Sean Reagan

0 The Mirage

Yesterday, shoveling a path to the horses – following tracks in the snow my daughters had made earlier – I was visited by God.

What do I mean by this?

1 The Oasis

Many years ago, during my first run-through of the ACIM lessons – some time after the devastation wrought by Lessons 79 and 80 – I was visited by God.

It was two or three a.m., late January, and I was sitting alone on the porch watching snow and the moonlight couple in a luminous – an ethereal – way. I was lonely – I am often lonely – but also happy.

I was happy because I was grateful for the beauty, grateful for the idea of God, and grateful for the way it all somehow coalesced in me. “It’s enough,” I whispered. And I meant it. In that moment, it was enough.

The world disappeared then, and there was only God. I’m not allowed – because I wouldn’t know how – to say more about that. I don’t know how long the moment lasted but I know exactly how it ended: I called it mine.

As soon as I tried to possess it, the moment was gone. I did not experience that grace again for almost thirteen years.

2 The Desert

When I remember that God is both the absence of difference AND everything signified BY difference, then something opens up in me and God pours through. Light pours through.

By “light” I mean the light in which everything – including darkness, including abstractions like math and philosophy – actually appears.

By “God” I mean that from which this light emerges and into which it returns.

The rule is, you can’t claim the experience because the law is, you don’t control the experience.

Which in application sugars out as, you don’t even understand the experience, maybe stop making up rules and laws for it?

3 The Mirage

In A Course in Miracles, we say that “God takes the final step.” It means that we get ourselves to the place where God can reach us, and that’s it. We don’t get to decide the when, where or anything else. God takes the final step.

Therefore, all that matters is readying myself. And the way I do that is by giving attention to the One Relationship presently still manifesting as many relationships, including ours.

The many relationships all point to the One Relationship. The One Relationship points to God. That’s what I know. I was shoveling snow, halfway between the horses and the house, and I was visited by God.

When the moment of unity ended – because I found in it an absence, yours – I was sad and lonely. When will Love finally come to stay?

Snow flurries whirled in the cold air; sunlight turned them prismatic.

“Soon,” you whispered across the precise distance fear insists we keep. “Not yet,” you whispered. “But soon.”

Five / Seven

I stepped outside last night at about eight or so and the snow had already begun. Douglas used to say, you’ve got the writing part down. The question is, what do you want to do with it?

I had hoped for a quiet snow gently falling so I could use “sussuration” in today’s writing, but cold winds howled blowing the snow into spirals and sheets. Even down by the hemlocks, where the world always slows and quietens, the weather verged on riotous, denying me.

The lesson is, never assume you speak the language of the Lord, always adopt the posture of the guest.

Douglas didn’t have rules about writing so much as a sense that order was explicable, and if you couldn’t explain what you were doing and why, then you were at risk of losing the whole project. He had earned the right to say that, that way. I was grateful listening.

I remember talking to him about Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” which is one of my favorite poems ever. He said that reading O’Hara closely taught him writing was more about what you didn’t say, rather than what you did.

Imagine Michaelangelo’s Pietà in terms of the marble that is not there. Actually look for it! What is absent defines what is present; it makes what is present possible.

The void is always present; it is the only way that form can appear at all. If I study the hemlock tree, I can only do by separating it from the cosmos and naming the part I want to focus on “hemlock.” The rest is . . . gone. It’s void.

At least until it’s called forth – until it’s desired – into some new form.

Because, critically, that which is not hemlock remains – is fully present – as the void from which the hemlock was drawn and into which it will return when my attention drifts elsewhere. There is no other way for there to be a hemlock in the first place.

This is true for literally every formal thing from a passing thought to a flake of snow to a spiral galaxy.

What we seek is always a form – Jesus, a friend, a hot meal, a hand on our shoulder, a kind word et cetera. But in desiring the form (which you cannot not do, which is a really important insight) we reject – separate from – everything the form is not.

Separation is not realizing – as George Spencer Brown wrote, here paraphrased – that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. We see the hemlock literally by denying the rest of the cosmos.

The suggestion is: notice what you do not ordinarily notice. Notice noticing: what even is noticing?

I remember working through this exercise with James a long time ago, both of us walking in circles around Upper Highland Lake for most of a day. He asked me if I thought Jesus did something similar, and my answer was, I don’t know but yes. We both laughed.

One way or the other, we have to see the void. It was the void that taught me the way choice was an illusion, and free will as simple a fantasy as Santa Claus ramming himself down chimneys. It was the void that allowed me to begin to accept that “the personal” was merely a perspective, no different than any other and thus not actually worth attention.

The void is the remedy for “me and mine,” because it undoes the ground of all the questions we ask as spiritual seekers, students, healers, stumblers, et cetera. Law and logic falter. Psychology falters. Even language falters. There’s nothing there. Also? Everything is there.

