Sean Reagan

Make Me One with Everything (is a Math Problem)

Say that I visit a psychotherapist. I have some choices. I can visit a Jungian or a Freudian or a Lacanian or a specialist in CBT or EMDR or Gendlin’s Focusing.

In each case, the therapist will use a specialized language and practice to help me sort through whatever problem I am trying to solve. Ideally, she deploys a language modality (Jungian, Freudian, Lacanian et cetera) with which she has optimal utility.

And I will do my part and she will do hers and healing will take place and – appropriately enough – I will credit [insert therapeutic modality] for the helpful shift. Thank you B.F. Skinner! Et cetera.

This dynamic reflects the fact that when it comes to being whole/holy/healthy/happy different languages work for different people. For some of us it’s psychotherapy in the Lacanian mode. For some it’s Christianity in the ACIM mode. For some it’s entheogens in a Native American mode.

In general, it is a fact that as we pursue healing – especially spiritual or psychological healing – the mode we select reflects a specialized language. It doesn’t work for everybody. Indeed, that’s part of its attraction: it is uniquely and especially suited to our particular unique experience.

I don’t think this is inherently a problem, so long as we don’t conflate “what works for me” with “what works for all people in all places at all times.” By all means speak your truth about A Course in Miracles or zazen or EFT. Just don’t use your truth to blot out another’s equally valid experience of truth.¹

If this makes sense, I want to introduce another idea.

When I visit the psychotherapist, regardless of what mode she practices, she sets her fee and I satisfy it using the same mathematical language. If a Freudian therapist and a Jungian therapist both charge $120 an hour, then both will accept 6 20-dollar bills as payment.

Mathematical language is more broadly applicable than, say, the language of A Course in Miracles. Or Jung. Or Karl Marx or the Buddha.

Why does this matter?

Because it implies that there are levels of order – and languages depicting those levels – that are more inclusive – and thus more loving² – than what we are presently using.

Math is a good example. So is biology.

To most people, ACIM is a bizarre word salad. Yet for some of us – certainly I am one – it was bread-and-water at a moment when my spiritual hunger verged on starvation. I was dying in that desert! And the Lord came in the form of a dense and strange blue book and delivered me.

For a couple of years I was very confused by how hard it was to make salvation clear – even to folks who professed to be students of the course. I knew the path I’d followed into the desert, knew what I’d done in the desert, knew to the last grain of sand the path I’d followed out, and . . .

Maybe six people cared and five them were just humoring me out of kindness.

Then I realized that there are as many ACIMs as there are students of ACIM and the confusion went away.

It is interesting in our living to look for the broadest common language to which we have access and to see where and how it links us to other people. I tend to feel closest to fellow ACIM students, especially those who share the excessive, quasi-Vedantic language with which I understand it.

But basic math – I mean literally addition and subtraction, some division and multiplication – unite me with everybody. Folks I know, folks I’ll never know, folks who share my political views, folks who hate my political views. Folks for whom ACIM is the bee’s knees and folks for whom it’s a steaming pile of horse shit. And the network of that unity circles the globe in short order.

Seriously: spend a dollar and the universe literally quivers.

I am not suggesting we become mathematicians or reinvigorate Pythagorean cults. Rather, I am suggesting a way of looking at our living that naturally expands it to allow for more love. There are languages that are so broadly functional and accessible that they transcend race, religion, gender, politics et cetera. We don’t even know we use them.

What does this suggest or imply about our devotion to the narrow semantics we tend to adore? And

What can we do to become more skillful with these broader, simpler forms of communicating? Can we find one – or more – that are simpler even than 1 + 1 = 2?

^{1. I am suggesting there are many ways to a truth, somewhat the way I suggest there are many ways to Boston (the utility of which are necessarily contextually-dependent). I am not making any assertions in this post as to what Truth is; I think for the type of observer you and I are, the “whole truth and nothing but the truth” is structurally foreclosed to us. Thus, pursuing it is a distraction. The appearance of many ways are the whole game, which is actually more than sufficient to establish and nurture a shared happiness, helpfulness and inner peace.}

^{2. I am using “loving” here in the Maturanan sense of denoting a radical equality of all observers. Buddhists aren’t better than Christians, spiders aren’t better than flies, and moonlight isn’t better than a Brooklyn 99 episode.}

Living in the Sight of God

God doesn’t hide. If you want to see the face of God, and you haven’t, it’s because the face of God is either not what you expected or not what you want. And that’s on you, not God.

