Sean Reagan

On How and Why Questions, Cosmic Solipsism, and Emily Dickinson

I have been reflecting for the past week or so on the difference between asking why and asking how, especially as the distinction relates to our various beliefs, especially those we might label “spiritual.”

coffee_metaphysics — Greek coffee in a hand-crafted mug . . . the mug was a gift years ago . . . the coffee a gift only the other day . . .

What are the effects of asking one question rather than another?

Over the past twenty years or so, I have become a fairly competent bread baker. I have read a number of classic texts on baking bread, experimented with dozens of recipes, dialogued with other bakers and made a lot of bread. Nobody would confuse me with an expert or an artisan, but the loaves I make are always eaten quickly. Nobody complains.

Say that you are interested in baking bread. You want to adopt a baking practice of your own. You want to talk to me about my experience. Let’s imagine you can ask me only one of the following two questions:

1. Why do you bake bread?

2. How do you bake bread?

Which would you ask? Why?

The suggestion here is not that one question is better or worse than the other, or that one answer is absolutely right and the other absolutely wrong. The suggestion is merely that the two questions yield vastly different types of answers, and noticing the difference matters.

If you ask the first question, we will have a long discussion about the women who raised me (mothers, grandmothers, and one aunt), 1970s hippies in western Massachusetts, especially the rural hilltowns where I grew up, and Zen. Absent the confluence of those influences then, I would not bake bread now. Ours would be a far-ranging conversation, equal parts biography, social commentary and half-assed eastern theology.

If you ask me the second question, I will give you my detailed basic recipe including ingredients and steps, and share with you the formal recipes from which that formula has been adapted. The dialogue will be pragmatic and concrete, befitting, perhaps, the craft of baking bread.

I don’t know which answer would be more helpful to you. It depends, really, on where you are at in the learning process, how committed you are and a host of other variables I can’t even imagine. That is why I don’t say one question is more valuable than other; they are different. Their value is subjective and contingent.

What happens if we turn this analysis in the direction of spirituality?

Instead of Sean baking bread, say instead we are talking about Sean yoking A Course in Miracles to Heinz von Foerster’s ethical dicta that 1) A is better off when B is better off and 2) always act so as to increase the number of choices.

What happens when we ask: why do you believe that ACIM can be helpfully yoked to Heinz von Foerster’s ethical dicta that 1) A is better off when B is better off and 2) always act so as to increase the number of choices?

What happens when we ask: how do you believe that ACIM can be helpfully yoked to Heinz von Foerster’s ethical dicta that 1) A is better off when B is better off and 2) always act so as to increase the number of choices?

If you try this on your own – I mean really stop reading for an hour or so and look into this on your own – what happens? Think of a fundamental belief you hold and then ask yourself: How do I believe this?

I happen to find “why” questions relatively easy. I can go deeper faster; I don’t lose my self doing so. Thus, when I started to ask “how” questions, things felt . . . unstable, untenable There was a sense of having reached that part of the map that reads “here there be dragons.”

Naturally, others have a different perspective. Again, the point is not to claim the status of right or wrong here but simply to explore the nature of our thinking in order to get closer to its source, and to better understand its mechanics so that we can – in ACIM terms – look at the problem where the problem actually is.

For a while, faced with “how” questions, I tried to pretend they were just poorly-worded variants of “why” questions. The speed with which we leap back to familiar interior ground – often without noticing we are doing so – is remarkable. I’d pose a “how” question and answer with “why am I asking that question” and actually believe I was getting somewhere.

Here is the thing. For me, “how” prompts answers that are – not unlike in the bread-baking example – more pragmatic and concrete than the abstract and argumentative nature of answers to “why” questions.

“How” questions move me into the body and into the world; they move me out of idealizing bread and into both recipe and ingredients. It’s the difference between musing on the nature and evolution of transportation and actually popping the hood of a car to see how it works and actually make it go.

Husserlian bracketing was incredibly helpful with this step: it allowed me to set aside certain questions in order to focus on experience as experience. Later I began to try and sort through the various ways of describing what was happening (as a prelude to responding to, or being in dialogue with, what was happening), and this led me away from A Course in Miracles specifically and religion/spirituality generally and towards material that, while its proponents tend to be frighteningly smart and educated, is actually (for me) much more straightforward.

Take, for example, this comment by Amanda Gefter, in a comment thread attending her essay “Cosmic Solipsism.”

. . . while common sense would suggest that we all live in a single universe and that different observers’ perspectives are merely different descriptions of one and the same reality, the latest advances in theoretical physics suggest otherwise. That is, we can assume . . . that there is one single reality occupied by several observers, but in doing so we actually violate the laws of physics (we clone information, for instance). Put another way, the laws of physics only make sense within a single reference frame at a time. This, to me, is both shocking and profound.

