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.

Like what you’re reading? Consider signing up for my weekly newsletter. No sales, no spam. Just thoughtful writing about love and A Course in Miracles.

What Does A Course in Miracles Teach?

Someone asked me the other day: what does A Course in Miracles teach? And I foundered trying to answer it because everything I wrote seemed bent on making the course attractive to new students or me attractive as a Course writer. How hard it is to be honest! How hard to accept how little the truth asks of us – simply that we let it be.

There is a natural tendency to glorify so-called spiritual paths and to credit ourselves just for walking on them. In my own life, I did that most acutely with Buddhism. I wasn’t serious about it. I didn’t want to do the work. I liked the idea of being Buddhist – and I liked the local Buddhist culture a lot – but it didn’t resonate in a deep way.

It wasn’t until I was nearly forty that I was ready to be grounded in a spiritual path – to study the scripture, listen to the teachers and integrate a practice with my daily life. I’m hardly immune to the fantasies and prattling that characterize a lot of ACIM, but I’ve managed to stay attentive to it, and relatively disciplined, and so in a stumbling sort of way, I have made a space in which it can function.

One of the harder aspects of the course is coming to terms with the fact that it is rigorous and demanding, and that the work we are called to do is not especially sexy or appealing. We are not seeking the beauty of Love itself but rather those blocks which impede our awareness of Love itself. That is its core teaching.

And those blocks are ugly, stubborn, repellent, cunning and quite frequently terrifying. But if one is going to practice A Course in Miracles, that is the work. That is what we do.

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).

It is fun to think of ourselves as truth-seekers and bringers of the light and all of that. It’s fun to call each other “brother.” But ACIM is not well-suited to clubbiness (all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) and sooner or later we have to see that we aren’t really bringing light but shadow. We have to see that what this particular path calls for is not truth-seekers but people who are ready to a) look at the obstacles to truth and b) accept a guide who can undo those obstacles.

I am slowly coming to appreciate this in a very deep way. The truth is given – it is there. We don’t have to become pilgrims in search of anything. But if God, or Love, is present – right here, right now – then why can’t we see it or feel it or know it?

To be a student of A Course in Miracles is to be ready at last to focus like laser on that question. We are done looking for God. We take on faith that God is. We are ready now to consider the mind that has arranged to not only obscure God’s isness but to make even looking at that obscurity a dangerous sin. It is not for the faint of heart.

Thus, A Course in Miracles teaches us that the atonement is simply the recognition that Love is given. It dawns in our mind as we gently seek out the clouds that block it and allow Jesus and the Holy Spirit to undo them for us. It is the marriage, not the month’s rapture, to paraphrase the poet Jack Gilbert. It is the work of a lifetime. And when we begin it in earnest – and begin to sense those first faint glimmers of light – no other work will satisfy.

A Course in Miracles: Please Take Notes

Often when I step back a bit from A Course in Miracles – disentangle myself from its metaphysics, the demands a sincere ACIM practice makes (or seems to make) – I am struck by its simple origins. It began when two people agreed to try and find a way out of mutual conflict. And it began too with willingness with respect to relating to Jesus.

“This is A Course in Miracles. Please take notes.” That was the first clear directive that Helen Schucman recieved from what she initially called “the voice,” and what she later identified as Jesus. What follows is well-known. She did take notes – quite faithfully, in a sort of stubborn way – and shared them with Bill Thetford.

Relationship – with Jesus and with one’s brothers and sisters – is the ground of the Course. Its helpfulness is premised on being open to our healed mind (symbolized by Jesus and the Holy Spirit) and extending love to others.

In time we learn those two forms of love – listening and loving – are not separate but more like two sides of the same coin.

So we can learn a lot, I think, simply by focusing on that ideal of relationship, that powerful early example the scribes offer of kindness and willingness. It wasn’t that Schucman and Thetford set out to create a new spiritual path, or become popular gurus, or get rich off a vedantic revision of Christianity. It was simply a desire to be kinder and gentler in relationship with others.

And – importantly – it also reflected a willingness to hear Jesus and then do what was asked. This is as true of Thetford as Schucman. As she says in the preface, Bill had his “special assignment” too.

Thus, if we look at the origins of the Course, we might ask where we are in respect to it: are we working diligently at being nicer to people, especially perhaps those people to whom we don’t really want to be nice? Are we making space in our life for a relationship with Jesus, one that is not premised on answers to our questions?

Maybe we can ask: if Jesus asked us to “takes notes,” would we?

Of course, we are at different places with respect to how this works – and even how it ought to work. I know that. The Course meets us where we are and it’s no use pretending otherwise. Often I think I’m half a step away from Heaven and then I’m gently reminded how much work remains. It’s okay. You reach a point where the expectation of divine reward subsides a little. You trust that what is happening is what is supposed to be happening. The ego’s ranting and raving becomes a little less influential. There is some space in which peace is not a stranger.

