On Understanding and Lesson 3 of A Course in Miracles

The third lesson of A Course in Miracles asks us to declare that “I do not understand anything I see . . .” (W-pI.3). I want to say something about this lesson, mostly arising from my own experience of being a course student. Perhaps it will be helpful.

As human beings who are social and whose social communion arises primarily in our languaging, we make meaning and our meaning-making is premised on understanding. At any given moment, our experience “means” something and more than not we “understand” it. If we understood less or less consistently, then there wouldn’t be any experience, personal or otherwise. In a sense, to be bereft of meaning is to no longer be.

This is to say that we don’t have to be taught over and over what the growling in our stomachs is or what will quiet it. Faced with a cliff we turn back rather than leap forward. Every object in our world appears already-named, already-contextualized, already differentiated from the background.

Does this make sense? In a very basic and fundamental way, we are quite functional and this functionality seems to arise from understanding meanings that appear to be pre-given or at least already there. Our experience is always shared (it includes both animate and inanimate others), always meaningful (named, contextualized, differentiated), always anticipatory (there’s a future for which we must provide),and always re-membering (there’s a past which taught us how to handle the present and provide for the future).

But the perceptual and cognitive tools by which this dynamic and vivid experience appears are incomplete. Clearly they do not reveal a whole but rather a sequenced composition of parts necessary to the observer’s continuity. We get what we need. Critically, these perceptual and cognitive tools do not consist of a 1:1 correspondence with some external reality. Your goldfish can’t sleep in your bed, your cat could care less about Emily Dickinson poems, and you can’t persuade a cheetah to go vegetarian. The world is not fixed or pre-given but actively and continually constructed by observers; indeed, the world is its observers.

The upshot of all this as it relates to A Course in Miracles – forgive my long-windedness – and its lessons is that when we encounter words we translate them according to a context of which we are at best only partly aware. This “translating” and this “awareness” (partial or otherwise) are pre-intentional; they just happen. If you think they don’t, take a look at the word “Jesus” and don’t recognize it or attach any personal or historical or theological meaning to it. You can’t. You aren’t built that way.

So, when I began to study A Course in Miracles, I did so intellectually. I read it over and over, read all the secondary material (Wapnick, Singh, Williamson, Renard et cetera) I could get my hands on, took notes, turned those notes into essays and published them, talked with other students and teachers both online and off, correlated ACIM ideas with other spiritual, religious, philosophical and psychological traditions, took positions on contested issues . . .

That kind of study is quintessentially “Seanish.” It’s what this particular “I” does and it’s how this particular “I” does it. More to the point, generally speaking, it’s functional. It works. It’s fun, it’s nurturing, it’s dialogic, it’s sexy (at least I find it sexy when it appears in others so I assume it’s sexy when I do it) . . . so, generally speaking, it’s how living occurs. Not a lot of reflection precedes it. It feels right and natural. It feels given. It’s me being me; I just do it. Why not?

But in saying that, I am implicitly saying something that Claire Petitmengin recognizes as a challenge to clear thinking and communication which in turn complicates – sometimes painfully – our living together as human beings called to bring forth love.

[Since] our cognitive processes are the most personal and intimate things about us, we think we are familiar with them, and cannot imagine for a moment that any particular inner effort should be necessary to become aware of them. . . [Yet] not only do we not know that we do not know . . . we believe that we know.

Is this clear? We don’t know that we don’t know, and we don’t know what we don’t know. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that we believe we know and so we never undertake to learn in a meaningful, transformative way. If we already know, then what is there to learn?

This is a universally human experience, but it can be especially acute in overly-verbose smarty-pants types like myself.

My early experience of the course lessons was shaped by the conviction – largely unseen and unchallenged at that point – that I already knew. The course was not new information so much as a reorganizing of principles and ideas with which I in my scholarship and mental wizardry was already familiar. It wasn’t the cake but the icing and I was already a pretty good baker.

So when the lesson said “I do not understand anything I see,” I assumed I understood what those words meant and cheerfully did the lesson. But that assumption was the very problem the lesson was given to address!

Thus, I was in a very important and consequential way blind to the course even as I “practiced” it.

My awakening as such began when at last I could read that lesson and rather than “do” it as I “understood” and “knew” it, stop and ask: “wait – is it true that I don’t understand anything I see? That can’t be right. Is it right? Oh my God it might be right . . . “

At that juncture, with that question, learning begins because I am no longer specifying the outcome or answer. I am giving attention to the experience without qualifying it. I am not “assigning” meaning but rather seeing what meaning, if any, will naturally arise. I am receptive and open (if trembling and tentative). I am assuming the posture of a student. I am making inquiry from a state of epistemic humility. I don’t know what will happen and I am letting that be okay. If only for a few seconds I am suspending my inclination to know and be certain in order to simply be.

