After A Course in Miracles

Ultimately, A Course in Miracles points beyond itself, as all “solutions” and “methods” and “paths,” spiritual and otherwise, must.

I say “must . . .”

What I mean is, in this life as “I” have lived and observed it, all solutions, methods and paths have pointed beyond themselves. From that consistency I infer a law, neatly summarized by the story of the monk who confuses the finger for the moon to which the finger points.

Eventually, these various solutions, methods and paths exhaust themselves, like funeral pyres coming to rest in ashes, blowing away in winds I cannot control. And I am left without finger or moon.

Am I therefore bereft? Is suffering mandatory?

Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-pI.189.7:3-5).
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Listen: even the cross must point beyond itself, for it is only a symbol within the ego’s world, a plaything for those who need to play a while longer. When at last the ego dies, it takes the cross – and crucifixion – with it.

Imagine a world where we do not crucify ourselves or others, and then do what you are uniquely called to do to bring that world forth. Only then will you learn the truth inherent in “there is no world” (W-pI.132.6:2).

If you cannot imagine such a world, or cannot hear the call to participate in it, then give attention – through inquiry – to why you cannot. Find people who will support you in this inquiry by not letting you settle for easy or comfortable answers, and by supporting you in asking subtler and more provocative questions.

We are at peace but believe otherwise – why?

After Idols

The various experiences for which we long are neither right nor wrong, good nor bad. It is the longing we must look at, not the object to which the longing attaches. That’s the error – to become focused on the object as if it were the problem (so often masquerading as the solution), rather the longing which actually generates the object.

To want anything other than what is is to implicitly deny that you already have everything. Longing begins in overlooking this simple fact, and it survives on the hunger generated by continuing to overlook this fact.

The north-facing bedroom altar. The underlying cloth was made by Chrisoula’s γιαγιά as a young woman in Greece.

But to understand this, you have to reframe your understanding of your body. Your body is an experience of the world, of the cosmos, creating a body in order to perceive itself. Thus, the body is not in any way “you” because you are not a partial or local phenomenon. You are the cosmos experiencing itself through a certain perspective. The body is more like an aperture than anything else – an absence or gap through which the whole is glimpsed, albeit partially.

If you don’t know this, then you will sense that something is missing and you will naturally want to find what is missing. At its most simple, this shows up in our craving for experience – new loves, flavors of tea, resonant songs and so forth. These experiences come and go on their own, but you can invest in them a kind of intensity and purpose that far exceeds the natural range of their being.

The little jade turtle was a gift to me from Chrisoula which she gave to me the night of our wedding when we were finally alone and could talk. The Buddha I purchased about twenty years ago in a state of utter panic, the cause of which I can no longer recall. The pastel rosary was a baptism gift to my son, who presently has no use for it, so I have temporarily appropriated it, often carrying it with me in my pocket, and sometimes even praying it. The other crucifix was a birthday gift from my children many years ago, and I wear it when I am out in the world but not around the house. The wicker basket holds certain other objects dear to Chrisoula and me, and the pins adorning it were made by youngest daughter in 2016 when she and other women were desperate for hope and turned to crafting to calm their hearts and share hope.

This constructs what A Course in Miracles calls “special relationships,” which are like idols worshiped for what we think we can get from them, rather than for what we can give. Nobody can actually give anything to an idol because idols are dead and inanimate. Their only life comes from the illusion of life projected onto them.

The solution is to look past the idol. Just forget about it. The idol has no power but what you give it; the special relationship only has the power you give it. Let it go. Let what happens, happen. Let what doesn’t happen also happen. You’ll see that the objects go nowhere, and the narrative apparently giving them meaning also goes nowhere, but the desire creating them . . .

The rabbits are me and Chrisoula at our wedding! See our Greek crowns? Fionnghuala made them for our most recent anniversary. The ikon in the lower right was a gift from my mother-in-law – she purchased it at a Greek monastery. The little wickless candles and their holder were a Christmas gift from Fionnghuala, who understands in a deep way how altars function.

. . . that shifts in a subtle but powerful way. Its generative capacity turns to life and renewal, rebirth in forgiveness, rather than death, sterility and mere repetition.

