Remembering the Playfulness of God

Someone asked me recently if I could say for certain that God has given us the answer to all our problems and we have ignored it.

My answer is: yes, with a slight amendment. “God had given us the answer to all our problems but we have forgotten it.”

The difference in framing is nontrivial. “Ignore” postulates a self who chooses to ignore helpful advice from authority. I am saying we are more like little kids who forgot to brush their teeth so their parents have to remind them.

Choosing to ignore helpful advice from authority figures sets up conflict – somebody wants to help us and we blow them off. It’s like a teen-ager saying, “no, I’m not going to brush my teeth – what are you going to do about it?”

My model proposes a gentler correction coming from the authority figure – sort of like a parent who reminds their child to remember to brush their teeth. And then let’s pick a book for bedtime, etc.

In other words, good parents don’t take it personally when 4-year-olds are forgetful. They just cheerfully correct them. They just want to be helpful.

We aren’t ignoring God’s gift so much as forgetting God’s gift. And God is happy to remind us.

If we stay in the “ignore” model – the going head-to-head model – the best-case scenario is that God throws up His hands and says okay, find out for yourself what happens when you don’t brush your teeth. Which is one thing if we’re talking about dental hygiene but another for, say, drinking and driving. Or going to war.

There’s a better way which is: trust your Creator. Trust Creation.

I mean that literally, by the way. You did not make yourself (T-10.V.5:3). What did?

If you go into this question deeply – if you seek your Creator, if you seek the site of Creation – you will see that what created you is Love and it created you like itself and that this creation is eternal.

And when you remember this you will never be lonely or unhappy again.

The Love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers and sisters, and God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him (T-10.V.7:6-7).

How easy is that? All we have to do is look with peace upon one another!

But to know this – to live it as our practice – we have to go deeply into the experience of remembering and reconnecting with our Creator! This means that we have to find out what God we are projecting because the God we project is what hides our actual Creator, whom we can only know in the absence of projection.

Are you scared of being punished? Do you think suffering is meritorious? Do behave well because you want or expect a reward? Do you hate Republicans/Democrats? Libs/fascists? Do you secretly – or not so secretly – think you’ve got something other people don’t?

It can be hard to answer those questions honestly.

But listen. The problem is projecting – the actual act of it. What is projected is not the problem. There is no right or wrong projection – they’re all neutral. Once we start projecting we’re as lost and confused as we’re going to get, regardless of the projection’s content. You can project a kind father or a murderous despot and the problem remains the same because they are both projections.

So we become responsible for our projection of God not by finding a better projection but by finding out what God actually is – as in, right here and now, in this actual moment, this very Holy Instant.

If you know what God is, then you don’t have to project anymore.

In my experience – and my study of others’ experience in this area – God is gentle, loving, patient and kind and we are like unto to little kids to Him – totally innocent, totally safe, totally happy. Punishment, sacrifice, suffering and conflict need never enter into it. Really!

Of course I mean we are “little kids” with respect to God. We are women and men in the world and in our experience. But what happens when we live as the grown sons and daughters of that Loving God? What do we do? Who do we do it with and for?

What does our living in the world look like when we know we are the one creation of love?

That is a radical life.

Those are fun questions to answer! All our egoic dysfunction and its mad premise of separation dissolve in the answer. It’s not that we become “one” with God – a kind of silly frame, really – but that we become love itself, actual expressions of love.

Therefore, don’t be stressed. Be playful. And the joy you feel will be God’s joy in you.

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The Third Principle of A Course in Miracles

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense, everything that comes from love is a miracle (T-1.3:1-3).

Here in the world – in these bodies in the world – love appears as a special emotion, one that we offer to some people, places and things and not to others. And, love is sometimes returned to us and sometimes it is not. It’s just the way it is. Who amongst us would say otherwise?

In these bodies and in this world, love depends on differences and judgment. It always reflects value judgments and preferences. Yet in the formulation of A Course in Miracles, which always invites us to perceive and live according to another law, love does not see differences at all. Love is blind to difference; love “sees” only sameness.

There is no love but God’s and all of love is His. There is no other principle that rules where love is not. Love is a law without opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one . . . (W-pI.127.3:5-8).

This is why there is no order of difficulty in miracles, and this is why their Source – which is Love Itself, which is our Source too – is “beyond evaluation” (T-1.I.2:2). Love is our inheritance, but of it we cannot speak for we cannot – in the context of world and body – truly understand, let alone experience, the truth of one without another.

This is not a crisis! Indeed, the function of the Course is to introduce us to a Teacher who uses the context of separation, and all of its seeming contents, to teach us that separation is an illusion and unity with God the whole of our reality.

