I sent out a newsletter this morning. You can sign up here if you like.

In that letter, I think aloud about the emphasis A Course in Miracles places on awakening others. The course is somewhat unusual in the nondual traditions (in which it is appropriately located) in its focus on our brothers and sisters. In ACIM, the one is the other, and vice-versa, and the project – the method, so to speak – is informed thusly.

Service, as A Course in Miracles sees it, is a surrender of the ego and its body-bound, world-bound framework, in favor of giving attention to our brothers and sisters. The form this attentiveness takes is not up to us; indeed, the surrender that precedes it means that whatever happens next in the world of form can’t be our doing. It is a profound letting go and, as such, also a profound gift.

As we sink deeper and deeper into the ineffable unspeakable essence that is our Source and Identity, that Source and Identity flows with increasing joy through us into the world. We don’t need to understand this, much less explain it. We do need to be ready and willing to give ourselves over to it.

Critically, whatever awakening is, it is not about us. This seems to be the salient insight.

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I have posted a lessons index laying out posts related to the workbook lessons. There are more posts floating around, but this index reflects those which are more care-filled and attentive. I began writing about the lessons a decade ago; my intention and insight have shifted in helpful ways since then. This year has been given to renewing my focus on the workbook, both alone and with others; I hope to update the index accordingly.

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Finally, I am grateful to everyone who reads and shares here with me. Together we are building a little oasis in the desert of illusion, one where we can all rest and be nurtured on our shared journey to the home we never left.

To say I am grateful is perhaps simplistic but it’s true. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being with me.

Love,
Sean

I sent a newsletter out today which explores the second principle of miracles. Although the early parts of the text can be choppy, the section outlining the fifty principles has always felt clear and helpful to me.

The second principle asks us to look beyond the miracle to its Source, reminding us that what matters is not how the miracles functions in our lives in the world but rather the Source from which that miracle flows, which is always love.

This is an important insight. Healing is not having our problems fixed but rather making contact with our true self which has no problems. This is a simple but powerful way of living that entirely upends our traditional understanding of self, world and other.

It is possible to be deeply and seriously happy, and to know a peace which surpasses understanding.

Feel free to sign up if you like.

Some housekeeping items:

First, it was recently pointed out to me that my contact page was not working and hasn’t for months. If you tried to reach out to me that way and did not receive a reply, please know that it reflects a technical error rather than any deliberate ignorance on my part. I’m really sorry.

Please do feel free to reach out to argue, ask questions and so forth. I am always happy for be in dialogue with fellow students.

Also, lately I’ve been reflecting on a recent dialogue in the comments to this old post, which I keep wanting to rewrite or convert to a post in their own right, but maybe it’s okay to just point to the exchange. I am very grateful for it.

Finally, I scrap a lot of writing when writing here, and recently started a kind of ACIM notebook site where those scraps might find a home. It’s less formal, less polished, less cohesive but perhaps still interesting.

I hope your winter and its various holy days and shifts in light has begun in a quiet and gentle way. I’m so glad you’re here.

Love,
Sean

I walked many miles in the rain last night. Past the village the dark is smooth and alive, like the heart of something wild. There are voices in the rain.

My walk was a plea for clarity and understanding; clarity and understanding were given.

The Holy Spirit is an experience in the world: it is a quiet acceptance of all things, including what we have judged against. It is the end of resistance; it is the acceptance of everything. It is in us but not of us.

To be given to the Holy Spirit’s calm openness is to see with clarity and grace all that stands between us and the honest declaration that “the peace of God is everything I want” (W-pI.205.1:2).

We can be confused about God – call it Love, call it Oneness – but we cannot be apart from it. When we want to be restored to Choiceless Awareness we are restored because we never left.

There is no “we.” There is no “us.” There is not even God.

Yet oddly, without us – which is to say, without you, which is to say, without God – I would not know this. Which, in my half-assed way, I wrote about in today’s newsletter. Sign up if you like.

And of course – with all my heart – thank you. 🙏

Love,
Sean

Happy All Saints Day.

I’ve been trying to find my way with a newsletter for years. Another one floats into the ether tomorrow morning. If you’re interested, you can read past newsletters and sign up for the future ones here.

I’ve also been having fun with videos lately.

This one is posted elsewhere on the site, but I wanted to share it upfront with folks who check in once in a while. Thanks for reading (and watching). In a sincere way, I am grateful to those of you who listen to and encourage me. As Paul said to the faithful of Thessaloniki long ago, “encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.”

The secret to writing and thinking publicly about A Course in Miracles is to realize that you are the student, not the teacher, and everyone who shows up – whatever their posture – has come to save you from bad dreams.

Those who would learn the same course share one interest and one goal. And thus he who was the learner becomes a teacher of God himself, for he has made the one decision that gave his teacher to him. He has seen in another person the same interests as his own (M-2.5:7-9).

