In a sense, to come to stillness is to see clearly that choice is the last illusion. There is nothing to choose between; there is only this: this this.
The many choices that appear to us are always various forms of the one choice, which is the choice to remember God or not remember God in everything we see.
But it’s a trick. Because even this one choice is not actually a choice, because we are never actually separate from God. It is like breathing; we can give attention to breathing or not, but it still sustains us. It is still how we live. We don’t have to remember God to be one with God, any more than we have to remember to breathe in order to draw breath.
There is nothing to choose because there is nothing to choose between. There is no this or that. There is only this: this this. Beyond all appearance there is only one life. To know this is to know that we are already home, and that our long journey in search of home was merely a dream.
You are not a stranger in the house of God . . . Illusions have no place where love abides, protecting you from everything that is not true (T-23.I.10:4, 6).
But this will not be our truth until we stop insisting on certain outcomes in the world. This person instead of that one. This path rather than that. Sun instead of rain.
The stillness to which we are called is deep. It is beyond what is personal and cultural. It is beyond needs and wants. It transcends the ages.
This was not clear to me until I let go of the one who was given to me as a soulmate. The one appeared and I let the one go. I let go of the one who was all that remained after the bleak nihilism of the void, the years and years of study, the endless succession of demons and ghosts advertising fear. I let go and . . .
. . . realized gently that there was nothing to let go of and nobody to do the letting go. In a way, it was like my soulmate took everything and disappeared, leaving me with nothing but God. How generous!
This is a precious gift, far beyond anything the world or a body can offer. We lose nothing and are given everything.
We can read and read and read about it but we won’t know this peace and joy until we actually let go of all that stands before it. Until we actually let go of every idol and symbol the world offers, then the peace of God will always be just another projection, another thing we have or don’t have.
So the suggestion is, stop projecting and actually do the thing you are afraid to do that you know will restore God to your memory. You know what it is; do it.
The form this takes will necessarily change from person to person. But in your heart – in the heart within your heart – you know the truth of your calling. You know the One who is calling. You know what to do to remember God and reflect only Heaven in this vale of tears and duress.
We are here to remind one another to do this, and to support one another as we do it, together remembering the love beyond all idols and symbols, including our soul mate, including A Course in Miracles, including Jesus, including even God.
I wrote a newsletter today – first in months – about how projection is a denial of the fact that we are creations of God, who is Love, and Who is not mocked. The clarity of this is blinding, and we tend to look away.
This was as clear as starlight in winter, as simple as drawing the next breath.
Still, for a little while, I went on studying.
But it was like how when you stop paddling a canoe, the canoe drifts a while before gliding to a halt. It takes time for an energetic pattern – of study, of loving, of sailing – to dissipate. But in time it does.
Then what?
For me, I found fear. All the emotional structures and relationships I’d built to manage the fear stopped working, and all that remained in their wake was the brutal logic of fear.
There is nothing to do in that space but be still. A parade of demons and monsters passes, one after the other, each horrifying in its own way, each making a case for your doom, and you just sit quietly watching. It feels like forever. It feels like torture.
Yet for me, there was a point in that parade when I realized that nothing in it was going to kill me. Scare me, yes. Horrify me, yes.
But end me? No.
Oddly, the relief I felt at this was quickly sublimated by a grim nihilism I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was like being pulled under stormy seas by an invisible hand. I’d fight for the surface, get dragged down again. After a while I couldn’t make the surface, but I’d still struggle for the light gleaming faintly above me.
Eventually – I think this is what has to happen, but I can speak only to my own experience – I just gave up and went down.
This is getting long and dramatic! So let me say this: in my experience, when you surrender to nihilism, when you lean right into it, give yourself wholly to it, it dissolves. I can’t say exactly how or why. It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t something I did. It was just a thing that happened in the absence of resistance.
That is a sweet space! Fear no longer has a stranglehold on you, death has no mask it can wear to intimidate you. When someone says “I and the Father are one,” you aren’t envious or jealous.
In a lot of ways, this feels like the end of what we call “the journey.” But it’s not. Nor is it a beginning.
So what is it?
I told a friend recently I feel as if I have walked ten thousand miles to reach the Gates of Eden and only in their shadow do I realize that the last step – the step through the gates, entrance unto the Kingdom – is harder than all the many millions that got me here. He laughed.
