Happiness is Relational

What works is what makes us happy, where “happy” is defined in a relational way – that is, where it is not a brief personal elevation of emotion but a solid network of entities each working to ensure the other is better off.

In saying this, I am thinking of Heinz von Foerster’s observation that “A is better off when B is better off.” This is similar to the Golden Rule, which A Course in Miracles suggests is the proper guide to behavior in the world.

So

A = psychological stress level

is better off when

B = blood sugar level is better off.

Note that this is not a linear progression! It’s circular. When I eat well, I feel better, and when I feel better, I eat well. When I make sure that I am eating in a healthy way, I am better able to manage the various psychological stressors that appear in my living.

A = My son Jeremiah’s band practice

is better off when

B = I relax my (well-intentioned but still pretty intense) focus on Jeremiah’s band practice.

Again, wellness is circular. Jeremiah plays better when he is freer because I maintain a certain critical distance; it is easier to maintain that distance when I see his freedom and hear the music the freedom brings forth.

A = local food safety and availability

is better off when

B = local farms and local means of food distribution are better off.

If you want to ensure that people in your community have access to healthy food, then support local agriculture and cooperative food distribution entities and food banks.

The one thrives when the other thrives. Since you are the one, focus on the other’s thriving – it will ensure your own because you are other unto the other.

[That’s a semantic trick – saying you are both the one and the other – but it’s sometimes a helpful trick, neatly inverting our experience of separation].

The above examples are not dispositive. The broader we define “A” and “B” the more variables come into play. For example, local food tends to be more expensive (which is prohibitive), some non-local food production is better than others, and so forth.

So it’s not an easy inquiry! You’ve got to be in dialogue; you’ve got to be in the specific process as it happens. You have to adapt and respond. You have to accept – in a very specific active way – the relational aspect of your living. And this aspect is far-reaching. Happiness is relational in both very specific local (what am I eating for lunch) and very global (what are we doing about global warming) kinds of ways. The one informs the other.

[And the one and the other are not separate . . .]

I am suggesting that we think about “happiness” more as the functional operation of relationship – an expression of an underlying fundamental coherence, say – than as a personal experience of desirable outcomes / good spirits / et cetera.

I am not minimizing the personal (see the examples above, the first two of which are expressly personal). But I am suggesting that we give attention to how “the personal” is basically a way of organizing an underlying network of relationships. It’s a handy way of making something enormous and complex manageable.

[You can’t see the whole but the whole can see you, and it speaks to you in a language you know].

Thinking relationally makes us happier, and being happier improves our ability to help others be happy, which in turn improves their ability to make others – including us – happy. It is a cyclical process that unfolds in an apparently linear way (like a wheel).

Is that approach commensurate with A Course in Miracles, my (still) spiritual practice of choice?

Well, it is certainly the case that the final edition of A Course in Miracles approved for distribution by Helen Schucman is mostly devoid of behavioral directives. So when I say, for example, that you should grow and raise your own food, join and shop at food cooperatives as often as possible, there is no explicit ACIM textual support for that position.

And yet.

The Golden Rule is the rule for appropriate behavior. You cannot behave appropriately unless you perceive correctly. Since you and your brother are equal members of one family, as you perceive both so you will do to both. You should look out from the perception of your own holiness to the holiness of others (T-1.III.6:4-7).

Now, the course is concerned not with what we actually do but with the premise from which we choose to do it. Its aim is to improve our perception of holiness in our own self so that we might perceive holiness in our brothers and sisters. When this perception is clear and accurate – when we know without confusion or condition that we comprise a single holy family – then our behavior will be loving, nurturing, sustainable and so forth. Perceiving no meaningful distinction between A and B, our behavior will naturally make both “better off.”

We might extend the definition of “family” here to include whales, dogs, otters, violets, maple trees, oceans, nimbus clouds and the moon and the stars and the sun. Doing so is consonant with the ACIM principle that “every part of creation is of one order” (T-7.IV.2:3).

