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 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 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
twilight looking west . . .
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.
a bee near dusk . . . their diligence and focus is amazing to witness . . .
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 . . .
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!
. . . 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, 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.
It can be helpful to see both history and present events not in terms of people but of currents; often the current gets a face – Jesus, say, or Buddha – but it is still a current, not an individual. And the current is merely a pattern in life, broadly defined, which is in motion, albeit at paces which are often outside our perceptual – and even cognitive – range.
Still silent Buddha beside the trail to the river . . .
Jesus, for example, was the public face of a Jewish movement that was both religious and political. He arose from cultural circumstances that he did not create but with which he was in relationship. Absent the men and women – Jewish and Roman and other – who were doing their living the way they were doing it at that time in that place, Jesus could not possibly have been Jesus. He was not meaningfully separate from his era; he cannot be meaningfully separated from history.
Bob Dylan once remarked that if he hadn’t come along doing the Woody Guthrie/socio-political folk/ rock’n’roll thing, then somebody else would have. He meant simply that it was an error to focus on him so intensely; the real point was that the movement of the music and the culture were not the work of the one but of the many. He was, he said, more like a link in a chain than the chain itself, or that which brought the chain into being.
On this view, the “one” – Jesus, say, or Bob Dylan – is less a cause of events and more of a face that one uses so as not to lose the narrative thread comprised by those events. The “hero” is not causative; people working and living and loving together are causative. Circumstances arises collectively. The hero is the stand-in so we can keep the story intact and accessible.
Why does this matter? What relevance does it have for us as we think through our spirituality and practice?
I am proposing a shift in thinking: that we think of ourselves not as separate discrete beings but as aspects of Being, no one of which is more important or helpful or necessary or meaningful than another. When we make this shift, our priorities shift in favor of love, and the effect is is a natural and serious happiness that is shared.
When I sit by the brook and give attention to the pools and currents before me, I notice there is one brook. There is one body of water flowing. Yet within that one body – that one movement – there are all these various sub-movements, swirling and spilling in and out of one another.
These eddies have their own form which unfolds in time; in this sense, they have their own separate identity. They beget other eddies and ripples, catch drifting twigs and leaves and carry them forward, unwind in the shallows, sink in the white water.
Yet the eddy’s existence is forever contingent on the brook. It is always just the brook being the brook a certain way for a few moments. The eddy dissolves but the brook doesn’t – the flowing water keeps on flowing. Water is still water.
Wherever one looks, there is Christ . . .
I am proposing that we see our own being as akin to an eddy in a brook. The atoms of which our bodies are comprised will decohere in time and recohere in other forms.
When the body goes, the mental psychological narrative that feels so essentially us – the ego, in ACIM terms – is going to dissolve as well. But what aspects of it were truly “ours” in the first case? Weren’t they just images and words and ideas which were floating through the culture? And won’t they keep floating after we’re gone? When the batteries run down in a radio it goes silent but music isn’t destroyed. It just plays on other radios. You can’t destroy music.
Our focus on heroes – on individuals – reinforces the concept that we are ourselves either heroes or followers. Competition, discord, and confusion tend to flow from this hierarchal, patriarchal belief system. Again, from a narrative perspective it’s functional. The problem comes when we think it reflects an actual independent objective reality.
So to think in a new way – one in which we are aspects of a collective – nodes, rather than separate discrete entities – inverts our traditional notions of self and body and world, and it isn’t easy. One has to work through the material in order to become convinced of its utility. And then one has to be vigilant in order not to slip back into old ways of thinking. It is eminently doable but it’s challenging.
Programs like A Course in Miracles exist to help us with this shift in thinking. Of course, the risk is that they become idols themselves; systems that we have to defend. If you find yourself arguing with somebody over whose interpretation of ACIM is right, then you’ve lost the thread. Step back, refocus, and then go on in love and kindness. It really doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing with the course; what matters is what you are doing, and what you are doing is easily evaluated: is it helpful? Is it – in a deep and serious way – making you happier?
But even that is to put too fine a point on the learning process envisioned by A Course in Miracles. In fact, the more pragmatic aim of the course is to introduce you to a teacher, and that teacher will advance the curriculum accordingly in an interior way. You are not responsible for your happiness! But you are responsible for your study, for the attention you give to your teacher, and whether you will practice what she suggests you practice. Once you have undertaken the course in the form of ACIM, then you are responsible for responding to the material in a way that evokes – clearly and sustainably – your inner teacher.
