The Stillness Inherent in A Course in Miracles

One of the things that A Course in Miracles has done for me is it has cleared some space in my mind. That’s kind of weird statement maybe – mind isn’t really bounded physically. But by practicing ACIM – studying the text and the lessons, following certain teachers whose practice most challenges and buttresses my own – there is some quiet that enters. There is some stillness.

For many years in my early and mid-twenties, I had aspirations of being a Buddhist. At the same time, I was deeply invested in Thomas Merton and other Christian mystics. Yet I was largely incapable of sitting still. And my mind was in constant motion. When I look back – I was in Burlington, VT in those days – I don’t know that I ever really sat still and just appreciated a flower, say. Or a sunset. Or a simple talk with a friend. The energy was always frenetic, always intense.

Even as I settled into adulthood – becoming a lawyer and journalist, a father and husband, a homeowner and all that – there was still a sort of craziness to my life. I had dreams of stillness but it was very hard to actually realize it. Even when I first began to practice ACIM – the daily lessons in particular – it was hard. The lessons would say devote fifteen or twenty minutes to this and I would get nervous! That’s a long time to sit still and think about one thing.

You know, we are who we are and it’s no good fighting it. I think part of the problem was that I was so invested in becoming. I couldn’t just accept that I had this interest in stillness that couldn’t manifest. I couldn’t just let it be the way it was. Why not? Because I had decided in advance who I had to be and what that being was going to look like. I was in my own way.

And that is what the course seems to have gently helped undo. It’s not that the thoughts aren’t there – and it’s not really that the desire to become something (a famous course teacher! the best student ever! this! that!) is gone – but that whatever “I” am is just not ruled by those energies any longer. There’s a lot of peace in just letting ourselves be crazy. I don’t know exactly how to tell you to do it, but if you can detach a bit and just watch your thoughts, it can be quite a relief. You see the stream of your thinking and you realize, “wow. No wonder I feel crazy all the time!”

The course teaches us that we aren’t these bodies but we aren’t these thoughts either. I think if you can get a little distance from what seems to be boiling in your brain, you’ll see that it’s true. And really, what happens then is that you encounter stillness – it becomes real for you. Thought drives us – we’re like hamsters on their wheels. But when you get into the space in which thought happens, it doesn’t have the same effect anymore. You aren’t bouncing from one crisis to the next, one challenge to the next. You aren’t stuck in an endless loop of problem-solving.

I spent a lifetime longing for that – the simplicity of quiet, of real stillness. And it came finally when I stopped trying to find it and simply became aware of what is. Through my practice of A Course in Miracles, I learned how to pay attention. And stillness was there waiting for me.

Dialogue and A Course in Miracles

Often when I talk about dialogue – having one, being in one, et cetera – what I am talking about is simply an intense and focused exchange between two people with similar interests. That is, you and I have a shared language – Christian, ACIM and so forth – and we are both devoted to direct experience of waking up in/to/through God – and we are trying to accomplish that to some degree by sharing with one another. Our dialogue resembles one part of a long walk to a shared home – clearing the trail, say. So it is helpful that way. Or it can be.

I don’t think this is precisely what David Bohm had in mind when he explored and wrote about dialogue, though I think he would perhaps have been supportive of it. But a Bohm dialogue envisions a suspension of judgment – a willingness to try and observe what is happening in oneself without acting on it – that is quite a tricky needle to thread. If you try it, the first thing you will see is that the idea of a goal becomes quite tenuous. So if the talk is ostensibly about, say, the role of forgiveness in A Course in Miracles there is a good chance it won’t remain there. Or that it won’t move much in traditional terms. You won’t get anywhere in the intellectual sense, the furthering of ideas sense.

There are two things going on here. The first is simply recognizing the value of deliberate, thoughtful and analytical sharing between people who are trying to end their seeming separation from God. This is valuable because it deprecates mystery and ensures that the focus is on the self. It is very easy to stay in the poetic and mythological language of A Course in Miracles. You can really savor it and get into it. You can talk about how Helen Schucman was the next best English writer to Shakespeare. And when you get tired of praising the prose, you can get into how the course revises critical metaphors like “crucifixion” and “Heaven” and critical stories like the one about Adam and Eve.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that – but it may not be terribly helpful. Certainly as anybody who has poked around this blog knows I have spent – and will no doubt continue to in some ways – a lot of time looking at the course in just that way. But getting all devoted to the course is simply to make an idol of it. On some level that is true. I think most students do it, to different degrees, and so I think sooner or later all students have to undo it.

