Sean Reagan

Bodies, Pain and Inner Peace

Earlier this week I wrote about pain and the body. What is an ACIM student to do when they are suffering chronic pain?

Here I want to go a little deeper into this question, focusing on the attraction of pain as an obstacle to inner peace.

A Course in Miracles identifies “the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers” as the second obstacle to peace (T-19.IV.B.1:3). The body offers us pleasure – hot sex, beautiful sunsets, apple pie, snuggling puppies, chips and salsa – and we want that. We are all in on pleasure.

But the Course says that all sensation the body experiences is painful – even when we label it “pleasure.” On this view, as soon as we accept the body as valuable for what it offers (e.g., pleasure), then we are actually all the way in on death.

What has the body really given you that justifies your strange belief that in it lies salvation? Do you not see that this is the belief in death? Here is the focus of the perception of Atonement on murder. Here is the source of the idea that love is fear (T-19.IV.B.2:6-9).

All of us want to give up chronic pain – migraines, sciatica, nausea, restless leg syndrome, you name it. But also, we all want to keep orgasms, chocolate, backyard fires, the scent of lilac and strolls on the beach at dawn. The Course is saying, we can’t have one without the other; the body is the experience, no matter what the label happens to be.

Thus, the Holy Spirit would release us from all of it – the so-called pleasure and the so-called pain – by teaching us that we are not a body. And we are scared of this lesson and refuse to learn it and thus remain alien to the peace that is our inheritance and home.

Is it a sacrifice to be removed from what can suffer? The Holy Spirit does not demand you sacrifice the hope of the body’s pleasure; it has no pleasure. But neither can it bring you fear of pain. Pain is the only “sacrifice” the Holy Spirit asks and this He would remove (T-19.IV.B.3:4-7).

In other words, by accepting the truth that we are not bodies, we are liberated from suffering, which is entirely an effect of our identification with bodies – regardless of whether we’re experiencing pleasure or pain in a given moment.

If we want peace – the peace that surpasses understanding, the peace of Christ – then we cannot have it in terms the body recognizes. Most of us want peace to be the functional equivalent of “orgasms, chocolate, backyard fires and strolls on the beach at dawn.”

But peace transcends all that, exactly the way it transcends “migraines, sciatica, nausea, and restless leg syndrome.”

Peace is extended from you only to the eternal, and it reaches out from the eternal in you. It flows across all else . . . You want communion, not the feast of fear. You want salvation, not the pain of guilt. And you want your Father, not a little mound of dust, to be your home (T-19.IV.B.4:1-2, 6-8).

For many of us, at this stage in our learning, we say something here like – “okay, fine. This sounds great. How exactly am I supposed to do this? How do I let go of the idea that I’m a body?”

It’s hard because the body keeps on going, right? We need to pee or sneeze. We want to sleep with somebody or we want them to not want to sleep with us. We want to eat truffles in bed. We need a cup of tea to get us going in the morning. We need to be more disciplined about our yoga. Whatever.

Here is the answer: do nothing with the body. Don’t worry about it. It takes care of itself. Our whole job as students of A Course in Miracles is simply to give up the idea of sacrifice and accept whatever peace is given accordingly (T-19.IV.B.9:1-2).

The body can bring you neither peace nor turmoil; neither joy nor pain. It is a means and not an end. It has no purpose of itself, but only what is given to it. The body will seem to be whatever is the means for reaching the goal that you assign to it. Only the mind can set a purpose, and only the mind can see the means for its accomplishment, and justify its use (T-19.IV.B.10:4-8).

A clumsy metaphor: if we want to go to Boston, then we will need a vehicle – a car, say. The car needs four tires, a working battery et cetera. It needs gas and oil at regular intervals. It can only travel on roads – it can’t fly or float. We don’t ask the car to be what it’s not – we accept it for what it is, use it for the goal we set, and that’s that.

The body is the means to achieve the goal we set. If the goal is the body’s pleasure, then we’re confused, for the same reason we’d be confused if we thought the car wanted to go to Boston. Or liked having a full tank of gas. Or going faster or slower.

Then we would never get to Boston. We’d grow bitter and resentful. Why won’t this car do what I want it to do? Why is it always making me wash it, check the spark plugs, et cetera? We would blame the car.

We might even think the car is guilty or sinful. We might condemn it. “There’s a special place in hell for vehicles like you.”

It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body and not find pain. It is essential that this relationship be understood, for it is one the ego sees as proof of sin (T-19.IV.B.12:1-2).