A Course in Miracles is all about remembering that Love is our fundament, but it’s important to understand that what we call love in the world – even at its finest, most effective and most lovely – is a form of hate because it sees differences, judges them as valuable or not, and then chooses between them accordingly. If one suffers for another’s gain, then we are not talking about love.

Until we can see this – and until we are willing to be accountable for it – we will continue to dwell in a world of fear, seemingly forever beholden to its grim and murderous effects.

What we call “love” is contingent on separation. This is the opposite of how A Course in Miracles views – and invites us to learn how to view – love. Reframing our understanding is a first step in learning how to live from a new belief system, one that is predicated not on differences but on sameness.

It is another way of relating altogether.

In this light, a miracle is a response to separation because it emphasizes this sameness, and thus undoes – temporarily, in a limited way – our reliance on distinctions. Miracles remind us that we are not separate from that which we judge, and that judgment is therefore being rendered against our own self. This insight softens our minds, loosening ego’s stranglehold, and allows us to move forward in relationship with our brothers and sisters with greater sensitivity and kindness.

In nontrivial ways, by healing the mind that believes it is separate, miracles make the world a temporarily better place. They enable a happy – and a getting happier – dream.

This, in turn, inspires us to become even more attentive to what the Course calls “miracle-mindedness.”

. . . miracle-mindedness means right-mindedness. The right-minded neither exalt nor depreciate the mind of the miracle worker or the miracle receiver (T-2.3:1-2).

Another way of saying this, is to say that “miracle-mindedness” recognizes the fundamental sameness of the minds of the both the miracle giver and miracle receiver, neatly manifesting the Course’s insistence that to give and receive are the same (T-26.I.3:6).

Miracle workers are not deceived by the appearances of difference, for they have learned that love recognizes only what is one and so cannot be judged. Thus, they do not act in ways that rely on or otherwise reinforce any apparent grounds for judgment or valuation. This radical equality – radical because it is the root of being, which is shared – becomes the standard by which we live and create. Peace and joy are its natural effects.

You and Your Perfection

You are enough. You are okay – you are more than okay.

I don’t mean that in an ACIM-theological way – like saying, yeah, the embodied egoic you sucks but the real you is enough.

I mean rather that when you’re out walking and pause beneath a tree, the tree is grateful. I mean that when you walk at night the stars shine brighter. Large bodies of water miss you when you are away from them too long, and the forest paths you walk are grateful for your feet.

You are enough. You are enough.

Nothing is missing in you; nothing is misplaced in you.

Nothing is forgotten in you; nothing is bereft.

Accepting this is the beginning of remembering God-as-Love. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s an awkward embrace of your own self – exactly as you are this moment. Nothing is missing – not even the nagging sense that something is missing is missing.

I love you – and you are perfect – because that is how you and the love forever extending itself in Creation are remembered in love. Not by finding fault, or repenting, or improving over time. Nothing to learn or acquire. Just a real, honest-to-God moment of self-love.

When we truly realize we are lovable – when we no longer resist love – then we have something to give to our brothers and sisters. Our lives become altars at which love is forever being blessed and offered. Right now this is so. In you, right now, it is so.

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Ending our Spiritual Identity Crisis

In The Voice that Precedes Thought Tara Singh writes that we either “avoid the crisis or we act.”

The crisis is spiritual; it is the crisis of identity; we do not know what we are in truth, and so continually project illusions of identity, which brings us to grief, and the world too. All thought is projection, and we are unwilling to become responsible for it. We are “much too tolerant of mind-wandering” (T-2.VI.4:6).

To become responsible for thought – to end projection, and to stop insisting on the illusion of separation – requires attention and commitment. It must be intentional. It must be active. If we do not come to it in that spirit, then we will not remember how little is actually asked of us (T-18.V.2:5). We will be overwhelmed and distracted. We will give up.

To become responsible is to see the crisis of mistaken identity clearly, resolve to become responsible for ending it, and then act accordingly.

The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By teaching peace you must learn it yourself, because you cannot teach what you still dissociate. Only thus can you win back the knowledge you threw away . . . Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love (T-6.III.4:3-5, 8-9).

The alternative to responsibility is avoidance. Avoidance means we refuse to give attention to the crisis; we step around it; we look away. We do this by projecting and believing in our projections. We tell ourselves there is no crisis, we already know what we are and how to live – just look at our house/marriage/job/body, we’ve got it all under control, we’re right and they’re wrong, et cetera.

These lies may allow us to avoid the challenge and consequences of actively facing our spiritual identity crisis, but they do not end the crisis.

And until the crisis is ended, we cannot actually know peace and happiness. We cannot remember that we are love (T-6.III.4:9).