When we are invested in idols and specialness, we are projecting, we are casting out a self, which creates an apparent lack, which must then be filled, remedied, amended, healed. Suddenly, the song or the person or the landscape feels like a natural extension of you, the part of you that’s missing and which you must have, will have, and when you do have then you will be complete and know the joy and peace of God.

Not so. Not so.

The crucifix belonged to my grandmother. It’s made of Irish peat and hung in her house. I believe she got in during one of her many visits to Ireland. I like its feminine appearance and the four spirals near the heart. The marble elephant was a gift from a friend back in college; same with the blue glass shell. The felt mice leaning on the lamp are a recent addition; Fionnghuala crafted them a couple of months ago. I love how soft they are and how colorful. There were three originally, but kittens absconded with one. An altar that does not allow for play is not an altar.

On the one hand, this error makes a certain kind of sense because what you are seeing is only your own self projected. It is meet and just to care deeply for that self. But on the other hand, you don’t realize that you are looking at your own self. You think you’re looking at a song. Or a person. Or a landscape.

Hence the confusion, the specialness, which are the absence of holiness, for which you do not need to be forgiven but which you very much do need to allow to be corrected if you want to be happy in the deepest, most sustainable sense of the word.

Or is the altar closer to these rainbows generated by prisms hanging in the east-facing window? Floating across the bedroom walls and door? Beautiful, temporary, shifting? Here and then gone, but when gone not gone, for the potential to be regenerated never leaves? In other words, to what is our attention given? How is it given? The are good question, worthy of our intelligence and care, the answer to which brings us not to another altar but to the Love which generates all altars, which is our inheritance, remembered at last in us forever.

Peace is knowing that it’s all you, because it’s all life. It’s not something that you understand in an intellectual sense; it’s something that arrives in you as a fact of your own being. It is a moment of self-recognition and it ends the illusion of separation (which also, by the way, ends “you” as you presently understand yourself). Henceforth, you will not be tortured by fantasies of future joy conditioned upon finding the right person, place, spiritual practice or any other apparent thing.

You will say “oh.” You will say “oh . . .”

You will be grateful and still, and your praise will be quiet and meaningful. You will be a prayer generated by the Love that names you its brother and sister, in which you are home forever.

Make it so my dear friend. Make it so.

Is A Course in Miracles Dangerous?

For a long time my answer to this question was: don’t be silly. And in a sense, that’s still my answer. It’s just a book with a year’s worth of lessons that most people never even finish, let along bring into application. What’s the risk? What’s the harm?

But I think a better answer might be that A Course in Miracles can be dangerous, especially if you’re settled into a way of thinking about life and God that you don’t want disturbed, and you’re actually committed to looking into that way of thinking in a sustained and serious way.

Even half-hearted students tend to find the course disruptive to their established belief system. And this is not always welcome, and can often feel like an attack. And attacked people usually feel like they’re in danger.

Yet this sense of the course only arises because we are scared of love – and, in particular, of the world’s symbols of love, especially God.

. . . you see love as destructive, and your only question is who is to be destroyed, you or another? You seek to answer this question in your special relationships, in which you seem to be both destroyer and destroyed in part, but able to be neither completely. And this you think saves you from God, Whose total Love would completely destroy you (T-15.X.7:4-6).

So when you ask if A Course in Miracles is dangerous, it might be helpful to go a step further and ask: of what am I scared? God? Love? The death of ego? The end of the world?

In the context of the body and the world – and the egoic belief system undergirding both – these questions appear reasonable. So in that context, it’s important to ask them and the go deeply into the various answers. A Course in Miracles is a way – not the way but a way – to do this.

It’s not a cult. It’s not a shallow New Age fantasy for non-serious people, though like all paths and traditions and methods, some people work it harder and more effectively than others.

The course is simply a means by which to challenge established patterns of thought that are bringing about results – guilt, anxiety, unhappiness, fear et cetera – that we don’t want. In that sense, it is a pragmatic framework for psychological healing in a spiritual context.

