Sean Reagan

Two basic facts underlie the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. First, what we experience as “love” in the world is actually hate. And second, everything that appears in and as the world is the same.

At first this appears ridiculous. Then it appears erroneous. Then it appears logical but undesirable.

Then it appears inevitable.

When it appears inevitable, we enter a state of denial that can apparently take lifetimes to wade through. Then comes a state of despair.

And that despair can be quite sustained and quite intense. It can be dangerous.

It can even be murderous.

But then – no warning – we give up. Not out of virtue and not because of reason. Not because we’ve evolved spiritually.

Because of defeat. Because of exhaustion.

Empty of desire, bereft of hope and deprived of reason, we become like corpses left to rot on a battlefield. Carrion. Dust to dust.

And yet.

When we give up, we do so because we see that the logic of the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles makes clear that there is nothing to do and nobody to do it.

But only ego sees this as “the end.”

To spirit it’s an engraved invitation to a joyful wedding where all life is married unto an open marriage with all life. And the reception goes on forever.

That marriage – and the party after – is not the end! It’s not Heaven, not Nirvana. It, too, is an illusion, else I could not speak of it. Yet in it, the singular spark of God (of which we know nothing) becomes a conflagration in which – at last – self-awareness dies.

Nisargadatta knew.

When you are very quiet, you have arrived at the basis of everything. That is the deep, dark blue state in which there are millions of stars and planets. When you are in that state, you have no awareness of your existence.

When there is nothing left to do, then everything becomes possible. And when everything is possible, you are free. And when you are free, you are happy. And when you are happy, all you want to do is extend that happiness to others, so you do, perfectly and consistently.

Hope does rise from the ash pit of despair but it does not rebuild a world and it does not rely on a separated self for its existence. It is simply an energetic ascending – a luminous spiral indistinguishable from the cosmos – in which fear and guilt do not exist.

When you let go of everything, what remains is love. For a while, the same old appearances will chug along – your wife, your brother, your best friend, your job, your back pain, your fantasies, your hobbies, your mortgage. But all these are orders of magnitude less stressful because you know – even if you are not yet sure that you know – that they are not real.

Neither fear nor worship the image: this is the law and the prophets.

Our work ends when we see the illusion as an illusion. There is nothing to do in or to or with an illusion. It disintegrates of its own accord, heeding laws we did not invent and over which we have no say.

There is no world. There is no separate self in existence anywhere. Ego shrouds these facts with darkness and despair, but there is another way to perceive them.

A Course in Miracles is an invitation to this alternative mode of perception, which it calls the Holy Spirit. There is no Holy Spirit! That, too, is just a dream within a dream within a dream.

And yet . . .

If you seek the peace that surpasses understanding, then you must consent to the destruction of both understanding and the one who would understand.

Today, may the love we share make it so.

The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. People have died on seeing this, because they saw no way except the pathways offered by the world. And learning they led nowhere, lost their hope (T-31.IV.3:3-5).

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (REM)

Few passages in A Course in Miracles speak so bluntly to its potential for nihilism as the one quoted above. Whatever you think matters in this world, whatever you think counts, whatever you think is helpful is . . . not. It leads nowhere. It’s nothing.

Nothing.

And unlike REM, the course does not suggest we’ll feel fine about this.

This is not an intellectual understanding, though it can begin as one. It is more in the nature of psychological trauma, of having some deep-down horror brought into the light. Your reasons for forgetting it are understandable, and you don’t want to be reminded now. You certainly don’t want a sustained relationship with it.

As the course makes clear, actually encountering the nothingness-that-is-the-world can make one long for death (which isn’t, by the way, either an escape or an end). To call this fact bleak is an understatement. Really, even calling it nihilism misses the point.

This juncture is painful, and is therefore experienced as such. And that is why we prefer not to reach it. Talk about it, sure. Speculate and hypothesize? Absolutely. Conflate reading about it in a book with actually living it? You bet.

Actually get there?

No.

This is why the ACIM community prefers to focus on stuff like holy relationships and oneness. And when that doesn’t work, argue about whether so-and-so is right or wrong about holy relationsips and oneness. There’s plenty of chestnuts: Who’s your teacher? Which edition do you read? Do you see special lights?

