Sean Reagan

On Oneness

Perhaps we might consider the difference between oneness and one, and see the way the observing organism has a tendency to translate the former into the latter, and then to forget its translation, and – inevitably – defend against any effort to instigate remembering.

window_apple — the world through an apple

(The fragment longs to be whole. The human desires union – sexual, dialogic, communal, spiritual. Poetically, the jagged shard dreams of the clay pot of which it was once a part. Yet, any return to that state necessarily ends the fragment’s discrete existence. And any “whole” that subsequently emerges will have seams and cracks that recall its fragmentation).

How can we think about this? And how can our thinking inform our living?

First, we can say that “oneness” reflects a state of equilibrium. Picture a town hall full of citizens carefully listening to a speaker make the case for passage of a certain article, or a church in which the faithful attend the deacon’s homily. All are present, all are giving attention, all are committed to the shared nature of the experience, observing the rules which facilitate mutuality.

We might say that this state or condition of mutual attendance is one of harmony, in which the part neither regrets its “a-partness,” in the sense of needing to solve or amend or undo it, nor longs to aggrandize any apparent whole. That is, the citizen or church-goer is neither wishing they were elsewhere or otherwise (regretting their apparent separation) nor trying to colonize the shared experience in order to possess it as her “own.”

Yet obviously that regret and that colonization happen. Why? How? How does the simple harmony of “oneness” become the rude invader named “one?”

Here we might consider that “one” is a set. It is a bounded unit that includes itself and, by definition, excludes others. If we look again at the image of the town hall or the church, the “oneness” is composed of parts that are balanced. Yet any one part can take “oneness” and declare it “mine.” Our sensorimotor subjectivity allows for just this way of being. Separation is easy to perceive and, once seen, easy to identify with and, once identified with, easy to defend (including through aggression).

Can you see this in your own experience? The way you can be a singular you? Pitted against the world? Can you feel the sense of fear and guilt that naturally correspond to this separation? Can you see what you have done account of this fear and guilt? Can you imagine what you would do? Or could do, if pushed just so?

And can you see how if you shift your attention, even a little, this experience of “one” merges into something less threatening? It is happening right now – in this shared experience of language. You reading what another wrote, and understanding it, and responding to it, in whatever way – slight, dramatic, affirmative, doubtful – you respond.

It is always the other who reminds us of wholeness, and who makes our return possible.

Each person has a responsibility to love one another – to look upon his fellow man only as God created him – because he has discovered there is no difference between himself and his brother.

This responsibility is yours.
To accept that responsibility
will transform your life

(Tara Singh The Future of Mankind 156)

In essence, I suggest a delicate dance. Any human observer can experience herself as singular and discrete. Her subjective experience allows her to claim oneness as “hers.” “We” peacefully coexisting is translated into one with boundaries that need defending.

Yet at any time, one can instead give attention to oneness. Most of our spiritual discipline – those of us in the tradition of A Course in Miracles and other contemporary expressions of oneness – can be understood as perceiving oneness rather than one. If you look for harmony, it will show itself. But this looking – this giving of attention – needs to be liberated from ideas of what oneness looks like, feels like, acts like, et cetera. All of that are weapons in the war of the one. Beat them into plowshares, if you will.

We overlook oneness because we see instead our presumptions about oneness. That is, rather than experience a state of equilibrium (which requires the other), we look for a personal experience that is our own – that we have, possess, commodify, et cetera. Either is possible but given a choice, why insist on pain?

When I say – as I sometimes do – “this this,” I am simply observing that we cannot simultaneously stand with both feet in the river and both feet on the bank. We cannot simultaneously be on the trail to the summit and on the summit. Our capitalist culture will sell any insight, which can appear to cheapen it, but “be here now” is truly good advice, and giving attention to it as a practice is really all one needs to do.

Thus, through the gift of attention, “one” remembers “oneness,” which includes the other, who is “not-one.” Here it is helpful to remember that “the other” does not experience herself as “other” but as “one.” And that “one” experiences us as “other.” What we call “love” is really just the realization that everything we say and do in our living is being done to, with and through others each of whom could be our own self. This realization restores awareness of equilibrium and ends the observing organism’s “detour into fear” (T-2.I.2:1).