I have been fortunate over the past year to have spent time with a couple of teachers who simultaneously deepened and relaxed my ACIM practice. The language is infinitely clearer and the metaphysics orders of magnitude less confusing. It’s a dream, yes, but one in which dreaming is no longer an impediment to inner peace and joy.

I hope that some of that light and helpfulness occasionally finds its way into what is shared here. In the dream we are having, our shared interests are a light which undoes the illusion of separation. Without you, it would be dark indeed.

Love,
Sean

Here is one of my favorite sentences from A Course in Miracles: “do you prefer that you be right or happy (T-29.VII.1:9)?”

I like it for two reasons.

First, it’s a good question! It helpfully points to the impossibility of inner peace when one is stuck on being right about something. Being right means somebody else has to be wrong. Right and wrong are the parents of conflict, not peace.

The second reason I like it is because it literally makes the very error it says we should not make. In doing so, it demonstrates the futility of experiencing inner peace by any means offered by the world – including A Course in Miracles and its excellent questions.

Right and wrong are natural aspects of the body’s experience of both itself and the world. To minds that believe they’re isolated in bodies, right and wrong appear as obvious possibilities with high stakes. You have to choose and your choice matters.

This is as true for minor problems (should I read another chapter or go to bed) as for major ones – like, should the U.S. launch preemptive nuclear strikes against other nuclear powers?

A Course in Miracles suggests that getting worked up about the answers to those questions isn’t going to bring us peace. Make a decision, sure, but don’t confuse your decision with the cause of your peace or lack thereof.

In other words, within the context of a dream, decisions only seem to be causes of effects.

Since it, too, appears in a dream, this also applies to A Course in Miracles. Thus, that question posed by the text, so helpful in guiding our decision-making minds, is itself the very problem it claims to resolve.

Why do I say this?

Because there is a right answer to the question of do you prefer to be right or happy and every course student knows it.

The right answer is: I prefer happiness.

The question which aims to liberate you from the right / wrong conflict is itself embedded in that conflict.

Even A Course in Miracles cannot escape the framework of separation that gives rise to both ego and world.

This need not be cause for dismay! Instead, it reminds us that nothing – nothing – in the world will save us, and so motivates us to empty our hands, unburden our hearts of all attachments, and forget all that we’ve learned.

Peace is not a dream yet it is also not in a dream. It is your inheritance from a God who loves you. But you are still confused about what you are, and you are still clinging to illusions of what love is.

There is no question – much less an answer – that can save you. Salvation is not a mystery, and real happiness is not conditional. What do you refuse to give your God Who asks for nothing?

I sent out a newsletter this morning. Being the socially clumsy and poorly-organized man that I am, I don’t know the precise overlap between who reads what I post here and who reads there. If you’re not signed up and you’d like to be, please feel free. And if not, no worries.

I have been happy lately, in the natural way that sometimes visits, especially when I am not working overtime to force my point-of-view on the world. Chrisoula and I have been half-assed homesteaders for years; Covid-19 reminds us that a more committed practice not only helps our family but expands our ability to be helpful to others.

In dialogue and action, we are deepening our commitment to self-reliance and local relationship in terms of food production. And we are thinking, too, of how to work differently, and otherwise make our living more creative, sustainable, and service-oriented.

This is not for everyone! I hope you will forgive me if I sound preachy. Healing takes the form that is most helpful to us, that most readily reminds us that our identity is not yoked to a body, and that the world of perception is illusory (e.g., T-2.IV.5:2). For me, in part, that has always taken the form of rigorous study and writing.

But it also includes a relationship with the world premised on actively working to balance the scales of justice so that all people enjoy the modest material abundance (and comfort and safety) that characterizes our living here on our homestead. I don’t always know what that means, so I have to be in relationship with others in order to learn. Together, we think out loud about how to help each other and how our helping can naturally extend to others.

This latter work – as opposed to study and writing – is harder for me, because it evokes the body and the body always evokes relationship. I am happiest in the forest or pasture, alone with my thoughts. With others – since childhood – I can be impatient, insecure, haughty, overly-sensitive . . .

I am, as Chrisoula often gently points out, a high-maintenance guy.

So learning proceeds apace, in the company of those with whom learning and healing are presently most effective and, as I consent to the posture of learning, which begins in humility, it is given me to be happy.

Healing is never only of the world (its pandemics, wars, famines or tsunamis et cetera) nor only of the self (its fear, guilt, pride, greed, et cetera) but is rather about discovering – and then gently living in – the nexus that self, world and other is.

We give attention to the life that is given to us, in all its beauty and confusion and pain, and we learn that beyond the flux and chaos is a stillness and peace and that the means to that joyful state is service unto one another, in whatever form appears.

To that end, I hope you are well, and that your families and communities are well, and I thank you for reading and sometime sharing with me here. Truly, without you, it would not mean a thing.

Love,
Sean