Reading A Course in Miracles: The Circle of Atonement

The circle of Atonement is the unified alignment of miracle workers whose shared goal of peace creates “interlocking chain of forgiveness” (T-1.I.25:1) that strengthens both those who are in the circle as well as those are perceived as external to it.

Miracles are shifts in thinking, away from fear and towards love. Collectively, these shifts in thought become the Atonement, which is is the undoing of fear and leaves in its wake only love (e.g., T-1.I.26:2-3). It is “the natural of profession of Children of God” (T-1.III.1:10) and is a “total commitment” (T-2.II.7:1).

Thus, those of us called to the particular form of the universal curriculum called A Course in Miracles, have as our “homework” a radical yet sustainable change of mind, which both arises from and reinforces our shared guiltlessness. Any suggestion to the contrary – that we are guilty, undeserving of love, deserving of condemnation, et cetera – we take as an invitation to further heal ourselves, others, and the world that together we bring forth.

“Heal” in this case simply means to give attention to our thinking, discern between unloving and loving thoughts, and accept only the latter as helpful.

As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. The power to work miracles belongs to you (T-1.III.1:6-7).

In this sense, A Course in Miracles contemplates an active student body who not only learn but bring their learning into application. Our “loving thoughts” reflect the voice of Christ, making space for them and following their directive becomes our operative understanding of healing. It is the Atonement, as A Course in Miracles defines it.

We are all joined in the Atonement here, and nothing else can unite us in this world. So will the world of separation slip away, and full communication be restored between the Father and the Son. The miracle acknowledges the guiltlessness that must been denied to produce the need of healing (T-15.V.5:1-3).

This work – discerning the loving from the unloving – is only complex, difficult, mysterious et cetera when we insist on conceptualizing miracles as having varying orders, which is to say, insisting that some apparent problems are bigger or more severe or harder to solve than others.

Seeing the world in this fractious and judgmental way appears natural to us – it’s just what brains do! – and so we tend to bring miracle-minded thinking to bear in inconsistent ways. When we are upset, or are aware that others are upset, we seek the corrective power of miracles. But no person, place, thing or situation is fundamentally different from another. To the miracle – and so to the miracle-minded – they are all the same.

When we accept this equality and consistency, then our struggles with A Course in Miracles easy considerably. We no longer have to judge and decide when and whether and how to work miracles; rather, we see that they apply to everything and everyone without discrimination. What could be easier than to always work miracles?

The miracle makes no distinction among degrees of misperception. It is a device for perception correction, effective quite apart from either the degree or the direction of the error. This is its true indiscrimininateness (T-1.I.49:1-3).

Thus, our frustration with a flat tire, our sadness over a friend’s diagnosis of cancer, our anger over a recent spate of nationalist homicides and our joy with the luxury of a few spare hours to read Emily Dickinson poems are all the same. They seem to be of different orders (cancer vs. flat tire, say) and they seem to be of varying quality (homicide vs. poetry) but to the miracle, they are identical.

Thus, we give them all over to the light of miracles, which in each instance “compares what you have made with creation, accepting what is in accord with it as true, and rejecting what is out of accord as false” (T-1.I.50:1).

We don’t always recognize love, and some of what we call love is actually fear. This is why even what we call love must be subject to miracles. We inevitably learn that a great deal of our thinking is “upside-down,” including what we considered “right-side up.” It is a fact of studying A Course in Miracles that we should prepare to be surprised at what we learn.

Yet becoming happy learners in this way creates a “circle of Atonement without end” (T-14.V.7:6).

Peace, then, be unto everyone who becomes a teacher of peace. For peace is the acknowledgement of perfect purity, from which no one is excluded. Within its holy circle is everyone whom God created . . . Joy is its unifying attribute, with no one left outside to suffer guilt alone (T-14.V.8:1-4).

The circle of Atonement becomes a symbol then of how uncompromising miracle-minded thinking is. It reflects our “total commitment” (T-2.II.7:1). And it also becomes a shared foundation of our collective experience of working miracles, because it is itself an opportunity to expand the range of love.

