Sean Reagan

When we encounter ourselves as less than perfectly-loving – which, if we are honest, is most of the time – there are two coherent responses. The first is not to freak out. The second is to do better.

That is what it means to actively practice the principle of forgiveness in A Course in Miracles.

We don’t freak out because drama – spiritual or otherwise – tends to be a distraction. Getting hung up on our flaws and shortcoming is a zero sum game: there are always going to be flaws and shortcomings. Giving our attention to them in the form of self-hate and self-improvement and so forth is just another way of focusing on ourselves rather than others. It’s just another way to ignore our brothers and sisters.

Really, when we perceive ourselves as imperfect – whether in our thoughts or our actions – we are just seeing the way in which we are touched by – effected by – living the shadows of – separation. This is what it looks and feels like for everyone. We aren’t special. If we are cool and collected when the separation shows its fangs, then we will understand we aren’t being singled out, and we won’t need to make it a big event. It’s like if you are taking a shower and you drop the soap: you don’t pray or call a psychotherapist. You pick up the soap.

It is okay – it is more than okay – to just get on with our living. Or – better – to let living get on with us.

So that’s the first coherent response: we don’t freak out.

The second response is that we just do better. Wherever we are falling short, we just fall less short less often.

For example, I am not naturally a patient person, especially when it comes to the domain of ideas. I want people to understand things the way I understand things and I want that to happen now. A lot of students and friends and so forth have struggled with this quality of mine over the years.

The point is not for me to become perfectly patient but rather to be more patient – and to be aware of when I am being impatient so that I can curb it.

This, too, is not a big deal.

There are all kinds of reasons why I am not patient – some are biological and chemical, some have to do with how I was raised, some are just my own psychological effluvia built up over the years. Taken together, these are actually effective explanations for my impatience. You could say, well, it makes sense that you’re impatient. It’s okay.

But really, who cares? The point is not to justify my imperfection, or understand my imperfection, or even explore my imperfection. The point is to notice it, not get hung up on it, and consistently do better.

So that is our ACIM practice of forgiveness: we decline to overreact and sincerely try to do better. Int his way, we become responsible for our own thinking and stop blaming our unhappiness and guilt and fear on external sources. What remains is peace and joy.

A Course in Miracles teaches that we are entitled to the “perfect comfort” that comes with “perfect trust” (T-2.III.5:1). What does it mean to be trusting? And, perhaps more to the point, in who or in what shall we place this trust?

To trust is to have faith in the reliability or fidelity of something perceived to be external to us. It reflects a level of confidence – to confide in – and thus owns a certain intimacy. To trust is to accept that notwithstanding uncertainty, what occurs will be okay, or even more than okay because our interests and the other’s do not significantly diverge.

The course invites us as students to trust the Holy Spirit, to take that spirit as our teacher, and to entrust to that spirit the whole of our learning process, without qualification or condition. We are assured that doing so is not an error and is, in fact, the most efficient way to remember oneness.

The Holy Spirit is the only Therapist. He makes healing clear in any situation in which He is the Guide . . . Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God (T-9.V.8:4-5, 11).

In course terms, the Holy Spirit perceives the world of form and uses it in order to point beyond that world to Love, which is our natural inheritance. This works because the Holy Spirit is Love, and is in us in a very real and tangible way and so we, too, are love, or creations of love.

So all that really happens as a consequence of our study is that we remember what we naturally are, and accept it as our identity, and henceforth live from that knowledge. Trust expands from “in” a being or deity and reaches the whole of our living, without limit or qualification. This is love.

So the suggestion here is that whatever “trust” is going on in our lives – that our debit card will work, that our partner will be on time for dinner, that our ACIM book isn’t going to suddenly turn into gibberish – are symbolic of the only trust that matters which is trust in the love brought forth in our living together in a consensual harmonious way.

Even our trust in the Holy Spirit is fundamentally a matter of trusting this love.

So the suggestion is that we actually formally trust this love. Let go, however briefly, of the symbols and forms that are its stand-ins, and really trust love. Even if this love – which is not of a body for a body – is not yet precisely or perfectly or presently our experience, this practice can still be fruitful because all communication is premised on trust.

That bears repeating: “communication is based on trust.”

When we trust the one with whom we communicate – a friend, a teacher, the Lord on high – then our communication is open and honest. We don’t judge what is communicated in advance – playing one aspect of it up, downplaying another. Our communication becomes utterly dialogical, utterly given to healing in and through mutuality, openness, consent, attention . . .

That is relatively straightforward as a concept, but how do we bring it into application, as Tara Singh used to say? That is, how we do allow the concept to inform our experience of living, of bringing forth love in our living?

