Light on the Separation from God

A Course in Miracles explains the origins of our guilt and suffering in the world in terms of a mistaken belief that we are separated from God. In this sense, the separation is the only real problem that we have (W-pI.79.1:4).

Thus, our separation from God is what we are trying to solve, or resolve. Or dissolve maybe. When that separation ends, then our journey from fear to love ends too. Our suffering is diffused into joy.

The temptation in talking about separation is to regurgitate the mythology of A Course in Miracles (i.e., “Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh” (T-27.VII.6:2)). But that’s tricky, because we sometimes take that mythology literally. Or else we get bogged down in the metaphysics, like wading through heavy mud. What had the idea? Who forgot to laugh?

Literal translations of what are meant to be helpful fictions, and metaphysical wool-gathering, are really just means by which we keep the possibility of salvation far off in the future. Why do that when it is available now?

So what is the separation? How do we make contact with it? And, importantly, what can we do to facilitate its demise?

A Course in Miracles says that we are “at home in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to reality” (T-10.I.2:1).

That is a nice image: we are asleep in heaven, dreaming we are in hell. So all that one has to do is wake up from the dream. There’s nothing to be done in the dream itself. The dream is the level of illusion. The cause of awakening does not reside there.

The Son is the Effect, whose Cause he would deny. And so he seems to be the cause, producing real effects. Nothing can have effects without a cause, and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both (T-21.II.10:6-8).

If we could see the clarity of this, it would liberate us from sorrow and confusion: we live in the dream of separation, and there is nothing inside that dream that we can do to end it. The action takes place at another level, internally.

At some point, human beings – or consciousness, if you like – took a wrong turn. We differentiated ourselves from our environment: the flowers, the trees, the buffalo, the people, the stars. We decided all that was out there and that we were a perceptive center. Naturally this made us feel special. We began to feel entitled. We wanted more. And we wanted better.

David Bohm has written about this clearly and persuasively.

[f]ragmentation . . . originates in thought – it is thought which divides everything up. Every division we make is a result of how we think. In actuality, the whole world is shades merging into one. But we select certain things and separate them from others – for convenience, at first. Later we give this separation great importance. We set up separate nations, which is entirely the result of our thinking, and then we begin to give them supreme importance. We also divide religions by thought – separate religions are entirely a result of how we think. And in the family, the divisions are in thought. The whole way the family is set up is due to the way we think about it (On Dialogue, 10).

The problem, of course, is that when we separate ourselves in this way, we seem to be alone. At the ontological level, this is terrifying. And it is way less satisfying than being one with stars and tulips and sleepy babies and turtles sunning themselves on logs and all of that.

In a way, over time, without ever once stopping to consider what we were doing, we set our tiny selves up as rulers only to learn that we had given up the only Kingdom there is.

This is a fact of human cognition and perception; it guides our thinking right now. And rather than face fear and dissatisfaction head on and re-embrace Oneness, we double down on separation. We continue to deny reality and we begin to project our fear outside, out there. This is the ego, the false self that insists on specialness and opposes God, and thus becomes the symbol anchoring our ongoing experience of separation.

Exclusion and separation are synonymous . . . We have said before that the separation was and is dissociation, and that once it occurs projection becomes its main defense, or the device that keeps it going (T-6.II.1:4-5).

This dissociation inevitably leads to conflict. We want to become better than what was One – stronger, faster, smarter, bigger, more powerful. We want to triumph over what we abandoned – not in the least because we are afraid of it, afraid of its retribution. We begin to concentrate on improving ourselves: our appearance, our belief systems, our weapons, our medicine, our stories. You and I do this; we all do this.

What you project you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project . . . projection will always hurt you. It reinforces you belief in your own split mind . . . (T-6.II.2:1-2, 3:1-2).

In this way, our focus is no longer on being but on becoming. And that is how the idea of time is made and sustained: one needs a future into which they can project their imminent perfection, as well as a past at which to look back on and judge as “less than.”

This happened. We did this. And projection became our default mode of perception. And the distinctions and divisions and fragments multiply exponentially.

This is how A Course in Miracles can say that the separation “occurred over millions of years (T-2.VIII.2:5).

