Day 4
A New Kind of Day, A New Way of Life
As the early chapters of A Course in Miracles came through, in addition to general spiritual teaching, Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford were also receiving personal instruction from Jesus. Both were leading them into a new kind of day that was meant to become a new way of life.
This new kind of day comes through with particular clarity in a discourse about “the chain of miscreation,” which is covered in Cameo 14 (found in the back of the Complete and Annotated Edition of A Course in Miracles). In this discourse, Jesus goes into detail about Helen’s and Bill’s errors over the course of a day. He does this not to shame them about that particular day, but rather to reveal how a typical day goes. It is a day in which our unloving thoughts and unguided decisions predictably lead to hurtful actions. These errors then linger in our minds for hours, dragging us down and provoking yet more errors on our part.
What was Jesus’ alternative to this typical day? It consisted of three steps.
1. Guarding your mind
Our unloving thoughts are the seeds of hurtful actions. If, then, we can watch for those seeds and catch them before they ever take root, our day can be free of behaviors we later regret. In regard to all the mistakes Helen and Bill made that day, Jesus said “Mind-watching would have prevented any of this from occurring.”
2. Asking for guidance
We make decisions every minute, but let’s face it, even our best decisions are just guesses. We are blind to so many of the factors that ideally should be taken into account. For this reason, Jesus again and again said that Helen and Bill should have asked him for guidance. This included asking about very small things, like whether to share a cab with a coworker, how to solve a storage problem, and how to arrange a lunch date. Such guidance, he said, would have saved both time and hurt feelings.
3. Giving miracles
The main meaning of “miracles” in the Course is that they are “expressions of love”—one person expressing love to another. In walking Helen and Bill through the events of their day, Jesus repeatedly points out small ways in which they could have behaved more lovingly. He mentions, for instance, Helen laughing at someone being made fun of, or Bill wanting to hang onto Helen’s Notes so that she wouldn’t “lose or dirty them,” or Helen taking dictation from Jesus in front of her husband, which made him uncomfortable. These were small instances of hurtful behavior, but they still lingered in the minds of those involved. Jesus said, There are ways of treating others in which only consistent courtesy, even in very little things, is offered. It is a very healing habit to acquire. (T-3.VIII.6:4)
Jesus is clearly setting forth a very different kind of day than the one we usually have. In this new day, we guard our minds so as to catch and correct unloving thoughts. We ask for guidance instead of acting on impulse and habit. And as a result, we behave in healing ways, instead of hurtful ones. Rather than a “chain of miscreation,” our day becomes like a string of lights that illuminates the lives we come in contact with as well as our own.
This is exactly what Bill had asked for in his “another way” speech in June of 1965. He had wanted a “way of living in harmony rather than discord.” Here was the answer.
In tomorrow’s message we will dive into the Course’s teaching on another very important topic: how the world began and how we ourselves came into being.
See you then,
Robert Perry
Founder
Circle of Atonement
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