When I awaken, and after writing a bit, I go outside. It’s dark yet. Snow is still falling but the wind is gone. I wander to the sideyard lilac and listen to flakes of snow graze its leaves falling. How still the world can become! How happy I am in the darkness and cold!

And how diligently I write, word after word, as if seeking the perfect one, as if I were incomplete without these sentences, as if something – but what – could not possibly otherwise be.

Four / Six

The rule is, don’t lie. And related to that is the understanding that I don’t always know when I’m lying.

This game we are playing – this work we are doing – is not for the faint of heart.

“Lying” is a bad word because of its moral and negative connotations. “Fantasy” is better. As in, when I write, the reader is always a fantasy, and the fantasy is always a defense against love.

That’s what I don’t want to say this morning. That’s what I don’t want to see.

People sometimes object to “fantasy,” on grounds that is can have positive connotations. It’s good to fantasize, it’s a way of seeing what we want. And anyway, who doesn’t daydream?

But I am saying something different. I am saying that when I write in and from that fantasy, I don’t see you at all. I see a process at work in me and I see its product, the sentences and lines that emerge on the page, some of which will survive the later cull named “rewriting.”

I hear you saying: so you’re focused on the writing, so what?

But no. I am focused on healing and the writing serves that focus. It has to or the writing becomes part of the problem – it becomes part of the illusion of separation.

Ihe writing serves the healing.

When writing serves healing the rule is, don’t lie, so I won’t: I don’t know you really but I do want your attention. I do want you to praise me. I do want you to argue with me. I do want you to say that you’ll be back to read tomorrow and the next day.

None of those “wants” are crimes against God or nature. But they do point at a perception of myself that is not complete without you, and that is a lie.

Believing that hurts me and you.

It hurts me because it allows me to remain in behavioral cycles that don’t make me happy. And it hurts you because it refuses to allow you to be the God-lit, God-created self that you naturally and perfectly are.

When we only see the other in relation to our own narrative, our own story, our own drama – then we are not really seeing them.

People are allowed to help of course but we are not allowed to demand their help or insist it take some specific form.

Relationship – true relationship – is when our whole existence is based on the other’s liberation from ego and all ego’s systemic effects (which are the world).

Holy relationship is when we intentionally make our relationship about that liberation.

When you are audience – when you are my audience – then I am still stuck in the very frame of self/other from which I long to escape.

What do I do?

I was thrown yesterday because reading others I saw instantly the many ways we can be in Advent, and I felt lost. What about my Advent? Will I have to give it up?

I felt like as a child, when I faced the playground at recess, and wondered who would play with me, and what would we play.

That’s fear.

And like I tried to make clear on Substack yesterday, we have to go into the fear. We have to basically deconstruct it. We have to pass through the easily identified levels in order to find ego so that we can offer ego up to the One Who Heals.

But we have to see the way we can offer ego up – that ego is a thing we made and so it’s up to us – not ego – what happens to ego.

We have to remember always that we want to heal and – at a deeper level than most of us can readily and steadily access – what we really really want is to heal the other.

I started a writing project, some folks are doing it with me, and they are already doing it differently than I’d expected.

And I am scared.

And I want you – yes, you reading – to fix this fear by acting in specific ways dictated by me, e.g., praise, respect, loyalty.

But, doing that holdis you to a standard set by judgment. I’ve decided for you that your function is to make me feel better.

And thing I want to be clear about – more than aything the thing I want to be clear about right now – is that when I decide in advance your function, and it mysteriously turns out to be about my ego drama – I am not loving you, but rather wallowing in fear.

Neither one of us truly wants that!

So I waken early – 3:30 a.m. – and I go outside with my coffee. The cold wakens me as much as the coffee. Everything is still except the sky. Polaris is right above the neighbor’s chimney but fifteen minutes later it’s a little to the right.

God is moving the Heavens.

God is moving in the Heavens.

The work is to find what obscures our remembrance of Love as our inheritance, and the Source of Love as our Identity.

Writing is a way of finding out what we think. I think I need you as a student – my student – or as a fan – my fan.

I know I’m an ACIM studet because I’m not concerned about “student” or “fan” – that shit is easy, take it or leave it – but about “my.”

It’s the “my” that locks us both into a fantasy of separation. It’s the “my” that makes it hard to notice this, let alone become still enough – dialogic enough – to undo it.

One thing that saved me was realizing the healing nature of curiosity. When I am curious about you – how you ended up on this path, why you’re into this teacher and not that one, whatever – then I quickly realize you aren’t grist for my mill. You’re something else – what?

When I am curious about something I study it. I give attention to it.

I enter into relationship with it as a student.

It’s pushing five a.m. now. The coffee is gone, the sleepers upstairs are stirring. Soon the sun will rise.