“Shocking and profound” is one way to put it. Another is to admit to a full-fledged existential crisis. Gefter again:

Sure, there are things like shadows and rainbows that only exist in a given reference frame, we thought, but there also other things, real things, like tables and chairs, stars and galaxies, things that exist out there, in the universe, the ontological furniture in the common room of existence. Only now we’ve discovered that the common room is empty. There’s nothing out there. The common room — the universe — doesn’t exist. You’re left with a splintered, illusory, solipsistic reality . . .

Yet oddly – at least for me – once you’re out there in the “splintered, illusory, solipsistic reality,” or once you’ve adapted to being out there, you notice that while the nature of your experience is different, its content is . . . more or less the same. You keep on living, and your living is not so unlike what it was before you stumbled into the empty common room.

Gefter characterizes her own experience of this reality as follows:

My mind is splintered, duplicated, repeated, cast out into universe after universe where it will live all these invisible lives, lives I will never know, a silent echo, and I’ll just be sitting here, in my own solitary world, straining to hear.

For me, it is closer to how Humberto Maturana sees it in his book The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love.” Maturana proposes a “relational space transcending the molecular dynamics that make it possible.”

And we human beings do so in the unity of body and mind through the integration of our emotions and our doings as we live our existence of loving languaging relational-reflective beings, conscious of the nature of our humanness in the deep desire of an ethical coexistence.

It has not stopped mattering to me – exciting me, inspiring me, inflaming me – that however deep the isolation, however terrifying the fractures – love is literally always still there, still functioning as a sort of hefted lantern. It’s like saying the common room can’t be empty because . . . I’m there. And I’m talking to you from within it so . . . perhaps you are there, too, somehow, in a Maturanan “relational space” transcending the banal ontology implied by physics.

Perhaps.

I think thinking this way moves us somewhat into the domain of what Emily Dickinson was getting at with her famous poem “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” Whenever I teach it, I literally fall to my knees. Sometimes I prostrate myself. The students laugh but not nervously; they know my worship is not faked.

In the poem, Dickinson notices how when you take away the light suddenly, our eyes adjust slowly to the resultant darkness. We stumble a little, but as our vision clarifies to the circumstances, we “meet the Road – erect.”

And so of larger – Darknesses –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out – within –

The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –

Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.

How shall we learn to see, you and I?

For me, the move towards “how” has instantiated new ways of seeing experience – or experiencing, if you like, or, to adopt the Dickinsonian mode, learning to see experience – that seem to naturally beget greater degrees of happiness. The darkness does seem to alter, or perhaps we are meant somehow to dwell in uncertainty, and recognizing this allows us to be calmer, quieter, gentler, mellower . . .

Life, it seems, does seem to step “almost straight.” And it does so naturally.

Dickinson again, in another poem from approximately the same time period:

Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved –
The Site – of it – by Architect
Could not again be proved –

‘Tis Vast – as our Capacity –
As fair – as our idea –
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –

To which I can only cry out: but how Emily? But how?

Cooperation and Coordination are Love

Institutions arise out of mutual acts of coordination among individuals who have as their goal a shared beneficence. For example, my neighbor and I have an agreement – I mow his lawn in spring, summer and Fall and he plows my driveway in winter.

The institution is neighborhood, the coordinating mechanism is barter, and the mutually beneficial outcome is obvious.

volunteer_rose — This rose showed up in a corner of the front yard this year . . . a lovely surprise, a welcome unintended visitor . . . and I think of it frequently when I think of how beauty finds a way to come forth in my living, as if insisting I remember – and bring forth in my own inept and stumbling way – love.

I consider this a kind of love. My neighbor and I perceive needs, enter a dialogue, and meet those needs in a way that works for us both. This is possible because of the attention we gave both to our own living and to each other’s living.

The principles that underlie this successful endeavor can be summed up as follows:

1. The question “what do I need” is yoked to “what can I give?”; and

2. The other person is a fellow human observer who could be our own self.

Approaching conflict and problems in this light – with these questions as guides – has helped me to better practically embody these two tenets of Heinz von Foerster:

1. A is better off when B is better off; and
2. Always act so as to increase the number of choices.

The effectiveness of this model is mostly local. My driveway is here; bartering with folks who are one hundred or one thousand miles away is far less likely to be fruitful.

All living is local. We live where our bodies are (but not only where our bodies are) and so love, as an embodied call-and-response in a community, broadly defined, is also local.

But clearly the effects of our living have ramifications beyond what is local. Even if those effects are so subtle as to all-but-unnoticed, they still exist. Von Foerster’s tenets still apply.

Take, for example, the decision to eat almonds. It takes approximately 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond. And the vast majority of almonds are grown in California, a state suffering a long-standing water crisis.

