All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

~ Max Planck

. . . rejoice that what illusions seemed to separate is one forever in the Mind of God (S-1.in.2:3).

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Mind, which is abstract, identifies with the body, which is believed to be not abstract but material and thus substantively other than mind. When and as mind does this, it denies that it does this. Then it forgets that it does this. Then it forgets that it forgot and, in this way, ends up believing it is a body. Any suggestion otherwise (there’s only consciousness, et cetera) feels silly, unbelievable.

This identification of mind with body is ancient, deep and entangled. It spirals out into the cosmos; it touches every atom. Body and world, world and universe, are one projection.

When mind believes it is permanently yoked to a body, fear arises. Desire and longing arise. Expectation and judgment, sorrow and happiness arise. These are all forms of suffering! They are all caused by the same illusion, which is that we are separate from – alien unto – Creation. We think we’re bodies but we’re not (W-pI.199.7:8); we think we’re in a world but there is no world (W-pI.132.6:2).

So separation is what we have to address. We have to awaken from the dream of misidentification that is separation. We have to realize we are not bodies and there is no world, and then see what happens. A Course in Miracles provides a framework to do this.

But remember: in truth, nobody awakens. Awakening is not an experience any body has. Even Jesus is just a projection! If you think you’re awakened, you’re kidding yourself. If somebody professes they’re awakened, they’re kidding themselves and you. None of this is a crisis (because none of it is real) but it is a kind of self-generated drama that keeps us from true peace and happiness.

Are we not ready to try something new?

That question is a trap! It’s a trap because whether you say yes or no, you are asserting that awakening takes effort and there’s a you somewhere that gets to decide the effort is worth it, let’s go for it, et cetera. And then you’re right back in the problem you meant to leave behind.

Try to see that there is no free will. Everything is caused by something else. Every belief we hold, every thought we have reflects prior conditioning. We’re just repeating what Mom and Dad said, and when enough of us do this, we call it culture. It’s what brains in bodies do – generate a self that thinks it’s responsible for everything.

This raises an interesting question: what caused our desire to awaken? Deep down you recognize in yourself something beautiful, strong, tender, just and merciful. What caused that? What is this energy that longs to remember itself through you by expressing itself as joy and peace for everyone?

What happens when you ask those questions in a serious and attentive way? What happens when you wait on answers that don’t come from you but from the Holy Spirit?

It’s okay to trust the part of us that wants to awaken. It’s okay to be guided by it. To do what it asks us to do: wear saffron robes, practice the ACIM daily lesson, pray a rosary, cut off a hand and throw it over the monastery wall. This longing to awaken is how God reaches for us; why not reach back?

Yes, I know – “reach back” is nonsense. God is nondual. There is no subject and object in God. There is no sky father with earth kids. There is no separate intelligence using language and concepts to call parts of itself back to itself. God is One.

“God is One.” We think we know what this means! But what is interesting is when we let go of our knowing.

The Planck epoch is an impossible-to-imagine time period a million million million million million million millionths of a second after the Big Bang. In it, our understanding of the laws of physics breaks down. We know the epoch exists but we cannot say what it is. Is not knowing a problem? When we learn that we have no idea what “God is One” means, we also learn that we knew all along. It’s this: this this.

In the separation, mind became “a perceiver rather than a creator” (T-3.IV.2:1). It can be helpful in our ACIM practice to look closely at this distinction.

Sit quietly for a few minutes and give attention. Here, snow falls. Blue jays jaw in the hemlocks. Images of my father playing catch with me appear. Feelings of frustration with so much weather-related suffering arise. More snow. The hayloft is cold. What’s for breakfast?

I perceive all this, yes? The sounds and shapes and colors, the memories and feelings, the ideas. I don’t create it – I perceive it. It is given. I don’t perceive its source or cause, only the ongoing effects. I can’t turn blue jays into cardinals. Can’t make snow into rainbow-colored confetti. Can’t not think of pink elephants.

(Nor, by the way, can I perceive nothing).¹

There is a lot of peace in realizing clearly both that mind perceives and how it perceives. The biggest insight is seeing how the perceiver (the self and the body) is also the perceived. We enter the loopy lovely spiral of creation.

One can understandably spend lifetimes in this space. There is a lot of happiness here. There is a lot of peace.

But A Course in Miracles suggests this space is the beginning rather than the end of healing. We have to investigate the truth of “before Abraham was, I am.” We have to go back to the beginning (e.g., T-3.VII.5:9).²

When we see how there is apparently only perception – and that the self, as such, is also a perception – then we can begin to give attention to “perceiving truly,” which in turn fosters love (T-3.III.1:8). This is different than merely giving attention. It evokes laws of Creation and an order in which those laws are known (rather than perceived). It removes the self as author of experience.

In other words, according to A Course in Miracles, there is something beyond perception. Or, to correct the first sentence of the preceding paragraph, there is not “only perception.”

Miracles, as A Course in Miracles uses the term, are designed to heal perception by teaching us how to only perceive truly in order to go beyond perception.

First question: What does it mean to perceive truly?