“It’s not like that at all,” he said. “It’s like you’re in a dressing room and you’ve taken off the fear suit but are realizing that there’s no love suit. Naked is the love suit. You are the love suit. And you’re scared to go out into the world like that.”
Love is blinding, and we tend to look away. Love is freeing, and we turn back to the cage. Love opens us up to the cosmos, and the cosmos enfolds us, vast folds of Love enveloping vast folds of Love endlessly.
In the newsletter, I wrote how sometimes I am like a child who refused to open his birthday gifts, and then complains that nobody got him anything. Where is my happiness?
Imagine you are sitting by a brook. The water is clear and clean.
A day or so later, the brook is clouded and full of trash, sluggishly working its way between muddy banks.
Then, a day or two after that, it is clear again.
In this example, the brook’s cleanliness and muddiness are both caused by something happening upstream. You do nothing but observe.
The suggestion is that before we judge the world – before we are even aware of the world – the world is real. Our senses and ideas are an observer, far downstream from “creation,” let alone the creator.
When I say the world is real, I am really saying “something precedes your experience, including the experience of awareness of experience, and for simplicity’s sake I am calling it ‘the world.'”
But Really, the World is Not Real
In A Course in Miracles “the world” is our perception of everything as both separate from us and external to us. That is the world ACIM dismisses when it argues that “there is no world” (W-pI.132.6:2). It’s more of an idea – a perceptual filter – than a physical thing (i.e., it’s more the observing than the observed).
Thus, that world – the one that appears separate from and external to us – is a matter (pun intended) of perception and belief. It’s like a reflection in a mirror: we perceive an image that we believe corresponds to what is being imaged. But it is always a reflection, with no powers or abilities of its own, and we can always be mistaken.
When we realize that world is an image, a reflection, and thus dead and not living, our interest in it as something separate from us diminishes. Our sense of it has something full of the power to make us happy or sad diminishes. Attention shifts inward. We want to gaze at the original, not the reflection.
We want life, not death.
Imagine you are looking in the mirror and you see your face – it’s kind but a little tired maybe. It shows its mileage; it’s serious but not unhappy.
If you want to get to know the one behind that appearance – that is, if you want to know yourself – you cannot talk to the mirror! Or you can, but it will get old real fast. You have to look within and (this is where A Course in Miracles can be especially helpful) you have to be in relationship with what you discover there.
So we can dismiss the world, and we can realize that we’re not bodies, but we still need each other. Whatever we are – and whatever is going on with us – we still need each other.
Nonduality in Christian Context: Abhishiktananda
This uncompromised emphasis on relationship as central to salvation reflects ACIM’s Christian roots. Nondual awakening in a Christian framework requires that we remember one another as equal members of one family. Jesus did not call us to abstract mystical union with God but rather to a dynamic relationship with one another as children of a Father in Heaven who loves us. It is in that relationship that we remember “I and the Father are one.” Hence this joyful declaration in the first letter of John.
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!
Richard Kearney said of Abhishiktananda, a Benedictine priest who found his spiritual home in Advaita Vedanta, that “Abhi” intuitively understood that “Christianity discovers its true self by journeying out through the other, the stranger, the outsider.”
Abhishiktanda wrote of this western Christian imperative to seeking a “true self” (so central to the ACIM curriculum (e.g. W-pII.In.9:7)):
But what makes the Christian inspiration distinct? Why this search for distinction, for identity? . . . Christianity is the discovery of myself in the other.
I can give up everything – I can lose everything – but somehow I can neither give up nor lose you, and this is the case for all my brothers and sisters, from my wife and children to strangers in Tibet, Bangladesh and Mogadishu. It is only in and through you that I can remember fully we are children – equal creations equally loved – of a loving God.
Indeed, it is only in this “not giving up” – which is to say, in being in relationship – that I can know myself. In terms of A Course in Miracles I surrender to the Will of God by accepting the Holy Spirit’s guidance to remember – as Jesus remembered – all my brothers and sisters remembering me in Christ.
This description of ACIM practice should not call to mind anything magical or supernatural. It merely translates the ordinary relationship in which moment by moment, day by day, year by year and lifetime by lifetime, you and I find our way together in community into a site of holiness.
Abhishiktananda again.
If Christ is the ‘only one’ for me . . . may I discover in him the glory of the Only One. And what does it matter if I discover the glory of the Only One in whatever created form there may be! For the glory of the Only One is in all one. This alone is important: that Christ should be Everything for me . . . Let every human being be the only one for me, my everything to whom I give myself totally. In this alone I will have the experience of the Only One.