Eating a single almond is not going to make impact that crisis in a substantive way, but cumulative acts of eating – or declining to eat – almonds will.

Our living is not separate from the living of others – humans, animals, plants, et cetera. This is not a mystical observation but rather the recognition that through economic, ecological, political and other networks, we cannot act without effecting, however subtly, the rest of the world.

Thus, Alexandr Kropotkin could say of human solidarity in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution:

It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid: the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.

The suggestion Kropotkin makes – and I make, too – is that this sense of mutuality is natural and inherent. We don’t have to invent it or teach it so much as encounter it and then allow it its full expression. What stands in the way of being kind? What obstructs our awareness of love?

How do we do this? By giving attention to our experience both as individuals and as members of a vast interwoven living collective.

When we perceive a need, be it hunger, safety, comfort, thirst, entertainment, or something else altogether, it’s okay to seek to assuage that need. But in doing so, can we also give attention to what we have to give? Can we ask how the way we meet this need increases the number of choices? Can we ask how meeting it makes others better off as well?

In our current cultural climate, when meeting needs related to the body, we tend to buy stuff – food, drink, clothing, entertainment. Comfort is for sale. But there are other ways: we can make things ourselves, re-purpose something already on hand, trade, barter or potlach or go deeply into the question of whether the need must be met at all.

I am not suggesting that money is evil and fiscal exchanges are evil. Money is just symbolic of rates of exchange, and the exchanges executed are in some sense neutral. However, I do notice that there is something in money – its ease-of-use perhaps, and its symbolic nature – that tends to stymie creativity and generosity that are inherent features of our being.

In part, this is because money quantifies value, and we aren’t good at discerning when this quantification is helpful and when it’s not. It’s fine to say a cup of coffee is worth a buck, and to set that as a rate of exchange. It’s harder to say that I love you X many dollars worth. In fact, it makes no sense at all. Love doesn’t work that way. But we can think it does. We can behave as if it does. And plenty of us do.

So money – indeed, any symbol which we substitute for value in our living – makes it harder to notice the other as a human observer who could be our own self. The focus shifts from the human meeting other human in living relationship in favor of the symbolic exchange. We confuse the two exchanges. We end up craving the symbol – idolizing the symbol – rather than bringing forth the mutual happiness the symbol can deliver.

When we see the other merely as a node in an exchange, readily interchangeable with someone else, the injury is not just to the other but to our selves as well. That is because I am better off when you are better off. Fear of scarcity lessens; envy lessens. When we are happy in a natural serious way we do not perceive one another as competitors but neighbors – as brothers and sisters in an extended family. Our natural empathic abilities are brought forth and what they bring forth in turn is love.

If you are a student of A Course in Miracles you might remember Ken Wapnick’s insistence that the course says nothing about behavior. This is mostly true. But even Ken – especially near the end of his life as his learning clarified – understood the course in terms of relationship. He urged students that whatever they were doing, to make it about the other person. Going out to dinner? Make it about the waitress, the cook, the other patrons. Driving to work? Make the drive about the other drivers. This is entirely consistent with von Foerster’s suggestions. And it is a healthy and helpful way to be an ACIM student, if that is one’s interest.

The metaphysics actually take care of themselves. Either we find satisfactory answers to the questions raised or the questions just stop figuring so intensely in our thinking. What matters is our happiness, at which you are an expert, albeit possibly one who is in denial about her skillfulness. The fruits of happiness are peace and its roots are love. Service – which is simply devoted attention given to the other, who is our self seen another way – is a helpful way to nurture joy.

Thus, we give attention to the other, and to the opportunity the other presents to bring forth in our shared living, relationships of mutual beneficence. You might think of these institutions – these formal notices of love – as “creations.” Trading recipes, watching the neighbor’s dog, listening when you’re tired, sharing the harvest . . . in this way we are being human, which is a way of bringing forth love.

There is Always a Loving Context

There is always a context that is loving. Whatever is happening can be both perceived and understood in terms of love. The work of being human is to clarify our perception and understanding in order to bring forth that love, which inures to our collective benefit.

beauty_context_love — Beauty is often a reminder to me that there is in all that occurs a loving context and the work of being human is to seek this context which is how it is brought forth.

The living that we do often involves pain: we step on a nail, or the car breaks down and our phone isn’t charged, or someone we love deeply dies. Earthquakes and nuclear meltdowns and serial killers pose statistically rare but not theoretical threats. Patterns ranging from alcoholism to depression to longstanding estrangements often wreak havoc on our families and communities.

It seems easy to see a way in which one ought to live in at least a modestly defensive crouch. It seems reasonable to dismiss as naive any suggestion that we can or ought to be happy even in moments of living that are painful.