In time, we forgot that the separation was simply a decision that we made – a way of thinking insisting it is “right” and “objective” when it has literally no grounds to make that assertion. Oneness became the dimmest of dim memories, a state that belonged only to rare human beings who had attained superhuman spiritual insights, like Jesus and the Buddha. We made God cruel and indifferent. And as our anguish and guilt predictably deepened, we passed it on to the external world through projection. The problem was never us – it was never our mode of perception. It was always some imperfection or flaw in the external world. The other was the problem; not us.

And in a way, this worked. We built bigger and better cities. We beat back plagues and lowered infant mortality rates. We tripled our life spans. We crossed the ocean and flew to the moon. We invented money, six-string guitars, representative democracy, and water purification filters. We invented cheese-flavored popcorn.

On the surface of it, there is so much for which to be grateful!

But of course we remain broken. We remain miserable and unsatisfied. The “God-shaped hole” that Sartre noticed yawns wider and wider. We yearn for inner peace. All this might be very subtle, barely noticeable, but it is there. It is the essence of our human condition. Deep down we sense we are as grand as moonlight, as deep as the sea, as strong as a mountain, and yet our lives appear to be a struggle with suffering until we admit defeat and die . . .

What is whole has everything and so never knows yearning. But what is separated from wholeness knows only lack and scarcity. That is the condition of those who sleep and dream of hell. That is the itch we gave birth to eons ago and have never managed to scratch.

And it will only get worse. Consider:

We have tried education but all that learning has not saved us. We are smart but we are hardly wise. We build cars that go 120 miles per hour and set the speed limit at 65. Five hundred years ago we killed each other with axes and clubs and now we have nuclear weapons – we can eliminate all life forever – and we call it progress. We call it safety. Where is the wisdom in that?

We tried wealth but that hasn’t worked. The emptiness we are talking about cannot be filled with fancy cars and elaborate houses and designer label clothing. Saving for retirement isn’t the worst thing in the world but it won’t restore wholeness to our fragmented minds. We still hurt each other. We still gorge on food we don’t need. Money brings out the worst in us, not what is wise.

And even religion has failed us. Jesus said two thousand years ago that “the kingdom of God is at hand” and “love they neighbor as thyself” and where are we? Twenty-five hundred years of Buddha, two thousand of Jesus, five hundred years since the enlightenment, a century and a half of Thoreau, fifty years of Gandhi and Martin Luther King . . . where are we?

Part of coming to terms with the separation from God is accepting that there is no external system that is going to save us. Not A Course in Miracles, not the law of attraction, not a rigorous study of David Bohm. We have to see this. We are beyond systems now. We build these systems with our separated minds and all they beget is more separation.

I think you and I can see this if we look closely at what we call life and don’t shy away from what we see there that is uncomfortable, unfamiliar or scary.

The separation is really no more than a habitual mode of thinking that privileges the egoic self over Oneness. It is a way of thinking that manages to screw everything up while simultaneously denying that it’s doing anything wrong. The problem is always out there: if we could only elect a different politician, or persuade people to become voluntarily poor, or stop eating meat, or become celibate, or follow Jesus . . .

This is why A Course in Miracles says over and over that salvation is literally nothing more than the recognition that we are doing all of this to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this is still true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream (T-27.VIII.10:1-6).

Salvation is the return to wholeness. It is the end of separation. It is literally a shift in thinking, a new paradigm in the structure and movement of thought.

If you look at the workbook lessons of A Course in Miracles, they are rarely taxing or demanding. We don’t have to crawl across cut glass. We don’t have to stay in one position for six hours. We don’t have to tithe or cut off our hands or confess all our supposed sins in public.

Rather, the lessons simply ask that we devote some consistent time and energy to a shift in our thinking, away from fear and towards love.

The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world. The exercises are planned to help you generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is equally applicable to everyone and everything you see (W-In.4:1-2).

The course insists that there is a space beyond the familiar structure of our thinking that we can access and that accessing it will transform all life as we know it.

What is beyond thought? Can we be still enough to find out? Devoted enough? Everything comes down to this!

The whole premise of ACIM is that yes, we can go beyond thought’s limitations. Quite easily actually. The course is very practical in this regard. It is very simple and clear: do this, then do that. We don’t even have to believe in it what we are doing – its efficacy, its rationale. We just have to be willing.

And gradually, as we practice, the belief system of separation is replaced by love, which is one. This is in the nature of a return, a dawning awareness of what was given to us by God, and how that gift remains pure and whole and true right here, right now.

