The egoic perspective is that we are bodies. Bodies are vulnerable. They get sick. They can be assaulted. They feel pain and discomfort. They even die. If in fact we are bodies, then defense measures – ranging from cardiovascular exercise to gun ownership – can make sense.
But if we are not bodies, then the whole attack-defense mechanism is not only in effective (what can be attacked? What can be defended?) but it’s affirmatively problematic because it serves to obscure our actual identity.
A Course in Miracles suggests that this dynamic is not our destiny.
I have tried to give my inheritance away in exchange for the world I see. But God has kept my inheritance safe for me. My own real thoughts will teach me what it is (W-pI.56.1:6-8).
Our “real thoughts” are abstract expressions of love that align with the full creative power of God. We are already thinking them; when we stop giving attention to egoic thinking, our real thoughts rise gently to the surface.
What we are in truth is holiness itself, and the gift of holiness is Vision – seeing not with the body’s eyes but with the mind that is creative because it was created in its Creator’s likeness. The real world reflects not the vulnerability of the body but “the Love of God” (W-pI.56.3:4).
Behind every image I have made, the truth remains unchanged. Behind every veil I have drawn across the face of love, its light remains undimmed. Beyond all my insane wishes is my will, united with the Will of my father (W-pI.56.4:2-4).
This is true because “God is still everywhere and in everything forever” (W-pI.56.4:5). We cannot see apart from God, because God is in our mind – and in all that our mind perceives. The truth of what we are is still held in the Mind of God (W-pI.56.5:4). We are one with God’s thoughts and with God (W-pI.56.5:5).
Our practice restores this fact to our memory, and in doing so leads us to a joy and peace that surpass our understanding.
A lot of people ask about ACIM and diet – are we encouraged, as students of the course, to eat a certain way? Avoid certain foods? Do we fast at this or that time of year and so forth? Does A Course in Miracles forbid eating meat?
Garden tomatoes from this past summer . . .
I think those are natural questions amongst seekers in general. Lots of religions have rules and regulations around food. When I was an aspiring Buddhist most of the men and women with whom I sat and studied were vegetarians. It was an extension of compassion – a way of demonstrating kindness to all life. In part because of that model, I was a vegetarian for many years. I have fond memories of those years, particularly after I met my wife and my cooking really took off. Chrisoula and I had – and still have from time to time – some incredible veggie dishes. Edward Espe Brown’s Zen-inspired cookbooks (especially The Tassajara Bread Book), Deborah Madison’s work, the various texts spiraling out of the Moosewood Collective . . . I still turn to those recipes.
When I was Catholic – especially as a child – we refrained from eating meat on Fridays (a point somewhat lost on the fish we sometimes consumed). As I grew older and more committed to Catholicism I did a fair amount of fasting – avoiding meals, limiting what I ate, and sometimes going for many days with only juice. Nor are Buddhism and Catholicism the only traditions where food is regulated in some ways.
But when we commit to practicing A Course in Miracles, we leave that behind. Well, we leave it behind in the sense that we no longer associate a formal way of eating – of embracing or rejecting a type of food or food preparation – with salvation. The Course has a single goal – to heal the mind that believes it is separated from God. Its references to behavior are scant at best. That is because correcting behavior does not necessarily heal the mind, while healing the mind will always affect behavior – though often in surprising ways.
Our little orchard was prolific this year . . . these were the blossoms in Spring.
The idea that we can be saved – can end our separation from God, can enter Heaven, et cetera – by changing habits of behavior is an old one. But if it were that easy, we wouldn’t need to have religious and spiritual practices. We’d just adopt certain regulations of behavior, set up some punishment/reward system to reinforce the desired behavior, and police one another. That does not lead to inner peace. In truth, it doesn’t really lead to outer peace either.
What is helpful is making contact with the part of our minds that believes if we can only tweak the external – get the right partner, or the right spiritual practice, or the right diet, or the right prayer – then we will be happy and never struggle again and then remembering that salvation does not work that way. The separation is an inside job – a problem of thought, not circumstance – and so it has to be addressed internally. What is going on outside of us exists as an effect of our thinking, not as a cause. We can learn from it, sure, but the fundamental shift is still going to be at the level of mind.
