Sean Reagan

The Universe We Are

The universe appears to us as a big, complex, beautiful and terrifying thing and, in a nontrivial way, we are as much a part of that universe as anything else. Black holes, falling stars, dark matter, homo sapiens, maple leaves and house flies. We are made of the same material obeying the same laws. It’s just that we are composed – are patterned – in such a way so as not to be giant suns or cyclones or apple blossoms but rather self-reflexive bipedal primates with a serious gift for languaging.

We are not typically aware of the atoms that comprise us. We see a hand, not the atomic and subatomic particles that when put together just so make a hand. So saying that we and the universe are one is sort of intellectual shorthand. It’s equivalent to saying, if we could see all the way to atomic and subatomic levels, then we’d see that there’s not really a “we” there. It’s just matter mattering.

But at the macro-levels where we do our living and loving and languaging, separation and distinction are very much the order of experience. And that is not a problem! It’s inherent in the perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human observer that we are (or appear as). It’s not a problem to be fixed or an illusion to deny. It’s how things are for things like us. That’s all.

Still, plenty of folks do have actual encounters with oneness that are effectively transformational. These encounters are relatively consistent across time and cultures. Extended meditation, fasting, partaking of certain flora, digging deeply into the afore-mentioned reflexivity or just getting lucky . . . clearly, there are ways for us to not only know intellectually that we are one but also to experience it the way we experience swimming, baking bread and making love.

The thing is, this oneness – especially in its more transformational modes – can be hard both to notice and, once noticed, hard to hold on to in a sustained way. Our ordinary state of mind and experience is premised on separation – that we are a discrete body, moving about amidst other discrete bodies, in a world that is basically endless separate objects like flowers, roads, fire hydrants, dogs, sweatshirts, black beans and hurricanes.

Our sense of being a distinct separate entity is a kind of user-generated illusion. It’s functional and pragmatic and consistent with our humanness but it’s hardly dispositive. It’s not a yardstick for truth or reality.

The appearance of a separate functional self is persistent, even when brought to light by scientists, philosophers, saints, prophets, salespeople and so forth. It is not itself destructive, save for the way that we tend to double down on it – as if we really are separate beings, with separate interests that need defending and protecting, and that justify all sorts of aggressive, greedy and destructive behavior against ourselves and others. If I’m atoms and you’re atoms (scientific shorthand for ‘”we” is actually “one”‘ – then what’s the big deal? Hugging it out is less painful. Compromise is easier.

But you have to see through the appearance. You have to know the appearance as an appearance – as a user-generated interface – even as you make use of it, even as you do your living and loving and languaging in it.

Apparently just knowing these facts, while not unhelpful, is not itself curative. We have to have an experience of wholeness or oneness. We need to see it in a clear way – taste it on the tongue like a rain drop – not as an abstraction but in an embodied way, like making love or eating bread or climbing a mountain.

One way of doing this is to give attention to our experience in a gentle, nonjudgmental and sustained way. Often, when we do this, everything that we need to know is revealed, often by making clear what to read next, write next, study next, pray on next and so forth. And then, over time, after enough of this attentiveness, there is a soft but intense realization that separation is not real.

In the wake of that realization, we realize that it’s okay to be calm, let things go, et cetera. We become gentler – with ourselves and with others. We’re able, in that space, to attend to life with less drama. We exercise a little, eat a little, stay close to those upon whom we depend and who in turn depend on us. We do good, which is not as abstract or vague as it sounds. We aren’t perfect at any of this, but it’s cool because perfection doesn’t matter, unless you are willing to define “perfection” as “exactly the way things are right now.”

Are we One or are we Separate?

Are we one? Or are we separate?

I used to think that these were important questions and that one could be either right or wrong with respect to them. I still they are important questions, mostly because of their potential to prompt helpful dialogues that in turn can clarify our thinking about life and self and others and so forth.

But I am less invested in being right or wrong about them. It’s not that I don’t think folks can’t be confused, but that more and more it’s clear that people are just where they are with this material and all you can do is give attention and not be a jerk. There’s always something new to learn.