All of these are are merely distractions from the difficult work of seeing an illusion for an illusion.

Oddly – or perhaps thankfully – all that really has to happen at this juncture is to see it’s all an illusion. It’s all a dream, without exception. Your kids, your lover, the sandwich you ate for lunch, the coffin your father was buried in and your father? All a dream.

And here’s the really hard part – there is nothing you can do in a dream about the dream.

I know, I know – we can “wake up” from the dream. We can avail ourselves of atonement, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, forgiveness . . .

But waking up – and Atonement, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and forgiveness – are part of the dream, too.

Where did you learn about waking up? In the dream.

Where did you hear that God is Love? That your deepest fear is that you’re powerful beyond measure? That Jesus is the way, the truth and the life?

In the dream.

A Course in Miracles, tantric orgasm, holy relationships, enlightenment, nonduality, double fudge brownies, Bob Dylan songs and Emily Dickinson poems . . . dream stuff. Equally utterly illusory.

When we see at last that whatever the world offers cannot save us, despair can feel natural and justified. Yet all that has really occurred is that you’ve seen through the illusion.

When we see that it’s a dream, and that nothing in the dream can save us from the dream, that’s the end. That’s the one thing we have to do. We can’t do anything else.

Stop looking for a way out of the dream. There isn’t one.

Stop pretending that one part of the dream is better or more important or sexier than another.

Stop pretending you’re the dreamer and that if you can only find the right interior switch you’ll magically be in charge of the dream.

Just see the dream in which there’s nothing to do and nobody to do it.

A Course in Miracles refers to this learning experience as the “lowest point” (T-31.IV.4:8). It emphasizes that “no pathway in the world can lead to God, nor any worldly goal be one with His” (T-31.IV.9:3). Indeed, anything you experience as a body in the world has the singular purpose of “confusion and despair” (T-31.IV.9:5).

So what is to be done?

Nothing.

When you reach that juncture of the dream, your role in the dream has ended. At that point, you’re in God’s hands, far beyond the reach of dreams.

The better question is: have you reached that juncture? If not, why not?

Make this year different by making it all the same (T-15.XI.10:11).

I want to distinguish between oneness and sameness.

What is one has no parts that can be compared and found the same or different to any degree.

What is the same is separate but identical and thus equal.

In the world in which you and I live, we will not find “oneness.” We will find claims of oneness and ideals of oneness but their appearance is by definition set against “multiplicity” and “many” et cetera.

I suggest – with I hope all requisite humility – that oneness in this world is fool’s gold.

Sameness on the other hand is very much possible and – because it is tantamount to equality – becomes the closest thing to Godliness – Love (with a capital L) – that we’re going to bring forth in these bodies in this world.

The goal of A Course in Miracles is not oneness but rather to rediscover and then integrate a new way of thinking characterized by the Holy Spirit.

In course terms, the Holy Spirit – by emphasizing sameness and equality – undoes the ego’s emphasis on difference and inequality.

As we see that everything is the same, we realize that special love is not justified under any circumstances. You can prefer vanilla ice cream to black raspberry – that’s just a thing that happens in bodies, like drawing a next breath – but you can’t love vanilla ice cream more than black raspberry.

As this becomes clearer, the differences that naturally appear in our lives – between ice cream flavors, between my kid and some random kid in Tibet, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump – start to matter a lot less.

You start to see how ego uses those apparent differences to justify hatred and indifference. And it seems so reasonable! Of course you hate political rulers who break up families, deport kids, normalize violence against women . . .

And that – that right there – is the separation.

And so that – that right there – is the site of salvation.

And also, that – that right there – is why so many of us tend to romanticize A Course in Miracles by sidestepping its utterly radical emphasis on equality as the foundation of holiness and love.

. . .

I’ll write another post soon about how hard it can be to live this way (which is why we side-step it) but how living this way is actually deeply practical and peaceful.

This post is dedicated to Cheryl, who so kindly reminded me to reflect on this issue this past weekend, and who is always (well, mostly always) patient with my tendency to play ACIM know-it-all. Also, if you like what you’re reading, consider signing up for my weekly newsletter. No sales, no spam. Just thoughtful writing about love and A Course in Miracles.

