A Course in Miracles: What is the Authority Problem?

The authority problem is related to judgment. When we judge another, it is because we believe that judging is our right and that judgment has value. This belief reflects an even deeper belief – that we are the author of self and world, that we are in charge of Creation.

This belief arises in – and because of – the context of separation. Separation produces an inevitable conflict between us and God, a mighty struggle to decide who has ultimate authority over our living and thinking. The authority problem does not deny God, it merely opposes God. Who is the boss – us or God?

The very question presumes separation.

In the world, in these bodies, we presume an authority that belongs to God, and because we are not God, we cannot help but wield that power in ways that hurt us and our brothers and sisters. Acceptance and application of this belief arises from the ego, which always seeks to maintain its existence by reinforcing separation. Ego argues that we are in control or should be. Ego argues that happiness is causes by what is external, and that it is up to us to manipulate the external in order to maximize our happiness (inevitably at the expense of others).

This belief is a distortion of truth and causes all fear and guilt, and thus all suffering.

The authority problem always leads to projection. It always doubles down on suffering. The solution to the problem is to practice justice, which always emphasizes mercy because mercy is what God offers us in Creation.

We are called to both recognize and accept that our actual identity is not separate from God or Creation, regardless of what label we place on it. This requires we no longer buy the ego’s lies about control and power, and instead surrender in order to more faithfully and accurately perceive our fundamental unity with all life, which is reality.

We cannot do this unaided. It is the Holy Spirit who teaches us how to remember the mercy of God and how to enact that in the dream of separation, in order to release all of us from pain. On that view, the “authority” is the Holy Spirit, Who speaks for God, and allows us to remember the peace that naturally arises when we no longer invest in or practice conflict.

The Fifteenth Principle of Miracles

Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning (T-1.I.15:1-4).

In A Course in Miracles, the statement “each day should be devoted to miracles” should not be understood as necessarily advocating for disregarding clocks or calendars. Rather, it addresses our psychological relationship with time and how that relationship can be used constructively to facilitate the undoing of separation.

We might restate by saying that time exists in order to facilitate the acceptance of the Atonement for our selves. We want to use time, not be used by time.

The basic decision of the miracle-minded is not to wait on time any longer than is necessary. Time can waste as well as be wasted (T-1.V.2:1-2).

A Course in Miracles suggests that time is a teaching device and a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with using time to schedule a vacation or to ensure that we can meet for coffee tomorrow. But the ultimate function of time – the Course-based use of it – is to facilitate spiritual learning that will transform us by showing us how to accept Love and thus undo fear and its effects in our lives

Miracles are the means by which this shift in perception – from fear to love, from interpretation and perception to knowledge – occurs. When we devote each day to miracles, we are consciously choosing to use time for the the Holy Spirit’s purpose of ending the separation and restoring our minds to Love, which manifests as the joyful extension of forgiveness as our spiritual practice.

In practice, this means giving attention to the condition of our mind on a daily – on an hourly and sometimes even on a minute-by-minute – basis. We want to align our thoughts with God’s Will – we want to think the way God thinks and we want to not think as God would not think. It’s easy to say and it’s hard to do; that’s why this is a practice, not an accomplishment.

When our minds become aligned with God in this way, then they produce effects in the world that are compassionate and gentle and naturally guide all our brothers and sisters to ever-deepening experience of peace and happiness. This happens in the context of separation in order to undo – in time – separation (which includes time).

This work is thus a “constructive” use of time, because it emphasizes letting go of ego-based perceptions in favor of a more loving and coherent view of the world and our place in it, one which the Holy Spirit naturally teaches us.

As our learning advances in this domain, then our relationship with time naturally alters. Indeed, in time, the need for time as a teaching tool will be undone and disappear. In other words, when we full embrace our identity as Creations of God, creating like unto our Creator, then we will at last have transcended ego-based interpretations of time (all of which essentially boil down to the body’s journey from birth to death with a lot of suffering in-between) in favor of the timelessness of Love.

Again, this is not about taking Saturday off to watch football or go on a picnic. It is not about refusing to meet for dinner at 7 p.m. rather than 6 because time isn’t real. It’s not about pretending December 25th isn’t Christmas. All that is just the form time takes in the world. It’s only a crisis if we insist on taking it literally.

Instead, our focus is on how we are using time. What is time for? If we are using it to strengthen and nurture miracle-minded thinking, and if working miracles is our sole function in the context of time – then the form time takes will shift and we will become happier and less-stressed. We will better help and be helped by our brothers and sisters. If we choose to waste time, and be wasted by it, then we will remain in a fear-based illusion of separation.