However, there is a way to live that does not involve an adversarial relationship with grief, scarcity, loss, fear, guilt and so forth. It is to simply give attention to our living as we live, and to notice in particular the way in which love is natural and expressive and present. It turns out that we bring forth love not by invention or effort but by seeing the blocks which impede its free passage. It’s here; our work is to see it in its hereness.

Our search for a loving context takes place in the context of “the other.” “The other” is any person, place, object or idea that we experience as “not-me.” It’s the neighbor who runs his leaf blower during our meditation practice, the rain that falls on our birthday picnic, the cancer cells that overtake the body of our beloved.

Thich Nhat Hanh, whose expression of Buddhism is exquisitely clear and coherent, points out that “when another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.”

We can gently extend this observation to our own self, since we are also inevitably “the other.” Suffering – be it because of an annoying neighbor, a ruined relationship or death itself – is a cry for help.

Here I am thinking of “cry for help” as a plea to be rewelcomed – regathered, reclaimed – into the family of the living. To be held as an equal, not as an oddity or an error, not as “less-than” in some way.

That is, when I experience suffering, I don’t actually need you to explain or correct or minimize or my suffering. Rather, I need you to reaffirm my fundamental equality with you – the radical sameness which is the fundament of our oneness, the community that we are, the unity. The form this affirmation takes will vary but its meaning never does: “you and I are the same, and your suffering is my suffering, and I love you in order to remember I am loved as well.”

A Course in Miracles frames the issue this way. Whatever we experience, be it “a tiny stab of pain, a little worldly pleasure, and the throes of death itself are but a single sound; a call for healing, and a plaintive cry for help within a world of misery” (T-27.VI.6:6).

Therefore, our work as students, is simply to “see forgiveness as the natural reaction to distress that rests on error, and thus calls for help” (T-30.VI.2:7).

Thus, I suggest that our work – what I sometimes call giving attention, or bringing forth love – is to seek in all that occurs a loving context. And it is work. It takes attention, intention, and practice. It is the deliberate offering of love to all beings – maple trees, cancer cells, human beings, elephants, the sea shells and the light of distant stars . . .

Thich Nhat Hanh again.

Through my love for you, I want to express my love for the whole cosmos, the whole of humanity, and all beings. By living with you, I want to learn to love everyone and all species. If I succeed in loving you, I will be able to love everyone and all species on Earth . . . This is the real message of love.

This love – and the work it necessitates in me – is often clearest in my role as a teacher. Students appear in a wide variety of fearful guilty postures: they are angry, smug, brash, aggressive, timid, indifferent, confused, stubborn . . . In time – years of time – I began to perceive how everything that appeared in these women and men arose from fear, which was simply the absence of love, and so my ability to respond to them clarified accordingly. How could it not?

When I am faced with a cry for love, I respond with love, because that is my nature – I am, as you are, homo sapiens amans. And when love is the focus, the form the expression of the need for love and the response to the need for love takes no longer make demands of my energy or attention.

It is like if I am tired and need to go upstairs to lay down in bed and sleep. I don’t look for an elevator that isn’t there. I don’t rearrange all the furniture in the house to accommodate the needs of the moment. I don’t lament my inability to levitate. I don’t pretend I live in a one-story house.

I walk to the stairs and climb them.

So practice love by seeking a loving context. Whatever occurs, whatever happens, whatever appears, whatever arises, there is in it a context of love. By seeking it, you bring it forth, and by bringing it forth, you heal yourself and the other and the world which is your shared reality. Nothing else becomes you.

What Is This Oneness Of Which We Speak

What do we mean when we say “oneness?” When we use that word in a spiritual context, to what does it point? How do we expect folks with whom we are in dialogue to hear and understand that word? How do we want them to hear and understand it?

godly_flowers — some of the lovely flowers with which I have been obsessed this summer . . .

Really, those questions are variants of this one: what is your understanding of that word? If you have had an experience to which that word applies, what was the experience? Why “oneness” and not some other word, like “awakening” or “enlightenment?”

If you have not had an experience to which oneness applies, then to what future experience or state does the word apply? Why do you call that state oneness? Might another word work as well or even better? Or no words at all? Is that even possible? Can something exist that language cannot describe or name or otherwise reach?

And whatever your understanding and relationship to “oneness,” from where did this understanding/relationship come? What person or text or texts gave it to you? Where did they get it? What lexicon? What tradition? And where did that lexicon/tradition get it? How far back can we go? What happens in those deep recesses of the history of human observers observing?

This is a trickier exercise than we might realize. Our understanding of abstract concepts (like oneness or justice or love, say) tend to differ from the understanding of others. A yoga instructor from Brooklyn, a Trappist monk in Kentucky, a physicist at U.C. Berkeley and a student of Rupert Spira in Wales are all familiar with “oneness” but if we graphed their understandings, they would be significantly, even wildly, divergent.

