Why Coherence Matters

The inclination to judge something – a person, an idea, a situation – as either good or bad and then to react accordingly is part of our biological heritage. It is what the brain does. Viewed in terms of evolution, one can appreciate why this happened. The organism – our body – has a survival instinct. It wants to live. In order to do that, it needs to recognize food and water that is safe to consume. It needs to recognize that a sabre tooth tiger poses a physical threat. It needs to distinguish between a human being who approaches with hand outstretched in welcome and one in whose hand a bloody knife is wielded.

So far as its capacity to judge goes, the human brain’s evolution has been intense and even sophisticated. Perhaps complex is a better word. Having figured out that fire was useful in many ways – it provide light against darkness, heat to be warmed by and to prepare food by – the human brain proceeded to tackle the question of how to make fire safely, consistently and predictably. Lightening is not the best or mots reliable source of fire! And then, having so learned how to make it, one learned how to carry it and nurture it and shape it to circumstances. There is a difference between a cooking fire and a light by which to walk through shadows. You can follow this developing – track it – from those first dangerous and uncontrollable fires all the way to figuring out how nuclear fission works. It’s just a process, one step leading to the other.

Seeing that process, can we also question it? I don’t mean challenging it on academic grounds – arguing about whether it tracked this way or that way and when the specific movement occurred and so forth – but rather: can we question its necessity? For example, cooked meat offers a greater degree of safe and sustainable nourishment than uncooked or undercooked meat. When the winter winds blow, a fire is not just a question of comfort but of survival. Can we agree that at that level, the brain’s activity made sense? That the emerging understanding of fire – as a form of energy that once harnessed facilitates in helpful ways the biological imperative to survive – was a net positive.

But the brain didn’t stop there. It kept going. It figured out at some point that the destructive powers of fire – fearful in the extreme – might also be contained in ways that could be directed at one’s enemies. Fire wasn’t just a personal boon but a weapon, too. And so we kept studying it and refining our use of it. We did something similar in the field of agriculture and shelter, in politics and economics. And at some point – it is hard to say precisely where and when – we crossed a line. We stopped seeing the evolution of mechanics and culture in terms of what could sustain the organism. Or rather, the evolution outstripped our capacity to evaluate each development on its merits. The brain just goes. And goes.

Thus, the sensibility of fire eventually becomes nuclear power and we have nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. The comfort and security that our far distant ancestors could only dream about has become a reality. But at the same time we have introduced an instability that effectively renders all our progress moot. We have made it very easy to ruin the world. Our ancestors wouldn’t have conceived that. Wise minds would have created differently.

For example, I often remark to myself while wandering through old New England cemeteries – a habit of mine – how tragic it is that so many children died before reaching adulthood. In 1850, amongst white families, nearly 217 infants per 1,000 died. In black families, the rate was 340. The infant mortality rate in the U.S. over the past three years averages just over seven deaths. That’s quite a reduction. And – certainly as a father and hopefully as a member of the human race – I am corresponding gratified that medicine has evolved in ways that make that reduction possible. I don’t think anybody would argue that’s a bad thing.

Yet the same human brain that managed to creatively and technically solve such a tragic problem also cast a violant pall over the world in which those children live longer. In 1850, disease and malnutrition could wipe out close to thirty percent of children. Nuclear war can take out virtually all of them.

That’s not a win-win situation.

It is, however, a powerful example of incoherence: devoting our problem-solving capacity to a “solution” that can only yield greater problems.It is easy to see how saving children’s lives makes sense – but nuclear power and weapons are hardly so logical. It is as if we are unable to discriminate or exercise control over the effects of our reasoning. Politicians might argue that nuclear missiles ensure a nation’s survival but this is only true – if it is true at all – under such grim scenarios that nobody should want to make the argument. Means and ends are wildly out of alignment. And we seem increasingly incapably of making them coherent – that is, bringing them into alignment.

I am interested in the possibility that we cannot solve this problem by the means at our disposal. Thought – the brain’s output – is powerful, often in admirable ways, but it lacks the means to self-correct. What I am calling wisdom is really just the capacity to be self-aware and self-reflective and it seems to be largely if not entirely absent. Wisdom sees the incoherence inherent in thought and sees too the way that thought denies its incoherence – by obscuring it or by projecting it outward. In this sense, wisdom is not a new way of thinking but a way of being aware of thinking. If we can watch thought – at the personal level and the cultural level both – without judging it then we create some space in which a new movement is possible.