Or so one says on a cloudy morning, writing in a reconfigured hayloft, for others one has never met, and yet meets in the sweet fields of language, which are always Love spilling and sealing the seams of us.

Self Setting Aside Self

A non-trivial aspect of my spiritual practice – that is rooted in A Course in Miracles but diverges in thoughtful applied ways – is to set gently aside questions of mystery in favor of engagement with what appears, or what seems to be, the case.

not me – but Fionnghuala – mucking the pasture . . .

That is, when I am mucking the horse pasture, or clearing trails in the forest, or baking bread, I am less concerned with the abstract nature of the self – the light of pure awareness, say, or Consciousness (with a capital C) – and more with how that self is experiencing its self right now.

In doing so, the spiritual mystery of the self, its nature, its origins, et cetera – naturally dissolve. It is as if – and may, in fact, be that – love is content with the subject/object divide, so long as it is allowed to rest gently and non-confrontationally in the apparent division.

Also in doing this, I am engaging in a sort of bastardized Husserlian bracketing. I am giving attention to what is given, rather than struggling mentally (or psychologically or intellectually) to understand what is given. Again, it is my experience – my thesis, as it were – that love understands itself in the context in which it appears. So the bracketing – which intends to set aside complex questions of self which have riddled western history and thinking for millenia – becomes a way of knowing. It is as if the questions that were bracketed return or – even better – never left.

horses and fly masks — it’s fly mask season . . .

What does this look like – or how is it enacted – in my living?

Say that I am mucking the horse pasture. I give attention to the task which includes both physical and mental elements:

– noticing where the manure is;
– forking it into the wheelbarrow;
– eyeballing the horses eyeballing me;
– noticing the birds, butterflies, and insects;
– noticing the flowers and grass;
– hydrating if necessary;
– not rushing and not slacking and not hurting my body;
– dumping manure in the proper compost pile (they are divided according to time of year and length of time spent composting);
– stirring the pile if and as necessary;
– putting the tools away

This is a lot to do! And, of course, it all sort of arises in an apparently singular welter. There is the work and there is the way my body handles it. There is the environment and the way in which attention reveals it – the more attention given, the more there is to attend. There is the overarching context of loving these very horses and wanting their living to be clean and pleasing and safe. There is the comfort and diligence in composting manure to enrich our gardens and allow us to barter with neighbors, and there is thus an overarching sense that one is doing to the best of one’s ability what is best and most loving for the collective.

It is not necessary to do anything in order to be aware of all this! It simply happens. And there is a natural corollary: it is not necessary to understand the self or its origins or its true nature in order to be a self or experience a self or bring that self into loving application. Simply do it and observe what is happening as it happens.

distant pasture — the pasture at a distance a little after dawn

The suggestion I make – because it arises from my experience – is that the mysteries and the mysticism (and salvation and awakening and present-moment-awareness and . . . ) are all simply natural aspects of what is naturally happening. They are included in the package, as it were. And they reveal themselves as we give attention to what is happening, which is not dramatic or intense but merely this very living that we are doing and were always doing.

No more and no less: and just enough, just so.

Spirituality and Wild Goose Chases

The idea there is some external purpose to life – divine or mystical or otherwise – is problematic in the sense that it tends to promote wild goose chases and inattention to what’s right here right now.

light, crucifix — light, openings, crosses, rafters . . . the space in which we find ourself tells us a story about our self . . .

We are “children of a loving God,” or we are “sleeping spiritual beings surrounded by a light which gently awakens us,” or there are ascended masters of various sizes, shapes and proclivities who have secret wisdom to offer . . .

These (and other) narratives are old stories born of an unwillingness to stay with the present moment, and the uncertainty (or unknowing) that such staying mandates. They are designed to magnify the self (even – sometimes often – under the guise of undoing the self) by giving the self something to do, like search for itself or for God or for Truth.

There is nothing wrong with these stories, other than that we believe them to be true and make use of them accordingly. An adult parent who believes in Santa Claus isn’t hurting anybody, but his children might be disappointed come the morning of December 25 when there’s no gifts under the tree.

It’s not a question of letting go of distracting narratives but simply looking beyond or through or around them. Think of them as blossoms in a garden that has absorbed all our attention; now we want to see the leaves and stems, and the smaller flowers here and there, and the cool shadows close to the earth, and the ants and so forth.