That’s not a problem, by the way. It’s a feature of human language and cognition manifest in spiritual and religious contexts. It’s simply what happens. But it’s not all that happens. We also start subtly believing that our vision is the vision, rendering those other visions and the folks who adhere to them “wrong” or “bad” or “evil” . . .

That kind of thinking affects our behavior and that behavior can cause conflict on a scale ranging from mild annoyance to bullying to genocide.

Thus, questions of coherence and dialogue in a spiritual or religious context are nontrivial and deserve the gift of our attention. Hence this essay: what are we saying when we say “oneness?”

It seems that what is good for a fox is not good for a chicken and vice-versa. Safe chickens mean starving foxes because foxes murder chickens. Justice to a chicken is a dead or otherwise stifled fox. But chickens murder worms and bugs all the time. Are foxes allies to bugs in the war against chickens? And don’t foxes have a right to live, too?

What is justice? What is fair? Who will say? How will we know?

There are many valid questions and moving parts – there is complexity – in coming to an agreement about what a word (justice, fair, oneness, love) means. Meaning is not fixed so much as a process that is open-ended and ongoing. What you and I agree is justice will probably sound quaint and possibly barbaric to folks a thousand years hence.

You might say, well, meaning depends on the context. I wouldn’t disagree. But I would point out that if a word changes depending on context, then its meaning isn’t really one that can be “right” or “wrong” in an absolute sense. The absence of “right” and “wrong” means there is nothing to defend and so nothing to attack.

But most of us don’t believe that. We believe in right and wrong. So we attack and defend. The question is whether this is a constructive way to live.

A number of significant folks in my living are devout and disciplined Buddhists. Is their understanding of “oneness” more or less “right” than the understanding of my father, who was a devout and disciplined Catholic deacon? Was Dad’s understanding better than his son’s, which is grounded in a sort of new-age Christian quasi-scientific melange?

In some domains, like justice, say, humans basically aim for as much consent as possible and make a decision accordingly. For example, we define limited exceptions under which one person may kill another person and, when those exceptions are violated, apply consensual penalties. I stipulate that it’s a far from perfect system, but it is more functional than no system at all.

Can we do that with oneness? Get some general agreement, sketch a broadly-defined thesis, and apply it?

And yet, oneness has been a spiritual ideal for me since my late teens when somebody gave me The Gospel According to Zen by Robert Sohl and I suddenly realized that my Catholic practice and understanding was merely a way of looking at the world, not the way of looking at it, and that other ways might be just as effective, and – critically – that there were probably other filters of which I was unaware.

Oneness has always owned an intuitive appeal, not least because I – like you probably – already think of myself as an individual, as “a one” if not “the one.” This belief inheres in human observers. Here is how A Course in Miracles frames it.

The ego’s goal is quite explicitly ego autonomy. From the beginning, then, its purpose is to be separate, sufficient unto itself and independent of any power except its own (T-11.V.4:4-5).

Thus, any body which the ego claims as its own, “becomes the central figure in the dreaming of the world” (T-27.VIII.1:1).

There is no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream in which it acts as if it were a person to be seen and be believed . . . The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to prove it is autonomous and real (T-27.VIII.1:2, 2:1).

One of the things that has slowly clarified for me in the past ten years – coming somewhat to a lovely, sustainable and ongoing fruition in Cambridge last year – is that the whole, as such, is closed to human observers, and so the best we can do is be as kind and helpful as possible (as happy as possible) within the confines of the experience that we are having. The balance – the ethics, the theology, the metaphysics, et cetera – are naturally addressed when our focus is on happiness.

After that, a lot of the pressure to be right or to get something or achieve something, more or less vanished. You could think of it in terms of the old Zen story: suddenly chopping wood and carrying water was just chopping wood and carrying water and it was okay. It didn’t need to be anything else; indeed, it couldn’t be anything else. Seeing that clearly meant accepting it, and accepting it meant a degree of peace that is remarkably fertile. Life goes on.

Thus, I am far less interested than I once was in hearing what folks think Nisargadatta meant by “oneness” or “the whole”, or what Sri Ramana meant or Krishnamurti or Tara Singh. Nor do I believe that any insights I claim are special or unique.

What is helpful is shifting our focus from the other – the priest, the guru, the author, the savior, the enlightened one – to what we mean by oneness. It is helpful to go very deeply into that and see what happens.

And nobody can do that for us. It is, in a sense, a lonesome valley we are called to walk on our own.

As I have pointed out (because it’s not an especially difficult insight to attain), oneness is more the case than not. Nonduality is a better description and explanation than dualism. But saying so doesn’t make it so and can sometimes even obscure it. So we have to be careful. We have to go slowly.