So this post is not an argument but more of a chance to point out a basic way in which we perhaps are one. It is relatively straightforward and uncontroversial, I hope.

That “way” is the medium of language. But before we talk about that, we need to digress for a moment into food.

In general, we experience life in terms of an apparent subjective unity that is called the self. For example, hunger shows up in this body and this body has to eat in order to ameliorate that hunger. Moreover, my embodied thoughts and actions (I’m hungry, I should make a sandwich, the bread’s in the cupboard) are what ensure that food goes from “out there” to “in here.”

If I’m hungry and I feed you, then maybe I’ve done a good deed and you’re grateful but I’ll still be hungry. If I’m hungry and instead of preparing a meal I write a poem about a meal, then I’ve maybe made some good art but I’m still hungry.

We could take it a step further. We could say that I subjectively experience preferences for certain kinds of food – fried clams, vanilla rice pudding, lemon bread, tomato and onion salad with feta, kale smoothies. You might share some of those preferences but you also have your own, some of which would nauseate me. After all, there are people in the world who actually crave blood sausage.

And dropping down yet another layer, I have specific memories and stories associated with food that are very much not yours. For example, home-baked bread is so intimate for me that I literally cannot explain why without crying. It’s a whole story involving four generations of women, an Irish Setter named Bridget, sex, a secret obsession with reading cookbooks as a child, and a meditation workshop I took at the Vermont Zen Center in late winter of 1991. Oh, and also a maroon poncho.

Lots of people love bread, bake their own bread, have memories of how they came to the joy and work of bread-baking, and that love and labor and remembering may comprise moving and complex narratives but I am quite confident that they do not replicate mine.

All of this is just to show a way in which we are clearly undeniably separate and it’s no big deal. I have to feed myself, not you, when I am hungry. My food preferences and your food preferences are different in varying ways. And my deep-rooted history of food informs a relationship with eating and cooking that is distinctly “mine” and not yours.

Is that clear? We are having this subjective experience and not another one. Others are having other ones. We’re having this one.

But as I said earlier, there is a way in which this very singular subjective experience – this “my” experience that “I” have – is perhaps not the whole story. That is, there are ways in which the apparently obvious and undeniable borders that separate us from one another and the world actually blur and become less definitive.

One way to see this is to think a little about language. You and I have a shared language here, right? It is English. But more than that, it is also English at a certain level of sophistication – a five-year-old would struggle with this essay. A PhD candidate would not.

Also our shared language here includes some abstract concepts – self, language, hunger, stories, sex, right, wrong, oneness. I didn’t have to explain or define any of those words to you; you got them already. They are probably in part why you’re here.

And dropping down yet another layer, all of those concepts and the basic building blocks through which they are expressed (words, sentences, paragraphs, supporting examples, et cetera) together constitute a kind of broad spiritual inquiry, the terms and conditions of which are also effectively implied. Up to now, I haven’t said a word about them.

That language – in all its richness and depth – isn’t just in my head and it isn’t just in yours: it’s shared. It’s mutual. It’s true that the act of Sean writing and you reading are separate acts but they are also co-dependent and thus together constitute an act of communication, of sharing meaning, of caring enough – about the human condition, locally and otherwise – to do so.

And, essential to our understanding, that constituted act yields effects. Subtle effects to be sure, but effects nonetheless. Our ideas change, our behavior changes, our relationships change . . . subtly, subtly but still. There are actual effects.

One way to to think of it is to imagine that this communication (this writing and reading and all it entails) is a kind of pattern in the pattern that is Sean which spins off and becomes a kind of pattern in the pattern that you are.

This patterning did not begin with me. Nor does it end with you. It is more accurate to think of it as a continuation or extension – a subtle modification – of something preexisting, ongoing. This particular language pattern you are reading is a distillation – a kind of collage – of the many language patterns that I’ve read, each of which was an act of communication with someone else. Some of those influences are obvious, others not so much. Some are so subtle that I don’t even remember them.

