Sean Reagan

Miracles should inspire gratitude, not awe. You should thank God for what you really are. The children of God are holy and the miracle honors their holiness, which can be hidden but never lost (T-1.I.31:1-2).

Miracles are natural expressions of love; they remind us that we are one with God, and that our brothers and sisters are also one with God. Because of this, conflict is impossible. Peace and happiness no longer come and go but stay with us because they are us. The way that we live in the world changes when we stop resisting what is true.

Gratitude is the natural response to this new way of living. Thankfulness arises without effort because it is merely another word for love.

Love makes no comparisons. And gratitude can only be sincere if it is joined to love. We offer thanks to God our Father that in us all things will find their freedom. It will never be that some are loosed while others still are bound. For who can gain in the name of love? (W-pI.195.4:2-6).

If we feel awe before the miracle then we are confused. Awe implies inequality, and the miracle establishes our total equality. What is one is not comprised of many parts, some greater and some lesser, but only what is the same. Miracles are not supernatural; they are not cosmic transgressions. They are confirmations of our shared underlying goodness, and invitations to remember that this goodness is all there is.

Miracles support us; they do not undermine us. They remind us of what we are, not what we were once upon a time nor what could be in the future. We don’t thank God for what we get; that is not what miracles are about. We don’t thank God for what changes, one way or the other.

We thank God for what we are, because all the miracles does is establish what is true about us. All they do is restore to our awareness what we are in truth. God has only one child and we are it. If God is love then we are love; if God is peace then we are peace; if God is merciful and just then we are merciful and just.

Our gratitude is our connection to God and to our brothers and sisters in God. That is how we remember what we are. We work out salvation in relationship.

All of God’s children are holy because all of Creation is holy. Holiness is not a behavioral attribute that some of us have and others don’t. It is not something we have in degrees. It is that which is innate and unchangeable in each of us, without consideration of our actions or beliefs. It cannot be performed.

Miracles honor that holiness. They recognize holiness at that level and they honor it. They reflect holiness throughout Creation, like a light endlessly extending brilliant rays of love, peace and happiness. Our holiness can be hidden – it can be forgotten – but it cannot be lost. It cannot be injured or impaired in any way.

What is true about us is what saves us because it reestablishes in us the truth of our identity. When we know who we are, then we know who all our brothers and sisters are as well. We know them as our brothers and sisters and, in doing so, come home at last to the One Who created us equal.

Recently, Scott Britton and I talked about A Course in Miracles. You can read his post and listen to our conversation on Itunes, Spotify, or Youtube.

Talking to Scott reminded me that no matter how much theorizing we do about the Course – and spirituality generally – we still need praxis. We still need to bring it into application.

A Course in Miracles has to be practiced, right? You don’t read about aspirin and expect the headache to go away. You don’t study the underlying chemistry. You take your medicine.

People say, fine. But how do I practice it?

I think the Course is very clear about this! We read the Text, do the Workbook lessons, and study the Manual for Teachers. Collectively they teach us to discern between the Holy Spirit and ego, and to learn from – and teach on behalf of – the Holy Spirit.

The rest is in the Holy Spirit’s hands because the Holy Spirit – who is not separate from us, by the way – knows that everying is actually in God’s Hands. Love holds everything.

I practice A Course in Miracles by giving attention to relationship, and asking the Holy Spirit to interpret each one – really, each moment in each one – in whatever way undoes fear and thus reveals Love for everyone involved.

The Holy Spirit teaches me how to rest and get out of the way by reminding me always that Love holds everying. There is nothing I need to do.

Take grievances. A sense I was wronged yesterday, am being wronged today, and will be wronged again tomorrow. We all collect grievances; they seem to be inherent. Ego loves them.

Upon what does the experience of grievance depend? How is it brought forth?

I don’t analyze the grievance – whether it is justified or not, how to respond to it, who to tell about it. How to get rid of it. How not to.

Instead, I ask: what must I believe for this grievance to matter? What must be true? What, if anything, could not be otherwise? Am I participating in the bringing forth? Could I not? Could it be otherwise?