This summer I have been infatuated with flowers. I am always infatuated with color, especially when it is fleeting (this is one aspect of my obsession with prisms). When I look at a flower, what is going on? Where does the flower begin and Sean end? Is the flower I see an external object or is it merely an image in my brain? Or both? Or something else altogether?

Smart and thoughtful people have made cogent arguments for all those options!

So I set them aside. I don’t want to argue with smart biologists and physicists and neuroscientists. I am neither well-read enough, nor well-educated enough, to do more than listen anyway. So my approach is simply to try and understand what it going on here, in my experience, as it happens.

Is the flower separate from the soil in which it grows? From the water it consumes? The sunlight in which it is nourished? Are the eyes with which I see it separate from the image? Is the body to which the image appears itself an image?

The sun is burning out, right? In five billion years it will be gone. Yet if I look at the sun – if I consider it over the span of my life and my children’s lives and their children’s lives – it is very stable and durable. I can’t perceive the instability even though I know it’s there. I can grasp the idea in a very abstract sense, but I cannot actually perceive it, the way I can perceive a maple leaf turning or a tide rolling out.

Human observers – you and I – are bounded. We can’t breathe in the absence of oxygen. We don’t have wings. We’re relatively smart – we can built things to enable us to breathe underwater or fly across the ocean. We can build computers to do math we can’t do in our own heads. But the perceptual and cognitive limits are still there. We can expand them but not infinitely.

So the suggestion is that perhaps the concept of oneness points to something that we cannot actually perceive. We can be very peaceful and content and happy, and it is my wish that all life attain that state, but is that oneness?

Often when we say “one” or “oneness” what we mean is a set of one, and we are that set. But another way of thinking about oneness is that it is a state of equilibrium. You could imagine many guitar strings resonating harmoniously and thus making one chord.

Jimi Hendrix wanted to bring hundreds of people together will a bunch of musical instruments. Didn’t matter whether they knew how to play them or had musical training or not. Just get everyone together, give them an instrument, and start them playing. At first it would be dissonant and chaotic. But Hendrix believed that after a sufficiency of time, something beautiful and harmonious would emerge, because that was the nature of humans being together and creating together. We listen: we collaborate: we synchronize: we harmonize.

Humberto Maturana characterized this harmony as an “unexpected turn in an always / recursive dancing dance.”

Empty seems human life to be!
Yes! . . . Or rich, in the fullness
of an always changing present
of eating, playing, and kissing.

Perhaps unity is not the single body joined with others in a set of single bodies all together but rather the harmonious being that arises from those bodies in the bringing forth of love, without regard to their spatial and temporal distribution. If we look at it that way, instead of the way we are conditioned to look at it, what happens?

Salvation is a secret you have kept but from yourself. The universe proclaims it so . . . How differently you will perceive the world when this is recognized! (T-27.VIII.12:4-5, 13:1)

I speak merely to a way of living – of bringing forth love – that has been helpful for me. It is to go deeply into the questions that naturally arise as one investigates what it means to be a self among other selves in a world that seems unduly complex and conflicted. There are answers! And there is a way to live in those answer such that problems as such do not arise as obstacles but as opportunities to love, and so what remains is what always was which is love.

Thinking through A Course in Miracles

How shall we organize our thinking? Through what lens or prism shall we allow our thoughts to pass in order to see brought forth clarification and subsequently helpfulness and love?

blue_hydrangea — my favorite color blossoming, the barn just visible beyond . . .

When made the subject of contemplation, clarity begets helpfulness, which initiates service, which is love. Through service the one loves the other and through service that love is reciprocated. Since the peace and happiness which are products of love are together our objective, it behooves us to be clear on how it is brought forth and how it is blocked from being brought forth.

That is why giving attention to how we organize our thinking matters.

Perhaps most importantly, at this phase of our study and understanding, we should also ask: how shall we avoid confusing this lens or prism for that which it produces?

On Selecting a Prism

Most folks who end up reading what I write are students of A Course in Miracles or are thinking about being students of A Course in Miracles or want to understand what, if anything, should come after studying A Course in Miracles.

The course is an example of a prism. It is a way of organizing one’s thoughts in order to clarify them, give attention to what is clarified, and to live in accordance with what is brought forth as it is brought forth.

There are other ways – Buddhism, atheism, social Darwinism, Zoroastrianism, et cetera – and they are each effective and not effective precisely according to the manner and being in which they are brought forth.

One can’t choose the “right” prism; one can only attend the prism that appears. It is attendance that brings forth love – not the prism – but this is a subtle point easily missed, especially when one is evaluating all the many prisms, or lenses, that are presenting.

apaloosa_cross — Jack – an appaloosa cross – leaving the run-in to visit his visitors . . .

The appearance of a prism often takes the form of having to choose it. When this occurs, the so-called decision is only hard if one believes there is in fact a right and a wrong choice and that both are available and each precludes the other.