Perhaps it is never a bad idea to keep things simple. For me, sometimes, that takes the form of stepping back from the Course, looking at it more generally and more gently. I try to avoid heavy duty analysis in favor of gratitude. I come away remembering that all that is really going on here is that a) I am learning to be in relationship with my right mind and b) I am learning to be in relationship with you. The one facilitates the other.

And truly, that is the work of a lifetime.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

In 1872, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem (1263 – “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”) that neatly sums up how human beings awaken to knowledge of God. When she wrote this poem, Dickinson’s greatest work was behind her; there is a sense in which these eight lines feel almost like an afterthought. But in truth, it is one of her finest pieces of work, a helpful note for those who turn to her not only as a wonderful poet but also as a spiritual preceptor.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
the Truth’s superb surprise

We are by nature bent on discovering the truth of our wholeness – that is, we know at the deepest level that we are separated and broken and dimly remember a state in which we were not. Our return to that state of perfection and wholeness is what drives the spiritual and religious quest. Indeed, Karen Armstrong has argued that spiritual epiphany or insight – a personal experience of the transcendent – may well be the primary defining human characteristic (The Case for God, p. 9).

Thus, Dickinson’s premise is that we must ultimately have “all the truth.” We cannot settle for part of it. This is reminiscent of Jesus’ repeated insistence in A Course in Miracles that compromise is not possible. We cannot have some light and some darkness too. Everything and nothing cannot, by definition, be mutual possibilities (e.g., T-3.II.1).

And yet, we are not – most of us – ready for the whole truth. We are so deeply enmeshed in the ego’s argument that we are bodies at war with other bodies, stalked by an angry and vengeful God, that if we were wrenched out of it at once our heads would explode. As Dickinson puts it the Truth’s “superb surprise” is simply too bright for us. And so it is revealed to us gently, circuitously even – as if the Holy Spirit loops us ever closer to the vivid center of being where only Love exists.

This calls to mind an important passage in the text of A Course in Miracles in which Jesus reminds us that we are not going to advance lickety-split from nightmare to awakening.

So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awakening, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, not to fear, the Voice that calls with love to awaken him; a gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed and where his brother was his friend (T-27.VII.13:4).

Dickinson says something similar in the final half of her wonderful poem.

As Lightening to the Children eased
with explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
or every man be blind –

Though we are clearly adults in body, in our spiritual lives we are more like little children. Orphans, even. The Truth must be revealed to us gently and slowly, in pieces, with clear and simple explanations of what is happening, so that we see the light gradually. It is the only way, suggests Dickinson, that a human being can come at last to Truth.

Jesus does not disagree.

How can you wake children in a more kindly way than by a gentle Voice that will not frighten them, but will merely remind them that the night is over and the light has come? You do not inform them that the nightmares that frightened them so badly are not real, because children believe in magic. You merely reassure them that they are safe now (T-6.V.2:1-3).

When I briefly (and ineptly) studied and practiced Buddhism in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I was deeply invested in enlightenment as an “aha!” moment. Waking up was an event bestowed upon worthy individuals by worthier ones – notably Buddha, although I was still deeply infatuated with Jesus at that time. It was something external to me that would be handed over as a reward – kind of like a badge or a trophy.

It took me a long time to see the silliness of that position, and even longer one to accept the alternative. Fortunately, Jesus is patient. In time, I began to understand that the Holy Spirit was not separate from me, and that “me and I” were simply shallow and painful symbols of the powerful decision-making mind.

You are the dreamer of the world of dreams. No other cause it has, nor ever will (T-27.VII.13:1-2).

Jesus is not talking about the figure in the dream – the egoic self to which we are all more or less still attached – but to the dreamer who projects the world. When we see that, we can assess the results of our efforts. And finding them wanting – as rigorous honesty will inevitably do – then we can open up the door to an alternative. We can let Jesus and the Holy Spirit help us to “see” better.

In essence, we are letting them “dazzle” us with happier and happier dreams until we can at last let dreaming go altogether.

There is enough testimony out there to conclude that for some people, this awakening thing really is like a snapping of the proverbial fingers. They go to bed with the ego and wake up to the Holy Spirit. But for most of us, the truth indeed “dazzles gradually.” We pray, we practice, we do what is in front of us. One step forward, two steps back. Maybe a little slide to the left or right. Maybe we stop by the roadside and cry a little, or whine about how hard it is. Maybe we help somebody or let somebody help us (thank you!).

Little by little we start to realize that the rays of God’s love are both more plentiful and present. We are happy – don’t analyze it! – and getting happier.

Take heart for those moments when you are aware of – and can accept – God’s love, even if it’s just a sliver. When we are starving, a crumb is better than nothing. Soon enough you’ll be ready for the occasional crust, and then a thick slice. And one day – maybe this afternoon, maybe next year, maybe in a decade or two – you’ll embrace the whole loaf. It’s all God asks.