Now, does A Course in Miracles always work? No. Can it confuse people in unhelpful ways? Sure. Sometimes. But that is the nature of healing – there are no sure things. We find a program or technique that feels resonant and we give attention to it for a while. If it works, great. If not, that’s okay, too.

Becoming happy – in a deep and sustainable way – is a reasonable goal in the context of our bodies in the world. A Course in Miracles can be a fruitful means of reaching that happiness. The “danger” it poses reflects the radical shifts in thought that – upsetting at first blush – actually produce a quiet joy and inner peace.

And, of course, if everything goes haywire, we can always turn back.

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Letting Go of Awakening

The Upanishads say that “only once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up.” That strikes me as unverifiable in principle, which raises the question: why would the authors say this?

I think there are at least two possibilities, or maybe just one that can be taken either more or less cynically. I’ll start with the optimistic take.

You say that only one soul wakes up every million years because you want folks to stop thinking about waking up as a goal. The biggest impediment to awakening or enlightenment is the notion that awakening or enlightenment is something other than this – this this.

If you tell somebody the odds are overwhelmingly against their waking up, then maybe you can get them to focus on the actions that do facilitate awakening but are actually boring: mostly, noticing that when you’re chopping wood and carrying water, you’re chopping wood and carrying water and noticing it.

When you lean into the ordinary motions of living, and simply notice the grace or light in which it all appears – comes and goes, folds and unfolds, flows and flows – then you are near to the wisdom of the psalmist:

Be still
and know that I am God

It turns out that nobody can teach you to be still, but they can teach you to notice when you’re not still which – if you get curious enough, desperate enough, lucky enough – can suddenly flex into knowledge of God. You say “oh.” You say “oh.”

I think that’s the reason it’s not a bad idea to put the whole “waking up” thing to the side, and just get on with being a kind person in the world – help others, let them help you, don’t get worked up about small stuff, it’s all small stuff, et cetera. That this comes so naturally to us – and makes us so happy – is a huge clue to our fundamental essence.

What’s the cynical perspective on “forget about waking up?”

That’s what folks say when they want “waking up” to be a sign of their spiritual elitism. That’s the language of a priest caste that doesn’t want the hoi polloi soiling the altar. “I’ve got it and you don’t but if you’re deferential enough / pay me enough – I may share a few crumbs with you.”

I’m less enamored of teachers than I used to be, but when I was enamored of Tara Singh one of his insights I most admired was his recognition of the “lovelessness of ‘I get it and you don’t.'” Notice when you’re doing that and then don’t do that.

I felt like that summed up a lot of ACIM energy – Gary Renard and his ascended masters, Ken’s “ACIM is the true Christianity,” David Hoffmeister’s claims to special “white light” experiences, Liz Cronkhite’s “I don’t have an ego but you still do.” That’s all nonsense – or rather, it’s nonsense to the extent it’s held up as having spiritual significance in and of itself. It’s really just more of what happens here in the inside of nothing.

Awakening begets a fundamental equality, a radical sameness, which entails a responsibility to be as loving as the Love which got you going in the first place. This is easier than it sounds because the Love in question undoes identity which dramatically undoes one’s perception of separation. The boundaries of self and other, self and world are waaaay more fluid than we believe.

All of this suggests a possible third reading of that phrase from the Upanishads. I’m suggesting that awakening is a shift in perspective that makes clear there is no body or self to wake up and that everything is just happening, just appearing and disappearing, and that this is perfectly normal.

I am also suggesting that when we see this, we realize we’ve been chasing a ghost, and it was the chase that distracted us from the simple clarity that there is only this: this this.

In other words, you can’t not be awake. You’re awake right now, even if “awake” is experienced as “a dream in which I wish I was awake.” But seriously: no harm, no foul. No worries. Really.

Still, people do get worked up about waking up – they aren’t awake, others are, they want it, they don’t want to want it, what’s the secret . . .

Thus, we might say something ridiculous like “only once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up” because we know that there is no such thing as waking up. Or sleeping. So why not just get it off the table at the outset?

Agape Love and A Course in Miracles

Even into this vale of tears – this shimmering illusion of a world – does the Infinite find a way to reach us. Escher drawings, Nisargadatta ramblings, Mertonian insights on the streets of Louisville. Truly, to see a goldfinch in the garden in mid-August is to see the Face of God and live. Nothing is being kept from us. Nothing is hidden.