Each one you see you place within the holy circle of Atonement or leave outside, judging him fit for crucifixion or redemption. If you bring him into the circle of purity, you will rest there with him. If you leave him without, you join him there (T-14.V.11:1-3).

The way we see our brother or sister is the way that we see our own self, and the way that we treat our brother or sister is the way that we treat our own self.

This is the secret to happiness; this is the key to salvation.

Refuse to accept anyone as with the blessing of Atonement, and bring into it by blessing him. Holiness must be shared, for there in lies everything that makes it holy. Come gladly to the holy circle, and look out in peace on all who think they are outside (T-14.V.11:5-7).

Thus, the circled of Atonement becomes a powerful teaching tool. We work together in order to heal our own self, and our togetherness allows healing to go beyond us. Our function is healing; our function is holiness. There is no other work but this.

March 2019: Housekeeping

This little post is more in the nature of a long-winded housekeeping note than anything else.

1. I sent out a newsletter (correlating a little poem of Emily Dickinson’s with ACIM principles of love and service). If you’re interested, you can sign up for the newsletter.

2. I have been rewriting old lesson posts. I began writing them back in 2011; my sincerity and devotion to that project were sound but the writing itself was rushed and a bit more biographical than necessary. Hence, rewriting.

Rewriting is not merely editing what has already been created. It is creating again. It makes something new. The process has been helpful to me, particularly in the way it has reminded me of Tara Singh’s observation that any one lesson of the course can awaken us from the dream of separation.

This is not to deny the lessons’ cumulative effect, nor to urge anyone to abandon a traditional linear approach to the curriculum. What works is what’s helpful! I merely testify to an ongoing experience of the richness of the material. It retains the viability of living scripture.

The rewrite has reached the first five lessons, if you are curious:

Lesson one
Lesson two
Lesson three
Lesson four
Lesson five

3. I would like to begin an ACIM dialogue group. My preference is to meet physically, perhaps once a month or so, for a sustained course-related sharing. I envision something along the lines of a Bohm dialogue-inspired workshop, with folks who share my approximate approach to and intensity with course material (which approach, Lord knows, is not for everyone).

I wonder if there are folks in an approximate radius to me who would be interested? I live in western Massachusetts. I am happy to travel a little (a few hours drive, say), and to be responsible for organizational details and coordinating.

If you’re interested, feel free to drop me a line or comment. Sometimes a sustained community can be a helpful resource in terms of insight and application.

4. Finally, I was going to add this material into the newsletter, but keeping that project simple matters, so I’ll post it here instead. It’s a couple of paragraphs from Eleanor Rosch, a scholar and writer whose work (especially when it comes to the nexus between religion and psychology) I find both challenging and nurturing.

To try to isolate and manipulate single factors that actually operate only systemically is like killing a rabbit and dissecting it to look for its aliveness. This is . . . a question of the kind of mind with which one perceives the world, whether in life or in science.

Opening to the wisdom in not knowing may be even more important than opening to experiences within knowing. Acknowledging not knowing is what evokes the genuine humbleness prized by every contemplative and healing tradition.

(from More Than Mindfulness: When You Have a Tiger by the Tail, Let It Eat You).

The emphasis here is primarily on epistemic humility – that is, beginning with what we don’t know, and what we don’t know we don’t know. Secondarily, it observes that what we perceive as distinct and separate tends to be an integral aspect of a system, and cannot be meaningfully considered apart from that system (nor, really, exist apart from the system – this includes, by the way, our self).

Given those premises, how shall we gaze at the world? With what sort of mind shall we approach our loving and living?

Thank you, as always, for reading and sharing with me.

Love,
Sean

Maturana on Self as Distinction

With respect to the self, Humberto Maturana makes the following observations (in his essay “Biology of Self-Consciousness”):

The distinction of the self is an overwhelming experience . . . once it takes place the distinction becomes the referential ground for all other distinctions . . .

