A Course in Miracles Lesson 158

Today I learn to give as I receive.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that revelation – direct union with God – is beyond the scope of what can be taught (T-1.II.2:1-3). Vision, on the other hand – recognizing our own self in our brothers and sisters and thus joining with them – is very much a skill that we can learn. And it is this to which the course directs it efforts. When we have accepted Christ’s vision, then our experience of being bodies in a world will be a happy dream that reflects – that symbolizes – the perfect wholeness of Heaven.

This distinction matters! The course teaches us a new way of thinking about miracles – shifts in thought that unite us with one another by teaching us that we have shared – not separate – interests. The more miracle-minded we become, the more our experience of living includes the free flow of Christ’s vision gently bringing all of us back to our home in the Mind of God (T-1.II.1:6, T-1.II.2:4-5). Miracles are practical and helpful. They undo each and every block to our awareness of Love, no matter how seemingly large or intractable. Given to serving the Voice for God – the Holy Spirit, our healed mind – miracles become radically transformational. They literally induce a peace which surpasses understanding.

Lesson 158 is very much concerned with facilitating our relationship to miracles. It wants us to deepen our miracle-mindedness and implies that we are ready to do so. It makes perfectly clear that our facility with miracles is intimately – is divinely – yoked to our relationship with our brothers and sisters. We do not end this meandering horror show alone. We are each the other’s way out. We are each other other’s savior.

Thus, we are called by this lesson to practice – to make manifest in the world – the Vision of Christ. We do this by insisting on seeing each one of our brothers and sisters as “another chance to let Christ’s vision shine on [us], and offer [us] the peace of God” (W-pI.158.10:5). Our experience of this love perceives only “an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearfult thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin” (W-pI.158.7:3). We refuse the separation and actively embrace the atonement.

Christ’s vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created . . . It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees (W-pI.158.7:1-2, 4-5).

We accomplish this – we make it possible – by recognizing that “the world can not give anything that faintly can compare with this in value” (W-pI.158.8:2). We want to be saved; we want only to be saved.

So we have to be clear about what is working and what is not when it comes to ourselves and our lives in this world. We have to be clear that the world does not offer us the peace and happiness for which we long. It never has and it never will. There is no constellation of external people, things, places and events that will bring about true joy. So long as we are holding onto the world even a little, we cannot begin to practice the vision of Christ. We have to empty our hearts entirely.

This letting go cannot be an intellectual exercise. If we are simply being logical and concluding that yes, the world does appear to be doomed so a spiritual alternative makes good sense, then it won’t be effective. It has to come from a sense of pervasive despair. Our helplessness has to be total and our sense of desolation utter and complete. It has to be felt in a deep way. Most of us don’t surrender willingly. We really have to go all the way down in defeat.

Yet – and this is where ACIM metaphysics can be really useful – we already are defeated. We don’t have to go on with the same old suffering. If we are attentive to our living – within the world, within these bodies – then we can see clearly the futility of our efforts, our own will. We’ve already been here and we’ve already done it. This surrender – this willingness to recognize that the world offers us literally nothing that we want – has already been accomplished. If we see this, then we can move on to seeing one another not as bodies but as light itself.

Thus do you learn to give as you receive. And thus Christ’s vision looks on you as well. This lesson is not difficult to learn, if you remember in you brother you but see yourself (W-pI.158.10:1-3).

Don’t wait on this! Look honestly at your life in the world and ask what it has gained you. Be clear about the peace that you want, and the happiness you want to have in order to share. Search out the love that you dimly remember. And come to this practice of kindness: this willingness to look on the world with Christ’s eyes – a vision that forgives, that embraces all it rests upon with love and joy. It is not easy because it is unfamiliar. But the doing breeds remembrance – this loving inclusiveness is what we are in truth. Give it and we receive it. And receiving it, we are brought back to our Creator in Heaven.

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A Course in Miracles Lesson 156

I walk with God in perfect holiness.

God does not move; we appear to move. The course is using “walk” here to reflect both our understanding of the world brought forth in separation and the reality of the real world. Basically we are on a journey that is an illusion because there is nothing to leave behind, nowhere to go, and nobody and no thing to do the journeying.

We don’t know that yet, and so we need helpful illusions to teach us and steady us while we learn. Hence, we “walk with God in perfect holiness” (W-pI.156.8:5).