There is only one mind and it does not have parts. Thus, there is only one Will and it does not will multiple or conflicting outcomes. This can be easily perceived yet most of us go our whole lives without even a glimpse of it. We go on and on as if there are billions of separate minds, each governed by a separate will, each driving a separate body to war and death. We refuse to see the one mind and the one will, the one life beyond all appearances.

And so the crisis of identity goes on, and we remain unhappy and destructive, forever exploring with one another the many forms of fear, hate and conflict. Don’t kid yourself: whales choking on plastic, kids starving in Sudan, and ice melting in the arctic is you and me and we are not well.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The one life is easily seen, if we will simply stop insisting that life is equivalent to the form in which we perceive it.

Life is an expression of God. If you see only what is limited by a form bracketed in time – a whale, kids kicking a soccer ball in the dust, polar bears adrift on shrinking ice floes – then you are not yet looking at the one life.

The one life is the ground from which all appearances arise and into which they return. It is kin to a void, an emptiness, yet it is also generative. It is feminine more than masculine, more fecund Goddess than semen-spurting God. It is more earth than rain. It created us as love, and so love is what we are, when we are not confused about what we are.

To give attention to the one life restores to mind the knowledge of one life, and in this way our spiritual crisis ends, and healing restores to mind the conditions of both infinite and eternal peace.

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Distinguishing Between Illusion and Hallucination

A hallucination is, I can put my hand through a chair because it’s not really there. There is no chair.

But an illusion is, something is there but I am not seeing it. I’m seeing something else. I see a chair but it’s actually atoms. Or information. Or Jesus teaching me how to forgive the world. Or an angel accommodating my mistaken belief I’m a body. Whatever.

Illusion is upended perception and we are doing it to ourselves.

Here’s a way to go into this.

A chair is real in that bodies can sit in it. To the body – which is physical – the physical world will always be real. This is not a problem at the level of the body! Your body is not stressed about being a body – how it functions, what’s next, how to solve being hungry, how to die.

But I suggest that that view of the chair is illusory. Because when we look at a “chair,” we are really looking at love.

How, when we look at a chair, are we really looking at love?

Because love is relational: it brings two together into one. Me and you, me and a dog, me and a blueberry pie, me and you and twilight on Mount Ascutney in Vermont.

So when we look at a chair, we think we are seeing wood set up in a way that somebody can plant their butt on it and rest. But really we are looking at a vast network of relationships – each one of which includes us – and all of which are love!

What are some of those relationships?

Consider the chair-designer who communicated with the chair-builder who communicated with the lumber store who communicated with a lumber distributor who communicated with a lumberjack who communicated with chainsaw manufacturers . . .

Each node in that sentence has its own nodes. How about the lumberjack cooperating with the folks who taught him how to cut down trees safely and efficiently? Or the tree in relationship with soil and sunlight? Or how the mass of the earth allows trees to fall when cut down – not float away into space?

Each relationship is premised on other kinds of relationships. The chair-builder’s body is made of cells which are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of quarks and they all have to work together cooperatively for the body to work, let alone society, let alone the cosmos.

Can you see this? Really see it? All these nodes and the relationships between them? Try! If you look closely enough at the chair it will take you all the way out to the beginning of the universe and all the way down to the most infinitisimal levels of matter.

And then you are just looking at a chair again. So simple!

And yet.

When you come back from your journey through the cosmos – all those levels, cellular and social, atomic and personal – you retain your awareness of relationship. In that way – through relationship – everything comes back to this chair. In relationship, we abstract a world. But all there really is, is relationship.

And all relationship is really love because love is cooperation and coordination in lawful service of creation. That is how everything comes into being. It is literally what the cosmos is. And you and I are not separate from the cosmos, much less each other.

When you look at a chair, you look at love. Don’t get hung up on what’s real and what’s an illusion. Just look; just give attention. See the one relationship that lives both in and beyond all appearances, and feel how it includes you, and know that this – this this – is love.

This is a way of thinking about the world and the body, and relating to the world through a body, that eventually allows us to remember the Stillness – the Unspeakable Perfection – that we sometimes call “God.”

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On Self Love

Self-love is important. We cannot give away what we don’t have (or don’t know that we have). Just as importantly, we cannot accept love from our brothers and sisters if we do not recognize the love as it is offered.

Self-love is both how we know we have something to give to everyone, and how we recognize it in everyone, thus allowing it to be given to us.

Another way of saying this is to say that loving our self liberates us from fear, and allows us to both offer and receive more of the infinite love that we share with all creation.

To be liberated from fear is to be liberated from attachment to all its forms in the world – impatience, anxiety, worry, addiction, distraction, depression, angst, et cetera.

If you really want to immerse yourself in self-love ACIM-style, read – or reread – Marianne Williamson’s book A Return to Love. It’s easy to dismiss it as too New Age, too simplistic, too commercial. It’s easy to find ways in which it doesn’t align perfectly with A Course in Miracles, especially the course’s metaphysical underpinning.

