There are few sentences as cheerful and uplifting – and unambiguous – as the one that precipitates Healing and Wholeness: “To heal is to make happy (T-5.In.1:1).” I wish that everyone who identifies as a healer – from crystal healers to talk therapists to MDs – would paste that above their office. To heal is to make happy. What else is there?

The miracle – which I have pointed out is an act of love, be it a smile to a stranger, a harsh word overlooked, or warm muffins made before anyone else in the house rises – gives rise to a happiness that in turn gives rise to gratitude. That has become my barometer. When I am in a state of thankfulness, I am miracle-minded. I am open to giving and receiving love. And I ask again: what else is there?

I have read ACIM commentaries that talk about how “we” are really “joy.” We don’t feel joy – we are joy. I get that and I respect that. But I’m at the lower rungs of the ladder. When the Course tells me that to heal is make happy – with its obvious corollary that to be healed is to feel happy – I take it quite literally. I don’t mind being happy in this body, in this world, in this long story that I am calling myself. That’s what healing is. It’s concrete and real and we are all entitled to it, all the time.

The other day I wrote a bit about spending some time in a hospital. Those are difficult environments for me. If I indulge the Course language that focuses on the world as illusion, then I’m tempted to ignore the world. For me, that’s a mistake. The way out of the world is forgiveness – the way out of the world is through healing. So I turn to Jesus in prayer, and I ask for help, and I turn over my egoic tendencies as best I’m able in favor of simple willingness and – surprise surprise – I am lifted. What seemed impossible passes with ease.

That, too, is A Course in Miracles. We can’t underestimate it. We can’t get so hung up on the metaphysics – which are so cool and which make me feel very smart and ultra spiritually radical when I sling them in conversation – that we overlook the simple need for healing in both ourselves and our brothers and sisters. When we perceive that need, we can ask for help in meeting it, and it will be met. Happiness will be the belwether. Gratitude will attend.

Are you happy? It’s good sometimes to stop and check in. If the answer is yes, great. If the answer is no, then fix it! You do not have to be unhappy.

Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have thought, and what you have not thought that God would have you think. Search sincerely for what you have done and left undone accordingly, and then change your mind to think with God’s (T-4.IV.2:4-5).

And then this, from the introduction to chapter five.

You are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude (T-5.In.3:1-2).

Healing is a decision to be happy by making happy. That it seems hard to pull off is no big deal: we aren’t doing this alone. We’re doing it together – and we’re doing it with that part of our minds that is bigger and more powerful than “we” ever can be. Be happy!

My holiness blesses the world.

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis – or has surfed through some of my more hand-wringing posts of the past – knows that work and money are a big challenge in my life. I can be comically confused about those issues, alternately conflating them with spirituality and grace and then despising them as pits of unholiness in which the devil himself croons and calls, luring us siren-like away from salvation.

This lesson invokes that struggle.

This idea contains the first glimmerings of your true function in the world, or why you are here. Your purpose is to see the world through your own holiness. Thus are you and the world blessed together (W-pI.37.1:1-3).

That is so simple and straightforward. Yet it’s funny, because when I read it the ego quietly comes in and does a little editing. It obliterates the second sentence, while leaving the first and third intact. Thus, it gets the pleasure of being reassured it has a function in the world and a reason for being here – and that it (and the world) are going to be blessed as a result of that function.

But, without that very specific and concrete second sentence, the egoic self still gets to ask its favorite question: what I am supposed to do with my life? I accept my grandeur of course but how do I manifest it? How do I get all that glory?

And then it devolves into brainstorming sessions, lists, google searches for helpful ideas and spiritual programs, impromptu goal-setting workshops . . . All of which keeps that second sentence, and the whole point of the lesson, out of mind, ensuring that all this frantic questioning and searching will never yield up an answer but just go on and on and on.

One of the aspects of ACIM that I love dearly is that it is quite unambiguous. If you read the text carefully and do the lessons faithfully and pay attention to the process as it and you unfold together, you will wake up and remember your identity as part of God. You will be free in every spiritual and religious and moral sense of the word. I’ve had enough crumbs to know the banquet that’s being offered.

But the ego won’t give in without a fight. Resistance is so attractive! It can be so reasonable, so reassuring. Why is that? Why is that when faced with Heaven we grasp instead for the straw hut off to the side?

In part because we still identify with the egoic self – and that self is deeply reassured by our refusal to participate in a Course designed to remove the blocks to our awareness of love, which is our real and true identity. It is always helpful to ask which self is feeling good, which self is being serviced by our resistance.

How do we battle the ego? Well, we don’t. The world teaches us that we have to defeat our enemies, but spirit – and Jesus – tell us to love them. It’s crazy if you look closely at it – this idea of turning the other cheek – but it works. The ego survives by virtue of the careful attention we pay it. When I fall into the mode of analyzing my life, my income, making color-coded charts, lists of pros and cons for this job and that job . . . it’s the sort of busywork that keeps the ego humming. More details please!