In other words, it is in relationship with one another that we discover – we remember – that which precedes both experience and awareness of experience, that which falls beyond our capacity for knowing-through-perception. It is relationship that allows us to know our “true self” – i.e., a self which transcends the world, the body, and the world’s and body’s conceptions of the self.
In relationship, we hear the fundamental “I AM” in which all else grows still and quiet. Everything from ACIM to Jesus to our life’s work is undone in it. “The discovery of Christ’s I AM,” wrote Abhishiktananda, “is the ruin of any Christian theology, for all notions are burnt within the fire of experience.”
This was an extension of his understanding that “Truth cannot be formulated.”
Christianity is neither knowledge, nor devotion, nor ethics and ritual — nor is it duty, religion (formulas, institutions). It is an explosion of the Spirit. It accepts any religious basis (jnana/bhakti/karma) to the extent necessary in each case.
We learn this when we “Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto our God” (W-pI.189.7:2-5). What does “whose kingdom is the world for you today” (T-30.I.16:8) mean then? And how shall we bring it forth?
For us, the formless truth borrows the framework of A Course in Miracles, extending the broader outlines of love that came into being in the Jesus movement that began in Galilee a couple of millenia ago. For us, it is the culmination of Jesus’ prayer that “all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21).
It’s like we are sitting by a brook. And we’re so fixated on the brook’s appearance that we don’t realize somebody sitting next to us. And so at last we turn . . .
Stillness does not ask anything of us. Nor can it be misunderstood. It is given totally and unconditionally.
Yet if we are thinking about stillness, then we do not know stillness. The problem is not thinking – thinking can be very creative and useful in context.
The problem is “about.”
“About” comes from an Old English word “onbūtan,” which means “outside of.” When we are thinking “about” something (or someone or something), we are acknowledging alienation and separation. We are dreaming a dream of exile from Love.
This is not really a problem when I am thinking “about” which path I will take on my walk this afternoon. But it is a problem – or something like a problem – when I am thinking “about” stillness. Then I am holding a self apart from stillness.
This “holding apart” is the source of our unhappiness. It is the logjam which interferes with the peace and creativity that is our natural inheritance as extensions of life whose only function is to extend in turn.
Stillness precedes thought. It is not “about” anything. We know it the way a sunflower knows to turn its bright face to the sun, the way a river knows its way to the sea, and the way the sea knows the gravitational pull of the moon.
We obscure and diminish knowledge of stillness when we are “about” it – analyzing, complicating, studying, imagining. You can picture us standing here observing stillness there. But what do we need to learn in order to draw our next breath? To see the sky as blue and not blood red?
Did you decide to love your dog/daughter/husband/etc? Or was the love given?
Stillness is natural for us. Stillness is what we are before we think to ask “what am I? What is my purpose in life? What should I do?”
Stillness is not an answer to a grand metaphysical question because it does not ask questions. It just knows.
Stillness is the one life behind all appearances.
Stillness begets happiness, which is closely related to gratitude. When we are still, we are happy, and our gratefulness is like sunlight, ever extending its life-giving rays. We do nothing; we are everything. Or, if you prefer, we do nothing because we are nothing.
On the one hand, this is a bunch of poetic nonsense. On the other, it is a promise of A Course in Miracles, the illusory path you and I have accepted as our shared way beyond illusions.
Completely unaffected by the turmoil and the terror of the world, the dreams of birth and death that here are dreamed, the myriad of forms that fear can take; quite undisturbed, the Thought God holds of you remains exactly as it always was. Surrounded by a stillness so complete no sound of battle comes remotely near; it rest in certainty and perfect peace. Here is your one reality kept safe, completely unaware of all the world that worships idols, and that knows not God (T-30.III.10:2-4).
This is our reality now; not five years from now. Not a thousand lifetimes from now. Not when we figure out what ACIM means by “battle” or “idols.” Not when we perfect this or that relationship. Now.
Stillness is always present. It is always untouched by the past and the future. All distinctions – which are the lifeblood of appearances – end in it.
The stillness and the peace of now enfold you in perfect gentleness. Everything is gone except the truth (T-16.VII.6:5-6).
I wrote about defensiveness and its proximity to projection in my newsletter this morning; please feel free to sign up.
When I become responsible for defensiveness, I project less, and the less I project, the more love and peace become the salient qualities of our shared living.