There is – there is always – another way. Time is a limit that needs not bind us. Miracles demonstrate how this is so and thus facilitate the use of time for healing from the idea of limitations.

The Fourteenth Principle of A Course in Miracles

Miracles bear witness to truth. They are convincing because they arise from conviction. Without conviction they deteriorate into magic, which is mindless and therefore destructive; or rather, the uncreative use of mind (T-1.I.14:1-3).

The miracle represent a shift in perception, away from fear and towards Love. The miracle is an effect of allowing the Holy Spirit rather than ego to interpret the world for us. Because the Holy Spirit knows the Mind of God, its “interpretations” are the functional equivalent of Knowledge. They lead to peace, not conflict.

When we know, there is no doubt or confusion. Miracles remove the need to guess or estimate. To know is to be in relationship with truth, which does not include opposites not subject itself to this or that interpretation. What do you know?

According to A Course in Miracles, miracles are a natural expression of love and truth. They convince us of their efficacy because they arise from the Holy Spirit’s confidence in the power of love and compassion, which together point to our unity with all our brothers and sisters (broadly defined to include mosquitos, crows and drops of rain) in Creation. When we share the Holy Spirit’s conviction, which is an extension of its trust in God, then miracles occur naturally and extend this conviction into the minds of our brothers and sisters.

However, if we do not share the Holy Spirit’s conviction, and instead rely on the unstable foundation offered by ego, then miracles as such are degraded. They devolve into “magic,” which is the Course’s word for the use of thought to try and achieve results in the world without first establishing our shared reality in and with God. When we want a better parking spot or winning lottery ticket, we are asking mind to be magical rather than miraculous. And mind can do this! But shifting outcomes in the external world will not bring us joy. It will not bring us peace.

Magic is fundamentally the uncreative use of the mind (e.g., it “makes” rather than “creates”) because it relies on the ego’s ideas about separation and sacrifice, rather than on the Holy Spirit’s conviction about the power and presence of Love. Because it does not recognize our underlying equality, which is our oneness with God and Creation, this kind of thinking can and often does lead to destructive behavior that reinforces rather than undoes the separation. The appearance of violence in any form means we are not thinking with God, which means we are listening to ego rather than Holy Spirit.

And while it’s well and good to address the external violence – please do do this – the real healing, the real solution, comes from healing the mind that believes it is separate from God. And for that, we need a teacher.

Indeed, this principle is basically a cautionary note about the importance of staying close to the Holy Spirit before attempting to work miracles. Humility is essential, because it teaches us not to overly rely on our own thinking, which cannot help but bring forth confusion about and distortions of reality. We are good at self-deception! We are good at convincing ourselves that outcomes we desire represent healing rather than harming.

The Thought God holds of you is perfectly unchanged by your forgetting. It will always be exactly as it was before the time when you forgot, and will be just the same when you remember. And it is the same within the interval when you forgot (T-30.III.7:6-8).

It is a fundamental principle of A Course in Miracles that our thoughts, beliefs and convictions shape our experience of reality. When we deliberately study with the Teacher who teaches Love, forgiveness and unity – because it teaches only as an extension of the Mind of God – we naturally experience – we naturally create – miracles. This miracle-minded thinking manifests a world in which our interconnectedness is obvious and desirable, thus inspiring yet more willingness to work together to undo both the perception and the effects of separation.

In this way, miracles serve to strengthen our faith and remind us of the power of love and compassion in our lives. Inner peace and happiness are not accidents. They are effects of a decision to become responsible for salvation, by accepting the Atonement for our own selves.

The Thirteenth Principle of A Course in Miracles

Miracles are both beginnings and endings, and so they alter the temporal order. They are always affirmations of rebirth, which seem to go back but really go forward. They undo the past in the present, and thus undo the future (T-1.I.13:1-3).

The thirteenth principle of miracles in A Course in Miracles is an early introduction to the holy instant, the Course’s life-altering perspective on the nature and purpose of both time and miracles. It makes clear that miracles – which are shifts in perception that create Love where formerly there was only fear – literally alter the temporal order, undoing the effects of our mistaken belief in the past and the future.

But how do they do this? And is this an example of symbolic language or are we meant to take the idea literally? Because if we are to take it literally, then aren’t we essentially granting miracles a supernatural quality we have already expressly denied they have?

We can start answering those questions by recognizing that time is a perception of the body, much like a three-dimensional world, the invisibility of infrared and infraviolet light, and the ability to hear sounds only in a frequency range between approximately 20 Hz to 20 kHz.

