Sean Reagan

Yet ask: if stability is a “user-generated illusion that is helpful,” then what is stillness? After all, I have said and not retracted this:

The you you think that you are – this body, this personality, this history – isn’t God. Rather, the stillness inside us – the deep center from which all peace springs – is God. It is there waiting for us. It never changes. It saves us from the world and it saves us from the mortal self in which we have so long been deceived.

And what exactly is A Course in Miracles getting at with its description of a dwelling places that never changes?

There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten . . . There is a place in you which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard. There is a resting place so still no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to gladden God . . . (T-29.V.1:11-3).

We might say that stillness is a user-generated concept that pacifies a restless mind by referencing a natural state of restfulness.

That is, the idea of stillness that is awakened by the word “stillness” functions as a reminder that we can experience quiet and inner peace and also functions as a trigger to enact that experience in a felt way.

Our minds are busy, but they don’t have to be. Our minds are full but they can empty themselves. The Buddhist concept of mind as a lake is helpful here. Worry and anxiety are like currents which stir up the silt and make the lake cloudy and dark. When those currents subside, the lake is clear and shimmering, perfectly reflecting all that appears before it.

As centuries of meditators and contemplatives have demonstrated, it is possible to learn how to quiet the mind. It’s not a religious or spiritual feat; it’s a human practice that makes us more peaceful (or still, if you like). And that peacefulness (or stillness) in turn allows our natural inclination to be kind, generous, patient, forgiving, creative, helpful – in a word, loving – to flow more readily. That flowing is a form of healing, of cleansing. It heals our split mind by allowing us to remember in greater and greater clarity the oneness that is our shared actuality.

It’s true that A Course in Miracles doesn’t advocate a formal meditation practice. But to adopt this as a rule means ignoring a couple of important aspects of the course.

First, the course is confused – because its author and editors (Schucman, Thetford and Wapnick) were confused – about the body. They were intellectuals whose milieu was academia; they prized thought. Like a lot of western theological thinkers, their thinking basically eclipsed the body. As I have said elsewhere, the course really perpetuates the old and unhelpful Christian dualism of spirit vs. body. There is nothing unusual about this, and none of us are immune to that type of thinking, but that doesn’t make it helpful.

So part of a sound and holistic ACIM practice is about making space for our bodies without getting worked up about whether they’re real or unreal, or whether Christ is in them or not in them or anything like that. The body is present; we have to let this be the case, live our living, and see what happens.

It is far less a dilemma than the course – and Christianity generally – have made it seem.

Second, although the workbook lessons never explicitly say so, they clearly imply that quiet time given to contemplating oneness – with God, with Creation, with the Other – is fundamental to our learning process. The curriculum is not complete without this practice. We have to make a quiet interior space in which learning can both occur and stabilize.

No more specific lessons are assigned, for there is no more need of them. Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God and your Self when you retire from the world, to seek reality instead. He will direct your efforts, telling you exactly what to do do, how to direct your mind and when to come to Him in silence, asking for His sure direction and His certain Word (W-ep.3:1-3).

We can quibble about semantics (it’s a beloved game to be sure) but this is clearly a call to contemplative prayer, to meditation, to stillness.

Is there something beyond all this? Beyond the body, other bodies, the world, the universe? In a sense to ask that question that way is to miss the point. The course is about remembering peace through forgiveness which is the intentional practice of overlooking error in order to perceive our shared interest in love. That is our practice. And our practice of forgiveness – which is our enacted experience in the world – is nurtured by shared contemplative prayer which is our communion with God. Do the work – attend the process – and let the spiritual chips fall where they fall.

As to whether anything lies beyond this remembered love . . . Does it matter? Again, our work is simply to be attentive to one another, in a forgiving way, and to see what happens when we do. “What happens” is not of our own doing – we aren’t responsible for it. Service and that which keeps us fit for service is imperative – taking care of our brothers and sisters and allowing them to care for us.

God will come to you only as you will give Him to your brothers. Learn first of them and you will be ready to hear God. That is because the function of love is one (T-4.VI.8:4-6).

Give the gift it was given you to give. Make others happy by seeking with them – by enacting with them – the Kingdom of God. Our shared practice of helpfulness in time reveals the stillness upon which our living rests. That stillness, once revealed, will gently encompass us, ending both inquiry and conflict.

Let’s say – more or less adopting Humberto Maturana’s phrasing – that love is the consensual coordination of doings among observers, each of whom could be the other.

