Sean Reagan

I sent out a newsletter today – first in a couple months – talking about how to forgive Jesus, who is just another projection in our projection-addled lives. You can sign up here if you like.

In this post I want to think through a related idea: there is only one will and that is God’s Will, which is love.

There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love. Neither you nor anything nor anyone you perceive is separate from this Will nor ever could be separate from it. Accept this and your suffering ends. Very simple!

Also, not simple at all, right?

What about the violent trauma many of us survive as kids? What about the 3.1 million children a year who die of hunger? What about melting polar ice caps? Gun violence?

Yes. I know this. I hear you.

Also?

There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love.

Part of what is hard about this is that it’s not an argument. It is a way of seeing that aligns itself with the One Will and thereby remembers Itself. In that remembrance, the self and the world is undone. There is nothing to argue about, nor anyone to argue with.

A clumsy analogy: imagine that you and I are in Boston and you are looking at a map.

“Hey,” I say. waving a hand. “Look at Boston.”

“I am looking at Boston,” you say, giving the map a shake. “See? Boston.”

“No,” I say. “Not a map of Boston – Boston. Boston Boston.”

“I am looking at Boston,” you say, giving another – slightly annoyed – shake of the map. “It says right here – Boston. See?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, look up from the map. We’re in Boston. This is Boston.”

And you just shake your head because to you it’s obvious that I am the one who is confused. You are looking at Boston; I am not looking at Boston.

What am I trying to say here?

I am saying that if you perceive many wills – or one will that isn’t Love – then you are looking at a facsimile of reality. And there is a better way.

Maybe you already know this. Or maybe you are saying, “okay – how do I change the way I look? How do I see reality and not the facsimile?”

My probably unsatisfying answer is, you don’t. Because you are part of the facsimile. And anyway, there is only one will. You can’t do anything.

Here is the thing. In the same way a map of Boston is not Boston but is not not Boston either (just a very narrowly-defined way of seeing Boston, of pointing at Boston), the help that you need to see past the facsimile is given in the facsimile.

If you allow yourself to be very quiet and still, then you will remember the help. It will be very clear; it will be very obvious. You will remember the help and you will accept it. It will have a form; it will be a method. And you will know it perfectly.

For me, the help was A Course in Miracles. In certain ways, it still is. But ACIM is a beginning, not an end (W-ep.1:1). All ACIM does is help you better hear your sane mind, your healed mind, which is the Holy Spirit.

When you hear the Holy Spirit, then everything clarifies and comes into place. It’s like watching a movie of cracking an egg backwards – the mess recollects itself into a seamless whole.

Everything the Holy Spirit says boils down to: “There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love. Neither you nor anything nor anyone you perceive is separate from this Will nor ever could be separate from it. Accept this and your suffering ends.”

If you are unhappy – in and with yourself, in and with the world, in and with the world and yourself – the invitation is to give your attention to A Course in Miracles. Become devoted to it; become religious. Don’t let it get away with vague spiritual promises. Question it; make demands of it. Ignore it if you need to. You can’t make a mistake. No more can it.

Practicing A Course in Miracles this way is like a long walk home. Maybe it rains or snows; maybe you share the trail with a traveler or two; maybe you get lost or have to rest. But all the while, the landscape grows more and more familiar and eventually you remember that this is home. You are going home and you are home. The journey grows easy because the destination is clear and unambiguous.

“Clear and unambiguous,” by the way, is just another way of saying “There is only one Will and it is the Will of God and the Will of God is Love.” Simple 🙂

Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong (T-1.I.6:1-2).

The suggestion that miracles are natural is important. It is an implicit argument against miracles being supernatural. In A Course in Miracles, we do understand miracles to mean walking on water, turning water into wine, or traveling through space and time, our fingers grazing the wings of ascended masters. We are not new age Ebeneezer Scrooges.

We are ordinary men and women in relationship with one another, remembering our potential for a radical, transformative love and bravely facing the interior obstructions and resistances to the free expresson of that love.