So the dialogue I have been practicing and exploring lately – which is not precisely Bohmian dialogue – has its goal to get closer to the ground from which A Course in Miracles springs. It doesn’t denigrate the imagery and language and mythology and so forth; but it is trying to get past it to the underlying structure. There are, for example, a lot of debates about Jesus in the course communities – whether we are dealing with the historical Jesus, Helen’s personal Jesus, the idea of Jesus, or something else altogether. And what I am saying now is that that is not a very important thing to worry about. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to settle that to figure out how to practice forgiveness. You really don’t.

Please keep in mind that I am not saying those ideas are altogether extraneous – they’re not. It is important to respond to what calls us. But it is also helpful to remember that we are aiming to wake up. If you look at the last lessons of the course you will see that they are not in the nature of conclusion, but beginning. The course is really more about setting up a base camp if you will, then about scaling the summit.

So what I am doing now is going slowly. I am not restricting myself to the course. If I encounter people who are adept in some other language and mythology, then I enter into dialogue with them. If they are okay with it, of course. Always I keep the focus on my experience. The teacher is not “out there.” Yes, some books are helpful, and yes, some people are helpful too. I relate with some of you quite deeply because you have done so much work and it so helpful to me.

But ultimately, we are waking up. We are ending, to the highest farthest degree possible, our separation. We are remembering or reclaiming or re-establishing oneness. To do that, we have to see what is going on inside of us. We have to find what is broken in us. We have to observe the ego – how thought works, how habit forms, how we react and respond to thought. We have to redefine the journey: what is really important? What is everything for? Do I want to be right or at peace? Nobody can do any of that for us. It is hard work – perhaps consuming many lifetimes. Yet I want to claim it now. I want to clarify and simplify.

Dialogue helps. It may not yet be true Bohm dialogue. It may never need to be that. But it is still helpful. It brings about some peace and some gratitude. That is something.

Thinking about Dialogue

So I have become interested lately in the idea of dialogue – not conversation or discussion – but dialogue. I am reading David Bohm, also Jiddu Krishnamurti. I do not feel as if I am wandering too far afield of Jesus and A Course in Miracles. Perhaps dialogue – this dialogue, this way – is another helpful form of the “universal curriculum.”

I am thinking of dialogue in terms of something that takes place between people who are alert to their own conditioning and tendency to be dull and stultified, and so want to awaken, and perhaps even see this dialogue, this exchange, as a means to do that. It is a creative gesture, a movement away from the self and towards oneness, however one understands oneness.

A person who engages in dialogue is both willing and able to suspend judgment. That is, they are aware of how judgment operates in their own thought system, they have at least a basic understanding of how it mucks up their perception of reality, and so they are engaged at least sometimes in non-judgmental thinking. It is not just an ideal, not just an intellectual appreciation, but something more tangible. Willingness is characteristic of the intellectual side but the ability is related to application. Neither can really exist without the other, but a person can identify more with one than the other, and so believe that willingness and ability are separated and conditional upon each other.

Dialogue is most effective when one has taken these initial steps in terms of their own thinking, their own innate inclination to judge.

It seems that dialogue makes some demands of its participants. It implies some preparation. This is because if we come into it without at least some basic awareness of how we operate at the level of thought, then we are going to be mired in opinion and a sort of offense/defense approach to the other person or persons. An effective dialogue is not about winning and it is not about persuading somebody else of the rightness of your own ideas and thinking. Indeed, a condition precedent might be that one enters the dialogue without any preconceived notion of what the dialogue is about or what it means or where it is going.

For many people, that is not possible. We are stuck in the cultural loop, repeating old ideas. Maybe one thing about a dialogue is that is is always new or at least it can be. If we can shed a lot of the framing upon which our thoughts are draped and shaded, then something new can happen.

One thing that can happen is that we can listen better. If we aren’t filled up with our own opinions and agendas, if we aren’t filtering experience through goals, then there is some space. The other person or persons are going to be better received because their words won’t have to navigate so many filters on our end. How often do we hear through our filters? We are always channeling experience in ways to support our view of ourselves and the world. We make a decision about what life means and then we interpret everything accordingly.

It is very hard for people to hear one another in that kind of setting. And it is even harder to change one’s mind.