There is – because there is always – another way.

Turning away from the face of God out of confusion or pride or arrogance is not a crime. You won’t be punished; but you will continue to experience the grief and discomfort that attends turning away from the face of God. And the anguish is very much God’s, as much as it is yours.

That’s a clue.

Still, very few of us want to gaze directly at the Lord, for the experience undoes so much of what we believed mattered about our lives. When our eyes rest on God, we realize that we have been living second-hand lives. We have been pretenders careening through meaningless dreams, crazed dogs chasing tails they will never catch, zombies mindlessly pursuing goals we neither chose nor can unchoose.

Often, on seeing this truth, we turn back. We turn away from God. Who would blame us? The hurt is intense, the shame nontrivial. How can seeing God make the life I live appear to be so much shit? This can’t be God, we tell ourselves. God would not allow my life to be such a sham.

Or – darker and deeper – we tell ourselves that if this is what it means to see God, then we’d rather live a lie. We’ll take the shit, thank you very much.

For we cannot behold God and live. This is an old and sturdy truth. We can count on it. If we see God, a death occurs. Yet the death is not an end but rather a rebirth unto eternal life. We give up what dies in favor of what can never die.

Or, better, we give up our identification with what dies in favor of what can never die.

It is the truth that sets us free. It is the truth that liberates us from the cycle of birth and death, so that we might live forever. And the truth is already given, in a form that we can readily perceive and understand. Call it God’s face and then will to gaze at it without fear or doubt or hesitation.

When we are ready to look and see, then we will look and see, and we will know the truth. We will remember God, and live in God’s Heaven forever.

If you’ve been looking, and you still can’t see, then find someone to talk to about this “still can’t see” thing. Nobody can look at God for us but there are folks who are good at helping us figure out what’s standing in the way. Are we scared? Disappointed? Clinging to illusions? A little bit of all of those? Or something else entirely?

Don’t be afraid to step off familiar trails. Don’t be frightened by teachers who have only part of the picture. Sometimes you’re there to teach them, and their “teaching” is a form of study which you gift to them. Give attention to black bears and violets, maple trees and moonlight. They have something to say about God, too.

Be not alone so you can be not afraid. The world is full of brothers and sisters who are lonely for Christ, and whose loneliness is expressed in words and forms with which you are familiar. Find them, and comfort them, and let them comfort you. Be home with them in Christ, that together you might together remember the Home you share with God.

So long as you have questions, answers will be given. Yet a day comes when the questions subside, and one rests gently in what is given, asking only how to give it away. For what you are is love, and only when you extend that love do you know that love.

And knowing that, you know that there is no longer any reason to not see God. What else could you behold but God? What else is seeing for?

Secrets in A Course in Miracles

Because so much of my epistemology relies on accepting uncertainty, and being open to revelation from what is not presently within the range of my knowing, it can be difficult to countenance A Course in Miracles which professes an end to uncertainty for those for whom it is the way (T-6.V.C.8:8).

Of course it was once for me very much the way, and so that past relationship becomes a sort of fructive omfalós by which I can countenance it, with backward glances that are equally grateful and critical.

The course was understood by its early authors, editors and readers to be paranormal – to fall outside the accepted boundaries of natural law. An aura of magic attended it. Later, they would realize this was an error and try to redo the assignment but the cat was out of the bag. The moment Helen Schucman declined to put her name on the text, Gary Renard and his ascended masters were inevitable.

For serious students of the course Renard is a distraction, a fact which often only becomes clear after reading and reflecting on his work. It’s okay. But Helen Schucman is also a distraction. For that matter, so is Jesus.

Indeed, even A Course in Miracles – the gestalt of its curriculum and many classrooms – is a distraction from that to which it would direct us.

And that can be tricky ground on which to stand or shuffle along.

My tribe, so to speak – the body of fellow students who with me form an ACIM classroom – are that collective of folks (mostly women as it turns out, which is itself instructive) who go very deeply into A Course in Miracles, discover a tiny door hidden inside it, a door with a note that reads “do not open under any circumstances,” and who open the door and go through it.

