorway suddenly sucks their resolve out of their minds, leaving them "free" to revert back to their usual judgments and specialness concerns. The contrast could not be more starkly dramatic, and guilt must necessarily follow the "betrayal" of Jesus and his course.

All this is easily avoided, however, when the conflict is raised to awareness and we can "look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that [we] have set it up" (T-27.VII.2:2). In switching teachers from the ego to Jesus, from guilt to forgiveness, we choose the honesty of looking at the real problem over the dishonest practice of looking for the problem where it is not, and then seeking to find the solution where it is not as well.

Words and Thoughts: Honesty and the End of Conflict

We begin this section on honesty by looking at an important passage that states that the problem is not the ego thought system per se, but our keeping it hidden, thus protecting us from the truth. This is the ego practice of ensuring that the real problem of the mind's decision for guilt never be recognized so it can be chosen against:

   No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected. … we [Jesus and the reader] must look first at [the ego] to see beyond it, since you have made it real. … And how else can one dispel illusions except by looking at them directly, without protecting them? (T-11.V.1:1,5; 2:2)

In a more succinctly stated form, a later section on the holy instant explains that we are not asked to abandon all ego thoughts, which would seem almost impossible at the early stages of the journey, where Jesus assumes us to be. Rather, we are only asked not to keep these thoughts, which looking at them with Jesus would surely release:

   The necessary condition for the holy instant does not require that you have no thoughts that are not pure. But it does require that you have none that you would keep (T-15.IV.9:1-2).

Bringing our conflicts and guilt to Jesus is the only true honesty possible in the illusory world, "the delusional system of those made mad by guilt" (T-13.in.2:2). It is the honesty of recognizing the truth of our situation of having chosen the ego over God. This means that we no longer tolerate the dishonesty of believing that our problems come from somewhere else, wherein we embrace the form over the content, the appearance over reality. Looking again at the description of honesty from the manual for teachers, we read further from the paragraph we cited above:

Honesty does not apply only to what you say. The term actually means consistency. There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; and no word lacks agreement with another. Such are the truly honest (M-4.II.1:4-7).

This consistency translates in our everyday life into not believing the stories and lies we tell ourselves about why we are upset ("I am never upset for the reason I think." [W-pI.5]). Jesus calls for us to have the little willingness to look with open eyes at these lies when we practice the ego's deception of believing that the causes of our problems lie outside us. After his above-mentioned cautionary words about not trusting our good intentions, Jesus says to us:

But trust implicitly your willingness, whatever else may enter. Concentrate only on this, and be not disturbed that shadows surround it (T-18.IV.2:3-4).

We can say that the temptation of the world is to believe it and its lies. As I have written before in these pages (The Lighthouse, June 2006), and have emphasized in workshops and classes, we should never truly believe anyone who tells us that 2 + 2 = 4. Any right-minded person, following the Underground Man in Dostoevsky's short novel, Notes from Underground, knows that 2 + 2 = 5. In other words, the world was established by the lie of separation and attack (cf. W-pII.3.2:1-4) and is upheld by the same lie, now perceived as external to the mind that is its source. Why, then, believe in the world or anyone who supports its foundation of lies and shadows by making the error of separation and specialness real?

Once the ego's illusory premise is accepted as true, everything that follows must also be illusory. Remember our two principles: ideas leave not their source and projection makes perception. This is the argument of Lesson 76, "I am under no laws but God's," which reflects our shift from outside to inside, the world to the mind, the illusion to the truth. Jesus continually returns to this shift in perception. The conclusion to "I Need Do Nothing" in Chapter 18 of the text, originally a personal message to Helen Schucman, scribe of A Course in Miracles, is a clear presentation of the Course's central thought.

   To do anything involves the body. And if you recognize you need do nothing, you have withdrawn the body's value from your mind. … To do nothing is to rest, and make a place within you where the activity of the body ceases to demand attention. … And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity (T-18.VII.7:1-2,7; 8:2).

This quiet center is the seat of honesty, for herein ends the seeming conflict between truth and illusion that is the ego's bread and butter, except that the bread is moldy and the butter rancid. The ego's gifts are such a shabby substitute for God's gift of Himself that we can only wonder at how we ever were insane enough to accept such a "parody" and "travesty" (T-24.VII.1:11; 10:9) of our true Self.