It means to accept what is perceived as given. The miracle “perceives everything as it is” (T-3.II.3:4). We don’t add to it, we don’t embellish it and we certainly don’t denigrate it.

It means not trying to make (or pretend that we have made) one part of perception truer than another (which is another way of saying, make it all the same). What is perceived is neutral; it’s the egoic self that brings evaluation and judgment into it.

It means that we don’t try to oppose perception in any way.

It means seeing – and accepting unconditionally – that we can’t oppose perception. “You cannot make untruth true” (T-3.II.6:2).

And finally, critically, it means understanding that “to perceive truth is not the same as to know it” (T-3.III.5:13).

A lot rides on that last distinction.

Right perception – true perception – is a beginning. It is a cornerstone. A Course in Miracles teaches that “right perception is necessary before God can communicate directly to His altars” (T-3.III.6:1). Right perception is adjacent to – without actually being – knowledge. It’s where we start.

Knowledge means certainty and the end of questioning (T-3.III.2:5). It is not variable (T-14.VIII.4:6). It does not induce action, because it is not related to the body or the world (T-3.III.6:8). To know is to be as God is, perfectly whole, imperturbable and peace-filled (T-13.VIII.2:3). Words do not apply and no image is fitting because knowledge is not symbolic (T-3.V.4:6-7).

Knowledge is impersonal (T-4.II.1:4). There is no self in it. There are no distinctions whatsoever in it (T-4.II.11:12).

It is tempting to claim that we have reached or attained or are in possession of knowledge. Or we make a goal of knowledge – it’s why we practice ACIM or see a therapist or go to church. We want to know God, know peace, know joy. Honestly, claims to knowledge and action purportedly undertaken on behalf of knowledge make us feel special.

But remember: specialness is always temptation. Only ego can be tempted, and the temptation always reinforces self-identification with a body. We want to be the one who “gets it,” the teacher not the student, or at least the favorite student. Our intention here is irrelevant; anything personal is always ego.

To want anything is to imply that what we are in truth is capable of lack, which is to accept sacrifice, which is to condone suffering. This is the opposite of truth! It is the opposite of the joy and peace which are our inheritance. It is important to see how our thinking functions, and to be entirely honest about its goals and effects. There is no other way to purify our thoughts and reach the ones we think with God.

The solution is to the problem of pretending we are further along spiritually than we actually are (which is just the problem of being distracted from what we are), is simply to go back and start again. Sit quietly and give attention for a few minutes. See what is given. See how you can’t oppose it. Rest in the space of non-opposition.

This leads to the second question: What is given in the space of non-opposition? That is, what is beyond perception?

1. Common arguments pushing back on this include: what about a whisky blackout? Under anesthesia? Deep sleep? Am I not at those times perceiving “nothing?”

   I think these are examples of impaired or altered perception, rather than no perception. The self remains in some embryonic degree because it reconstitutes itself, and incorporates the so-called “blank” into its being. “Can’t remember” is different than “nothing.”[↩]

2. If there is one! The “loopy spiral” image suggests there is no actual beginning, only arbitrary declarations that vary according to the one doing the declaring. “Beginnings” and “endings” – and even “now” – are concepts contingent on linear experiences of time. The experience is one thing (that’s just a feature of bodies, particularly human ones) but the actual existence of time is another. The course (like many nondual paths) insists that time is not real and will – when we remember what we are in truth) – just disappear. It’s illusion, not reality. “Back to the beginning” then is symbolic, but of what? This is a fun and nontrivial question![↩]

Your Self-fullness is as boundless as God’s. Like His, It extends forever and in perfect peace. Its radiance is so intense that It creates in perfect joy, and only the whole can be born of its Wholeness (T-7.IX.6:7-9).

We are restless. We are in search of that which will bring all searching to an end. We perceive ourselves as on a journey, but it’s an oddly incomplete image: from where did we take our leave? In what direction are we heading? Upon whose word or promise does our faith in destination lie?

Everything that arises falls, while everything that falls, eventually arises again. The form of the world changes – first moonlight, then cardinals, then love, then loneliness – but the rising and falling don’t change. Good, bad, happy, unhappy . . .

We look for the One who perceives this flux of phenomena – the seer who must be the self – but it too rises and falls because we cannot perceive it apart from the rising and falling. We look for the First Cause – the Source – the “the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” – and find what? Only more images, only more ideas.

Everything that rises and falls – including the idea of God, including the idea of rising and falling – rises and falls within whatever it is that we are in truth. We can understand this in terms of the body, if we want: language and image are window dressing for corresponding neurochemical impulses. We can understand it in abstract terms like mind or spirituality: ideas arising within the one mind that is God’s.

But however we do it, can we see – can we make contact with – that within which it arises? The suggestion is that this “within which-ness” is important, in the sense that it is all there is in terms of experience.

It’s elusive and hard to talk about but that’s mostly because we are looking so hard for it, and talking so much about it.

What happens when we surrender our search for God? Undo our insistence on specialness? What happens when we stop talking about the so-called “inexpressible?”

Then, like a deer entering the pasture at twilight – elegant, shy, graceful, a gift – it appears. It’s this: this this. And it’s always here; it couldn’t not be here.