I think the door is obvious once you know what you’re looking for and decide you want to find it, but apparently one can spend lifetimes – thousands of them – deliberately missing the door. In the end it’s okay, but it feels like going on a picnic and then refusing to eat food outdoors. I mean sure, it’s your call, but . . . why?

In terms of my ACIM teachers, I think Ken Wapnick knew about the door – and what lay beyond it – but remained embedded in the course, Boddhisattva style, doing what he could to get folks to notice – if not pass through – the door. I think this; I don’t know this. But the progression of his writing and teaching suggests it.

I believe Tara Singh went through the door early – maybe too early and maybe too quickly – and thus can be quite – even fatally – confusing to sincere students. Distributing food to the poor alongside Mother Theresa . . . where in ACIM does it say do that?

Which feels like a good question until you realize that you’re hungry and need to eat.

(If you’re still puzzled by people who eat pizza while professing to have no body (W-pI.136.20:5), Singh is a better teacher than Wapnick)

Opening the door is transgressive and it has to be this way. It’s not that something bad happens on the other side or that there are gods or angels or demons or ACIM bosses who will punish us for opening it.

No, the transgression matters because it is an assertion of responsibility and an acceptance of the consequences which attend that assertion. When we open the door, we become constructive in the nearly literal sense of building something with our own mind and our own bodies.

It’s kind of like you thought ACIM was the church and it turns out it’s just a pep talk for going out and building a church.

But “the church” is not a physical structure, nor even a metaphysical one. It’s a social one and like everything else we do in language, it’s virtual.

When we pass through the door we absolve our share of mind of its invented paternal gods and related patriarchal structures, and become unto our own self – and to one another – the designer/creator one naturally is.

On that view, God and all projects related to God become nontrivial ideas that can be helpful or unhelpful according to context, and so cease to function as either causes or judges. The work becomes to find what is most helpful (most functional) in the bringing forth of love, in the very context in which we find our self, and that works tends to be free of the old images of spirituality and religion and even right and wrong.

Indeed, to optimize love, it sort of has to be free of old images. As Humberto Maturana says, “every love is love at first sight.” Otherwise it isn’t love but something else.

If you are happily studying or teaching A Course in Miracles, then by all means don’t let me stand in your way. But if you are studying or teaching, and there is a nagging sense of missing something, and you keep looking back at the course to find it . . .

Well in that situation, what you are looking away from is the door. And I say: turn to it. Turn to it, and open it, and fall into love, over and over and over.

Notes on the God of Uncertainty

Hugh Gash makes an interesting observation in “Constructivism and Mystical Experience:”

” . . . when there is a mismatch between experience and what is expected, gaps are experienced that reveal an inadequacy in previously constructed ways of organizing the experience.”

Say that I often get irritated when people wake up and come downstairs because it disrupts my morning ritual of prayer, reading and writing. Then, one day, I notice that the presence of others is not disruptive but easily integrates into my morning dance with the sacred, and that this makes me happy – happier than my attempts at solitude.

Why? What happened? What is different this morning?

Answering those questions matters because I want to be happy, and I want to be socially inclusive, and happiness and inclusiveness are related. They are mutually generative. I value my family; I don’t want to be petty and exclusive with respect to our shared space and living. The more welcoming I become, the happier I become. They happier I become, the happier they become. They happier they become, the more welcoming I become. It is a warm and nurturing cycle.

Gash suggests that the gap between my expectation (which is premised on my usual response, my past response) and my experience (which is new) makes clear that the way I have been organizing this particular experience is inadequate, or flawed. I have constructed it in unhelpful ways, and have now learned that there is another – or better – way.

How shall I bring this better way forth more consistently and sustainably?

I think giving attention to this specific question is a form of spiritual living, in the sense that it recognizes something is missing and seeks to find that something and then formally integrate it.

But in order to be effective, this giving attention has to go slowly. It has to proceed with epistemic humility. If I quickly assert that what is missing is “God” or “Love” or “right understanding of A Course in Miracles” or “a consistent meditation practice” et cetera, then I am effectively shoveling the mud of the past into the gap.

Our work is to let the gap be! To let flow through it what flows through it: to see what flows, and to let what flows be what it is, without a lot of intervention and aggression. We have to let what is new be new, which means unfamiliar and surprising and probably a little uncomfortable.