But they are there, and they effect me, and in that sense, those writers and I are one. We are ripples partaking of the same pool of water.

I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean this literally.

Gazing at the sky through a diamond-shaped hole . . .

All this patterning literally changes us. It literally shifts all the patterns – the patterns that we are, the patterns of our families, the individual patterns of the many members, the communities those families comprise, the larger communities comprised by communities . . . On and on it goes. Ideas are clarified, thinking is invigorated, new modes of communication arise, psychological inclinations are affirmed or denied, behavioral patterns adjust . . .

These are subtle subtle effects but they are also nontrivial. Indeed, they are literally our world. Whatever is going on around you – the building you are in, the device you are reading these words on, the love you will make later, the meal you will eat, the conversations you will have, the bed you will sleep on – all of it is simply patterns repatterning.

When one is clear about this, the question of “are we one or are we separate” blurs. One can begin to see how answering that question in any way requires making decisions about boundaries that are not forbidden by any means – that are even helpful – but are also arbitary. We tend to make them without thinking, according to familial, cultural, biological inclinations but still. They could literally go anywhere.

So that is a way of starting with language and noticing how it points to a way that separation blurs. It is hardly the only way. Gardening and raising (or hunting) animals for food is another way that the porous nature of the boundaries of self/world/other reveals itself.

All we really need to do is be attentive and honest, such as we are able. Give attention, don’t resist what shows up, don’t fret about what doesn’t show up, and don’t rush through what shows up. Nothing is hidden (but some stuff does remain apparently mysterious (which should not be read as an invitation to invent mysterious answers)). What is one knows itself and more than that, knows what to do with what is – or seems to be – separate from itself.

Given the Sea, Swim

The other day I mentioned on a not-uncommon tension in Christianity: God is unknowable and ineffable and yet also, somehow, knowable (as loving, just, generous, et cetera). Does this tension adhere to A Course in Miracles as well?

I think it doesn’t, at least not in such an obvious way.

With respect to God and relationship with God, A Course in Miracles tracks two themes. First, the course is not directly aimed at repairing or amending our relationship with God. Its singular objective is to make it possible for us to hear in a sustained way the voice of the Holy Spirit, which it calls our “inner teacher.”

It’s that teacher who handles repairing and amending (clarifying and nurturing) our relationship with God.

So in that sense the course is literally just a course – you take it, you meet your inner teacher and . . . move on.

At the same time (the second track), the course literally abounds with references to God and relationship with God, all of which reinforce a single theme: you are not apart in any meaningful way from God but you do believe that you are. And since you believe this belief, you experience pain as if you actually are separate from God. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Thus, God as posited by ACIM is not a distant creator separate in any way from its creation. God is not a mystery – unknowable and unfathomable in divine transcendent and glorious ineffability.

Rather, God is a personal and intimate reality immediately present in both time and space, awaiting our decision to remember said intimacy and choose not to reject it.

Thus God, ACIM-style.

The question is – because the question is always – is this formulation helpful?

There is no single answer to that question, which means there is no “right” answer to it. It is personal and local and subject to change. With respect to your experience of its helpfulness, only you can speak to it.

I began studying A Course in Miracles a little less than eight years ago. For about five of those years, the course was profoundly helpful. After a while, its helpfulness lessened. But to my mind this “lessening” affirms the overall effectiveness and utility of the course. Why? Because it did what it said it would do: it introduced me to my inner teacher and, as promised, my inner teacher took it from there.

My experience of the course deviates from that of many ACIM students, especially those for whom the course functions as a kind of ongoing spiritual path. For me, the Holy Spirit was understood as – and literally experienced as – “attention.” And attention eventually moved me away from supernatural causation, duality (mind vs. body), and unreflected languaging ((like “God” or “angels” or “atonement”) though this is a bit more complex and deserves its own post).

Attention gently carried me away from A Course in Miracles and towards an experience of stillness and love and being that is simpler and lovelier, more natural and serious, than anything I’ve heretofore known. It is enough; it is more than enough.