Have you met your teacher? Not the human stand-in – Ken Wapnick or Tara Singh, say – but the one the course calls the Holy Spirit? That is really all that matters. If you haven’t, it’s worth looking into what, if anything, you might do to facilitate the meeting. And if you have had that meeting, then it’s worth committing in a radical way to the new learning experience that naturally evolves from being in relationship with this teacher.
We do not become Jesus through the course. In fact, Jesus is eclipsed by the course. It is akin to the Buddhist concept that if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Jesus is a big draw but once you commit to learning, he more or less recedes. The course is not about aligning with the right historical figures or narrative traditions: Jesus, Saint Paul, Thomas Merton, Ken Wapnick, David Hoffmeister, Christianity, Advaita Vedanta, et cetera. Rather, it is about taking the teacher who points to the deeper currents and, in pointing to them, points beyond them as well.
Imagine that we are on the beach watching surfers. They wear colorful neoprene suits and balance on vividly painted boards. They are elegant and athletic and beautiful.
petals fall off flowers to rest briefly on the porch but the world is not fallen and we are not fallen . . .
As we watch them, as we delight in watching them, someone comes along and invites us to give attention to the waves themselves. The surfers are cool, they say, but the waves . . .
So we do – we give attention to the waves. And the waves are magnificent – they are enormous, powerful, sensual. They astound us by transcending us. We cannot take our eyes off them. That such natural beauty and power should exist in the world . . .
As we watch in awe, we are then asked to consider not the waves but the sea itself. Yes, the waves are incredible, we are told, but the sea is so vast and complex . . .
And so we do – we give attention to the sea. And the sea is enormous and mysterious and . . .
How far can this pointing go? How deep will the Holy Spirit take us?
How far are we willing to go?
Generally, our attention is given to the world. We see its injustices and travesties, say. We see the daily grind of chores and errands. We like our morning coffee, don’t like our morning commute. We see the many layers of relationship. We see the needs met, and the needs unmet, and we work strenuously to redress the perceived imbalances.
And then the Holy Spirit comes along – our teacher if we are tracking A Course in Miracles – and says, “yes, that’s all well and good, but let’s go a little deeper. Let’s look at the currents.” And then it invites us to go even deeper, and deeper yet.
Eventually, our attention ceases to take critical notice of the world. It’s there but our attention is moving towards the sources of this world. We begin to actually understand the external world is a reflection of internal conflicts. And more and more we give attention to those conflicts. They arise from fundamental emotions: fear, love, lack of trust, infantile spiritual hungers . . .
A Course in Miracles is a practical tool for learning how to go very deeply into this interior, into these primal psychological origins, in a way that eventually safely and coherently plunges us past all conflict, and into the eternal wellspring of peace and joy and happiness. It restores us to the love that is our natural inheritance.
And, mirabile dictu, there is no Buddha there! There is no Jesus. No Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie. Not even the cultural currents that begat those identities remains. Love is simpler than that. True inclusivity undoes that which it welcomes so that what remains is only love.
what dies, dies, and what lives, lives, and what neither dies nor lives goes on . . .
This serenity waits only our care-filled study. It awaits only our commitment to learning, which is to say, it waits only unequivocal trust placed in our teacher, who cannot fail. Shall we let go of history, our own and the world’s to boot? Shall we let go of the old stories and attend only the still quiet voice for God?
I extend my hand to you. I, too, am scared; I, too, am learning to trust; I, too, am not ready to go alone into the valley. I ask you to go with me: to trust me that I might trust you. We have come so far together, sometimes hand-in-hand, sometimes at distances it seemed we could not bridge.
But now – so close to the end, so near the final wall of fog and bracken – shall we bind ourselves, one to the other – and go on in love to the Love in which we were never separated to begin?
Helen Schucman wrote A Course in Miracles and projected responsibility for that project onto her ideal of Jesus. Because the course is so helpful to me, I am deeply grateful to her for seeing the work through, and am not especially concerned about the ethics and particulars of her writing process. You do what you have to do to express what you have to express. That is what healing is.
However, once you disentangle the text (by which I mean all three primary volumes of the course) from a historical and agentic Jesus, then your own responsibility towards study, learning and application are clarified. You are called to meet the course where you see it (a corollary to the principle that the course meets you where you are). Being right or wrong about it, getting it or not getting it . . . these fall away as your attention is directed to your own experience of being a student, which is neither right nor wrong but simply is. Attention becomes the teacher and it is always instructive.
The question becomes: is the course helpful? Is a given teacher or approach helpful? And, of course, how are we defining “helpful?”