Don’t be tempted by arguments that the world is not real, that the self is an illusion, that aspirin and chemotherapy are magic and you shouldn’t avail yourself of them, and all of that. Those are distractions premised on bad epistemology and misreadings of A Course in Miracles. They are attractive because of their potential to distract. It’s boring and difficult to adapt your eating to a local economy. It’s fun to argue that the self is an illusion! But the former will make you happier, and others happier too, and the latter is basically a funhouse / hall of mirrors / maze.

I am not saying that question of self and world and other and truth and reality and so forth are not proper subjects of contemplation and dialogue. They are. What I am saying is that if you give attention to happiness, then you will be happier, and being happier is actually what you want. And, because you are a kind and loving person (really – you are!), you want others to be happy, too. The right/wrong binary with respect to abstract inquiries has its place but it is not fundamental.

Love is fundamental. Happiness is fundamental. And you already know how to bring it forth, you’ve just been indulging half-measures and otherwise putting it off. If you’d like to try another way, you can.

The Secret to Awakening

If somebody asked me for the secret to awakening or the best way to see the face of God and live or how to be so happy that even dying can’t turn your frownie upside downie, I’d probably say “give attention to your experience of resistance and see what you can do to cut it down to zero.”

By that I’d mean three things.

First, actually make time and space to sit quietly and notice your experience of resistance. What form does it take? What elicits it? How does it avoid being noticed? What does it prefer you notice? And so forth.

The point here is not to wallow in pain and suffering but rather to become intimately familiar with your own subjective experience of resistance. By “intimate” I mean to a clinical degree, an expert degree.

Second. When you begin to become deeply familiar with your experience of resistance, it will point to certain gaps in your knowing. For example, you might discover that you are resistant to that which causes you to feel shame. And all you really know about shame is that you don’t like it.

So I’d study shame. I’d go out and learn what the best and most informed thinkers have to say on the subject of shame. I’d avoid popular writing (or I’d only skim it to sketch the general boundaries of the topic) and instead dive into the academic literature. A good library that gives you access to academic databases is essential.

I’d read carefully. I’d keep a running annotated bibliography. Essays that really resonated, I’d print and store in a loose-leaf binder. When I found a thinker who really turned the interior lights on, I’d read everything they wrote that I could get my hands on. Everything.

My goal would be goose my knowledge of their work and thinking to a point where I could ask intelligent thought-provoking questions of them, including follow-up questions. My goal would be to merit a dialogue, not as a supplicant but as an equal, another person committed to learning and sharing.

And I would do this for every thing that appears in my giving of attention to resistance: shame, grief, guilt, fear, lust . . .

It is a lot work. But I will tell you that a point inevitably arrives when you begin to perceive underlying patterns and recurrences. Connections appear; themes arise. Then you can start to move away from general topics (shame, fear etc) and begin to focus on the matriarchs and patriarchs whose teachings most clearly and succinctly point to the “underlying patterns and recurrences.” What does Husserl say? Emily Dickinson? David Bohm?

The work is still academic but at this juncture it actually acquires an almost monastic bent. You basically become as a disciple unto these thinkers. It’s not a short-term learning process but a lifelong commitment. It’s not a visit to the library; it’s “I-can’t-find-my-bed-because-of-all-these-books-and-papers. And I don’t care.”

These two stages – giving attention to the personal experience and academic study – can take years. If they don’t, you either got supremely lucky or you’re faking it (for yourself and/or others – which it’s okay, it happens and can be corrected for).

The neat thing is that the two stages begin to inform one another. They begin to run in tandem, buttressing and sustaining one another. You’re studying shame and it facilitates a new way of giving attention to your experience of shame which brings up some new insight about a family dynamic from childhood replaying in your current home setting which reminds you of that essay you read last year that was confusing but maybe you should look at it again . . .

Here’s the thing. At some point in this process, you realize that you no longer experience resistance the way you used to experience it. You are in a different posture with respect to it.

