Joining with You: Notes on Tara Singh’s “Love Holds No Grievances”

The other day I re-read part one of Love Holds No Grievances by Tara Singh. It is a beautiful book, not quite 100 pages, and so full of wisdom and insight that even a handful of sentences can change your life. If you give the words the attention – which is to give yourself the gift of attention – then you will awaken from the sleep of forgetfulness.

Reading Tara Singh saved A Course in Miracles for me. Before I encountered him, the Course was mostly an intellectual exercise. I was studying Ken Wapnick very closely; I wanted to be his equal and then I wanted to supplant him. That is what you do in academia; you study the elders and then you replace them. And then wait for the new guard to arrive with their veneration and the destruction it inevitably hides.

Tara Singh called me to application. He reminded me instantly that my intellect and the culture in which it was effective was not going to save me. It was not going to end the internal conflict and its myriad external effects. It was not going to restore to my awareness God’s Creation and my home in it. I was forty years old, I had been studying and thinking and arguing and professing all my life, what did I think was going to be different this time? I treated ACIM as another idea, another thought system to be mastered. I was cheapening it without even recognizing I was doing it.

And Tara Singh made clear there was another way and that it lay in application, in practice. In that insight, I realized what was missing in my life, and began the slow and difficult journey of becoming responsible.

I found my practice. Theory, at last, was joined to praxis.

People get confused about this. A lot of students will say, it doesn’t matter what you do. Rob banks, cheat on your taxes, eat chips and watch television. They say – mostly parroting Ken Wapnick – that A Course in Miracles is not about behavior. This is true but in such a shallow and technical sense as to be almost useless. It’s like pretending you can live in the blueprint of a house, rather than the house the blueprint would have you build. It’s good to have a blueprint, sure. But you need a hammer and nails. You have to follow the blueprint; you have to do what it says; you have to build what it teaches you to build.

So that was what I got reading Tara Singh. I got that the Course was meant to be lived, rather than merely studied. And learning this changed everything.

It is not easy to read or follow Tara Singh. He’s not a coach, like Marianne Williamson. He’s not an academic, like Ken Wapnick. He’s a Teacher in the Platonic sense. He read the Course and brought it into application and discovered thereby the truth of “Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists.” And then he taught it by speaking the truth – the truth of his experience of living what the Course teaches.

Very few people, if any, are actually doing that. And it’s really hard to study with those people because you can’t fake it. They won’t let you use them as a distraction. They aren’t trying to get anything from you – your money, your admiration, your attention. It’s a different kind of relationship. You can take it or you can leave it, but you can’t use it avoid the truth.

That is why Tara Singh will say things like, stop watching so much television. Or paint your room and put fresh flowers in it. Keep a gratitude list. Read Walt Whitman and Thoreau. It is incredibly personal but it never deviates from the Text, Workbook and Manual for Teachers. If somebody has the integrity – if they are speaking from truth – then it lands differently in you. Practicing A Course in Miracles means allowing it to take form in your life. The question isn’t, what does it mean to not let grievances hide the light of God in you but rather, how does letting go of grievances manifest in your living?

You just have to do it. Or learn that you can’t do it, and then learn how. But it’s always the doing – the giving of attention to your own life, to finding truth in your own life and then allowing it to transform you.

Because that is what A Course in Miracles does – it transforms us. When we are living it out in our lives – when it touches all of our relationships, when it affects what we eat and how we sleep – it changes us. I am personally a slow and stubborn learner, whose handiness with words occasionally obscures my confusion and laziness. It’s easy to stunt like a prophet. But still. The Course calls me to accountability in every minute. I learn how to be silent. I learn how to be honest. I learn how to become responsible for projection. I learn how to discern between the Holy Spirit and ego, and then listen only to Holy Spirit.

What Tara Singh taught me – which is also what Thérèse of Lisieux taught me, by the way – is that you have to become a saint. Thérèse saw clearly that if she was going to take the Sermon on the Mount literally then she was going to have to be a saint, and she accepted that responsibility. She brought everything to it – her labor, her prayer, her creativity, her passion, her confusion, her loneliness, all of it. And she learned what everybody learns who does this work. You can’t become a saint – that’s obvious as soon as you try. The effort to become anything hides the light of God in you. But you can consent to be transformed by allowing every block to your remembrance of Love, which is our shared inheritance, to be undone in us.

Tara Singh says that one sentence of the Course will awaken you if you give it the attention it deserves. You read “love holds no grievances” or “my grievances hide the light of the world in me” and you are instantly brought to the crisis of, is this true or not? If you don’t know, then the crisis is, will you find out?