Thus, you can be a devout meat eater – taking down a meat lover’s pizza every night and a rasher of bacon at breakfast – and be a student of A Course in Miracles. You can also be a vegetarian. Or a vegan. You can be – as Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes once said – a dessertatarian and be a student of the Course. There is no right or wrong way to approach food. As Krishnamurti once said, here paraphrased: eat meat or don’t eat meat but get on with it. In other words, the healing the Course contemplates has nothing to do with our bodies. We can’t eat or fast or exercise or dance or walk our way to inner peace. It’s all in the mind.
Prize-winning eggs from our flock of layer hens.
That said, it’s important to not be cavalier about the issues that can come up around food. For many of us, it is an area in which we need considerable healing. Forgiveness is always appropriate. If someone is addicted to food in some way, then their practice of the Course is going to involve forgiving – seeing with Jesus or the Holy Spirit – that relationship. And that forgiveness – which, remember, happens in the mind – will probably have some effect on the outside.
Our practice of A Course in Miracles is deeply personal. The course never looks the same from one student to the next. We are called to heal in very specific ways. I know Course students who are very passionate about not eating meat. I respect that. My own practice with food has been to deepen my relationship with it at the level of production – Chrisoula and I (and the kids) grow a tremendous amount of veggies and fruit, raise pigs for meat, chickens for eggs and meat, buy beef from local farmers. We have even kept bees and a goat for milking. I don’t think anybody’s practice of the Course has to mimic that – indeed, it probably shouldn’t. But it is neatly tied into forgiveness for me – a kind of simplicity, a kind of self-reliance, a kind of healthy diet.
The question is always: does it work? It is it helpful? It is important that we not be bullied into thinking that we have to practice a certain way. A Course in Miracles meets us where we are and helps us move from that place ever closer to inner peace and coherence. In that light, what is “right” for someone in an external way is not going to be right for somebody else. It’s okay to find our way.
Apple harvest! Always one of the great joys of homesteading . . .
Ultimately, the course is about changing our minds, where “change” means “heal.” Sometimes that change shows up in the world. Obviously my home and living arrangements look different than other students who aren’t as devoted to homesteading. Obviously, my relationships are in many ways shaded by my family’s commitment to growing, raising and preserving our own food and nurturing a network of like-minded consumers and farmers. But what really matters is the mind in and through which all of this lovingkindness takes place. I eat and relate to food in the most loving way that I can. If the goal is love – healing the mind – then whatever follows will be helpful.
To that end, be kind to yourself. Remember the guidance of Lesson 294: the body is “of service for a while and fit to serve, to keep its usefulness while it can serve, and then to be replaced for greater good” (W-pII.294.1:11). Don’t endanger yourself or others in the name of spirituality. Eat well; eat in a way that minimizes guilt; eat in a way that extends love to your brothers and sisters, broadly defined. We gain nothing by depriving ourselves of calories, nutrients, water and the simple joys that attend eating. Wherever we are at with respect to food, our eating – the whole gestalt of it, from growing to preparing to eating to composting – is yet a way to remember that together we are Love.
Note: As this post has been read and commented upon over the years, I have become increasingly sensitive to the importance of respecting the food and eating choices of my brothers and sisters. The course is silent on the subject of what to eat; beyond that, food is like everything else – a means to forgive (that is, to see in a loving and holistic way) the world and all its contents. It is necessary to give attention to life as it arises; it is not necessary to adopt rigorous diets, undergo intense fasts or otherwise attack our bodies.
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Lesson 55 of A Course in Miracles – and the lessons it reviews – is a chance to see again – to experience again – that we do not not know our own best interests because we do not know who or what we are. Our experience, filtered through the ego’s teaching lens, establishes that we suffer alone in a world of chaos. It is this we try to avoid, or try to fix, or try to reimagine.
What I see now are but signs of disease, disaster and death . . . The very fact that I see such things is proof that I do not understand God. Therefore I also do not understand His Son (W-pI.55.1:2-4-5).
The solution to this problem requires no activity on our part. Rather, it is a shift in thought. The only real problem we have is that we think we have a problem (T-26.II.3:3). The abstract solution is to remember that none of this is real because we are not separate from God. The specific solution is to be willing to change the way we think in order to see “the witnesses to the truth” (W-pI.55.1:7).