This is not easy to do. And, that, too, is part of why I say it is spiritual, because my sense is that spiritual living requires attentiveness and discipline and especially maturity, the specific maturity of accepting the tedium inherent in simply being still (being attentive in a disciplined way), especially when the stillness isn’t instantly rewarding or sexy or remunerative or otherwise gratifying.

We tend to ignore gaps, to slide right over them. Or, noticing them, we fill them with past conceptions and practices. Often, we don’t notice we are sliding or mindlessly filling. And then when we do notice we try to unfill the gaps, or demand others gaps appear so we can handle them mindfully.

But that is now how gaps work! Gaps occur on their own; we can’t force a gap to appear. All we can do is go slowly and attentively, living the very lives we are living, and when gaps appear, respond to them gently and cautiously.

It helps me to think of gaps as stray dogs who tag along in my vicinity but who are too frightened to initiate or manage direct contact. I have to be quiet and slow. I have to murmur and coo. I have to carry treats. I have to kneel and open my palms, not make eye contact.

And after I’ve maximized openness, I have to let the dogs control the encounter. It’s their encounter. I have to be grateful for whatever happens, no matter how tentative or scant or apparently unsuccessful it is.

That’s it. I just live with my living. This is what living is. It’s this – this very this. It’s this very going slowly, this very going humbly, this very ongoing posture of a servant attending an uncertain god, whose uncertainty is holy and so can never transition to certainty.

Yes, in a way this is just wordy bullshit. Yes, we are always only loving our own self. Yes those gaps are just Sean another way. Those stray dogs are just Sean remembering Sean, the universe universing. Yes, yes, yes.

And yet.

The God of Uncertainty yields Her blessing only when we consent to not force Her into the high church of certainty, where the priests are devout patriarchs who wear blinders inside and are scared to go outside after dark. They’re big on obedience and faith; you can’t ask too many questions. Messiness is not allowed, beginning again and starting over are verboten, et cetera.

We don’t know what we don’t know ever. All our insights and learning are subsumed by a horizon of “what if.” Thus, the church of our not knowing – the altar of our slow and humble, our uncertain God – is everywhere always. We are never not praying. We are never not communing. She is never not in attendance.

What does the open heart learn who worships at this particular altar?

One, that they are not only the forever unknowable whole, for they are also always the sliver in whom the memory of original fracture tells and retells its origin story, forever insisting on its narrative prerogative. We are called to heed our stories for those stories are how we pray to the God of Uncertainty. They are alms and offering both.

The Gift of Attention is all She asks. And what she gives in reply is a reminder that the part being apart is also the whole, and in order to be a part apart it cannot remember the whole. We want to be the whole, secretly know we are the whole and yet . . . our experience is one of separation from the whole.

This separation begets yearning which is always for our God, whatever the particular object – a person, a dog, a landscape, a memory, a goal. The object (which is always an image) points to the God of Uncertainty, who Herself eschews direct observation, preferring hints and murmurs, glimpses and fragments.

Thus, our yearning is sacred, because it arises from separation and points toward oneness, towards unity. It is the very fulcrum on which the hymn of happiness is never not being softly sung. When we yearn for what is already accomplished – which is all the yearning there is, else how would we know what to yearn for (for our God has made us in Her image and what we are is expert yearners) – we know, without knowing, ecstatic unity.

And should we ever taste ecstatic unity – which we do, surely, from time to time – we forget it almost instantly, as condition of our being, which is forever bent on seeking and losing, having and giving away, remembering and forgetting. The one brings forth the other, and the other obliterates the one, and so becomes the one, the only, which then – by necessity, by love – brings forth the other.

On and on it goes, now as humans, now as maple trees, now as starlight, now as black bears, now as neutrinos, now as God-knows-what . . .

More on Illusion and Reality

Illusions always arise with respect to a referent: they are compared to what is believed to be real and on the basis of the comparison are found lacking in some fundamental way. That is how we determine whether an object or experience will be labeled “real” or “illusory.”

However, at the moment of experience, illusions are always experienced as real. It is only after we have had the experience and compared it to some other experience that we can say it was or was not an illusion.