We don’t want to find out because we know at some deep place that when we do, we will realize that A Course in MIracles is calling us to be saints. Not for nothing did Helen Schucman say that Mother Teresa was an example of living the Course, and not for nothing did Tara Singh and his family of students enter into a sustained relationship of service with and modeled on Mother Teresa’s example.

We have to let go of the personal. It’s funny that we don’t want to. I fought this for years before I let go even a little, and even then it wasn’t because I was wise or anything. It was because I was scared if I didn’t I would die. It was still selfish! But it was enough. When you let go even a little, just for a millisecond, you realize that there is nothing you would hold onto even if you could. Life provides; God provides. The given is everpresent and always sufficient.

Then the work is just to remember it and, for me, remembering it means being in relationship with you, in order to learn that together we are Christ. Tara Singh was a teacher. I am not a teacher. But I am a fellow student and fellow traveler who will study with you, and support you in your study. I will not leave you alone in the classroom because the classroom only exists with you. Together we learn that we are Christ, and then together we share our freedom with the world.

ACIM: Heralds of Eternity

A Course in Miracles says that we come closest to our true self in holy relationships (T-20.V.1:1), which are holy because they are premised on what we can give, rather than what we can get.

No one can give if he is concerned with the results of giving. That is a limitation on the giving itself, and neither the giver nor the receiver would have the gift (M-6.3:4-5).

Do you have a relationship like that? Where all that matters is what you can offer? And it doesn’t matter at all what happens after you give the gift?

Most of us, if we are honest, have to say no. Maybe once in a while one or two of our relationships are like that. But basically, no.

Most of us, if we are honest, would like to be on the receiving end of a relationship like that.

And it’s okay. It’s more than okay.

If “no” is the truth, then that is what we have to say. Honesty is liberating. When we know we are broken, then both the need and the means of healing clarify. It is a blessing to say to a trusted brother or sister – and through them to the Holy Spirit we share – “I’m scared of love” or “I don’t know how to love” or “I worry all my love is hate.”

When I began to be comfortable not faking my spiritual progress, what appeared was not “spiritual progress” but friendship. My isolation crumbled; I took a seat at the table with you. I met my brothers and sisters, and entered in relationship with them.

I know sometimes the way I write makes things seem poetic or whatever. But I am not talking about anything we don’t all understand. I am talking about the ordinary beauty and grind of just making friends. We are nervous and awkward; we stumble a little finding our way. Sometimes our feelings get hurt.

But once in a while you realize you are in the presence of Christ, and then all that you want to do is serve them.

Judge not what is invisible to you or you will never see it, but wait in patience for its coming . . . Your brother’s worth has been established by his Father . . . What is in him will shine so brightly in your grateful vision that you will merely love him and be glad (T-20.V.3:5, 4:3 – 4).

In that moment, that relationship testifies to eternity. It is a herald restoring to our awareness God’s certainty – we remember ourselves as God knows us because we have glimpsed – however briefly – Christ in our brother or sister and learned – and will not lightly forget – that together we are Christ.

And we do nothing to make this happen other than recognize that there is nothing we can do, even if we wanted.

Your brother or sister is the gift, and they they know it not. No more do you. And yet, have faith that He Who sees the gift in you and your brother will offer and receive it for you both (T-20.V.7:7-9).

Is it clear? We aren’t here to become spiritual masters or experts. There is nothing to learn. We don’t need a monastery or a school. We just have to agree to join with one another in whatever confused and frightened way we can manage.

That is the gift God asks that we give Him: to risk, over and over, a holy relationship. To listen for the herald and, hearing the call, to answer.

Another Way – an ACIM Way – to Look at Reality

Dear L___________,

Another way to think about reality is that it’s this – this this. You can be confused about it, sure. You can deny it. You can even be cognitively or otherwise incapable of recognizing it.

But you can’t not be in it. You can’t not be included.

So a good question to ask is: since right now I am in reality – since right now I myself am real – what is happening that makes me believe otherwise?

Generally, you will find that it has to with your thinking – your interpretation.

Understand you do not respond to anything directly, but your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response (T-12.I.1:4-5).

Eugene Gendlin was very good on this point. In his book Focusing, he wrote:

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it (162).

So in this sense, A Course in Miracles might be understood as a somewhat idiosyncratic means of understanding – of bringing into application – Gendlin’s point.

Right now you are interacting with reality, with the truth, because there is nothing else to interact with. Only truth is true (T-14.II.2:1). “. . . Truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything” (T-12.I.1:3).

Yet you are dissatisfied. Why?