Is it clear? There is no sin in the body’s appetites, there is only the confusion that the body is valuable because of those appetities. The question is simply what is the body for? And the answer is, to communicate with our brothers and sisters, and remember together that Love, not fear, is our inheritance, because we are children of a living God Who is Love.

Why should the body be anything to you? Certainly what is is made of is not precious. And just as certainly it has no feeling. It transmits to you the feelings you want. Like any communication medium the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them (T-19.IV.B.14:1-6).

When we see the body as valuable for what it can get us, then we are accepting that pain and pleasure, rather than peace, is our goal. Investigate this! Is this really what you want? To ping pong between fleeting moments of pain and pleasure?

Stop worrying about the body. Don’t judge the body for avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. Let it do what it does. Sleep when you’re tired, eat when you’re hungry. Simply become open-minded to the possibility that peace is not a condition of the body but of the mind – and that its realization is in the mind.

Peace may or may not have predictable effects at the level of the body. Jesus died on a crucifix, after all. Therese of Lisieux literally rotted away. My Dad was profoundly disabled by a stroke. Mac, our first beautiful horse, died tragically of colic. You know what I’m talking about – you have your stories too.

Ego wants us to hear those stories and become fearful. What if I have a stroke? What if Chrisoula gets cancer? I better eat healthier – I don’t exercise enough – maybe a therapist can help with my stress . . . All of that is a fearful pursuit of an illusion – that the body is valuable for what it offers.

There is a better way.

The Holy Spirit teaches me that everything which happens at the level of the body are simply helpful manifestations of the only lesson I need to learn: that I am not a body. And it does this by reminding me that the body is a means of communication, and not in any way and end unto itself.

If my car breaks down and I need to get to Boston, then I’d rent or buy a new car. Or take a bus. It’s a hassle maybe, but it’s not an existential crisis. Just so with the body. Right now I’m sitting on the couch at 5 a.m. – I’m a little tired and a little hungry. I’ve got to get ready for work soon.

But I’m writing and rewriting, and I am thinking of you. I am grateful that you read what is written here because it helps me write better, and writing is how I learn. And I am hopeful that what is written will in some way be helpful for you, in your ACIM study and practice. We are joining – not at the level of the body, though our bodies have a place – but at the level of the mind.

Beyond pain and pleasure, we are getting clear on what we are in truth. We are remembering our shared identity as Christ, as extensions of God in Creation. And this – and only this – is the source of peace and joy.

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Learning to Act in the Name of Love

This post but another way:

Heinz von Foerster said “If you want to see, learn how to act.”

“Learn how to act” is an instruction for living. It is a direction given to a body in a world. For example, somebody is yelling at us or we want to yell at somebody. What is the right thing to do in this or any other given situation? What matters above all else?

My best answer to these and similar questions is service, because it is the most effective counter to the world’s answer, which is survival. Survival breeds conflict, frequently brutal. Service slows thing down. It opens a door for reflection and dialogue. Service is forgiving. In the zero-sum conflict engendered by survival, everybody loses eventually.

When the game is survival, then we are taught to live a certain way – mostly defensive but, when tactically optimal, offensively. We have a plan for what to do with the yellers; we have rules about when we get to yell. This is the way we live. But there is no denying that the world it brings forth includes pain and suffering, and it would be better if this were not so.

And if yelling feels too easy an example, change it to “launching nuclear weapons.” The principle is the same.

When we live defensively, as we must when the goal is to survive, we perceive differences, evaluate them according to our perception of our survival needs, and then respond in ways which maximize our interests at the expense of others. That’s how the game of survival is played.

Service seeks outcomes in which all win. The easiest way to do this is try to be sure that other has more than you. There are many formal ways to do this – service, potlach, voluntary poverty. We resist this way of living because survival demands we resist it. But if we were all working as hard as possible to take care of others – broadly defined to include sunflowers, rivers and the surface of Mars – if we were putting all those before us – then we’d all be a lot happier. As it is, we ignore our innocence and thus forget the innocence of others.

In a sense, we must be like Bill Thetford who stated clearly “there must be another way,” inaugurating the work that would become A Course in Miracles. He steadied Helen as she brought for the material. Our work, like his, is to be patient, supportive and inobtrusive as The Way is given. We midwife our own peace or we will not know peace, and the way we midwife peace is we set aside conflict. We become nonviolent.

The answer to Bill’s question, by the way, is there is another way. It’s to understand that our perception of differences is not how God thinks or sees. We can never say of what we perceive, “this is the truth” or “this is the light” because that declaration belongs to God. In the hellscape of separation, it’s better we don’t assume the divine prerogative. Rather, let what is given be given.

So the the action we are learning (a la von Foerster) is surrender: we are letting What Is be. We are no longer insisting that our interpretation is the right or the only or the best or even a viable way.