On this view, love is basically the embodied enacted agreement, tacit or otherwise, to cooperate with one another in the activities that are our living and give rise to our world. The grounds for this agreement (which excludes nothing, i.e., it includes rocks and quasars and clams and giraffes and marigolds et cetera) are that any perceived differences in form, while apparent, are not in and of themselves proof of any actual separation. Thus, who helps another helps her own self. Who makes another happy makes her self be happy.

We can expand this by saying – again, in concert with Maturana – that this definition of love is not a question of philosophy or some other abstraction but rather of biology. That is, love is a natural extension of stucturally-determined experience, and when it is not extending itself, something has interfered.

Daily life shows us that even though we live in war and hurt each other, we are loving animals that become bodily and psychically ill when deprived of love, and that love is both the first medicine and the fundament for the recovery of somatic and psychic health. We are love-dependent animals at all ages. Indeed, most if not all human suffering arises in the negation of love and is cured through the restoration of love (Maturana The Origin of Humanness).

A possible analogy might be vision. Our eyes don’t “choose” to see. Seeing is what eyes do because that is how they are made; it is what they are for (see also T-24.VII.6:2). Their function arises from their design and construction and cannot be meaningfully separated from it. You and I, as human observers, naturally extend love. This is, as A Course in Miracles points out, our “natural inheritance” (In.1:7). It arises as a consequence of our design (and we are not the designer/author).

What, then, is the problem? If love is a natural extension of our very structural existence, then why is so much of our activity, and so many of the systems to which we are subject, basically unloving? Why do they make love so difficult?

This is a good question! We became students of A Course in Miracles, followers of Buddha and Jesus, participants in psychotherapy, yoga practitioners, vegetarians and Tantric sex partners because of it. And yet the hurt and unhappiness go on. Why is it so hard, this thing that – in our brain, in our heart, in our gut, in our soul – it seems should be so natural and effortless?

A Course in Miracles suggests that our awareness of love is blocked, and so we’ve forgotten it even existed, much less bother living in, as, and through it. An eye is made to see. But if you put a blindfold over it, then it won’t see. Its function hasn’t changed. Its natural abilities aren’t ruined. It’s just that their extension and application has been stymied.

Something like that is going on with love.

By and large, we aren’t happy, and our unhappiness is related to what blocks the free expression and extension of our natural inheritance which is love. We don’t need to learn what love is or improve our ability to love or anything like that. We just need to remove the blocks to its natural extension. We need to give attention to practices and systems that are unjust, inefficient, and dysfunctional. Navigating the world is harder than it ought to be. And even if we aren’t personally in crisis, it’s easy enough to point out who and what is. Look at the Middle East (it’s on fire). Look at the coral reefs (they’re dying). Look at the tiger population (it’s dwindling). And so on.

The occasional bright spot aside, something is not working well (or at least not working as well as it could). If love is what we are, we seem to have found a way to forget this, and/or to act as if it were not true.

A Course in Miracles doesn’t talk about enlightenment so much as awakening, and I think this is a helpful metaphor. We have forgotten some important facts about our being, and we have forgotten that we have forgotten them, and the effect of this double forgetfulness is exactly like we are asleep and having a bad dream.

For example, say that while sleeping I dream of doing battle with a monster in a dark forest while meteors light up the sky and burn the earth and my late father cries out for me to come help him but I do not know where he is or how to find him. Frightening stuff! Yet what is really going on is that I am asleep in bed beside Chrisoula and in a few hours I’ll get up and make breakfast, and then read, write and teach. However real the dream appears, it’s just a dream.

You have chosen a sleep in which you have bad dreams, but the sleep is not real and God calls you to awake. There will be nothing left of your dreams when you hear Him, because you will awaken . . . When you wake you will see the truth around you and in you, and you will no longer believe in dreams because they will have no reality for you (T-6.IV.6:3-4, 7).

In A Course in Miracles, our sleep is the separation from God from which nightmares – the apparent causes of our unhappiness – arise. Maturana would phrase it differently. He would suggest that thousands of years ago human beings side-stepped from a mother/woman-focused way of living and into patriarchy, a system of living predicated on dominance, submission, attack, defense, competition, subjugation, et cetera (see also T-2.VIII.2:5). Patriarchy begets subsystems like war and militaries, economies and taxes, prisons and malls and landfills, which as a whole serve the system rather than the person. They might do some local good – consider your neighborhood elementary school, perhaps, or the nearest hospital emergency room – but on balance, they are not about love so much as profit, not about the person so much as the continuity of the system out of which they take their function. We keep trying to fix them, and replace them, and some of our efforts are noteworthy (representative democracy, for example) but still. There is work to do. And the suggestion is that we are basically tweaking symptoms rather than going right to the heart of the matter, which is remembering love as the way to end the separation, which is our brief detour into patriarchy, which is unhappiness.