Those are all fine arguments – I make them myself from time to time – but none of them undo the fact that Williamson understood in a deep and sustainable way how A Course in Miracles is premised on self-love.

Indeed, the extent to which Marianne Williamson is an “ugh” moment for us is the extent to which we are still scared of love. The mirror she offers us is vast.

Our defense against the light is always some form of guilt that we project onto ourselves or others. God can love us infinitely, the universe can support us unendingly, but until we agree with God’s kind appraisal of us and the universe’s merciful behavior, we will do everything in our power to keep the miracles were entitled to at bay. Why the self-hatred? (283)

The “why” part of that question is easy: fear underlies self-hatred. We project because we’re scared. A better question is how do we undo fear? Williamson has an answer for that (and it is the answer contemplated by ACIM): “through the acceptance of God’s will as our own” (283).

God’s will is that we be happy. God’s will is that we forgive ourselves. God’s will is that we find our place in Heaven now (283).

Williamson frees you to care about your own happiness. Do you like chocolate? It’s okay to eat chocolate. Got a less-than-perfect body? You’re beautiful. Put some fresh flowers out to remind yourself. Neighbor being mean? He’s just crying out for love. Give him some fresh flowers and chocolate.

Basically, treat yourself as gently, kindly and generously as you would a child or a beloved pet. Bring all your best self to loving your self. You deserve it.

This feels selfish – or it sounds childish – or perhaps both – but in practice it’s a form of self-acceptance and self-approval that works wonders in our unhealed mind. It clarifies our values, softens our expectations and maximizes our interest in cooperation with our brothers and sisters.

When we love ourselves, we have a lot of love to give away. We also recognize love in others and are happy to accept it from them.

Here, I want to say something about recognizing love in others.

Sometimes, people offer love but the “love” is actually fear wearing a mask of love. Under the guise of love, somebody is projecting fear.

An example of fear masquerading as love might be the friend who offers us unsolicited criticism about something sensitive – what our body looks like or how we parent, say. We didn’t ask, there was no problem and all of a sudden, here’s this person “fixing” everything. “I don’t mean to be critical but . . . “

This is not love – it’s fear. I’m scared that I’m not attractive enough or a good enough father and so I project that fear on to you. I want you to feel those feelings, not me.

But I also want to pretend I’m a good guy so I pretend I’m being helpful. “Hey, I notice you never exercise . . . “

That’s a fairly obvious example. Sometimes the projection of fear is much more subtle. Sometimes it’s habitual as often happens in families. We don’t even notice it happening until the Holy Spirit (or a lesser therapist 🙂 ) points it out.

Getting better at self-love allows us to get better at noticing fear-based behavior and not accepting it by pretending it’s a form of love.

“Not accepting” should be free of conflict. It’s not aggressive – it doesn’t even have to be vocal. It’s more like noticing the projection before it reaches you and gently side-stepping it. Someone says “that color’s not flattering on you” and you just smile and say in your shared mind, “Not today, sister – I love you too much.”

We all have issues. That’s a given in bodies in the world. So that’s not the problem. The problem is whether we are seeing our issues as symptoms of the deeper conflict between fear and love and – through interaction with the symptoms – choosing love instead of fear.

Sometimes we are the one who is projecting fear – our control issues, our insecurity issues, our unwillingness to be vulnerable issues. When people gently and nondramatically refuse these projections, it is a beautiful gift to us, even if it stings, which it probably does. These brothers and sisters are reminding us that our problems are our own and can’t be projected. We must face the fear where it actually is – with us.

So the question is always to notice the relationship we are in – with a job, a person, a political movement, a spiritual tradition – and be as honest as possible about what the relationship is for. Is it helping us discern between fear and love and thus helping us choose love?

Or is it keeping us away from discernment and thus making a choice for fear? Is the relationship healing the underlying error or is it reinforcing the underlying error?

It is not a crisis to experience self-love at the level of a body in the world. It’s okay to treat ourselves to a vacation, a meal, a good night’s sleep, a night out, whatever.

This is okay because these joys are symptoms of the underlying choice for love. When you are happy in the world, you are choosing love over fear. That choice is actually happening at a very deep level and up here – at the shallow and ephemeral (the phenomenological) level of bodies – it looks like a great sandwich or meditation or lingering by a pretty flower.

The stuff that’s problematic – the wars, the friends who died too young, our inability to quit drinking – are simply symptoms of the choice for fear.

A Course in Miracles teaches us not to despair when these show up because the choice for love can always be made again (T-31.VIII.1:5). That’s what the world is for – to provide a framework in which to choose love instead of fear, for us and for our brothers and sisters.

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