Sean Reagan

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→

I trust all my brothers who are one with me.

A Course in Miracles is a twig on the branch of the Christian tree that deals with nonduality. We are not separate from God, nor from our brothers and sisters, nor from anything else in Creation – blue whales, violets, black holes, quasars.

Our remembrance of this oneness – and our ability to sustainably hold it in awareness – depends on remembering that we are not bodies because bodies are limits and what God creates cannot be limited.

Today, we pray on oneness and lift into awareness, to let it rest there like a sun all day, its light suffusing us with peace and happiness. We need to do nothing to bring this oneness forth; its purity and innocence are beyond our capacity to injure or impair.

Our work is not to force remembrance into experience, but rather to open our minds to possibility, to empty them of all thoughts that would block God’s Love, and shadow the light in which all appearances – including life – have their being.

Our focus is on a glad heart and an open mind, which together – in God’s time and according to God’s plan – reveal our true self, which revelation IS the revalation of oneness.

←Lesson 200
Lesson 202→

I am not a body. I am free.

Few lessons pose such a challenge to the ego’s framework as this one: every lie the ego tells, and every story it convinces us is true, rests on the premise that we are bodies, that bodies are limits, and that we are subject to those limits. Only when we realize that we are minds will we experience the freedom, joy and creativity that are our inheritance in and as God’s Creation.

The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked . . . It rests in God. And who can be afraid who lives in Innocence, and only loves? (W-pI.199.2:1, 3-4).

Lesson 199 is the end of guilt, and the end of fear. It is a clear and unequivocal statement that reframes what we are in truth. Of course the ego dreads hearing it. Of course it resists. Of course it fights back.

In the space created by this lesson, we are free to look at the world in a new way. Our perspective is no longer localized to the body nor driven by the body’s appetites and hierarchy of needs. Rather, it is informed by Love instead of fear, and therefore reminds us that we are not separate from our brothers and sisters, and that our only purpose in life is to remember this, over and over. This remembering is loving in a loveless place (T-14.IV.4:10). Thus, Lesson 199 returns to our awareness our function.

To the ego – which is to say, to the world’s way of thinking to which we are still in many ways attached and invested – this idea is wrong (W-pI.199.3:2). It is dangerous even. We have to care for the body! We have to protect and defend it. When it dies, we will die, and so we have to look out for it at all costs. It is a fact that nobody else will do this for us.

This is like the dark side of of our function of loving in a loveless place: the ego teaches us to go to war with our brothers and sisters, arguing that conflict is the only peace and respite we can know.

Here is the thing: A Course in Miracles does not deny the appearance of the body or its utility for communication purposes. It simply invites us to surrender our identity as a body, and to see what happens. And what happens is always healing.

The body disappears, because you have no need of it except the need the Holy Spirit sees. For this, the body will appear as a useful form for what the mind must do. It thus becomes a vehicle which helps forgiveness be extended to the all-inclusive goal that it must reach, according to God’s plan (W-pI.199.4:3-5).

Critically, this does not happen under our direction and intention, but the Holy Spirit’s. Our work is to accept the radical reorientation of identity away from the body and towards spirit. No more than that – but, also, no less.

Our goal as Course students is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by consenting to be led by it away from fear. Which, somewhat paradoxically, we often experience as fearful.

The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom . . . The body’s purpose is now unambiguous . . . it is a worthy servant of the freedom which the mind within the Holy Spirit seeks (W-pI.199.6:1, 3, 6).

This translation of the body’s function is not a gift we receive alone, because it is not a gift that we receive at all save by giving it away. When we begin to intuit that we are not bodies, it becomes impossible to identify others as bodies. A new world appears in which the barriers to peace and happiness are no longer insurmountable. They become appearances the Holy Spirit will readily translate into love, allowing us to see our brothers and sisters in a new way, which liberates them from their own experience of being limited by the body.

. . . carry freedom as your gift to those who still believe they are enslaved within a body . . . Let love replace their fears through you. Accept salvation now, and give your mind to Him Who calls you to make this gift to Him (W-pI.199.7:2, 4-5).

This is our liberation – the ability to remember what we are in truth by being of service to our brothers and sisters, in order to awaken with them unto the Love and happiness that God Himself extends to us in Creation.

←Lesson 198
Lesson 200→

There is no cruelty in God and none in me.