Really go into this! Not for an afternoon or even a month. Rather, go into it until you have answered it for yourself, once and for all.

We have many diverse grievances but the means by which they occur and appear never changes. Heal that and grievances are gone forever.

These inquiries move us away from the ego’s victim narrative – the precious self under attack from its brothers and sisters, from God Himself, and thus at war with Creation, ever justified in self-defense up to and including murder – and into the problem of perception, which is the confusion of mind and body, idea and matter, cause and effect – which A Course in Miracles is given to correct.

Peace, not conflict, is our reality. Healing, not suffering, is our function.

Yes, it is hard to sustain these inquiries. It requires discipline. It requires stepping outside – way outside eventually – our intellectual and psychological comfort zones. We have to consider some truly frightening stuff. We have to face bravely the dark and what lives there.

Of course the temptation is to not do this but instead to come back to the grievance, which is always personal, always special. The grievance wants to be looked at; it’s happy to be looked at. There’s always a victim, always a victimizer. We say we don’t like that binary but we sure do bring it forth a lot.

It’s almost like we secretly appreciate – find value in – suffering.

So long as we are giving attention to the grievance then we are not giving attention to that which would heal all grievances by healing the mind that thinks it is separate from God and Creation.

That is the only level at which healing is possible. And so that is the level the ego wants us to never ever look at. It works viciously – single-mindedly, tirelessly – to keep us from seeing that we are doing this to ourselves.

That is the “how” the ego will not let you see. That is the “how” we project, in one form or another. And that is what the Holy Spirit heals in us.

In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause, and look not to effects . . . He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him that you may look together on its foolish cause and laugh with Him a while. You judge its effects, but He has judged their cause. And by His judgment are effects removed (T-27.VIII.9:1, 3-5).

So that is the work then – to see through the projection, to see that we are doing this to ourselves, and to reverse our understanding of cause and effect. This learning naturally occurs when we give attention only to the Holy Spirit, and not at all to ego.

Therefore, this is not a practice we do for an hour in the morning or once a week on Sunday or only at the solstice or whatever. Mind is always creating (T-2.VI.9:7). Vigilance, discipline and willingness are never out of place.

To practice A Course in Miracles is to give attention to it in order to understand the practice and then – over and over – to practice it by giving attention to the Holy Spirit instead of ego. In this way, we remember how to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10) and reclaim our identity as Love (T-14.IV.5:6).

1

Earlier this week I wrote about the “problem” of evil. Here I want to go deeper into it, but from the perspective of having enemies.

Many ACIM students, when asked to make a list of their enemies, demur. “All men are my brothers.” “I’m a lover, not a hater.” They obey a voice inside which says students of A Course in Miracles can’t have enemies. They don’t do war.

But if not having enemies matters at all to you, it is because, at a level you have not yet investigated, much less accepted, you do have enemies. You do do war.

There is – thank Christ there is – another way.

That way is, when someone asks you to make a list of your enemies, ask if they want it alphabetized by name or harm done to you.

Honesty allows us to come to the actual question, which isn’t do we have enemies. We all have enemies. The question is, why do we need to deny it?

Maybe we are protecting our status as spiritual people. Maybe we want to be nonviolent like Gandhi or radical like Dorothy Day. Maybe we are denying our disappointment that we aren’t as spiritually or psychologically-grounded as once-upon-a-time we dreamed we’d be.

Maybe. But I think there’s something else. Denial is a brutally efficient cover story, a lie so convincing that even the teller forgets what’s true.

We’re in denial about having enemies for the same reason we’re always in denial: because otherwise we’d have no choice but to see that we are doing this – all of this – to ourselves (T-27.VIII.10:1).

2

It is a decision to have enemies. It is a decision resulting from an error about what we are and what reality is. The error is our conviction that we are bodies in a world.

We think we are bodies and, because bodies suffer and die, we believe we are going to suffer and die. The game is Survivor, the rule is kill or be killed, and we set up elaborate defenses, including the best defense of all: a good offense.