And yet we are unhappy. We hurt each other, sometimes in terrible ways. We look the other way when our brothers and sisters choke on tear gas or go hungry or have no home in which to sleep. We overlook the goldfinch because we’re worried about the mortgage or the kids or whatever. What is wrong with us? And can A Course in Miracles help? Can living Christianly help?

Inasmuch as the problem is one of thought, then yes – A Course in Miracles, as a contemporary expression of Christianity, can help. When our minds change, our living changes. We leave the space of fear and isolation and enter the domain of agape love.

By “agape” I mean a love that subsumes all other loves, and by which we are personally transformed. Transformation in this sense is not a physical change, but a mental one. Our soul is enlivened and brought forth as a real force in the world. Love lays claim to us and the forceful presence of soul is our deep and abiding consent to union with it.

The fruits of this union are inner peace and joy, not as psychological extremes but as sustainable modes of living that shift but do not disappear. We dwell beyond the reach of abandonment.

Thus, this union includes our farewell to Ecstasy and Misery, the wild twins of our spiritual childhood, whose gifts fade in the light of the one who is light.

Ecstasy and Misery are processes of Eros – the love that inhabits a body and seeks its own reflection in other bodies. Erotic love matters, and I honor it. The happiness and pleasure it engenders – and even the sadness and loneliness it engenders – are not unwelcome. 

Yet I notice that erotic love lacks staying power. It is closer to lightning than fire. In it, every aspect of living intensifies to an almost unbearable degree. It is exquisite, both in its capacity for delight and its capacity for devastation. But it also takes me away from the world. It is harder to do the dishes, talk my daughter through grief, weed the garden, change the oil in the car, hire somebody to repair the roof . . . 

Agape is the love into which eros is enfolded. It is our full, open-hearted and open-minded presence unto others in a way that sustains us as a collective, rather than individually or in specially-focused partnerships. Agape is mutual, a dialogue rich with honesty and sincerity. It is integral and congruent. It enables coherence; it undoes the disjointed, misguided emphasis on me, myself and I.

It can be helpful to ask: what sustains our “full, open-hearted, open-minded presence unto others?” What allows us to balance day in and out in a posture of attentive service? What is the natural, effortless flow of living that we name agape?

It is not hard to find this – indeed, it arises naturally and sustains itself perfectly. What’s hard about it – for me – is that it’s not sufficiently erotic. I resist agape because it celebrates us rather than me. Further, it expands “us” to include elephants and milkweed plants and stray dogs and people I’ve never even met.

It requires a love that is holy where “holy” is uninterested in the ongoing drama of Sean’s Personal Very Important Quest To Be Holy Through Oneness With God.

I want all my living to own the ecstatic psychedelic intensity of a heroic dose of psilocybin; I want big moves, dramatic answers, mirror balls on all the time. And yet, happiness, it turns out, is less lightning bolt than cooking fire, less God than simply home. And less home-as-place or home-as-other-body than a state of mind in which distinctions between others are irrelevant. I mean who wouldn’t you feed if they were starving? Can you really convince yourself that the God in Whom you are so mentally entangled wants others to suffer? 

So: what is the state that renders us maximally helpful to others all day every day?

The answer to that question may be glimpsed at the extremes – I do not deny the instructive value of Eros – but it actually lives in the stillness of the center, the quiet productivity of home and hearth, the soul at rest, the soul in creative repose.

Presently, the image that serves this sense of the divine – this soulfulness – is feminine. The father God’s run is coming to a close – not in the sense of death, but of correction. A Course in Miracles directs us not to ascended masters and light shows but to the sustainable peace of the maternal heart. Mother the cosmos, and let the cosmos mother you. It works just that way.

This was one of Tara Singh’s great insights (which I doubt he recognized): the Mother was absent from A Course in Miracles, and so he brought her in via Mother Theresa who, remember, Helen Schucman said was a real-world example of somebody living by ACIM  principles. Singh himself embodied a lot of cultural misogyny but his devotion to Mother Theresa speaks to a healing impulse – a correction through realignment of divine energy – that is worth attending.

