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’s band practice

is better off when

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

Again, wellness is circular. My son 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.