And it turns out this simply being is a process – a form of becoming – that enfolds us into one another and into the world, and the other and the world into us. To the extent we are able to sustain our attention to this process, then our learning as such transitions from a goal-oriented exercise to the lucid tranquility of awareness itself.

Our being – never still, never quiet, never discrete – yields to our becoming, which shapes and alters our being, which yields to our becoming, and so the processual, recursive nature of our experience continues. We are, so to speak, immersed anticipatingly, recursively, becomingly, livingly, that is, enkinaesthetically, with our world (Susan A.J. Stuart).

When I don’t know, and I know that I don’t know, then learning begins. Receptivity and generosity begin. In this beginning this way, I am no longer a teacher. Love is the teacher.

And here is the thing: Love’s classroom scares me. The human classroom intrigues and inspires and excites me but, because Love’s classroom doesn’t give a rat’s ass about scholarship or IQ or effort, it scares the crap out of me.

If Love didn’t scare me, then the course would not be a helpful or necessary corrective, and this public writing (which is in a sense a kind of atonement) would not be necessary either. You are probably here because you, too, are scared of Love, though this fear no doubt shows up – is described – a little differently for you.

Yet here we are, learning what it means to be in love, and how to be in love, which is to say, how to bring forth love, together and apart, for all the world that our living together brings forth. I would be remiss if I didn’t say I am grateful, especially since so much of my living suggests I’m basically not even aware of you, let alone loving you in a way that saves us and our world.

In my experience, A Course in Miracles is not about ending our spiritual search/psychological quest for wholeness/philosophical yearning for Truth in some ultimate or final sense but rather about making a better beginning. It taught me how to be humble and thus open to a way of thinking and being that at times still feels deeply unnatural. And yet.

That is all I mean when I say I have moved on from A Course in Miracles. It ended the foolishness and loneliness of delay which arose from misplaced confidence in personal knowing and shallow insistence on the sufficiency of becoming better. It nudged me gently but surely into a light which, oddly enough, you embody. But – equally oddly – you only embody it as I see it in you. And vice-versa.

Thus, absent you, no me. Absent me, no you. Our shared love – tender and tentative as it may be, dim as it sometimes seems – is literally the light of the world. I saw it the moment I knew I wasn’t seeing it: and you were the one that I saw.

On Application and A Course in Miracles

I often say – taking my lead from my primary ACIM teacher Tara Singh – that intellectual understanding, while not inherently counter-productive, is not in and of itself sufficient for bringing forth in a sustained collaborative way the creativity and life-giving force of love. What we learn must brought into application. As Jean Piaget said, “You have got to design and build, not just talk about your philosophical fantasies.”

Perhaps it is like driving school. Of course it is helpful to learn what the various traffic signs and lights mean. Of course we want to learn what the various controls and levers and pedals on the dashboard and at our feet do. But all our learning is pointless – literally null – unless we actually drive.

So by “in application” I mean enacted by the structure we are in the very world brought forth by (and therefore appropriate to) that structure. Note that this does not contradict but actually reinforces spiritual teachings that the world and the body are not real (e.g., ACIM W-pII.222.1:1-2 and see the comments to this post).

The Structure We Are

We have the structure of human beings. We are bipedal languaging mammalian primates. We have big brains and opposable thumbs. We are communal. If you look in a mirror, you don’t see a unicorn or a lake trout. You don’t see a molecule or a pine tree or a lake. You see homo sapiens.

Even if our bodies aren’t real, they have a real appearance, and that appearance obeys laws that the bodies – real or otherwise – did not create and cannot flount without penalty. We can’t breathe underwater. We can’t fly unaided. We don’t convert nectar to honey.

We can build submarines and hang gliders. We can keep bees. We can learn new languages. We can objectify ourselves in order to talk about ourselves. But we still don’t know what we don’t know. Our brains, as magnificent and functional as they are, can’t cognize what they are not designed to cognize.

The World Those Structures Bring Forth

These structural boundaries and the laws they obey bring forth a world appropriate to those structures. That is, we perceive and cognize in ways that allow us to go on being the structural observers that we are. A tick brings forth a different world, one that allows it to go on being a tick. And an ant, an ant. And so forth.

Thus, there is not the world but many worlds. And the world brought forth is not brought forth for its truthfulness – its fidelity to some external reality – but for its usefulness. That is, perception and cognition are about fitness. That glass of water you crave after a long run is indeed helpful to your ability to go on being an observer with the structure of a human being, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually a glass of water. A tick wouldn’t even notice it. Why should the world be truer for you than for a tick?

