God is but Love, and therefore so am I

This is a walking lesson. During my Buddhist phase, I was taught kinhin – walking meditation. It was in addition to zazen. I wonder if this lesson can be practiced in a similar way. Can walking in a purposeful, measured and intentional way be part of our ACIM practice?

On the first step: I will step back, and let Him lead the way. On the next: I walk with God in perfect holiness. Or one statement every two steps.

Or just an easy mental rhythm as we move gently through the world. I will step back and let God lead the way. I walk with God in perfect holiness.

The metaphor both lessons adopt is that of being a walker – a body walking. The suggestion I am making is: let us put our actual bodies into it. What happens?

A Course in Miracles occurs in the context of separation, to assist in the undoing of separation. Therefore, it appears to bodies in a world. And the healing it anticipates and which its practice brings forth also appear to bodies in a world.

Rather than resist this obvious condition of healing, why not lean – or step – into it?

The suggestion is not that this is a right or even a better way to do the lesson than to sit still and meditation in the core ideas. The suggestion is that it may be more helpful. What do we have to lose by trying?

←Lesson 172
Lesson 174→

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Yesterday I talked about how this sequence of lessons deploys a call-and-resonse model that is designed to gently nudge us byond the domain of reason and intellect and into the domain of faith.

Faith is not superior to reason but it does allows for certain kinds of insights that reason in its infancy can’t fully reach (because it is still so yoked to the need to report back, to justify itself).

Today, again, we are presented with nontrivial statements about our self – that, paradoxically, we are safest when we are utterly defenseless and that God counts us among his ministers.

“Minister” here should not be confused with a church leader, but with the older – more natural – understanding of one who tends and cares for others. In other words, a healer.

I have written a lot about nonviolence and A Course in Miracles. I’ve written less but still plenty about how we can heal in God’s name, as students of the course.

Yet again, these big important ideas are subsumed by a greater one: that God is Love and we are not separate from God. When individual lessons are reduced to a single powerful lesson, they are not being minimized. Rather, we are being asked to see how they flow from a greater truth, which is the truth of our identity which is in God as Love.

When that is clear, then nonviolence ceases to be merely conceptual, and our capacity for healing is neither dormant nor theroretical but active and effective. It is a real thing right now.

It’s easy enough to say (or write) this. It is harder to accept – to know – the truth of it, in a way that ends any alternative perspective.

Hence, for today and a little while longer, we are not trying to “get” anything. Nor are we trying to let go of anything. We are simply expressing a willingness to have our mind pried open by any means possible, and to find out what happens next.

Therefore, I wish you something new in your practice today.

←Lesson 171
Lesson 173→

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Our theme now is that God is Love and therefore, we are as well. The mantra-like nature of this sequence of lessons is a simple veil masking an exponentially deeper and more powerful idea: that we are not separate from God.

This is not to be understood as “in these bodies, with these personalities and stories, we shall be lifted up and incorporated into the perfect unity of God.”

Rather, it is to be understood as: what you are in truth is already one with God and never was and never will be otherwise. We are confused about what we are – no more than that but also, no less.

The second statement obviates the first. If we think that the egoic self – with its body-identification, its time and space orientation, and its language-based relationshps – is God, then we’re confused.

A Course in Miracles is about undoing that confusion. In this sequence of lessons, it de-emphasizes the intellectual approach that tends to dominate the curriculum, in favor of an almost call-and-response simplicity.

If you hate this simplicity, don’t worry. It’s not a crime against God or Nature.

But if you find yourself responding to it – finding it welcome or easy, finding it affirming or familiar – know that somewhere in the deep past, ancestors praise and celebrate you, while in the future your descendents thank you. This is an old and veritable approach to learning.

So in this lesson, for example, the ancillary ideas are that everything we perceive is an echo of the Holy Spirit, who is the Voice for God, and that we are endowed with the power of decision.

These are not simple ideas. And yet the lesson does not invite us to go into them in an intellectual way – proving them wrong or right, say. Explaining them or theorizing about them.

Rather, the lesson asks us to put right and wrong aside – set analysis aside – and instead focus on something broader – that God is Love and we are not separate from God.

We are being asked to take a very lofty view of ourselves here, one that is beyond the reach of reason and evidence, and thus can only be reached by faith. Intellect is beside the point; sometimes it has to be.