Just like a butterfly perceives colors that we do not, and a dog hears sounds that we cannot, it is reasonable to expect that a tick or a sunflower, say, have different experiences of time than we do.

When we realize that time is of the body, then we can ask a new question: what is time at the level of the spirit which, as the twelfth principle makes clear, is the only level of reality?

The suggestion is that the Holy Spirit may or may not be interested in giving an answer to that in terms that make sense to mind that still believes it is yoked to a body. But It will absolutely be interested in making clear that the real question is not whether time is real – to the body it will always be real, to spirit it will never be – but rather are we using time for atonement or for suffering? That is, are we accepting the ego’s use of time or the Holy Spirit’s?

The ego uses time to focus on death and nothingness, always laced with hints of hell. We were bad in the past, which means we are guilty now, which means we will suffer in the future. This is a bleak and merciless perspective and offers no hope or respite, which is the point. We hate it but we feel trapped by it because it seems so real. We fail to see it is merely a construction born of thinking with the ego instead of the Holy Spirit.

When we give attention to the Holy Spirit, It gently insists that the present is all of time there is, and that the past and the future are illusions which cannot cause anything – neither joy nor pain – except in dreams that accept what is unreal as real.

You are confused, says the Holy Spirit. But your confusion can be corrected. The question is, are we ready?

The instant in which magnitude dawns upon you is but as far away as your desire for it. As long as you desire it not and cherish littleness instead, by so much is it far from you. By so much as you want it will you bring it nearer (T-15.IV.2:2-4).

What does this mean in practice?

In application, the thirteenth miracle principle allows us to revisit past experiences and emotions in order to recognize the lessons they hold and to integrate these healing insights of the lessons into our present lives. By acknowledging and processing the past, we create the necessary conditions for healing and growth in the present, effectively releasing the future from the shackles of past limitations and traumas.

This is a temporary process. It occurs in the context of separation in order to undo separation, which is always how the Holy Spirit teaches us.

This is forgiveness as the Holy Spirit understands it, which is simply right-mindedness, or right seeing. It does not deny that we have tied ourselves into metaphysical and psychological knots by accepting the ego’s interpretation of time. Rather, It uses that illusion to undo the suffering that interpretation causes. It is literally the manifestation of the other way for which Bill Thetford cried out, effectively augmenting A Course in Miracles.

Miracles are experiences of release from suffering because they demonstrate that the cause of suffering is an interpretation which can be changed. We are doing this to ourselves and, when we are ready, we can do something different.

Between Easters: the Holy Instant

Presently I am between Easters. We celebrated Easter with the Catholic side of the family last week and we will celebrate Orthodox Easter with the Greek side tomorrow. It is a happy time.

Of course, as a student of A Course in Miracles, and a half-assed Teacher of God, Easter – the resurrection inherent in choosing again for peace and Love, of accepting atonement for oneself, of loving in a loveless place – is an ongoing process, not an event. It’s a practice, not a holiday.

But what does it mean for resurrection to be an ongoing process rather than an event in time?

As I understand and practice A Course in Miracles, it means giving attention to the holy instant, which over the past year has assumed an increasing vitality and helpfulness in my experience, anchoring what it means to be in holy relationship, and to be healed.

I want here to share some recent notes about the holy instant that come from an ongoing dialogue about healing. A sister and I have been working together for a year or so, a shared inquiry and application of spiritual learning that has been deeply liberating.

We are both aware in our dialogue that healing – to be healing – must extend beyond the limitations imposed by bodies – it’s not about us because it’s never about us – and so I offer these notes in case others find them helpful, insightful, or whatever.

Or not! That’s okay, too 🙏

*

Just some random thoughts in response to your email yesterday. Thank you for asking about the holy instant; the emphasis on it arose early in our dialogue. It has become a vital part of my ACIM practice.

First, the logic of it, the understanding of it. The logos of it.

Strictly speaking, neither the past nor the future are here now, and so they cannot be causes of what is. The present is not shaped by either the past or the future; it is free of them; it is of another order. It’s not about time, as bodies understand time – a flow that moves in one direction, birth to death, yesterday to tomorrow.

And the easiest way to understand this “other order” is simply to see that the past and the future are not – here and now – capable of causing anything.

Basically, they are illusions.

We can pretend they are causes! But it’s the same pretense as pretending that the moon circles the earth. Looks that way, yes. Doesn’t feel like the earth moves, yes. But truth is true, and only truth is true. The moon does not circle the earth; the past and the future are not causes. We can indulge the fiction – there may even be cogent arguments for why we should indulge the fiction – but it’s still fiction.

