Happiness is a decision for which we are responsible. It is not more complex than that. We don’t need to fix anything outside of us; we have to let go of the idea that anything outside of us can be fixed. None of that is the problem.

Our work as students of A Course in Miracles is to decide to be happy; happiness itself follows naturally and perfectly.

Therefore, if we are not happy – e.g., if we cannot say that we “. . . have no cares, no worries, no anxieties, but [are] merely perfectly calm and quiet all the time” (T-15.I.1:1) – then it is because we have decided not to be. We have chosen against joy. And while this is not a crime against God or nature, there is a better way.

That way is to find out why we are deciding against happiness.

The work of A Course in Miracles is to ask that question and be as open-minded, creative and courageous as possible in finding the answer. We don’t have to become happy – we have to find out why we are resisting happiness. When we get clear on the nature of the resistance, then the happiness naturally arises, care of a power that is in us but not of us.

Our study and practice will reveal to us the blocks to love; our work is to see them. They are undone for us; not because we see them but because seeing them means we are reclaiming the Love that we are in truth.

The easiest way to identify blocks to love is not notice when you are happy and when you are not. In this instance happiness is not the ersatz happiness of the world, i.e., getting what you want, having more than what you need, et cetera. It is much closer to what the poet Jack Gilbert called – here paraphrased – “a natural, serious happiness.”

To be naturally seriously happy is to be coherent at all levels of our being. Coherence is the absence of resistance; it is a natural and radical (in the sense of reaching from the roots) acceptance that brings forth what is whole and unified. It is the remembrance of oneness by oneness. There is no doubt in it; there is no fear.

Coherence, like Love – for which it is merely another synonym, like Knowledge – is natural and easy. It isn’t forced; it doesn’t need to be protected because it can’t be threatened. We all know this space! The work is to nuture and bring it forth in a reliable sustainable way, which often means learning how to recognize it in the first place.

There is a level of being at which we are simply extending the Will of God, which is creative and loving, and is experienced by us as creative and loving as it extends through us. The best analogy is that we become prisms unto God’s love: a light moves through us and appears in the world as beautiful peace and joy. Our brothers and sisters are illuminated, and feel it too, because it includes them.

And so the practice – after the Workbook, after the Manual, after The text – is to come to stillness each morning, and give the day to the Holy Spirit who will give it to God on our behalf, because we are still not ready for that. Which is fine – that’s why we’re here. Our goal is to accept our role as learners and then be the most cheerful and willing student we can manage.

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.

You are enough. You are okay – you are more than okay.

I don’t mean that in an ACIM-theological way – like saying, yeah, the embodied egoic you sucks but the real you is enough.

I mean rather that when you’re out walking and pause beneath a tree, the tree is grateful. I mean that when you walk at night the stars shine brighter. Large bodies of water miss you when you are away from them too long, and the forest paths you walk are grateful for your feet.

You are enough. You are enough.

Nothing is missing in you; nothing is misplaced in you.

Nothing is forgotten in you; nothing is bereft.

Accepting this is the beginning of remembering God-as-Love. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s an awkward embrace of your own self – exactly as you are this moment. Nothing is missing – not even the nagging sense that something is missing is missing.

I love you – and you are perfect – because that is how you and the love forever extending itself in Creation are remembered in love. Not by finding fault, or repenting, or improving over time. Nothing to learn or acquire. Just a real, honest-to-God moment of self-love.

When we truly realize we are lovable – when we no longer resist love – then we have something to give to our brothers and sisters. Our lives become altars at which love is forever being blessed and offered. Right now this is so. In you, right now, it is so.

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A cup of coffee or a single walk can change our life forever. One glance from a brother or sister who sees us without any projection of guilt, theirs or ours, is perfect healing. Only after it is given to us can we offer it to others.

One way to understand our role as students of A Course in Miracles is to understand that God – love, life, justice, mercy – is literally begging us to remember we are not separate from God. Begging us.

I wrote about this in today’s newsletter. You can sign up here if you like.

