Wanting Monasteries

For a long time I wanted a monastery.

Then I wanted one with whom to want a monastery with me.

Then I wanted one with whom to expand this want to include the various ecstasies associated with the insights one imagined would be gained in the monastery, yet are in this living mainly enacted sensually in the body and its play.

All of this was a distraction constantly elaborating itself. It was enchanting; I was enchanted. And like all of those who are enchanted, I could sometimes enchant, and bring others into and along with my dreaming.

Yet all of this was not an expansion of my living, nor a recognition of our shared foundation in love, much less a bringing forth of love. It was more in the nature of forcing enclosure on the free expression of life, which inevitably choked and strangled it, causing stagnation and frustration.

Our mental anguish and psychological struggles are not separate from our body’s ability to conserve itself and take joy in its conservation (by wanting this form of living over another – the monastery, say). The one specifies – or mirrors, perhaps – the other.

Moreover, our suffering is never personal, but involves the collective (again, through specification or, if you like, mirroring). The culture, as such, moves in us as much as we move in it. By definition, we neither thrive nor suffer alone.

Therefore, it is imperative that we address our unhappiness, as and where it is experienced, and see if it cannot be remade into happiness, as and where it is experienced, and if it can be so remade, how it can be, and what contribution we might make to the project.

As it happens, what arises naturally is happiness and love, and yet as human beings who are capable of reflection in and through language, what also arises is division and fracture (this is the observer/observed divide, which is basically a misinterpretation of what self-reference is) so that happiness and love, while not obliterated, are blocked and obstructed, which sickens us, in our both our aloneness and our togetherness.

Attention given to the blocks, which are simply attempts to enforce and/or restrict patterns of thinking (see the previous reference to enclosures), is healing because it undoes the blocks. Through attention one sees that they cannot actually force life (through projection) into any given pattern and so gradually simply attend to the patterns that are given.

The result is ease and gratitude and inner peace, which naturally extends itself by teaching itself how to recognize and remember itself.

You could picture a flowing river: its steady flow towards the sea, the many eddies and currents rising and falling and appearing, both on its surface and deeper down where one cannot physically see (but can feel when they stand in the river).

Could you step into the river and with your hands or your mind or any other aspect of your living turn the river around? Stop it in its channel? Turn it to ice? Or to sand?

You might interrupt it in some insignificant ways. You might end this or that eddy. But you cannot stop the river on your own.

I realized that I did not need a monastery, because no monastery was given, and thus wanting a monastery was the source of considerable anguish and grief (for which, I imagined, the monastery, or the one with whom to want a monastery, or the one with whom to play at the healing one imagined was implicit in the monastery was a cure).

Once the longing for the monastery dissolved, more or less, what remained was the peace one had long projected unto the monastery and unto the one with whom the monastery might be simulated (romantically, intellectually, sexually, familially, et cetera).

What was left was the living that lives itself, outside of time, and without conditions or qualifications that would separate it from any other living. I realized that this living was itself all that was given, and that it was sufficient – it was more than sufficient.

And so the work becomes attending the bringing forth of love in this living, not by enclosing it or by forcing it into this or that form, or by looking away from it towards some imagined other living, but by simply noticing it as it is.

What one notices – and I resist this mightily, still – is that the discrete self is also merely another object, like a coffee cup or a dog or an idea of justice. It too appears, no more important or less important than any other appearance. And the light in which all these appearances arise – call it Christ, call it consciousness, call it your Heart Light, call it whatever – does not distinguish between appearance. It is a light that does indeed fall on the just and the unjust alike, the preferred and the not-preferred alike.

Love in a Reflexive Domain

In a reflexive domain, the actors can and do act on both themselves and on the domain. In a reflexive domain, the domain is responsive. So living in a reflexive domain means that living is fundamentally relational.

Our selves are a reflexive domain; our relationships are a reflexive domain; our communities are a reflexive domain; our world is a reflexive domain; the universe is a reflexive domain.