The value of this lesson then lies in our ability to take it seriously but not literally. It points to something, and empowers us to integrate this something into our lives in the world so that we can ultimately go beyond it.

You cannot walk the world apart from God, because you not be without Him. He is what your life is. Where you are He is (W-pI.156.2:4-6).

The key word in that quotation is “life.” Life is where the abstract perfection of God – itself impossible to imagine in the context of separation – becomes tangible to an exquisite degree. That is because the course emphasizes not many lives in many forms but one life, inclusive.

There is one life. That life you share with Him. Nothing can be apart from Him and live (W-pI.156.2:7-9).

Tara Singh often observed that there was “one life beyond appearances.” Therefore, the maple tree that you pass on your walk only appears to be separate. Same with the chickadees on it limbs, the dandelions at its base. Same with the soil and the sun and the rain. All one.

It is possible to give attention to this one life. We can start by loving the seemingly separate instances of it – who doesn’t love a maple tree full of chickadees – yet in time this love will generalize. We will stop seeing the form as an example of oneness, and begin to see oneness because of the form (and thus effectively eclipsing the form). The chickadees are our brother, and the maple tree is our brother, and Tara Singh is our brother, because there is only one life.

This love – which begins as a remembrance and self-transforms to a present recognition – is a gift in which our innocence is revealed as a gift that we are giving unto the world.

The light in you is what the universe longs to behold. All living things are still before you, for they recognize Who walks with you. The light you carry is their own. And they they see in your their holiness, saluating you as a savior and as God (W-pI.156.5:1-4).

The light that we carry is shared – it is not Sean’s. It is not even “ours.” It cannot be possessed. It can only be recognized, and it is only recognized when it is shared, or allowed to extend itself through us. This sharing is kin to the willingness to see only what is true. What is true is Love in which all differences – those that are negative, those that are positive, and the full spectrum in between – are undone. Since we too are merely a symbol of life, we get out of the way, and let Life be Itself for Itself. That is what salvation is.

As you step back, the light in you steps forward and encompasses the world. It heralds not the end of sin in punishment and death. In lightness and in laughter is sin gone, because its quaint absurdity is seen (W-pI.156.6:2-4).

We are not guilty. Guilt depends on separation for its existence – separate bodies, separate interests and the endless string of conflicts in which those bodies become entangled, often in terrifying ways. Yet when we see there is one life – not our life, but one life – then the grounds for guilt are dissolved and our innocence appears, like a light that cannot be put out.

This happens in time. It happens to selves apparently encased in bodies. It happens in the world. Collectively, it is the transformation of nightmares to happy dreams, and it is reflected in our shared willingness to be servants and peacemakers rather than masters and warmongers.

When we declare that we walk with God, we take a stand against separation – which is death – in favor of Life, which is God, which is Love. We live on terms that reflect our shared salvation, and thus make salvation real for the world.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. That means that if we asked who walks with us a thousand times (e.g., W-pI.156.8:2), then we would do it every minute and a half. We literally would not go two minutes without stopping to ask: who walks with me? It sounds crazy, right? But is there any evidence that Jesus is not being literal here? Isn’t this a variation on the old idea to ask and ask again. 

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:7).

This lesson invites us to an intense devotion, the ultimate fruit of which is freedom. We awaken when we remember – and are no longer willing to forget – that it is God who walks with us, that we bear within us a holy light whose radiance we can neither diminish nor eliminate. Holiness, it turns out, is the condition of life. We go with God always, as God goes with us.

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Coherence is Movement

Coherence is in motion. It is a moment, much like a river as it moves from higher to lower ground, bounded by banks. This distinction matters, inasmuch as we seem to have a tendency, innate or otherwise, to look for static, one-off solutions. We imagine that there is a blueprint for truth and reality and if we can find it and study it, then we will have the answer and every conflict will be solved and will remain so forever.

But coherence is not like that. Indeed, no sooner do we say “this is coherent” or “this view will make us coherent” then we are wrong. We are being incoherent. Coherence cannot be trapped in amber or reduced to bullet points. Krishnamurti said that “truth is a pathless land.” So what we are suggesting then is that maps are static but the territory is alive and shifting and changing moment to moment. It is a movement for which the map – even a very good one, a very clear one – cannot be a permanent substitute.