Maybe Maturana is right. I don’t know. Maybe ACIM is right. I don’t know that either. I do know that taking both as maps by which navigating experience (being in the world) is simplified and clarified has been helpful. That is, rather than get lost in arguments about right and wrong (which reinforce the patriarchy or separation or however one wants to explain our ongoing systemic unhappiness and negation of love), one can simply read the maps and venture out into the territory, learning as they go. As I am fond of saying, give attention and see what happens. Set aside the metaphysics and just try to make the world in which you live more just and fair and loving. Literally put your body at the service of love. What happens?

You will first dream of peace, and then awaken to it. Your first exchange of what you made for what you want is the exchange of nightmares for the happy dreams of love (T-13.VII.9:1-2).

For me, especially in the past year or so, rather than focus on possible causes or explanations, I find it useful to simply give attention to description. It turns out that if you describe the problem you are having then you simultaneously describe – by implication if not explicitly – the solution. It is not always easy to see this, but it is still there to be seen.

If we are unhappy, why? We don’t like our job, our spouse, our school, our body, our spiritual tradition, the movie we’re watching, the food we’re eating, the weather outside . . . The more specific we get about what’s missing, or present but not functioning, the better. If it’s raining you can get an umbrella. If you’re uncomfortable in jeans you can put on a skirt. It’s not as sexy as metaphysical and philosophical ruminations, but it tends to yield higher returns. Or at least pragmatic ones. It turns out we can fix what’s broken and, if we can’t fix it but tried in a sincere way, then we can accept what’s broken with minimal distress. Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer,” like the Golden Rule, is not unwelcome.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Becoming happy is actually not a metaphysical problem, though it can be reflected on in those terms. Unhappiness is a problem of acting in the sense that it reflects deviation from love, which is to say, per Maturana, deviation from “the consensual coordination of doings among observers, each of whom could be the other.”

Besides, when we give attention to the so-called small stuff – the local stuff, that which is present right here and now – the apparently global or even cosmic stuff is not left untouched. For example, our decision (mine and Chrisoula’s) to raise pigs for meat, chickens for meat and eggs, to garden (veggies, fruits, berries) intensely, to buy, barter and potlach with nearby farmers and homesteaders, is not just an affirmation of local economy. It is also a rejection of larger economies which are disconnected from people and the earth on which they bring for their living and thus, in the service of profit, hurt people and the earth. Does our living this way smash patriarchy, as the kids say? Well, no. But it does withdraw consent from patriarchy. Thus, in a local way, it begets love, and in the cosmic way, it at least mitigates the ongoing harmful effects of patriarchy (or separation). So it does in fact diminish patriarchy (or separation). Over time – and with your help – the effects of this diminishing are nontrivial.

But really, all that talk about patriarchy and separation and Jesus and the Buddha and so forth can be too much. In fact, all we are actually doing, Chrisoula and I, is what makes sense while making us happy. So ask: what makes sense while making you happy?

I like the hard work of spading gardens, lugging sacks of pig feed, clearing pasture and trails, cutting firewood, putting up fencing. Chrisoula enjoys the tedium (see Cheryl’s point below for a fair criticism of my word choice here) of weeding, harvesting, sewing, and putting up food. We both enjoy homeschooling our kids. We deeply appreciate how this way of living places us in relation to other people and to the earth and to the various systems to which we are subject. Often, what works about it is as simple as being tired at day’s end and so sleeping better. In this work and what arises from it, one can start to forget there was a problem in the first place. “You will first dream of peace, and then awaken to it . . .”

I am saying that when we give attention to the little stuff – the local stuff – and make our objective our own happiness, we will rediscover – or reawaken to, if you like – what it means to be a loving human being, a loving human observer in community with other observers, consensually coordinationg our doings. It isn’t complicated; it’s simply a matter of attending to what’s there to be attended, in the natural way of attending to it. Weeding a garden, going for a walk, washing the dishes, making love, writing poems, mowing the lawn. These activities do not occur in isolation but in community, and the borders or boundaries we use to define community (self and others) are very porous when studied up close. The one with whom you walk, break bread, kiss and converse, could be your own self. Thus, cooperation and camaraderie and dialogue becomes natural because we aren’t trying to change anybody or prove anything; we are just taking good care of each other, we are being servants and Bodhisattvas without making a big deal of it. It’s easy because once you cut through all the constructed layers of egoic self, serving others in kindness is what we want. We can’t actually be kept from it.