But it’s important to notice that interacting with or on oneself is of a different nature than acting with or on others or on the universe. In order to look at yourself, you have to separate yourself into observer and observed. But of course this is an imaginary construct; you cannot actually be separate from yourself.

This construction – this separation into observer and observed – is already the case. It is how we live; it is how the human structure organizes itself. In that sense, the observer/observed divide is not inherently a problem. It’s natural.

No, the problem, to to speak, is when we conflate this construction with life and world itself – i.e., we deny that the observer/observed divide is a structure-contingent construction and believe it is instead a truthful 1:1 reflection of reality itself.

That denial is an investment in incoherence, and the subsequent belief doubles down on the investment. Not only does it appear that you are a discrete entity in the world, but you start to act that way; in fact, you try to enforce that way.

A lot of our psychological distress arises because of this conflation/confusion. In turn, our psychological distress causes us to act in ways that harm others in our shared reflexive domain.

If you want inner peace and world peace, then you have to address this issue. You have to give attention to it in your experience, where and as it arises. Nobody can do it for you.

So we want to look closely at this belief that the observer/observed divide is real. We want to be sure our beliefs are consistent with what is actually going on, to the best of our ability. We want to be coherent.

I think that dialogue in this sense is helpful. It has been for me. Looking at the situation in many ways and from many angle is helpful. The observer/observed divide is not only a spiritual situation, or a psychological one, or a sociological one, or a linguistic one. But all of those perspectives can help us to flesh out and better comprehend the situation.

Again, we are simply understanding that the self and the world are constructions that arise from our structure, and that any experience of separation is imaginary. There may be grounds for the imagining, but there are not grounds for the opposite – i.e., calling the experience “real” or “true.”

Clarity in this sense enhances our ability to inhabit the world we construct with others in sustainable and loving ways. This is a natural state of being but we are – individually and collectively – estranged from it.

So we experience the self as divided but we also experience it as whole (because it is always both). The two aspects co-exist and mutually specify one another. It is a decision to say one is right (wholeness) and one wrong (divided or partial).

What we want to question is the decision.

Wholeness and separation happen; both are viable. The emptiness of the sky specifies the moon within it; but the moon specifies that which is not the moon but rather the emptiness of sky. In fact, we experience them at the same time. They bring one another forth.

Certainly one can prefer the moon to no-moon, or an empty sky to a sky with objects in it, but that doesn’t change the underlying fact that the moon and the sky are one-appearing-as-two.

This treatment invokes an interesting trinity. The moon, the sky and that which observes the two. That is, there is the duality of observer and observed and the observer that observes the two-as-one. There is X. There is Y. And there is that which perceives [X and Y]. Call it Z.

Of course, this move is not finite! We can also say: there is X. There is Y. There is Z (which observes both X and Y). And there is also A which observes Z (which observes X and Y).

Naturally, this evokes B which observes A (which observes Z (which observes X and Y)).

And on and on it goes.

This is a way of saying that we can always expand the domain in which one observes both the self and the other. It is infinite, or appears to be. Certainly we cannot stipulate to the end of it.

But can we stipulate to the beginning of it?

It is not easy to explain how the self comes about. What precedes the awareness that calls itself “I?” We can introduce concepts like conception and birth and infant consciousness and conditioning and so forth but these are concepts that arise within – or subsequent to – “I.”

We can say “there is only awareness” or “there is only consciousness.” One might prefer one narrative to another but . . . the narratives propose possible beginnings. They do not denote the one true beginning.

So the awareness that is the self is a bit of a mystery, and one has to go slowly with it in order to be clear what it is and how it functions. This “going slow” is in the nature of dialogue, of exploration, in which the very act of exploring brings forth both map and territory.

Of course it is the case that some folks claim to have gone beyond the “I.” The self as such drops out. This experience of “beyond I” is more or less isomorphic across human culture and history. Clearly it happens, or something happens that makes a lot of people tell a similar story about the happening.