At that point, you can take the third step – which, actually, has already been taken. But now you can engage it intentionally. You can begin to actually actively undo resistance. You can give attention to its appearance in your living and, because you are in this new posture (of understanding) with respect to it, your attention undoes it, usually right there on the spot.

And bliss and joy and love abound.

Of course, it won’t always happen that way. It can be a two steps forward, half a step sideways, three steps back and doh-si-doh sometimes. But other times it’s clear sailing; some days you undo so much resistance you feel like you’re gazing directly in the face of God while drawing breath, like you were asleep all those years and now you’re awake . . .

I don’t say it works this way for everyone. Clearly it doesn’t. We aren’t all turned on by libraries. When I started to really study David Bohm’s work on dialogue I lost a lot of readers at this site. A lot of folks with whom I was sharing the ACIM path, so to speak, shuffled off. It didn’t get any better with Husserl, Maturana, Varela et cetera.

But you have to follow the trail your feet make, not the trail that’s most crowded or most comfortable.

These days, I am exponentially less resistant to experience. I judge what happens less. I don’t cling to insight when it arises, and I don’t pursue extremes of sensation. When I do judge or cling or pursue I notice it happening and it more or less dissolves.

Resistance creates friction which is painful. I don’t want to be in pain, and I don’t want to contribute to the pain of others. So a policy of nonresistance is practical and kind. It heals the collective as well as the individual node floating around in it.

We give attention to our experience of resistance so as to become intimate and expert with our subjective experience of it, and we then become expert – or at least supremely competent – with the overall subject matter driving our resistance and, finally, we work on a regular basis integrating experience and study so as to undo resistance in our daily living.

It’s something to try anyway.

A Course in Miracles as Map

In a sense, A Course in Miracles became a distraction. Imagine that you are trying to reach a particular city, and have with you a map that guides you to the city. When you reach the city, the map is no longer helpful – indeed, if you insist on referring to it, it can only confuse you. It has done all it can do.

I have used that analogy for years – Boston as a space of awakening to which A Course in Miracles was directing me. But it confuses the actual experience, in that “awakening” or “oneness” or “inner peace” are not places to which one journeys in a linear way. There is neither travel nor destination (nor traveler, but that is actually a different – and more difficult – question).

It is clearer to think of “awakening,” “oneness” or “inner peace”  as processes (of relations, really) to which one acclimates in time. Imagine that you are unhappy with the ambient temperature. One option is to get up and look for a warmer or cooler location. Another is to accept the circumstances in which you presently find yourself. No travel required!

Of course, that analogy is of limited value as well. After all, if you’re cold, by all means you should find a warm stove or a heavy quilt or a cup of warm tea. And if you’re hot, please do dip a toe in the brook. Physical discomfort asks to be redressed, to whatever extent possible.

But our spiritual discomfort arises not from adverse (or even ideal) external circumstances – being outside Boston, say, or being too hot or cold – but rather from conflating external circumstances with causation. That is, we believe it is the world and cosmos that causes our grief or joy, our inner peace or lack thereof, and we conduct our living accordingly. Fix the externals!

A Course in Miracles suggests we have it backwards, at least as it applies to inner peace (happiness, joy, et cetera).

We look inside first, decide what kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it. We make it true by our interpretations of what it is we are seeing (preface xi).

This is not a radical position, nor it is it unique to A Course in Miracles. It is not inherently “spiritual.” It reflects a basic understanding of how perception and cognition operate in our structure as human beings.

Consider, for example, Humberto Maturana’s view in The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love.

As we conserve that which makes us human beings, we open a space for unending changes in the worlds that we bring forth as languaging beings without losing the human identity. Moreover, human beingness is a manner of living in interpersonal relations, not a form or manner of handling an independent world.

This reflects what writer Pille Bunnell calls “a significant aspect of Maturana’s cosmology.”

. . . namely he has impeccably avoided grounding his network of explanations in any externality, including those that are difficult to refute because they are invisible or taboo. If there were an externality, one would not be able to “get outside” that externality, and thus the application of the cosmology to itself could not take place. In this cosmology there is no referent other than the happening of the process of human living, with all that we do and experience as we live and reflect on ourselves, our doings, and our world.