So I step back. I notice the resistance. I see what form it takes – I try to be very specific. “Oh, I’m skipping that second sentence. Let me read it closely a few times.” I return, again and again, to the calm specificity of the lessons – or the textual passage – that is giving me problems. I ask for help in understanding it. And I try not to sweat it. Jesus isn’t up there with a stopwatch wondering why in hell I’m such a slowpoke and poor learner. It’s all okay. Or it’s going to be.

I resist that second line because it is so abstract it means that all my questions about who I am and what I’m to do are no more significant than this morning’s decision to put bananas in the pancake batter instead of chocolate chips (yeah – my kids weren’t too happy but those bananas had to go somewhere soon). I’m here to see the world – all the world – from the center of holiness. I’m here to replace physical sight with spiritual vision. I’m here to work the simple and natural miracles of awareness and attention which can only beget love. If that’s true, it doesn’t matter whether I’m teaching kids how to read Emily Dickinson, or writing poetry, or advising politicians on how to speak to rural voters. It’s all the same.

The ego thrives on specificity, right? Sean is this and he’s that, and you’re not those things, but you are these other things that he’s not, and that’s totally different from people who live halfway around the globe and speak different languages and on and on and on. This lesson clearly indicates that those differences, be they big or small, are not the issue. They don’t matter. Come back to that calm center. Make contact with your holiness. Radiate it. Radiate it when you’re at the bus station, in the kitchen, walking in the woods, talkingt to the bank teller, the cashier, the postmaster, the kid next door. No exceptions.

Your holiness is the salvation of the world. It lets you teach the world that it is one with you, not by preaching to it, nor by telling it anything, but merely by your quiet recogniition that in your holiness are all things blessed along with you (W-pI.37.3:1-2).

That’s unappealing to the ego, which hates equality, and despises any thought system in which it has to share power with others. But to Spirit – which is where we are heading, no matter how halting our steps – it’s the only game in town. Salvation is always at hand.

My holiness envelopes everything I see.

This lesson reminds me of zazen for some reason – or maybe just my own experience of it so many years ago. It brings some intensity to my experience of seeing, charging every object that falls into my line of vision or thinking, lending a clarity that is otherwise not present.

This is a function of two things that are going on in this lesson. One of them is summed up by these lines:

You are holy because your mind is part of God’s. And because you are holy, your sight must be holy . . . If your mind is part of God’s you must be sinless or a part of his mind would be sinful. Your sight is related to His Holiness, not to your ego, and therefore not to your body (W-pI.36.1:2-3,7-8).

The self that is doing the seeing is not the egoic self. It’s the self that is a thought in the mind of God and remains there. This is a tricky idea to handle – the more so because trying to get it intellectually is an almost surefire way to miss it altogether. The question is how to do make contact with that real self, that self that is part of God. How do we let go of the ego? And the answer is that – for most of us anyway – we have to let go of the ego piecemeal, step by step, one day at a time. Maybe one lifetime at a time. And what remains when the ego is quieted away to nothing is God.

So instead of trying to understand this idea – as it’s presented in this lesson – I simply try to be willing to experience it. That’s all. I gently remind myself of the main idea and then just go about doing the lesson. Four sessions and as many in between as I can remember. I try not to expect much. It’s about showing up, doing the lessons, getting on with life.

As I’ve said before, a lot of the benefits of doing the lessons is deeply internal – we don’t really recognize it as it happens. It shows up later. Or maybe it doesn’t have observable effects at all. We have to be patient.

I do find that when I really focus on something – a chair, a passing cat, a leaf trapped in ice – and experience it (or be willing to experience it) as enveloped in a holiness of which I am a part, that my actual seeing becomes quite intense. That’s what reminds me of my brief (and very half-assed) Zen experience. I see all the hairline fractures in the ice, the brittle brown veins of the leaf, the slight curl of the leaf tip, the green and red sparkles of sunlight rendered prismatic in the ice.

This is related – for this student, anyway – to the Holy Instant, which is a ways down the road yet in both lessons and text. It brings me into an intense awareness of what is, right now, right here. That’s a hard state to manage, usually because I start to analyze it, question it, get greedy about possessing it, wonder how I can market it, whatever. But this lesson is a subtle tip on how to have that experience without blowing it. Just focus on this, then focus on that, and let the goal of your seeing be holiness.

My mind is part of God’s. I am very holy.

As the workbook points out, this lesson focuses on the perceiver – not on what is perceived. Thus, instead of dwelling on tables and trees and fish tanks and trying to change my mind about them, I know get to focus on me. The first time I saw those words, I could have danced. I was so happy to finally be getting the attention I deserved.

I sometimes feel that the genius of the Course is that it can be read in a way that the “I” and “You” are the physical egoic narrative self and – without changing a word – also as if “you” and “I” are simply parts of God. This lesson is obviously aimed at helping us transform from the former reading to the latter. I get to dwell on who I am – unappreciated, easily confused, arrogant, eloquent, greedy, whatever – and each time I do I get a gentle nudge that those lables – and the self to which they ostensibly apply – is not real, not who I really am.