“Miracles are natural” means that they are predictable and understandable and therefore replicable. In this way, they are not fundamentally different than baking a pie or flying a kite. Everybody can do it. We don’t need any special training; we don’t need to devote ten thousand hours to practice; we don’t need to crawl through the desert on our knees repenting.

Be happy, for your only function here is happiness. You have no need to be less loving to God’s Son than He Whose Love created him as loving as Himself . . . you are joining with God’s Will in doing this (W-pI.102.5:1-2, 4).

This understanding of miracles is helpful to our overarching practice of A Course in Miracles because it facilitates keeping the focus on the mind, rather than on continually projecting external solutions to our apparent problems. We aren’t waiting for God to intervene in the world. We aren’t waiting on some lesser-known but still divine entity to up-end the laws of physics. We aren’t waiting on magic.

What we need is given to us – is inherent in us – awaiting only our decision to bring it into application.

What does this look like in practice?

Together, we are remembering that we are not bodies and that there is no world, and this can be understood as certainly and clearly as we understand that flying kites and baking pies are fun and communal and thus meaningful. A few basic instructions, some willingness and away we go.

In this way, we become responsible for our own happiness, and that of our brothers and sisters as well. We remember that we have something to give – that we can be of service by sharing the cause for peace and happiness – and that giving this cause away is how we keep it.

We may be confused about what constitutes “natural” in this context. Indeed, the Course asks us to consider some dramatic possibilities – the reversal of cause-and-effect and the illusory nature of the material world, for example. But the absence of understanding here is not a gap into which the supernatural flows. People thought the earth was flat once; people thought that phlogiston was an indispensable element of combustion.

What challenges us – especially when it takes the form of what we do not yet know or understand – is simply an invitation to become humble and to deepen our shared learning.

We want to be what we are in truth, not what we would be if the ego could write, direct and producte the movie of our lives. Indeed, our addiction to fantasy and other forms of distorted thinking rests on the ego’s desire to always keep us focused on and believing in impossible futures. How else can it so consistently hold our attention?

Our work is to disregard the ego’s penchant for fantasy and drama, and instead return to the simplicity of our lives in the world, where miracles gently remind us – in the very context of separation – that separation is an illusion unbecoming God’s creation.

It is because miracles are natural that their absence reflects an error. However, the error is one of thought; we are confused and our confusion leads to misdirected and unproductive behavior. The error is looking for the miracle outside of us, instead of changing our mind about what miracles are, and then seeing what happens. The miracle may or may not have apparent external effects, but it must reflect a mind that changes – willingly, humbly, happily – from fear to love.

A Course in Miracles is clear: neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit will help us change the world, but they will help us change our minds about the world (T-2.VI.4:1-3). The miracle is each and every moment that we accept that help, turning away from the world as a source of either solace or suffering, and instead embrace our shared spiritual Teacher within.

Remember: our default state is understanding and holiness. We are creations of Love and our natural state is the state of extending love in the same way that love creates us and extends itself through us. Miracles are both evidence of this and effects of this. Miracle-minded thinking begets more miracle-minded thinking, which in turn begets a happy dream that only gets happier. This happiness touches all life; its effects do not expire.

Thus, if we find ourselves facing an apparent absence or scarcity of miracles – if we are are estranged from the inner peace and joy that miracles routinely offer – then we simply turn our gaze to the unhealed mind within and ask for help in changing it. Doing so aligns us with the natural flow of God’s Will. We are not called to suffer.

The prayer is, “help me to see this differently, that I might remember I can see differently. And in the remembering, remember what I am in truth.” In this way, the miracle restores to our mind its natural power of creation, which is its power to create as it was created.

Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that matters is their Source, which is far beyond evaluation (T-1.I.2:1-2).