Humberto Maturana uses the example of a trout leaping to a fisherman’s fly. At the moment the fish perceives the fly and executes its leap, the fly is “real” – a living creature the trout can eat. It is only after the trout is hooked that that the illusion becomes apparent. That’s when the trout can say, “wait – this didn’t happen last time. This fly is not a real fly.”

Thus, if I assert some object or experience is an illusion, I am doing so via a comparison. The question is: what is being compared to what? (And – if I am feeling particularly ambitious – who or what is doing the comparing?)

What is being compared to what? I want to go deeply into this. I want to answer it in a satisfying and personal way.

That is, I want to be careful that I am not saying “the world is an illusion” because that’s what A Course in Miracles says. I don’t want to say “I am awareness itself” because Rupert Spira or Leo Hartong say that. I don’t want to say “I am that” because Ramana Maharshi said it.

What is my experience? How does that experience express itself?

I want to be attentive to the actual process of observation and determination as it happens in my living; I want to be responsible for it. What is it? How shall I speak of it?

In general these days, I am less interested in arguing that the world – or some aspect of it – is an illusion than I am in thinking out loud about the unexamined interior certainty that underlies these concepts and our dialogues about them.

Say that you and I sit out by the apple trees at dusk. We share a cup of tea. We talk or don’t talk. Here is the view from earlier this summer.

Is the sky an illusion? Are the vivid colors real? What about the apple trees on the right? The hemlock trees on the left? The bodies observing it all?

Bracket those questions for a moment. Set them aside. Beneath them there is an underlying certainty or confidence that something – whatever we name it, however we describe it – is happening.

Is that point clear? Before we get into the metaphysics, the folk physics, the quantum physics, the biology, the theology, the soteriology, et cetera, can we just agree that something is going on? Something to which all the afore-mentioned conceptual frameworks might be applied?

If that is clear, then consider these questions: how do I know that something is happening? How does it appear? Is it real? Is it an illusion? To what would I compare it in order to know?

The feeling of certainty or confidence is internal and abstract. I can’t point to it the way I can point to the sky. When I am attentive to it – when I am curious about it – the focus shifts in a subtle way. In a recent newsletter (sign up if you like), I suggested a way to think about this interior abstraction is as “being.”

Can we glimpse being itself? Impersonal, unconditional, all-in-all?

If not, why not? And how do we know “not?”

If so, then what questions remain when we do catch that glimpse? What questions are dissolved?

This raises another challenge. Given that a previous experience taken to be real was subsequently revealed to be an illusion, how do I know this new one (this glimpse of being, say) will not also be subsequently declared an illusion?

The answer is that I do not know it won’t be!

And with that, the bottom just . . . falls out. There is no certainty; there is no end to the questions. It’s inquiries all the way down.

What do we do then?

Well, I want to go slowly with experience (like, say, the experience of seeing and suggesting that “it’s inquiries all the way down”) and the assertions that I make about it. I want to speak to my experience of truth without aggrandizing it (i.e., posturing as the one who gets it). I don’t want to arrogate more certainty than is justified, assuming any is justified at all.

We are averse to doubt. We like teachers who reassure us the ground is solid, not teachers who glibly profess that maybe it’s solid and maybe it’s not and we’ll never know for sure. Confident teachers declaring they’ve got The Answer™ will always distract us from our responsibility to explore the interior – answerless though it may be – on our own.

Often, people become frustrated at this point. They feel curtailed or confounded. Am I really saying we can never know anything for sure?

Well, yes. (And I am also suggesting – albeit not so much in this post – that we investigate the stability and “realness” of the underlying knower who knows we can never know anything for sure).

But also, saying “I don’t know” is not the end of the road. The bottom falls out but the show goes on. There is still making love and gardening and baking bread and long walks to and from the river and sharing tea under the apple trees at dusk.

It all goes on just like it did, almost as if there’s nothing to get in the first place . . . This is a very important insight!

When we realize how little we know and accept that we cannot fundamentally know everything, then it becomes possible to lean into our actual experience. Who cares what it is? This is it! This very this! And we can be curious about it and responsive to it. We can revel in it and play with it. We can sing to it and listen as it sings back or doesn’t sing back.

In other words, we can consent to the gentle and natural bringing forth of love. We listen better. We become less insistent that this or that way of living is right or wrong. We soften; we melt. And as we do, life gives itself to us and we are adequate unto it. We are more than adequate unto it.