The lesson is asking us to enter what Abhishiktanda called “the Cave of the Heart,” a domain of which Wittgenstein both was and wasn’t signifying when he observed that whatever lay beyond speech could not be spoken of, and thus silence was the better path.

We speak these words – repeat them, mantra-like – and when we are ready and willing, the Holy Spirit will take us to a place of stillness and silence in which the truth of our identity stands so clear and true that we will never again believe the silly idea that you are a body in a world, the latter of which isn’t real, and the former of which is doomed.

←Lesson 170
Lesson 172→

Do you know the Taung Child?

This child lived approximately three million years ago. Its skull – all we have to remember it – indicates that at about four years of age its eyes were plucked out by a great eagle.

Imagine its terror – being held down by a bird twice its size. Imagine its pain. Imagine its suffering and death.

Now imagine its mother. Did she see it happen? Did she try to stop it? Did she try to comfort the child as it died? Was there any comfort for her?

The love of the parent for its child is one of our oldest inheritances. Humberto Maturana suggests that the extended childhood characteristic of our human family works because parents love their children, need help raising them, and thus learned how to communicate in order to cooperate and coordinate in creating a care-based culture. All our being rests on the love that neoteny brings forth in us.

We are descendents of mothers and fathers in more ways than one.

This naturally informed Jesus’ easy reference to God as his “abba,” a nomenclature which emphasizes the absolute trust of the child in the absolute kindness of its parent, as perfect a love as Jesus could imagine because, really, it is as perfect a love as any of us can imagine.

In this review, A Course in Miracles draws on this ancient tradition, and asks us to hold it in mind as we study and practice.

Lead our practicing as does a father lead a little child along a way he does not understand. Yet does he follow, sure that he is safe because his father leads the way for him. So we bring our practicing to You (W-pI.rV.In.2:5-6,3:1).

This is necessary, we are told, because we are “preparing for another phase of understanding” (W-pI.rV.In.1:3), which will require “more effort and more time” (W-pI.rV.In.1:2). We are preparing to remember, in a real and sustained way, that “God is but Love, and therefore so am I” (W-pI.rV.In.4:3).

This Self alone knows Love. This Self alone is perfectly consistent in Its Thoughts; knows Its Creator, understands Itself, is perfect in Its knowledge and Its Love, and never changes from Its constant state of union with Its Father and Itself (W-pI.rV.In.4:4-5).

So we are being invited to intensify our practice, but in the direction of devotion and surrender – that is, in the direction of a child who knows that her mother loves and will not abandon her. She need do nothing. We are talking about trust, not intellectual accomplishment. We are talking about becoming followers, not leaders. We are remembering the ancient promise of love itself.

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (MT 18:3) needs “only one slight correction to be meaningful in this context” (T-2.VII.6:14): “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never remember the kingdom of heaven.” For we are already in it but have forgotten.

And what then of the Taung Child? How does that distant member of our vast family factor in to our learning?

He lives in me as my fear of pain and death, no? He lives in me as my fear of being parentless and my fear of losing a child. He lives in me as my respect for the birds of the sky, whose need to eat is no less worthy than mine. And he lives in me as the knowledge that no brother or sister can be separate from me. He speaks to me as Christ, no less than Jesus and no less than you.

Listen to him:

I am incomplete without your part in me. And as I am made whole we go together to our ancient home, prepared for us before time was and kept unchanged by time, immaculate and safe, as it will be at last when time is done (W-pI.rV.In.8:7-8).

Together, then, yes? Together for all of us.

There is no cruelty in God and none in me.

Lesson 170 asks us to consider that we are confused about the difference between fear and love – that we are calling fear love, and worshipping it accordingly, and as a consequence are actually afraid of love.

This reversal divides us against ourselves, making peace impossible.

Fear seems to protect us, right? It seems like a rational response to a threat against our safety and well-being. It’s a sign that we are under attack and need to defend ourselves. A snarling dog, a man pointing a gun, a diagnosis of incurable cancer . . . fear makes sense, no? Only a fool would argue otherwise.

And yet A Course in Miracles suggests that this belief in the reasonableness of fear is actually a block to love because it can be used to justify attack in the form of self-defense. Hurt is always both the objective and outcome of attack but calling it “self-defense” allows us to avoid responsibility for that hurt. Attack is always cruel and yet “no cruelty abides in us, for there is none in God” (W-pI.170.13:2). What gives?