But we do we posit this as an ideal, don’t we? Who doesn’t want to be enlightened? Yet certain elite folks can run 4-minute miles, but nobody is getting rich persuading ordinary folks that they, too, can run a 4-minute mile. Or should run one.

Why should the so-called spiritual domain be any different? I don’t hate on myself because I can’t run a 4-minute mile. I don’t stop running.

We are all welcome to our living, and this welcome is equal unto all of us, regardless of the special skills or abilities our particular structure includes.

It’s helpful to remember that the domain of the one who runs a 4-minute mile includes the one who builds and operates stopwatches, and the one who builds and operates means of record-keeping.

That is, 4-minute miles are only possible because of folks who figured out how to build things, and how to build them consistently and uniformly. Don’t even get me started on the technology of running shoes . . .

The key observation is that always the one specifies, or makes possible, the other. This is always the case. If we understand this, then our need to be “one” or the “other” subsides. What is the significance of X or Y when there is Z? Or Z when there is A?

Where you are – geographically, psychologically, spiritually, athletically – is where you are. What could be simpler?

Thus, the spiritual prerogative to wake up or become enlightened is simply a concept brought forth by what is already both awake and full of light. It comes forth in a domain of its own making, and is naturally transcended by new domains.

In a sense, “awakening” and “enlightenment” and “Christ-mind” and “Heaven” and all those related terms apply to a domain that is already being eclipsed by new domains. This is how our living progresses; this is how being functions. The lights are already on; there is no need to turn them on more. You can’t.

Wanting or desiring the state we designate as enlightened/awakened is what brings those states into existence, and brings into existence as well those who profess to have accomplished those states, and those who profess to have the secret to accomplishing those states, and those who seek those states. The unenlightened specify the enlightened, and vice-versa; absent the one, the other doesn’t exist. On this front anyway, there is nothing left to do.

I am suggesting one enlarge the domain of experience. See the observer/observed split. See the seer. It’s nothing special. Rather, one simply sees that the self as such is a recurring feature of an ever-expanding domain of which one is a part and to which one is subject.

As Louis Kauffman says, “the world is everything that is the case, and the world evolves according to the theories and actions of the participants in that world.”

Of course, all this is explanatory and academic. It’s like sitting in a classroom and listening to some guy lecture you about the importance of bridges. After a while, you want to build a bridge.

How shall we build a bridge?

At a practical here-is-a-thing-you-can-do level, if you want to be happier, even truly deeply happy, then one thing to try is to look closely at your descriptions of self, world and other. How do you describe the world? Your self? Other people? Objects in experience? Experience?

“Description” in this case refers not only to a verbal portrayal of this or that sensual experience (seeing a rose, hearing a melody, smelling a cake et cetera) but also reaches the levels of category (flower/valentine/partner/love), explanations of origins (seed, water, sunlight, soil), and so forth.

For example, who do you love? How do you love them? How do you classify that love? Why is it love and not lust or mere affection? And so forth.

On that view, “description” is vast and tangled. Examining it is more like visiting a jungle than looking up the word “Jungle” in a dictionary.

I think this is one of the interesting aspects of psychotherapy, that it allows us – when we are committed to the process which includes a devoted therapist – to really dig down into our descriptions and see them clearly: how we feel, the language we use, the mythologies, how our narratives evolve, the featured characters, recurring themes.

When psychotherapy is effective, the whole culture – the whole history of being human moves in it and in us as well.

Of course, psychotherapy is not the only way to go about examining our descriptions. One can read deeply, one can have a writing or other artistic practice. You can study A Course in Miracles which redefines and reorganizes your thinking and its contents . . .

It is a question of fit and effectiveness. What works? What helps you go deeply into your descriptions?