If we accept this position generally, then the solution to any experience of conflict becomes apparent. As the course frames it, “Seek not to change the world, but to change your mind about the world” (T-21.In.1:7).

This is the meaning of Lesson 193‘s suggestion that if we forgive something, then we will see it differently. Forgiveness, in ACIM parlance, means looking without at our lives in the world in order to change our mind about our lives in the world. It is the means by which understand that happiness or unhappiness is not caused by cold but by how we think about cold (and bodies). When this shift in thinking occurs, a supernatural quilt does not appear and wrap itself around us. The ambient temperature does not suddenly rise. But our unhappiness at being cold will melt away because happiness is not caused by cold, or any other external condition.

Coincidentally, when we are no longer unhappy – or otherwise burdened with conflict – it often becomes easier to adjust our apparent external circumstances. We remember where the quilt is, or we remind ourselves that we don’t have to suffer and it’s okay to turn the heat up a few degrees. This change affects our bodies but not our happiness.

This is a major shift in thinking! Really, for many of us, it is an almost total reversal.

What does this mean in practice? How do we shift our thinking?

In my experience, it actually doesn’t matter what we do. Once we have made the basic connection, then the transition takes care of itself. It’s sort of like once you’ve “seen” the optical illusion, then it’s easier to see the next time. Eventually, it stops appearing as an illusion.

As I said earlier, this is simply a matter of understanding how cause-and-effect work. Our structural perception is backwards; it takes time and attention to straighten it out. But the straightening, as such, is eminently doable.

A Course in Miracles is in this sense a map – treating it as such matters. We use it to discover the means to undo our confused and conflicted belief system. But the map is not itself the means! Thus, our study has to find itself in application – in the world of the senses. I.e., when you reach Boston, give attention to Boston.

The Play Our Loving Longs to Behold

To love is to play. To long for the other is to long to be in communication. Play in communication is the play our love for one another longs to bring forth. Truly we are love.

One could argue that this post reflects a category mistake: that is, it assigns qualities to something that should not be applied to it, which undermines the balance of the argument.

In other words, trying to locate an abstract entity like music or song in time and space (the way we could locate, say, a body or a piece of furniture) is an error. One can’t apply the standards of domain A to that which only abides in domain B.

Thus, one cannot – or at least should not – use the physical whereabouts of Fur Elise to disprove the existence of time and space (on the other hand, if we were just debating the nature or existence of time, music might still be useful because it necessarily occurs in – or over – time).

This is a fair and important criticism! But note: its efficacy as such rests on the assumption that time and space are real and have their own qualities apart from mental or ideal abstractions.

That is, it presumes the existence – the real measurable existence – of a physical domain against which things like concepts of beauty or ideas about justice and love can be compared.

Equating a song with, say, a body may be an error but in order for it to be an error, we have to accept certain premises about time, space, materiality and so forth.

So do we accept them?

I suggest that the only sustainable perspective viz. time and space and the objects that are subject to time and space as existing prior to and independent of observation (thus allowing for category mistakes or errors) is one of agnosticism. We can’t prove an external world exists, much less that it resembles our sensual reproduction of it. We can act like it exists – and we can argue that this acting is beneficial, even loving – but we can’t prove it exists, or say what, if anything, it looks/tastes/feels/smells/sounds like.

In that sense then, every thing that arises – object and concept alike – arises according to the structure we have, which is that of a wordy primate, whose language games beget both infinity and eternity, and so “every thing that arises” cannot be said to have a 1:1 correspondence with anything other than its own arising.

On that view, the category mistake dissolves, because we are no longer presuming an a prior validity of this or that domain. We don’t assume an objective physical world; we don’t assume time and space as constructs that exist independent of the structure that brings them forth; we don’t assume a self independent of the language play in which the self appears, et cetera.