When we no longer defend our perspective – when we do not insist that what we see and experience is reality itself – when we change the way we act – what do we see?

Experience is always relative to an observer – Sean in mid-November in New England in 2022 doing morning chores, say. Jack, our blind Appaloosa to whom I toss hay, experiences a different world. As does the bald eagle hunting along the river beyond the pasture. As does a mouse twitching in a feral cat’s jaws.

Asking whose perspective – whose world or reality – is right or wrong is silly. Me, the horse, the eagle, the mouse and the cat? Believing that our perspective is right – is correct to the exclusion of all other perspectives – is an error.

When we stop insisting on our way, a new way of being emeges, one that opens and allows the other – be it a horse, an eagle or a stranger – to be our equal. We see them that way, because that is the way God sees them. And we see our own self in them. The eagle’s grandeur is our grandeur; the blind horse’s intuition is our intuition; the feral cat’s murderousness and hunger is our murderousness and hunger.

We don’t have enemies anymore when this happens. We become servants when this happens, joyous servants. We become partners with the Holy Spirit establishing a happy dream for all life, the necessary pre-condition to remembering Heaven.

Therefore it is said, become interested – deeply interested – in the other.

Forsake not your brother. For you who are the same will not decide alone nor differently. Either you give each other life or death; either you are each other’s savior or his judge, offering him sanctuary or condemnation (T-22.II.7:1-3).

Anyway, that is one way to think about and practice A Course in Miracles: to accept, nurture and extend a way of living that brings forth the other as fully as possible, as our equal, as the one who saves us and who we would save, forever.

Homesteading and ACIM

I would like to write about my experience of homesteading – raising one’s own food and the relationships that entails – and how it relates to what A Course in Miracles calls the “Happy Dream.”

Pictures are just random, “around the place and around our lives” kind of thing.

Chrisoula and I have constructed over the years a homesteading practice by which we raise and grow a lot of our own food, and network with local farmers and fellow homesteaders for as much of the balance as possible. This is a process which we are always learning how to do better. It is local but its effects are far-reaching. It allows us to live in ways that do the most good, as we understand it.

Here is how I frame this, as a student of A Course in Miracles: our job is to be helpful, and helpfulness has a specific form.

God knows what His son needs before he asks. He is not at all concerned with form, but having given the content it is His Will that it be understood. And that suffices. The form adapts itself to need; the content is unchanging, as eternal as its Creator (C-3.3:2-5).

For Chrisoula and I, the form was – is – homesteading. Living that way fully and without reservation allows us to focus less on impersonal transactions and more on communication, coordination and cooperation which, together, allow for a community of personal relationships with our brothers and sisters which, in turn, become the outpouring and inswelling of the Atonement.

. . . the one responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. The teacher of God is a miracle worker because he gives the gifts he has received. Yet he must first accept them. He need do no more, nor is there more that he could do. By accepting healing he can give it (M-7.3:2-6).

In formal terms, we buy beef from local farmers, raise pigs and chickens to slaughter, buy weekly staples (corn meal, rice, beans) from local farmers, etc. We make our on yogurt and granola and bake our own bread. Most of the rest of our food we buy from cooperatives where we are members, buying in bulk.

Not everyone can do this! We understand that. No suggestion is made that the form our living takes should be the form another’s living takes. That would be boring and unhelpful. Indeed, if another’s living doesn’t take the form of managing a food co-op, say, then our own living would be impoverished.

You have a role to play in the Atonement which I will dictate to you. Ask me which miracles you should perform (T-1.III.4:2-3).

So it is a question of giving care-filled attention to one’s living, and seeing where in it there is room to be as kind and helpful to others as possible. Building a network of local farmers and homesteaders, supporting them, becoming one with them, relieves pressure on global/national economies and allows us to relate differently to the people and the earth around us. But it’s not just – or even only – political or economic.

For example, when we work in the garden and with the animals, we are surrounded by wild birds – turkey vultures, bald eagles, crows, ravens, cardinals, grackles, chickadees, barn swallows, cowbirds, blue jays, blue birds, orioles, juncos, tufted titmice and more. Our work quiets the incessant mental chatter (always notice what naturally silences ego), and so we become aware of the birds not as an adjunct to human experience – pretty details, like bangles on a scarf – but as experience itself. To the birds, we are the adjunct. We are the side show. When the perspective shifts in this way and one is no longer better or more special or privileged than a crow . . .

That is when the work and the living merge to become a sweetness and a gentle lesson, a shared presence that appears in bodies but transcends them in an ongoing blessing from the Lord. This is the Happy Dream – unearned and unmerited, accomplished in but not by us.

