Sean Reagan

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→

I want the peace of God.

To say that we want the peace of God is easy. To mean it is another level. It shifts our focus entirely, and our lives become dedicated to God’s peace without qualification or condition. There is nothing else to want.

When we accept that we are not bodies, but remain as God created us, we effectively declare that we are done with sharing the world’s values. We are no longer going to be driven by its definition of success or happiness or order.

We are turning away from the world, not because we reject it – there is nothing there to reject – but because we know at last that true happiness can only be found in God’s Love. The world is not our home; while we pass through it as aliens, we are going to hold in mind the one true thing we can know in this world: we are not the authors of our self, and so we must remain as God created us.

The rest is a question of faith, right? Our faith that God does not make mistakes, that God only creates what is loving, that everything other than Love is an illusion.

We say “yes” to God and then we let go and see what happens.

The key to this review is to give attention to the depth of our want. Are we just saying the words or is it our truth? It is okay to just say the words. Fear and delay are not crimes against God or nature. It is good to see them clearly, because seeing them clearly teaches us what we need to work on next.

God’s peace is already given. It is simply a question of what we are ready to recognize and accept. Let us be honest today in asking and answering the question; doing so will shorten our journey home by many orders of magnitude.

←Lesson 204
Lesson 206→

The Name of God is my inheritance.

Perhaps you are unsure of God’s Name. You think yours is “Sean” or “Mary” or “Douglas.” Maybe on a good day you can claim “Christ” for a few minutes. But Yahweh? El Shaddai?

No.

But look. Even our accepted “names” for God are simply placeholders. God cannot be named as we understand names. For us, names point to bodies, to objects. This is “Sean. That’s a “pine tree.”

Names are an aspect of separation, cherished by ego because of how sensitive we become with respect to them. They are limits that fragment what is whole. We think naming a thing means we know it, and that we know it nature and origin. But we are confused. That is why the Holy Spirit uses them differently, starting with the Name of God.

Here me: you and I have forgotten God’s Name. It is not a word. It cannot be expressed by human vocal cords nor contained by an alphabet.

The Name of God is what you know when you know your own self prior to language. When our Buddhist brothers and sisters ask us what was our face before we were born, they are reframing the question. But the point is the same: we are reaching deeper than personality. We are reaching deeper than what is personal.

What you are and what God is transcends language. Indeed, what you are and what God is transcends identification. If this makes today’s lesson more complicated, that’s okay! Remembering God’s Name liberates us from time and all the illusions of the body and the world.

We rest today in what we are, asking nothing but the grace to place nothing else before us – no word, no image, no ideal. We accept our inheritance by embracing our creation.

←Lesson 203
Lesson 205→

I will be still an instant and go home.

There is the experience of being home, and there is the experience of being not-at-home. To be home is to be safe. To be home is to know rest. When we are home we are creative and welcoming. We can lay a table for friends, make a bed for guests, welcome pilgrims in from the rain.

When we are not-at-home we depend on the kindness of strangers. We need help finding our way. Our rest is less fulfilling; our minds are not at ease. We have to be alert when we are alien. We have to take a different kind of care.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that we are home when we accept that we are not bodies and cannot be contained or limited in any way. Our “home” is not a place or even a condition, but rather a way of thinking that does not recognize separation.

God does not call us to a lifetyle or to a new place on the map or even into a new relationship. Rather, God calls us to accept our true identity in Creation, which is to be one with Creation.

When we remember and accept this truth, then we no longer enter into conflict as readily. We become instruments of peace whose only function is to “love in a loveless place.” When we answer God’s call – which is always the call to know ourselves as God knows us – familiar frames of “home” are undone.

This is because the proble of separation is not a problem of space – it is not about where or when – but rather about “who.” It is a question of identity that is resolved the instant we accept God’s Love as inevitable because of what we are.

←Lesson 201
Lesson 203→