Sean Reagan

A Course in Miracles

Kenosis and A Course in Miracles

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You must empty yourself of everything, including even the longing for life. You must give up everything, including control over your death. Forget about living and dying, and then forget you forgot about it.

You will ask, “what is left? What more do you want of me God? What else can I give?”

And then you will wait for an answer. Like standing alone on a high cliff overlooking the desert at night you will wait. You are not allowed to rush towards the answer; you are not allowed to make demands about how it is given. You have to rid your mind of all anticipation, foregoing even your right to be disappointed.

Even when you have given everything up, you will find you have not given everything up. When you let go and let go and let go and there’s nothing left to let go of, you still have your will. You still have this willingness to let go. Can you let go of even that? Can you let go of letting go? Can you let go of all conditions you have placed before God and Love?

Do you see how this involves forgetting? How it has to involve forgetting? Do you see how it is not a getting but a forgetting and that this is why you resist it?

When you do see this, then even your desire to please God will not remain. And then you will know perfection in a blade of grass, a ray of moonlight, a child’s laugh, crickets on a warm summer night. All the differences in the world will not be able to turn you away from loving everything equally and totally.

This is because what remains when nothing remains is what God gave us in Creation; what remains is the gift, which is being itself. This existence: this this. And it is not a gift, like a diamond in a black box, but rather a giving, continuous and everpresent, eternally freely extending itself as if it were alive and not dead, as if it were beyond the reach of life and death. Not an object but a process; not a process but a law, not a law but the end of the need for law.

This is what we call kenosis. This is the self-emptying of everything, even of kenosis. In A Course in Miracles, we call this “God takes the last step” (T-13.VIII.3:2). We call it coming empty-handed unto our God (W-pI.189.7:5). Most of us intellectualize it, make an idol of it. We make it a thing with which we can be in relationship. I certainly do.

And yet.

It’s not that. It can’t be objectified. It has no ability to even register our existence.

How much of you can you disappear? How still can your mind become?

Beyond God, what?

If Love is the Answer

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If we believe that Love is the answer, then our living should reflect this. If we are not happy all the time – if we are scared, defensive, greedy, closed-minded, even to a tiny degree – then we are still not accepting Love is the answer. We like the idea but not the application. It’s not a crime against God or Nature but there is a better way.

If we cannot fully accept that Love is the answer, it is because we are scared. We are scared of losing our self, of losing control, of losing life . . . and that’s not a fear we can really talk our way out of. It’s like quarry jumping – you can’t talk your way through the air into the water. You have to leap.

That’s an imperfect analogy, of course. It’s helpful to talk, share, build community, study, do therapy and so forth. It’s just that the actual experience of letting go of fear is not something we talk through – we live it. We let go – first for a second, then for a minute, then for a week. Then it becomes a practice; then it becomes the focal point of a life dedicated to peace.

A Course in Miracles is a way of doing this – of creating circumstances in which we can face the fear that obstructs our remembrance that Love is the answer and that God is Love.

Fear is not the problem; the problem is not looking at fear. But when we look at fear – when we can say, “I am scared and so I am projecting and spiraling” – that is different. That is healing; that is undoing ego. That’s helpful because it creates the conditions for and of peace.

It doesn’t always feel good to look at fear, especially when it’s deep-rooted and won’t dissolve right away. We want to feel good! But wanting to feel good is a projection – it’s the projection of a self that always feels good, that’s entitled to feel good. And we have to let that go! That, too, has to go. That, too, is a symbol of fear. Only when we are free of projection will we be free to remember that we are Love and know the peace that is our inheritance and the gift we extend to others.

Looking at fear is just a thing we do while there is fear to look at. There won’t always be. And this “looking” and the way in which is it is a form of healing will become increasingly intuitive for us; it will happen more and more without apparent effort or intention. So that’s something to look forward to :).

The Will of God is Love

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I sent out a newsletter today – first in a couple months – talking about how to forgive Jesus, who is just another projection in our projection-addled lives. You can sign up here if you like.

In this post I want to think through a related idea: there is only one will and that is God’s Will, which is love.

