This morning we will talk about the "quiet center." This is a phrase that occurs near
the end of "I Need Do Nothing," a section in the text, Chapter 18. At the beginning
of Chapter 18 actually, there's another parallel phrase where Jesus says "turn you to the stately
calm within." The quiet center is when our decision-making mind chooses to become right-minded,
when it chooses to rest in the love and the peace of the Holy Spirit or Jesus, as opposed
to the unquiet center which is when our mind chooses the ego and its raucous shrieks of
sin, guilt, fear, attack, punishment and death. In that section, "I Need Do Nothing" near
the end, Jesus is appealing to us to always turn to that quiet center. I always think
when I read that passage of the eye of a hurricane. You have this swirling mass of hemispheric
pressure and turmoil, and in the center of it is the eye. This eye is the quiet center
that keeps us sane, that keeps us peaceful despite all the raucous shrieks of the ego,
all the frenetic activity that is always swirling around us as bodies living in a world of bodies,
living in a world of special relationships. And no matter what occurs outside, whether
we are a Haitian living amidst the earthquake, whether we are the effects of a tsunami in
Southeast Asia, or we are on a battlefield in Iraq or Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the
West Bank, Gaza. No matter where we are, wherever there are these ravages of war, there is always
a place of peace. There's that quiet center we could return to and that's the appeal of
that section, and indeed, of course, it's the appeal throughout the whole course. Jesus
is not telling us to deny the world or ignore the world or ignore our bodies or our bodies'
various needs but to in the midst of that, still be able to go to that quiet center where
everything is quiet and everything is peaceful. It's that same idea of lifting ourselves with
Jesus above the battleground looking back down. Indeed, the body is always active. The
body is tyrannized by its needs. I've sometimes spoken of the body as being a veritable need-machine
which is driven by the ego need to keep us mindless, and nothing roots us more in the
body, the mindless world of bodies, than pain...pleasure too, of course. And this is what makes the
body real and keeps that quiet center so far, far away from us that we could never choose
it. So, again, we are not asked to deny what goes on in the world. We are not asked to
deny the hurricanes and the tremendous force of winds and rains that always pelt us. Indeed
we are asked in the midst of that to rise above it and go to that quiet center, and
in that quiet center we see everything differently. That's what Jesus means when he tells us over
and over again to choose again. It's the mind that chooses, not the body; and so he's asking
us to go there and there is no problem that the quiet center cannot solve, no problem.
That's why the first principle of miracles says there is no order of difficulty among
them. There is no order of difficulty in miracles, as Bill Thetford always used to say, because
there is no order of difficulty in problem-solving. Every problem is the same, it's the mind's
decision for guilt. That's the problem, not the guilt, not the thought of sin, it's the
mind's belief in guilt or sin. It's the mind's decision to believe in them that is the problem.
Every single problem that besets us and the world, every single problem without exception,
is a projection of that decision of the mind. When we go into that quiet center, all of
a sudden we understand that, we understand to deny the first law of chaos that there
is no hierarchy of illusions. In fact, the first principle of miracles is the correction
for that. Every illusion is the same. Every problem is the same: one problem, one solution
as Lesson 79 and 80 say. The world erects one problem after another, after another,
after another. Some are grotesque. Some are hideous. Some are horrendous. Some are seemingly
minor, but they are all the same. They have all been given power by the mind to disrupt
our peace. When we return to that quiet center which is the home of the Holy Spirit and is
our home as well, suddenly everything changes. The world of form might not change but our
perception changes. And that's the vision of Christ seeing everyone and every situation
as the same, and all that's required for that healing shift of perception is to return to
the mind and say I no longer want the disquiet of the ego. I want that quiet center that
God has given.