The invitation here is to be specific. If you already have and are all of what is real and true, then what about that doesn’t work? Are you upset about world hunger? Would you rather not be an addict? Have cancer?

Most of the time, our answer eventually grounds out in, I want to feel more special. That’s what all our projection of different circumstances is – wanting to be special. And awakening – the end of the sleep of forgetfulness – is more like losing any sense of specialness.

It’s hard to stop projecting a different future – an improved future, a healthier future, a richer future, whatever.

And yet that is the path to the peace that surpasses understanding.

The death of specialness is not your death, but your awakening into life eternal. You but emerge from an illusion of what you are to the acceptance of yourself as God created you (T-24.II.14:4-5).

We have to give attention in a sincere and devoted way to our “specialness,” to what makes us feel unique, better, different, other. It means being focused and open-minded. I’m not just noticing what I like, but also what I don’t like. I’m not flinching away from what scares or upsets me. I’m not denying the gaps in my knowledge.

A Course in Miracles wants us to become responsible for our guilt and fear, which are the words it uses to denote the underlying condition that obstructs our awareness of reality, which is given, totally present, and all there is.

This is work, like when you enter therapy determined to actually change this time. It’s like bottoming out in the twelve steps. Ramana Maharshi said of giving up the self in order to know truth that “[e]agerness to do it must be equal to that of a man kept under water trying to rise up to the surface for his life.”

It is not a crime against God or nature to not have this eagerness, but it’s also helpful to ask, why you don’t. Are you happy enough? Do you not need to awaken? What do you want? Why are you doing this?

If the answer is no, I don’t need to awaken, everything’s fine, I’m just going to chin up or whatever, then okay. Truly!

But if the answer is, I want to know truth and reality, I want to see the Face of God and live, then let’s do that. Now. With all our heart and mind.

Since reality is all there is, and since you cannot be other than in reality all the way, it does not need to you to believe in it or know it at all in order for it to be what it is and to do its thing.

Reality is. You, too.

Love,
Sean

P.S. Whenever somebody says they want to see the Face of God and live, the answer is always: you already have seen it and you didn’t know it.

Which is another way of saying – gently, patiently – *look.

Called Home to the Holy Instant

Often I am outside before dawn. Light changes; the world wakes up. Chickens and horses, neighbors walking dogs, the traffic on Route Nine going east. When we are still and quiet, the world wakes up inside us. Thought slows and the mind extends far beyond the body, discovering it is already one with the horses, the hills, and the slowly brightening sky.

Over and over the Holy Spirit guides me back to what A Course in Miracles calls the “holy instant,” and which other traditions call the present, Brahman, Now, et cetera. In the holy instant, I realize again my fundamental unity with all Life. Division and conflict are illusions. There is only Love – impersonal and impartial, perfectly neutral, perfectly just.

This realization cannot be forgotten. It can be ignored and defied but it can never be forgotten. It lives in all of us, a faint spark with a divine mandate of conflagration. We cannot make Truth untrue.

I knew God all the time as a child. God was everywhere in all things – the rough tongues of calves, buttercups in the meadow, sunlight on quartz after it rained. The world was not separate from me and I was not separate from life. It was holy in a way that required no defense or explanation. Like a creation of God that knows it cannot leave the Mind of its Creator, I lived without guilt or fear. My innocence was perfect freedom.

This is a projection, of course! Yet like all projections it contains a kernel of truth which must not be disowned. I did know God, and this knowing began to erode around the time my “I” began to distinguish itself. Two? Three? I know it accelerated a lot around age four. Suddenly I was a body, suddenly there was a world in which that body – and other bodies that it loved – was not always safe. Life was divided and set against itself. There was nothing to be done. And the Newsweek covers, which my father read religiously, made clear that it was only going to get worse.

This happens to all of us. It is a human story, echoing in all the other stories we tell and sing. The long journey home, the snake in the garden, the help we are condemned to mistake and crucify. But “I” is not a crime against God or Nature. It’s not even unnnatural, in and of itself.

Rather, our belief in it – which is our acceptance of it as our identity (what ACIM calls “a tiny mad idea”) – is an error that can be corrected. For me, the desire that it be corrected was eclipsed by a fear of what would happen if I so much as tried to correct it.

Coming to terms with that took years. Years. It took facing down fear – of you, your body, your God, and my inability to control any of it. It took facing down the nihilism of seeing there was way no way out on the ego’s terms. I had to learn it good enough to teach it. It was not easy. It still isn’t.

