A Course in Miracles Lesson 12

I am upset because I see a meaningless world.

Again, with this lesson we build on previous lessons – working increasingly to both understand and take responsibility for the role our minds play in creating the world that we see and experience. Lesson 12 drives the point home. Our upset – call it anger, fear, guilt, shame, distress, worry, sadness, loneliness etc. – is not caused by the world. Those feelings – those impressions – are what we have projected onto the world. The real source of our stress is our perception of meaninglessness, and our unwillingness to become responsible for it.

Two things stand out in this lesson of A Course in Miracles. The first is the beautiful wording – poetic, actually – that describes just what is happening in this process of projection.

If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth. Beneath your words is written the Word of God (W-pI.12.5:3-7).

Few passages of the either the text or workbook are as clear and precise as this. We perceive what we want to perceive. It is a choice we make, one that we can undo – and make again, differently – whenever we want. The truth – God’s Word – is already there, waiting. Beneath the anguish and hostility, the guilt and fear that is our text is God’s text, clean, shining and pure. Which would we rather see?

If we can understand this distinction – and accept it – and then bring it into application (Tara Singh‘s phrase for walking the walk of any spiritual path)  – then we both understand and are practicing what A Course in Miracles aims to teach.

So in this respect, Lesson 12 is an opportunity – early in the process – to begin taking responsibility for projection and learning how peace arises when we stop insisting on our interpretation of experience.

The second aspect of this lesson that is worth noticing is the way in which it declares that our upset is directly related – can be traced to – the world’s apparent meaninglessness. In other words, logic would seem to dictate that we’re upset because we see violence, poverty, hunger, loneliness, anger, greed etc. Those things upset us – it’s obvious, right?

But A Course in Miracles is explicit: the source of our stress is our unwillingness to simply accept the meaninglessness of the world. We can’t bear it and so we rush to fill it. The rush to fill it becomes our stress because what we add is not meaning but confusion. Lesson 12 is an invitation to simply allow the meaninglessness to be what it is, to see its fundamental neutrality.

What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy (W-pI.12.5:1-3).

Thus, if we can accept meaninglessness for what it really is – which is neither good nor bad but simply an entirely neutral fact – then what we will perceive on it will be God’s Word, which is our happiness and our rest.

There is a clear – if unstated – subtext here. There are two ways of looking at the world – one is our own (call it the ego’s) and one is with Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit, both of whom enable us to patiently wait for the inevitable revelation of God’s Word.

Thus, one of the questions that Lesson 12 asks us to answer is: with whom are we looking at the world? Are we asking Jesus to join us? Are we inviting the Holy Spirit to share its vision?

Or are we simply surrendering to the throes of ego? Are we doubling down on our perception, our understanding, our vision of life in the world?

There is – there is always – another way. Are we ready to avail ourselves of it?

←Lesson 11
Lesson 13→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 11

My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.

The first ten lessons are essentially an introduction to how our bodies function with respect to meaning and purpose. We are being invited to rethink – literally – the way in which mind is experienced in and as a body.

The upshot of those lessons is to undermine our settled understanding of the body and subtly shift our thinking away from sensation and towards the activity of mind. 

Lesson 11 is the first lesson of A Course in Miracles which yokes this shift to the world.

The world and our bodies are a single movement – the one brings the other forth. Our physical senses manifest a world and our brain provides a narrative about that world. It is persuasive and convincing. It seems to just be the way it is.

Our understanding of that movement is not that the one brings the other forth, but rather that our bodies are simply noticing what already exists. There really is a pine tree, with a chickadee singing in it, with the sun setting over the horizon outside my window. And it really is beautiful. And beauty really does make me feel happy, joyous and free.

Lesson eleven is the beginning of reversing this structure of cause-and-effect.

Today’s idea introduces the concepts that your thoughts determine the world you see. Be glad indeed to practice the idea in its initial form, for in this idea is your release made sure. The key to forgiveness lies in it (W-pI.11.1:3-5).

If you believe that cause is external – if that belief is reflected in your thought, if it effectively is your thought – then that is how the world will appear. It will rain on your picnic and you will feel sorrow because your picnic was ruined.

But the cause of joy is interior and rain – and picnics – can neither bring it forth nor shut it down nor modify it in any way.

The course does not ask us to believe this – that would be too big a leap at this juncture. Rather, it asks us – in a mild and gentle way – to simply give attention to the possibility of it. We’re talking about three to five minutes of practice over the course of a single day.

It is like learning how to swim by taking one small step after another ever deeper into the pool. And at any juncture, we can slow down. There is no being thrown in the deep end here.

This lesson – the world is meaningless when and as it proceeds from meaningless thoughts – is the foundation of forgiveness, which A Course in Miracles defines as “the healing of the perception of separation” (T-3.V.9:1).

Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind, or you will also perceive that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven (T-9.IV.5:3-4).

What never happened cannot have effects. What is not real cannot have effects. This is the shift in thinking offered by A Course in Miracles.

In a sense, lesson 11 is a big step. It is the first time that we are explicitly told that what we see or perceive is our responsibility. What we perceive – war, famine, loneliness, poverty and the corresponding grief and suffering – extends from our mind because of our confusion about how cause and effect actually function. When at last we begin to understand accept this, then we draw near “peace, relaxation and freedom from worry” (W-p-I.11.3:4). 

Early versions of A Course in Miracles include the admonition that part of asking Jesus what miracles to do automatically meant that we also ask him what miracles not to do. Miracle workers, in their enthusiasm and lovingkindness – but also in their tendency to overestimate their spiritual progress – are inclined to do everything. Heal this and heal that and then go knock on doors to find more opportunities to heal. 

But the course advises us to relax. To breathe. To accept the viability of baby steps and trust that salvation is in better hands than ours. 

I raise this because Lesson 11 is fun. I like it and, because the workbook indicates that it’s critical to the foundation of peace and joy, I want to get it right. I want to get it perfect. But implicit in the ACIM curriculum is the fact that we are always right where we are meant to be. We are learning what we are meant to learn and this juncture, with these companions, through these circumstances. 

Ego resists that truth and masks my resistance to with good intentions. But Spirit – when I give it space and listen to it quietly speak – says thank you for your trust. In the end, its gratitude is all we need.

←Lesson 10
Lesson 12→

Some Keep the Sabbath . . .

One of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems is #236 – Some Keep the Sabbath. It captures for me several of the qualities that I admire most in her work: playfulness, irreverence and – deeply related to the first two qualities – a profound awareness and commitment to waking up to one’s identity in God.

As anyone who has read her work – poems and letters both – knows, Dickinson was a brave and eloquent woman. Her intelligence had a ferocity to it that most of us can only dream of. I’ve always disliked Julie Harris’ portrayal of Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst because it indulges in a timidity that was simply not a salient characteristic of this extraordinary poetic and religious mind.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –

Even though in that part of New England in the middle of the nineteenth century it was not unheard of to prefer to the woods to church (as even a cursory review of Thoreau and Emerson makes clear), Dickinson’s opening lines are still a radical rejection of tradition – both spiritual and cultural. She is not denying the inclination to worship, to know God through the Sabbath, but she is announcing her intention to do so without bowing to conventional means. She eschews both hierarchy and patriarchy in one fell couplet.

More than that, she is denying the human inclination to organization altogether. As the poem unfolds, roles typically assigned to people or buildings – directing a choir, the dome overhead – are assigned to nature. Dickinson is not just saying that we can perceive God in the natural world around us – she is positing that all our efforts to the contrary are precisely what shut God out, what render God in accessible.

People, in the ordinary course of being people – who set about building churches and filling them on Sundays – are not following God so much as walling any experience of God out.

That is still not a very popular position to take in Christian circles.

In a sense then, what Dickinson is asking is this: you want to worship? Do nothing. The Kingdom is already here – the bobolink sings, the apple tree limbs shift in the breeze. It is already done. The altar is not encased in four walls. It is bestowed in equal measure on the world and all its contents. The sermon is not spoken through a chosen minister (in Dickinson’s day, almost always a man) – rather, it is spoken all the time, by all things.

Reading Dickinson, one is hard-pressed to escape the sense that we are being subtly called to pay attention. She is not the first person to hear a bobolink sing. But the implication in her poems – and poem 236 stands as a strong witness – is that our attention can go deeper. Can take us deeper. Indeed, salvation – in the truest, most natural sense of the word – may require that we go deeper.

Emily Dickinson taught me to return to the woods, to turn my face to the sky, to gaze long and fiercely at the birds within range of my vision. She is my patron saint of intense devotion to awakening. She is a witness to the way that our physical sight is but a shallow substitute for the broader, the more divine vision with which we are all blessed but so few are able to employ.

Accept no substitute for spirituality! Accept no other experience of God – of spirit – whatever word you use to signify that Divine Source that forever pours forth its grace in all moments, in one continuous line. Dickinson’s gift was not merely literary – it was also a profound spiritual wisdom. There are few people who have gone so far – and left such a helpful and powerful record – in pursuing their vision of God.

Consider those last lines of the poem.

So instead of of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

Heaven is not a goal – an objective to be achieved at the end of some superior effort. Rather, it is a condition of the present moment, one into which we can slip with joyful ease. Emily Dickinson shows us how – all we have to do is choose to follow.