It seems to be the enemy without that you attack. Yet your defense sets up an enemy within . . . love now has an “enemy,” an opposite; and fear, the alien, now needs your defense against the threat of what you really are (W-pI.170.3:1-3).

The projection of fear outside of us – and the subsequent cycles of attack and defense, as we rage in vain against a mirage – is not a crime against God or nature. It’s just a colossal waste of time. The better way – the way of healing – is to challenge our belief in the “necessity and reasonableness” of fear because it justifies attack. We listen to the Voice for Love, the Holy Spirit, Who asks us to “lay down all defenses as merely foolish” (W-pI.170.5:4).

It is important to give attention to the depths at which we do not believe that “laying down all defenses” makes sense. We have to see how deeply we cherish our supposed right to self-defense, how literally everything in our world is connected to this “right.” We believe that if we give up self-defense, we’ll die.

When we begin to glimpse the enormity of this challenge, then we begin to understand just how radical A Course in Miracles truly is. Just as the historical Jesus advocated and practiced nonviolence, so are we called to that beautiful and demanding tradition in which we lay aside our many weapons of attack – and the argument for self-defense upon which they all depend – to watch them “crumble into dust” because dust is all they ever were (W-pI.170.5:5-6).

Now do your eyes belong to Christ, and He looks through them. Now your voice belongs to God and echoes His. And now your heart remains at peace forever . . . Now has fear made way for love, as God Himself replaces cruelty (W-pI.170.12:1-3, 6).

Is it clear? We become nonviolent because attack is never justified (T-30.VI.1:1). Cruelty can never be a source of solace, grace or safety. Nor are there exceptions to this rule (e.g., W-pI.170.1:2). When we accept this, and live accordingly, then the world is made new. Only the perfection of our brothers and sisters is remembered. It is in this state that we are ready for God to take the last step (T-13.VIII.3:2).

This is a choice we actively make! Here in these bodies in this world we actively choose to let go of every justification for attack, and instead seek only to be a means by which the memory of God’s love is restored to all minds.

We have reached this decision many times before and always turned back without making it (W-pI.170.11:3). The god of cruelty and attack assumes many forms, all of them deceptive, all of which demand we reject our power to choose love and instead worship in paralysis at the altar of fear (W-pI.170.8:6-7). And we have listened. We have obeyed.

Lesson 170 reminds us repeatedly that the decision to become a peacemaker rather than a hostage to fear “can be terrible” (W-pI.170.8:1). Of course we have walked away from it. But it can also be the moment of our release, if we are willing to look at the decision clearly, accept the Holy Spirit’s evaluation of it, and become responsibility for choosing again.

How shall we do this?

The lesson suggests that the answer to this question can be found in the Fourth Obstacle to Peace in Chapter Nineteen of the Text. There, we learn that the final and greatest obstacle to love is our fear of God. We are sworn to forget this obstacle exists, let alone commit to its undoing.

How do we face our fear of God?

Together. We face it together.

A Course in Miracles is clear that the way we remember – and bring to light – this final daunting obstacle is by forgiving our brothers and sisters. We do not reach this juncture alone, and we cannot go forward from it alone either. We need each other to establish the mutuality of forgiveness.

Beside you is one who offers you the chalice of Atonement, for the Holy Spirit is in him. Would you hold his sins against him, or accept his gift to you? Is this giver of salvation your friend or enemy? Choose which he is, remembering that you will receive of him according to your choice (T-19.IV.D.13:1-4).

In other words, we remember love by forgiving our brothers and sisters – by seeing in them only the perfection of Creation, untouched by the vicious judgments of the ego. When that is all we see in others, then we will understand that we merely perceive our own reflection. There is only holiness in Creation. What else could we see? And when that is all we see, what possible justification for conflict remains?

If you want to remember Heaven, then do Heaven. Be Heaven.

On this view, Lesson 170 is a watershed moment in our practice. Think back to those early first lessons, when we were looking around at things, coming to terms with the power of our mind to define and categorize them, effectively giving meaning to literally everything. Here we do something similar, but with exponentially greater depth and power.

You make what you defend against, and by your own defense against it is it real and inescapable. Lay down your arms, and only then do you perceive it false (W-pI.170.2:6-7).

We have this moment together, you and I: shall we not, together, create the peace we are created to create?

←Lesson 169
Lesson 171→