The point is not that we should become Catholic nuns – Mother Theresa also embodied a lot of cultural misogyny. Rather, the point is to seek the model of living that allows us to bring forth a love that is inclusive, nurturing and non-discriminatory. One that expands beyond hierarchical modes of organizing being. 

Is the Infinite genderless? Of course. But our theological history has not handled that fact well and so we’re stuck with gendered imagery. I’m grateful to Tara Singh for his imperfect guidance; he knew, intuitively, there is One in whom all our errors – even the most violent and patriarchal, those in which our living is presently catastrophized – are gently corrected, as if they had never occurred, as if there were a love in which nothing but love endured.

Our Boundless Joyful Self

Your Self-fullness is as boundless as God’s. Like His, It extends forever and in perfect peace. Its radiance is so intense that It creates in perfect joy, and only the whole can be born of its Wholeness (T-7.IX.6:7-9).

We are restless. We are in search of that which will bring all searching to an end. We perceive ourselves as on a journey, but it’s an oddly incomplete image: from where did we take our leave? In what direction are we heading? Upon whose word or promise does our faith in destination lie?

Everything that arises falls, while everything that falls, eventually arises again. The form of the world changes – first moonlight, then cardinals, then love, then loneliness – but the rising and falling don’t change. Good, bad, happy, unhappy . . .

We look for the One who perceives this flux of phenomena – the seer who must be the self – but it too rises and falls because we cannot perceive it apart from the rising and falling. We look for the First Cause – the Source – the “the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” – and find what? Only more images, only more ideas.

Everything that rises and falls – including the idea of God, including the idea of rising and falling – rises and falls within whatever it is that we are in truth. We can understand this in terms of the body, if we want: language and image are window dressing for corresponding neurochemical impulses. We can understand it in abstract terms like mind or spirituality: ideas arising within the one mind that is God’s.

But however we do it, can we see – can we make contact with – that within which it arises? The suggestion is that this “within which-ness” is important, in the sense that it is all there is in terms of experience.

It’s elusive and hard to talk about but that’s mostly because we are looking so hard for it, and talking so much about it.

What happens when we surrender our search for God? Undo our insistence on specialness? What happens when we stop talking about the so-called “inexpressible?”

Then, like a deer entering the pasture at twilight – elegant, shy, graceful, a gift – it appears. It’s this: this this. And it’s always here; it couldn’t not be here.

God always speaks. That is the thing. We want so badly to know God and we never see that our want is simply another form of resistance, cleverly disguised as sincerity and right effort. A kind of passivity is called for, a kind of letting go. A kind of resignation even. We quit – really and truly quit – and only at that moment does ever-present light finally reach our eyes.

Yet to want to quit is to keep going. Even to write “we quit – really and truly quit –  and only at that moment does ever-present light reach our eyes” is to keep going. It’s maddening: until we drop it, we’re holding it, and we can’t drop it until we hold it.

In you is all of Heaven. Every leaf that falls is given life in you. Each bird that ever sang will sing again in you. And every flower that ever bloomed has saved its perfume and its loveliness for you (T-25.IV.5:1-4).

In you . . .

“You” in this case does not refer to Sean or to the body with which “Sean” presently (and stubbornly) identifies. We really have to see this: the grace and peace to which A Course in Miracles points neither begins or ends in bodies, which includes thought and feeling and idea and perception. What is has –

Nothing before and nothing after it. No other place; no other state or time. Nothing beyond or nearer. Nothing else. In any form (T-25.IV.5:6-10).

Of itself, even our restlessness is perfect: it is simply another breeze passing over the open field of life. We don’t have to bring it to peace. We don’t have to search and we don’t even have to stop searching: we simply have to notice the “within which-ness” that is always here, always present. We have to notice the emptiness from which form briefly arises and into which it returns.

To say it is a simple thing – possibly even a  helpful thing – but it is still just foam on the salty waves we are all already surfing. What remains is joy: which is not the body’s pleasure nor the mind’s happiness but rather that within which those fleeting experience arise and fall to rise again.