We can have that experience of unity. We can know the deep and quiet stillness of knowing that nothing is that isn’t God. We can be that stillness. We can know only love.

But that knowing ends as soon as thought enters and says: I want this experience to be mine! As soon as we remember “me” and try to clutch experience to that self – to possess the experience, own it, manipulate it, lord it over others – it ends.

Oneness is what is – the given – and separation is the thought that reaches in and tries to make what is whole and one fragmented and many.

We can observe this movement in our thoughts if we are attentive. If we watch our thinking – how it arises, what it does, where it goes, what it asks of us, how we respond – we can see how thought makes time real and shifts us away from being to becoming, from our home in love to our exile in fear.

It feels very natural to us to be in time and to be devoted to becoming, to self-improvement. But once we have experienced the alternative, even a little, we see that in fact it is separation and fragmentation that are deeply unnatural. The calm stillness of inner peace – lit by the Christ, the love inherent in all of us – is our true natural state.

All this can seem very mystical and abstract, but it is not. We are living the separation right this very moment, and we can choose to live the alternative right now too. We can move from fear to love.

When we do that, we see how thought is illusory – and how perception is illusory, too. Not in the sense of a hallucination – a thing which isn’t there. But rather, a thing that is there but is seen wrong and so confused with something else. When we choose to return to God, which is to remember that we never left God, then clear seeing becomes our experience and our belief in separation falls away like mist in a rising sun.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 168

Your grace is given me. I claim it now.

We claim God’s love – God’s grace – in confidence, not because of anything inherent in us, but because of what God is. God does not distinguish between minds that sleep and those which are awake. God is not bothered by the appearance of the world or the ego. Love seeks nothing but itself, and since there is nothing but itself, Love is all it finds.

You and I don’t believe that, otherwise we do not need – would not bring forth – projects like A Course in Miracles. We perceive a world that is literally made by distinctions and differences, many of which are in conflict with each other. Violence and grief abound. Whatever good there is – and we do see good – is easily offset by the bad.

Therefore, when A Course in Miracles asserts that hope and despair are literally impossible in reality (W-pI.168.2:1), our reaction is to call it nonsense or just pretend it makes sense through various intellectual dodges. Only a fool would pretend there isn’t sometimes cause for despair.

And yet.

. . . in grace you see a light that covers all the world in love, and watch fear disappear from every face as hearts rise up and claim the light as theirs. What now remains that Heaven be delayed an instant longer? What is still undone when your forgiveness rests on everything? (W-pI.168.5:3-5)

Good questions it doesn’t hurt to actually pause and try to answer for ourselves.

The essence of this lesson is that we don’t personally contribute to grace, beyond our willingness to remember it, to “claim” it. We don’t invent grace, sustain grace, or amend grace. We simply ask that it be given and then rest in anticipation of remembering that it has already been both given and accepted.

Would God not gladly give the means by which His Will is recognized? His grace is yours by your acknowledgement. And memory of him awakens in the mind that asks the means of Him whereby its sleep is done (W-pI.168.2:4-6).

Therefore, the simple mechanics of the lesson assert that God is correct about love and we are confused. We are simply clarifying a perceptual error.

Your grace is given me. I claim it now. Father I come to You. And You will come to me who ask (W-pI.168.6:5-8).

Critically, we do not have to believe this! We simply have to be willing to try it. Our motives are beside the point. It doesn’t matter why you want to go home if you are already home.

A Course in Miracles works by degrees, which is to say, it works as we work it, to the very degree that we work it. There is no judgment in this! As the lesson makes clear, God’s love is perfectly given whether we are asleep or awake (e.g., W-pI.168.1:9-11). We do the best we can and then let the spiritual chips fall where they will. God’s grace teaches us not to fear their falling.

←Lesson 167
Lesson 169→

Ending Projection Through Service

Projection is the foundation of our grief and sorrow. It gives rise to illusions which confuse our ability to redress problems where they actually are.

One way to undo projection, and by extension its pernicious effects, is through service to our brothers and sisters.

It is understood by most students of A Course in Miracles that the external world – from the smallest of its flowers to its most cataclysmic wars to our most beloved and intimate companions – is an illusion.