On this view, even our identity as “a wordy primate whose language games beget both infinity and eternity, and and so “every thing that arises” cannot be said to have a 1:1 correspondence with anything other than its own arising” dissolves in a recursive dance that can only perceive its own dancing (and never the dance floor or the dancers or the tune). As Emily Dickinson put it:

Of life to own –
From Life to draw –
But never touch the Reservoir –

So all we can do is give attention to experience and being and see what happens: what else is revealed?

As I have been observing for years, the real question is whether a perspective or position or posture is helpful. And that is a very personal inquiry, forever subject to change. What helps you may not help me. And what helps me may not help me tomorrow. Such is the nature of the inexhaustible untouchable reservoir.

I am less interested in arguments about right and wrong than I am in giving attention – alone and with others, when and as appropriate – to the shared, interobjective arising of self, world and other and, through dialogue, seeing what is recalled, remembered, learned, and so forth.

In my experience, all this study – and all the shifts in living implied by all this study – point to Love. Even God as such is just a nontrivial idea that can, according to context, helpfully point to Love. But it is hardly the only pointer; let alone the most helpful.

Of course, you have something to say about that too! Thus, writing the way I do is in no small part an invitation: what do you think? What else can we do but ask? For I live in you – begin and end in you – and our shared wordiness brings forth the play our loving longs to behold.

On God, Love and A Course in Miracles

I want to jot down some notes with respect to God, bodies, love, oneness and A Course in Miracles. I want to propose an anology: body as an instrument on which the melody of love plays. To me this is a helpful frame, one that gestures away from limitation and loss and towards undifferentiated oneness.

Imagine that you live in a cave and have never heard music. You’ve hear sounds (birds and wind, say), but not formal music. You have no idea what that even is. One day, you visit a nearby city where you come upon a woman holding a box-like instrument with strings. As her hands move along the box the most wondrous sounds emerge! A melody that rips you open like a ripe melon and spills your soul across the cobblestones. This is beauty! This is life!

Then a bee stings a nearby horse who rears and smashes the box-like instrument to pieces. The woman who held it leaves. You fall to your knees in grief. That brief moment of divine piercing beauty is gone, never to return . . .

In this – I know, I know, totally ridiculous – hypothetical, we have confused the source of music with the instrument upon which the music was temporarily played. We believe that when the instrument is gone, the music is gone too.

But of course we are wrong in that belief. The haunting lovely tune we heard can easily be played on another guitar. Or on a flute. Or a piano. It can even be whistled. We can even learn to do it ourselves.

The suggestion is that with respect to love and bodies, we are very much that traveler hearing music for the first time and equating it with the instrument. We are confused about the source of our experience of love. We experience love in bodies, and through other bodies, and so we believe that absent those various bodies, then there is no love.

Even if we intellectually disagree with this, we still believe it and the belief informs our living. There’s a reason we like hugs and sitting around fires and snuggling under warm blankets in winter.

But ask yourself: where is Beethoven’s fur elise?

We can readily point to objects like sheet music and recordings. But those are just examples of the music appearing; they are not where the music is.

Nobody believes that when a grand piano is destroyed Chopin’s etudes are gone. Or that when the sheet music is lost that the etudes are lost as well. Nobody believes that absent Chopin or Beethoven, music itself would vanish.

Where is music? Where is beauty? Where is love? Where is life?

These questions point to a reality that is not conditioned upon time and space and the materiality time and distance imply.

When my father died, life did not end. Love did not end. There was a dead body in the room, but life itself was not absent. My father wasn’t absent either, though the nature of his presence had deeply shifted. I do not expect this to be any different when my own body ceases to draw breath, its memories and dreams dissipate, and the patterning of its cognition and perception slows to a trickle then stops.

Life is not created by the body any more than music is created by an instrument. Life expresses through a body, sure. It temporarily appears in and through bodies, sure. But the body is not the source of life. It is not the cause of life. It is merely an instance of life.

Similarly, beauty and meaning are not in or of a body; this is clear simply from the fact that we don’t all agree about beauty and meaning. For example, I am in an open marriage with chickadees but most people barely notice them. All bodies draw breath, but not all bodies bother with the sacred formalities I indulge when it comes to these little birds.