Let’s say that space and time are user-generated interfaces which are functional but not truthful, and that the discrete selves populating that interface, and to whom that interface appears, are actually aspects of the interface. They are not separate from it.

Whatever reality is, it’s not what we perceive and think about. That’s the screen – the story – that obscures reality.

So long as one is clear that we’re looking at a screen and a story on that screen, then it’s not really problematic. But if one believes that the screen and the story are themselves reality, then problems emerge. In ACIM parlance, one becomes separated. And the separation is painful.

It is very hard on this view to be trusting.

On the view that we are actually separate and discrete, and what is happening is a reflection of what is true, then it makes sense to value communication as embodied (in cultures, communities, selves). Then at best death does end the familiar and useful mode, necessitating some new mode.

On the view that what is one cannot be separated, and thus cannot actually experience loss or sacrifice, then communication is always something other than the language-based exchange between separate entities that death appears to obliterate.

I am wondering if, because it is clear that death does not end communication, that rather than question the nature of communication, one should instead question the nature of death.

To the body, death will always be a terminus. To the body, other bodies will always be subject to evaluation in terms of needs perceived to exist in this body. To the body, the self will always be local, able to comment only on what the body, by virtue of its perceptual and cognitive limits, allows according to its time and space-based coordinates.

The question is whether there is another way to see? Can we see in a more global way? A cosmic way? Can oneness, or love, be the perspective?

The suggestion is: yes, it can be, but one has to trust it. When we do, insights are given which – and instructors are given who – point gently beyond the body.

A while back I had the insight that who was special to me went with me regardless of whether we were in actual dialogue or physical proximity. I don’t mean that “Other” and “Sean” were two units now unified as one (OtherSean), like two balls of clay combined to make a single mug.

Rather, I mean that the separate units are functional illusions behind which unity rests patiently, and in which the illusion of separation was easily discarded because it lacked utility.

This unity, as such, encompasses everything.

The work is how to live from that insight, where living is brought forth in and as bodies for whom conflict appears as a natural phenomenon, and separation an actual limitation on communication and loving, always understanding that the appearance helpful or unhelpful, but not true.

A Course in Miracles is helpful to me in this specific way. It says, here is a practice that will help you navigate the world of separation in a way that undoes your belief in separation while strengthening your intuition that only love is real.

In his essay “Physics and Mind: Minding Quanta and Cosmology” Karl H. Pribram suggests that brain is to mind as person is to experience. As he puts it, somewhat inelegantly, you can eat a brain but you can’t eat experience.

Zombie inferences aside, I think this is an interesting way to think about what it means to approach our living together as human beings who live together and bring forth love in their shared living, especially if one of our lenses for that living happens to be A Course in Miracles.

Pribram is saying that a brain “minds” in a way similar to how a person “experiences.” On this view, “mind” is a process from which discrete moments may be isolated and examined without inhibiting its fundamental dynamism.

For example, you can give particular attention to your feelings for a certain person, place or thing. You can isolate those feelings and study them and reflect on them. What do they mean, what behavior do they suggest, how they have changed – but the flow of experience itself does not stop. It goes on in the form of reflecting and studying itself.

In the next moment, you might study and reflect on this “study and reflection,” but to the same effect. Experience is continuous and reflexive; it doesn’t have any gaps.

It is tempting to try and find a unified stable observer in all of this – the one who is looking at the flowing, evaluating the flowing, and directing the flowing. But the observer is basically the mechanical body; what is conscious and aware of its consciousness is the observing, the observing looking at observing.

In this way, there is a sense of there being a discrete observer and a discrete observed – the one who observes a certain relationship, say. But even as this seems to be a fair description of our experience of our experiencing, it is not actually sustainable. The separation that is implied is an illusion; it may be functional or even inevitable, but it is not veridical. Observer, observing, and observed arise in a simultaneous triadic way. Linear and hierarchical models of perception and cognition are simply means of organizing what arises and are helpful in certain contexts; they are not 1:1 reflections of Truth.

Critically – to Pribram’s point – we can’t eat this arising! We can’t make it stop or start, slow down or speed up. We can’t make it rain when the garden’s dry or sunny just in time for the picnic. We can certainly give attention to it in a thoughtful way (we can organize it and reflect on the mode of organization) but even if we don’t give attention, attention keeps on giving itself, just somewhat less thoughtfully, somewhat less aware of its givingness.

If we really look into this, and if our looking is clear and subject to contemplation, then we will see that whatever we are is basically “along for the ride.” We aren’t the driver and we aren’t the car. We are riding. Riding riding.