ACIM just asks us to be clear about this, to notice it. Logically, the past and the future are not what we assume they are. They can’t cause pain or peace.

Seeing this made me curious: what does cause pain or peace then? And what is the present if not a temporal experience of the past being translated into the future?

The answer is: Mind. Only mind creates effects.

And now a hopefully not irrelevant side note . . .

I am reading – skimming is probably a better word – “Preconquest Consciousness,” an essay by E. Richard Sorenson, and the general thesis is that duality – by which time and space and matter were suddenly elevated to primacy over consciousness/awareness, which elevation was also the birth of ego, a pattern of human thinking that emphasizes the individual over and above the collective, at the expense of the collective – is a fairly recent (past 10,000 years, say) development.

On Sorenson’s view, ego is a cultural artefact and the conditions that brought it forth are the same conditions it zealously and viciously defends and extends by any means possible – separation, perception of differences, judgment, scarcity, competition et cetera. And this is a huge human problem that we are only just now beginning to rethink and correct because, personally, locally and globally, it is very very clear that something is deeply tragically amiss.

Buddha and Jesus are examples of early corrections – and they remain nontrivial. The problem of ego was thouands of years old when they enountered it (and encountered, too, early religious attempts to respond to it, which they radically and helpfully re-interpreted).

Buddha responds (I am generalizing wildly, apologies to our Buddhist brothers and sisters) by teaching us how to meditate in way that untangles thought patterns and mental moves that collectively are ego, and thus remember a state of nondual awareness that naturally extends unto the world.

And Jesus advocates a radical reimagining of the collective, all of us functioning as brothers and sisters, as equal children of a Loving Creator whose only goal is our shared happiness, which happiness is a present condition presently unrecognized.

Both are nonviolent; both are service-oriented; and both point to a transcendent Love that is non-dual in nature.

The Jesus we encounter in A Course in Miracles connects with Buddha by emphasizing the present, the holy instant, and suggesting that one reaches it – remembers it, experiences it – as a practice, as a thing we do in bodies in the world. Just like one can do zazen, one can practice the holy instant.

Logos – which is basically all the preceding paragraphs – brings us to the practice, to the actual Cave of the Heart (I am borrowing Abhishiktananda’s phrasing here). It’s helpful to know the argument, be able to articulate it, know the broad cultural strokes of it. It’s helpful to know the way to the Cave. Maps are not beside the point.

But when one reaches the Cave of the Heart, then one has to let the map go (whether it’s Sorenson, Bourgeault or even A Course in Miracles).

We enter the Cave empty-handed. There is no other way to enter it.

You ask what the holy instant feels like. It is a testament to our relationship that I can at least try to answer that.

The holy instant is clear and quiet. There is only one thought and it cannot be symbolized. There is nothing to possess or own because everything is given, and given equally. It is vivid and electric, but also deeply relaxing. It is a great power creating only peace and love. It cannot be mistaken. Once sampled, it undoes the desire for any substitute or simulacra.

The holy instant is a gift, not an accomplishment. It is a gift that is already given. The work is not to do anything to achieve or merit or gain it but to see that we can not do anything and to accept that. This is easy to say and hard to do, because we are inherently problem-solvers and meaning-makers. That is what ego is.

Premeditated meditation or contemplative prayer – sitting with an expectation, a goal (of awakening, inner peace, lower blood pressure, whatever) however subtle or apparently pure – will not work.

Letting go of our very nature and identity is murderously hard. As you know, the existential crisis it begets is no joke.

We cannot do this work alone, which is why spiritual friendships like ours are so vital, and why clarity about the Holy Spirit – knowing how to recognize Its voice, how to discern it from ego – is so essential.

Experience of the holy instant comes and goes. It is a teaching tool because it both shows us what true peace and happiness are (thus motivating us) and because it teaches us precisely what the Course is saying about being radical in our acceptance of Love (as Jesus and Buddha were).

The holy instant is both profoundly deconstructive (in a Derridean sense) and profoundly creative. It is endlessly a death, and endlessly a birth. In that way, it transcends both.

Nothing outside of it is real; nothing within it can be threatened.

Happy Easter and thanks again for being here with me.

Love,
Sean

Beyond the Specialness of Jesus

We always meet Jesus in a context – one that is shaped by our body and our relationships, i.e., the world. And our context is always alien to the historical Jesus’s context. He was a charismatic peasant Jew living in the chokehold of Roman empire, during a phase of human history that was more brutal and stupid than most of us can imagine.