In A Course in Miracles, atonement corrects the error of mistaken self-identity. We are confused about what we are, and our confusion creates illusions – including the illusion of problems. Atonement is the overall process by which those illusions are undone, and mind restored to its rightful state of knowledge.

Miracles are the means of the Atonement. Imagine you are building a bonfire – a great light to comfort your brothers and sisters. Each miracle is kindling, facilitating this symbol which we build together and around which we gather.

In a sense, miracles – which are shifts in thought away from fear and towards love – are given to restore our self to our Self. It has nothing to do with what’s going on in the world, and everything to do with the mind that is perceiving the world as “that which is out there” or “that which is not this” and then making decision about what it all means and who it’s for and what it’s worth and so forth.

Thus, the miracle is indifferent to the specific problem to which we apply it. To the miracle, a stubbed toe and the death of a child are equal. They aren’t equal to us – hence the need for miracles – but the miracle heals both problems in exactly the same way: it reminds us of what we are in truth. And what we are in truth is totally unaffected by pain and loss, sacrifice and suffering. It simply does not recognize them. Thus, their apparent causes are transformed into causes for peace, love and understanding.

Yet miracles have effects in the context in which they are needed. When we observe the miracle’s effects – especially when, according to our unhealed mind, they appear truly miraculous (we are healed from cancer or win the lottery or the grief of personal loss is suddenly manageable) – we begin to perceive the nature of the gift we have been given.

That is, we begin to realize that the healing the miracle offers is both too great and too generous to have come from our own sense of self, which is limited. Miracles are not of the world, nor of the limited selves which populate that world. They can’t be. They are too magnificient in helpfulness.

Miracles are gifts of God through which we remember our shared identity with both the Creator and Creation, both because there is nothing to hide or keep from one another. Sharing is total. “God has no secret communications, for everything of Him is perfectly open and freely accessible to all, being for all” (T-14.X.11:2).

This begets a sense of respect and humility for the Source of the miracle. It is as if we begin to fully understand that a Will other than our own is at work in us, and it is that Will we trust rather than our puny and confused own.

Where there is love, your brother must give it to you because of what it is. But where there is a call for love, you must give it because of what you are . . . by supplying your Identity wherever it is not recognized, you will recognize It (T-14.X.12:2-3, 5).

This posture of humility and respect is important because it allows us to be more open to the miracle and its healing effects. It enables us to get out of our own way, to “let go and let God.”

We begin to understand that “fear is really nothing and love is everything” (T-2.VII.5:3). We begin to notice our lives subtly changing as our will realigns with God’s, under the gentle guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This is a critical step in the overall correction of the error of self-identity. We cease to fully trust our limited sense of what is a problem and, thus, what the correction must be. We avail ourselves of an intelligence whose knowledge of correction and healing is total and thus incapable of error.

Importantly, this intelligence is “far beyond evaluation” (T-1.I.2:2). We can neither explain nor judge it. We aren’t being invited to re-imagine ourselves as gods or ascended masters or spiritual gurus. We aren’t here to get what we want. We are here to be healed. All that is required is willingness and open-mindedness.

Imagine visiting a doctor. You have cancer, and you are being treated. Do you understand how chemotherapy functions in the body? Do you understand how to build a chemotherapy pump? Could you actually manage a hospital?

No. And you don’t have to. You just show up and trust that a whole bunch of people you never met did and will continue doing their job which allows a whole bunch of other people – some of whom you will meet – to do their job. You’re just here to be healed. And when you see the vast network of brothers and sisters collaborating and cooperating in your healing, you will realize that miracles aren’t actually about you at all.

This will come as a vast relief.

You and I are just here to be healed. The so-called error is confusion about what we are in truth, and the so-called solution is given through miracles, which restore to mind our actual identity. Fear is really nothing; love is all there is.

Will you give yourself to the One who knows what is best for you? And knows how to give what is best for you in the form you can most easily accept?

Will you – at last – obey the Law of Love, which is your Source, and the Source of all, in and through which, you will remember yourself as Love?

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