May Newsletter

I sent out a newsletter this morning. If you’d like to read it, you can sign up here.

As I often say, A Course in Miracles is a course, not a spiritual path. You take the course – maybe two or three times if you’re slow and stubborn like me – and then something new happens. You are introduced to your inner Teacher, and that Teacher handles the curriculum going forward.

“Handles the curriculum” can mean studying other traditions – taking other courses, as it were – or it can simply mean attending in a general lived way the understanding and application – the lived integration of – “I am not a body” and “there is no world.”

Yet there is a sense in which we see that “ego” is simply a belief at odds with nature, and that letting go of this belief is an all-or-nothing venture. There’s no evolution to it at all. You can’t hold onto ego a little and be free; you can’t repair it or heal it or otherwise amend it.

Ego is sort of the like the bottom block of a Jenga tower. If you pull it out, the whole edifice topples. We tend to work the edges, pull the safest blocks. The edifice wobbles but never collapses. A Course in Miracles just makes the observation that it’s okay to go right to the foundation and yank it out.

How simple, then, is God’s plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one Teacher of reality, Who understands what it is. He does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not change (T-12.I.6:4-7).

The clarity of that insight can be oppressive, hard to sustain, and so forth. It’s scary to imagine pulling the plug on ego, because the edifice it’s constructed is dear to us. It feels like we’re giving something up – our lives. And so we turn from the precipice, back to the safer ground of spiritual routines, Coleman Barks’ Rumi poems, self-improvement through therapy or homesteading or yoga or writing about A Course in Miracles.

There are ten thousand times ten thousand ways ego has of convincing us that we’re getting rid of ego without actually touching ego. Even posts like this – and newsletters like this morning’s – are just more babble in the ego’s putrid brook.

Or that is the risk, anyway. Yet A Course in Miracles offers us one other promise: that what ego makes in hate, the Holy Spirit can use in Love to remind us that we are always home in God.

Thus my wordiness, which is not unrelated to my happiness, which is not unrelated to your happiness. We are in it together until it sees fit to remind us that our many fictions are mere distractions – including the fiction of oneness.

~ Sean