God always speaks. That is the thing. We want so badly to know God and we never see that our want is simply another form of resistance, cleverly disguised as sincerity and right effort. A kind of passivity is called for, a kind of letting go. A kind of resignation even. We quit – really and truly quit – and only at that moment does ever-present light finally reach our eyes.

Yet to want to quit is to keep going. Even to write “we quit – really and truly quit –  and only at that moment does ever-present light reach our eyes” is to keep going. It’s maddening: until we drop it, we’re holding it, and we can’t drop it until we hold it.

In you is all of Heaven. Every leaf that falls is given life in you. Each bird that ever sang will sing again in you. And every flower that ever bloomed has saved its perfume and its loveliness for you (T-25.IV.5:1-4).

In you . . .

“You” in this case does not refer to Sean or to the body with which “Sean” presently (and stubbornly) identifies. We really have to see this: the grace and peace to which A Course in Miracles points neither begins or ends in bodies, which includes thought and feeling and idea and perception. What is has –

Nothing before and nothing after it. No other place; no other state or time. Nothing beyond or nearer. Nothing else. In any form (T-25.IV.5:6-10).

Of itself, even our restlessness is perfect: it is simply another breeze passing over the open field of life. We don’t have to bring it to peace. We don’t have to search and we don’t even have to stop searching: we simply have to notice the “within which-ness” that is always here, always present. We have to notice the emptiness from which form briefly arises and into which it returns.

To say it is a simple thing – possibly even a  helpful thing – but it is still just foam on the salty waves we are all already surfing. What remains is joy: which is not the body’s pleasure nor the mind’s happiness but rather that within which those fleeting experience arise and fall to rise again.

But all this is silliness.

I enjoy being outdoors in the morning listening to birds.

I enjoy the light of dawn: its shy secretive blue, its slow but steady reveal of the world.

I love coffee, even bad coffee.

No more than all this! And no less either.

No mysteries. No secrets.

Just this.

This in which the one who talks too much about “void” risks being spiritually obtuse.

This in which the one who speaks of “emptiness” and “stillness” with near-evangelical fervor . . .

. . . has forgotten something and thinks “you” have it.

This in which it is clear that nobody has forgotten anything.

This in which nothing is lost.

This in which this morning I didn’t go to the barn but stayed inside, without coffee, exhausted, laying on the couch, watching light bleed through drawn curtains due east. After hours of night given to reading and prayer, all with an intensity evoking Kapleau’s description of shikan-taza . . .

. . . shikan-taza is a heightened state of concentrated awareness wherein one is neither tense nor hurried, and certainly never slack. It is the mind of somebody facing death (The Three Pillars of Zen 56).

Which in turn recalls these two questions and their answer from A Course in Miracles:

What would you see without the fear of death? What would you feel and think if death held no attraction for you? Very simply, you would remember your Father. The Creator of life, the Source of everything that lives, the Father of the universe and of the universe of universes, and of everything that lies even beyond them would you remember (T-19.IV.D.1:1-4).

Lay there unmoving. Eyes open then shut. Bird song but different, not like in the barn. Muffled a little. Traffic also different, groaning on the downslope of Route Nine past the village cemetery. The neighbor’s lambs bawl; a rooster crows.

Kapleau – he is summarizing a lecture of Yasutani-Roshi – also says:

Compared with an unskilled swordsman a master uses his sword effortlessly. But this was not always the case, for there was a time when he had to strain himself to the utmost, owing to his imperfect technique, to preserve his life. It is no different with shikan-taza (The Three Pillars of Zen 57).

How tired I am! Yet how grateful.

I live in you –
not as darkness
but as a light in which
even darkness cannot hide.

I live in you as that
which you long
to give away.

I live in you
as love.

In time, the world awakens. The mail truck from Springfield arrives, the driver calling “good morning” to M., who from the loading dock answers – quieter, knowing who is still asleep on Main Street – “good morning.”

For it is morning. Before judgment – good, bad, this or that – it is morning. Light streams over the hills, mist rises off the pasture.

How happy I am. How grateful.

More than this quiet joy this morning is not possible; less is possible, to the precise extent I insist on prerogatives that do not come from the Holy One. The secret to salvation is that we do this unto our own self (T-18.VIII.10:1). Shall we take this literally then? See what happens if we do, at least?

You have no problems, though you think you have . . . Think not the limits you impose on what you see can limit God in any way (T-26.II.3:3, 5).

Yes, so long as there is a perception of lack, then there will be a perception of problems, and so long as there is a perception of problems, then others will appear to “fill” the lack or “solve” the problem or “assuage the pain” or “reinforce the pain . . . ”

All a dream. All  dust even now blowing away. Not even dust. Not even a dream.

Only this. Always only this.

It is not given us to fool God or argue with God or negotiate with God or even to deny God. Every image and idea and act which implies the contrary is not and never was real. We need only surrender to this simple fact, and then love and peace and joy will flow over us the way sunlight floods a landscape, allowing it to be seen by eyes that know how to see.

In you I speak
because
in you I hear.

Between silence
and what-silence-is-not,
I wait for you to join me.