In Lieu of Contradiction

The world and the body are already in existence when we deny their existence or participate in spiritual practices that aim to undo their existence or reveal their illusoriness or what have you. If they weren’t there, we wouldn’t need to respond to them one way or another.

In this sense, the world and the body are given. They are brought forth in a way that is not related to our will or intention. We didn’t ask for this. We showed up at the table for a meal that was already underway. We have no idea what will go on after our share of the food and drink is consumed.

What is the body? What is the world? There is nothing inherently wrong with asking those questions! But it is helpful to see that they arise in a body in a world and, more to the point, in a body that is already conformed to the world. In other words, it takes a body to ask what a body is. It takes a world to ask what a world is.

In that way our questions double back on themselves. They become recursive and beget infinite regression. Every answer we give to the question “what is a body” is given in terms already set by the body. The answer always arises in and as the very thing it intends to explain. It’s like a sign that says “Please Do Not Read This Sign.” In order to obey it, you have to disobey it. But if you disobey it, then you can’t obey it.

Recursive loops like this can be taken as invitations to ask a different question. If questions about the body and the world inevitably trap us in self-referential loops, then what else can we ask? What other inquiry might serve?

Personally Speaking

I don’t know what your answer to the preceding two questions might be. In my experience it is very hard to get beyond our training – spiritual and otherwise – in order to have a direct encounter with the problem of self-referentiality. I don’t mean an intellectual encounter (anybody can talk about the observer and the observed) but rather a full-on embodied encounter, the moment when you actually see the loop that you are and realize the utter futility of escaping it.

And Yet

But, of course, phrases like “the utter futility of escaping” only make sense if we presume there is something to escape to – another way of being, another space in which to be. But is there? And how would you know? How can you exceed your structure? Or the world appropriate to that structure (from which that structure cannot be meaningfully separated)?

Sometimes in my writing I say something like “there is only this: this this.” By that I mean, all that can possibly be is already inherent in this very experience, including the possibility – but never the confirmation – that there is more than this experience. Whatever you sense or intuit or dream (good, bad or indifferent) is always brought forth in and through the structure you are in the world brought forth by that structure.

Thus, questions about self and world, or body and world, while fun and interesting and sometimes insightful, are never more than “fun and interesting and sometimes insightful.” In the end, it doesn’t matter whether things are illusory or not, or real or not, because nothing actually changes based on one or the other answer. This sounds unremarkable but it is actually a deeply transformative and even mystical answer.

For example, you might decide that the apple you are about to eat is an illusion, but it is still going to taste good and appease your hunger. If you tried to eat a lump of coal on grounds that it’s only an illusion, you’d be sick. And still hungry. Given hunger and an apple, you eat. The metaphysics are surprisingly only a sideshow.

Only Partially True

But actually, that is only partially true. The posture that we take towards our living does seem to matter, at least in the way in which it either brings forth more or less love. We can throw the apple at our neighbor and hurt them or we can bake them a pie and make them happy. And there is something in our structure (and the world that structure brings forth) that prefers to bake them a pie. There is something in our structure (and the world that structure brings forth) that prefers folks bake us a pie, rather than throw apples at our heads.

This love is also a law – like the one that says we can’t breathe underwater or smell a lilac bush a thousand yards away. And it seems to be the one way in which our structure – both at the local level of the body and cosmic level of the world and the universe – becomes malleable. When we love, a new being is brought forth: the relationship implied by love is the new being and a new world is brought forth on terms familiar to that being (and conducive to its ongoingness).

Thus, whether what we are dealing with is real or illusory, or whether those are even helpful questions, there is the creative and vivid experience of love towards which we naturally tend, and this experience transcends the binary real/illusory divide because it inheres in both of them equally well.

It may not matter whether the body is real or not, or the world real or not. It may be that the infinite regress implied by the recursion of the original question (it takes a body to ask what a body is and world to ask what a world is) is pointing us away from looking for sources and towards processes, specifically processes that are loving in the fundamental way favored by our structure and the world our structure brings forth.

This Very Experience

Thus, while mental or intellectual learning is fine and not by definition unhelpful, what is consistently helpful is bringing our learning into application, where “into application” is understood as “giving attention to experience – to this very experience.”

When we do that, we are inevitably brought into direct contact with love (even if it goes unrecognized or ignored). At that juncture, the search is over because all love wants is love. In a sense, all we learn is that we exist in order that love might remember itself. Indeed, to the extent we persist in defining the self or the world, we might say the self and the world are together the process by which love reimagines itself for itself.

Relationship: Our Shared Gaze at God

Perhaps another aspect of relationship that bears considering is its direction. That is, one way to be in relationship with another is to look at them – I am here looking at you over there. But another way is to look together is to face the same direction together, where that direction is love.

