Escape routes
By: Sarah Mohan
Tags: Thinking, Dreams, A Course In Miracles, Escape, Problem Solving

Lesson 10 from A Course in Miracles came up the other day as I noticed my mind doing its hamster wheel routine about my new house. I had been taking my internal dilemma very seriously ever since I signed away my life to that nice old house — I was obsessed you might say — but for the rest of that day I stopped thinking about it. I enjoyed a quiet cup of tea for the first time in months. And yet, the feeling of imprisonment snuck back in another form.

The idea that my thoughts do not mean anything, the idea that my thoughts cannot help me, I can accept as a hypothesis. But I still need a railroad, a pathway, a tunnel — a liberator that will take me out of the enervating confines of the thought system I live within, and into a more satisfying state. I’m not bored on a daily basis; I have no trouble filling a day with things to eat, things to read, things to do. But I have to admit that I am deeply unsatisfied with my life as I am living it — just like I was when I was married.

Mine is a first world problem, as they say. I am not an actual slave; I am a privileged white woman, and I have been relatively unscathed by the current pandemic. But that doesn’t mean I should feel guilty about having a problem, or believe that I am not entitled ask for an answer to my particular problem.

Everyone in this world seems to have his own special prob­lems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution that solves them all is to be accepted. […] A long series of different problems seems to confront you, and as one is settled the next one and the next arise. There seems to be no end to them. There is no time in which you feel completely free of problems and at peace. The world seems to present you with a vast number of problems, each requiring a different answer. This perception places you in a position in which your problem solving must be inadequate, and failure is inevitable. No one could solve all the problems the world appears to hold. They seem to be on so many levels, in such varying forms and with such varied content, that they confront you with an impossi­ble situation. Dismay and depression are inevitable as you regard them. Some spring up unexpectedly, just as you think you have resolved the previous ones. Others remain unsolved under a cloud of denial, and rise to haunt you from time to time, only to be hidden again but still unsolved.

That’s from lesson 79 in A Course in Miracles. Whatever our problems may be, there is one answer, says the Course: we have to ask for guidance. Our guides may take different forms, our paths may look very different, and the answers will come in the form most helpful to each particular person.

Harriet Tubman said she inherited special gifts — including the ability to travel outside the body and to visit the future — from her father, who “could always predict the future” and “foretold the Mexican war”. Stronger than other girls, she spent a lot of time with Ben Ross in the timber gangs. In their quiet times in the woods, they may have revived something of the atmosphere of the Sacred Forest of the Ashanti, and the practice of West African dream trackers accustomed to operating outside the body, sometimes in the forms of animals.

~ Robert Moss

Whatever the trick is that will spring the trap for me and let me go free, has to be a trick that I understand and can use. The general idea — that my thinking entraps me — doesn’t actually free me. I need a WAY, a VISION, a DREAM, a GUIDE, or a MAP to show me what to do next.

Yesterday I dreamt that people were offering sandwiches, and I was hungry and excited to get my sandwich. When the sandwich came it turned out to be one slice of bread overly slathered with peanut butter, which I began to eat, disappointed. That dream does not seem like a clue to the answer, but you never know…