Gifts of Light (Just Hug Already)

Say that you and I are sharing together. We are in a cafe, perhaps, having tea or coffee. We are talking about Emily Dickinson and her struggle to adequately express her deep spiritual insights and experiences in the Christian and other patriarchal languages that were given to her.

There I am. There you are. There is the tea and the coffee. And there is the cafe around us – tables and chairs and booths, wall art, mirrors, baristas . . .

Can you see our dialogue? I don’t mean can you imagine the scene I just described; I mean, in that moment, can you see our dialogue – can you the sharing that we are co-creating in the moment?

Does it have a form? Does it move? Is it responsive? Alive?

If it’s easier, try this: at some point today or tomorrow you will have a conversation of some significance with someone. When and as you do, can you see the dialogue you are having? Can you see what is being co-created in the moment?

Does it have a form? Does it move? Is it responsive? Alive?

I am indicating here a shift in how one understands the verb “to see.” I am defusing it from the bodily senses and expanding it to include the finer, subtler tones of awareness. What is revealed when we “look” at what is abstract and conceptual? Beyond the names we give it, can we see it? Experience it? Does it see and experience us?

Although this takes getting used to, one can develop a way of seeing that doesn’t “stop” at bodies and other material objects, but rather takes notices of the patterns – the energies – in which those bodies are dimly implicated.

I am thinking here along these lines in A Course in Miracles:

The wish to see calls down the grace of God upon your eyes, and brings the gift of light that makes sight possible. Would you behold your brother? (T-25.VI.3:1-2)

And, related:

As nothingness cannot be pictured, so there is no symbol for totality. Reality is ultimately known without a form, unpictured and unseen (T-27.III.5:1-2).

The exercise I am suggesting is not strictly aligned with A Course in Miracles. I have simply over the years found it a helpful way to manifest “the grace of God” upon my eyes so that I might “behold my brother and sister.”

When the focus shifts from the body to what is creating, we make a move in the direction of mind, where abstraction is natural. The body is inherently limited, but the mind is not – it can travel, don masks, give without losing, gain without cost. It defies the limitations of the body.

Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind . . . Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one (W-pI.161.2:1, 4:2).

When we share together, our ideas are abstractions that meet and create new abstractions. Your ideas enter me, and mine enter you, and new ideas exfoliate accordingly. In this way, love extends itself without limit or condition.

The suggestion I make is to give attention to this at the level of creation. That is, rather than look at a specific idea or thought or image, note the creativity literally forming and reforming – folding and enfolding – in dialogue. See the mind in its natural condition and mode of expression.

This is not a metaphor! Our capacity for awareness is highly evolved, if somewhat alien to us in our present state of identifying so intimately with a body. Exercising awareness is restorative; it is like being slowly filled with light and – prism-like – radiating rainbows everywhere.

When we give attention to one another and our shared creating in this way we “give welcome to the power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations” (T-27.III.7:8).

I think this sort of thing can get complex and mysterious pretty quickly. Notwithstanding my deep love of complexity and my not-so-secret longing to always be the smartest guy in the room and adored by all, I think the real work here is not to understand intellectually, but to just practice seeing.

That is, seeing – in the sense the course is using here – is not an intellectual exercise but an actual act we take in relation with one another. It’s like the difference between defining “hug” and giving/getting a hug. I mean, of course, let’s talk about the etymological roots of “hug” and all that, but also . . . let’s hug already.