Attention and observation of the present moment in its fullness is literally the work of a lifetime, and it doesn’t help to be running after imaginary angels and gods and scriptures and so forth.

One way to think of this is to distinguish between the narrative we make and the narrative we are given. The latter is peaceful, even when ostensibly violent or conflicted, while the former reinforces and reifies conflict, no matter how apparently pure and noble our intentions.

In my own experience, which may or may not be helpful, what works is to become aware of the nature of attention – its scope, its responsiveness, its operative fullness – and simultaneously to let attention be, or at least discover the limits of “my” relationship to it.

The suggestion is that there is no “you” or “I” directing attention, though those pronouns and that which they temporarily signify do show up within attention. But their appearance is more in the nature of a reflection than anything solidified or capable of agency. They are helpful in a limited way.

I say “suggestion” in order to be clear that experience or being in these respects may show up differently for other folks. Those differences are generally only slight differences of degree, but the semantics employed to express those differences can admit to gaps one can ride an elephant through.

It’s good to go slow and not be in any rush to build a tribe or even get anywhere in particular. The collective has already found us, and “the way,” strictly speaking, does not require any discernment on our part.

Of course, it can sound silly to say that – even mystical. It can sound like some sort of divine imperative to be a couch potato or slacker or just existentially indifferent.

But the suggestion – there’s that word again – is that the opposite is more accurate. There is work to be done, learning and teaching, communication awaiting sundry embodiments. Absent a central director – God or self – life doesn’t stagnate but opens into a dynamic flow, flowering even, where the focus is not on outcomes or advantages, save in the broadest and most abstract sense.

It is a paradox but “you” become most peaceful and productive and creative when there is no longer an “you” to be found, and the world is saved – which is to say, made anew in us – once we stop our endless fixation on its shortcomings and griefs.

Maple Trees in Place of Jesus

What would a maple tree do?

I don’t see it quite so often anymore, but for a time folks would pose this question: what would Jesus do?

I think it’s a poor question on several counts, though I understand the folks asking it had good intentions, and certainly in some instances, asking and answering that question, brought about desirable results. But still.

I’m not sure my proposed alternative – what would a maple tree do? – is any better, but I do think it might nudge our thinking in interesting directions, which in turn might prove helpful in terms of the world we bring forth.

Anytime someone says “Jesus” it is prudent to ask what they mean. It is one of the more complicated pair of syllables one can utter. When it is said, is what is meant the historical Jesus? The Jewish peasant who was a follower of John the Baptist, assumed and transformed his teacher’s ministry for several years, and then was executed by the Romans?

To say one is going to do what that Jesus did is not easy because we don’t really know what he did. That is, constructing a rational narrative for that man’s life is a matter of informed (to greater and lesser degrees) conjecture because there is so little evidence with which to work and all of it is deeply biased.

Almost inevitably, when we talk about Jesus then we are really talking about our own political and cultural interests and agendas now.

There is nothing wrong with talking about political and cultural ideals and projects, but to assume that the historical Jesus would be on board with them is a largely unjustified leap.

Folks might also be referring to the Jesus of scripture. But that Jesus is an idealized (as in “existing in imagination or idea,” not “the best” or “perfect”) Jesus. It is Jesus according to an author or authors who had specific goals and constructed a Jesus that furthered their goals. (Hence the generous variation in the Pauline epistles). Since scripture does not have one author but many, there are many Jesuses in the New Testament, and even more in the various communities that have evolved in response to its scriptural variegation.

That Jesus – because it is an idea – can be put to literally any end one likes and so more or less ceases to function in any meaningful way. Jesus opposes the death penalty! Jesus supports the death penalty for cop-killers! And so forth.

Critically, nobody can admit that the scriptural Jesus is merely an idealized Jesus – they always claim it is the true historical Jesus. Why? Because absent that embodied authority, their position becomes merely one among many, and not the right or true position.

There is a lesson in that for those of us still working through what it means to be a body or a spirit or a spirit in a body or a body with a spirit . . .