Reading A Course in Miracles: The Atonement as Defense

The “Atonement as Defense” is a section of A Course in Miracles that calls us to defend the truth by denying the power of error to hurt us in any way. We know that we are deferring to error – or the power of wrong-minded thinking – whenever we feel doubt or fear. These feelings impede our miracle-working abilities. They render the Atonement inaccessible. They block the way to Heaven.

We tend to think of denial in terms of its negative negative connotations – i.e., its use to hide the truth. Alcoholics deny the affect their drinking has on family members and so never get sober. Teachers deny their intellectual arrogance is intimidating students and so the students never ask for help and never learn to the fullest of their or their teacher’s potential. On this view, denial creates a vicious circle that only repeats the fundamental error. Healing never happens.

However, A Course in Miracles explicitly states that there is also a way in which denial can be used positively. If we use it to deny the ability of error – alternatively called a lack of love or sin – to injure us, then we are using it appropriately. Indeed, to deny the power of error is to tacitly affirm the power of truth and love. This is the right use – a Christ-minded use – of this tool.

How do we learn to use denial in defense of truth and love?

The means are easier to understand after the value of the goal is firmly established. It is a question of what it is for. Everyone defends his treasure, and will do so automatically. The real questions are, what do you treasure and how much do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these questions and to bring them into all your actions, you will have little difficulty in clarifying the means. The means are available whenever you ask (T-2.II.3:2-7).

This echoes the beautiful passages in Matthew’s Gospel about where we “lay up” our treasure.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

And a few sentences later, the helpful reminder that a person cannot “serve two masters:”

. . . for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Or, as the course puts it: “The Atonement is a total commitment” (T-2.II.7:1).

Thus, in A Course in Miracles, we are invited to clarify our intentions. We are being asked to set a very specific goal of healing. If we can set our eyes on Heaven – if we can recognize that our sole problem is that we believe we are separated from God and that repairing that perceived separation is the only healing that matters – then the means to achieve will be made instantly available.

We should submit all things – work, relationships, prayer, parenting, health – to this one test: What is it for? Does it serve the separation or or does it serve salvation? If it serves separation, then let it fall to the wayside without a second thought. Allow only that which furthers the goal of salvation to be in your life. No compromises!

We are called to simplify our lives so that we might focus exclusively on returning to God. Nothing else matters. And the return is not complicated, either. The means are actually already given to us. But setting this goal – making this our one objective to the exclusion of all others . . . that is a big deal. That is a challenge. We can delay making it for a long time. We can forget to make it, or forget we made it.

Focusing solely on our return to God can seem impossible. It can seem like the work of spiritual super heroes and heroines. We’re not saints – we’re just ordinary people. I’ve got to make dinner, put the kids to bed, talk to an editor about a story I’m working on, prepare for the next class. This is how life works. Are we actually supposed to give up those aspects of our lives?

In fact, we are called to bring order to our living, so that we might better remember and bring to application our sole focus on ending the separation and remembering our identity in and as love. This order appears in the ordinary circumstances that comprise our living; nothing changes but how we view our living. That is what the miracle does: it brings order to our perception in order to remember love.

The miracle turns the defense of the Atonement to your real protection, and as you become more and more secure you assume your natural talent of protecting others, knowing yourself as both a brother and a Son (T-2.II.7:8).

Our continual efforts to save and be saved are not without fruit. We make progress in time and that’s okay. Our awareness of the active protective value of the Atonement – God’s Love – increases in time and as it does we are able to extend our knowledge of it -and its security – to our brothers and sisters. We become servants unto their own experience of salvation.

Thus, this section then is an opportunity to reflect on our commitment to awakening and to our brothers and sisters as collaborators in salvation. It is a road map to help us a) measure that commitment and b) bring it better into application.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 10

My thoughts do not mean anything.

Within each lesson there is always a seed or two, the flowering of which seems to aim at completely undoing our sense of self. There is a tendency to merely glance at these “seeds” – to pass over them quickly – under the mistaken belief that we are making the lessons less fearful and thus more manageable. Leave what’s scary for another day! But this is a delay tactic that only postpones our inevitable – and desirable – readjustment. Atonement, as Jesus points out frequently in A Course in Miracles, reflects a total commitment on our part.

As it clearly states, Lesson 10 is a second, somewhat altered, take on a soon-to-be familiar theme: our thoughts are meaningless. We saw this first in ACIM Lesson 4 which compared our thoughts to the objects we perceive in the material world. The goal was to begin to sense that our “thoughts” are actually outside of us rather than within and that they are also in a critical sense “past.”

We are not ignoring that aspect in Lesson 10. Implicit in the brief review of Lesson 4, is the need to remember that our thoughts – as we now understand them – are essentially unreal in the sense of time and space, which is to say, in the sense of bodies. We need to rethink the way we think: and this “rethinking” is not a function of the brain but rather of that in which – or through which – the brain has its function.