Importantly, our bodies know how to do these things. Gardening, cooking, making love, resting . . . Our bodies lean into these activities without a lot of effort. They commune with the earth and the other as if knowing exactly what the other needs, as if the other really were just the one in a different light. And really, says mathematician Louis Kauffman, how could it be otherwise?

The universe is constructed in such a way that it can refer to itself . . . the universe can pretend that it is two and then let itself refer to the two, and find out that it has in the process referred only to the one, that is, itself.

He later clarified that observation, paraphrasing physicist John Wheeler.

The Universe is a self-excited circuit, arising from its own observation of itself, which is that very observation of itself. There is nothing in the universe except the self-participation of the nothing that becomes information and form arising from its own eternal return.

And he is very close to Heinz von Foerster’s observation – dear to Maturana as well – that “I am the observed relation between myself and observing myself.”

Thus, when we turn to other observers, and the world which they appear to share with us, there is often a sense of a mysterious but abiding love. Whether we consider fellow human beings or trees, rivers, birds, rocks, flowers, seahorses, black bears or grains of sand, a respectful sustainable communion emerges that has as its foundation this inquiry: where, if anywhere, does the one end and the other begin?

Giving sustained and close attention to that question – giving attention to it literally in the fabric of the living we right now are bringing forth – was the most “spiritual” practice I ever undertook . . .

According to A Course in Miracles, all that you and I have set between our selves and love can be undone. All we have to do is see the way we have literally built a world and a way of living in that world that obscures love. See the obscurations and the obscurations will dissolve. Maturana called this system of blocks and obstructions patriarchy. A Course in Miracles calls it the separation (and the ego). Set aside for a moment the name, and focus on that to which the name points: we live in a way that attacks purity, simplicity, innocence and love. Yet we cannot defeat love, end love, or destroy love. We hold at a distance the very thing that we long to hold dear. All our loneliness and grief in this world and way of living testifies against the ineffectiveness of what we are doing, signifying our perennial desire for what Bill Thetford called “another way.”

If you would look upon love, which is the world’s reality, how could you do better than to recognize, in every defense against it, the underlying appeal for it? And how could you better learn of its reality than by answering the appeal for it by giving it? (T-12.10:1-2)

So the course, not unlike (though not precisely like) Maturana, urges us to live in radical (from the roots) proximity to our natural inclination to love one another, and to bring this loving forth in these very bodies in this very world through cooperation, inclusiveness, generosity, simplicity, sharing, playing . . .

” . . . replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity. For the separation is only the denial of union, and correctly interpereted, attests to our eternal knowledge that union is true (T-12.10:5-6).

Essentially, we embody peace in order to learn that bodies are not the bounded objects we think they are, and that love is the natural extension of what we actually are.

Love makes us happy and healthy. Love dissolves the negative effects of patriarchy and separation – our long nightmare-ridden sleep – like handfuls of salt scattered in the sea. It is as if they were never there in the first case. First we will dream of peace, then we will awaken to peace . . .

Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but your welcome of what always was. Therefore, the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost (T-13.VII.9:7-8).

So there is nothing to do and yet, until we remember this, there is so much to do, and all of it has to do with bringing forth love. We do this according to whatever ideals are operative in us at a given time. Given our desire to be happy and to heal the world, and given a spiritual practice and curriculum like A Course in Miracles, what we do is attend our brothers and sisters in order to maximize their own happiness. Doing so lifts us as well.

Eventually we learn that love was all there was anyway, and there is nothing to do, and nobody to do it, but why rush? Why not – right now – share the love you deep down know you is yours to give?

Stability and durability are user-generated illusions that are helpful. They facilitate happiness and happiness – like attention – can be our spiritual teacher if we want.

What do I mean when I say that “stability and durability are user-generated illusions that are helpful?”

Well, I don’t perceive the back stairs as clouds of atoms which are mostly empty space in which electrons swarm. Rather, I perceive and otherwise experience them as solid wooden beams nailed to a wooden frame. Doing so is functional. I’d never get in and out of the house if I experienced nothing but clouds of atoms and swarms of electrons.

In a similar way, a lightening bolt’s existence seems very short – a mere blip in the long span of a human life. Yet that human life barely measures against the expansive duration of, say, a star.

What appears stable and durable from one perspective does not appear so from another.

That is why we say that stability and durability are a matter of perception inhering in an observer and working for that observer. The observer’s perception constructs a world in which that observer enacts their living. Thus, there are as many worlds as there are observers.