One can see this dynamic at play in the community of A Course in Miracles as well. This Jesus also functions in an idealized way – rewriting traditional Christian concepts like forgiveness and atonement (though not quite as radically as Ken Wapnick and others proposed), indulging nonduality, et cetera – and is also the historical Jesus. Indeed, in the creation stories that surround the scribing of the ACIM material, Helen is positioned as having been one of Jesus’s followers in a previous life.

In other words, when somebody asks “what would Jesus do?” it is always code for “what do I want to do in this situation?” Using Jesus is just a way of blessing off on our preferences, of implying that what we do is right or true or The Way. And while sometimes this produces happy results – feeding the poor, visiting the imprisoned – it can also produce unhappy results like discrimination and other forms of violence.

mornng_coffee — morning coffee . . . marble slab for a coaster . . . light in the hay loft lovely . . .

Is my suggestion – what would a maple tree do? – any better?

Jesus was a human observer whose range of activity – both mental and physical – approximately mirrors our own. He could lay a hand on the sick. He could lecture a crowd. He could eat bread and drink wine. He could go for a walk or kneel to pray or draw in the sand.

A maple tree does not do those things. It can’t. Thus, to compare ourselves to a maple tree is to fundamentally reframe our idea of what it means to act and think. It moves us out of the familiar “human” range and into another range.

Maple trees do not move. They don’t travel. That means that what happens, happens. When a hurricane comes, they can’t move to another town. If somebody comes by with an ax, they can’t hide. They can’t fight back. If a squirrel decides to live in their branches, they can’t say “I’d rather save that space for a chickadee.”

Maple trees don’t foliate in winter. Tough luck for them if they’d like to. In fall their foliage dies in lovely reds, yellows and oranges. Tough luck for them if they want to try blue, purple and silver. In spring, they produce a sweet sap. Tough luck for them if they’d rather produce beer. Or just take a break from sap-production altogether.

Do you see the trend emerging here?

In our human observing, maple trees are essentially passive. Their relationship to their environment – their way of living in a world – is one of acceptance. What happens, happens. Their ability to actively shape is muted. They don’t have dramatic powers of resistance. If an evil man who has just slaughtered a thousand men sits beneath a maple tree, he will enjoy the same cool shade as a virtuous woman who just midwifed a baby would.

Is the challenge the maple tree poses becoming clear?

Maple trees need sustenance to live; in that sense, they have appetites. Yet they don’t take more rain or sunlight than is given to them. The rain that is given is what they receive. The sunlight that is given is what they receive. The soil is the soil; they don’t shop for a replacement.

Is the discipline the maple tree demands becoming clear?

So when we are faced with a crisis – when we would call on the model of Jesus to help us choose how to act – what happens when we call instead on a maple tree?

I think – that is, it seems to me in this wordy and meandering way of living – that maple trees counsel acceptance, patience, and tolerance. They would counsel these practices to a radical (a demanding and unfamiliar) degree.

Yet we are not maple trees! If a tiger is bearing down on us, we should by all means move. But maybe we should also not adopt a policy of killing or containing all tigers because they are incredibly efficient carnivorous killers.

If we are hungry, then we should eat. But maybe also opt for food that was grown in a sustainable way, the value of which is measured not only in its cost at the grocery store. Maybe align our appetite with justice and love: farmers and homesteaders who are thinking not only of economic bottom lines but also ecological wholeness.

We are not maple trees – but we are not Jesus either! We are just the human observer that we are, doing our living in coordinated ways, with other human and animal and plant and mineral observers. Together we bring forth a world. The question is always what world shall we bring forth? Since love is the foundation of our being – the pliant nutritious loam of our shared existence – what actions and coordinations most probably and efficiently and sustainably bring love forth?

Jesus is okay but confusing to the point of distraction. So maybe let Jesus go on that account. At least see what happens when you do. Maybe become the disciple of maple trees. Maybe find out what a maple tree does in the domain of its experience and then – to the full reach of your own being – do the same in the domain of your own.

Rational Thinking With Respect to Spiritual Mysteries

We might say that practical answers are important according to context.

For example, I want to bake bread and make soup for dinner.

It helps that there are bread and soup recipes. It helps there is a coop nearby that sells vegetables, flour, herbs and spices. It helps that I have homemade bags in which to store what I buy.

The recipes, the coop, and the bags are all made by people. People used language and engineering and design plans to put these things together and then sustain and share them.

planting — seeding the garden . . . that time of year . . .