Often, when we see the other, we like or don’t like what we see. This way of seeing has to do with appetite, with what we want and how our wants converge with what we need. We see the other and perceive a way that they can satisfy us. And that becomes the ground of the relationship.

To put it that way is crass and so it disappoints those of us who are spiritually evolved or psychologically mature or whatever. But it doesn’t have to be. Our structure means that we will have needs – for food, for water, for shelter, for intimacy. And those needs tend to express as wants – for this kind of food, this kind of shelter, this kind of partner. It’s natural.

The problem isn’t that we are humans with needs that manifest as wants. That’s just a fact of our structure; it’s no more problematic than a blueberry bush bearing blueberries or a sunflower turning its crown towards the sun.

The problem is that we see the other only in light of those needs and wants, as if their sole reason for existence is to satisfy us, as if their only function were to serve us, as if we were royalty and they our obedient subjects.

This is a form of lovelessness because it reduces the other to a satellite. The other is no longer our equal, our collaborator, our co-creator. The being of the other is no longer equivalent to our own being but is ancillary to it, subject to it. It is a form of violence to insist on seeing the other this way.

We can heal this, or at least begin healing it, simply by trying to be aware of the other’s function. A sunflower does not exist so that I can perceive beauty and be spiritually lifted, even though that is a nice thing. A pig does not exist so that I can have bacon, even though that is a nice thing. Men and women don’t exist so that we can experience splendid orgasms with them, even though that, too, is a nice thing.

Who or what is the other when I no longer see them in terms of my own appetites? What is their function? What is their purpose?

Of course, answering this question also answers – or moves in the direction of answering – the question of who or what am I?

The equivalence in those questions – the way “who is the other” merges with “who am I” – hints at the other ground of relationship, the alternative to looking at the other in terms of securing personal satisfaction. That alternative ground is when we look together in the same direction, which I am going to suggest is a form of love. That, too, relates us, and in a way that is more deeply and naturally satisfying than attending to our physical appetites.

It is also part of our structure that we long for transcendent experiences. We feel separated and want to be united or made whole. We become religious and go to psychotherapists and watch Oprah because of these feelings. These longings – for wholeness, for union, for oneness – can be satisfied but not by co-opting or controlling the other.

Instead, they are satisfied by cooperating and collaborating with the other, which is another way of saying: looking together in the same direction. If our shared goal is love, and we understand our function to be buttressing one another in the bringing forth of love, then our relationship is no longer exploitative or selfish. It is creative; it serves the collective, the all-of-us-altogether.

A relationship like that is of holy sustenance. Its peacefulness and gentleness radiate without concern for time or space. It is no longer bound by the body. Its expression is free and open.

Of course we are still going to eat and drink and make love. But those experiences are subsumed in the holiness of holding hands and sharing the trail that leads to God. Our shared function becomes our relationship, and that relationship transcends our personal interests and identities. It literally becomes a new way of being-in-love.

First we understand this intellectually and then we do the work of bringing it into application. It is a learning process that unfolds in time, and we experience it as “our” process. Thus, it has the nature of a transition, as if we are leaving the old for the new. It has the feeling of a journey, with a beginning and an end. Often, there is a specific other around whom this transition/journey focuses.

Rather than resist the appearance of self-improvement projects, spiritual journeys and significant others, make responsible use of them. They are actually functional analogs; their “truth” or “reality” as such is not the point. Their helpfulness very much is. We learn together what love is, and our learning is slow and sometimes torturous. We journey together and our journey takes longer than we expected. It’s okay. It’s more than okay. I am here, writing for you, and every day my hands empty a little more that I might take your own more surely, for both our benefit.

Really, what else can we do, given these lives in this world? The journey always dissolves in the single step before us. The one who walks beside us is our own self, remembering the unity that by definition precedes any experience of separation or fracture. Let us look not at one another nor past one another but rather stand together and together gaze at the dim light beckoning, the one that got us started on this project at the outset. The light is love and in our shared gaze it brightens. In our shared gaze, distance is undone and we arrive together at the home we never left.

Nitpicking and Neo Advaita

It is a staple of a lot of contemporary neo-advaita writing that we are awareness itself and what happens – the whole of our living – happens inside of us. Here is how John Sherman, a teacher I admire a great deal, puts it.

I say, ‘There is nothing but you anywhere to be found’, and it sounds like this is some big spiritual pronouncement. But just check it out. You can’t find anything but yourself anywhere. You will find all these things that come and go in you. It is all you . . . You are the container of it, that’s all.

John’s point is that there is no time or place or experience from which we are absent. Living is continuous, without gaps. Absent awareness, what could possibly exist?