Your part is only to offer [the Holy Spirit] a little willingness to let Him remove all fear and hatred, and to be forgiven. On your little faith, joined with His understanding, He will build your part in the Atonement and make sure that you fulfill it easily. And with Him, you will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith, and rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone (T-18.V.2:5-8).

Nor does this gift of Atonement end but rather goes on undoing the self-centeredness that impairs awareness of love: here are the worms in the compost, here is kale in the garden, sprouting after a long winter, there are the ground hogs, there are the bees, here are the farmers, there are the neighbors . . .

So as we work to help our brothers and sisters – by being more self-reliant and productive – we are given a simpler and lovelier experience of being in the world. Our interests are not separate from the world, and the world’s interests are not separate from our own. Experience widens; everything is included. The center, as such, is everywhere.

Students of A Course in Miracles are apt to get hung up on “there is no world” (W-pI.132.6:2) and “I am not a body” (W-pI.199.8:7). These are important aspects of the course, not to be ignored. But the course is also clear that it exists within the ego’s framework (C-in.3:1). It is a tool of the world by which we might begin to perceive in a new and helpful way what self and world actually are.

This “new” perception is already inherent in us, but we have forgotten it, and so we need help remembering. A Course in Miracles is our help. It helps us – in these bodies in this world – undo our reliance on and confusion about bodies and worlds.

The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance (In.1:6-7).

Thus, it is not by grasping complex metaphysics that we are saved. It is through a new experience of peace which arises through knowing that we are not separate from one another – where “other” includes birds, worms, flowers, mountains, galaxies and so forth. “Knowing” is an experience and not subject to doubt, which is what separates it from perception.

For example, we perceive the moon as a two-dimensional disc circling the earth. This perception is unreliable – the moon is not a two-dimensional and it doesn’t circle the earth. But we know the seeing of it. The seeing is the knowing. What it is, we maybe can’t say, but that it is, we know prior to language or any other condition.

So sometimes it is helpful to ask what do I perceive? What do I know?

Knowing is easy to overlook because it’s not a problem and it doesn’t raise any questions. It just is. We are so accustomed to solving problems and answering questions that we’ve lost our ability to rest gently in that which provokes no disturbances and begs no fixing.

What do I know? This. This this. What else could I know?

Lean into your living because by doing so you can love more and learn more about love. I mean that. Don’t do it because of what you want to get in exchange – insights, spiritual ecstasy, less stress, a better body, sacred sex and all that. Want is of the ego, always. Our job is to just see past its wants by not getting worked up about them. Don’t fight, don’t fix, don’t fidget. Just look for ways to be helpful, respond in the way it is given to you to respond, and then see what happens.

A lot of seemingly big questions float through the brain: who am I? What am I? What is the nature of reality? How will I know? And so forth.

I used to say that these questions are “fun and interesting” but lately I am not so sure. Lately I begin to see that they are more like enticing distractions, cookies for starved seekers who actually need bread, rice, apples and tea. Eschew empty calories; attend the Divine Feast.

For truly the Heavenly Meal is already given, already laid out before us. We don’t see it because of what we place before it: a heavy veil of activity, problems, history, theology, philosophy, psychology, et cetera. But veils are made to be drawn aside; they are allowed to flutter to the floor. Veils hide and entice but – and this is important – for us, “hiding” and “enticing” are the veil.

We are the ones called now to see beyond this veil – this play of what hides and entices, this dance of perception and knowledge – to the Face of Christ, the Love of God, the Hearth Fires of the Great Mother and her quiet Help-Meet, our Father. Shall we, you and I, together as one, offer ourselves to a world in crisis, to learn once and for all that there is no world – nor even you and I – but only love?

Your Dream of Nothing is Nothing to God

The cosmos exists because you are asleep and dreaming (T-10.I.2:1).

When you wake up the cosmos will no longer exist and since you are part of the cosmos, you will no longer exist either. And since you no longer exist, there will be no memory of any dream.

The cosmos is merely what nothing would look like if it could be something, which it cannot be.

This is only hard to understand because we prefer mystery to clarity, and indignation to peace. We’d rather reign in hell than serve in Heaven, a sentiment cherished by all the separated ones.

There is another way.

When the light comes and you have said “God’s Will is mine,” you will see such beauty that you will know it is not of you. Out of your joy you will create beauty in His Name, for your joy could no more be contained than His. The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven, and into the Presence of God. I cannot tell you what this will be like, for your heart is not ready (T-11.III.3:3-6).