Thus, if we want to be coherent – or have an experience of coherence – then we need to let go of some presuppositions. Chief amongst these is the notion that truth can be caught in time and held in place. It has no qualities that allow us to do this. It is not even an idea or a thought. Ideas and thoughts are easily held, fossilized or codified, and given physical manifestations. Sometimes that activity can reflect coherence but it is not itself coherence.

What I am saying – what I am sort of circling around saying – is that we cannot ourselves make coherence. We can’t force it. On some level, even to have it as a goal is to miss the point, and so ultimately to miss coherence. Some Buddhist teachers will tell their students, you cannot become enlightened if you wish to become enlightened. Or perhaps it is also a bit like the artist Jasper Johns who said that to be a great artist, one has to give up everything, including the desire to become a great artist.

For most of us, this sort of direction (trying to awaken is what prohibits awakening) – if it even qualifies as direction – is maddening. We believe that reality can be known and measured and that actions can be taken based on those measurements. It is like building a bridge or updating software – orderly and predictable to the point of routine.

But if that is so, then why are we in crisis – personally, communally, globally? Why are things breaking down at all levels?

It is seeing that – seeing the incoherence of our fundamental assumptions, the ones that give rise to our beliefs, which in turn drive our perceptions and then our actions – that enable us to take our first tentative steps in the direction of coherence.

I say “tentative” and I mean it. If we are going to create meaning in a coherent way, and experience coherence, then we have to move slowly. We have to keep in mind that we are not building anything nor even discovering anything but simply encountering something that is already present and already dynamic. It has its own energy apart from our judgment and perception.

In that light, then, the qualities that enable us be coherent are not necessarily what we would expect. For example, a quality of attentiveness is very important. We have to give attention to what is happening in an internal way. We have to see how our thoughts emerge, the shape they take, the nature of their movement on the inside, and how that affects the outside.

Really, it is a kind of attention that slows things down, or takes things one at a time. It doesn’t multitask. It wants to see what is happening with our anger, say, but then it also wants to see what is happening with our assumptions about the anger. As David Bohm often pointed out, if we are looking inward without questioning our assumptions then we are not going to get anywhere because it is the assumptions that are doing the looking.

What he meant is simply that we might assume that anger is bad and if that is the case, then we are going to “see” anger as bad. We have to see that assumption that colors our inquiry. When we do, its power is diluted considerably and we get a clearer sense of how the anger operates – its relation to some central self, the way it drives the body into fight or flight and so forth. All of that can be very valuable but in order to get to it, we have to get to the assumptions. And in order to get to the assumptions we have to be patient, and attentive, and even painstaking. The reward for this can be quite impressive – coherence is healing and peaceful – but we cannot overlook the hard work upon which it rests.

On Guilt, Corsets and A Course in Miracles

I was talking with a friend the other day about forgiveness. In particular, I was harboring a grudge with an ACIM teacher who is not meeting my personal standard for gender equity. Cut him some slack, my friend said. He’s your father’s age. It’s a generational thing.

When we find ourselves really hating on somebody, it’s not a bad idea to take a look in the mirror. I don’t mean that in a critical way – like we’re really the rotten ones who deserve disdain and rejection. I mean rather that we need to be aware of how our guilt facilitates projection and how that projection creates a world full of others who are responsible for our problems. I’m not screwed up and confused about gender – look at how carefully I always write “brothers AND sisters” – but that other teacher . . . man, it’s like the nineteenth century all over again.

Our so-called enemies are our best teachers, if we can crack the door just enough to let Jesus in.

And yet . . .

Cutting people slack is not my strong suit. I like guilt to be as tight-fitting as a nineteenth century corset. I want it to be so close it hurts.

The problem is, that corset isn’t just on you – it’s on me, too. It’s choking both of us. Guilt – much like corsets – doesn’t really do anybody any good. They force us into unnatural positions – that is, we are naturally kind and loving and joyful and guilt crimps us with fear and anger. Corsets could cause long-term health problems, too – just like guilt and anger can. You don’t have to believe in the body to take this seriously. A lifetime of guilt only lengthens the nightmare through we are stumbling. It’s a sort of spiritual constriction. Why not break free?

Probably there are ACIM students so naturally gifted they sneeze and wake up in Heaven. I’m not one of them. For me, it takes work. It takes forgiveness. That means that I have to pay attention to what’s going on in the so-called dream. It means I have to see when I’m enslaved by the ego and when – grudgingly sometimes, haltingly sometimes, tentatively sometimes – I’m listening only to the Holy Spirit.