In our home, we put a lot of thought into gardening and animals. We think about fencing, pastures, veggie rotation, when to plant and when to harvest, how to better age compost, putting food up, bartering with neighbors . . .

This sort of rational informed thinking and planning is very useful for gardening and creating a safe, local, sustainable food supply.

Is it as useful for awakening? Or enlightenment? Encountering nondual experience? Whatever word or phrase we want to use?

Maybe!

If we agree that there are many paths up the mountain, then one of them must be the way of rigorous scholarship, intellectual effort and rational thinking. That is, one of the ways up the mountain is the same as the one that allows us to make and sustain a homestead.

But in going up the mountain this way, we have to take care not to disparage paths that are characterized less by reason and more by, say, devotion. Entering into personal relationships with idealized Christs, writing Rumi-like paeans to the Goddess, worshiping on our knees, and so forth.

There are folks for whom that kind of approach to spirituality works. I don’t want to ignore or otherwise denigrate it by pretending my way is superior.

If all paths lead to the summit, then all we can say of a given path is that it is effective relative to our perspective. Because we want all beings to have the same freedom we have, we must recognize that other folks will choose other paths, and those paths will be effective relative to their perspective.

Yet even as we take these varying paths, we are on the same mountain, and our passing-through affects all of us.

Our garden is not separate from other gardens in the area. For example, by including many flowers, we nurture local bee populations, which strengthens other gardens (as they, in turn, strengthen ours). By composting literally everything that can be composted, we minimize waste (and waste removal costs and energy) and build up the soil for the gardeners and homesteaders who will come after us.

In a similar way, our commitment to growing and raising food on our homestead, supplementing that production through a network of local farmers and homesteaders, and shopping locally for the balance, ripples in non-trivial ways across local, regional, national and global economies.

mulch hay in the garden — mulch hay ready to be scattered through the garden as planting begins in earnest . . .

We do the work we are doing, with the understanding that its effects do not end with whatever limits we impose on our collective human experience.

In a sense, I want all people to be as thoughtful as is possible with respect to conserving and nurturing natural resources. Being aware of how we consume seems to make the world safer and more productive for all lives. But the way in which folks do this – their readiness, their willingness, their access (to land, cooperatives, income et cetera) is not uniform. Love obligates us to see and honor this.

So in all things we do what we can. A reasonable goal seems to be to make our doings as coherent and loving as possible. This is true for our so-called spiritual practice as well. Give attention to it. What works? What doesn’t? What do you wish would work but can’t seem to make work? What issues keep coming back? Who is helpful in your process? How do you define “helpful?” and so forth.

We are already awake. Nonduality is the ground of our being. But distractions abound. Sometimes rather than walk our path we defend it. Or try to force others to walk it. Sometimes we close our eyes and then complain that we can’t see. Sometimes we are content with what is given. There is no law that says you have to climb a mountain, or go all the way to the summit. It’s okay to not worry and be happy. It really is.

Most of what distracts us goes away naturally when we slow down and respond to life as it appears without making a big deal of it. In a sense, one comes to the realization that not all mysteries have to solved. Some of them we can just enjoy.

Who Was Helen Schucman?

Was Helen Schucman psychic?

In my view, that question functions as gossip – akin to speculating about someone’s sexuality. We are all intuitive to one extent or another. We all express our intuitions in deeply personal ways. Singling out one person’s expression for analysis – especially without their consent and participation – feels intrusive and unkind.

Here is how I would frame an inquiry into Helen’s so-called psychic or scribal powers: does it matter if she was psychic?

The way that we answer that question is interesting because it anticipates another – more interesting and fruitful – question: who actually wrote A Course in Miracles?

Helen Schucman (with an assist from Bill Thetford)?

Or Jesus (with an assist from Helen Schucman with an assist from Bill Thetford)?

The way that we answer that question speaks volumes to how we view the ACIM curriculum. If we believe that Jesus dictated it, then we are apt to believe that by embracing it we are ipso facto embracing Jesus. We become students of a course ordained by Jesus Himself. We get as close to being a contemporary disciple as one can get.