There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love. Neither you nor anything nor anyone you perceive is separate from this Will nor ever could be separate from it. Accept this and your suffering ends. Very simple!

Also, not simple at all, right?

What about the violent trauma many of us survive as kids? What about the 3.1 million children a year who die of hunger? What about melting polar ice caps? Gun violence?

Yes. I know this. I hear you.

Also?

There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love.

Part of what is hard about this is that it’s not an argument. It is a way of seeing that aligns itself with the One Will and thereby remembers Itself. In that remembrance, the self and the world is undone. There is nothing to argue about, nor anyone to argue with.

A clumsy analogy: imagine that you and I are in Boston and you are looking at a map.

“Hey,” I say. waving a hand. “Look at Boston.”

“I am looking at Boston,” you say, giving the map a shake. “See? Boston.”

“No,” I say. “Not a map of Boston – Boston. Boston Boston.”

“I am looking at Boston,” you say, giving another – slightly annoyed – shake of the map. “It says right here – Boston. See?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, look up from the map. We’re in Boston. This is Boston.”

And you just shake your head because to you it’s obvious that I am the one who is confused. You are looking at Boston; I am not looking at Boston.

What am I trying to say here?

I am saying that if you perceive many wills – or one will that isn’t Love – then you are looking at a facsimile of reality. And there is a better way.

Maybe you already know this. Or maybe you are saying, “okay – how do I change the way I look? How do I see reality and not the facsimile?”

My probably unsatisfying answer is, you don’t. Because you are part of the facsimile. And anyway, there is only one will. You can’t do anything.

Here is the thing. In the same way a map of Boston is not Boston but is not not Boston either (just a very narrowly-defined way of seeing Boston, of pointing at Boston), the help that you need to see past the facsimile is given in the facsimile.

If you allow yourself to be very quiet and still, then you will remember the help. It will be very clear; it will be very obvious. You will remember the help and you will accept it. It will have a form; it will be a method. And you will know it perfectly.

For me, the help was A Course in Miracles. In certain ways, it still is. But ACIM is a beginning, not an end (W-ep.1:1). All ACIM does is help you better hear your sane mind, your healed mind, which is the Holy Spirit.

When you hear the Holy Spirit, then everything clarifies and comes into place. It’s like watching a movie of cracking an egg backwards – the mess recollects itself into a seamless whole.

Everything the Holy Spirit says boils down to: “There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love. Neither you nor anything nor anyone you perceive is separate from this Will nor ever could be separate from it. Accept this and your suffering ends.”

If you are unhappy – in and with yourself, in and with the world, in and with the world and yourself – the invitation is to give your attention to A Course in Miracles. Become devoted to it; become religious. Don’t let it get away with vague spiritual promises. Question it; make demands of it. Ignore it if you need to. You can’t make a mistake. No more can it.

Practicing A Course in Miracles this way is like a long walk home. Maybe it rains or snows; maybe you share the trail with a traveler or two; maybe you get lost or have to rest. But all the while, the landscape grows more and more familiar and eventually you remember that this is home. You are going home and you are home. The journey grows easy because the destination is clear and unambiguous.

“Clear and unambiguous,” by the way, is just another way of saying “There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love.” Simple 🙂

The Second Principle of A Course in Miracles

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Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that matters is their Source, which is far beyond evaluation (T-1.I.2:1-2).

In A Course in Miracles, atonement corrects the error of mistaken self-identity. We are confused about what we are, and our confusion creates illusions – including the illusion of problems. Atonement is the overall process by which those illusions are undone, and mind restored to its rightful state of knowledge.

Miracles are the means of the Atonement. Imagine you are building a bonfire – a great light to comfort your brothers and sisters. Each miracle is kindling, facilitating this symbol around which we gather and which, in truth we build together.

In a sense, miracles – which are shifts in thought away from fear and towards love – are given to restore our self to our Self. It has nothing to do with what’s going on in the world, and everything to do with the mind that is perceiving the world and making decision about what it all means and who it’s for and so forth.