And, at some point in the happiness that arises thereby, I catch a glimpse of choicelessness and realizes that I have finally reached the beginning – the literal only step – of the journey-that-neither-begins-nor-ends.
Choicelessness is scary. Our conditioning is premised on concepts of free will; the idea that there is always something we can do in any situation to maximize it for our benefit (and the benefit of those we deign to love). An independent functional self is the literal ground of this belief system; neither can exist without the other.
To realize that there is no such self is – to the idea that there is such a self – utterly terrifying. Small wonder we tend not to question it or at least not question it very deeply. It is the void: empty, meaningless, ever ready to devour life whole, leaving nothing. Of course we turn away; of course we try to squirrel away a crumb.
We have to look at the void. But here’s the thing. At some point in the “Void-is-Horror” narrative, the narrative falls away and it is seen at last that the void is not dead; it is not nothing. Rather, it is a generative emptiness, utterly creative, utterly giving. And the love it extends – because it does not perceive differences – is truly unconditional.
This is so far beyond being a good person or a holy person or an awakened person. None of that matters at all. And it is a gift rather than a reward. Our work is not to earn anything, much less deserve anything, but simply to undo everything – everything – that obstructs our remembrance of this all-loving generative stillness.
Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thing the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-pI.189.7:2-5).
Are we ready for it?
It is for this moment, this question, that our study and practice of A Course in Miracles is given, and it is to this moment that it endlessly delivers us.
In a sense, to be crucified is simply to be yoked to body in the same way a body can be nailed to a cross. There is no escape, only death. Everything dies, blows away in dust, and is forgotten.
Yet resurrection is a form of remembering. It is a restoration to mind the knowledge of its wholeness, which is not associated with bodies at all, and thus beyond birth and death and the trials in between.
Thus, Easter is neither a day nor an event, much less a holy day or event. Rather, it is a way of thinking for which we are responsible, and for which we choose to be responsible because what else could love possibly want?
I have been thinking lately about my insistence that love assume a certain form in order to actually be love. Jack, my daughter’s blind horse, who I visit each morning with a flake of hay, is teaching me that this is insane. He reminds me that service is the way to end projection, and thus remember Love.
I wrote about the service part of this lesson in today’s newsletter. You can sign up here if you like. The horse part – which is the love part – I want to go briefly into here.
Jack lost sight in both of his eyes last year. Both eyes were eventually removed. At the time, the vet responsibly told my daughter that some folks opt to put their horses down when this happens. Sophia said – how do I put this delicately – “fuck that.”
Jack struggled for a month or so with blindness, and then became so skilled at navigating pasture and run-in you wouldn’t know he doesn’t have eyes. Sophia still rides him. It’s like nothing has changed. It is amazing.
What does this have to do with love?
It is fear that insists life must assume this or that form – a certain man or woman, say, or a horse with intact eyesight – in order to be love. You know, right, full, just, perfect, ecstatic, et cetera . . .
The perfect ideal is the ultimate projection because it can never be met, and thus leaves us forever searching, thus obeying ego’s dictate to seek but never find (T-12.IV.1:4).
Yet life somehow manages to flow without this perfection. It is almost as if life is perfectly whole and safe, and we – through the lie of projection – simply refuse to see this. It’s almost as if ego isn’t even wrong – it’s not even actually there.
It turns out that while eyes are nice, Jack does not need them to live a happy fulfilled life. It is as if the forms he perceived were – how shall we put this delicately – not actually there in the first place.
I mean we know that’s not true but . . . do we?
A Course in Miracles insists that our emphasis on the sensate world – the world brought forth through the body’s senses – is an illusion and thus unimportant. It asks us to consider that the body’s eyes don’t see, its ears don’t hear, its hands don’t hold . . .
Can this be true? Can love be formless? How would we know?
Mornings I usually wake to Jack calling from the pasture. He’s hungry; my function is to feed him. I stumble into chore clothes and head outside in pre-dawn darkness. Chickens natter in the barn as I gather the requisite flakes. Jack waits by the gate, impatient as always. “Ask and ye shall receive,” I say jokingly, and toss the hay.
And as the gold flake lands on still-frozen earth, I hear in the recess of my mind – the cave of my heart – Jesus say “ditto.”
Am I not blessed? Is the gift not given? Shivering in the New England cold, wordy and unwise but not unhappy? Listening to a blind horse munch hay? Sun rising, chickadees singing? Who is serving who?
Beloved: how much longer must we pretend we don’t know?