The comparisons humans make (to suns and lightning bolts, say, or to floorboards and atoms), and the conclusions we draw from these comparisons (usually some variation of “our world is the one true world”), tend to confuse the fundamental issue that everything is a process. Even the observer who is observing the various changes is a process.

But so what? What good is knowing all that? We still have to figure out how to be kind to people who are not kind to us. We still have to figure out how to share resources with other living creatures, including other humans (especially those who don’t look like us or think differently from us et cetera). We still have to deal with our confusion and unhappiness nudging us toward clarity and joy, as if clarity and joy were ideals. We still have to deal with ideals.

For me – which explicitly means not for you, though my experience may be helpful in the context of your own, and vice-versa – dialing down the drama of these issues and questions has been helpful.

I don’t need to solve fundamental problems of the cosmos – what banged and where it banged and what happens when it all runs down, if in fact it does. I don’t need to untangle the metaphysical and theological bracken of the past few millenia.

I find those issues fun and interesting – they have a place – but the pressure to do more than merely give attention to them has abated considerably.

No, what I need is to be patient, generous, forgiving, nurturing, humble, diligent, just, fair – in a word, loving.

So the question is fundamental and clear: what helps me be more loving?

That is the only question that matters anymore, and everything that appears – from A Course in Miracles to baking bread to legal weed to swimming in the brook to teaching research and writing to making love – is evaluated accordingly.

The answer is basically this: If it’s for love, then use it and share it. If it’s not for love, then set it aside.

And here’s a fact I am only just beginning to see in a deep sustainable way: everything, without exception, is for love.

I certainly don’t think that the answer to all our problems lies in emulating first century Christian communities, but I do think it’s worth reflecting on how they understood love (in the wake of Jesus): shared wealth, commensality (eating together), all property held in common, service to the poor, non-participation with evil, pacifism and so forth.

And I agree with Tara Singh that “in service there is holiness that takes away loneliness and depression.”

We have to rise to a state of right-mindedness to extend the compassionate nature of Mother Earth with her flowing rivers blessed by rain. Right-mindedness knows nothing of the duality of loss and gain, success and failure. It identifies only with the abundance of goodness (The Joseph Plan of A Course in Miracles for the Lean Years 17).

That is, by giving our lives to our brothers and sisters, we are made whole. Giving love is the way to receive love. And the giving varies according to the observer, because the world that needs love varies according to observer.

Thus, I march to protest the mistreatment of women and immigrant families. I teach from texts that explore what it means to be a peaceful, thoughtful, responsible human being in community with other beings, including plant, mineral and animal. Chrisoula and I grow our own vegetables and fruit, raise our own meat, and work closely with local farmers and gardeners to make up the balance through barter, potlach and local non-corporate sales. We join and patronize cooperatives as much as possible. We try to reduce and reuse and repurpose with an eye ever on sustainability.

I am learning to “lean out” of the commons as a white man in order to make space for women and people of color to assume leadership roles and guide the creation of a more just and loving world.

In dialogue I try to listen. In writing, I try to keep it simple and honest.

I have a lot to learn, and to unlearn.

These are all actions that feel important because they place the radical equality of all life at the center of our civic and communal and private life. They aim to sustain local agriculture and business practices which help ensure food safety for all of us. They actively redress present and historical patterns of violence and repression. They dislocate the discrete self, expanding the apparent center so that it is more inclusive, and thus more creative and fertile and sustainable

I take literally these maxims of Heinz von Foerster: “A is better off when B and better off” and “Always act so as to increase choice.”

In light of all this, “awakening” as such is not a personal event but rather remembering the shared awareness of the vitality of love as a ongoing process in which we are all included without condition or qualification and through which our living as discrete entities is transcended and undone.

That is a mouthful! But if it sounds fancy or unduly mystical, it’s not. It looks and feels like what it looks and feels like when you are deeply happy and maximally helpful. Critically, you already know this. It is already your experience.

Happiness and helpfulness naturally intersect, reinforcing and infusing one another. We call this mutuality “love.”

I want you to be happy. The best I can do to this end is to act in ways that leave us both better off, and that optimize your ability to act in ways that leave us all better off. Since the “whole” and the “future” are cognitively closed to human observers, we are left with doing the best we can with what is given to us. It’s not a mystery; the love you need is the love you have to give, and the love you have to give is the precise love the world is – right now – asking you to share.

So we give attention, and we give love, and we try to stay open to the love that others give. We know we are doing it right when we are happy. Happiness is a great teacher, well worth following.