You aren’t real.

Generally, this is not a kind thing to say to another person. We all believe we’re here and embodied; denying that – especially when we’re projecting that denial onto another person – is a form of violence.

The clearest and most helpful thing a body can say to another is: “we are the same.”

To a body, bodies are real. A mind that believes it’s in a body has to deal with this. In the ACIM community, this “deal” tends to take two forms: we deny the body and/or we improve the self.

But there is – there is always – another way.

Denial of the Body

The body will not buy that either it or the world in which it lives, which includes other bodies, is an illusion. If you deny the body, you will eventually hurt it, and this hurt can extend to other bodies in many ways.

No matter how spiritually evolved you are, when you have to sneeze, you sneeze. When you have to pee, you pee. Can you stop your hair from growing? Can you breathe underwater unaided?

Rather than try to force the body into some premeditated ideal of oneness or spiritual giantism, why not just forget about the body?

Think for a moment about your hair. Do you have to remember every day to make it grow? Do you have to speed up or slow its growth? Do you have to recall the complex biology underlying its growth in order for that biology to function?

No. You do not. You forget about your hair. You don’t deny your hair – that requires conflict, which is idiotic. Who fights with their hair?

The suggestion is . . . consider doing that with the whole body. Just let it all go. It’s doing its thing without you – it really is. Just let it.

Forgetting is different than denial. Denial is a form of conflict – you have to concentrate. You have to use effort to keep a thing out of mind. It pushes back and you have to overwhelm it.

Denial is hard. Forgetting is easy because it’s just a recognition that your effort is not required and so you breathe. You relax.

Self-Improvement

This leads us to self-improvement. Self-improvement is a form of mind reinforcing the original error of believing it is in a body. We eat healthy, do yoga, meditate, read ACIM, journal, go to psychotherapy. And in all of that there is an undercurrent of “am I better than I was five minutes ago? Five years ago? Two decades ago?”

This is what drove Ken Wapnick and the Board of Directors at FACIM to litigation with Marianne Williamson. They believed she’d made a wrong turn with the course, essentially obliterating its metaphysics. You can’t liberate mind if you’re constantly doubling down on the idea of making a better home for it in the body in the world.

When mind believes its “in” a body, it adopts the posture of a self. It becomes a perspective and a narrative. It localizes and specializes.

All we can do is notice this. Well, notice it and not resist it. “You” and “I” don’t solve the problem of the mind that believes it’s permanently at home in a body because “you” and “I” are features of the problem.

“You” and “I” are what disappear when the problem is solved. “Sean” isn’t going to be in some heavenly post-time, post-body space thinking, “wow, that was insane – I’m so glad I’m not doing that anymore.”

The question isn’t really what happens after the mind-body problem is solved (although spoiler alert: it’s not actually a problem). Rather, the problem is how do we notice the mind-body dilemma in a sustainable way from within the dilemma?

If that’s all we have to do – and it is, because it’s all we can do – then how do we do it?

The Gift of Attention

Start by noticing that you have been given a gift: the gift of attention. You can notice things. You can notice beauty and joy and suffering. You can notice ideas and objects. You can notice relationships.

Your attention is also a gift that you give to others – whether they are sunflowers or horses or people. In the ambient rays of your attention, the other comes alive in deep and meaningful ways. You can perceive their needs and wants, and you can respond to those needs and wants in helpful and non-dramatic ways.

The sunflower needs nothing and so you just admire it. The horse needs hay or water so you give it. Your friend or lover or partner needs you to apologize or give them space or talk about their mother or whatever. So you do that.

Attention is oddly happiest – must fruitful – when it’s not about you but about others.¹ It just loves to flow out of you and take in all the other lives and loves that are there to be observed. And interestingly, attention does not distinguish in its function. It beholds a sunflower the same way it beholds a kitten or your neighbor.

Your reaction to those images is different, sure. That’s judgment. We prefer an hot apple pie to a pile of steaming chicken guts. But attention holds them in exactly the same way.

The suggestion here is to forget about the material and just give yourself over to attention. What happens when you do that?

Love does not perceive differences. It does not see them and compensate for them – smooth them out, negotiate between them, choose one over the other. It just doesn’t see them.

You and I – being ourselves differences – do see differences. But attention is a subtle teacher that gently allows us to begin to notice how everything – no matter how we perceive it – is in fact the same.

That’s the critical insight that we want to bring forth in our living. And attention – which from time to time I suggest is the Holy Spirit – is the guide who instructs us on how to do this.

. . . the attraction of guilt is only fear. Here is the one emotion that you made, whatever it may seem to be. This is the emotion of secrecy, of private thoughts and of the body. This is the one emotion that opposes love, and always leads to sight of differences and loss of sameness.

(T-22.I.4:6-9).

Being symptoms of the problem, we don’t actually solve the problem. We just agree to see the need for healing, and then watch the healing occur.

Being symptoms of the problem, we will disappear. Symptoms don’t hang around and watch the underlying error or sickness get healed. Don’t worry about waking up, and don’t worry about dying. Don’t worry about “getting” or “not getting” it.

Be present to life in a mild but consistent way and you will be led beyond self-identity to the end of suffering.

1. This was where Ken Wapnick landed in his teaching. “Make it about other people.” When you’re driving on the highway, think of the other drivers. Eating out in a restaurant? Make it about the waiter. I have my issues with Ken but this is actually profoundly good advice for “living ACIM.”[↩]

You can’t retrofit God into your experience. Nor can you expand your experience to include God. God is outside / beyond / unrelated to experience. The best you can do is realize this, and then stop trying. Give up on God, holiness, oneness, Christ, A Course in Miracles, the world in which they appear and the self to which they appear.

What happens when you do that?

And if you cannot do that, or do not understand how to do that, what can you learn about what is stopping you?

It is hard to see this (much less cheerfully accept it) but ego loves A Course in Miracles. Ego wrote A Course in Miracles! And edited it and published it and teaches it and studies it . . . The course is just another illusion in a simmering welter of illusion we call the world, which includes the illusion of a self in need of saving for whom spiritual programs like A Course in Miracles are – wait for it – Godsends.

Does this mean we shouldn’t read and study ACIM? No. But it also doesn’t mean that we should read and study it. Or that there is something fundamentally right – as opposed to helpful – about reading and studying it.

In a sense, the essence of “practicing” A Course in Miracles lies in taking it seriously but not literally. It’s just a dream, but for us, in the context of dreams, it can be helpful. Can you take the course seriously while simultaneously recognizing that it’s not real? That’s it just another illusion in a sea of illusions?

That, too, can be hard to get hold of.

People like to say, “well, okay, Sean. What is real?” And while the course does allude to reality, it does so in the context of making clear that our confusion on the subject is such that we’re better off focusing on clarity in confusion, rather than identifying what lies beyond confusion.

It’s sort of like we’re patients in a hospital, and we want to talk about what life will be like upon release, and the doctor is like “whoa! Let’s get you healed first and then we can talk about release.”

In other words, “reality” is a distraction from the basic work of just seeing in a natural, sustainable way that it’s all a dream.

What is God? You’ll know when you know. And when you know, the question will lose its importance and so will you. You’ll forget all about it – and yourself. God is neither in nor of the dream and thus is altogether beyond remembering and forgetting. Our work is to notice the dream, and accept that it’s a dream, and that’s it. The rest – whatever it is, whatever form it takes or doesn’t take – flows from that understanding.

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.