And yet we did, and still do. Consequently, Jesus pleads with us to be honest with him, to hold nothing back from him, which really means from ourselves. And herein lies the work of A Course in Miracles. He needs us to look openly and honestly at our "scraps of fear," for these little thoughts of specialness, judgment, and attack are sufficient to block our awareness of his loving presence in our minds. His help, then, would be rendered impotent, for we cannot avail ourselves of this wise and loving counsel as long as we remain ambivalent about our desire to be an ego. Thus he says to us:

Watch your mind for the scraps of fear, or you will be unable to ask me to do so. … Watch carefully and see what it is you are really asking for. Be very honest with yourself in this, for we must hide nothing from each other (T-4.III.7:5; 8:1-2).

We demonstrate our honesty with Jesus by doing the work he asks us to do: we look with open eyes, free from judgment, at the stories and lies our egos tell us. Happily, we do not have to be perfect, but we do need the little willingness to bring to the right-minded truth our decision to be egos. To repeat:

   The necessary condition for the holy instant does not require that you have no thoughts that are not pure. But it does require that you have none that you would keep (T-15.IV.9:1-2).

To be ready to learn to gain access to the truth, therefore, does not mean we have mastered the process of forgiveness. Indeed, this idea is so important it is stated twice in the Course (T-2.VII.7; M-4.IX.1:10). Accepting the Atonement through forgiveness is a process, which is why at the close of the workbook's one-year training program, we are reminded that "This course is a beginning, not an end" (W-ep.1:1). We are never asked to be perfect—only God and Christ are perfect—but we are asked for the little willingness to learn to become perfect. Honesty with Jesus about our egos is the first and actually the most significant step, since the rest inevitably follow from our determination to become happy learners.

A helpful rule of thumb to guide us on our journey from dishonesty to honesty is to evaluate everything in our day from one of two criteria: either it facilitates our acceptance of the Atonement or hinders it. What could be simpler and more in keeping with the simplicity of Jesus' teachings, being a variation of what he says, for example, at the beginning of the section entitled "The Simplicity of Salvation":

   How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. … what is false can not be true, and what is true can not be false (T-31.I.1:1-3,7).

Within our world of illusion, what is true is anything that allows us to remember we are minds, not bodies, and therefore nothing outside us can ever hurt us. This is the meaning behind Jesus' rhetorical question and its answer: "Are thoughts, then, dangerous? To bodies, yes!" (T-21. VIII.1:1-2). But not to minds! Moreover, pleasure can never be of the body either, which does not feel, as it does not exist outside the mind that projected it. Rephrasing this important sentence, we read: "The body enjoys not the pleasure it receives because it has no feeling" (T-28.VI.2:2). Therefore, what is false in our world is the level confusion that would tell us that the body does in fact feel pleasure and pain, and thus has the power to take away our peace or give it to us. This is succinctly yet incisively summarized in the workbook:

… accepting today's idea ["My salvation comes from me"] … means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace or upset you in any way. (W-pI.70.2:1-2).

Restating this, we can say that truth in this world, which the ego made, is that the mind's decision for guilt is the cause of everything we feel as bodies (physically and psychologically), which are but effects. The lie is that the world and its laws are the cause of our pains and pleasures, over which we have almost no control:

Once you were unaware of what the cause of everything the world appeared to thrust upon you, uninvited and unasked, must really be. Of one thing you were sure: Of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was not among them (T-27.VII.7:3-4).

Choosing finally to learn and live out the Holy Spirit's truth, we are able to return to our minds and make a different choice, deciding that forgiveness is what we want instead of guilt. The right-minded choice being made, guilt is gone and our loving thoughts of forgiveness and non-judgment guide our bodies or personal lives in actions that can only be loving, forgiving, and non-judgmental. It is this consistency that constitutes the honesty of our life here, wherein our thoughts and words (and behavior) reflect the oneness of Heaven's love.

Once our perspective has shifted, the littleness of the ego's world of bodies gently gives way to the magnitude of the mind's power that is nothing less than the means for choosing Heaven or hell. In the words of "Transformation," a poem that Helen took down:

The trivial
Enlarge in magnitude, while what seemed large
Resumes the littleness that is its due.
The dim grow bright, and what was bright before
Flickers and fades and finally is gone.
(The Gifts of God, p, 64)

The peace of God that the ego has judged as trivial now becomes life's only purpose, and the need for the attainment of worldly goals diminishes in intensity until it disappears entirely. Under Jesus' guidance we learn to use the world's symbols of specialness as the means of reaching beyond them to the mind's truth of Atonement. This is the Word beyond words, attainment of which is our ultimate goal. This consummation of the journey we take with Jesus and the Course is the expression of the mind's decision, once and for all, not to believe the lies of our wrong-minded thoughts, but to accept the one truth of our reality as unseparated selves: Ideas leave not their source, and so we have never left our Father's house. "Song to My Self," another of Helen's poems, joyously exclaims:

I never left my Father's house. What need
Have I to journey back to Him again?
(The Gifts of God, p. 38)

Thus does our journey end where it had begun, in the decision-making mind. Where we had formerly chosen against the Word of Atonement, constructing a massive, albeit illusory thought system of guilt, punishment, and death, and then a world of guilt, punishment, and death to conceal it, we now embrace the Word that dissolves the lies in a gentle blaze of truth. We have reached the real world, the Word and Thought beyond all words and thoughts.

Beyond Words and Thoughts: One Thought

Very infrequently, Helen spoke to me of another level of "hearing," which transcended her experience of Jesus' voice and words. On certain rare occasions (I doubt if it happened more than four or five times), I was with Helen when she allowed herself and me to experience this other dimension. It was indeed a movement beyond hearing Jesus, to a state of mind even beyond the individuality of Jesus himself, not to mention Helen's. At these times our scribe appeared timeless, transformed into a state in which she seemed to merge finally with what I referred to in Absence from Felicity as Helen's priestess self. In these truly holy instants I was vouchsafed a glimpse into her real identity, an egoless, trans-world self that was barely here and that transcended human thought and emotion. The words she uttered during these times flowed through her from a source that was clearly not of this world, but rather reflected an ancient, eternal wisdom, the Word beyond words that patiently awaits the mind's acceptance of it.

This egoless, knowing self was the real Helen, as it would be our real self, although the name "Helen" (or our own) does not really fit here. The person that the world recognizes as our self, with whom we relate almost all of the time—the idol of specialness—is totally unrelated to this other self, analogous to the Thought God holds of us, the Christ He created one with Him, as reflected in this beautiful paragraph near the end of the text:

   Beyond all idols is the Thought God holds of you. Completely unaffected by the turmoil and the terror of the world … the Thought God holds of you remains exactly as it always was. Surrounded by a stillness so complete no sound of battle comes remotely near, it rests in certainty and perfect peace. Here is your one reality kept safe, completely unaware of all the world that worships idols, and that knows not God. In perfect sureness of its changelessness and of its rest in its eternal home, the Thought God holds of you has never left the Mind of its Creator Whom it knows, as its Creator knows that it is there (T-30.III.10).

Throughout A Course in Miracles, Jesus tells us how insignificant words are, for it is only the content behind the form that is important. For example, in the introduction to Lessons 181-200, in the context of our "journey beyond words" (3:1), Jesus speaks of the inadequacy of words ("of little consequence" [2:5]) to convey what lies beyond the blocks he is helping us to undo. In Lesson 183—"I call upon God's Name and on my own."—he tells us of the insignificance of words to reach God, Who stands behind all words (7:3-4; 10:3).

It must follow, then, that words, serving the purpose of the ego's need to keep us separated, can never be true, even though they can be used to help God's Son recognize the illusory nature of his world and self.

The teacher of God must … learn to use words in a new way. … he learns how to let his words be chosen for him by ceasing to decide for himself what he will say. … He does not control the direction of his speaking. He listens and hears and speaks (M-21.4:4-5,8-9).

Their purpose reinterpreted by the Holy Spirit, our words lead us to the Word. The forgiveness of illusions we once held dear now reflect Heaven's love, and we are mere steps away from the dream's end. We thus can no longer be enslaved by the specifics of the world, for we are aware of the one Word that stands behind them all. This Word—the remembrance of love that Atonement brings—is our true goal. And so we are reminded in The Song of Prayer (S-1.I.4) that it is only God's Love—the one Word and Thought—that we truly want, not the little words that come from our decision to be separated and specific. Our choice is now for the abstract Self that God created one with Him. Therefore Jesus asks us to overlook the specific needs and requests of our lives, and ask instead for God's true answer. This is the answer we truly seek, the only one we accept, the only one we truly love.

Armed with the gentle strength of this Word beyond words, love over special love, Jesus before the ego, we live our lives mindful of their true purpose: not to be taken in by the "voices of the dead" (W-pI.106.2:3). Instead, we hear the Voice that speaks of life and love, that gently leads us home as we, together with Jesus and all our brothers, "disappear into the Presence beyond the veil, not to be lost but found; not to be seen but known" (T-19.IV-D.19:1). The Word has come to us at last, and we are that Word.