The world I see is hardly the representation of loving thoughts . . . It is anything but a reflection of the Love of God and the Love of His Son. It is my own attack thoughts that give rise to this picture (W-pI.55.2:2, 4-5).
When we accept responsibility for these thoughts, we simultaneously become able to make contact with our “loving thoughts” which reform the deranged projections of hate and restore to the peace that is God’s intended gift for us (W-pI.55.2:6).
Do you notice ow the narrative voice has changed in the review lessons? In the regular lessons, the narrative Jesus addresses us directly – “you” have this experience, “you” think that, “you” must try to do this in order to heal. But now the text adopts the first person. “I do not know who I am . . . “(W-pI.55.5:2). This is a deliberate shift, and it accomplishes two things.
First, it begins to merge our self with that of Jesus. In A Course in Miracles, Jesus is both teacher and elder brother – a role model for how a separated Child of God follows the Holy Spirit to full acceptance of the Atonement. He is like us and we are like him, different only in our belief in the illusion of separation.
There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you (T-1.II.3:10-13).
So the lessons are helping us accept Atonement, in order to better realize our potential for holiness.
The other thing that happens in the narrative shift is that we begin to learn how ideas in A Course in Miracles can be expressed in many ways, and often the most effective is in language that is personal to us. Several main lessons near the end of the first fifty encourage us to try restating the lesson in the form of related ideas (Lesson 43 and Lesson 46). We are being given license to integrate them more fully into our experience and thus increase their helpfulness.
Why is that helpful? Because the more loving our thoughts become, the easier it is to turn those thoughts toward the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the fact that they are loving is evidence that they are flowing from and to and with the Holy Spirit already. Thus, we are taking the teacher who can translate our experience from fear and hate into the gentle light of Heaven.
It is easy to overlook the benefits of review periods. But these lessons are here for a reason; they are structured the way they are for a reason. When we merely glance at them, we don’t hurt ourselves. We merely fail to use time as constructively as possible. We are postponing salvation.
Is there not a better way? And is it not right before us?
So as students of A Course in Miracles we have to make this fundamental decision – we have to choose that we want joy (which is the Kingdom of Heaven) and we have to turn to the teacher who knows how to bring us there. That is what we have to do. This happens naturally when we embrace a serious spiritual path, the one that is ordained for us personally. It’s not about saying no to the other valid paths, or disparaging them, but about saying yes to the one that is laid out for us by God.
When we say yes, we are given help. Jesus becomes available in a tangible way. Lately I imagine him as a long-distance friend – one I don’t see because he lives in another country, but with whom I maintain a deep and thoughtful two-way contact. This personal relationship is critical to my practice and understanding of A Course in Miracles. But, just like friendship necessarily varies from one relationship to the next, your own experience of Jesus will be different.
Jesus points us to the Holy Spirit and urges us to accept “him” as our teacher. This pointing can take the place of prayerful directives, clarity in reading the text, or a combination thereof. The Holy Spirit is symbolic. When we pray to the Holy Spirit we are praying to that part of our mind that a) knows its wholeness in God and b) sees the separation alive in another part of our mind and, by virtue of its capacity to see and know our whole mind, heal it.
We are participants in that healing process. This section and its subsections outlines the essence of how we participate. We reverse our understanding of what it means to give. We teach peace in order to learn it. And finally, we adopt a position of vigilance in favor of God. This is another way of restating another Course adage: what is it for (T-17.VI.2:1-2)? Everything that we experience – images, events, people – are opportunities to choose the Holy Spirit as our teacher. They are chances to wake up to the Kingdom of Heaven. If we are always looking for Heaven – if we are always on the alert for signs of Love and the Joyful Peace that attends God – then we are more likely to see those things.
This is a corollary to projection. We project what we don’t want and thus see it – and attack it – in others. I’m not an insensitive parent, that other person is. But projection – a dubious tool employed by the ego to maintain the illusion of separate bodies and separate experiences – can be used by the Holy Spirit too. That’s what happens when we take him as our teacher. Rather than project fear or guilt, he extends love. So where the ego finds evidence of the separation, the Holy Spirit points out signs of Heaven’s peaceful glory. To have this, we simply have to invite him in.