I am happy in this moment – the writing led me to happiness in the moment – because I have found my function: I am your reader. I’m here listening for the sound of you writing – pen scratching, keys tapping. I know that sound well; I’ve shared in its gift. It’s the sound of God moving in the Heavens, the deep quiet from which language arises and back into it falls. It’s a single star, high in the sky, that cannot steer us wrong.

Two / Four

I say travels, but I am not going anywhere.

Most of my life I projected a future that – although it never came – kept me passionately focused on tomorrow rather than today, there instead of here. It felt optimistic and forward looking. It privileged dreaming over any other activity. A different house, different land, different job, different writing, different whatever. That’s when life begins! That’s when I’ll be happy!

I no longer do that. So I am not going anywhere.

This is a disorienting and unsettled way of being, but I am grateful. Letting go of a valuable defense is never easy, but good things happen when we clear space for God.

One of the hard things – one of the things I wish I could share with folks getting started with the course – is that when you become responsible for projection, when you actively seek reality rather than fantasy, life unsettles itself. It can feel boring or even scary.

Projection is always a defense against knowing yourself. When we lay a defense down we feel vulnerable. What if I am attacked? I get attacked all the time.

The work is, you have to stick it out through that fear. The commitment to becoming responsible for projection isn’t about changing the content of the projection. It’s not about new and improved projections.

It’s about laying the whole mental process of projection aside forever.

Vulnerability is what it feels like to remember your innocence. It’s not easy. But when we are vulnerable, we are in the presence of innocence. It’s good to intentionally notice this. It makes the rawness feel less troubling. There’s a beauty and a harmony there that’s deeper than fear can reach.

If we practice being still within the experience of vulnerability, then a transformation occurs. The innocence clarified by vulnerability becomes a light in which we see the value of sharing – of supporting one another, making one another safe, making one another at home in the world.

Tara Singh wrote often about the connection between awakening and “having something to give another.” It changes everything, having something to give and knowing what it is.

So “I am not going anywhere” is also a statement about my commitment to facing my fear of holiness and relationship that you offer me. That is what “here” becomes – the site where we learn what we are in truth through the gentle mechanics of a relationship in which both parties seek only the holiness and well-being of the other.

If I stop projecting a future in which everything is brighter, solider, happier, livelier – just, you know, different than all this – then I learn something.

I learn that I am scared of a quiet life, a stable life, a tender life. I learn that I am scared of what relationship means in a life like that.

I meet the interior addict again – the one who cannot bear boredom or sameness, who treasures specialness and separate interests, who will literally put his life in danger just to feel something. Even after all these years his arguments remain persuasive.

I meet the inner child again – the one who loves prisms and reading, walking dogs in the forest, baking bread and soup, playing guitar and writing poems. He appears so naive and trusting.

I’m scared to love that child. I know the ways the world can destroy him. I also hate him for being weak. Why should I have to step up and be his protector?

I wish I didn’t feel that way but I do. I wish there had been another way – an easier way, maybe. Less cluttered and winding.

I put the writing aside and go outdoors. The horses don’t know it’s Advent. The hemlock trees aren’t ranging through the intersection of pop spirituality and twelve step psychology.

They are my teachers, too.

The air is cold in my lungs; crows holler on the far side of the river. I mutter a few prayers and face the rising sun.

Cater-corner to the horse pasture is our raspberry patch. For the last couple years I have forgotten to trim them back. What was once neat rows for easy picking has become an impenetrable tangle. Woodchucks built an entrance to their underground palace at its center. I count a couple empty bird nests.

I’m a bad homesteader. There’s probably half a dozen pies and twenty or thirty pints of jam in there, and we basically eat a couple handfuls in passing. If I was more disciplined, lessy dreamy . . .

But also, what’s messy to me is not to the woodchucks. What doesn’t go in my pantry doesn’t go uneaten – blue jays and chickadees and sparrows see to that. Does it matter if the patch has overgrown the fire pit? Crept nearly all the way to the horse gate?

I’m not going anywhere, I tell the horses. The horses say – in the way horses do – that’s cool but you could at least go to the barn and get us a couple flakes of hay?

I get them hay.

The bland lesson of all my life’s travels – the escapism, the lies, the homelessness – all the catastrophes and all the comedy – is that wherever I have gone, I am always there waiting.

I wrote last week about finding a gift for God this Advent, and I wonder if the question is less what is the gift – that’s not really a secret, is it – than do I have the courage and discipline to give it.

I can’t tell if the raspberries are a failure or a success. I don’t know if my heart is ready for the truth. I’ve come a long way but . . .

. . . where am I really?

I go back inside and make more coffee to finish the writing. The kids are up getting ready for chores. I’m scared and confused – but also a little happy – getting around to these last sentences. I wish you were here. Over coffee and pancakes we could talk about it: what does God want? What can we possibly give?

At the table – in the inquiry – I wonder where we would go?

Two