And perhaps most critically, he observes that the “experience of the self as an object obscures its original constitution as a relation . . . “

What we call the “self” is a distinction that is made in experience. In the same way I distinguish a coffee cup from what is not a coffee cup, I distinguish the “self” from what the self is not.

On this view, what we are calling the self is simply a kind of experience that arises in organisms capable of reflection. It is a sort of primal distinction, in that it enables all other distinctions.

That is, the cosmos comes into being in reference to the self for whom the cosmos comes into being.

So far we are not making any spiritual observations. We are simply seeing the way human perception and cognition work, which is a way of contextualizing our own perception and cognition.

We are what sees and, critically, we are also what we see. Our observations – be they of chickadees, children or chocolate cakes – are not separate from us. The appearance of separation is an effect to which we acclimate (like not seeing the blind spot that is in our eye). But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule; it’s not real.

Maturana emphasizes that tremendous power of this primary distinction. The self is overwhelming, so much so that it obscures its own origins. It might even go scurrying off after those origins, sometimes under the guise of a spiritual quest. What am I? What is Truth?

If you want to correlate this to the separation in A Course in Miracles you can, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to bring God into it at all. Indeed, bringing God or Jesus or Heaven into it is often just a way of sustaining the obscuration. Why make this harder than it has to be?

You are that which obscures what you are: you are that which asks what you are. Give attention to the distinctions that appear (what is this, what is that) and give attention to how they appear (in time and space, and in language). Separation is an appearance contingent on a mode of thinking that can – if one wants and is otherwise amenable – be undone.

But it is not a mystery. No supernatural origins or causes or methods apply. It is as simple as climbing down the ladder we climbed up, or retracing our steps on a path. And it can begin with this insight: “ladder” and “path” are analogies, and the use of analogy is separative.

Heal!

Lenten Writing: Bird-Shaped Holes

This morning I watched two tufted titmice in the maple tree at the bedroom window. They sipped from icicles on limbs that nearly reached the porch roof which is still laden with snow from recent storms. They were quick and alert, the way it sometimes feels to be happy.

They reminded me of the summer before law school and how obsessed with birds I suddenly became. I had left Vermont to live in a city close to the law school. I was lost and confused, unsure of where ambition had led me. In response I read deeply and obsessively about birds, hiked alone up and down the Seven Sisters, canoed miles of the Connecticut River between Sunderland and Northampton, sat for hours in Forest Park, all with binoculars, guidebooks and notepads.

The idea became that there was a hole in me that only birds could fill. Every time I saw a bird, the void that was so much of my being, that I pictured as a sort of hungry blackness, would fill a little. It was as if the birds were made of light. Each feathery ray illuminating me by degrees, staving off collapse.

Of course I would say it differently today. Birds – like maple trees, like children, like rivers – frame the void, which is utterly impersonal. The shape of anything is the shape of the cosmos, and that to which we give attention is already attending us, for we too are objects, living frames through which the universe spills.

For a long time I called that understanding – and its occasional embodied manifestations – holy, which was a way of making it a special private accomplishment. I regret that, of course. The desire to hoard anything as a way of excluding others from sharing it is unloving. It hurts, and the pain is not ours alone.

One learns, one does.

The tufted titmice, though. They also reminded me of how earlier last week – before Lent began – I had felt unexpectedly very close to Jesus, somewhat the way I felt in Vermont before leaving for law school. In those days, in Vermont, I wrote poems and songs and rarely spoke to anyone other than Jesus, the cardinal exception being public librarians who helped me track down obscure articles and out-of-print books. My study was the Lord and the liberation from sin proclaimed by his son. Its fruit was a dizzy sense of proximity and intimacy with Christ.

It was the same last week. If I spoke, Jesus answered. Whatever worried me, Jesus reminded me he would cover it. It was like being wrapped in a weighted blanket all day, angels murmuring pacifying hymns at all hours. I liked it. I suspected it would pass but while it lingered, I liked it.