So for me, while I consider “God” a nontrivial idea, it doesn’t enter into my present experience in obviously tangible or causative ways.

Of course I am being a bit disingenuous here. In a sense, my life has been given wholly to the question of God’s reality, identity, accessibility and so forth. I remain deeply interested and curious about these ideas. But the energy around the inquiry has shifted considerably. The consequences are not as drastic. And the material under study is no longer quite so dense, abstract or theological.

In other words, the inquiry is fun and interesting and doesn’t have the life-and-death intensity it used to have. I am learning and my learning has no end. There is a sweetness in that and – to one who has long struggled to relax and be kind and gentle to oneself – some relief.

Thus, when asked (and sometimes still when not asked), I suggest that the answer to any spiritual conundrum/problem/rut/etc is to just give attention to what’s right there in front of you. If you’re in a zendo, do zazen. If you’re in a Christian church then give it all up for Jesus. If you’re studying ACIM, then study it.

If you’re in the sea, then swim.

Give attention to where you are and to what you are: give attention to the whole of what is given to you – the paths, the teachers, the obstructions, the distractions, the supplicants, the supports, the questions and answers, the hungers and lusts, the semantics and grammars, the that-which-is-not-yet-given. All of it. Let it all be and see how you fit into it all being.

Because you do fit, and you are home, but only you can see and know this.

Allowing the Mystery

I am reading God and You: Prayer as a Personal Relationship by William Barry. Barry is a thoughtful Jesuit whose project frames prayer as akin to a deep and abiding friendship. Even as he acknowledges prayer’s breadth – petitionary, contemplative, emotional, mental et cetera – he maintains its ground is in the nature of mutual relationship.

In many ways, this is a sound and pragmatic approach. Human beings are by nature cooperative and relational. Working with one another towards shared ends is our modus operandi. In this light, prayer is simply an extension of the natural expression of our humanness. You can’t not pray.

Barry’s characterization is appealing because of its innate familiarity. There are no intellectual leaps involved. We’re just being reminded of what we’re already adept at. Prayerful relationship with God might be difficult or challenging, but only in the way that any relationship can be challenging or difficult. Indeed, a relationship that was never challenging or difficult would not really count as a meaningful relationship in the first case.

Part of the problem with Barry’s book is a familiar one in Christianity. On the one hand, he portrays God as an impenetrable mystery and on the other – simultaneously – as personally interested in us, all-loving et cetera.

. . . human beings are finite and limited and cannot take in the Mystery we call God. At the deepest level of our being we are both attracted to knowing and loving that Mystery and terrified of it” (Barry 32).

Yet in the next paragraph, Barry writes that “God loves us with an everlasting love.”

It is not nitpicking – nor an offense against Barry – to observe that one cannot have it both ways. God cannot simultaneously be both knowable and familiar and mysterious and unknowable.

I say all this carefully and hopefully at least modestly respectfully. I’m hardly immune to holding contradictory views. But I do think when we become clear about the contradiction – or when it is effectively pointed out to us – we are obligated to give it careful attention. Conflict needs to be resolved.

In my experience, we need to not rush through or past the mystery part. It’s good to realize that we don’t know something. It’s scary and unsettling, but it’s not inherently problematic. It’s not evil. In fact, it can be a very creative and ultimately loving space.

Gaps in our map are not indicative of gaps in the territory! A thousand years ago, it made perfect sense to imagine the sun revolved around the earth. We’ve updated our maps now. The earth isn’t flat. Gardens don’t grow according to the whims of gods and goddesses or when we execute virgins. People weren’t made; they evolved. They are still evolving.

It’s true we don’t know everything, but that’s not a good argument for throwing God into the apparent gap – even if it’s a God who “loves us with an everlasting love.”

If you sit in the mystery, what happens? If you do not rush into the pre-given mental frameworks of Catholicism, monotheism, humanism and so forth, what happens?