This is logically sound and we can experience it and the experience can be – especially when it is new – quite profound. We can, as John suggests, look into this experience in a sustained way and see what it is all about. What does it teach us about what we are in truth? John again:

So, always, in all cases, the opportunity is present to just look at this underlying reality. Just to look at it, not to get it, not to become it. That’s absurd, since you are it. Not to get it, not to become it, not to understand it. Just to look at it . . . That’s the inquiry. The inquiry is looking at reality as often as you can, looking at what you know to be unmoving, everpresent presence itself, as often as you can . . .

I agree with John that this is a helpful practice. I use the phrase “give attention” but the basic process is the same.

Where I deviate a bit from this neo-advaita posture is in the conclusion that this “unmoving, everpresent presence” is the self. As John puts it, we are the underlying reality. And I would say that differently. I would say something like “we are manifestations of the underlying reality that can, by virtue of our structure, sense that reality and reflect on it in language.”

I suspect John (and others) would say I am complicating things, or being too intellectual. Just look! Stop being so nitpicky and wordy. Stop being the guy who always says “yes, but . . . ”

Well, yes. But.

You see, we don’t actually know what the underlying reality is. We can intimate its presence and we can investigate it and think about it, but we can’t actually know it. Our structure – which is creative, in the sense that it brings forth a world – is also prohibitive. It is also a limit on experience. We can’t walk through walls or see molecules unaided or smell lilac bushes from a mile off. We can look inside – intensely and deeply – but there is no assurance that what we encounter is consistent with reality. As Francisco Varela puts it, “there is no a priori reason why introspection should have access to the process (es) that generate it, and thus introspection itself is useless for the elucidation of its mechanism.”

Given that simple fact, epistemic humility is in order. I am not contesting that we experience a sense of presence – of awareness – forever attending our living. I am suggesting that we not rush to any judgment about what that means. I am saying it could simply be what it feels to be a human observer, one with a brain and kidneys and a history that will terminate at death and all that.

What tends to happen is that folks confuse the structure by which they sense a reality for the reality, as if there were a 1:1 correspondence. And the suggestion I am making is that we can’t be confident there is a 1:1 correspondence. All we can say for sure is that there is a correlation. It is like seeing a red rose and concluding roses are red. Well, for most human observers, sure. Roses are red. But for a dog, no. For an ant no. For another rose, no.

Thus, the work is to go slowly, to keep looking and to remain in dialogue with experience, with living itself.

Now, part of why I am an advocate of going slowly, especially in dialogue, is because it allows us to focus on how we appear / show up / are implicated in language. That is, what words are we using, how are we using them, how are we responding to the words of others and so forth. In my experience, this is a helpful way to clarify and intensify our shared experience of living.

For example, here is the late Nathan Gill, another writer and teacher in the neo-advaita tradition whose work I also admire.

In the play of life the desire to come to rest in your true nature takes the form of seeking for awakening or enlightenment. The paradox is that your true nature is always at every moment completely available, but is obscured by seeking for it. In turn, the agitation felt by seeking serves as a goad to further seeking.

When the nature of this seeking process is understood and then undermined by living in the acceptance of every moment of life just as it is, then seeking and agitation soon naturally fall away. Your true nature is then revealed to be none other than this awake space or awareness in which everything appears.

Here, Nathan uses the phrase “true nature” rather than John’s “self.” That is more resonant for me because it is less categorical than John’s phrasing. There is a subtle but nontrivial difference between saying “I am the underlying reality” and “my true nature is the underlying reality.”

I say all this this way because I tend to use the word “love” to refer to the underlying reality, whatever it actually is. I am not saying that Love is our reality; I am saying that love moves us in ways that accord with reality. Our living is fused intimately to love: the ecstasy and joy of making love, baking bread, pouring tea, walking to the river, telling stories after dark . . . Even with all our technological progress, our fundament is as it ever was: love itself. We are joined – are as one – in the care and nurture that is the sustenance of life.

It seems to me that whatever is going on, what guides us in and through it, what welcomes us to it, what instructs and informs us in it, is love in its ordinary embodied natural simplicity.

Thus, the work is to see the way in which we are obstructing the free flow of love. Love, as A Course in Miracles points out, is our natural inheritance but in our confusion and misidentification, we obstruct both acceptance and extension of that love. So the work is to see the obstructions. We don’t have to undo the obstructions; we simply have to see them. Seeing them is how they are undone.

This is another way of saying that what we are doing when we give attention to the self and the other and the world is that we are recovering our true nature. We are remembering our true identity. Here is how Nathan Gill puts it.