Right now you are not with me. The hayloft is empty, save for my trestle table and chair, shelf upon shelf spilling with books. It’s quiet here but for chickens clucking below the window. I am alone, writing this. And what I write you will read later, in the privacy of your own space, which I can imagine but never know.

It seems that we are separated, yes?

This can feel a little redundant or overly-simplistic but A Course in Miracles asks us not to overlook it: we believe that we are separate from our brothers and sisters, which is not great, so we should ask: what is the cause of this gap?

The answer, says the course, is the body. The body is the cause of the perceived gap between us.

Look closely: does the body not form an impenetrable wall around you? You can never live in “my” interior, as I can never live in “yours.” I mean, yes, we pretend to be “soul-mates” and “true loves” and whatnot but . . . when was the last time somebody else drinking a glass of water quenched your thirst?

The course suggests that if it weren’t for the body – this one right here, writing in the hay loft – then our union would be total and we would know the joy and peace of selfless Love. Without separate interests arising in separate bodies we would be one, and nothing could part us.

And yet . . . We go on with these bodies and this separation. Why?

The body saves you, for it gets away from total sacrifice and gives to you the time in which to build again your separate self, which you truly believe diminishes as you and your brother meet (T-29.I.4:7).

The course suggests here that bodies are our chosen means for making and emphasizing – and thus experiencing as real – separation.

But critically, the body only serves this function with our consent (e.g., T-29.I.5:1). The only reason you and I are not aware of our fundamental unity right now is because we refuse to challenge the erroneous conviction that what we are is in fact contained and constrained by a body.

So the suggestion then is that we look at this fact and see it clearly as possible. We don’t want to deny the body, and we don’t want to change it. We don’t want to integrate it with spirit. Healing isn’t our job but God’s. Our job is to notice our need for healing, our yearning for it, and then allow help to be given. Can you notice how your body is a barrier to Love?

If there is one cookie, we can’t both eat all of it. If I am walking on the beaches of Cape Cod then I can’t also be walking on the shores of Lake Champlain. If I have cancer I am not simultaneously cancer-free. In these ways, the body is a limit which makes the idea of sacrifice meaningful. I can’t take every human being in my arms – I can only take a few, mostly one at a time. Always we are giving up, letting go, until even love is frittered away and forgotten.

Sometimes I think I’m past all that. I wave my hand and say “I am not a body, I’m free” and then . . . forget all about the hard work of looking within with Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Of course, repeating words and ideas is a thing bodies do. There’s no such thing as an original thought. And bodies do this because it reinforces separation. Can we see it happening? Can we accept it is happening?

To see and accept this is not a judgment against the body. The body itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, weak nor strong (e.g., T-29.I.5:1). It’s not even a judgment against the belief system underlying the body’s privilege.

Instead, it’s the recognition of confusion in the mind which is healed by being recognized. You don’t have to solve a mystery, or learn a secret, or say the right prayer, or give up sex and chocolate or anything.

You just have to notice how your body works to minimize – really, to deny the very existence of – infinite and eternal and free-flowing Love.

Would you know that nothing stands between you and your brother and sister? Would you know there is no gap behind which you can hide? There is a shock that comes to those who learn their savior is their enemy no more (T-29.I.8:4-6).

We are scared of that shock because we associate it with a thing that happens in and to a body. Zap! But there’s something after the shock, and it’s softer and gentler. It quiets the storm and calms the waves.

It’s happiness.

The “happy message” of A Course in Miracles is simply that “God is Love” (T-29.I.8:7). But the Love in question is neither contained in nor constrained by the body. Instead, it is the Love we discover by letting go of the egoic shadow in order to embrace the “promise of the living God” (T-29.II.6:1).

God gave you all there is. And to be sure you could not lose it, did He give the same to every living thing as well. And thus is every living thing a part of you, as of Himself (T-29.VIII.9:7-9).

Those are radical sentences, and deeply comforting.

When we give attention to how our bodies function in the world, it is given to us to see beyond those bodies to Love, and so to be regulated by the body no more. This is not a problem of science or philosophy; it is not a question of religion. It is a simple gift which we give away in order to learn that all is in us, who are home in God, eternally.

