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.

I wrote about defensiveness and its proximity to projection in my newsletter this morning; please feel free to sign up.

When I become responsible for defensiveness, I project less, and the less I project, the more love and peace become the salient qualities of our shared living.

And, at some point in the happiness that arises thereby, I catch a glimpse of choicelessness and realizes that I have finally reached the beginning – the literal only step – of the journey-that-neither-begins-nor-ends.

Choicelessness is scary. Our conditioning is premised on concepts of free will; the idea that there is always something we can do in any situation to maximize it for our benefit (and the benefit of those we deign to love). An independent functional self is the literal ground of this belief system; neither can exist without the other.

To realize that there is no such self is – to the idea that there is such a self – utterly terrifying. Small wonder we tend not to question it or at least not question it very deeply. It is the void: empty, meaningless, ever ready to devour life whole, leaving nothing. Of course we turn away; of course we try to squirrel away a crumb.

We have to look at the void. But here’s the thing. At some point in the “Void-is-Horror” narrative, the narrative falls away and it is seen at last that the void is not dead; it is not nothing. Rather, it is a generative emptiness, utterly creative, utterly giving. And the love it extends – because it does not perceive differences – is truly unconditional.

This is so far beyond being a good person or a holy person or an awakened person. None of that matters at all. And it is a gift rather than a reward. Our work is not to earn anything, much less deserve anything, but simply to undo everything – everything – that obstructs our remembrance of this all-loving generative stillness.

Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thing the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-pI.189.7:2-5).

Are we ready for it?

It is for this moment, this question, that our study and practice of A Course in Miracles is given, and it is to this moment that it endlessly delivers us.

In a sense, to be crucified is simply to be yoked to body in the same way a body can be nailed to a cross. There is no escape, only death. Everything dies, blows away in dust, and is forgotten.

Yet resurrection is a form of remembering. It is a restoration to mind the knowledge of its wholeness, which is not associated with bodies at all, and thus beyond birth and death and the trials in between.

Thus, Easter is neither a day nor an event, much less a holy day or event. Rather, it is a way of thinking for which we are responsible, and for which we choose to be responsible because what else could love possibly want?

I have been thinking lately about my insistence that love assume a certain form in order to actually be love. Jack, my daughter’s blind horse, who I visit each morning with a flake of hay, is teaching me that this is insane. He reminds me that service is the way to end projection, and thus remember Love.

I wrote about the service part of this lesson in today’s newsletter. You can sign up here if you like. The horse part – which is the love part – I want to go briefly into here.

Jack lost sight in both of his eyes last year. Both eyes were eventually removed. At the time, the vet responsibly told my daughter that some folks opt to put their horses down when this happens. Sophia said – how do I put this delicately – “fuck that.”

Jack struggled for a month or so with blindness, and then became so skilled at navigating pasture and run-in you wouldn’t know he doesn’t have eyes. Sophia still rides him. It’s like nothing has changed. It is amazing.

What does this have to do with love?

It is fear that insists life must assume this or that form – a certain man or woman, say, or a horse with intact eyesight – in order to be love. You know, right, full, just, perfect, ecstatic, et cetera . . .

The perfect ideal is the ultimate projection because it can never be met, and thus leaves us forever searching, thus obeying ego’s dictate to seek but never find (T-12.IV.1:4).

Yet life somehow manages to flow without this perfection. It is almost as if life is perfectly whole and safe, and we – through the lie of projection – simply refuse to see this. It’s almost as if ego isn’t even wrong – it’s not even actually there.

It turns out that while eyes are nice, Jack does not need them to live a happy fulfilled life. It is as if the forms he perceived were – how shall we put this delicately – not actually there in the first place.

I mean we know that’s not true but . . . do we?

A Course in Miracles insists that our emphasis on the sensate world – the world brought forth through the body’s senses – is an illusion and thus unimportant. It asks us to consider that the body’s eyes don’t see, its ears don’t hear, its hands don’t hold . . .

Can this be true? Can love be formless? How would we know?

Mornings I usually wake to Jack calling from the pasture. He’s hungry; my function is to feed him. I stumble into chore clothes and head outside in pre-dawn darkness. Chickens natter in the barn as I gather the requisite flakes. Jack waits by the gate, impatient as always. “Ask and ye shall receive,” I say jokingly, and toss the hay.

And as the gold flake lands on still-frozen earth, I hear in the recess of my mind – the cave of my heart – Jesus say “ditto.”

Am I not blessed? Is the gift not given? Shivering in the New England cold, wordy and unwise but not unhappy? Listening to a blind horse munch hay? Sun rising, chickadees singing? Who is serving who?

Beloved: how much longer must we pretend we don’t know?

Spring is coming. The chickadees are more voluble; crows linger longer on the thawing compost. The horses call for their morning flakes of hay earlier and earlier, sunlight cresting eastern hills where the river turns.

I am sufficiently embodied to be deeply happy about this. And sufficiently right-minded to know it’s okay to say that to you.

Most of the weekend was given to writing about this line from A Course in Miracles: “It is sure that those who select certain ones as partners in any aspect of living, and use them for any purpose which they would not share with others, are trying to live with guilt rather than die of it” (T-16.IV.4:5).

It’s part of a relatively complex analysis of how we use special love relationships to avoid looking at hate, and how not looking at hate is the whole reason we’re so confused about what love is. Good stuff. I mean hard stuff, but . . . also good.

The idea was I’d write about this for today’s newsletter, but after seven thousand words and about as many rewrites it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. I went to bed a wee bit consternated, woke up at 5 a.m., and wrote today’s newsletter in a hot second.

What works? What helps? What flows?

You can sign up here for the newsletter if you like.

One thing about special love relationships is that they’re hard to notice. We are wired and conditioned to integrate them into our living without realizing that’s what we’re doing, much less why we’re doing it. We call them holy relationships. Or just love. And continue on our not-so-merry-but-at-least-a-little-merry way. It’s not a crime against God or nature.

But everything – without exception apparently – has to be raised into the light of inquiry, lest we hold onto some shred of illusion and from it build yet another cosmos in which suffering and loss abound. As the Buddha might say, were I not so smitten with Jesus, just how many times do you want to ride this carousel, son?

In the newsletter this morning, I ended up musing on the right/wrong binary which – while not entirely irrelevant to happiness – often obscures a much better question with respect to happiness, to wit: does this (whatever this is) help? If yes, press play. If no, shuffle onto the next jukebox and see if that one has any songs for dancing, making love, singing at the top of your lungs while driving down the interstate . . .

What does all this have to do with the afore-mentioned quote from A Course in Miracles?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe I’ll get to it in a future post or newsletter.

The thing is, what’s challenging about that quote is that it asks us to share the very thing we are most afraid to share. What is that? Is it sex? Praise? Attention? Love? A story about what our Dad did?

If we can answer that question quickly, then we probably aren’t answering it honestly. The easy answer is the one that’s given so we won’t see the real answer.

What feels so precious – makes you feel so vulnerable – that even thinking about giving it away to just anyone is tantamount to death?

I know what the answer is for me and – this is the whole point of this post – I don’t want to share it with you. I’m too scared. Which is why I wrote the newsletter I wrote, and also why this post dances with truth but only at a flirty distance. The loving embrace of the slow dance – that beautiful intimation of our shared oneness – remains . . . what? Do you know?

Anyway, I hope you will not stop twisting by the pool with me.