Sean Reagan

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Our theme now is that God is Love and therefore, we are as well. The mantra-like nature of this sequence of lessons is a simple veil masking an exponentially deeper and more powerful idea: that we are not separate from God.

This is not to be understood as “in these bodies, with these personalities and stories, we shall be lifted up and incorporated into the perfect unity of God.”

Rather, it is to be understood as: what you are in truth is already one with God and never was and never will be otherwise. We are confused about what we are – no more than that but also, no less.

The second statement obviates the first. If we think that the egoic self – with its body-identification, its time and space orientation, and its language-based relationshps – is God, then we’re confused.

A Course in Miracles is about undoing that confusion. In this sequence of lessons, it de-emphasizes the intellectual approach that tends to dominate the curriculum, in favor of an almost call-and-response simplicity.

If you hate this simplicity, don’t worry. It’s not a crime against God or Nature.

But if you find yourself responding to it – finding it welcome or easy, finding it affirming or familiar – know that somewhere in the deep past, ancestors praise and celebrate you, while in the future your descendents thank you. This is an old and veritable approach to learning.

So in this lesson, for example, the ancillary ideas are that everything we perceive is an echo of the Holy Spirit, who is the Voice for God, and that we are endowed with the power of decision.

These are not simple ideas. And yet the lesson does not invite us to go into them in an intellectual way – proving them wrong or right, say. Explaining them or theorizing about them.

Rather, the lesson asks us to put right and wrong aside – set analysis aside – and instead focus on something broader – that God is Love and we are not separate from God.

We are being asked to take a very lofty view of ourselves here, one that is beyond the reach of reason and evidence, and thus can only be reached by faith. Intellect is beside the point; sometimes it has to be.

The lesson is asking us to enter what Abhishiktanda called “the Cave of the Heart,” a domain of which Wittgenstein both was and wasn’t signifying when he observed that whatever lay beyond speech could not be spoken of, and thus silence was the better path.

We speak these words – repeat them, mantra-like – and when we are ready and willing, the Holy Spirit will take us to a place of stillness and silence in which the truth of our identity stands so clear and true that we will never again believe the silly idea that you are a body in a world, the latter of which isn’t real, and the former of which is doomed.

←Lesson 170
Lesson 172→

Do you know the Taung Child?

This child lived approximately three million years ago. Its skull – all we have to remember it – indicates that at about four years of age its eyes were plucked out by a great eagle.

Imagine its terror – being held down by a bird twice its size. Imagine its pain. Imagine its suffering and death.

Now imagine its mother. Did she see it happen? Did she try to stop it? Did she try to comfort the child as it died? Was there any comfort for her?

The love of the parent for its child is one of our oldest inheritances. Humberto Maturana suggests that the extended childhood characteristic of our human family works because parents love their children, need help raising them, and thus learned how to communicate in order to cooperate and coordinate in creating a care-based culture. All our being rests on the love that neoteny brings forth in us.

We are descendents of mothers and fathers in more ways than one.

This naturally informed Jesus’ easy reference to God as his “abba,” a nomenclature which emphasizes the absolute trust of the child in the absolute kindness of its parent, as perfect a love as Jesus could imagine because, really, it is as perfect a love as any of us can imagine.

In this review, A Course in Miracles draws on this ancient tradition, and asks us to hold it in mind as we study and practice.

Lead our practicing as does a father lead a little child along a way he does not understand. Yet does he follow, sure that he is safe because his father leads the way for him. So we bring our practicing to You (W-pI.rV.In.2:5-6,3:1).

This is necessary, we are told, because we are “preparing for another phase of understanding” (W-pI.rV.In.1:3), which will require “more effort and more time” (W-pI.rV.In.1:2). We are preparing to remember, in a real and sustained way, that “God is but Love, and therefore so am I” (W-pI.rV.In.4:3).

This Self alone knows Love. This Self alone is perfectly consistent in Its Thoughts; knows Its Creator, understands Itself, is perfect in Its knowledge and Its Love, and never changes from Its constant state of union with Its Father and Itself (W-pI.rV.In.4:4-5).

So we are being invited to intensify our practice, but in the direction of devotion and surrender – that is, in the direction of a child who knows that her mother loves and will not abandon her. She need do nothing. We are talking about trust, not intellectual accomplishment. We are talking about becoming followers, not leaders. We are remembering the ancient promise of love itself.

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (MT 18:3) needs “only one slight correction to be meaningful in this context” (T-2.VII.6:14): “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never remember the kingdom of heaven.” For we are already in it but have forgotten.

And what then of the Taung Child? How does that distant member of our vast family factor in to our learning?

He lives in me as my fear of pain and death, no? He lives in me as my fear of being parentless and my fear of losing a child. He lives in me as my respect for the birds of the sky, whose need to eat is no less worthy than mine. And he lives in me as the knowledge that no brother or sister can be separate from me. He speaks to me as Christ, no less than Jesus and no less than you.

Listen to him:

I am incomplete without your part in me. And as I am made whole we go together to our ancient home, prepared for us before time was and kept unchanged by time, immaculate and safe, as it will be at last when time is done (W-pI.rV.In.8:7-8).

Together, then, yes? Together for all of us.

Salvation of the world depends on me.

When we accept the invitation to remember God, and to know ourselves as God created us, we do not do it alone. Nor we do we do it only for ourselves. Our unity with all our brothers and sisters means that salvation is shared. There are not many minds awakening piecemeal but one mind awakening all at once.

Therefore, when we consider our practice of A Course in Miracles, it is incumbent on us to remember that it is a communal practice, one whose effects radiate outward through our family, our culture and the world.

The gifts that God gives us are the means to remember that God is Love and Love holds everything. They are the gifts of patience, kindness, mercy, and nonviolence that together heal our mind from the disease of separation. We have the means by which to heal our split mind and restore it to wholeness. But doing so requires us to be in relation with all our brothers and sisters.

The many classrooms the world offers us are always relationships. Even when we seem to be alone, we are in relationship. We do not know ourselves apart from our brothers and sisters, and apart from the world. In truth, it is not possible to be healed alone. When we see this clearly, then recognizing the salvation of world depends on us ceases to be a grandiose or intimidating statement and becomes instead a statement of fact whose clarity naturally instantiates further healing.

To know ourselves fully and truly as we are in Creation is to know God and to know as well that God is Love. This thought heals because the world is also a thought. The light of self-knowledge is healing because it reveals that nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists.

We are not separate from God, nor from one another. Appearances to the contrary are illusions, and it is given to us to undo them, gently and patiently forever, so that we might know at last the reality and truth of salavation.

←Lesson 205
Lesson 207→

I call upon God’s Name and on my own.

To speak the Name of God is to speak our own name because God would not – indeed, could not – have it otherwise. As a child shares its name and identity with its family on earth, so in Creation do we share our identity with God, who is our Father and Mother, our unified Creator.

Our lives on earth are shaped by separation. This happens to all of us. We perceive evil and we know sin. No person is untouched by it, no day passes without its grim witness.

The temptation is to think we are called to respond to it in form – to go to war with evil, to hate hatred, to condemn condemnation in all its myriad forms.

And that is merely ego perpetuating the problem of separation by convincing us that we are apart from it, and can choose whether to help or hinder, which choice we will make according to how it benefits us.

And A Course in Miracles comes along and undoes all of that by insisting that nothing real can be threatend and nothing unreal exists. It teaches us that what we are in truth makes evil and sin impossible, illusions that are undone as simply as saying “yes to God and to God’s Love.

←Lesson 202
Lesson 204→