When I am in the throes of the ego – as when I am griping that so-and-so insists on calling women “brothers” – I need to slow down and ask for help. Maybe cutting people slack isn’t something for which I’ve got a knack, but Jesus certainly does. It’s okay – it’s more than okay – to ask him for a few tips. It’s my experience that he answers and that his answers are always helpful (which is a separate issue from my resistance to those answers).

When we understand at last that the world is composed of our projections and that these projections merely reflect our self-hatred, greed and guilt, then we get to entertain some real healing. We get to invite the teacher in who knows a) how screwed-up and sketchy we think we are and b) that we’re really just healed minds at one with God. This healing might not feel especially metaphysical. It’s probably not going to be dramatic. Rather, you get to look at the so-called sexist ACIM teacher and see your anger with him as resistance to healing. And so you can see, too, that he knows something you don’t. And maybe – just maybe – you can let go of that anger and finally ask for the help you’ve been longing for since time began.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Quite the opposite, actually. But I am saying that it’s doable – for you and for me. We can chuck these corsets any time we want. We can celebrate the unconditional sisterhood we share with God. The only question is when.

Striving for Littleness: A Course in Miracles

A frequent theme of A Course in Miracles is that of littleness and grandeur – the former representing the ego and the latter, God – cannot coexist (T-9.VIII.6:4-5). We are explicitly urged not to be content with littleness – but rather to seek a majesty and magnitude befitting the wholeness in which we are indelibly created and thus create alike.

Littleness and glory are the choices open to your striving and your vigilance. You will always choose one at the expense of the other (T-15.III.1:7-8).

There are a couple ideas I want to be clear about in my thinking here. The first is that the course is accepting – tacitly – that striving and vigilance are part of our experience in the world. They are facets of our learning. This is important to see because it is easy with the course to drift off into “it’s all a big illusion” and nothing matters. Forgiveness is hard work and it requires some tenacity and some discernment. We do not simply announce our intention to accept Jesus and then coast off into a Heavenly sunset. Rather, we realize that we are bereft and we begin to work our way back to wholeness. For some of us, the way back is A Course in Miracles and its generous view of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

So if we are students of the course, then we are going to strive for glory and we are going to be vigilant on behalf of the Kingdom. Two thousand years ago Jesus taught his followers to repent because the Kingdom of God was near – literally at hand. As John Crossan has said, this reflects a sapiential eschatology – that is, God waits for us to act and to join him, not the other way around. It is a radical perspective – quite out of sync with most of Christianity which continues to emphasize a distant judge whose retribution in the form of an apocalypse we must await in fear and trembling.

This striving is not effortful although I think it appears that way sometimes. It certainly feels that way at times! For me, it requires a level of attention that is not always natural or habitual. Hours can pass before I look up and remember that I want to think with Jesus and not the ego. So I have to be attentive and forgiving – okay, I slipped for a few hours but I’m back. I am turning my mind and its thoughts over to Jesus. This process is also facilitated by creating space in which it is possible to be still and quiet. For me, that is most often in the early morning before Chrisoula and the kids wake up.

I try to avoid what Krishnamurti called “pre-meditated meditation.” That is, I don’t sit in a particular position or take any particular approach. Sometimes I am on a zafu, sometimes on my knees, and sometimes I just sip tea in a rocking chair. Sometimes I am deeply quiet and sometimes I chat with Jesus and sometimes I just fret about work or one of my children or how to pay the mortgage or whatever. In all those spaces, I simply try to be with Jesus: I try to think with him. I try to see my thoughts with him. That’s all. No more but no less, either.

The other aspect of that quote from the text that I appreciate is the difference between littleness and grandeur. In the context of that section, it is making a clear distinction between things of the world and things of God.

Everything in this world is little because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness can content you. When you strive for anything in this world in the belief that it will bring you peace, you are belittling yourself and blinding yourself to glory (T-15.III.1:5-6).

Eschatology is a word that refers to endings. In Christianity, it reflects the so-called end times, the end of the world. Eschatology is a kind of world-negation – either because God is coming to end the world or because we are going to leave it by finding God. The course is not so dissimilar, really. The afore-mentioned passage clearly indicates that we cannot find peace or joy or meaning in the world because it is so little – indeed, it is the very manifestation of littleness. The world is not sufficient unto God – and so we who are God’s creations, one with God, and creating alike God cannot be content with it or in it.

