Notes at Summer’s End

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.