Ai Weiwei gave a great demonstration of this principle when he purposefully destroyed a Han Dynasty urn. It was an object one could call “priceless” in both its aesthetic beauty and cultural relevance. But he destroyed it. And why not? Beauty and meaning aren’t locked in this or that form. Shatter the vase and art goes on (in photographs and video of the destruction, in countless essays exploring the act and so forth). Shatter the form but love, beauty and meaning go on.

So what happens when we shift our attention from the form to the content (to borrow one of Ken Wapnick’s chestnuts)?

One thing that happens is that the forms don’t go anywhere. That is, the particular instance of love remain viable and intact. Chickadees are still chickadees; Bob Dylan songs are still Bob Dylan songs; Emily Dickinson poems are still Emily Dickinson poems. Bodies gotta body.

But another thing that happens – the really interesting thing that happens – is that one’s investment in and attachment to these forms diminishes; indeed, it reduces almost to zero. That’s because one begins to know that love is not the form. We still perceive the form but our perception pales beside the love we know. Forms come and go; love does not. And what we respond to is not the form but the love. Form is different, various, shifting; love is the same.

This distinction is critical to the curriculum of A Course in Miracles. Forms are illusory; as such, they can either distract us in futile and frantic pursuits or they can remind us of Love. The whole purpose of our study is to learn to use the world and everything in it to remember Love.

Illusions serve the purpose they were made to serve. And from their purpose they derive whatever meaning they seem to have. God gave to all illusions that were made another purpose that would justify a miracle whatever form they took. In every miracle all healing lies, for God gave answer to them all as one. And what is one to Him must be the same (T-26.VII.15:1-5).

It can be very liberating to see and accept this. Seeing and accepting happen in time and space; they are “our” learning process. The chickadees are sweet to me because they point to the oneness of God. Of course I am in an open marriage with them. But once one sees this, then it is a relatively small step to shift from the formal instance to the generalized content. Why bother with chickadees when you can just revel in love?

What God calls one will be forever one, not separate. His Kingdom is united; thus it was created, and thus it will ever be (T-26.VII.15:7-8).

Love transcends the form through which we first perceive it. We aren’t bodies any more than guitars are music. We aren’t bodies to which spirits are attached and we aren’t spirits having bodily experiences. Our bodies are wholly neutral aspects of a time/space illusion that dissolves in love.

There is just this living appearing to itself: spilling over and onto and into and out of itself: and this living is loving. It is not like this, it is this: this this: and ever thus.

Beyond the Meaninglessness of Thought

Tara Singh makes the excellent point that thought is absolutely uncowed by being told in the 10th lesson of A Course in Miracles that “My thoughts do not mean anything.” Indeed, it welcomes the idea, the way a congregation of well-intentioned Christians might welcome a hungry pilgrim. How else shall we convince the Lord of our sincerity and readiness?

But how shall we go beyond thought? Even to pose the question is to think. It can appear that we are trapped, that wherever we look we encounter yet another subjective thought.

However, we can use reason to see that our thoughts are not our own and that we did not make ourselves. A Course in Miracles frequently distinguishes between “thought” and “reason.” Rather than write the distinction off as mere semantics (which of course it is in a sense), it can be helpful to just take the course at its word and see what happens.

So let’s say that one way of thinking is to use reason, which is to say, to carefully articulate the appearance of cause and effect as they relate to one another. I notice I am hungry, I direct my body to the kitchen and heat up soup, and I eat it. Set aside for a moment the nontrivial question of who the “I” is and what it is *actually doing. Can we at least stipulate to the appearance of cause-and-effect and intention?

Given that, can we go another step and see that thought basically arises unbidden? That is, most of what is going on in our minds is appearing of its own accord? Memories, ideas, fantasies, plans . . . They spill over one another in a steady stream, coming and going. Given the word “grandmother” can you not think of your grandmother? Or grandmothers?

If we could actually control what appears in mind, then we wouldn’t need the A Course in Miracles or any other method of learning how to be calm and peaceful and kind. We’d already be there.