The course is “helpful” to the extent it makes us happy in a natural serious way. This should not be conflated with feeling good all the time. Part of being happy means accepting periods of struggle and confusion and grief with equanimity and honest inquiry; part of being happy means looking closely at interior material that is frightening or offensive in order to see past it to the love that is our “natural inheritance” (T-in.1:7). “This course has explicitly stated that its goal for you is happiness and peace” (T-13.II.7:1). Thus, the text observes that . . .
. . . delay of joy is needless. God wills you perfect happiness now. Is it possible that this is not also your will? And is it possible that this is not also the will of your brothers? (T-9.VII.1:7-10).
Happiness is not an object one has or doesn’t have. It’s not an event or outcome that meets our personal preferential standards. Rather, it is a process in which one finds oneself, an inclusive flow through which one’s living filters in helpful, nurturing and quietly joyous ways.
Note too that “happy” in this instance also means “having happiness to give.” In general, we know we are happy less by how we feel and more by how we make others feel. This can be a challenging shift in thinking for a lot of us – truly it was (and is) for me – but nonetheless, it matters. Happiness is what we share, not what we have. And paradoxically, it is only by giving it away without qualification or condition that we actually have it.
To gain you must give, not bargain. To bargain is to limit giving, and this is not God’s Will (T-7.I.4:3-4).
Again, I am talking about the deep happiness envisioned by A Course in Miracles, not the shallow ersatz imitation promulgated and sold by the world. The love we are given is not limited by formal constraints. It heeds none of the limits we impose on it; it doesn’t even notice these limits.
If we attend to this serious happiness, then it will in turn attend to us, and then everything will fall into place. Our practice, our metaphysics, our ideals, our understanding our unconscious drives . . . By this I mean simply that concepts of oneness, Heaven, awakening from the dream and so forth will naturally clarify. We already know what we need to know; we experience what we need to experience because that is the experience we are having. This is always unique to us, always perfect, and always helpful.
When we see our living this way, and live authentically from that seeing, then we are – in ACIM parlance – a Teacher of God. We no longer perceive another’s interest as separate from our own (M-1.1:2). All that matters then is the extension of love and peace, which are the fruits of forgiveness, which is itself a fruit of our reliance on a power that is – to paraphrase Saint Paul – in us but not of us.
A Course in Miracles is an invitation to live this life in a new way, one that is premised on love, simplicity, kindness, generosity, service, inclusiveness and trust. It is a practice of radical honesty and inquiry. The form this learning-to-live-in-love takes naturally varies according to context, but the content – to borrow a time-honored course trope – will be the same.
The form of the course varies greatly. So do the particular teaching aids involved. But the content of the course never varies. Its central theme is always, “God’s Son is guiltless, and in his innocence is his salvation” (M-1.3:2-5).
Thus, in my stumbling stuttering way I manifest simplicity and generosity and kindness by writing and homesteading – raising as much of our food as possible, contributing to local economic structures that undo pernicious national and global structures, etc. Somebody else achieves the same effect driving a cab. Somebody else by practicing medicine. Someone else with their saxophone. And so forth.
The question is not the form but the content, and so it is only that to which our attention is directed. One might think they are attracted to homesteading because the work is honest, the diet healthy, the economics more virtuous and the communal aspects more moral but, in fact, it’s simply because that homesteading is where love appears in this case most clearly and pragmatically, and so naturally one goes there. Naturally one does their living there. Naturally – indeed, inevitably – one brings forth love there.
And what does this bringing forth love teach us? That love, as such, is not limited to the homestead or to homesteading. It is everywhere. It spills and overflows and illuminates and slakes and blesses literally everything. It lights up our little self and our little world and in its radiance we understand that this beam reaches contexts we cannot even imagine.
Little by little we surrender to this love and, like a beneficent sea, it lifts us and carries us gently beyond our perception of limitations, our small designs and plans, our secrets and lies, and our fear of death and hell.
The work, then, is to simply attend our own gardens and not worry too much about what others are up to. Helen Schucman brought forth love in the form of A Course in Miracles through what one might reasonably call confusion about authorship. It doesn’t matter! What matters is that the course is here, and that it is up to us to contextualize it, to bring it into application in our own living that we might dream a dream of happiness and peace with one another and then wake up . . .
What is helpful? What makes you happy? To what life does your intuition direct you? Our responsibility is to our own surrender and our own giving of attention. That’s all. Things work out, and then things just . . . disappear, leaving only love. We are together learning – and living together as one – this very fact.