Lesson 170 asks us to consider that we are confused about the difference between fear and love – that we are calling fear love, and worshipping it accordingly, and as a consequence are actually afraid of love.

This reversal divides us against ourselves, making peace impossible.

Fear seems to protect us, right? It seems like a rational response to a threat against our safety and well-being. It’s a sign that we are under attack and need to defend ourselves. A snarling dog, a man pointing a gun, a diagnosis of incurable cancer . . . fear makes sense, no? Only a fool would argue otherwise.

And yet A Course in Miracles suggests that this belief in the reasonableness of fear is actually a block to love because it can be used to justify attack in the form of self-defense. Hurt is always both the objective and outcome of attack but calling it “self-defense” allows us to avoid responsibility for that hurt. Attack is always cruel and yet “no cruelty abides in us, for there is none in God” (W-pI.170.13:2). What gives?

It seems to be the enemy without that you attack. Yet your defense sets up an enemy within . . . love now has an “enemy,” an opposite; and fear, the alien, now needs your defense against the threat of what you really are (W-pI.170.3:1-3).

The projection of fear outside of us – and the subsequent cycles of attack and defense, as we rage in vain against a mirage – is not a crime against God or nature. It’s just a colossal waste of time. The better way – the way of healing – is to challenge our belief in the “necessity and reasonableness” of fear because it justifies attack. We listen to the Voice for Love, the Holy Spirit, Who asks us to “lay down all defenses as merely foolish” (W-pI.170.5:4).

It is important to give attention to the depths at which we do not believe that “laying down all defenses” makes sense. We have to see how deeply we cherish our supposed right to self-defense, how literally everything in our world is connected to this “right.” We believe that if we give up self-defense, we’ll die.

When we begin to glimpse the enormity of this challenge, then we begin to understand just how radical A Course in Miracles truly is. Just as the historical Jesus advocated and practiced nonviolence, so are we called to that beautiful and demanding tradition in which we lay aside our many weapons of attack – and the argument for self-defense upon which they all depend – to watch them “crumble into dust” because dust is all they ever were (W-pI.170.5:5-6).

Now do your eyes belong to Christ, and He looks through them. Now your voice belongs to God and echoes His. And now your heart remains at peace forever . . . Now has fear made way for love, as God Himself replaces cruelty (W-pI.170.12:1-3, 6).

Is it clear? We become nonviolent because attack is never justified (T-30.VI.1:1). Cruelty can never be a source of solace, grace or safety. Nor are there exceptions to this rule (e.g., W-pI.170.1:2). When we accept this, and live accordingly, then the world is made new. Only the perfection of our brothers and sisters is remembered. It is in this state that we are ready for God to take the last step (T-13.VIII.3:2).

This is a choice we actively make! Here in these bodies in this world we actively choose to let go of every justification for attack, and instead seek only to be a means by which the memory of God’s love is restored to all minds.

We have reached this decision many times before and always turned back without making it (W-pI.170.11:3). The god of cruelty and attack assumes many forms, all of them deceptive, all of which demand we reject our power to choose love and instead worship in paralysis at the altar of fear (W-pI.170.8:6-7). And we have listened. We have obeyed.

Lesson 170 reminds us repeatedly that the decision to become a peacemaker rather than a hostage to fear “can be terrible” (W-pI.170.8:1). Of course we have walked away from it. But it can also be the moment of our release, if we are willing to look at the decision clearly, accept the Holy Spirit’s evaluation of it, and become responsibility for choosing again.

How shall we do this?

The lesson suggests that the answer to this question can be found in the Fourth Obstacle to Peace in Chapter Nineteen of the Text. There, we learn that the final and greatest obstacle to love is our fear of God. We are sworn to forget this obstacle exists, let alone commit to its undoing.

How do we face our fear of God?

Together. We face it together.

A Course in Miracles is clear that the way we remember – and bring to light – this final daunting obstacle is by forgiving our brothers and sisters. We do not reach this juncture alone, and we cannot go forward from it alone either. We need each other to establish the mutuality of forgiveness.

Beside you is one who offers you the chalice of Atonement, for the Holy Spirit is in him. Would you hold his sins against him, or accept his gift to you? Is this giver of salvation your friend or enemy? Choose which he is, remembering that you will receive of him according to your choice (T-19.IV.D.13:1-4).