So if we look at thinking – at thought – we can see that it arises of its own accord. Whatever its source is, it isn’t our own intention and will. Our intention and will comes into play after thought appears. We can single out one thought or theme for attention, but we can’t stop the flow itself.

When we see this, another juncture opens up to reason. It’s the question of to whom or to what does thought appear? That is, what is doing all this noticing? What is aware?

If you, like me, are a smarty-pants then you already know the answer: there is only awareness. We are the vast container in which all of this coming and going appears. If you, like me, are lucky, then you’ve even had an experience of the container, of the great undifferentiated unified awareness. You have lived – briefly intensely – your oneness with the cosmos.

And you might – like me – have realized that even that oneness is simply an experience that comes and goes, and in that realization realized that you do not know and so cannot say what the Source of Awareness is or who your Creator is or literally anything.

There is clearly this – this very this – but its origins remain clouded. Who speaks of it is not speaking of it.

And thus we come to silence. Thus we come to humility. Thus we come to openness. Thus we come to the fact of:

In no situation that arises do you realize the outcome that would make you happy. Therefore, you have no guide to appropriate action, and no way of judging the result. What you do is determined by your perception of the situation, and that perception is wrong. It is inevitable, then, that you will not serve your own best interests (W-pI.24.1:1-4).

That is the space in which A Course of Miracles meets us: that is the radical openness in which we can authentically say that we do not know and so will refrain from judgment. We assume then the posture of the student – who is the disciple, the apostle – and we learn what is there to be learned. We do not make the curriculum, and so we cannot be the teacher.

So much of our peace and joy is related to that previous sentence – “We do not make the curriculum, and so we cannot be the teacher.” Truly it is the beginning of remembering God as Love in communion with our brothers and sisters.

In silence then we can give attention to our Source or Creator. If there is anything we need to know or experience or share, then it will be given to us. If not, no worries.

This is a practice of grateful acceptance for what appears conjoined to passive indifference for the origins of the appearance, or the means of appearance. Obviously I am not suggesting it is wrong or dangerous to look into appearances and appearing. Rather, I am suggesting that the outcome of these investigations is beside the point.

The point is the looking; not what is looked at, and not what is looking.

In an important sense, awareness is that which cannot be deceived. This is a subtle point. Our senses bring forth a world instantly, flooding it with signification. If I drop a glass you can’t opt not to hear it shatter; if lightening sears the skies, you can’t decide to not see it, or unsee it.

Awareness is not deceived. But our thinking can be quite slippery! We can question everything, including apparent answers, and we can judge the answers, and order them according to our judgment.

But it is possible to come to an awareness of awareness that allows us to see the utility of thought, which is to say, its limitations. There is a lot that thought can do; and there is a lot of static in it as well. Thought itself can’t unsort itself, but awareness can. Awareness is like an interpreter gently indicating what mental or communicative threads require attention and which can be allowed to meander off.

There is a juncture where we begin to appreciate the way in which life takes its own care and “our” contribution is remarkably minimal. So much of our thinking is just . . . not necessary. But good luck getting thought to agree with that.

I remember many years ago sitting in the former Dharmadhatu Center in Burlington, Vermont. Prior to meditation, a volunteer talked about allowing one’s thoughts to simply pass by, like dandelion seeds in a breeze. And I thought – budding spiritual master that I was – my thoughts are way too important to just let pass by.

I was then – and in some ways remain – fascinated by thought. I like ideas and I like words and I like the way words go together and how they mean and how meaning can affect the words in turn. Thinking – especially with others, in person or through their texts – literally turns me on.

But this doesn’t upend the ACIM principle that my thoughts don’t mean anything. The course distinguishes between egoic thoughts and thoughts we think with God. Only the former are meaningless. And awareness will direct our attention to the latter.

That is, the thoughts we think with God are already present. We aren’t waiting for an infusion of love or insight; we are already sufficient unto holiness. We are already sacred, and our sacredness touches everything, including thought.