It is easy to say that nuclear war is not rational. Plenty of writers and thinkers and soldiers and politicians have said that over the years. Ever since the first bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there have been voices challenging the ethics and morality of utilizing such power. But the presence of those voices – the persuasiveness of their arguments, their organization into focused collectives, and so forth – has done nothing to slow or contain the growth of that power. We have created and set loose the very chaos and instability that we once sought to inure ourselves against.

If we see this, then we might begin to say that opposition as we traditionally understand it – logic, persuasion, demonstration and so forth – are not working. Perhaps we might even begin to see that they are part of the problem because they arise from – and reinforce – the source of the problem. If we can look at this without judgment – if we can be aware of what is happening and our thought is implicated in what is happening, then we can become aware of the incoherence, which is often quite subtle, quite hard to catch. But even a glimpse – just seeing that what we are doing is not working either at the production of nuclear power end or at the opposition to that power – can help us to establish a ground from which some new possibility might emerge.

Indeed, it seems to me that under present circumstances there is no greater calling.

 

Defense Mechanisms and A Course in Miracles

When we think of defense mechanisms in psychological or spiritual terms, we usually mean a way of thinking – of projection, say, or denial – by which the truth is intentionally obscured. The egoic self perceives as a threat and so engages in some pattern of thought – some habit of thought, a reflex of thought really – that keeps it at bay. In terms of A Course in Miracles, we might say that all defense mechanisms, regardless of their particular form, are in the nature of a wall. They maintain a separation – of self from Truth, self from Source, self from God.

Defense mechanisms are not – in the most ideal sense of the word – natural, but they are certainly common. They are reminders of the fact that both of the course’s scribes were Freudian psychotherapists. Freud defined defense mechanisms as psychological weapons wielded by the subconscious in order to manipulate reality. In A Course in Miracles which, while influenced by Sigmund Freud, also breaks with Freudian thought in notable ways, we all experience them. As we practice ACIM or in another spiritual tradition we are able to undo them. And the deeper we go, the more defenses we find. The undoing is somewhat constant – until we reach that place where the choice is very stark and we can undo them at their source, eradicating both the specific forms of defenses that remain as well as the inclination to create new ones.

I think it is helpful to remember that we are defensive even against Jesus. Whatever our practice, whatever its symbols of healing and love, on some level we are resistant to them. On the surface we can gush about how wonderful they are, wax rhapsodic about their virtues and impact on our lives but deeper down we don’t want they have to offer. The egoic self is entrenched and will not relinquish its position willingly.

Because our defense mechanisms are products of the egoic self and its belief system and thought patterns, we cannot undo them when we are relating only to the egoic self. Some other energy is going to have to enter the process. We have to change our minds but not in a superficial way. It is not simply a question of saying, “well, I am defensive but I am not going to do that anymore.” It has to resonate in a deeper way, a more holistic way. If it is coming only from the ego, from the shallow levels of pain and pleasure, then it won’t work except temporarily. And we want a more permanent solution.

So it is good to start by seeing our defense systems in action. This is quite an accomplishment in and of itself! The ego does not appreciate light of any kind. So as soon as we make a commitment to seeing egoic thought patterns at work – observing how they arise, how they operate, what their effects are and then deciding whether we still want those effects or not – we are undermining the ego. We are relating to our self at a deeper level. And we will know this because we will see – at least initially – how hard it is to watch the egoic self at work. It resists any effort to really know it.

There is nothing for that difficulty but to persevere. Keep looking. At first it will be hard. Your mind will drift. You will slip into excuses – I’m only behaving this way for justifiable reasons. And so forth. But soon you will come to a place where the inclination to judge what is happening in your thoughts will loosen its grip. You’ll be able to see yourself think. When that happens, patterns emerge. You begin to see that the ego is very quick and slippery but it is not especially complicated.

I will give you a personal example. For a long time I was an angry person. I knew that there were aspects of my childhood that had been painful and unfair – situations where power balances were askew and so I was unable to protect or defend myself. No wonder I was angry – it was a sort of delayed response to an unjust past. Nobody could argue with me. Nobody could say I should do it otherwise. But one day I had to admit that believing in that narrative was a way of explaining the anger but it did not relieve the anger. It just displaced it.