And pass it did, slowly eclipsed by my ongoing reading, teaching, writing and house-and-homestead chores. It was good that it passed. It was. The work now is not easy and there are no guides, no maps, and no easy outs. Fellow travelers, yes. Way stations, yes. A deep sense of it-will-all-work-out, yes. But guides and maps, no. Not anymore.

And that, really, finally, was the point of this morning’s titmice. They reminded me of that period that came after that year or so of dialogic intimacy with Jesus, a period in which a vast emptiness arose in me, one that declined to be filled with familiar narratives, scriptural exegesis, institutional ritual and pre-meditated meditations.

The birds forced me into the world in a rough but focused way. Look for us, they cried. Know us better, they sang. They forced me into a relationship with attention that for all its studiousness was never not yoked to the world. The birds forced me to attend. They called me to a vivid praxis that was unexpected and confusing. Bird-watching? Really?

And yet that praxis sustained me through those early confusing years of law school, the crazy academic pressure and competition, the living in a city, the abiding uncertainty about lawyering as a career. Really, until I settled in with Chrisoula, and we moved back to Vermont and – in our stumbling way – into the homesteading life that is our (yet shaky) fundament, that bird-centered praxis was what breathed me.

What I mean to say – chirpy avian that I sometimes am – is that we do not always know the form our requisite praxis will take. Today, on the fifth day of Lent, 2019, it took the shape of two tufted titmice, these sentences and, threaded throughout, a sense that you were listening, noticing, attending, bringing me forth in love.

Lenten Writing: Attention

By asking “what shall I do?” or “how shall I do something, anything at all?” I am displacing praxis with more study. And this is the move that I want to see myself making. Not to stop myself or correct myself but simply to see it. Not as a matter of what is right or what is wrong but what is.

Of course, the distinction between praxis and study is artificial, or rather, is contrary to their fundamental unity, which is apparent (inherent) in how they are given.

In order to make distinctions, I must have already bought into (brought forth) the idea of value – that is, the idea that a thing can have value at all, and thus can have more or less value than some other thing.

Value is a concept that forces one to distinguish and this can be seen because no sooner do I make the distinction (between, say, praxis and study) then I prefer one to the other (study to praxis).

Playfully, it is study which indicates that this happens and also suggests that maybe it shouldn’t happen, at least not unintentionally, at least not without being noticed. So praxis is the subject of study, and in that sense precedes (or is distinguished from) it.

And so the quest for praxis as such is not coherent, because an effective and meaningful praxis was there all along, revealed by the very study which it had brought into being (which, in turn, brought it into being).

(The web becomes quite tangled, almost as if we are begging to be ensnared and even consumed by the one who builds the web).

So perhaps I could reframe the whole thing and say that it is not a question of being praxical, but rather being differently praxical, intentionally praxical.

That is, it is better to live a life inspired by Catholic Worker values than a life inspired by publicly mulling over one’s thinking about Catholic Worker values.

That is, go feed the hungry! Rather than think about feeding the hungry.

(Wittgenstein said, look, don’t think).

But that, too, assigns value to a distinction, which is not the new or fresh praxis contemplated by the evolution of study, this new or fresh juncture it has reached (or suggests it has reached, perhaps simply to call attention to itself yet again, for is this not how study always flirts, always insisting that it – not application – be the subject of one’s attention).

One might way then: don’t fall for the illusion of right action; don’t fall for the pretense that the self is undone in that action which secretly validates the self. Just keep writing and reading and doing what’s in front of you. Let the spiritual chips fall where they may, which they always do anyway. Just breathe. Let others breathe, too.

If the hungry need food then they will find us, or find someone else, and then  someone else – with some other form of hunger – will find us. Aren’t we all going forward with hands outstretched, palms to the heavens?

Well, what finds us today – on this fourth day of Lent 2019, at 3 a.m. in the morning – is wordiness, the play that longs to clarify itself in communion with others for whom play – this play – also has value.

Freedom is Always Relational

It seems as we look into our experience of living that we are free to adopt various means of looking into our experience of living, each of which may provide a slightly different perspective of and thus experience of living.