Thus, the miracle is indifferent to the specific problem to which we apply it in the world. To the miracle, a stubbed toe and the death of a child are equal. They aren’t equal to us – hence the need for miracles – but the miracle heals both problems exactly the same way: it reminds us of what we are in truth. And what we are in truth is totally unaffected by pain and loss, sacrifice and suffering. It simply does not recognize them.

Yet miracles have effects in the context in which they are needed. When we observe the miracle’s effects – especially when, according to our unhealed mind, they appear truly miraculous (we are healed from cancer or win the lottery) – we begin to perceive the nature of the gift we have been given.

That is, we begin to realize that the healing the miracle offers is too great and too generous to have come from our own sense of self, which is limited. Miracles are not of the world, nor of the limited selves which populate that world. They can’t be.

Miracles are gifts of God through which we remember our shared identity with both the Creator and Creation.

This begets a sense of respect and humility for the Source of the miracle. It is as if we begin to fully understand that a Will other than our own is at work in us, and it is that Will we trust rather than our puny and confused own.

This posture of humility and respect is important because it allows us to be more open to the miracle and its healing effects. It enables us to get out of our own way, to “let go and let God.”

We begin to understand that “fear is really nothing and love is everything” (T-2.VII.5:3), and notice that our lives begin to subtly change as our will realigns with God’s, under the gentle guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This is a critical step in the overall correction of the error of self-identity. We cease to fully trust our limited sense of what is a problem and, thus, what the correction must be. We avail ourselves of an intelligence whose knowledge of correction and healing is total and thus incapable of error.

Importantly, this intelligence is “far beyond evaluation” (T-1.I.2:2). We can neither explain it nor judge it. We aren’t being invited to re-imagine ourselves as gods or ascended masters or spiritual gurus. We are here to be healed. All that is required is willingness and open-mindedness.

Imagine visiting a doctor. You have cancer, and you are being treated. Do you understand how chemotherapy functions in the body? Do you understand how to build a chemotherapy pump? Could you actually run a hospital?

No. And you don’t have to. You just show up and trust that a whole bunch of people you never met did and will continue doing their job which allows a whole bunch of other people – some of whom you will meet – to do their job. You’re just here to be healed. And when you see the vast network of brothers and sisters collaborating and cooperating in healing, you will realize that miracles aren’t actually about you at all.

You and I are just here to be healed. The so-called error is confusion about what we are in truth, and the so-called solution is given through miracles, which restore to mind our actual identity. Fear is really nothing; love is all there is.

Will you give yourself to the One who knows what is best for you? And knows how to give what is best for you in the form you can most easily accept?

Will you – at last – obey the Law of Love, which is your Source, and the Source of all, in and through which, you will remember yourself as Love?

Seeking the Law of Love

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We have to reach the junction where we see our own specialness, which means being willing to understand that specialness is not love but hate. This is easy to hold as a spiritual ideal but hard to live out in terms of the body.

Basically, if we see something in ourself that we believe makes us different from our brothers and sisters, then we are still seeing specialness.

If we think there is something we have earned through our challenging but faithful spiritual effort, then we are still seeing specialness.

If we think we have been given something that can be owned, that we can have while others don’t, then we are still seeing specialness.

Any difference by which we come out ahead, as if life were a game one could win and another lose – even the faintest whiff of such a difference – means that we are all the way lost in a nightmare of specialness.

This is a very hard hill to climb. It is like facing a garden overwhelmed by neglect.

The Law of Love (which we are allowed to remember) brings forth only equality; it has no other function. Love sees only what is the same. Appearances mean nothing to it at all.

If we see differences, then our vision is still limited to the level of form. We still think form is where value and meaningfulness reside. Thinking this way is not a crime against God or nature, but it does not make us happy because it does appear to violate the Law of Love.

And sometimes the effects of this violation do seem to go beyond mere “unhappiness,” as anyone who reads a newspaper or uses social media knows.

So our work is to keep climbing the hill, keep rooting out those notions of specialness which are the means by which ego sustains the separation. We just keep going until the form disappears and all we see is love and the call for love, which – because they both bring forth the same response, love – are both expressions of the Law of Love.

