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.

Less poetically. Less biographically.

As a matter of experience – lived experience prior to settling into this or that language or mode of expression (science, philosophy, advaita, historical et cetera et cetera et cetera) – what happens when you listen to the birds and to the silence in which their song appears?

As an exercise, a thing done with intention and curiosity, with devotion – what happens?

You hear birds. And the sound of them variegates and complexifies as you listen, becoming not just lovely but wonder-filled. How deeply hearing goes into the two-note Spring song of a chickadee! Dylan goes quiet, Chopin goes quiet, ego goes quiet . . .

And then, between notes, you hear the silence. The rich expanse of it seemingly endless and utterly open. Oh, maybe there are other sounds, too, at first – the river in the distance, the traffic at even greater distance. Maybe the neighbors, maybe a dog.

But all these sounds – without exception – stand aside their antithesis, silence.

You listen to the silence. You give attention to it. What happens? Isn’t it almost alive? Doesn’t it almost feel like something always about to give birth to sound? This sound then that sound? This melody then that? Isn’t silence intelligent and creative? Isn’t it alive?

As you go deeper into it, you begin to see that if there were not those sounds, then there would not be this silence. Therefore, silence is not the source of sound! Whatever the source of sound is, it is the source of silence, too. What a discovery!

In this way, you begin to sense how silence and sound are like positive and negative – charges, integers, images – which, when brought together, dissolve into . . .

What exactly?

Into emptiness. Stillness. Consciousness. God.

Though as soon as you name it, you are in retreat. And it’s okay to retreat – God is not at war with you. Emptiness doesn’t care whether you stay or go. Consciousness doesn’t mind what you do or leave undone.

But still. When you name it, you also bring forth all it isn’t.

You don’t have to do that anymore. You can; you don’t have to.

And see how in all of this – this wondrous encounter with Void, this penetration into the Sacred Heart of Christ, this union with God, all the holy secrets and mysteries unraveling at the Mind’s altar – there are still birds singing, and in between the song there are still these soft silences.

And there is still the one who – hearing them – loves them. Loves them. And the love streams, pours, flows – now grateful, now amazed, now studious, now amused . . .

Only this, of course. Always only this. But also – oh my Lord – this.

In the morning I take my coffee to the barn and sit on a bale of hay. It is still dark though eastern hills bleed pale light. Mid-April but still cold enough to button the old flannel overshirt my father wore.

Pull the purple wool cap Chrisoula made down over my ears.

Sit shivering in the dark, sipping coffee, listening to birds sing.

Listening to birds sing, then listening to the silence between the songs of birds.

Shiver: coffee: bird song: silence.

And eventually – as faint beams of sunlight enter the barn through dusty windows, and caffeine sets the blood humming – getting around to wondering:

Does bird song break – does it fill – the silence?

Does silence support the bird song? Does it make the bird song possible?

And so on, in variation.

Coffee: bird song: silence: inquiry.

Yet the questions – because of their underlying reliance on the existence of cause-and-effect, and its underlying reliance on linearity, none of which we are allowed to take as Truth – go nowhere.

Go on and on going nowhere.

And yet.

Sunlight illumines banks of cloud laying still on the horizon: mallow and lilac, roseate accents, lavender folds. How fast one’s coffee cools, the mug chilling already-chilled fingers!

The bird song and the silence cancel each other, like one plus minus one leaving zero. There is neither bird song nor silence: there is only emptiness. Only stillness.

There is only this – this this – pouring itself continually from itself into itself: the nameless and formless endlessly creating what is nameless and formless endlessly creating.

So what? Who cares?

Really: who cares?

Finish the coffee, rise and stretch. Set the mug on a shelf near the WD-40, and get going on chores. Throw feed for the chickens and fill their waterers. Throw hay to the horses, water them under watchful eyes. Head indoors to slice apples for drying, get bread dough going, hang laundry, wash dishes. Write and teach. This and that.

And so on and so forth and so on.

How sweet to touch the hem of the Mother’s dress as she passes in the morning! How satisfying to care for the Father in His many forms asking for care. Thank Christ for coffee in mid-Spring, and mornings given to the birds.

Thank Christ for you, in whom and through whom all of this is given, over and over, in love.