Well, maybe it’s a bit more complicated. We have to invite him – but of course he is already there, because he is part of us in a real way. He is our right minds. What we really have to do – and what this section calls on us to do – is be vigilant on his behalf. Seek God and you will find him. Knock and the doors will open. There are no maps and no mysteries and no secret handshakes. Those who seek Heaven will remember they are already there.
In a sense, Atonement – which is the correction for the mad idea of separation – includes an appreciation of the power of our mind. If thought can create a world in which we suffer and die, can it not also set that world aside in order to behold the origin and truth of its own creative ability?
Can it not create – through extension, not projection – only the perfect, the good and the true?
. . . life is thought. Let me look on the world I see as the representation of my own state of mind. I know that my state of mind can change. And so I also know the world I see can change as well (W-pI.54.2:3-6).
Life is inclusive, rather than divisive. There is Life, not many lives. God creates in a continuous flow, rather than by bits and pieces. Thus, there is no such thing as a private thought. Since all mind is one, “every mind contains all minds” (W-pI.161.4:2). Our power to create is shared; it comes forth in unity with our brothers and sisters.
As my thoughts of separation call to the separation thoughts of others, so my real thoughts awaken the real thoughts in them. And the world my real thoughts show me will dawn on their sight as well as mine (W-pI.54.3:6-7).
Critically, Lesson 18 describes a mutual experience. As we awaken others, others awaken us. It is impossible for a Child of God to be alone or to create in isolation. Love does not reinforce separation – the illusion of the personal self with private thoughts and separate interests. It undoes separation by demonstrating that the power to change every mind about what it is, is in us because it is in God.
And only what God created is real, and nothing God did not create exists. This is the source of unending peace (T-in.2:2-4).
The workbook lessons teach us that the world has already been changed, and in doing so, reminds us that what we are in truth is beyond the reach of illusions. It can’t suffer; it can only heal and be healed.
I would behold the proof that what has been done through me has enabled love to replace fear, laughter to replace tears, and abundance to replace loss. I would look upon the real world, and let it teach me that my will and the Will of God are one (W-pI.54.2:4-5).
The answer – and all the happiness it can offer us – has been given. Are we ready now to accept it and – through our active acceptance – extend it to a world in need of salvation?
The world is a series of images made by that which is incapable of accurately perceiving reality. It is impossible for us to be happy in the world becausethe world is not real but also because the mind which made it is unhealed. It has no idea what is actually going on.
The fact that I see a world in which there is suffering and loss and death shows me that I am seeing only the representation of my insane thoughts, and am not allowing my real thoughts to cast their beneficent light on what I see. Yet God’s way is sure (W-pI.53.5:4-5).
Because we have forgotten what we are in truth, we have forgotten how to use the creative power of our shared mind. It’s like we’re a single leaf trying to pretend it’s the whole tree. It can’t work because it’s not true.
What is producing this world is insane, and so is what is produces. Reality is not insane, and I have real thoughts as well as insane ones (W-pI.53.1:3-4).
The promise A Course in Miracles makes is that despite the mistaken identity and fearful world, and despite the intensity of the suffering that attends it, we have not lost our actual identity. Reality remains unchanged and unaffected by our confusion. A single leaf can say and do whatever it likes in its vain attempts to “be” a tree but it cannot destroy the tree of which it is a part.
So there is a way out of madness. We need not despair. We have made the world and the self and we believe they are real because we made them. Yet we can always make another choice, one that arises in love and reaffirms love as our source.
. . . I place my trust in reality. In choosing this, I will escape all the effects of the world of fear, because I am acknowledging that it does not exist (W-pI.53.3:7-8).
This shift is not like throwing a light switch (though technically it can be). It’s more like a gentle evolution unfolding in time. We see a little light, step towards it and . . . turn back to the darkness of guilt and fear.
And then start again.
This is the path that we follow as ACIM students. It’s not a crisis. The lessons are gentle reminders that our work is simply to our best to remember – moment by moment – that God did not create a meaningless world and so our suffering is entirely optional.
This is good news! The more so because it actually works when brought into application. Our journey through the workbook is a journey from darkness to light, from guilt to grace, and from fear to love. We want no other journey and no other journey becomes us. No other journey leads us home because this journey is our home.