Our guiltlessness establishes that we are not bodies and that we are one with our brothers and sisters in God’s creation.

Bodies are private. If I dip my foot in the brook, your toes don’t get wet. Yet somehow, when I hold you in mind – when I hold a kind thought of you, when I recall kindnesses you have offered me – I am made happy, and when I offer this happiness to those around me, they gain everything and I lose nothing. As A Course in Miracles points out, ideas can be shared without leaving their source (T-26.VII.4:7).

It’s as if bodies are a limit but ideas – that which occurs at the level of thought, of mind – are shared and thus infinite.

It is very helpful to see the way in which our identity – the “what” we are – is closer to a thought than to a body. Can we see the way that someone who is far away from us – who is perhaps “dead” even – still lives in our mind? Still speaks and influences us? Can still reach others through us? Can we begin to see how the body is a means of communication? A site of love remembering it is love?

Truly, it is not bodies that relate, but minds. And minds are not objects (like bodies) but more like processes. They are like currents or eddies in a brook; patterns in a much larger flow from which they are not separate. In the end, bodies are things minds observe – like Christmas trees or black bears. Bodies depend on minds to exist, not the other way around.

Being shown our guiltlessness is how we realize – not merely intellectually, but holistically, at all levels of existence – that what we are is unrelated to a body, much less to a particular body with its particular life, much less to a world in a universe.

That is because bodies are private and thus cannot actually be in relationship; only minds can be in relationship. And only in relationship can we be shown our guiltlessness. Only in relationship can we share our guiltlessness, letting it shine into other minds to awaken them from the dream of separation.

That all this apparently unfolds in the context of bodies and their world is not a problem. Forget the metaphysics and just give attention to being gentle and kind in sustainable and non-dramatic ways. Make your living about your brothers and sisters, rather than your own self, and see what happens.

One thing that will happen is that your identity will loosen itself from the dense frame of the body and expand to include all our brothers and sisters, as well as concepts like peace and justice, as well as non-human beings like sunflowers and rainbow trout, and finally, Love Itself.

And then, in that space of openness – welcoming everything and resisting nothing, knowing at last the radical equality of all that is – we are reminded of our innocence, and thus enter graceful communion with all life, forever and ever. There is nothing else for us to do!

Thank you, as always, for sharing the way with me.

In a newsletter today I wrote about the relationship between attention and Love. You can sign up here if you like. I want to think out loud here a bit more about this. Healing and awakening are both implicated in it.

In his notebooks, Paul Brunton said that misunderstandings about our identity – i.e., our confusion about what we are in truth – is “not only a metaphysical error but also a mental habit.”

We may correct the error intellectually but we shall still have to deal with the habit. So deeply ingrained is it that only a total effort can successfully alter it” (Notebooks 1:37).

This is a helpful observation! We want to be metaphysically coherent and we want that coherence to be sustainably reflected in our living – our families, communities, traditions et cetera. Healing – which is the incoherent becoming coherent – requires the balm of truth in order to reach all levels of our being – the social, political, symbolic, material.

For example, we may logically conclude that God is Love and Love is what we are in truth, and then go on being driven by fear and hate. So at one level we have the pacifying insight, but at another, nothing changes. Somehow the insight that “God is Love” has to bring an end to fear and hate at all the levels.

We need an insight into the unhelpfulness of the old pattern and we need to actually repattern – or perhaps unpattern – it.

“Insight” happens at the level of thought. But the body and the world are the site of repatterning inspired by the insight, recursively deepening it.

What does this process look like in practice for students of A Course in Miracles?

Say that I hike to the top of Mount Ascutney because it is there I feel closest to God. I follow the Weathersfield trail, reach the summit, meet with the Lord in quiet prayer and . . .

. . . hike back down! I have to go back into my life, right? Kids need supper, apples need picking, poems need writing. In other words, I want to the grace of the summit prayer to gracefully inform the other, more common areas of my life as well.