All I can do is to remind you of your true nature until it becomes simply obvious. We are all the very same one. Our true nature is awareness, acknowledgment of which allows exclusive identification as the individual character to be seen through. There is no awakening in the sense of some fantastic future projected enlightenment event. Rather, the simple acknowledgement of your always-present nature as awareness undermines the whole seeking movement, which is your agitation or dis-ease.

Thus, we give attention to what appears. We make a gift of our capacity to attend: we become students, lovers, sherpas, disciples. We decline to conclude – to finish – and instead go on slowly, continuing to serve one another and love one another. We go on clarifying and refining experience so that love might be brought forth in our living in precisely the way it longs to come forth.

We do this this way because love fixes everything. Love is the light which all our problems are solved, all our distractions set aside. Not right away and not perfectly, at least as we perceive it given the nature of our structure. But love either heals the world or gives us more patience and humility and perseverance to go on offering healing to it. Love makes us happy and happiness girds us against apparent sacrifice and loss. It shows us the next step and holds our hand while we take it.

Religion and the End of Conflict

Religion (broadly defined so as to include spiritual practices like A Course in Miracles) can be a helpful way to work through the difficulties that attend our living, which is to say, to learn how to better bring forth love in our living with others who could be our own self. But it is only effective to the extent one sees the way it arises as a condition of the very problem it aims to solve.

Another way to think about this is to say that religion is not about what is actual but about what is possible at a given point.

What do I mean by this?

Religion evolved as a way of responding to the various challenges that inhere in the experience of being human in a world in which humans live, which living is inevitably circumscribed by perceptual and cognitive horizons. That is, religion provides narratives and rituals that help us deal with the fear and grief associated with, say, death – our own and others’. However, critically, it does not explain death. We cannot, in Merold Westphalt’s memorable phrase, “peek over God’s shoulder.”

Perception and cognition are limits – you can’t see every color on the light spectrum, you can’t survive on uncooked meat, and you can’t make it rain by thinking hard about rain.

But perception and cognition – in part because they are limits, are also creative. Through them, a world comes into being – blue skies, soft satin sheets, compound sentences, ants at picnics, twelve-string guitars on which Bach airs can be played. The world we perceive and think about and do our living in is the world brought forth by perception and cognition. Absolute truth or objective truth are lies we tell ourselves to avoid the responsibility subjectivity entails.

Heinz von Foerster puts it this way:

Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity.

And A Course in Miracles like this:

Everyone teaches, and teaches all the time. This is a responsibility you inevitably assume the moment you accept any premise at all, and no one can organize their life without some thought system (T-6.In.2:2-3).

Thus, not only can we not peek over God’s shoulder, the very act of trying is a distraction from the work we are actually called (by the world we bring forth by virtue of our structure) to do. There is a moral imperative to not seek the objective stance, the true perspective, the actual source. It’s okay – it’s more than okay – to leave God to God.

Peter Nelson, an Australian psychotherapist and writer, puts it this way.

The quest for foundations is a vanity that takes us away from the kind of knowing that is actually possible for us and leads to a fragmentation and separation that contributes to our destruction, “metaphorically” as well as “actually.”

Our perceptual and cognitive limits point to or intimate the existence of a source or ground of being but they also simultaneously preclude us from ever reaching it. Belief systems – religious and spiritual ones in particular – emerge to help us manage this fundamental state of unknowing and uncertainty. What are we? What happens when we die? What is the relationship between experience and the world? Is there a relationship? Why should I care about my neighbor? Why do bad things happen? And so forth. Religion comforts us, provides a community for us, gives us purported answers, and gives us behavioral models to facilitate consistent living in an uncertain world.

Regrettably, over time, those systems morph from suggestions to absolute truths. “Here’s a way to think about death and dying” becomes “here is the way to think about death and dying.” Once you start to believe you’re privy to the way, the truth and the life, it’s a surprisingly quick trip to torturing folks who refuse to convert to your belief system. We all think we wouldn’t do it but the truth is, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Don’t kid yourself.

Why do we take a few good ideas for helping manage our living and turn them into absolutes which justify so many manners of violence?

Well at least in part because we are in a war against uncertainty. We want to know. We believe The Truth exists and that we have some powerful natural right to know it unconditionally. We want the way, the truth and the life; not pale facsimiles. And yet our desire is forever thwarted. We cannot reach that whole . . . it is forever foreclosed to us by virtue of our structure.

Perhaps it is like when we are young and our teachers or parents insist we share our toys, not tease others, and shake hands after a fight. Those are fine ways of managing existence – better than fine actually – but they do not explain why conflict exists in the first place, nor how it specifically arises in us.

It’s clearly good to have strategies for managing conflict but we might ask: would it be better to understand the source of conflict and undo it there? And thus obviate the need for conflict resolution strategies?