On day, after I’d found A Course in Miracles and had been studying it for some time, I saw that whenever I felt anger it was always a response to fear. Maybe you are thinking, “wow, you never had a therapist who pointed that out?” But you see, it is no good having somebody else explain it, or reading about it in a book. That is just the intellect – it is just remembering what somebody else said about your problem. Real solutions are born at the level of personal insight. You see the anger and then – like lightning flashing – you see the fear.

Once that happened, I never felt anger the same way again. Every time it showed up, I would just let it go in order to see the fear that lay beyond it. And the fear was always there. Pretty soon, I didn’t think of myself as a guy with anger issues – I thought of myself as a man in fear.

The ego does not appreciate that! The anger had a story attached to it. It was all about me. It was always easy to justify by pointing to external circumstances – difficult aspects of childhood, the annoying behavior of coworkers, economic injustice, whatever. But the fear was different. It was more amorphous. It didn’t seem to attach to anything so much as just exist – like a cloud that lay over the land as far as the eye could see in four directions.

So you sit with what is revealed. You get past this problem and you find another one. And you sit with it. I sat with the fear. I held it up to the light. Let’s look at this: how does it show up? What does it do? What does it make me want to do? And so forth. Again, it is a question of just looking – looking with Jesus, if you will. Or the Holy Spirit. We are saying to the egoic self, I can’t make use of you in this situation so I’m going to turn elsewhere.

Of course, that “turning” is symbolic – but it is incredibly helpful. It is incredibly powerful. We are opening up regions of mind that have hitherto been left darkened and empty. In essence, we are unifying our thought – bringing the power of Mind to bear on our fractured and separated little mind.

When we are able to look at our defense mechanisms in this way, we are blessed with insight. And insight always undoes the mechanism, enabling us to go even deeper into the question of who and what we are in truth. I am not saying that it is easy but it is simple. It is really all that we are called to do – bring the light of understanding to bear on our conflicts and confusions. As we do that – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly – they are dissolved and a corresponding peace enters. Joy heightens. And we are able to continue the necessary deepening, the necessary sharing.

Solving Problems with A Course in Miracles

Yesterday, while mowing the lawn, I fell into a funk. I remembered a lie that I told many years ago. It was a big lie to somebody who is a relatively important and consistent part of my life. I’ve never been called out on it and now and then I remember it and wonder if I will be. It marks a low point in that particular relationship and I always feel bad when I think about it.

This is a post about solving problems with A Course in Miracles. Feeling terrible is not mandatory, suffering does not build character, and it’s okay to be happy.

I decided to look closely at the lie. I remembered the circumstances of it: the fear I felt in the moment, the anger. The person to whom I lied has not always been nice to me and has sometimes been affirmatively mean. There were people in the room who were supposed to have my back who did not. It was understandable that from a frightened and injured place, I made a mistake. It was defensive and really, who could blame me?

That is how the ego “solves” problems: it breaks them into little pieces. You think you’ve got a problem? You’ve really got fifty problems. And each of those problems? Yep. Fifty more in each of them. Looking closely at the lie only complicated my feelings. Maybe I felt justified in the lie but now I was mad at the people who were supposed to support me and didn’t. So I had to look closely at those relationships. You know what I mean?

It is a web from which we can never quite untangle ourselves. And the ego assures us that our “struggles” are sincere efforts to fix the problem. And so on and on it goes.

A Course in Miracles would end that. It teaches us that we only have one problem – our perceived separation from God – and that that problem has already been solved.

Everyone in the world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the solution that solves them all is to be accepted. Who can see that a problem has been solved if he thinks the problem is something else (W-pI.79.2:1-3)?

No matter what the problem seems to be, it is always the same problem: we believe that we are separated from God and thus must suffer the consequences. When I told the lie, it was because in that moment I did not accept that God and I were wholly one but rather apart.

But – and I think this is really the point I wanted to make – the lie is not the problem either. The problem was that while mowing the lawn, I felt separated from God. So I pulled a story from the past – one of my better ones for “proving” that me and God are on opposite terms – and used that to feel crappy.

Is that clear? I am trying to say that no matter what we are thinking – what movie from the past we’re playing (I told this crazy lie) or what fear of the future we’re indulging (I wonder when I’ll get caught lying and what kind of shame and humiliation I’ll feel) – the only issue is that in the present moment we have denied our fundamental essential unity with God. Period. There is nothing else to solve ever. Nothing else ever happened.

The temptation to regard problems as many is the temptation to keep the problem of separation unsolved (W-pI.79.4:1).