On that view, the question of illusion vs. reality subsides because the work is always to be attentive and humble, to go slowly and curiously, and see what happens.

Spirituality as Equality

This observation underlies a lot of my thinking and practice, half-assed as it is: “Spiritual” is in some important sense the equivalent of perceiving all being as “equal” or even “same.”

This is the miracle of creation; that it is one forever . . . Though every aspect is the whole, you cannot know this until you see that every aspect is the same, perceived in the same light and therefore one (T-13.VIII.5:1, 3).

Physical proximity matters to our species. We tend to care most for those who are near and dear. My kids are more important than the kids in the next town and I don’t even think about kids in China or Guatemala. Of course that’s not true – all kids matter. But my behavior certainly implies that it’s not true.

So “spirituality” opens up the idea that whatever love I offer my kids is the love to which all kids are entitled. I may not personally be able to love all kids that way, but I am going to look for ways to make it easier for all kids to know that love. Maybe I utilize resources differently (e.g., kids in Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo mine the metals for our phones), or vote for candidates with platforms that are more kid-friendly.

Spirituality asks me to look at the experience of love that I have locally – in this body, this family, this community – and then broaden it. It asks me to consider a collective in which all beings are worthy of love and then to act accordingly.

The other thing this leveling does is that it de-specializes folks. What I mean by that is that it undoes the emphasis on gurus or enlightened teachers as somehow not human. To call someone a “saint” or “master” is to subtly dismiss them, to place them beyond the periphery of self and world. It “others” them in unhelpful ways.

But if I don’t “other” Jesus or Saint Francis or Thich Nhat Hanh, if I insist that they are like me and what they experience I can experience, and what they extend, I can extend, then my responsibility changes. My relationships change.

If I can be radically loving, then I will be radically loving (which begins with undoing that which impedes the natural expression of radical love). And if I am not ready to be that loving, then I can at least see that clearly and be responsible for the gap.

That is the other way that spirituality matters – it undoes the hierarchy of achievement, of specialness.

A lot of this can be subsumed under the notion of “undoing self-interest.” Or expanding it infinitely. How shall I think about my being, such that sunflowers and ex-lovers and fireflies and kids in Africa are implicated in the love that is brought forth in my living?

We tend to measure ourselves against standards, right? Be this good, this generous, this activist. We have ideals of Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama. But “spiritual” as I am using the word, the idea, means not changing the standards but rather rethinking the value of standards altogether.

A big part of my thinking in the past two years – under the influence of Humberto Maturana, Ernst von Glasersfeld and Heinz von Foerster – has been coming to see the way that we are naturally structurally given to love and peace and that the work, so to speak, is clarifying this and facilitating its expression.

On that view, I don’t need to denigrate myself because I’m not the Dalai Lama nor praise myself because I’m not Donald Trump. I need to let go of reliance on standards – I need to see that the spectrum those opposites introduce is not natural and not helpful. I need to garden more, and bake bread more, and play more music – activities that naturally arise in my living as expressions of love, community, inclusiveness, nurture . . .

But I don’t garden because somebody said to and I don’t bake bread because of how it makes others think of me: those practices are just simple expressions of how I understand myself and my responsibilities to my family, my town, my planet and so forth. Other activities will arise for other folks.

In a sense, the point is not what we do but rather its source. How does it arise in us? What calls it forth?

I want to let love come forth in me the way it naturally comes forth. This requires attention, study and practice but it’s more like learning to ride a bike than becoming “a good person.” Riding a bike is mechanical. Yes there are psychological elements, but they are met in satisfaction of the mechanics. I get more confident as I get more effective at riding. This is true of love as well.

In the end, love does the work. This is the helpful insight. We don’t have to do much other than be present; love does the work. Love directs us, guides us, moves us, instructs us. Our job is to be gently attentive, to be open and willing. To be – as I wrote in this context – partners in our own healing.

Life goes on! The neighbors run their chain saw after dark and it’s frustrating. Chickens die and my daughter’s heart breaks. Teaching gets mired in bureaucratic mud. In life the bread sometimes doesn’t rise.

Beyond all of that is the gentle ongoing living that is not bound by form nor limited in expression. It bears us along and the work is to be okay with that, to see it clearly and be okay with it. To “perceive it in the same light” and know on that basis that what appears as many is in fact one.