So a dialogue is a sort of open-ended space in which people are in communication with one another. The space is not the physical space in which the dialogue takes place (although this is not insignificant). Nor is it a metaphor. It is a real condition in which one is deeply attentive to and aware of their thoughts and the effect of their thoughts and is exercising great care in how those thoughts impinge on communication. The dialogue aims to create itself anew every moment by not relying on the past and by shedding the inclination to judge according to preconceived conditions.

On this view, dialogue is radical, in the sense that it goes to the root, the very base of what it means to be in relationship – with another person, with a landscape, with the universe, with life. Its aimlessness is its strength, because it constantly allows for the very awakening – the very energizing – that makes it so necessary. When we are in dialogue we are getting to the bottom of things, we are getting to the essence, we are finding the “dead center,” which is actually alive in a way we can barely imagine.

Dialogue is healthy – it is healing. It leads us towards the paradox of egoic thought without borrowing that thought’s structure or method. It is undoing. It is a means by which one can realize the truth inherent in A Course in Miracles or another mythology, another belief system. Love is what we are; love is all there is. This, too, is dialogue.

Language and Awakening

The word is not the thing.

Sooner or later, we have to make some peace with this, bring it into application. I have a friend who experienced what she felt was true oneness. She proceeded to tell her partner who was with her at the time. Her partner said, “did the experience last as long as the explanation of it did?” It was a good point.

We have to communicate. And words are a viable means of doing this. But they are naturally porous. I write “dog” thinking of the dog who sits near my feet awaiting her walk. But you think of the neighbor’s dog who kept you up all night barking. We have pinned down exactly nothing. And it gets harder when we talk about God and Love, not to mention Separation and Atonement which have very specific ACIM meanings. It is a mistake to trust language too much.

I am saying that talking about all this is not always fruitful and can in fact be quite dangerous in the sense that it perpetuates the very problem we are trying to solve.

One way of using words responsibly is to engage in dialogue. I don’t mean a conversation between two people. I mean a dialogue – that is, the creation of shared meaning. This can be a singular experience or it can include any number of other people. In the kind of dialogue that I envision here, we talk very slowly and carefully. Our objective is to recognize the tricky nature of words and mitigate that by choosing them carefully.

Choosing words carefully means that we are also paying attention to our internal filters: we are aware of our conditioning, our biases, our opinions and the way that they influence language. We might say that they are our language. And we are willing to suspend all of it, or at least try to suspend it, in the interest of dialogue, of creating some shared meaning.

Obviously, the other piece of this is listening. Our filters are translating what others say, too. Often, when we are talking to someone – and I am using talking in a very broad sense, including what is happening now between you and me – we are not really hearing what they say so much as measuring the degree to which it comports with our own beliefs, opinions, et cetera.

When we approach dialogue carefully, we realize that we have a tendency to view others (and the world at large) as little more than extensions of what we want to believe we are. We are not really making any room for what is – we are insisting on our interpretation of what is.

How does this help with our practice of A Course in Miracles? The course is really just an extended metaphor for changing our mind. It calls us to interact differently with how we think. Mind is both the problem and the solution. Words like “Jesus” and “God” and “Holy Spirit” are good for capturing our attention, but they must be undone if we are going to experience the end of the separation. Not temporarily undone – all the way undone.

The word is not – the word is never – the thing.

To be in dialogue – with oneself, with another, with the course – is to move slowly. It is to fix one’s intention on discovery of what works – what is functional and helpful – and then to proceed cautiously and responsibly. In course terms we say the ego is always ready to undermine us. But we might simply say that using mind to undo mind is complex – a paradox even – and so we have to be alert. We have to be sensitive. There is nothing sinister at work here. We are simply undoing a habit of thinking – of using mind – that is quite entrenched. It’s hard – of course it is hard.

But it is also doable. This, to me, is the great gift of A Course in Miracles – at least in my life. It has made awakening possible. Its Christian language, Platonic philosophy and Freudian ideal caught my attention and held it long enough to see the problem. The solution, of course, is neither Christian nor Platonic nor Freudian. But that’s okay. We have to see the problem – we have to know it – before the solution becomes obvious and accessible.

I am saying: go slowly and ask a lot of questions. When you get scared, don’t try to solve the fear. When it seems impossible, relax. Rest, even. It’s okay. Or it’s going to be.

The Absolutely Right Way to Practice A Course in Miracles

A year or so ago someone wrote me about a negative experience they’d had with a fairly well-known course teacher. With this teacher, they experienced a lot of pressure to practice A Course in Miracles a particular way. The coercion bothered them but at a deeper level, they were also bothered by the idea that it was even possible to approach the course from such a black and white place.