How do we solve the problem of separation? Well, it is helpful to remember that in course terms it has already been solved (see ACIM lesson 80). To experience the problem as solved . . . I bring my attention to the moment – me, the lawn, the mower, the neighbor’s kids, the chickadees, whatever. God is there – I don’t have to do anything. I just have to be willing to realize the truth. If that level of awareness doesn’t work, then I pray. I ask for help. Sometimes I literally fall to my knees and say, “help me for Christ’s sake!”

It takes some time, yes. And we all slip back into egoic modes of thought. But it’s okay. Keep trying. Pray and meditate. Study the course or whatever text or tradition appeals to you. One of these days, we’re not going to feel guilty anymore!

What Do You Do if You Skip the Daily ACIM Lesson?

A Course in Miracles is best understood as a course – a text with accompanying lessons and a manual for teachers. It is true that we can use these resources as we see fit – and that what works for one student is not necessarily going to work for another – but I also think that we are giving short thrift to ACIM if we get too casual about how we study and practice the course. In that light, people sometimes ask: what should you do when you skip your daily ACIM lesson?

I think there are two levels to answering that question: a practical sort of day-to-day level, kind of like telling somebody what to do when they forget their homework. And there is another level where we can actually learn something valuable and transformational because we skipped the lesson. If we choose to see it rightly, we are never not learning.

On the practical level, if you forget to do a lesson, just take a deep breath and resolve to remember tomorrow. If you forget tomorrow, then take a deep breath and resolve to get to it the next day. Very few students actually go through the full gamut of three hundred sixty-five lessons without missing one or two. And given that we are not supposed to become ascetics or monks, the ordinary events of our daily life are sometimes going to crowd in and overwhelm or obscure our practice it happens.

If you are serious about your study – if you are intent on making this your spiritual practice – then it simply does not matter that you are sometimes forgetful or casual. It is your willingness to continue – to return to the practice itself – that will save you.

Lesson 27 is very much to the point on what happens when we miss the application of a lesson – or some aspect of it.

You will probably miss several applications, and perhaps quite a number. Do not be disturbed by this, but do try to keep on your schedule from then on (W-pI.27.4:4-5).

That gentle admonition – and it is gentle indeed – leads me to the second level learning raised by the question of skipping or missing ACIM lessons: there are no consequences. It is worth repeating: there are no consequences.

If you look closely at lesson 27 – and it is hardly the only lesson that states this or its equivalent – you will see that Jesus is very clear. You cannot make a mistake. There is no examination. There are no conditions. And because of that, there are no consequences. You don’t have to be worried, you don’t have to compare yourself to other students, you don’t have to build yourself up or tear yourself down.

You simply have to practice the course to the best of your ability, without stress or anxiety. It is outside every aspect of our lives in the world.

That is a revolutionary idea! We are so invested in being right and reaping the benefits and, conversely, of being wrong and suffering the consequences. It is so ingrained in us and it is such a source of worry and fear and guilt. And the course is teaching us that this kind of thinking – right and wrong, good and bad – simply doesn’t exist. It’s not real. There is tremendous liberation in that.

So don’t worry if you miss a lesson. Remember that you have already passed this course. You are already a teacher of God ready to save the world. Your remembrance of this simply beautiful fact is only a matter of time. Come back to the course. Come back to the lessons. Choose again, in confidence and love.

Joel Goldsmith and A Course in Miracles

Many students of A Course in Miracles are aware of the degree to which reading Joel Goldsmith can be a nurturing and helpful experience. Goldsmith was a twentieth century Christian writer whose view of Jesus and the gospels – and, indeed, the whole range of Christian theology and imagery – was deeply inflected by his study and practice of Christian Science (an oft-unappreciated influence on ACIM), as well as a generosity and mysticism that tends to reflect Eastern spirituality. Goldsmith perceived life in terms of its wholeness. When one realized – or remembered – this wholeness, they simultaneously realized the way in which they were that wholeness. Thus, in what Goldsmith (and his followers) called “The Infinite Way,” one was not separate from God but was contained in and by – and existed through – a pervasive and everpresent God. God is everywhere and all things all the time: as are we, when we remember.

There is neither beginning nor end in or to that which we call God and by our calling are made whole.