The reasons we go into our descriptions in this way is because when we see them clearly, in all their dimensionality, to the fullest extent possible at a given time, then we can begin to revise them. Or at least not be so in the dark about them. Before we can make a change, we have to want to make the change, and this means seeing clearly what we are doing and what the effects of our doing are.

So as we go into our descriptions, we can say something like, well, this is not actually an accurate (or effective or resonant or what-have-you) description so I am going to update (or delete or edit) it.

This is about becoming more coherent, which is another way of saying become more consistently and sustainably aligned with the loving being we naturally are.

And really it is about becoming more aware and sensitive to the reflexive domain that is our living: it is about living harmoniously with our living, and loving it as we live it.

The Observer and the Observed Redux

We create an image of ourselves.

We see ourselves as others see us. Or perhaps as our imagined God sees us. Or as we wish we could be. Or should be. Or would be if we had different parents, lived in a different part of the world, spoke another language, had another partner, lived in a different era, et cetera.

Projection is not inherently a problem. We can’t actually separate ourselves into the one who observes and the one who is observed.

In that sense, separation is an illusion.

But we can – and do – believe that this separation is real. We can subtly convince ourselves that the image is “right” or “best” or “most deserving” or whatever.  We begin to believe that self, pursue that self, flog that self, worship that self . . . We divide the world into those who help and those who oppose.

In this way, we are removed from our actual living. We look away from our self towards an image of our self and forget that the image is just an image.

So we are removed from our living, and this makes our living incoherent, often painfully so. Say I have a problem at work. I watch the image of myself replay the problem, then invent a solution, then live happily in the solution.

But the image is not me, and so I go on living in my problem. The image can’t actually do anything; it is like a shadow, or any other projection. To solve something requires that we not project.

But we are very very good at creating, projecting and watching the image. One has to be good at this, in order to get along in their family and their society.

Your parents say “you are this or that.” So you learn you are a thing; naturally you look for that thing. Naturally you try to make that thing conform to the expectation of those upon whom you depend for survival. Parents, teachers, bosses, cool kids, et cetera.

We learn that good girls do this; bad boys do that. Successful men do this; successful women do that. God loves these people but not those people. On and on it goes.

All of that information – to which we are subject at an early age, and then bombarded with as time goes on (which “going on” has become almost impossible to manage in the age of the social) – are the projections of others.

We build our own projection based on the projections of others. It’s the best model. We do it before we know we are doing it; we aren’t allowed to question the process.

But of course this is a terrible way to live, and causes us all kinds of grief, both personally and collectively. It’s inauthentic; we live as a projected image that is supposed to satisfy the world and it doesn’t work.

So the question, years later, becomes how do we stop projecting an image of ourselves. How do we live with the one, rather than an imitation of the one?

This is the old problem of the observer and the observed. It has been around for a long time. You are the observer and the image is the observed.

Intellectually, the solution is easy enough to state. The observer and the observed are one; they appear separate but in fact they are not.

But that generally does not end the experience of separation. It describes it accurately, it focuses our attention well enough. But it doesn’t solve it.

It’s like facing a big river. We are on one side and home is on the other. So we say “well we have to get to the other side. We need a bridge.”

We have accurately stated the problem – which is important – but there is a lot of space between “we need a bridge” and actually building somehow a bridge.

Some of the people with whom I first began to personally explore this condition solved it with Zen Buddhism. I admire them a great deal, and consider Buddhism a coherent and reasonable approach.

Some people I met subsequently resolved it in therapy. They worked very hard – it was painful at times – and, in truth, I think they got lucky with great therapists (which are harder to find than one thinks).

I met some people – a few – who solved it by working with new age forms of Christian mysticism, mainly A Course in Miracles. This become for many years my own preferred method, and though I do not always think of myself as an ACIM student, I am deeply grateful for and attentive to it.

Later in my living – particularly in the summer and fall of 2017 and onward – I began to meet and read and dialogue with people who readily saw the problem but did not get overly worked up about it.