Milton wasn’t fucking around. Jesus wasn’t – and still isn’t – fucking around. And – whether you like it or not – you are not fucking around either.

The way is given, the problem solved. The reason we don’t live it is because we are scared of “nothingness.” We disappear, the dog disappears, the cosmos disappears. Not a shred of a memory of God or Peace or Love remains. We can’t accept it. So we keep trying to make separation work. At least in hell they give you crumbs.

Until one day – not because we can’t solve the problem but because we finally see that we are taking good people down by trying – we give up. We surrender.

When you care as much about the other as you care about your own self – not saying the words but living it in a way that cannot be denied, only affirmed – the separation ends.

The reason you don’t need to be afraid of nothingness at the end is because nothingness is not the end.

Something is the end, even if it’s nothing.

And you know this because this is the end. This is nothing: this this.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 177

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Most of our fear cashes out in our fear of death, supplemented from time to time in our fear of eternal suffering. So long as we dread the body’s end, and associate it with our won, then we cannot be happy and we cannot share that happiness with our brothers and sisters.

Therefore, A Course in Miracles is given to help remove from our thinking the darkness and distortion the fear of death inevitably introduces.

All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake in place of aspirations and of dreams. But death is counted on (W-pI.163.3:1-2).

All of life is hostage to death – there is no aspect or element of living that does not fall under the cruel shadow of death (W-pI.163.3:4).

Yet ask: can God die? Go into this! However you define God, understand God, imagine God – can it end? Be destroyed? Can God really and truly be confined to a body to suffer the fate all bodies suffer?

If God cannot die, and if you are God’s Creation, then how can you die? The body, yes. Bodies come and go. Does God? And if God does not, how in the name of whatever you deem sacred, can you?

It is not essential that we believe this. It is essential that we are willing to consider it. When we give it space – when we allow the inquiry and the response to unfold in us, to blossom in us, then eventually we reach the second half of this lesson: “We are one with God Who is our Source” (W-pI.177.2:1).

And it is this remembrance which liberates us to create like unto God.

The Son’s creations are like his Father’s. Yet in creating them the Son does not delude himself that he is independnet of his Source. His union with It is the source of his creating. Apart from this he has no power to create, and what he makes is meaningless (T-21.II.12:1-4).

Thus our living becomes a creative act that extends from our Source in Creation unto Creation Itself, forever bringing forth the Love that is our inheritance.

←Lesson 176
Lesson 178→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 176

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

One of the tricks to practicing A Course in Miracles is accepting that it cannot be practiced in isolation but requires relationship. This means that we need each other – like, literally need each other.

In the same way that I have a gift to give you, you have a gift to give to me. And just as you are not complete without my gift, I am not complete without yours.

This review period emphasizes our total dependence on each other and also contextualizes it as a fundamental aspect of Creation.

In previous lessons we focused on how we see the other – we focused on our need to hold in mind the Love of God, and to seek the holiness that is IN the other as a consequence of their Creation and contingency on God.

Now we ask the other – in recognition of their holiness, in recognition of their integrity, in recognition of the Creator they cannot help but witness unto – to bless us.

I invite you to take this request literally! To recognize your need, to recognize that you cannot complete yourself, that you cannot dictate to the other but only ask and be open.

I invite you to go without expectation to your brother or sister and ask them to bless you.

This is hard to do! It is hard not to have an expectation of the form the blessing will take. It is not hard not to project onto the other – they will reject us, they aren’t as spiritually advanced as we are, we are doing them a favor, we blessed them so what are they waiting for, et cetera.

It is hard because our days are not easy. Work is hard, family is hard. The world is scary and dangerous. Sometimes just remembering that we want to be better – let alone actually being better – is almost impossible.

Together, these are nontrivial aspects of our living that we should not ignore.

What heals them – and what allows us to go to our brothers and sisters in vulnerability and honesty and openness – is the second part of the review, which is the context for all healing: we are as God created us. We – and the other – cannot be otherwise.

When we declare that we are as God created us, we should give careful attention to how it makes us feel. Do we feel proud? Do we feel indifferent to others?

Or do we feel humbled and grateful? Do we feel a deep sense of obligation and responsibility?

I want to gently suggest that it is the latter we want to feel – humility, gratitude and responsibility. It is not a crime against God or nature to not feel this! There is a reason we are students!

But A Course in Miracles is an invitation to relationship with our brothers and sisters without exception. We are not healed until all minds are healed. This should appear to be an impossible task to us, which is why we need God’s Teacher to teach us.

These review lessons are opportunities to not only understand the Course, but to bring it into application in the very circumstances of our living.

←Lesson 175
Lesson 177→