The union that is implied here – that what occurs on the summit does not stay on the summit, so to speak, but is incorporated with everything else through relationship – hints at the wholeness of reality.

It is fairly easy to say that “God is Love.” Even to believe it is not so hard! But to live that way in the world in a body is not easy at all!

In fact, the world and the body are made to deny that God is Love. They argue that God is at best not real and at worst cruel and indifferent. They argue that you are alone in your struggle to survive. Even the possibility of release through death is denied. What else is hell for?

So I have to remind myself that God is Love. I have to literally forcibly remember to remember that “God is Love” is true and only that is true.

Then, holding that truth like a lantern, I have to go into the world – which is both inside and outside my body – and love in literal pragmatic ways that which is murderously hostile to love.

We are called, you and I, to take literally the prayer of Saint Francis, which takes literally the Sermon on the Mount, which took literally a love that even crucifixion could not kill.

We know what we have to do. We are saints in chrysalis, and now is our time to be reborn in Love. For whatever time is given us in this confusing landscape of body and world, let us offer only love. Let us be the means by which love – the love that even crucifixion could not kill – extends itself to itself, thus remembering itself forever and for all.

I wrote a newsletter today – first in months – about how projection is a denial of the fact that we are creations of God, who is Love, and Who is not mocked. The clarity of this is blinding, and we tend to look away.

You can sign up here, if you are interested.

A few years ago in the Cambridge Public Library I had the insight that I didn’t need to study anymore. Every jot of information necessary to awaken from the dream had been given to me.

This was as clear as starlight in winter, as simple as drawing the next breath.

Still, for a little while, I went on studying.

But it was like how when you stop paddling a canoe, the canoe drifts a while before gliding to a halt. It takes time for an energetic pattern – of study, of loving, of sailing – to dissipate. But in time it does.

Then what?

For me, I found fear. All the emotional structures and relationships I’d built to manage the fear stopped working, and all that remained in their wake was the brutal logic of fear.

There is nothing to do in that space but be still. A parade of demons and monsters passes, one after the other, each horrifying in its own way, each making a case for your doom, and you just sit quietly watching. It feels like forever. It feels like torture.

Yet for me, there was a point in that parade when I realized that nothing in it was going to kill me. Scare me, yes. Horrify me, yes.

But end me? No.

Oddly, the relief I felt at this was quickly sublimated by a grim nihilism I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was like being pulled under stormy seas by an invisible hand. I’d fight for the surface, get dragged down again. After a while I couldn’t make the surface, but I’d still struggle for the light gleaming faintly above me.

Eventually – I think this is what has to happen, but I can speak only to my own experience – I just gave up and went down.

This is getting long and dramatic! So let me say this: in my experience, when you surrender to nihilism, when you lean right into it, give yourself wholly to it, it dissolves. I can’t say exactly how or why. It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t something I did. It was just a thing that happened in the absence of resistance.

That is a sweet space! Fear no longer has a stranglehold on you, death has no mask it can wear to intimidate you. When someone says “I and the Father are one,” you aren’t envious or jealous.

In a lot of ways, this feels like the end of what we call “the journey.” But it’s not. Nor is it a beginning.

So what is it?

I told a friend recently I feel as if I have walked ten thousand miles to reach the Gates of Eden and only in their shadow do I realize that the last step – the step through the gates, entrance unto the Kingdom – is harder than all the many millions that got me here. He laughed.

“It’s not like that at all,” he said. “It’s like you’re in a dressing room and you’ve taken off the fear suit but are realizing that there’s no love suit. Naked is the love suit. You are the love suit. And you’re scared to go out into the world like that.”

Love is blinding, and we tend to look away. Love is freeing, and we turn back to the cage. Love opens us up to the cosmos, and the cosmos enfolds us, vast folds of Love enveloping vast folds of Love endlessly.

In the newsletter, I wrote how sometimes I am like a child who refused to open his birthday gifts, and then complains that nobody got him anything. Where is my happiness?

What happens if I accept the gift?

These are the same question.