This can seem like a journey of lifetimes, but in fact the more attention we give it, the more time bends to accommodate us. It can seem impossible – root out all specialness? – but after a while the weeds literally leap into our hands. It’s like reality wants to be remembered. It’s like we’re wearing a blindfold and all we have to do is remove it.

It’s like Christ is real, and you and I are it, and that’s that.

It’s like there’s only one law, and everything else is an illusion, including our confusion about the one law by which Creation is.

So keep climbing the divine mountain. Keep weeding the psyche’s garden. Keep going until you discover the law by which the ideas “you have no problems” (T-26.II.3:3), “giving and recieving are the same” (T-26.I.3:6) and “you are doing this to yourself” (T-27.VIII.10:1) are made true.

The Law of Love is there to be found. Our seeking makes it so.

November Notes on Gratitude

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November frost on mostly empty gardens lingers past noon. Bare maple trees scratch deep gray skies. At night I listen to owls on the other side of the river and by day wait for whatever the cold and early dark of winter will bring.

The mind turns to gratefulness.

Who will teach us how to give thanks? Not what we give thanks for but literally how to give thanks? For assuredly, we do not know. One need only give attention to the world – that grim picture of an inside condition (e.g., A Course in Miracles preface xi) – to see this is the case.

I thought aloud about this in yesterday’s newsletter. You can sign up here, if you like.

In The Voice that Precedes All Thought, Tara Singh wrote that “there is something that words cannot communicate / but the spirit of gratitude can” (5).

Recently I was part of a team-building gratitude exercise that relied heavily on language. We talked in very specific ways about gratitude and took notes on the who, what, why, where, when and how of our gratefulness. We shared aloud.

The wordiness was not wrong but it did obscure the deeper dive to which gratitude calls us. This “dive,” says Singh, is a form of interior listening.

The listening within silences thought,
having received what is beyond thought.
If we could listen then we come to silence.
Thought has a place,
for there is the precise and factual thought
that carries the silence with it.
It has the ability to silence.
And one is grateful and appreciative (10).

The emphasis shifts from the external world, which is merely an image made by our projected fear, to the pure light of God, which includes all things, and thus softens our resistance to the end of differences that are the sine qua non of time and space.

Gratefulness does not know a lack.
It trusts in the Will of God
and leaves God’s things to God.
It knows that
for what you are grateful you will never be denied.

All else is duality, fear, and selfishness,
bound to the body and its sensations (11).

It is easy to be thankful for family, shelter and food. It is easy to see how these things are not given to all of us equally, and to work to resolve the inequity. This is human and there is nothing wrong – and much right – with it.

Yet we are called to a deeper awareness of reality. We are called to be witnesses to the one life beyond all appearances, the God-lit clarity of our shared being. This is a gift to us; it is not a thing that we earn or gather or merit. In truth, it already is given. We are simply to busy to notice.

Busy-ness is a form of fear. It doesn’t matter if it’s bending the knee to the demands the world makes or to the psychological demands that we make. All of it merely postpones peace. Busy-ness is the opposite of the stillness in which love recollects itself in us as a present reality shared with all life. We remember our perfection, which excludes no body and no thing, which is how it is perfect.

Gratefulness is the natural effect of this state and, paradoxically, its cause.

When you are in a state of gratefulness,
nothing is external to you.
Gratefulness does not judge
because it sees the One Life (8).

This peace can be known by us in a very real and tangible way. It is neither a future state nor a mystery. It arises when we are humble enough to realize of ourselves we can do nothing and willing enough to remember that with God, all things are possible.

Our remembrance is a gift to us for which we give thanks but, because it knows there is only one life, it is also a gift that we give to the world.

There is nothing arrogant or prideful in this! We can only extend the gift because we see clearly that the separated self is not real and is thus not responsible in any way for the “One Life.” Truly, nothing is at stake.

Your life is blessed then
and your heart sings songs of adoration
of the perfection of God (6).

I wish you much peace and joy this coming week, and thank you for sharing this path with me.

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