From a dualistic standpoint, this analysis feels sound, but it is actually not.

Hold the apparent choices in mind and give attention to the one that makes you happy – that is, what makes you feel safest, lightest, most interested, most familiar, most likely to learn something, be of service to others, et cetera.

There is an answer to this question! And when you see this – that there is an answer, and what that answer is – then you also see how the so-called choice was never actually a choice between disparate options but rather a question of attending with diligence, patience and care that which was always so.

It Organizes What?

I have good friends whose lives are “organized” according to the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their thinking includes the nomenclature of addiction and recovery, and the spiritual principles brought forth by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith in the early half of the twentieth century.

I also have good friends whose lives are “organized” according to Mahayana Buddhism; they live in religious communities centered around zazen and sesshin, guided by a hierarchy of teachers and students. The language they use a blend of historical and contemporary Buddhism.

I also have good friends and family members whose lives are “organized” according to Catholicism. I have friends and family members who hew to various progressive strands of Protestant Christianity and Judaism. There are even a few who are evangelical conservatives, whose religion is unabashedly yoked to their support for Donald Trump and the various “Make America Great Again” policies he espouses.

Of course, my own thinking is organized through the prism of A Course in Miracles, a prism that was sculpted to a most helpful degree through my study of nondualism in the western tradition, including in particular second order cybernetics and constructivism.

The prism – be it AA, Buddhism, some strand of Christianity or ACIM – is simply what is helpful. Our lives make more sense in light of it; our confusion abates. We feel, however faintly, some sense of alignment with the universe. We are happier than we were before, and our happiness is not shallow or self-contained but magnifies and extends itself – is manifest in – those with whom we we are bringing forth a world.

Thus, it is okay – more than okay, really – to discard ways of organizing our thinking that are harmful, and to be rigorous in the attention we give to those ways that remain as we discern what makes us happy and what impedes the free flow of happiness.

Confusing Prisms With What They Bring Forth

If I hold an actual prism to the sun, the light passes through it and – by operation of the glass – is separated into its component colors. Rainbows abound. I am never not amazed by this, never not made joyful, in a natural and quiet way.

However, the prism is not a rainbow. It’s merely a tool by which rainbows – otherwise hidden to a given organism – are revealed.

It is important that I not confuse the prism for that which it brings forth.

Say that I organize my thinking according to A Course in Miracles. Forgiveness, atonement, projection, love . . . all these concepts and ideas, when allowed to pass through ACIM, clarify for me, and the clarification is helpful.

“Clarify” in this case means “understand in ways that allow for useful application” and “helpful” means “making the bringing forth of love less effortful.”

The clarification and the love that it brings forth are what matters; I am grateful for the tool but I do not confuse it for the effect it produces. When it rains, we don’t get out a hammer and nails; we move into the shelter the hammer and nails helped build.

bee_on_blossom — a bee near dusk . . . their diligence and focus is amazing to witness . . .

A Zen student might say that one wants to not confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.

I am under no illusion that what is helpful to me will be helpful to you or anybody else. In fact, sometimes the exact opposite is the case. I know this because I directly observe what is helpful for others being not-helpful for me.

For example, I know some folks for whom worship services centered around eating peyote are helpful and bring forth admirable levels of service, insight and peaceableness. It is how they organize their thinking.

Those services do not have the same effect for me. They are scary and destabilizing. To the extent they are helpful it is simply in how obviously they make clear “not this.”

I extrapolate from this that my subjective experience of A Course in Miracles will be seen the same way by at least some other folks. I do not experience this as a crisis! On the contrary, it allows me to relax into a state of gratitude and attention for my path, or prism, or means of organizing my thinking – there is nothing left to defend, and nothing on behalf of which I should proselytize.

Again, the critical element is not the prism but that which the prism brings forth. When we encounter love – in and through communion with others, most of whom are organizing their thoughts with different models (or prisms) than we are – it is the love we experience and accept and extend; not the means by which the love was brought forth in the other (although that may be of subsequent interest).

In other words, I have not lost my friendship with those whose worship includes peyote. I don’t use their prism, and they don’t use mine, but we recognize the love that is brought respectively, and its extension is not contingent on prisms. It transcends experience.

Yes but . . .

little_new_england_cemetery — the little town cemetery on the other side and up on the hill a bit from Main Street . . .

It has been hard for me – and the process is still underway and I suspect will endure so long as the host organism endures – to surrender my inclination to worship/cherish/defend the prism over the beauty the prism brings forth. I am not writing this because the rainbow holds me fast!

This difficulty appears to inhere in homo sapiens. We love our tools and are skilled at studying them in order to improve them, a cycle which often subsumes common sense. Do we really need cars that go ninety miles an hour? Nuclear weapons? Even iPhones seem to be a few dance steps beyond actual utility.