They came out of STEM fields mostly. If they didn’t – if they were, say, philosophers – they tended to rely on STEM fields for their insights. For them, the observer/observed split was something that happened, was acknowledged as an illusion rather than a reflection of some observer-independent reality, and they carried on accordingly.

No big deal. They weren’t uninterested in the problem, especially as it applied to their respective fields. They just weren’t intimidated by it. It was like “we need a bridge” and so the work instantly became, “let’s build a bridge.” The problem was only relevant in terms of optimizing the fix.

Those folks were a real eye-opener for me. They still are. The problem I had spent thirty years studying and addressing, sometimes to considerable personal detriment, was to them just . . . not a big deal.

Could it be they were right?

Well, as it turns out they were right. But so was I. So were my Buddhist friends, and my friends in therapy, and my new-age Christian mystic friends.

That is because the way you solve the observer/observed puzzle is personal. There is no right way; there is no one way. There is only the way that works, and that is subjective and contextual.

Yet for me, seeing that it was a) subjective and b) not a big deal was deeply liberating. It was not the answer, but it certainly cleared the way for the answer to be given.

I wasn’t looking for anything outside of me any longer. The answer was given to me; I had it already. That I was overlooking or otherwise not noticing it was not stressful. It’s much easier to look for a lost ball if you know what room it’s in.

And, critically, I was no longer intimidated by the question. It no longer felt as if it were the purview of the few – the priests, the gurus, the geniuses, or even the lucky. It was for everybody. It was no big deal.

So you could give attention to the situation you called a problem, and the answer would be revealed. You could build the bridge.

Naturally the question arises: what is the bridge?

On the one hand, the answer is: you tell me. And I am not being disingenuous! If you asked me what the best pie was, I’d say the same thing. I mean here it’s apple but over there, with you . . . you tell me.

On the other hand, the answer is almost always implicit in the question; the form of the question, broadly speaking, sketches the form of the answer.

Where does the observer/observed situation arise most clearly for you? In Nisargadatta and Ramana? In A Course in Miracles? Eugene Gendlin? Richard Feynman?

The answer to that question will reveal the focus for your attention. If the answer is ACIM, then give your attention to ACIM and let the answer be revealed. If it’s Feynman, then give attention accordingly and watch the answer arise. Et cetera.

Importantly, if the answer if Feynman and you are obsessing over A Course in Miracles, then probably all you are going to learn is that ACIM isn’t for you.

It is okay – it is more than okay – to let go of that which does not work. Its not working is how it tries to let go of you. So, you know, cooperate with universe. The answer is not hidden from us on purpose. It’s important to remember this. Where the light is, sight is.

When you “see” the answer it will come as a recognition because you already know it; you just didn’t know it was the “answer.” It will be like, “oh. That.”

And living will go on. The answer, so to speak, just clarifies the nature of the work. You have to write and teach more, or you have to go away to a monastery, or you have to run for office, or you have to live alone in a strange city. Whatever.

That will be okay: that will be just another appearance, another swirl of phenomena unto that which – in all the change, never changes.

On Objectification, Observers, Observation and Objects

I have written before that in a sense there are no objects, only processes. You can look at it that way, if you like. Some processes – like the moon or the earth, say – are sufficiently stable that we can treat them as objects. But if we look closely and honestly, they are in flux. They are processes.

Other objects, like eddies in a brook, begin and end within the range of our perception. So seeing them as processes is easier. We objectify them in the abstract. I say “eddy” and you know the concept of which I speak. The concept is stable; but the actual eddy in the brook is clearly processual. It’s passing. Calling it an object would be confusing.

Now, the concept “eddy” is passing as well. It too is in flux. But is harder to see this; it is maybe impossible to see it, save as yet another concept. But the goal here is not to force our seeing unto a space where it was not made to function.

Rather, we want to perceive and engage with an underlying principle, a foundational principle: the world – the cosmos – is itself a process. It is all flux.

What happens when we look into this?