We think that is reality but we’re wrong. In reality this error is not a crisis. Since we are not bodies and there is no world any decision made on that basis has no effect.

But in the apparent experience itself?

Yes. At that level – in that thought system – it is a crisis. It is the crisis of separation, the conviction that everything has separate interests and separate goals, which can only produce chaos, competition and conflict. The game is Survivor, the rule is kill or be killed, et cetera.

The game exists because we believe in it. Because we believe in it, it’s what we see and, because it’s what we see, it’s what is there to be interacted with. Until you learn that it’s an illusion, you won’t know a thing about reality.

In other words, so long as we insist on miscreation, we can neither know nor extend creation.

A Course in Miracles teaches that defenses do what they are made to defend against (T-17.IV.7:1). We construct a world in which enemies make sense, and then pretend to be disappointed when war starts. If we light a firecracker, there’s going to be a bang. What do we gain by pretending otherwise?

I can’t answer that question for you, but I can tell you what the answer was for me. The answer was: freedom from responsibility. If you are the cause of the problem, then I am absolved of any need to solve it. You are the guilty party; I am just a victim – of you, of life, of God, of circumstance et cetera. That framework allows me to indulge the separation-based fantasy of my innocence at your expense. Rather than collaborate with the Holy Spirit to undo each and every block to love, I let ego build – this is the right analogy – yet another wall.

Choosing fear over peace, separation over unity, is a terrible way to think. It hurts us, it hurts others, it brings forth a merciless and unjust world. Who cherishes it is . . . confused.

And yet, the Course offers that person – e.g., me, e.g., you – a way out.

Forgive yourself your madness, and forget all senseless journeys and all goal-less aims. They have no meaning. You cannot escape from what you are (T-31.IV.11:1-3).

The illusion is that we can escape. It appears as the belief that there is some kind of self-improvement or self-actualization or socio-political program or holy relationship out there that will fix everything – me, you, the coral reefs, the Amazon, Amazon. Everything. I’ll start an ACIM commune, I’ll teach yoga, study centering prayer, I’ll manifest abundance, find a new therapist, get a divorce . . .

There are so many ways to avoid looking at the underlying error! We can spend lifetimes – we have spent lifetimes – playing with them. But eventually, says the Course, their shared futility becomes obvious.

You did not come to learn to find a road the world does not contain. The search for different pathways in the world is but the search for different forms of truth. And this would keep the truth from being reached (T-31.IV.6:3-5).

Why do we not want to reach truth?

Because we’re scared. And we know that the fear is not really outside but in the mind. It’s not somebody else, it’s us. We do not want to look at that. We really like saying “you did it.” Or “they did it.” But don’t judge against yourself for this judgment and projection. Instead, empathize with yourself. It’s hard to open one’s heart in hell.

When we look within we should see stuff we resent, stuff that scares us, stuff that we hate. Seven deadly sins, four horsemen of the apocalypse, Facebook. Serial killers, arms dealers, red dye number five. The more we look, the worse it should get.

I’m not saying that you would nuke a country full of innocent people. I’m saying that you believe you can be happy in a world in which some people would do that. And the reason you believe you can be happy in that world is because – wait for it – you would nuke a country full of innocents. Your only real objection is the lack of plausible deniability.

You want to push the button but blame somebody else. Me, too.

I know, I know – that’s not fair. You and I are in therapy, we quit drinking, we tithe, we study and practice A Course in Miracles, we grow our own food, we vote and we march, et cetera et cetera

I agree that we’re getting better, and that there is a way in which our getting better matters. But weapons of mass destruction and assymetric warfare and misinformation are still out there. And they’re out there because we still have enemies.

And we still have enemies because way down deep – past religion, past psychotherapy, past physics and astronomy – we don’t believe the problem is us. We’re not doing this; somebody else is doing this.

They’re the problem, not us.

