After Hate, This Love

Two basic facts underlie the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. First, what we experience as “love” in the world is actually hate. And second, everything that appears in and as the world is the same.

At first this appears ridiculous. Then it appears erroneous. Then it appears logical but undesirable.

Then it appears inevitable.

When it appears inevitable, we enter a state of denial that can apparently take lifetimes to wade through. Then comes a state of despair.

And that despair can be quite sustained and quite intense. It can be dangerous.

It can even be murderous.

But then – no warning – we give up. Not out of virtue and not because of reason. Not because we’ve evolved spiritually.

Because of defeat. Because of exhaustion.

Empty of desire, bereft of hope and deprived of reason, we become like corpses left to rot on a battlefield. Carrion. Dust to dust.

And yet.

When we give up, we do so because we see that the logic of the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles makes clear that there is nothing to do and nobody to do it.

But only ego sees this as “the end.”

To spirit it’s an engraved invitation to a joyful wedding where all life is married unto an open marriage with all life. And the reception goes on forever.

That marriage – and the party after – is not the end! It’s not Heaven, not Nirvana. It, too, is an illusion, else I could not speak of it. Yet in it, the singular spark of God (of which we know nothing) becomes a conflagration in which – at last – self-awareness dies.

Nisargadatta knew.

When you are very quiet, you have arrived at the basis of everything. That is the deep, dark blue state in which there are millions of stars and planets. When you are in that state, you have no awareness of your existence.

When there is nothing left to do, then everything becomes possible. And when everything is possible, you are free. And when you are free, you are happy. And when you are happy, all you want to do is extend that happiness to others, so you do, perfectly and consistently.

Hope does rise from the ash pit of despair but it does not rebuild a world and it does not rely on a separated self for its existence. It is simply an energetic ascending – a luminous spiral indistinguishable from the cosmos – in which fear and guilt do not exist.

When you let go of everything, what remains is love. For a while, the same old appearances will chug along – your wife, your brother, your best friend, your job, your back pain, your fantasies, your hobbies, your mortgage. But all these are orders of magnitude less stressful because you know – even if you are not yet sure that you know – that they are not real.

Neither fear nor worship the image: this is the law and the prophets.

Our work ends when we see the illusion as an illusion. There is nothing to do in or to or with an illusion. It disintegrates of its own accord, heeding laws we did not invent and over which we have no say.

There is no world. There is no separate self in existence anywhere. Ego shrouds these facts with darkness and despair, but there is another way to perceive them.

A Course in Miracles is an invitation to this alternative mode of perception, which it calls the Holy Spirit. There is no Holy Spirit! That, too, is just a dream within a dream within a dream.

And yet . . .

If you seek the peace that surpasses understanding, then you must consent to the destruction of both understanding and the one who would understand.

Today, may the love we share make it so.