Well, we attach differently to given objects, right? I don’t invest a lot in those eddies because that would be silly. I don’t say, “what a lovely eddy, maybe I can sell it and make enough money to retire and write poetry with my sweetheart all day.”

That would be silly because the eddy is a process. It’s passing. It’s fluxional. However, I still take joy in seeing the eddy. It makes me happy. Indeed, I often go to the river out back just to admire its many eddies. Like quartz rocks, they have always pleased me.

That is an important insight – that what is passing, what is impermanent, can still make us happy, even deeply so. We don’t have to possess it. We don’t have to control it. It’s sufficient that it exists, and that we exist, and that we briefly co-exist.

[When we go deeply into this we see that the eddy makes us happy because it reflects back to us our true nature – we too are processes, that is, passing patterns in a greater flux. This is clear in the way the eddy and the one who sees it mutually specify one another – the one brings for the other (who could be its own self (which, obviously, ends otherness altogether))]

The suggestion here is to consider extending that principle of joy-without-attachment unto all processes – all the objects that we pretend are permanent. Our favorite cabin, our dog, the polished quartz in the garden, our children, our spouses, our bibles and our coffee mugs . . .

On this view, an object is just a symbol for a process. It is organism-specific; our structure brings the object forth. The object is in this sense “right” for us. It is how our living organizes itself in order to recognize itself.

So the objects – from eddies in the brook to our beloved in bed – are really just patterns brought forth by our structure, together specifying love, where “love” is synonymous with “coherence.”

Another way of saying this is to say that love is what works well. Love is what works so well that we don’t notice it working; it just is. So all of these objects – which collectively are a world – are brought forth by and through us and when we are clear that they are simply temporarily and contingently stable appearances of flux – the flux gazing at itself, in a sense. The loveliness and helpfulness of this can be almost too much to bear. The sweetness becomes too much to bear.

This sweetness scared me for a long time. It still does, from time to time, and in a way. It overwhelms me. I resisted it for a long time, with various narratives (I don’t deserve it, suffering is a man’s privilege, I’ll get to it someday, one more drink or hit of acid, et cetera).

But resistance hurts, and hurt extends itself. When we say yes to love the boon reaches not only our own living but the world’s as well.

In the end, the sweetness of seeing the loving organization of the world as it is insists on itself. It will not be denied, because it cannot be denied. It’s merely the self remembering the self. It’s you being you. It’s altogether one movement, the way “juicy” and “red” are one movement in a single apple. You can’t separate it, save conceptually, and even then the “separation” is a stipulation that confirms the underlying wholeness.

So the work for me became not understanding this in an intellectual sense – though that mattered deeply because the study was the woodshedding, the scholarship was the yoga – but rather in accepting what I had learned.

That is, having discerned through study the path, and having confirmed through study the path’s utility, what remained was to walk it. And one does not walk by reading a book about walking; one walks.

It was as if I had studied light for a long time and then somebody just came along and said “here is a lantern. Would you like to hold it?”

And I was scared to hold it. I was scared for a long time to hold it. My hands shook. My heart trembled.

And the thing was, the fear was optional because I didn’t have to “take” the lantern because I already “had” the lantern. There was nothing to be scared of, nor anything really to do.

But it can take a while to see – as in understand and accept in a natural, sustainable way – this fact.

Now that’s a silly analogy because, as I eventually figured out, you can only “study” the light because you have the light to study by in the first place. Being afraid – being unready to hear and proclaim the good news, so to speak – makes an enormously practical difference in our living, even as it makes no fundamental difference at all. The light is there anyway. But still. It does hurt to resist this.

Insight comes of its own accord. There are many roads, none of them royal. I had to go past the cross on the high lonely hill, then past “past the cross on the high lonely hill.” I had to live mostly alone in a library in order to be reborn in a library. Writing writing all the time.

I don’t know what works for you, or will work for you. I am only glad that you are here, bringing me forth in love.

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.