I mentioned being outdoors. Dawn can become too easy so sometimes I go out at night. We live in a New England village but it’s not hard to reach the forest. Ten minutes, a couple of benign trespasses and I disappear from the world of people and their seemingly endless problems. I become one with the moon and stars, with owls and bats, and one with late fall wind keening in the pines.

The practice is to give attention to the Holy Spirit. To consent to be guided by the Holy Spirit to the holy instant, where self dissolves, taking with it our strange religion of having problems.

For most of us, awakening is not a lightning bolt but something gentler and more sustainable. You know how you wade into the sea, then lean forward diving into it? Like that. “Waking up” in the softest, sweetest – in the easiest – sense of the word.

We dream that reality is a dream. But reality is not a dream. It’s this: this this.

If you say this little essay is just words, I agree! It is just words. But words aren’t useless. I can’t eat the word “food” but I can use it find something I can eat. We cannot undo thought with more thought. But thought can learn to look at itself, inquire into itself, ask how it is generated and how it sustains itself.

Thought can ask – and live the answer to – the question: who or what is behind all this? Beyond the contents of thought, beyond the movement generating that content is . . . what?

The answer to this question is not another thought but an experience: like (while not at all like) how dawn slowly reveals a world that had been hidden in shadows and darkness. It’s not supernatural and it’s not special. In it, an owl is a bird, not a messenger sent by God to tell us a secret.

The secret – such as it is – is that this is okay. It really is. When we stop insisting on specialness, holiness is revealed.

It took a long time to become lost, and yet it takes no time at all to be found. The Holy Spirit endlessly reminds us what we are in Truth by asking us to offer to the world only what we want to receive. Hence the suggestion “give attention.” Rest in the body in the world. Fight nothing; resist nothing.

Whether dawn or midnight, I always hear the river. I live a few stone’s throws from the middle branch of the Westfield River. During the day the world is too loud to hear it, but at dawn and at midnight, you hear its continual murmur, hymn-like and clear. You understand what Heraclitus meant when he said nobody steps in the same river twice because it’s never the same river and never the same person.

And yet.

Beyond the ever-shifting nature of reality is that which does not change for it is that to which the river appears, and without which the river cannot be said to exist. You are that. You were always that. Its name is your name, its essence is your essence, and its truth your truth. I invite you to remember this: to discover it for yourself; I remind you that you are allowed to be happy, to know peace, and to be one with Creation.

Indeed, I remind you that you cannot be other than unified in and with Creation, and that this unity is happiness and peace. Together we make it so.

Awakening to Truth through A Course in Miracles

Truth needs no interpretation, because it needs no defense (T-17.IV.10:2). It is one without another, perfect in its simplicity (T-26.III.1:8).

That’s the suggestion A Course in Miracles makes. In truth there is no choice, because there is nothing to choose between (T-26.III.1:10). Thus there is no conflict anywhere in the system. That’s not the way we live right now – eternally happy and always at peace. But it was once, and it will be again.

That, too, is a suggestion the Course makes.

For now, ensconced in bodies beholden to a world in which uncertainty is the law and the death the certain end, what the truth is is not really our concern. It’s like we want to travel to Boston but the car is broken. First we have to fix the car, or find another way to travel. Boston will be there.

In A Course in Miracles, the “way to travel” has to do with the interior guidance we follow for our living. We have two choices – the Holy Spirit and ego. The Course teaches us how to clearly discern between them and, based on that discernment, to make a decision to listen to one and not the other, so as to no longer be conflicted and torn.

Ego and the Holy Spirit have profoundly different teaching styles which produce very different outcomes. We are always listening to one or the other, and with a little practice, can notice their effects instantaneously. The Holy Spirit produces awareness of a calm and sustainable happiness that naturally gives itself away. It is in us but not of us (M-4.I.1:5).

The ego produces both possessiveness and defensiveness, always with a barely-manageable intensity. Happiness is a fleeting feeling we pursue and cling to, not a thing we are and thus effortlessly extend.

Both the Holy Spirit and the ego are in the human mind as ways of interpreting and understanding what we perceive. Both are telling a story. Both are familiar but ego tends to be the one to which we most readily give attention. We have been conditioned by family and culture to take its teaching literally for a thousand lifetimes. It adds up.

The ego interprets against truth, distorting it to make competition and conflict seem reasonable and inevitable. The world is full of clashing interests and agendas; as bodies we are vulnerable; if we don’t look out for number one who will?

And then, having sold us that bridge, the ego comes up with all kinds of ideas about how to look out for our selves, not a single one of which ever involves seeing the falsehood of the underlying construct, which is the separated, alienated self which is itself an illusion.