The suggestion is not that we shouldn’t ever pray, or that we shouldn’t think in terms of “God” or “not-God.” We are where we are, and we have to own that. After all, here I am reading William Barry and it’s not because I feel like being an intellectual pain-in-the-ass.

The suggestion is simply to give attention to what is happening in order to see clearly what-is-happening. And perhaps to notice the way in which we tend to assume that we already know what is happening. And perhaps to notice that we tend to translate what is happening into familiar terms – love, inner peace, stillness, Christ, lovingkindness, ego, et cetera.

In a way, the only thing we can really do – especially when we reach the apparent “mystery” – is to slowly and carefully update our maps. The relevant territory is internal. We have to go alone and we have to go with the intention of leaving a trail. The deeply personal nature of the work means that external teachers and traditions are only going to be so helpful.

The last thing we put down on this interior journey is our expectation of what we’ll find as we go. If you know in advance what the center holds – if you know it’s a “God” whose love is everlasting – for that matter, if you are sure there is a “center” at all – then you aren’t really going empty-handed into the so-called heart of the so-called mystery.

In a different context – here paraphrased – the artist Jasper Johns said that in order to be a great artist one had to give up everything, including the desire to be a great artist. It is a leap – a commitment – most of us are not willing to make. And it’s okay but also, aren’t we ready at last to make it? Given the sea, why not swim?

If you are reading this – and mulling it over, agreeing or disagreeing – then you are no longer happy or content with retreating into redundant ideology and semantics about God and Love and Inner Peace and all of that. You want to go all the way now and you are trying to figure out how. I don’t personally have any answers in that regard and I’m probably the last – or second to last anyway – person I’d ask.

But here’s the thing. Posts like this – and the reading and thought that underlie them – are a nontrivial part of how “Sean” goes empty-handed into the interior. And if you are here, then perhaps you are traveling, too. And perhaps – just perhaps – in that lovelily syllable “too” is a hint of what comes next.

On Being Done with A Course in Miracles

I wonder sometimes if we are ever really finished with anything. I took Modern American Poetry with Lorrie Smith in the late 80s; I never took it again. And yet its effects are never not swirling through what I call “my life.” As a writer, a reader, a man, a father, a husband, a teacher, a homesteader, a fuck-up, a dogged angel . . .

bridges-leading-to-bridges — One one bridge looking at another bridge . . . There are all these ways that touch one another, lead to and from one another . . . always there is only all this going.

Just so with A Course in Miracles. I took the course and gave it deep and sustained attention for several years. And then I moved away from it. I have compared the course to a way station on a mountain: you stop, you do what you have to do, and then you keep going.

But I wonder if a better metaphor is not simply courses themselves. After all, the course is not a spiritual path but a time-bound, curriculum-bound class. Why complicate things?

For example, I haven’t taken a math class in over thirty years. Barring some very unforeseen developments, I won’t take one again. And, for the most part, good riddance and God bless.

Yet I use math literally every single day. Grading papers, buying groceries for the family or hay for the horses, balancing my checkbook, playing certain probability-based dice games (APBA baseball, Dungeons & Dragons, backgammon). Indeed, my life would not function well at all if I did not have basic math skills that were readily brought to bear when needed.

I no longer read A Course in Miracles with any regularity. From time to time, I go back to it to double check something or out of curiosity. It is a comfort, in its way. I don’t read any ACIM teachers at all anymore. Perhaps that will change one day. Perhaps not.

I don’t experience this as a virtue or a problem or a mystery.

Still, the course’s effects – like those of Modern American Poetry so many years ago – go on in my life. On and on they go. They are like a bead of food coloring dropped into clear water. Swirling, eddying, clouding, shading. A Course in Miracles centered my thinking and drove my personal curriculum like nothing else ever had.

If we go back to the hiking-up-the-mountain analogy – we are in danger of over-analogizing here, I know – at the mountain’s summit, one no longer needs the map that got them there. But one’s gratitude for the map is perhaps more intense than ever.

I am grateful indeed for ACIM.