A Course in Miracles makes sense to me as a method for managing one’s living. It is an effective strategy for being in responsive dialogue with one’s neighbors (thus alleviating apparently external conflict), and for maintaining a healing perspective on one’s interior craziness (thus alleviating apparently internal conflict).

. . . no one can organize their life without some thought system. Once you have developed a thought system of any kind, you live by it and teach it (T-6.In.2:3-4).

But the course is terribly ineffective – as virtually all formal religions and religious systems are – when it comes to explaining how conflict arises in the first case. That’s because A Course in Miracles is a metaphor for what it means to not be able to peek over God’s shoulder. Its “explanations” are stories whose purpose is to teach. They are not unlike Aesop’s fables. There was not actually a stork and a fox who taunted one another about their respective manner of eating, but the story does make a valid point about the importance of respect for the other’s differences. We should take it seriously if it is helpful but we shouldn’t take it literally.

Again, it is critical to understand that Westphal didn’t mean that God literally has a shoulder or even that there is literally a God. Rather, he meant that human beings cannot occupy an objective perspective. We can’t know the truth, nor even whether the truth exists, and what this means is that we are called to a degree of epistemic humility. We can’t know the ultimate or final truth, and if our living is predicated on anything but that fact, then we are bound for unhappiness, and not just our own. We’re likely to hurt others as well.

Do you know the power of “I don’t know,” or the glory and beauty of humility? There is space in you to bring all thoughts and knowing to an end. The one who comes to “I don’t know” is certainly more at peace. And from there, perhaps, something else can begin (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 94-95).

This was the essence of Tara Singh’s beautiful clarity when he called our attention to the lovelessness of “I’ve got it and you don’t.” The belief that we understand, that we have some insight or potential that others don’t have is a form of violence. Helen Schucman encouraged Singh to keep daily gratitude lists, in essence making gratitude the foundation of his ACIM practice and teaching. Gratitude relieved him of the need to compete with others and thus brought forth a healing love.

Have you ever observed your own perfection and given thanks? Then your life, too, would be a song. Every breath would convey your adoration. To see perfection in yourself and in a brother becomes the function of each one, until there is no imperfection or misperception, and you realize that, beyond appearances, there is no “other,” only God (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 135).

Conflict arises because we believe that we are apart from the world: we believe that we have separate interests, and that these interests require defense which, in turn, sometimes requires attack. Most of us say we don’t believe this, and we can be very good at persuading ourselves and others that we don’t, but if we examine our living carefully, we will see that in fact we do believe we are apart from one another, and that this separation breeds competition, and we conduct our living accordingly. The people who enacted the Holocaust were not monsters. They were human beings like you and me who erred in a deeply grievous way that you and I could err, given the same circumstances. Our capacity to bring forth peace and love – to not err on the side of hatred – is contingent on our never forgetting that fact.

If we see lovelessness happening, then we can respond to it in the moment. If I’m being a jerk in the classroom, then I can be less of a jerk, and make the requisite amends. If I am selfish in my living at home, the same. But as I used to say with respect to making amends as a spiritual practice: the point is not to become great at saying “I’m sorry.” The point is to become the sort of living being who does not need to make amends so often.

That is why eventually our so-called spiritual seeking moves us in the direction of what can be applied and brought into application. This was part of what alienated Tara Singh from the Foundation for Inner Peace and FACIM and more canonical approaches to ACIM. Singh understood that we have to work out the course in the course of our very living; anything else was insufficient.

Insist upon direct knowing. Let that be your decision. Unless you and I have come to gratefulness and peace, the future will be our master and we will live by the fear of consequences. Take a stand not to be regulated by your “knowings” and the future will have less sway over you. The commitment not to let your assumptions or ideas influence you brings with it its own awareness (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 128).

I have come to see the wisdom of this but not without considerable effort. But over time I have understood that while we need to give careful attention to our ideas about living, we need also be aware of how those ideas can sometimes take us away from the actual living they imply. J.A. Simmons a Christian scholar whose work I find helpful, even though we are treading somewhat different paths, puts it this way.

Engaging in hermeneutics is absolutely essential for thinking and living well, but sometimes hermeneutic inquiry can invite a second-order existence that fails to find traction in what Wittgenstein might call the ‘rough ground’ of a community’s shared hopes, beliefs, and rituals. This is not an either/or decision between engaged practice or detached theory, but simply a Kierkegaardian reminder not to forget about living while we think about how best to live. Phenomenology in a postmodern/post-secular context should propel us into our historical communities, not away from them. It should call us to critical engagement, not disregard and detachment.

By all means study. Indeed, our cognitive capacities – our gift for logic, rational thought, evidence-gathering, clarifying bias – are incredibly useful in figuring out why we suffer and how to minimize that suffering.