In that light, there is not a great deal of theological space between Goldsmith’s work and A Course in Miracles. Hence the interest that students of the one path tend to show in the other. Some spiritual and religious traditions don’t mix well with the course even though they seem a natural fit. Buddhism is a good example. At the surface, it seems to mirror many key principles of the course: the role of past lives and evolving understanding of spiritual principles, training the mind, a goal (or no-goal, as it were) of awakening/reaching Nirvana. But in practice, the two diverge quite radically. There is much less formality and rigidity in the application of A Course in Miracles (especially with respect to behavioral proscriptions) than you often see in Buddhism.*

That’s not really true with respect to Goldsmith’s Infinite Way. He died before the course was made public and so never encountered it personally. But I think he would have recognized that the Jesus with whom he interacted and the Jesus channeled by Helen Schucman were coming from the same place. Both had a “Vedantic Christianity” feel to them, a phrase that Bill Thetford used to describe his sense of how the course fit into popular religious frameworks. No doubt part of this is attributable to their shared influence of Christian Science, a tradition to which the course owes a great deal of its core ideas and sensibilities.

Yet in another way, Goldsmith is quite different from A Course in Miracles. His writing was his writing – while his books often include sections that are channeled, they are by and large his own language attempting to explain his own experience of God and Jesus. This is a significant difference from how Schucman described the origins of the course. Regardless of how one feels about ACIM ideas, it is very hard to argue that it is not an impressive piece of writing. It has a depth and gravitas often associated with scripture or literature. Although the word “channeled” can be tossed around too lightly – and in the case of A Course in Miracles is largely synonymous with “inspired” – there is no arguing that the work Schucman and Thetford created together has a timelessness and beauty and consistency that is remarkable, no less so because of its helpfulness.

In the case of Joel Goldsmith, the writing quality is more sporadic. I don’t mean to criticize him unfairly; certainly other readers will have different views. The Infinite Way is his most readable book. The others are less memorable. But in fairness to Goldsmith, he wasn’t trying to create masterpieces so much as simply share his ideas as widely and readily as possible. He was evangelical in that sense. And in that sense, his work is also a departure from the course. Neither Schucman nor Thetford took personal credit for the work they created and they were slow and reluctant to share it. Goldsmith is always the author of record, and he was always trying to reach as many people as possible.

And he was certainly prolific! If you consider his books and audio lectures together, there are literally hundreds of opportunities to partake of his thinking. His books were often culled from his lectures and presentations and sometimes have a cobbled-together feel to them. There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. I think Goldsmith was a genuine man whose experience of Jesus was authentic. His desire to extend that experience was also authentic – and helpful, too. But it has a different literary quality than ACIM. And, in the end, I think a different effect, too. For example, Goldsmith often told students that “God must become an activity in our consciousness.” People, he said, governed their surroundings “by the nature of what is taking place in you consciousness.” A Course in Miracles does not focus so much on consciousness as a phenomenon in which or through which God appears. It uses the word mind more and emphasizes the degree to which that mind is not embodied.

I often recommend Goldsmith’s book The Infinite Way to people. It is a fairly straightforward read and the most succinct and clarified expression of Goldsmith’s teachings of the many I’ve read. It is justifiably his most famous and popular book. And it is a nice adjunct to A Course in Miracles. Reading it often sheds light on some of the ideas contained in the course – notably the idea that we are already one with God and need only remember that fact. Goldsmith was a big advocate of meditation and prayer, both of which he considered the means by which we reestablished our awareness of our unity with God. He advocated for frequent moments of prayer – throughout the day turning to God in vocal prayer, intensely focused meditation on ideas contained in traditional biblical scripture. By doing this consistently, one would gradually be transformed. Eventually, your faith in God – your capacity to be at one with God – would transcend every other aspect of existence. There would be nothing else.

It is always good to ask about the wisdom and practicality of combining spiritual practices. While I think it is clear that reading Goldsmith is not going to completely confuse most students of A Course in Miracles, it is possible it could delay the awakening experience anticipated by both methods. If you are taking a bus to Boston, and then you stop to take a different bus to Worcester, and then in Worcester grab another bus to Boston, you’re going to get where you’re going but you are extending the time frame considerably. Why delay? A Course in Miracles is very clear and simple: it is a course, not a spiritual path. One reads the text and does the lesson to the precise extent doing so is helpful. The course is deeply pragmatic. It is clear about how it asks us to interact with it.

There is less of that clarity with Goldsmith! With ACIM, if we are attentive and disciplined, we are going to finish the course and move on to what is next: an evolving relationship with the Holy Spirit as our guide and teacher. Again, this is not to criticize Goldsmith so much as to point out that he and the course do diverge in this important way. I think it is good to give oneself to the course for a year. It is not such a long period of time and a certain wholeness of devotion can yield helpful results. If we can be focused on that, we open up some space in which our relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit will deepen and become increasingly dynamic.