That is to say, the way we look at our living affects our living which affects the way we look at our living. It is circular. But it is not a vicious circle – one that traps us, like “I am a liar,” where if it’s true it’s false but if it’s false then it’s true.

Rather, it is – to borrow Francisco Varela’s turn-of-phrase – a creative circle, one that deepens and extends itself by including (rather than excluding or occluding) more and more – eventually all, if such a thing is possible – of the cosmos.

Thus, the self-referential self can learn about Buddhism and socialism, it can adopt veganism or celibacy, it can learn to play cello or run a marathon, it can go to therapy or read R.D. Laing . . . All of these apparent activities enlarge and expand the fundamental self-reference and recursion that is always underway and always underlies – and incorporates and expands – self-experience.

To put this somewhat more abstractly, or perhaps just differently, we are observers and our observation is free. It can assume different forms, pick and choose among a priori assumptions, study and amend itself, treat itself to chemical alteration through drugs, fasting, meditation, ritual. Doing so changes it and its observation.

In this way and for these reasons, a fundamental freedom underlies our experience as human observers. Realization of this freedom evokes an ethics of responsibility. Since we construct our worlds and selves, then the world and the self we construct is our responsibility.

This is less onerous than it seems. Love is natural; what is not love is love-obstructed or love-inhibited or love-denied, at either cultural or individual levels. The work is not to invent love or replace love but rather to undo the blocks which prohibit its natural extension (this reflects a natural understanding of a core principle of A Course in Miracles).

Thus, we are not called to be Buddhists but to allow others to be Buddhists. We are not called to learn to play the cello but to allow others to play the cello. Naturally, this allowance is mutual, which means that if we want to be Buddhist or cellists we can be – but not as an assertion of a personal right. Rather, it happens as a gift or blessing from the collective, the all-of-us. They – the other(s) – allow us to be Buddhists or cellists (or Buddhist cellists).

This is what it means to be free. Freedom is always relational, and what we give to others is what they can and do give to us. This is not complicated. But what obscures it can be – and often appears to be – complicated indeed. One can become obsessed with untangling the various semantic and cultural forms that obstruct love, often without seeming to obstruct it, and often while explicitly declaring they are not obstructing it.

Love is what arises naturally, and what extends itself naturally, and one merely has to notice this. It effectuates itself; it is not our job to do it. Our job, so to speak, is simply to notice it happening and, as much as possible, not get in the way (by insisting that Buddhists are better than Christians, or more spiritually mature than Zoroastrianists, or that cellos are superior to electric guitars, or that Beethoven beats Chopin but nobody beats Mozart et cetera).

This “job” can seem quite abstract. It is tempting to merely talk about love, and to describe love, and to profess one’s love for love, and so forth. It is tempting to do that because it is easier than actually loving! In order to bring love forth, it is helpful to become clear on who and what we are – and who and what the self is, which is also to answer who an what the other is, and the collective, and the many worlds we bring forth, et cetera.

Hence the importance of giving attention to self-reference, and becoming clear on how it functions. This is not a spiritual quest but a human one that can be cast in spiritual terms, if that is helpful.

Regardless of how one frames it, it is the work we have to do if we are going to establish the primacy and maximize or optimize the free expression of love as our fundament. What this means in practice is what Francisco Varela suggested was a possible human Utopia.

If everybody would agree that their current reality is a reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity for constructing a reality, then perhaps we could agree on a meta-agreement for computing a reality that would mean survival and dignity for everybody on the planet . . .

The center of any such meta-agreement – and the ground of our ability to see that reality is always “a” reality and not “the” reality – is the question of self-reference. Varela called it “the nerve of this logic of paradise.”

I find this characterization – because it hints at spirituality without toppling in headfirst – helpful. The self is an illusion but it’s no good saying so; we have to see it, and then, having seen it, integrate it into our ongoing experience. Doing so is hard to varying degrees but peace and joy – ours and everyone else’s – is contingent on it. Why wait?