The illusion arises through projection. When we project, we dissociate from our own ideas or attitudes and place them on external objects ranging from people to places to weather events. That way, we are not the source of discomfort or fear or guilt; the external object is. We see the rain that cancels our picnic as the cause of our sadness.

It is this cause-and-effect relationship that underlies our experience of the world as illusory. We are sad because we have projected responsibility for our happiness onto an external object which is neutral and incapable of causing anything, much less sorrow.

When you project, you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated (T-6.II.2:1-3).

We can think of projection is a device that sustains our perception of separation from God. It is the means by which this fundamental dissociation is sustained. Thus, projection is an active and ongoing rejection of oneness. So long as it goes on, healing – and thus happiness and inner peace – are impossible.

The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth. such a rebirth is impossible so long as you continue to project or miscreate (T-2.I.3:7-8).

It is imperative that we bring projection to its end, and it is also our responsibility to do this.

How shall we end projection?

For many years, I approached the question of projection from the experience of self as center. I would examine my experience of being Sean in the world and consider everything as a projection. This ACIM teacher is my projection. So is my wife. This student is a projection and that cashier and both my parents and the neighbor down the street whose dog is always after the chickens and . . .

I tried very hard to look closely at these and the situations that arose in conjunction with them: my feelings, judgments, desires, biases. What I was willing to see, what I didn’t want to see. What was I disowning? How could I retrieve it?

There is nothing wrong with that approach. In fact, there is a lot that is helpful. Our careful attention to the external world as a sort of unconscious extension of the self can be very healing.

In time, however, I began to experience this dynamic differently. Significantly, I saw that not only were you my projection, but that I was also your projection.

This insight destabilized the personal I which appeared to function as the center from which literally everything else radiated. Suddenly, the center as such was everywhere. And as a result, my personal projections and perceptions became less important. I began to see in a deep and sustained way that we are in this together, and so our healing is entangled.

This is the beginning of awakening.

A teacher of God is anyone who choose to be one. His qualifications consist solely in this; somehow, somewhere he has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else’s. Once he has done that, his road is established and his direction is sure. A light has entered the darkness (M-1.1:1-4).

Here is an interesting and helpful experiment: go through your day thinking not about your personal growth and spiritual evolution but rather everybody else’s. Think of yourself as simply another illusion in their dream of separation and then be the best illusion you can possibly be for them.

If you do this, you will notice that you are far less focused on your own stuff – your disappointments, fears, obstacles, goals. You become more interested in other people – what they’re thinking and feeling, what they’re trying to do, where they need help and where they simply need to be left alone.

You will find it becomes natural to understand what they want from you, and then to give that to them. If you have not yet seen the face of Christ, this can bring that experience much closer in a tangible and pragmatic way.

Few things are as satisfying as helping our brothers and sisters step a little closer to God. It is both an honor and a privilege to be a speck of light in another’s dream. Thus, our work becomes being there for them as wholly and fully as we can. We give ourselves without reservation.

This is effective because our brothers and sisters are our own self. The gift we extend to them is the gift that we extend to our own self. We are not losing anything in service; rather, we are gaining everything, even when the at of service appears illogical or irrational.

When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless him. His need is yours. You need the blessing you can offer him. There is no way for you to have it except by giving it (T-7.VII.2:1-4).

When I stand in front of a class, I think: they have put me here. They made me. And I try to be aware of that as I teach – as I move around the classroom, shepherding dialogue, grading papers, answering questions and prodding them to go deeper or farther with this or that reading or insight.

When I sit down at the dinner table, I do the same thing. And when I attend meetings with municipal leaders. And when I attend holiday gatherings with extended family. And when I talk on the phone with fellow ACIM students. And answer emails. And . . .

We are never not able to be of service to those who long for awakening, because their longing is our longing, and by responding to it, we respond to our own self. It is natural and simple and the way is always clear. The path opens up before us literally as we walk it.

Remember the beautiful words Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Thus does Jesus encourage to see that we do not live in a world of strangers but rather a world of brothers and sisters who are our collaborators in salvation. Everything we do can be holy; everything we do can testify to love.

In this way, we are redeemed by the power of service. It relieves us of self-interest and make our lives a record of giving to each other. We have to be here for one another in active and loving ways. We do not enter Heaven alone or by degrees: we go hand-in-hand, and our going is Heaven itself.