Of course, that “still small voice” inside might urge you to read Goldsmith now. And there is nothing really wrong with that and much that can be good and useful. Given the broad similarities between his material and the course material, it is understandable that students of one and the other often cross over. Some cross-pollination of ideas and practices is probably inevitable; indeed, it is probably desirable. No spiritual tradition has a monopoly on truth.

So read with discernment – Goldsmith and the course. Read prayerfully. Don’t rush from one to the other and back. Both would teach you that you are already home in God. In the end, the work is not to do the reading but to accept the lesson the reading teaches and make it the whole of our being.

*I am aware that to speak of Buddhism as such is itself misleading. There are many schools and traditions within Buddhism, many of which differ greatly from one another. A Course in Miracles tends to be more insular; this is another distinction between the two.

Forget Your Inner Feelings

From time to time I talk to students of A Course in Miracles who feel bad that they still experience guilt and anger and fear and sorrow and whatever other icky emotions you can name. How can it be after all the lessons and study and prayer? Aren’t we supposed to be deliriously happy all the time? Attended by ascended masters? Personally visited by Jesus? How is it that we’re still exhibiting all those nasty human traits? We should be angels by now!

I hear that. I have days where my expectations of spiritual growth or nirvana or what have you get in the way of peace. I eat too many potato chips and think, a holy man wouldn’t have done that. Or I space out in front of Netflix. Or I am insufficiently worried about nuclear war or too casual about banking regulations. It’s always something.

That is the egoic self at work. It likes problems – personal problems, global problems, problems on sitcoms, problems with the neighbors. It just chews through them like bears in a blueberry patch. It is especially fond of the spiritual ideal – our personal image of the holy man or woman. It can toy with the self for years with that image, that ideal. Maybe lifetimes. It’s quite a cycle. I’m not holy but I want to be holy so I’ll do this thing which is holy and okay now I’ve done it and I’m not holy so I’ll try this other path . . . It’s tiring! And like hamsters on the proverbial wheel, we never really get anywhere.

Here’s a better approach – one consistent with the teachings of A Course in Miracles: don’t worry about your inner feelings. Don’t worry about matching up to any ideal that you project. That’s just static. It’s got nothing to do with what you are in truth and nothing to do with realizing that truth.

Just let it go.

Take a look at section seven of the seventeenth chapter of the ACIM text. The subject is the need to be faithful – in our brothers and sisters and in our selves. It is teaching us that only the mind can solve a problem – as soon as a problem appears unsolvable it is because we have decided that the body is going to be part of the solution. But take special note of how the course addresses this particular body/mind confusion.

. . . bodies cannot solve anything. It is their intrusion on the relationship, an error in your thoughts about the situation, which then becomes justification for your lack of faith. You will make this error, but be not at all concerned with that. The error does not matter (T-17.VII.3:5-8).

The emphasis in italics is mine. The course takes for granted that we’re going to confuse body and mind. And it doesn’t care! It’s not relevant. It has nothing to do with waking up. Can you sense how liberating this is? How it frees us entirely and forever from consequence? The activity of the egoic self – it’s about me and my progress, me and my improvement, me and my standing in the community, and so on and so forth – is a given. And it’s without effect.

You can relax. You can breathe. You don’t have to resist those “bad” feelings. They’ve got nothing to do with anything that matters.

Use not your faithlessness. Let it enter and look upon it calmly, but do not use it (T-17.VII.5:3-4).

You can substitute “anger” for faithlessness. You can substitute “lust.” You can substitute “indifference.” Whatever you name those feelings which you judge as negative and which you have decided impede your waking up to Oneness in God, plug them into that phrase. And be very clear about the directive: you can let those feelings enter – don’t fight them in any way, don’t get all alarmed and panicky about them – but don’t make use of them. That’s all. It is like Gandhi said so many years ago – it wasn’t that he didn’t have anger in him. He did. He just chose not to identify with it. And in that choice, he was liberating from having to act on it in any way.

Your anger (or guilt or fear or whatever) is not a problem – your belief that your anger is a problem is the problem. So let it be. Let the inner feelings come and go and don’t freak out about them. Stay focused. You want to be peaceful and loving. You want to be in the Kingdom of Heaven. Okay. That is the goal. That’s all you need to do.