I want to briefly follow up this post about teaching A Course in Miracles with a note going deeper into my study of Ken Wapnick and Tara Singh, both of whom functioned as formal primary ACIM teachers. Particularly, I want to criticize them and then explain how criticism is not fatal to love or gratitude.

Ken Wapnick

In The Most Commonly Asked Questions about A Course in Miracles, Ken tackles the reasonable question of why, if ACIM is a correction of Jesus’s message, it took Jesus some 2,000 years to get around to to correcting it. I mean, a lot went wrong in those centuries. What was he waiting for?

Ken’s answer is long and worth reading in full, but I want to focus on this part of it:

The fear that [Jesus] engendered – for it constitutes a grave threat to the ego’s thought system of darkness – led to the Son’s closing the door to protect his individual self, and this took the form of seeking to destroy Jesus, and then his message, as the history of Christianity attests. This is why the gospel writers changed the entire message of Jesus and rooted it in the crucifixion, which reflected the ego’s underlying plan to perpetuate its own thought system of betrayal, suffering and death (100).

It takes a lot of – what’s the word? Oh right – ego – to argue that one can speak to Jesus’s “entire message” and that almost everybody else for the past two thousand years has been getting only parts of it – and confused parts at that. Ken did this a lot; and it reflects a real failure of both humility and scholarship.

For me, the closer I come to Christ – which is an abstraction reflecting epistemic proximity to Jesus – the less willing I am to assert special or privileged knowledge. I notice this is true for many folks whose prayer life has brought them near to the heart of life. It’s as if the closer you get to Jesus, the more you see that Jesus isn’t the point at all. You can let him go.

Ken’s efforts to cast A Course in Miracles as a singular correction of Christianity arose as his own special learning project. I get that and I respect that. We’ve all got our baggage. But statements subtly implying you are in touch with the real true message of Jesus are . . . well, they’ve been around for a long time, too. And they are violent, not loving. And it doesn’t take a theological genius to recognize this.

Tara Singh

The other day I pointed out that Singh’s teaching is helpful in terms of application. Nobody has more deeply modeled for me what it means to live A Course in Miracles (though, in fairness, Marianne Williamson comes closer than a lot of us are comfortable admitting).

That said, take a look at these stanzas describing Singh’s first visit in decades with his biological sisters:

My sisters looked grey and wrinkled,
as if volcanic ash had shrunken them tremendously.

There was nothing to recognize in them.

. . .

There was not the character that distinguishes a person.

Most people in the world
are like manufactured toys, lacking individuality.
The wind-up toy does what’s particular.
And most of what they said all during my stay
was an echo of the past.

Most of us are second-hand people
with no voices of our own,
educated by insecurity and unfulfillment
to labor for what we own.
For we own not our own Voice and, without it,
each one is lost in the confusion of projected images

(Remembering God in All You See 127).

I wish that Singh had been able to see that this harsh depiction of his siblings was itself a “projected image” and thus reflected confusion, not clarity, fear not love.

When his nephews show him a video of their wedding, Singh comments that he was “demoralized to see everyone dancing about, shaking their hips,/rejoicing in their degeneration” (Remembering God 133).

I mean people dance, right? People can even be sexy without sinking into degeneration. Bodies gotta be bodies – why not dance? Why not shake your hips? They’re not there just so your knees and waist can be connected.

Singh manages to avoid casting that highly critical eye on himself, writing that for his family the “joy of meeting him . . . “

was like a furnace in the cold winter.
They began to rejuvenate.
I could see it
and in two days they noticed it in each other
and spoke of How revived they were
since I was in their midst

(Remembering God 128).

He also comments how much they all admire him:

It seems they had never heard a person
who could be so direct and non-accusatory
and not be swayed from his own integrity

(Remembering God 129).

I have struggled a great deal in my learning with this aspect of Singh – his moral arrogance, his self-satisfaction, his judgment of others, his certainty that his way is The Way . . . It’s been an enormous challenge in terms contextualizing the wisdom and insight that permeates so much of his thinking.

On Criticism

If you go very deeply into your criticism of others, you will find your own self and you will remember love.