The Veil Before Christ’s Face

It is important that we not confuse the veil that obscures Christ’s face with the face of Christ itself. The veil terrifies us; but Christ integrates us instantly and wholly into Love. So long as we are scared, even to the tiniest degree, we  behold the veil before Christ’s face, and not Christ itself. We don’t need to denigrate ourselves for doing this; it happens. It’s okay. We all do it. But we can help each other undo it, too.

The veil before Christ’s face is a symbol. It represents the fear and guilt that underlie our experience of separation from God and Love. Thus, the veil is not external, though sometimes what is external can help us to get a handle on where and how to look for it. There is a point in one’s practice of A Course in Miracles where the interior landscape begins to clarify and we can move around in it easier. So we know where to go to look at the fear and the guilt, and we know the safe spot to which we can safely retreat, regain strength and come back again.

This is the work! It is why we study the course – to learn how to look in a gentle sustainable way at the blocks that stand in the way of Love, which is to say: the fear and guilt that function as a veil obscuring Christ. Nothing else matters. Our income tax bracket, our broken marriage, the books we haven’t read, the bottles of booze people we love kill themselves in . . . none of it.

All that matters is looking at the veil in order to learn that the veil is not there.

The veil hangs dark and heavy and still – more like a wall of iron with terrifying faces painted on it in blood – inside of us. It’s there when we’re burying a beloved dog and it’s there when your child gives us a Valentine even though it’s April. The outside means nothing to it. Don’t look for the veil in what is external. Don’t look for anything there – not even Christ.

All we are learning to do – all this lifetime and this study and this practice is for – is look at the veil. And when we make contact with it, then all that matters is coming back to it over and over until at last we are ready to draw it aside and give attention to what it has long kept hidden from us.

The veil across the face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, they are all different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself that holds him off from you, and you away from him (T-31.VII.9:1).

This is not hard to understand intellectually. We are one and our failure to recognize this is the separation. So the atonement is simply the acceptance of our oneness. Our brothers and sisters are not apart from us and we are not apart from them.

We know this at the level of mental thought. But we do not feel it as the truth of our being. And so we do not live it. I look around the room as I write and you are not here. You are in your room, with your prayers and your books and your people. And thus I still labor under the illusion that my body and your body are what really matters. Thus do I perceive the gap that separates us as real. Leonard Cohen sang about this very beautifully in his song Closing Time.

I loved you for your beauty
that doesn’t make a fool of me
You were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there’s a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body’s really you

We get confused. The world seems so real to us. The way it tastes and feels, smells and sounds. The way other folks arise in it as friends and enemies and lovers. Parts of this world are so lovely, we can’t imagine giving them up. Parts are so horrifying, we can’t even allow ourselves to think about them. Our bodies please us one day but fail us the next. We try to understand it and figure it out and make it mean something, but it doesn’t. It can’t. Not consistently. This world was made to hide the face of Christ, not reveal it.

Sooner or later we see this function of the world and at last let it go. We close our eyes and grope for the hand within – the hand of Jesus, who leads us to the Holy Spirit, who perfectly enfolds us and leads us gently and surely to the veil that we have placed between the Love that is God and everything else and helps us pull it aside. Nothing is real except what lies on the far side of the veil. The whole journey was a dream: only this is real.

When one reaches this place, it is possible to become frozen for what feels like a lifetime. We find ourselves wanting another spiritual practice or a better teacher or improved life circumstances or another run with psychotherapy or a new exercise regimen. And all of this – however appealing, however apparently logical – is merely a form of delay. All any of it means is that we are going to come back to this moment again later. Why wait? Why postpone love?

If you are reading this, it is because you have done the work and found the companions who both guide you to the veil and then stand beside you while you decide whether – finally – to reach out and brush it aside. If my word counts for anything: there is no better time and we are not joined for any better purpose.

We do not need to be afraid of God any longer. We do not need to be separated from Love any longer.

Let us join together in a holy instant, here in this place where the purpose, given in a holy instant, has led you. And let us join in faith that He Who brought us here together will offer you the innocence you need, and that you will accept it for my love and His (T-19.D.i.9:6-7).

We stand with each other in order that we might each turn within and find the imagined source of darkness and pain. We are joined as one that we might look at guilt and fear and see it dissolved. The veil before Christ’s face is undone in our mutual service and attentiveness. And seeing it – and knowing our brothers and sisters stand with us, and that we are joined by the mightiest of companions – we at last are ready to undo it. We reach out with trembling fingers towards this last obstacle to Love: it shifts: disappears: and then . . .