If you pay attention to the course community – from its highest levels to its lowest and farthest-flung – you know this is a real problem. A lot of well-intentioned people believe that it’s their way or the highway. Or they present themselves that way. And so beginners and sometimes even veterans find themselves engaging less with the course and more with someone else’s interpretation of the course.

So is there a right way to practice A Course in Miracles? An “only” way?

No.

However, I wonder if we could say that there are helpful and less helpful ways to practice it? And that the arbiter of what is helpful and the degree to which it is helpful is you, in prayerful conjunction with the Holy Spirit and Jesus?

That feels healthier to me, and more consistent with the overall tone and message of A Course in Miracles.

It is my experience that the course meets us where we are. That is, whatever our spiritual needs and abilities happen to be at a given time, the course will – if it is the path that we are choosing – naturally and usefully fit into them. We will be challenged and nurtured to the precise degree that we’re ready, willing and able to be.

And that is going to be a different experience for each student. Not only that, but that experience is going to change over time. It is a process and it changes and we change with it.

And the course shifts gear to be with us at all times – even, sometimes, to where it is no longer a viable spiritual practice.

I will give you a couple of personal examples. When I first encountered the course, I was quickly and intensely invested in the debate about which edition to read. The urtext? The sparkly edition? The Criswell? What?

As an English professor and professional writer, this seemed like a reasonable issue. It appealed to both my personal and professional instincts. So I read a lot of blog posts on the subject. I got hold of every edition, read them and compared them to one another. It was a very academic process, a very intense process and . . . a very ego-driven process. I wanted to be right. And for me to be right, others had to be wrong.

I dove right into the heart of the conflict. It was my early lens into the course community and A Course in Miracles itself.

These days, I am uninterested in that debate – or at least a lot less interested. When asked, I encourage people to just stick with the FIP edition. If they feel really strongly that there’s a better one, then I encourage them to go for it. The differences between editions are far less significant than what is similar. You’re going to get it regardless of the edition you read. The conflict – which can be quite intense – is a real distraction. The idea that one edition is superior to the other for all students all the time . . . it’s just crazy. Who would want to indulge it? You find what works and then you stick with it.

Still, even though I regret that early focus – because it indulged conflict and not peace – I still learned. I got a great crash course in the course community. I was exposed to some thinkers – Robert Perry, Kenneth Wapnick, Liz Cronkhite – who are helpful for many reasons other than their take on which edition of ACIM is authentic, or real, or condoned.

So what I am saying is that while the Sean of today would discourage the approach that the Sean of yesterday took, the Sean of yesterday was still learning. He was still making progress.

It was okay. It really was.

Here’s another example. Gary Renard’s book The Disappearance of the Universe showed up in my practice at about the time I let go of the ACIM edition question. It was a rough time. I had made a commitment to the course, but was also feeling quite lost with it. I wasn’t sure I understood it, wasn’t sure what teachers to read. I felt chastened by the fact that I’d indulged community conflict so much.

In that space, Renard was an accessible and incredibly supportive teacher. His attitude and style allowed me to breathe. I didn’t care about the whole Arten and Pursah debate. I just read the book several times through. It had a real calming effect on me. It was like talking to somebody who wasn’t invested in being brilliant or overly spiritual or anything. It was so refreshing that way.

Years later, I don’t really turn to Renard’s work. It was incredibly useful at a point in my practice, and then it stopped being so useful. It helped to create a fruitful learning environment in which other teachers appeared.

Again, what worked back then does not work now. But so what? This is a learning process, not a learning event. I know students who stay with Gary for years. He’s their teacher. He’s got what they want or need. And that’s fine with me. I’m happy for them. I don’t think I’m more right than they are just because I moved on.

Always ask: what is working? What is not? And then follow what works and gently and lovingly let go of what does not. It’s okay. And it’s going to get even more okay. Our teacher is the Holy Spirit. We are already what we need to learn. Be attentive and gentle. Be open. It works. It’s working.

What is Dialogue?

What is dialogue? What does it mean to be in dialogue?

In answering those questions, I am thinking of David Bohm’s excellent little book On Dialogue, his dialogues with Krishnamurti in The End of Time, and of A Course in Miracles. Although I am no longer a formal ACIM student, the course’s focus on undoing as a means of encountering those blocks which impede awareness of love is enhanced by an understanding of – and the use of  – Bohmian dialogue.