3

Go slowly with me here. I confuse easily 🙂

At some point, you realize that you are a bottomless pit of evil, that there is no end to the awfulness in you. In my experience, you have this insight in the exact same way that you have the insight – because it is fundamentally the same insight – that the many pathways of the world are without exception utterly useless.

Nothing is going to change. You aren’t going to change, the world isn’t going to change. It’s hopeless.

And your response to this appearance of hopelessness is an existential angst so terrifying not even death will be a release.

Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way except the pathways offered by the world. And learning they led nowhere, lost their hope (T-31.IV.3:4-5).

This is a bleak space but paradoxically it’s also a liberating one. Therefore we should not fear but rather seek it out. It’s bleak because this is how ego sees the world and ego is dark. But it’s liberating because we are not ego and are under no obligation – moral, spiritual or otherwise – to believe its lies.

From the twenty-fourth miracle principle:

You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real (T-1.I.24:2-4).

In other words, you don’t have to buy the life and worldview peddled by ego because there is no ego, only your willingness to pretend there is. You’re lying to yourself, you’re playing a game with phantoms. You’re a child daydreaming. You’re a child having a nightmare.

I’m not saying that you’re the problem. Children are never the problem. I’m saying there is no problem and any time you want to believe that, and live in the world that freedom and innocence brings forth (which is a gift of your Father in Heaven), you can.

Suffering is an illusion readily translated into peace and joy by the Holy Spirit.

Ego is like a so-called friend who always brings you down. Subtle insults and digs, never sees the best in you or anyone, doesn’t do optimism, thinks love is for the lucky or the foolish, et cetera. We all know this person (for a very good reason, by the way, projection is no joke) and we all know that you don’t argue with them, you don’t go to war with them. You just walk away from them.

If you refuse to be in conflict, then there is no conflict. The gift we offer the so-called toxic other is the gift of not putting up with their bullshit, which is to say that we choose to only see Christ in them. It doesn’t matter if they understand this or not. It doesn’t matter if we understand it. It doesn’t matter how or even whether they respond. We do it anyway. If our expression of Love requires satisfaction to be valid then guess what? It’s not Love, it’s hate.

It turns out that loving this way is literally possible, and that doing so makes us happy in a clear, calm and quiet way that is sweeter and more sustainable than most of can imagine. This happiness naturally extends itself to others, becoming lighter and lighter as it goes. It is a gift that we receive by giving away and nothing – literally nothing – else becomes us. It is the spark of light that ends the darkness out of which nightmares are made and in which they seem so real.

4

The question of the world is “what am I” (T-6.IV.2:7) and the ego has an answer. You’ve been listening to it and believing it’s the truth for your whole life. We all have. It teaches you to fear your brothers and sisters, to kill them before they kill you, and that killing them isn’t your fault but theirs or God’s or somebody’s. You didn’t make the cosmos. You’re just a regular Joe trying to survive.

The Holy Spirit has a better answer to the question of “what am I.” The Holy Spirit’s answer is, you are Love Itself.

Child of God you were created to create the good, the beautiful and the holy. Do not forget this (T-1.VII.2:1-2).

This is what Jesus heard, this is what he believed and this is what he did not forget, even unto a cross. We are called to remember and extend perfect innocence as well, under far less strenuous conditions than Jesus faced.

. . . teach your own perfect immunity; which is the truth in you, and realize that it cannot be assailed. Do not try to protect it yourself, or you are believing that it is assailable (T-6.I.6:4-5).

When we remember what we are in truth, then the last veil drops. And this – this – is what we are so desperate to avoid seeing. We are Love, and we are scared to be Love, because we think Love is weak because that is what ego taught us. Its proof is, was and will always be the body. Love doesn’t stop bullets. Love doesn’t cure cancer. Love doesn’t shut down concentration camps. It doesn’t even bake bread. Have you heard of the twentieth century?

This argument against Love can seem very persuasive. But in the end it fails. Illusions can’t prove or disprove illusion. Only truth proves anything. That is why we say that only truth is true (T-14.II.3:3). Truth is the new reference frame the Holy Spirit teaches us (T-14.II.6:1). When we are true to our own truth, then we will remember God, because what we are in truth and what God is are not separate (T-14.II.8:7). There is nothing else to remember (T-14.III.19:5).