Krishnamurti and A Course in Miracles

I remember years ago picking up a copy of Krishnamurti’s slim but powerful book Freedom from the Known. Krishnamurti is a complicated figure, as likely to arouse conflict as anyone else, but I think beyond the level of opinion, his articulation of the human condition in relation to what might loosely be its spiritual search is clear and helpful. It is natural to ask what, if any, relationship can be found between Krishnamurti and A Course in Miracles.

In Freedom from the Known, Krishnamurti neatly frames the dilemma.

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to – then you will also see that this living thing is actually what you are – your anger, your brutality, your violence, your despair, the agony and sorrow you live in. In the understanding of all this is the truth, and you can understand it only if you know how to look at those things in your life. An you cannot look through an ideology, through a screen of words, through hopes and fears (15).

As soon as we say that is the truth – whether we are pointing to the Catholic Church or Islam or A Course in Miracles – then we are no longer talking about truth. We can accept this insight intellectually, of course – most of us are quite sophisticated about these things now – but that is different than understanding it at the level of mind, where change is actually possible, and where change must happen, if it is to happen at all.

On the one hand, I think Krishnamurti would have been quite dismissive of A Course in Miracles. It is a clearly Christian text and relies entirely on Christian ideas, images and symbols. To the extent that the course aims to undo all of this – and I believe it does – it still does it in the first place.

Krishnamurti urged his followers to a sort of radical attention. This is not so dissimilar to what quantum physicist and philosopher David Bohm taught in his work on dialogue and creativity. We need to make contact with thought outside the lens of the self: our judgments, our opinions, our feelings and all of that. We have to pay attention to the movement of both the observer and the observed.

Lee Nichol has written clearly and helpfully that this sort of engagement – the radical undoing that facilitates contact with Truth, with Reality – can only happen when one has done considerable work on themselves.

Bohm claims that the ramifications of the ego process – both individual and collective – are at the root of human fragmentation and suffering. At the heart of his dialogue proposal was the prospect that awareness of the movement of ego, willingly engaged in by a number of people simultaneously, might quicken insights into the ego process that could take much longer if approached only on an individual basis.

In other words, we have to work on who we are – we have to make contact with our own ego experience before we can begin to make contact with the Truth that it obscures.

This is very much in the wheelhouse of what A Course in Miracles teaches. Indeed, one could say that what A Course in Miracles is about is simply making contact with all the ideas and opinions and idols that obstruct our capacity to see and know Truth. Truth is given. When we see this, the need for learning is over.

Love is not learned. Its meaning lies within itself. And learning ends when you have recognized all it is not. That is the interference; that is what needs to be undone. Love is not learned because there never was a time in which you knew it not (T-18.IX.12:1-5).

This is what Krishnamurti refers to when he talks about the need to go beyond the level of teachers and ideology and words.

There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you – your relationship with others and with the world – there is nothing else . . . when we look at what is taking place in the world we begin to understand that there is no inner and outer process; there is only one unitary process, it is a whole, total movement, the inner movement expressing itself as the outer and the outer reacting again on the inner (Freedom from the Known 15, 16).

One of the charges sometimes laid against A Course in Miracles is that it is too dense and metaphysical and thus encourages an ultimately unhelpful intellectual approach. Certainly I have been guilty of this in my own practice. And yet, reading Krishnamurti often feels even more risky in this regard. He is clear what is needed – attention, freedom, courage and so forth – but somewhat less clear in what to do when we can’t seem to bring that about. In many ways, he was an incredibly disciplined teacher in refusing to allow his teaching to be codified or reduced to a system.

I don’t doubt a lot of human beings are okay with that. But others – and I am one – needed a better map. A more practical map. The Truth might be a pathless land, as Krishnamurti observed when dissolving the Order of the Star, but some of us need to pretend there is a path in order to figure out – sooner or later – that here is no path.

I don’t think Krishnamurti is especially helpful in that regard. I speak for myself of course. While I find his writing deeply inspiring and clear, I often fumble in their application. It was not so different from reading a lot of Christian mystics, from Saint John of the Cross to Thomas Merton. One felt such longing to be where they were and believed that such a longing could be satisfied and yet . . .