Thus, an ACIM student who strives for God and is vigilant for God’s presence is negating the world. That’s confusing! Our egoic self would like us to understand that negation in terms of no more cheesecake, no more hugs, no more sex, no more Emily Dickinson poems, no more midnight walks with the dogs, no more riding horses with our daughters, no more this and no more that.

But we are not giving anything up. We are not turning away from the world so much as revising or rethinking the world. We are in it to learn how to undo it. And so we eat the cheesecake and keep Jesus in mind. We make love and keep Jesus in mind. We play tag with the kids and keep Jesus in mind. We change the oil in the car and keep Jesus in mind. And so on. That’s it – and it’s hard to accept sometimes that it’s enough. Just staying close to the idea of Jesus in our mind is enough to undo the world and deliver us to the gates of Heaven.

Defending an Illusion

The first and biggest illusion is our identification the body. Conflating it with self is the surest way to demean that self – to make it vulnerable, temporary and degraded. When we talk about defending illusions, this is the biggie – this is the one upon which so many others rest. When we are no longer insanely devoted to this idea that we are the container and not the content that fills it, then we are going to know real freedom. We are going to remember our identity in God.

Defending an illusion is the ego’s great raison d’etre – it is how it came into effect and it is how it sustains itself. We cannot bear the loveliness of what we are in truth – indeed, we actively resist that love. We are sure that we have broken with God and that God is angry to the point of vengeance and – more to the point – at the deepest levels, we want that. We want to be God. That’s how special we believe we are – we think we are God.

But you see, the egoic self knows something – it knows that despite its yearning for power and eternity and all of that – it isn’t that. It knows there is something else. It knows that the thoughts of God are its undoing. And fearing that – determined above all else to preserve itself – it hides as much as it can in the body. Indeed, the body’s frailty and impermanence is the best case the ego can make that we are not God. And yet – even as it makes that argument – the ego hates the body, because it does not want to die with it.

This is the sort of craziness that defies logic. I think understanding it – at least the rough outlines – is important. The ego is subtle at times and vicious at others but its goal never changes. It wants to survive. It does not want to die.

It is only be allowing the ego to be undone – by sharing it with the Holy Spirit, taking our lead from Jesus – that we can learn that what we are in truth cannot be killed. It cannot be injured. It is perfectly whole and perfectly safe and has been that way forever and will remain so forever as well.

Often, we say that our lives are on big illusion – “it’s all a big illusion,” we say. I say be careful of being dismissive and – I say this from experience – from faking an understanding of the metaphysics that underlie the course. The ego is a big fan of intellectual appreciation – it can so easily use it as a tool of comparison. I’m not as smart as that student and not as awakened as that one. And so forth. Illusions are not undone by reason but by a love that has nothing whatsoever to do with the body.

The ego exerts maximum vigilance about what it permits into awareness, and this is not the way a balanced mind holds together. The ego is thrown further off balance because it keeps its primary motivation from you awareness, and raises control rather than sanity to predominance (T-4.V.1:3-4).

That love is a kind of attention. It is an awareness that disregards the ego’s voice – its judgment, its insistence, its guilty insinuations and its angry demands. This love simply observes – it sees. What is seen without judgment is seen with the Holy Spirit and what the Holy Spirit sees and finds out of accord with the thoughts of God, it simply dissoves. It undoes on our behalf. And with each such undoing, we are made a little more whole. We are brought a little bit closer to truth.

Our best hope is not to defend illusions but to give up on them entirely. Let them be! Who cares? They are dust and detritus blown by the ego’s idiotic ramblings and scramblings. They can obscure the truth for a little while but of themselves they are without substance. There is nothing to defend – we are not under attack and even if we were, what we are is perfectly impregnable and impervious.

We can start opening the space for undoing by gently catching ourselves as we focus on the body. Maybe it shows up in fatigue or hunger or lust. I have to have this! I have to have that! And suddenly, our well-being is so integrated with the body that the two – self and body – are hardly distinguishable. Tease them apart. Don’t worry about being hungry – just look at the hunger with Jesus. Don’t worry that you have crazy thoughts when you’re tired at work. Just look at the thoughts with Jesus or the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to be well – that’s going to be taken care of for us. We simply have to want to be well – it takes the briefest moment, just a flash of longing. I want to remember who I am. And then you have opened the door and all the help you need pours through. It’s already happened. It’s already done.