Nobody can do this for you, and it is very much worth doing.

By “go very deeply into your criticism of others,” I mean that it’s okay to take yourself seriously. You are not a bad or shallow person; don’t be afraid of your judgments. Look at them; judge them. What do you see?

When I investigate my criticisms of Ken and Tara Singh, I find myself: I find my arrogance and my sense of entitlement, my interest in being right rather than happy, my grandiosity and stubbornness, and my willingness to marginalize others in any way possible in order to elevate my self.

But I don’t stop there. I keep going.

Another level down I find a confused child who is often hurt and confused by the utter lack of order that permeates his life. He hides a lot – usually in books but sometimes in showing off his facility with language. This boy grows up to be a judgmental man who’s way too good at overlooking his own judgment.

But I don’t stop there either. I keep going.

And then, another level down, I find fear.

When you reach fear, you are nearly home. But note: if you are not actually terrified when you reach fear, if you are not literally scared, then you have only reached the idea of fear, an interpretation of fear.

You have to go all the way to the actual fear, and then you have to be ready to stand in it for lifetimes. The light will come but you do not bring it. You are empty-handed here. You are as nothing here. So far as I can tell, there is no other way.

When I describe the process of going deeply into my criticism of my teachers, I talk about dropping down levels. Each one of those levels can take years to fully see, let alone consent to go beyond. It’s work; it’s hard work.

But when you reach fear, when you can stay with your fear, when you can be empty-handed outside and desolate inside, then you have reached the Gates of Eden. You are at the far reach of the battlefield; one more step and you will know peace.

Ken Wapnick on Fear

Here is Ken talking about the eighteenth principle of A Course in Miracles and, by extension, the power of love to heal our fear.

. . . our worth is established by God. Your worth is the same as mine. If I see you as being worthier than I, or less worthy than I am – victim or victimizer – then that is an attack . . . It is a consistent teaching of A Course in Miracles that we are all the same, moving beyond the superficial differences of our bodies – physical and psychological – to the underlying unity of not only the Christ in us, but also our shared need to remember what we have forgotten and to escape from the prison of our own guilt (58).

He adds a little later,

We would never try to attack or hurt others if we were not afraid of them. By choosing the Holy Spirit instead of the ego, we are really choosing love instead of fear (71).

So it’s interesting, right? I see these differences between me and Ken, and I criticize him for it – justly, of course – and . . . He just so happens to have this deep insight into the power of love which heals my fear of him and everybody else. It’s like I go all the way into my criticism and reach fear and . . . the very thing I fear has the answer.

Tara Singh on Fear

Here is what Tara Singh has to say about fear and love.

Fear is a projection and not a reality. Fear comes when you deny your own potential to love, and to be honest and just. Honesty is never afraid. Lack of conviction creates an organization of lawyers, police forces and military powers to protect its own bondage, limitation and unreality. When you are with reality, there are no projections because the grace of the present brings you to the inseperable wholeness of your being (Nothing Real can be Threatened 104-05).

Earlier I was critical of Tara Singh for judging others – I judged him for judging others. What but fear would cause me to do this? And when I go into the fear, I see that Tara Singh is already there to teach me that my fear is not reality, but my potential for love in place of fear is.

In other words, through my criticism I find myself. I go all the way into that self and reach the fear. And I find that my teachers have done this, too, for they are here. At the last veil, my teachers stand – almost as if waiting for me – and say “together let us pull back this veil. Let us find out what lies beyond fear.”

Love is Always the Answer

There is nothing wrong with criticism. The brain judges; don’t worry about that. Simply give attention to the criticism, and allow yourself to reach all the way through it to the fear that underlies it.

You are not separate from your teachers; what you see in them is in you and this includes both what is confused in them and what is beautiful and healing in them. At last you see your connectedness; your teachers are joined to you, and you to them, in a union that is not premised on hierarchies of worthiness or knowledge. We are all fucked up; also, we are all full of light and grace.

It is a great relief to know that your teachers are human, and that the problems we have as humans can be solved, because they all arise from the fundamental confusion that we are separated from life. I give thanks for the ones who stood in the light a certain way, that I might remember how even my brokenness can be healed and brought to love.