But since A Course in Miracles ultimately refutes the existence of separate identities, it also denies the identity of an itinerant peasant who was executed by the Romans a couple of millenia ago for carrying on the work of John the Baptist. If you carefully follow the course, you reach a juncture where there is no Jesus.

Nor, by the way, is there a Gary Renard (or an Arten or Pursah). Or a Ken Wapnick. Or a Tara Singh. Or a Marianne Williamson. Or a . . .

But those fine teachers are not the real sticking points! The sticking point is that there is no [insert your name here]. And most of us would cheerfully throw Helen Schucman herself under the bus rather than give up our own identity.

Helen Schucman – not Jesus – wrote A Course in Miracles. It expresses her lifelong fascination with Christianity (especially the healing implicit in Christian Science and the mysticism inherent in Catholicism), and its nexus with psychology and with emerging popular views of eastern spirituality. Critically, in order to effectively write this material, she had to pretend it wasn’t her doing the writing but rather Jesus.

In other words, I don’t think there was any way for Schucman to face the ACIM material other than to displace it. Or – to put it into course terms – project the material onto her projection of Jesus and then deny that’s what she was doing.

Most of us who read the course are de facto enablers of Helen, in the sense that we go along with her fantasy. We pretend that Jesus really is implicated in authorship of the course. I don’t think any of us get away from this aspect of A Course in Miracles. Saying Jesus wrote it is sexy. Saying that we are followers of Jesus through A Course in Miracles is righteous. And sexy + righteous = special. It’s our favorite equation.

I know that for many students to dismiss Jesus (and perhaps Helen Schucman and A Course in Miracles too) this way amounts to an assault on the sacred. Forgive me. But also, consider the possibility that denotations like “sacred” may themselves be an assault on that to which “sacred” points.

So here is another question. If A Course in Miracles was written by Helen Schucman, and reflects in part her confusion about Christian spirituality and identity, and in part the popular enlightenment zeitgeist of the sixties and early seventies (manifest to varying degrees of effectiveness in Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, et cetera), would that be okay? Why or why not?

Back when I was practicing a half-assed Zen in Vermont, I read Kodo Sawaki. He was a confusing teacher, largely because – especially back then – I preferred my spiritual teachers to radiate holiness. You could say chop wood and carry water but the actual chopping and carrying was for schlubs. To be spiritual was to be special, in a way that made you better than others (though, of course, you never admitted this).

Sawaki was – and is, really – good medicine for that kind of confusion and arrogance.

The asshole doesn’t need to be ashamed of being the asshole. The feet don’t have any reason to go on strike just because they’re only feet. The head isn’t the most important of all, and the navel doesn’t need to imagine he’s the father of all things. It’s strange though that people look at the prime minister as an especially important person. The nose can’t replace the eyes, and the mouth can’t replace the ears. Everything has its own identity, which is unsurpassable in the whole universe.

Sawaki recognized that his methods and style were controversial, especially for folks invested in concepts of “sacred,” especially as they applied to “identity,” ours or anyone else’s.

They say that my sermons are hollow, not holy. I agree with them because I myself am not holy. The Buddha’s teaching guides people to the place where there is nothing special . . . People often misunderstand faith as kind of ecstasy of intoxication . . . True faith is sobering up from such intoxication.

True faith is sobering up from such intoxication . . .

It is easy to become intoxicated with A Course in Miracles – the scribe was psychic, Jesus is its author, popular teachers are taught by ascended masters, we might see light shows or gain supernatural abilities . . .

If that’s your thing, then it’s your thing. Give attention to it and see where it goes. For me, its yield was more in the nature of an ersatz high one has to work harder and harder to sustain. But my way is not The Way, much less your way.

In my experience, it was helpful to treat the course as a course, allow it to function as if functioned, and then move on. A Course in Miracles introduces us to an inner teacher that it calls the Holy Spirit, and that teacher takes over the curriculum. It is deeply personal and deeply effective. One doubles down on their study and – when the times comes, which it does – lets the whole thing go.

Helen-Schucman — Helen Schucman (by Brian Whelan)

Thus, beyond the high drama and supernatural special effects so many of us project onto the course, there is the simple promise of becoming peaceful and happy to an almost exquisite degree, simply by seeing the self for what is and thus ending our personal resistance to experience. That is the real promise, and the real joy. And for it, my gratitude to Helen Schucman is immense.

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