Another Jesus

Our attraction to Jesus always says more about us – our needs, hopes, dreams, biases, et cetera – than it does about him. He’s gone; what remains is a complex narrative skein that transcends religion and history. Out of it we construct a Jesus – we project a Jesus. We dream a Jesus. How could it be otherwise?

The problem arises when we believe that our projection is the right version of Jesus – that it’s not a projection at all, nor even an opinion, but rather the only possible interpretation of the historical Jesus, the Way the Truth and the Life Jesus. We all do this, we all conveniently forget that we do it, and then (tragically) forget that we forgot we do it.

But why? Why this incredibly effective internal resistance to just accepting the projection and not making a big deal about it?

Because when we can convince ourselves and others that our Jesus is the real Jesus, then we are no longer responsible for our behavior. We’re doing what Jesus would do, what Jesus would condone doing, and we are not doing what Jesus would not do. It’s out of our hands; we’re just channels.

We make Jesus an idol and then hide behind it. It’s easier.

This “hiding” can look like hyper-aggressive evangelizing – e.g., killing people who refuse to convert. It can look selfish – e.g., Jesus is giving me special messages. Or it can be fatally passive, like waiting for on a healer who never arrives. In the latter case – which is where most of us reading and writing this post are – it’s like looking in a mirror and waiting for the image to tell us what to do with our lives.

This passivity breeds a lot of pain and suffering. It is qualitatively different than aggression and self-centeredness but not quantitatively so.

I tend to see Jesus as both a historical and local advocate for an inclusive, nonviolent collectivism, emphasizing what is common rather than different in us, which tends to cash out in ideas like “be responsible for projection,” “be a servant,” “cooperate, don’t compete,” et cetera, which ideas are only doable and sustainable when one enjoys a serenely confident intimacy with Yahweh.

Am I right about that?

I mean, it’s a coherent argument right? It incorporates theology, anthropology, history, psychology and so forth. It privileges shared happiness over individual satisfaction, which raises the peace-and-joy waterline for all of us. Living in that model is difficult but not impossible. And peace is better than war, joy better than suffering.

But it’s not “right” in an absolute sense, like how non-salt water freezes at 32 degrees Farenheit. It’s “right” in the sense that it’s helpful for me, in the context in which I find myself, like how some people benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy but others prefer a twelve-step group. Others might like my Jesus, too, but others won’t, and this is not a flaw in my projection’s design but rather a light making clear that what is true is what is helpful and what is helpful varies from context to context.

Still, when the conversation moves from “is this the real Jesus” to “does this version of Jesus work,” a lot of us bristle. Suddenly the suggestion is that Jesus is just one more healng modality, no different than psychotherapy, entheogens, yoga or whatever. And for us, Jesus has to be a little different, a little more special than all those other things.

We really do want the Jesus, rather than a Jesus.

Which brings us back to the first paragraph. We always encounter Jesus in a particular context, and part of that context is specialness – ours and Jesus’s. I am using “special” here in the ACIM sense of “different, and better because of those differences,” which always produces violence (e.g., T-24.I.3:1-2).

The very fact that we project a Jesus is proof that we remain invested in his specialness and our own. There is literally no other reason for him to be here.

Again, the projection is not the problem – projecting is just the human brain doing its human thing. If you didn’t project Jesus, you’d project Buddha. Or an angel. Or this or that mode of psychotherapy. And then that would be right; that would be the means by which you double down on specialness and, by extension, on separation.

So a big part of my own Jesus practice is about accepting Jesus not as special but as helpful in the context in which I encounter him. That is my responsibility – to not use Jesus to reinforce my separation from the world and from my brothers and sisters but rather to accept Jesus as a means of remembering that I am not separate from the world and from my brothers and sisters. And then to act accordingly.

This necessarily means shifting the focus from being right to what works, which requires that I be humble, attentive, open-minded, vulnerable, willing et cetera. It means remembering that “what works” has to be inclusive. It has to be a big tent. We go together or we don’t go at all. There is no other way to practice forgiveness and know salvation.

When we want the end of separation more than we want separation (and we should not kid ourselves about how hard it is to reach this juncture, let alone act from it in authentic and sustainable ways), then Jesus becomes the exact helper that we need, helping us to the precise and intimate extent that we need help.

The help is real; the help is not an illusion. Therefore, the one who helps is real, too. He’s just not other than the one who is helped. And as A Course in Miracles says, “herein lies the peace of God” (In.2:4).