I am not trying to tell folks that they shouldn’t study the course, or that they have to return to the course, or anything like that. I am simply saying: give attention to the personal nature of what you are calling your experience – your psychology, your spirituality, your philosophy, your semantics, your aesthetic. What works and what doesn’t? What serves and what doesn’t? What resonates and what doesn’t?

There is no mountain and so there is no summit. Thus, are there are no way stations either. It is perhaps simpler and clearer to say that there are patterns out there that intersect with the patterns we are, and all we can really do is be attentive to the repatterning.

This attentiveness is very personal. Since everything is constantly changing, however subtly, it is not possible to come to conclusions that work in all situations all the time. It is tempting to do that – and in a lot of ways that is our default mode – but it is ultimately unsatisfying because it is dysfunctional and incoherent.

You are a pattern that briefly intersected with the pattern we call A Course in Miracles, which briefly intersected with the pattern of Sean, who wrote this pattern called a blog post, and from which all sorts of new and beautiful – relevant and irrelevant, helpful and not-helpful – patterns are right now unfurling.

And the unfurling never finishes. It never ever finishes.

So we give attention. We let stuff go, we pick stuff up. And the rivers flow, and the stars fall, and the winds come down from the sky. The bread rises, the pigs cry out for mercy in their pens, and the babies make us dream of a better and more peaceful world. It goes on like this. Us, too.

The Limits of Knowing

The tower of knowing reaches higher and higher into the sky. Its foundations support apparently infinite extension. Each floor includes the beginning of a staircase that ascends to yet another level. We build this tower faster and faster. We build machines to speed up the process even more – through automation, efficiency, scalability.

And yet our spiritual hunger – our need to know and to be right in and about our knowing – continues unabated. It is as if we are a starving people eating air. No matter how much of it we swallow, it does not satisfy. It does not nourish. It does not end, even briefly, our hunger.

One who would be fed in a sustainable way – so as to sustainably feed others in turn – does not eschew knowledge but simply sees clearly the inherent futility of any ultimate end to it.

We are not rats in a maze to which we shall one day find an exit. We are not ensouled primates begging favor from Heaven while avoiding Hell. And we are not lanterns whose function is to be set aflame and to remain so lit unto eternity.

We did not ask to be given this experience because it arises of its own accord. Nor are we the authors of its conclusion. There is no maze to be let out from.

There is no distinction between the structure of our bodies and that to which the word “soul” might point, which is another way of saying there is neither a mediator to help us bridge the gap, nor a gap that needs to be bridged.

And the function of a lantern is to be lit and hefted, then darkened and put away, and then lit and hefted, and then darkened and put away. To seek only one of those states – and to seek to make it permanent unto the exclusion of the other – is to miss the contingent nature of light and dark and the one who perceives them both distinctly.

In Cambridge once, a man stumbled out of the library – stacks of books spilling from his carosel, pages of random essays flying away behind him in the breeze – and fell exhausted onto a bench facing the slow unfurling of the Charles River in late summer sunlight. A lifetime of study had suddenly vanished from his mind, leaving it clear and smooth, like a prism through which the sun streamed. He felt as if were a dog suddenly liberated from leash and collar and the owner who had insisted such restraints were necessary. It was as if he had awakened from a dream of confinement and restriction and could run now in open fields or nap in a nest of old blankets or trot slowly along a forest path.

Questions beget answers, and those answers beget new questions which in turn beget answers, and it is neither right nor wrong, nor good nor bad, to partake of this cycle. Yet in our confusion, we do not see this cycle, but think we are following a line (meandering but ultimately true) at the end of which is THE ANSWER, and that THE ANSWER is the One True God, and this God is glad at our arrival, and so we are glad, too.

It is not so.

The wheel of a wagon executes an interminable circle. It loops forever. Yet the line it leaves behind it is straight and singular – possessed of both beginning and end – and apparently unerring in its linearity. Imagine the turning wheel gazes at this line, sighs and asks “What is happening? What am I?”

The line does not answer, for the line is merely an effect of the wheel. And the wheel only turns: and turns: and turns.

february thaw –
the chickadees and I
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