This is why the ACIM Workbook invites us to let go of everything, even our most cherished ideas about God, Love, Truth and Beauty.

Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-pI.189.7:1-6).

When we remember what we are in truth, then the world is instantly transformed from a site of conflict to a site of healing. We understand everything is a reflection of an inner state (T-21.in.1:5), and that all change is therefore internal. That is why the Course teaches us that to have peace we must teach peace to learn peace (T-6.V.B.7:5). To teach peace is to refuse to learn from the ego, and instead to learn only from the Holy Spirit.

We have to accept this; we have to become responsible for it. We have to stop denying the healing power of Love that is us. You and I are not bodies and there is no world. Nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists (T-in.2:2-3). This is the peace of God (T-in.2:4).

5

Right now, we are like children making faces in a mirror and getting angry at the jerk in the mirror who won’t stop making faces at us. It’s time to stop playing childish games. It’s time to become the spiritual adult all God’s children need. Their need is our need, and nobody else can meet it.

The kid thinks you’re an enemy he has to defeat. You think the kid is a problem you have have to solve. There is another way. Right now, the Holy Spirit is teaching it to you. Learn or don’t learn, it’s up you, but can we at least accept that the power of decision is ours?

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The Holy Spirit is a way of thinking that A Course in Miracles posits as both the ego’s opposite and the ego’s undoing.

Like ego, the Holy Spirit is experienced as a voice which both interprets experience and makes suggestions about how to respond to experience. However, listening to it rather than to ego produces experience that is gentler and happier and more coherent with respect to the world and our brothers and sisters.

In essence, ego obstructs our spiritual growth, but the Holy Spirit supports and guides our spiritual transformation from fear to Love, which is simply the remembrance of the truth of our divine nature.

The Holy Spirit makes us happy always, and always in quiet and sustainable ways. Ego makes us happy sometimes, but always conditionally.

The Holy Spirit’s voice is quiet and still. It does not argue. It does not make demands. It does not speculate. The Holy Spirit knows wholeness and peace but it also recognizes our mistaken belief in separation. Knowing separation is not real, the Holy Spirit gently teaches us how to align our will with God’s Will in order to remember that only truth is true, thus undoing separation and its effects.

In practice, the Holy Spirit helps us correct perceptions, by helping us shift from fear-based thinking to love-based thinking. The Holy Spirit teaches us how to communicate with God, essentially mediating between our egoic mind and our God-lit mind, thus accessing deeper levels of truth, which naturally bring forth more stillness and joy.

Thus, the Holy Spirit is essential to our practice of forgiveness. We cannot see rightly with the Holy Spirit’s guidance, where “see” does not refer merely to the physical sensation that produce a world, but rather to how we understand and value that world.

The Holy Spirit is in our mind – it is, in a nontrivial sense, our healed mind – and brings us effortlessly to the grace of our shared responsibility for Creation. In sharing this answer with us, the Holy Spirit reminds us that we both have and are the answer to the illusory problem of separation.

This understanding of the Holy Spirit runs counter to more traditional Christian understandings in the sense that the Holy Spirit is characterized as a Teacher who corrects perception in order to facilitate forgiveness. This focus on inner transformation at the level of the mind does not align with much of Christianity, where the focus is on behavior.

Both A Course in Miracles and many branches of traditional Christianity identify the Holy Spirit as a divine presence, intimately connected to God. However, ACIM places greater emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s role in facilitating our spiritual growth by helping us correct our perceptions, practice forgiveness, and experience miracles.

As a kind of side note, this focus on personal transformation is largely responsible for the Course’s connection to New Age traditions which emphasize personal growth and abundance and so forth, often at the expense of the collective. Whether ACIM is a New Age phenomenon or not, its understanding of the Holy Spirit is not about advancing personal interests and gain but rather undoing them and recognizing instead our shared interest in salvation.