In other words, we remember love by forgiving our brothers and sisters – by seeing in them only the perfection of Creation, untouched by the vicious judgments of the ego. When that is all we see in others, then we will understand that we merely perceive our own reflection. There is only holiness in Creation. What else could we see? And when that is all we see, what possible justification for conflict remains?

If you want to remember Heaven, then do Heaven. Be Heaven.

On this view, Lesson 170 is a watershed moment in our practice. Think back to those early first lessons, when we were looking around at things, coming to terms with the power of our mind to define and categorize them, effectively giving meaning to literally everything. Here we do something similar, but with exponentially greater depth and power.

You make what you defend against, and by your own defense against it is it real and inescapable. Lay down your arms, and only then do you perceive it false (W-pI.170.2:6-7).

We have this moment together, you and I: shall we not, together, create the peace we are created to create?

←Lesson 169
Lesson 171→

It can be but my gratitude I earn.

A Course in Miracles makes an interesting point in this lesson. It notes that we have good intentions, that we are perfectly willing to be kind and generous and merciful, but that our efforts are always conditional upon receiving praise and honor in return.

We’re happy to give, we just want to be sure that we get something in return – we want our ego stroked.

And inevitably – because the outside world is the picture of an inside condition (T-21.in.1:5), and because we conceive of God as external to us – this becomes our model of God: a giver whose gifts always come with strings.

No wonder we are unhappy. No wonder the world is full of suffering. It is very hard to be happy and at peace, when everything we have and everything we give is yoked to conditions with which we may or may not agree and to which we may or may not have given assent.

Ultimately, this reflects the confusion of associating guilt with God, because we do not recognize the power of our thinking. If our giving is conditioned on receiving something of equal or greater value, then we are not actually giving. We are taking. We are not realizing that our actions – which make us and others unhappy – are guided by our thoughts, which are under our control. God has nothing to do with it.

Why do we take? Why do we make giving conditional upon what we can get? The answer is, because we believe in the scarcity principle, which is the hallmark of all bodies. There are limited resources (water, food, shelter, companions, et cetera, we are in competition with one another for those scarce resources, and what I gain you must lose, and vice-versa.

But why do we believe this? Why do we accept such a grim and unhappy picture?

Because we believe we are guilty, and do not merit anything better.

And this is an error.

God blesses every gift you give to Him, and every gift is given Him, because it can be given only to yourself. And what belongs to God must be His own (W-pI.197.5:1-2).

But in order to know this, we have to be kind and generous without any thought of return. We have to decline to attack and instead commit to cooperating with our brothers and sisters. Not upon expectation of some return or some other form of bargaining. Just because we are ready to accept on faith that love – inclusion without exception, giving without condition – reflects what we are in truth. Only then will we remember the “never-ending joy” that is our inheritance as God’s children (W-pI.197.5:3).

No suggestion is made that this is easy; on the contrary, the reason the Course exists and is in our lives is because it is not easy.

So the work is to be grateful and to serve others and, when we notice that we are doing this because we want praise or social status or some other benefit, then we just shrug and say, “there goes ego again.”

It’s not a big deal. In fact, just noticing it as it happens is restorative. Noticing it means noticing its effects, and noticing its effects means noticing we don’t want those effects. It is at that juncture that we take the Thetfordian step – there must be another way.

And, indeed, that way is inevitable.

To everyone who lives will Christ yet come, for everyone must live and move in Him. His Being in His Father is secure, because Their Will is One. Their gratitude to all They have created has no end, for gratitude remains a part of love (W-pI.197.7:3-5).

Do not judge against yourself because ego still has a place in your thoughts, and its effects are still rampant in the world. Rather, be grateful when you can for whatever you can be grateful for – a flower, a friendship, a moment of quiet. When you exclude someone from love, gently remind yourself that this is not how Christ thinks, and then do better, even a little.

As we practice gratefulness, we begin to perceive a new world, one in which we are not pitched against each other in competition, but rather learning together that we are one, and that Love holds everything.

In that world, we begin to sense a new God, and we sense, too, that every act of kindness – however small, however grudgingly we extend it, is given to God Himself and received by God Himself, Who is not separate from us, and the effect is joy. The effect is peace.

We begin to perceive God everything and in all things, even those that challenge and haunt us. Everything becomes an opportunity to bless our own self, and in that blessing, to become yet more grateful.

←Lesson 196
Lesson 198→