Advent Journal: At the Behest of Jesus

I am willing to be Utopian this Advent, at the behest of Jesus, who does not see the world any other way. That’s the stance we take – love is real and only love is real. Then you’re in a different space. It’s new and you have be new within it. It takes two to remember we are one.

One way to understand “back to the garden” is that it refers to our child’s mind before the distinction that is “I” occurs (e.g., T-2.I.3:1). Note that this distinction does not mean we are conscious of either the change or its effects. The state signified by “the garden” lies beyond the reach of both thought and perception. But we create it or, better, recreate it in certain relationships that are open to transcendence and subversity. A Course in Miracles calls those relationships “holy.”

Holy relationships are transcendent and subversive because they will not tolerate injustice and indifference and work actively to undo those experiences and their effects. The premise of holiness is inclusion – healing and inclusion are not separate. What else could wholeness be?

. . . exempt no one from your love, or you will be hiding a dark place in your mind where the Holy Spirit is not welcome. And thus you will exempt yourself from His healing power, for by not offering total love you will not be healed completely (T-13.III.9:2-3).

The suggestion – for those of tracking A Course in Miracles on the Road to Emmaus (because the Woman at the Well said to) – is that innocence refers to a way of seeing, not a way of behaving. It reflects a natural state of coherence rather than a moral state that can be gained or lost or comprised. We don’t have to do anything but be exactly as God created us – and this takes neither time nor effort, but it does take willingness.

Innocence does not involve projection and denial at all, but only forgiveness, sincerely chosen based on our acceptance of God, and of Love, as our Creator. Innocence lets go of what needs to be defended, seeking only that which can be shared without loss to anyone. But to understand and apply this – to live in this way – we have to explicitly reject the mind/body dualism so beloved of our Greek brothers and sisters long ago.

The ancient Greeks developed and practiced a form of deep thinking about the world and reality that was profoundly effective and durable. Reality is measurable, predictable, discoverable. Yet the only way one can only talk about that world and that reality is by removing the observing self from it. This is separation! The Greeks divided the world into the observer and the observed and made the split a formal condition of their thinking. On this view, separation is the price you pay to reliably understand and interact with reality.

This is a model of thinking that, once adopted, trains other minds to think like it because that’s how human minds work. We’re problem solvers and imitators – if something works for someone, we run with it too. And those Greeks (so beloved of so many in our ACIM community) solved a lot of problems, opened up a lot of paths to happiness, wholeness and health. In certain critical ways, the ancient Greeks invented our minds. And it’s not wrong to be grateful!

But Jesus invites us to a different way of thinking, and a different way of living, and it begins (in the Holy Instant) by noticing how separation is a move that we make, and thus can make differently. Why else choose again?

It’s hard to notice that move – the gap we make so that we can become observers who are separate from what we observe and evaluate and relate with. The move feels natural and even inevitable. It feels right. It begets a sense of certainty and confidence (that can easily morph into arrogance and authoritarianism). But remember! Wittgenstein said that certainty was kin to tone of voice. We speak with certainty in order to convey a sense of conviction but the truth value of our statement is not evaluated according to the tone in which it is uttered. I can say with great passion that it’s raining but my passion cannot turn sunlight into rain (though it might – this is where the trouble begins – convince you to not look out the window or otherwise think for your own self).

So an interesting question is, when are we convinced by truth itself? By the fact before us? And when are we convinced by a feeling – ours or anyone else’s?

And, in both cases, is there another way?

The suggestion is, yeah there’s another way. It’s called you follow Jesus, who was not a dualist like the Greeks, and who did not want the observer removed from the world but rather located in it, entangled and embedded in it, in loving relationship with it. We do have to work with the mind in order to undo the separation, but the result of that work is a level of connection – of happiness, creativity and peace – that transcends anything separation offers. Forget about inside and outside; forget about self and other. Just love.

Christopher Fuchs, who would probably deeply resent my doing this, makes a powerful argument that separation – this division into observer and observed, so central to the Greeks, and so pervasive in our own thought – does NOT conform to reality and therefore should be reassessed.

. . . it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley and Eddington, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all.

The cut – the separation – is the cosmic equivalent to the distinction that occurs in the innocent child when “I” appears. The universe cleaves itself in two, into a seer and a seen, and a lot of functionality and information was gained thereby, but at the expense of considerable suffering. We lost our shared innocence and the peace and joy that are its natural effects.

What does Jesus say we are in truth? Something like, we are the site of division prior to the cut, the state of uncertainty or unknowing before it resolves into this particular experience. We are connected – are one – so act like it.

If we are still and quiet, we can see these moves – the division of self and other, self and world, self and God. You can glimpse it as a structure giving shape to what it holds, the way water in a vase assumes the shape of the vase. But what if there are other structures? Other shapes?

In Advent this year I am willing to be Utopian. I am willing to learn how to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10), so that together we can regain the order and harmony of holiness. There is no separation anywhere. Let’s you and I be proof together.