But our study is sterile if it does not reach the moist potentiality of living in the world: its fructivity blossoms in the messy and confused loveliness of our living as loving languaging beings, each one of whom could be the other.

Tara Singh said in another context – I am working from memory, not the specific texts, and thus paraphrasing – that when Jesus said “I and the father are one” he spoke to his reality. When we say it, it’s just words. And so Singh called on us to learn why it was just words so that we could learn how to live in a way that it was our actuality. Or, better yet, find our own actuality, and the language that expresses that actuality without qualification or condition.

That is the work, and no other work is really satisfying. The work, so to speak, appears differently for each of us, but it is not different in any fundamental way. How shall we bring forth love? The answer is within us in the form of that which obstructs the free flow of love, and it is without us in the sense that the context of working out the bringing forth appears in the other, or, in approximately ACIM terms, our brothers and sisters.

So a religion – or spiritual tradition or practice, if you like – such as A Course in Miracles is helpful to the extent it redirects us away from mental quests for absolutes and towards the messy  and lovely collective of the world. If it organizes our thinking in ways that help us to bring forth love in communion with our brothers and sisters, broadly defined so as to include starfish, snowflakes, rivers and bears, each one of whom could be our own self, then great. Be religious. But if it leads us to double down on mental purity, on the lovelessness of “I’ve got it and you don’t,” then shuck religion. There’s a better way.

I don’t know what this means for you, of course. I know folks who bring forth love out of religious traditions that are at best confusing and sometimes frightening to me. And I know folks for whom ACIM becomes a kind of moral straitjacket that they try to make everyone else wear. We have to go deeply into our experience of love and that which obstructs love, and this means going deeply into the world our loving – and obstructing loving – brings forth. There is no other work, and nobody can do it for us.

Awakening in Relationship

I think we are moving perhaps in the direction of a space where it is possible to address questions of awakening and what-happens-after without so much judgment and confusion and drama. Perhaps we are getting clear on the simplicity. Perhaps we are focusing on the helpful work and the relationships which make that work light.

The other is a way of seeing, especially when we love them a great deal. Love is a way of seeing our own self in a lightened way. I mean this literally. The other is a lens and what we see through that lens is what we are, and when we are in love with this other, then we see ourselves as both beloved and loving, and if we are truly blessed then we see that there is only love, and both self and other dissolve utterly. There is only relationship; there was always only relationship.

Naturally this happens in bodies – in our apparent structure as human beings – which I experience always as deeply confusing. I want to make love and bake bread and walk hand-in-hand in the forest and wake early and boil water for tea. Naturally that is all lovely and important but it is only a shallow expression of love. I don’t mean “shallow” here in a negative sense. I just mean that it is local and temporal, and love is so much more than that. It is bigger than that – cosmically bigger, infinitely bigger.

The work, in part, is to see this: to see that the love brought forth in the structure for the structure is not created by the structure. If that is clear, it becomes possible to see beyond the structure, or sense beyond it, and thus be liberated from it in the sense of having to identify with it in toto.

The other that we love is the way that this cosmic vastness is shown to us. We see the other and then slowly – for me it took many years and many spilled words of strangled dialogue, many steps forward and back – we see the love itself. Imagine that you are reading by candle and then somebody turns on an overhead light. The dim glow of the candle is negligible. Where before you had to squint to read each word now the whole page is legible and bright. When we see love itself, the other becomes like the window through which the light streams. You are grateful for the window but my God the light. The lovelily life-giving light . . .

All things that God created timeless
are His gifts to me. The passing and the frail
are not part of my inheritance.
Such are His promises.

(Helen Schucman The Gifts of God)

Love is timeless and unchanging. Its guidance is sure. Its radiance is beyond trust and contingency as we understand those concepts.

With whom and with what are we in relationship? Can any other question matter? Unless our whole being is devoted to being in relationship with God – that is, with life and with love – than we are not in relationship at all. Everything else is a pale imitation, useful only for reminding us of the timeless love that is our real identity and the real foundation of our being.

When we give attention this way to the other, the other ceases to exist as an object. They are not apart from us, nor we from them. They are here: they are us. The body might be far away – in Alaska or Nepal. It might be buried somewhere in the earth. It doesn’t matter. The other is not a body! No more are we. The love that appears in bodies is a hint, a faint gesture at the love that brings the body forth.

Our salvation, so to speak, is to realize this about our love: that is not about the body, nor about personal relationship even, but about love that is unchanging and everpresent, forever flowing and infusing and inspiring. Nothing else calls to us; the other is simply the wind that blows the door open: a world appears, a universe, and all of it held in the luminous love that for a little while longer we might agree to call God.