On the other hand, we are not just “along for the ride.” We are not merely “along for the ride.”  Within proscribed boundaries, we are able to act. In the present metaphor of riding in a car, we can roll the window down and stick our heads out. We can look right or left; we can play games; we can nap. That is, there are things we can do with our living – make phone calls, bake bread, extend certain invitations, decline others . . .

Ultimately, this domain of available actions is what allows us to ask questions about our living and to seek “better” and “better yet” and “best” ways of being and bringing forth love.

For some of us, the “ride” includes a spiritual template and applications. We understand it in terms of atonement, forgiveness, Jesus or the Buddha, meditation, past lives, karmic debts and so forth. Asking “why” this is so does not matter (though it is not an uninteresting question) so much as considering “how” we interact and engage with this “spiritual” template and its applications.

Ask: do you have some sense of what it means to be holy? To live in a spiritual or godly way?

It is okay – it is more than okay – to privilege our interior sense of holiness, if one exists. It is okay to let the inner lamp shine on our subjective sense of Christ and Buddha and others, folding and enfolding their many scriptures, including A Course in Miracles, and see what happens when we do.

We should not worry about whether we are “getting it” in the way Ken Wapnick or Tara Singh or Nisargadatta or Henri Nouwen or Thomas Merton “got it.”

Really, A Course in Miracles is like a radio and our experience of it as students is the music the radio plays. You want a good radio, but only so you can listen to good music. When the radio plays Tom Petty or Lady Gaga or Beethoven we don’t gawk in amazement at the radio. It’s not writing and performing anything. It’s the artists and their music that inspire us.

Thus, A Course in Miracles is a means to an end; getting worked up about it as anything other than a means is like worshiping a hammer and nails while it rains instead of ducking into the shelter the hammer and nails helped build.

So what is the end? Where are we going with A Course in Miracles?

In my experience, we are learning how to make sustainable contact with our inner teacher, which the course calls “Holy Spirit” but which I have more helpfully thought of as “attention.” Obviously your experience will vary; obviously your semantic preferences may not align with mine.

What does that teacher teach us? What does she offer that deepens our understanding and living?

She teaches us how to bring forth love in our living, and to understand that this bringing forth of love is a kind of opening-out in which the appearance of our separate interests dissolves and our fundamental unity and mutuality is remembered.

Oneness is not an illusion. It is not merely an ideal. Nor is it a personal experience to be hoarded or squandered or celebrated. It is the foundation of our existence and is often obscured by our confused identification of self as permanently located in and as a body. We conflate the song with the radio on which it plays.

Or – on Pribram’s view – we fail to distinguish between brain and mind and focus only on what we can eat. When we do this – when we fall prey to this error – we do becomes zombies, mindlessly staggering through a world whose value is perceived only in terms of what we can get for ourselves.

If mind can be reduced to a brain, or self reduced to a discrete body, and we are thus discrete bodies in a world of limited resources, then this zombified approach is not illogical. Defense and attack make sense. We have to look out for number one. Anything else is irresponsible.

But if we are implicated in a unity, a nondual mutuality, and that is our identity, then our behavior and priorities and understanding will naturally change. The meaning of our existence will change. It will become more loving and generous and forgiving (both in the course sense and the traditional sense). It will become radically inclusive.

We will stop being zombies and become something closer to saints. We will leave a world of sacrifice and scarcity in favor of the Garden, where separate interests are not idealized and service to one another is a joyful – indeed, a holy – responsibility.

Of course, it is relatively easy to write and talk this way. It is orders of magnitude harder to bring into application, in part because of the temptation to stop and put up tents at one’s personal sense of awakening as a personal accomplishment. We’re going to sell as many books as Eckhart Tolle, have a daily stream of admirers like Nisargadatta, indulge our sexuality like Osho . . .

We might instead think of awakening – the realization of the unity implied but not revealed by our human experience – less as some triumph of the self reflected in worldly terms than as simply getting off the train at a given destination. We scrimped and saved, bought a ticket, got to the station, boarded the train, rode the train and now we are here!

And then – after the amazement of “here” subsides, which it will – our living goes on, more or less as it always has, and which it will do until it doesn’t, and other living rises in its place.

I am suggesting awakening less as as something mysterious and rare and more as just a natural realization of what was always the case. The altar as such is everywhere which means that there really isn’t an altar.

In other words, the work is basically figuring out how to be loving in a world that is often indifferent to love and sometimes outright hostile towards it. We have to work it out where and as we are; there is no other way and nobody else to do it. Just give attention to what is helpful; be happy; make your living about your brothers and sisters.

If one looks at the course and at learning in this way, and if one takes Pribram’s sense of being into account (you can eat a brain but you can’t eat experience), then a lot of the pressure of living eases. As it does, love flows through, in and of itself. It’s doing so anyway; our work really is to get out of the way.