The Holy Spirit also interprets, but always in favor of truth. It knows we are not ready for a direct experience of Love, so it facilitates a happier and happier dream. Where once we suffered alone, now we share and celebrate. The Holy Spirit understands what illusions are but, rather than resist them, it uses them to teach us how to see beyond illusion, and thus to become increasingly open to truth.

So our ACIM practice in many ways is simply to look in a deep and sustained way at our thoughts – at the patterns in our thinking – and notice how thought functions. Can we see when we are projecting? Can we see how bias subtly arises to shade our view?

This has to do not with the content of thought but with its function – the way that thought works. That is what we want to see, and that is what the Holy Spirit will gently undo. The specific projection is never the problem; it’s the inclination to project at all that is the problem. And so that is what needs to be healed.

And as we do this, in time, we slowly awaken. The sleep of forgetfulness ends, one miracle at a time. We begin to perceive in harmony with truth because our minds are no longer held captive by ego, entranced by its deception and manipulation. We go slower and judge less; we are less attached to particular outcomes because we trust God. We know that all things work together for good (e.g., M-4.I.1:4). Acceptance, not understanding, is required.

There is a lot of happiness in this way of living. The happy dream is no joke. Nor is the happy dream static or one-off. It becomes happier and happier as we open more and more to the Love and understanding that is our natural state of being in creation.

We do not have to protect the truth. We do not have to seek, study or contemplate oneness. We simply have to give attention to the Holy Spirit, following its lead, and learning from its reliability, that our faith in God is not misplaced, and can only lead to an ever-deeper experience of joy and peace.

Walking Away from Golgotha

A Course in Miracles uses crucifixion as a symbol of the separation which occurs routinely in our living as the sense of being unfairly attacked. It’s an abstraction with consequences to which we can respond with love.

Crucifixion symbolizes the attempt to combine attack and innocence (T-27.I.1:1). There is the one who does the crucifying – the attacker, the victimizer, the evil one, i.e. you – and there is the innocent one being crucified, being victimized, i.e., me.

You’re the Roman soldier with a hammer, and I’m Jesus laying down on splintered wood.

The thing is, the desire to be crucified – to suffer and sacrifice – is not separate from the desire to crucify. You can’t have the one without the other. When I feel victimized – misunderstood, neglected, wronged, whatever – then by definition I have brought forth the one who victimizes. I make my brother an enemy, a crucifier which – wait for it – means I have crucified him.

There is – thank Christ there is – another way.

The suggestion the Course makes – the healing it offers – is that this view of crucifixion reflects a deep confusion about what we are in truth, what our brothers and sisters are in truth and, critically, what God is.

You cannot sacrifice yourself alone. For sacrifice is total. If it would occur at all it would entail the whole of God’s creation, and the Father with the sacrifice of His beloved Son (T-27.I.1:7-8).

When I perceive myself as victimized I am actually victimizing you. I feel righteous in this – how could I not? I am the Christ and you are the murderer of Christ. In this way, I make myself the sign that you have lost your innocence; you need only look at me to be reminded of your condemnation (T-27.I.2:3).

Do we really believe God thinks that way? Or would condone behavior that reflects thinking that way?

When we realize the answer is “no,” and then commit to thinking differently – to thinking as God thinks, which is to consent to be reminded that our will and God’s Will are not separate but perfectly aligned – then healing begins. We remember our shared innocence.

Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of [your brother or sister’s] guilt, for you will not escape the death you made for him. But in his innocence you find your own (T-27.I.1.2:6-7).

When I free you from responsibility for my suffering, then I naturally witness to your innocence. And here is the thing: when I witness unto yours, I also witness unto mine. Just as sacrifice is total, so is salvation. Only innocence recognizes innocence. We are liberated as one because we are one.

The world cannot be saved by attack. You and I cannot be saved by attack. Our innocence can only be remembered – brought to mind – when we lay down our weapons, release our ideas about just war and righteous conflict, and meet one another in the space which arises when attack is no longer viable.

This is hard to do. It requires that we be intentionally vulnerable; it requires that we be radical; it requires that we accept, literally, that our only function is to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10).

It requires that we enter into a sustained committed – indeed, a monogamous – relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Leave all decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He knows it. So will He teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt instead of love. Give up this frantic and insane attempt that cheats you of the joy of living with your God and Father, and of waking gladly to His Love and Holiness that join together as the truth in you, making you one with Him (T-14.IV.5:4-6).

Today, let us be neither the one with the hammer nor the one on the cross. Let us walk away from Golgotha together, hand-in-hand, to remind our brothers and sisters of our freedom and our peace. What other function could possibly be worthy of us?