Yet I am grateful that our brains work this way! I am amazed that objects such as scythes and guitars and toilets exist – let alone actual prisms. The problem seems to lie in turning this power of thought, this analyze-to-improve habit to thought itself, which is to say, to being itself. This is how we end up with gods and sacraments and in-groups and inquisitions and so forth.

The “other way,” to which Bill Thetford turned, bringing Helen Schucman along with him, seems to lie in attending the love our living together naturally brings forth, and noticing the fundamental simplicity of this bringing forth, and the way it is not really contingent on what is external – our tools, our shelter, our partners and so forth – but is actually an internal way of seeing or giving attention which is nondual.

Anyway, the point being made in this post is to simply make use of the prism that presents itself to us, ever attending the happiness it naturally brings forth, and allowing that happiness to deepen and expand on itself until the even the prism that initially brought it forth is eclipsed.

A Course in Miracles may be helpful in organizing our thinking, but the real joy is the clear way it brings love and peace through happiness into our living, allowing us to bring happiness unto others. What a world is made accordingly!

On Holy Relationships and Love

. . . in the relational domain of love the other is not asked and is not expected to justify his or her existence . . . love is unidirectional, and occurs as a spontaneous happening of accepting the legitimacy of the other as a matter of course . . .

~ Humberto Maturana

In general, I find it more helpful to think of “holy relationship” and “special relationship” as perspectives rather than fixed objects; that is, they are a way of seeing, rather than a thing seen.

bee_balm — Bee balm, one of my favorite flowers, struggling a little bit in the shady side garden . . .

This is helpful in two ways.

First, it shifts my focus away from the thing seen and back to my own mind, my own perspective, my own seeing. Thus, it places responsibility (response-ability) for love and healing where it belongs – in the mind, rather than in the separate object or image that the self perceives.

In doing so, it renders cause (and thus creation) an interior rather than an exterior process. It reinforces the critical ACIM concept that we cannot be affected by what it apparently outside; only the mind is causative. Only the mind heals; only the mind can be healed.

Taking this approach also means that rather than try to figure out whether an external relationship is right or wrong (or real or not real) I can focus on the helpfulness of a given perspective, and adopt it accordingly. As Francisco Varela points out, what is true is what is helpful. This is such as an important insight!

And what is helpful is what makes us happy, in the deep sense of meaningful work, fructive community, and healthy holistic relationships. Critically, it includes – indeed, is most usefully measured by – the happiness that we bring forth in others.

If one adopts this approach, then there are no holy or special relationships “out there.” Any relationship can be either special or holy depending on how one looks at it, how one perceives its function, what one asks of it, what one is ready and willing to bring to it and so forth.

Further, a relationship that is special at 7 a.m. can be holy at 7:05; and a relationship that was holy last night can become special as soon as the morning alarm goes off.

As well, what you perceive as a holy relationship may easily be perceived as special by me, and vice-versa. Really, what matters is the interior perspective in which the relationship is seen, not what an external observer sees, or how they describe what they see.

This leads to the second helpful aspect of seeing “holy relationship” and “special relationship” as perspectives.

If you and I both look at X and you see “holy” and I see “special,” what does that say about X? And, just as importantly, what does that say about our seeing?

These are important questions, and it worth giving sustained attention to them. They can be doors through which nonduality can be clearly perceived.

It took me years to satisfactorily respond to those questions. When that learning process was finished, I found a new way of thinking about questions like these.

Ever since Aristotle, it has been a staple of western thought that a statement cannot be both true and false. The classic example is “I am a liar.” If it is true, then it is false. But if it is false, then it is true. This is an impossible state of affairs!

However, Chris Fields among other thinkers has argued persuasively – incorporating fairly rigorous logical analysis and the quantum that, in fact, the universe does allow for a statement to be both true and false; that, in fact, this may even be a preferred – or actual, if you like – state of being (the formal name for this is dialetheism; I speak to it . . . humbly).

Even so, a human observers in the ordinary course of their observing cannot see it this way. We can appreciate the concept, but our minds don’t naturally adopt and hold all perspectives; they hold one. And that’s okay so long as we don’t confuse the one we hold for the truth (and, by extension, characterize the perspective of others as false).

Take your perspective seriously but not literally – how much of our living softens when we take this as if it were the law and the prophets . . .

On this view, a relationship is both holy and special. It is a midlife crisis and true love. Yet the splinter we are doesn’t perceive this until – miracle of miracles – we allow the other to be our self in which case, all of a sudden, all of the views are “ours” and peaceably coexist. This is why Humberto Maturana says that love is the consensual coordination of doings with others who could be our own self.

There is neither one nor another, nor one and another, and there is only one and another. In this way, our stranglehold on the external world loosens – or learns that there is nothing to grasp – and love remembers itself all and at once.