Lesson 10 takes it a step further, largely through the lines that are both the heart – and the above-mentioned seeds – of this exercise.

Now we are emphasizing that the presence of these “thoughts” means that you are not thinking. This is merely another way of repeating our earlier statement that your mind is really a blank W-pI.10.3:2-3).

If these thoughts – about whether Chrisoula or I will take Sophia riding today, or what is for supper, or will I teach Dickinson or Whitman this semester, or where is the next dollar will come from, or why am I so suddenly and intensely scared of death, why doesn’t so-and-so call anymore, etc. – do not constitute thinking, then what does?

Better yet, who is the “you” that this workbook lesson addresses?

I think that last question is one of the true gifts of A Course in Miracles, although it arrives – and can remain for sometimes – more in the nature of a curse. Whoever – and whatever – we are, our bodies and the brain-chatter produced by them are inside of us.

We aren’t who we think we are. We aren’t what we think we are. When Jesus assures us in the text that we are perfect creations of a loving Creator, he isn’t referring to Sean Reagan or you or anybody else. He is not referring to bodies. He is not referring to identities attached to bodies.

Thus, this “identity in God” to which I often refer is not some perfection of the bodily self, some pinnacle of emotional wellness, a last stop on the train of spiritual evolution.

Rather, it is spirit itself. And there is only one spirit, only one mind. This we that “we” think “we” are is going to be wholly and utterly subsumed by its origins, absorbed back into God from which it did not, in truth, depart. We fight that – we are fighting it right now, else what is the ego for – but with each lesson we take another inexorable step in the direction of Heaven where differences of any kind are entirely dissolved.

This is not an experience that we have as bodies. Our physical experience is subject to the laws that characterize bodies – ups and downs, comings and goings.  At best, our bodily experience hints at the greater peace from which it borrows its existence. Lesson 10 is a way in which  we begin to allow the weighty pervasiveness of the body to recede as we give attention to mind and the light in which – and through which – mind exists.

←Lesson 9
Lesson 11→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 9

I see nothing as it is right now.

In the early lessons, we move back and forth between “seeing” as an activity of the physical body in the physical world and “vision” as an action of spirit in the real but abstract – imperceptible to the physical eye – world. The goal of these early lessons is to help us recognize this shift – this back-and-forth – so that we can notice when we are seeing physically and choose instead to see with the Holy Spirit.

This morning, coming back from the field and forest, I passed a fir tree. Against the full moon – soft and blurred in a bower of cloud – each needle was perfectly illuminated, sharp and distinct, pure and still in the frozen air. I stood a long time gazing at this image, mind ranging as it does when I am outdoors walking.

The world presents both moments and images of beauty to us – pictures of perfection and glory, radiance and grace. You can’t photograph or even write about it without removing yourself from the fullness of the experience. God is there in those moments, fully present, fully willing to be seen and known. If you will accept the gift (and if you do not know how to accept the gift then ask yourself how, for you know how to do this because it is inherent in what you are) then you will learn that you have always had it.

ACIM Lesson 9 is a wonderful exercise in acknowledging that so long as we rely on physical seeing and the ego’s interpretation of what we see, then we will be clueless. We will fail to understand. As always, this acknowledgement is itself an helpful undoing. As we look about our lives – the room in which we read, the road on which we drive, the institution at which we work, the people with whom we interact – we are being consistently  invited to consider the possibility that we are completely mistaken about all of it. For many of us, even cracking this door even a little will be too shocking, too unsettling.

But we should not fight this. We should not judge it but simply allow it to be the part of our experience it naturally is. The workbook lessons are not about getting anything right – rather, they are opportunities to practice a new way of living that enables us to remember the peace and love that is our natural inheritance. We have already passed the midterm and final exam. What remains is to bring them into application, excluding nothing in particular and including nothing in particular. That’s it. The rest is handled by God because it is already being handled by God.

Indeed, one of the joys of this lesson is the degree to which we can realize – or even just act as if we realize – that God cheerfully does handle the rest. To stare deeply at an orange or trout jumping in the river or an old dog or moonlight beyond the fir tree, and at the same time to accept that we are simultaneously actively disrupting our capability to see love, is to invite a new, a radical experience. Or rather, to perceive the ordinary with new eyes. The real world is given. We are not called to add to it or redefine it or even to understand it. Its accessibility is contingent on nothing but our willingness to let God show it to us, which God is always doing because sharing is what God is.

Thus it is given to us to look around: to partake of the world in its loveliness and complexity, its bounty and multiplicity. With the eyes we are given, we look. And we allow our looking to be infused with acceptance of the underlying confusion A Course in Miracles is given to undo. To look with open eyes from a posture of epistemic humility is to be open to the natural enlightenment of God. We can be grateful and in our gratitude wait joyfully for the answer God has already given.

←Lesson 8
Lesson 10→

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