How? How?

This was caused Bohm to be frustrated near the end of his life with how his work on dialogue was being received and practiced. Certainly, it is connected to Nichol’s observations. If you have only a vague sense of where you want to go but no earthly idea how to travel or what direction to face or who to turn to for guidance, then you’re going to foment more of the separation and fragmentation that you want to avoid.

This is where A Course in Miracles is especially helpful. It is a course! It is a year-long class that one can take at one’s own pace and return to as necessary. Its sense of order – a text, a workbook, and a manual for teachers – is precisely the sort of framework that can move one to that place where understanding and following Krishnamurti can actually bear fruit.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false (T-16.IV.6:1-2).

Thus, however much one disparages guides and authorities and teachers, one can also be grateful that some helpful ones exist. A Course in Miracles has proven a critical system in helping to clear my mind of the detritus that clouds truth. It is as we dissolve those clouds – according to a sacred rubric, guided by the Holy Spirit – that we begin to understand at last what Krishnamurti was getting at.

To be able to look at this seems to me to be all that is needed, because if we know how to look, then the whole thing becomes very clear, and to look needs no philosophy, no teacher. Nobody needs to tell you how to look. You just look (Freedom from the Known 16).

We must be true to ourselves. We must be honest. And we must be rigorous. If we need help, we need to ask for it. If one teacher does not work, then perhaps another will. Krishnamurti and A Course in Miracles can be a good fit. There are others. You know.

A Course in Miracles: If You Knew Who Walked Beside You

walking
we always walking with one another . . . that which is holy and helpful walks beside us . . .

A Course in Miracles is a challenging and rigorous spiritual path. It demands a level of attention and willingness that often feels foreign to us. It is not about seeking truth or beauty, but about finding those beliefs and idols that stand in the way of truth and beauty – and that level of seeking can only be undertaken by the very determined. Indeed, absent the help of others – including symbols of Love like Jesus and so forth – our practice would be impossible.

Here is how Helen Shucman’s Jesus puts it in A Course in Miracles:

Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it. If you knew Who walks beside you on the path that you have chosen, fear would be impossible (T-18.III.3:2-3).

It is perhaps impossible not to conceive of the course as resembling a path on which one journeys. It is implicit in the human condition: we evolve, change, move in this direction or that. Narrative evolves both to explain and entertain.  And so, until we are able to grasp the simple fact espoused by Krishnamurti – that truth is a pathless land – then we have to work with metaphors and symbols.

That is why the Jesus we encounter in the text and workbook can teach us that he “walks” beside us, as does the Holy Spirit. Indeed, they are our guides out of the world of paths and progress. Without their sure guidance in which to place our trust, we would be permanently lost in fear and guilt. We would be caught in an endless loop of lovelessness.

You do not know because the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it . . . You go toward love still hating it, and terribly afraid of its judgment on you. And you do not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have made of it (T-18.III.3:3, 5-6).

One of the things that we should not fear is our reliance on symbols – right symbols can be used to undo falsity. That is, if we approach our lives and our spiritual practice with Jesus and the Holy Spirit (themselves symbols), then all symbols can be converted to helpfulness. Everything we have made – the world, our bodies, other bodies – can be used to undo what we have made. Beneath all the hell and misery through which we stumble bereft, remains a single flicker of love. It is enough to redeem us.

. . . your goal is the advance from fear to truth . . . Let us join quickly in an instant of light, and it will be enough to remind you that your goal is light (T-18.III.2:2,5).

How do we make contact with the one who walk beside us?

It is simple: we reach out to one another. We make the way lighter for our brothers and sisters and we allow them to do the same for us. Jesus said it two thousand years ago: whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me as well. He is saying it now as well.

You who hold your brother’s hand also hold mine, for when you joined each other you were not alone. Do you believe that I would leave you in the darkness that you agreed to leave with me? In your relationship is this world’s light (T-18.III.4:1-3).

We are not alone. The way appears fearful indeed – and the work perhaps beyond our capability – but we are joined by those whose love and light will replace our meager efforts and sustain our wavering faith. Look no further than the one who stands beside you – in the grocery store as you shop, in the bed where you sleep, in the woods where you pray. Love is with us always in the form of our brothers and sisters, as we are love unto them.

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