Lately, this has been somewhat easier for me to handle than it was for a long time. Very early on in the Course I had some incredible experiences – I don’t mind calling them revelations – but then it settled into something more pedestrian. But this past month or so – in part because my focus and practice has intensified – I’ve begun to feel some more dramatic dismantling, less like I’m gonig to be treated to some fancy heavenly discoteque thing, and more like the ego really is being undone. The chatter is there but it just doesn’t have the kick and stability it used to have.

The other thing that’s been making sense to me – and which didn’t for the longest time – is that it doesn’t matter if the perception of myself is good or bad. They’re all equally untrue. For a long time – and it still happens – I believed that if I saw myself in a loving light it was superior to the alternative. But the thing is, you can’t make an illusion true by gussying it up. It’s either all false or all true. The particular perception of it can’t change that. So more and more – and this lesson is a great reminder – I find myself wondering what lies beyond all this “me me me” energy. You think you’ve got it kicked and then another subtle layer shows up. It’s a lot of work!

**

Worth nothing that the pace has been picking up lately. We are now up to fifteen minutes a day – thrice a day – with frequent applications during the day. I am trying to be faithful to this, without using the schedule to bludgeon myself when I slip. But it is clear that we are trying to change a way of thinking and that this is best done through repetition.

This is one of my favorite lessons in the workbook. I truly believe that it encapsulates several core ideas that are essential to practicing A Course in Miracles. We are the one with the power. We exercise the power by choosing to think differently. Changing our thoughts changes what we see, or perceive. And the result? Peace. That’s the Course in a nutshell.

I spent the night in a hospital. I arrived late, after a long day, and I stayed up for about nine hours sitting by my father’s bed. I hate hospitals. They make me feel powerless. They’re like bland bureaucracies with the power of life and death. I feel depersonalized and threatened when I am in them. And that’s on top of worrying about whomever I’m there to support or help.

I respond generally with rage-like fantasies that are scary and embarrassing and silly. It’s like part of my mind has to compensate for the fear and to do so it imagines me – the physical me – as being bigger and badder than a hospital ever could be. It’s crazy.

But I have to do better than that – or I want to – because I am needed in that situation and I do not help anybody – not my father, not myself, not my siblings or my mother, not the dedicated staff – nobody – if I am crazy and sullen and paranoid.

Lesson 34 was a beautiful antidote, even if highly annoying at times.

I began practicing it at about 3 a.m. while my father slept. The room was tiny and the chair was hard but it was a fine and mellow meditation. I read the lesson by the light of my cell phone, then closed my eyes. I found that my mind followed the previous lessons - I am not the victim of the world I see because I have invented the world I see. There is another way of looking at the world. I could see peace instead of this.

I’ll tell you something else, too. Perhaps because it was quiet and dark, perhaps because it was an unusual and intense situation, but I broke the “rules” a little bit. I did the five minute meditation – because I fully recognize and accept the truth that peace is an inside job, an internal matter and the external world merely reflects that internal condition – but when it was over I opened my eyes and kept going. I’d look at the hospital bed. I could see peace instead of this. The cord you yank to call the nurses? I could see peace instead of this. The concrete garage blocking my view out the window? I could see peace instead of this.

Then I applied it to sounds. That beeping from the saline drip? I could see peace instead of this. The snoring two doors down? I could see peace instead of this. The doctor telling a joke?

I could see peace instead of this.

The funny thing was, I’d gone into the whole situation in a good place. What I mean by that is that I was crazy and frazzled place but I was willing. I wasn’t going into it alone. I walked into that hospital fully expecting the worst but ready to be okay with it. This is going to suck, Jesus, and we both know it, but let’s get it done. And at first – for a quick couple of minutes – it did suck. All the doors were locked. But then this guy – who knows what he was doing sitting in a dark car with his window open – directed me to the one door that was open. The don’t-mess-with-me security officer at the front desk? Asked about the weather before directing me upstairs. The nurse who was going to demand I leave because “visiting hours” were over? She brought me a pillow and a blanket.

Every turn – whatever happened – the worst turned out to be okay. No, it was better than okay. Not earth-shattering. But it was fine. And then, at some point during my Lesson 34 mumbles, maybe around the time the sun was starting to rise, it hit me. Things were okay because I was okay. That willingness at the beginning meant I was bringing my will into alignment with God’s will. And even though that didn’t pacify the ego – hence the ongoing fear etc. – it  certainly did open something deeper, something beyond the ego’s reach. I experienced love and safety at each turn because I am love and safety. No me as in Sean, you understand. Me as in you and me. And you and me as in God.

This was a sort of peaceful recognition. I was exhausted – sleep-deprived – strung out on bad coffee – worried about how the rest of the day was going to pan out. No light shows. No dulcet voices. Just a sweet warm sense of peace. I’m okay. It’s okay. When I’m willing to act as if I’m not an ego – when I’m willing to be a miracle worker even though I totally doubt the wisdom of the assignment – I’m joined. Maybe it’s Jesus. Maybe it’s the Holy Spirit. And maybe there is really nothing out there but Love.