Like Bohm, I understand dialogue first in terms of its lexiconic origins. It is a Greek word – dialogos. Logos means word or, better, the meaning of the word. And “dia” means through – not two. So dialogue is not a verbal exchange between two individuals; rather, it is the creation of shared meaning, a cooperative exploration of thought as it arises in relationship.

Dialogue does not aim at the “Truth.” Bohm would want to know what one means by that word. Really, we can only ascertain its usefulness or relevance if we are clear on its meaning. I am positing some absolute – God, say, though I am less partial to that word that I have been – that can be discerned through careful dialogue. Discerned and realized.

And I am saying further – and here I think I am safely on Bohmiam ground – that the difficulties we face as a society (globally, nationally, locally, familialy and even personal) cannot be resolved absent that discernment and realization.

We have to be clear: about what is going on and why it is happening the way it is.

So then one thing that dialogue can do is it can move slowly. This seems important. Something in us longs to go quickly – to get on with life, as if the journey exists solely for the destination. We all know – intuitively if not explicitly – that strictly speaking there is no destination, but that does not seem to slow us down. Using the past as a map, we gloss over the present in the interest of building some (more) desirable future. There is not much time to talk, let alone get clear on what we mean when we talk.

For example, I made reference to “truth” earlier – even gave it a capital “T.” It is fair to ask what I mean by that. But even the answer I gave – in terms of the absolute – begs some exploration. There are all sorts of implications in that word – especially when it is tagged with “God.” So maybe it is worth slowing down and trying to get clear about it. Is there a better word? Can we separate “God” from all the philosophical and theological baggage to which it has so long been chained?

And it is not just about philosophy or morality or what have you. It is also about conditioning – it is about our filters. Bohm suggests that our filters – the senses that take in data, the brain that selects and organizes it – are effectively an observer. We cannot really have a dialogue about truth if we are not challenging – raising to light – our various filters in this regard. On what basis do we retain some ideas by discard others? What are the rules by which the brain functions? If we cannot see them – if we cannot both listen and speak – outside of them, then we are not really going to get anywhere. We’re just going to go in circles.

So we can say that dialogue moves slowly and that it moves slowly because a) that enables us to be very very clear about what we mean with this or that word and also b) because it is hard to maintain awareness of our filters – our conditioning – if we move too quickly. The filters are default settings and that is what we are trying to undo. That is the influence from which we want to escape.

Dialogue implies talking, of course, and I think – perhaps because I am naturally a talker – most of us look at it that way. There’s nothing wrong with that. Speaking slower, being more selective with language, being aware of the thought process that underlies our inclination to and mode of communication is all very helpful.

Yet the other aspect of dialogue – as necessary if not more so – is listening. I hate phrases like “active” listening or “dynamic” listening. They come up sometimes in workshops or classrooms and they are always soft code for “pay attention.” I am all for paying attention, but there is a big difference between simply hearing what somebody says and listening to them. Listening as I am considering it here – hopefully with Bohm as a sort of guide – has to do with self-awareness. Who is listening?

In other words, the filters are as active when we hear as when we talk – maybe more so. And so somebody says the word “truth” and we simply translate it to our own personal meaning and continue merrily along our way. Yet it is impossible that you and I should use the word “truth” and mean precisely the same thing – or even roughly the same thing.

If we are listening while aware of the activity of the filters, then a word like “truth” will sound almost foreign to us. So perhaps we will I am not sure what you mean by this.

I think this sort of careful and deliberate dialogue can help us to clarify what is happening in our thoughts – it can make more obvious the belief systems at work and thus enable us to question their effectiveness. It is not really possible, for example, to engage in Bohmian dialouge around, say, Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and not make some contact with our egoic mind and its chaotic extravagance. If forgiveness is right seeing, then dialogue – this sort of dialogue – is an excellent tool at our disposal.

I want to add one other thought. It is easy to relegate dialogue to the category of becoming – another means of self-improvement, betterment, et cetera. But is it not just problem-solving. It is not another mode of psychotherapy. Rather, it is an experience unto itself – at its best, that is what it is. We have a direct experience of both self and communication. And that is immensely energizing. If you have ever felt it, you know what I mean. It doesn’t really matter what was said, or whether any conclusions were reached, or future dialogues scheduled. You are simply lifted by what transpires, as it transpires.

Thus, dialogue is active – intensely, joyfully active. Its effects are ever in our reach.