Sean Reagan

Love Does Not Compare: ACIM Daily Lesson 195

Let us pause for a moment and think of those with whom we compare ourselves. I mean literally search our thoughts and find those individuals (or groups even), and maybe even do a little comparing right now.

Aren’t these folks easy to find? Easy to objectify? Easy to envy or scorn? Those who are less patient, less diligent in their scholarship, less attentive to food security? Those who are richer, thinner, or can run farther faster? Those who panic when faced with a crowd and those who can’t shut up and share the stage?

sun_rising_red — dawn in the hayloft, light hinting red

It is helpful to see this rogues gallery and to acknowledge its existence. We made it. Its halls are worn bare because we visit so often and so faithfully.

Lesson 195 of A Course in Miracles is ostensibly about gratitude, but it yokes this core concept to our tendency to compare ourselves to others and find them – or us – wanting. Comparison, it turns out, is not a recipe for inner peace.

You do not offer God your gratitude because your brother is more slave than you, nor could you sanely be enraged if he seems freer. Love makes no comparisons. And gratitude can only be sincere if it be joined to love (W-pI.195.4:1-3).

Love makes no comparisons . . .

We have to stay with that phrase for a moment because it is so utterly beautiful and also so mind-numbingly ridiculous.

Doesn’t that phrase feel electric in your brain? “Love makes no comparisons,” “Love does not compare . . . ” Doesn’t it resonate when uttered as if the very angels of Heaven were harmonizing along with you?

And truly, don’t you feel a little self-righteous saying it? I do. Like how cool is it that we are the ones who know that love makes no comparisons . . .

But look. As human observers, we make comparisons. We live by them. We compare foods, find some nutritious and others a chemical abomination, and then eat accordingly. We have to go on a long drive and opt for a Bob Dylan playlist, not Techno, because we want to be happy and relaxed on our drive, not jaw-grinding insane.

Or we love someone – we hold them, kiss them, watch over their rest, catch our breath when they smile – because we’ve been around, we’ve seen the options – and this someone is the best someone. They’re good to us, they make us laugh. They know when we need a little extra attention and when we have to be alone. Not just anybody can be this somebody!

You cannot not make comparisons. Okay? You really have to see this! You have to see how comparing actually inheres in your body, in your thoughts, and in the language you use. Comparison is you; it’s as much you as anything else you’d like to say is you.

We have to see it that way because if we don’t, then the utter ridiculousness of the lesson – upon which its helpfulness is predicated – won’t be clear. You see? You are being told to adopt as a practice something that you literally cannot do. It isn’t fair. It’s masochistic.

So what do we do?

Lesson 195 advises us to let our gratitude make room for “the sick, the weak, the needy and afraid, and those who mourn a seeming loss and those who feel apparent pain, who suffer cold or hunger, or who walk the way of hatred and pain of death” (W-pI.195.5:2).

All these go with you. Let us not compare ourselves with them, for thus we split them off from our awareness of the unity we share with them, as they must share with us (W-pI.195.5:3-4).

Do you see what happened there? We – you and I, of all people – got thrown in with “the sick, the weak, the needy and afraid, and those who mourn a seeming loss and those who feel apparent pain, who suffer cold or hunger, or who walk the way of hatred and pain of death.”

It’s not a mistake. It’s a fact of our shared unity. If you are honest, can’t you see yourself somewhere in that list? It’s not a description of others – it’s a description of our own living.

Comparison only makes logical sense if there are at least two things. I can compare my right hand to my left hand, but not my right hand to my right hand. I can compare the maple tree out front to the maple tree out back, but I can’t compare the maple tree out front to the maple tree out front.

What is one and thus the same cannot be compared to itself.

We thank our Father for one thing alone; that we are separate from no living thing, and therefore one with Him. And we rejoice that no exceptions can ever be made which would reduce our wholeness . . . We give thanks for every living thing, for otherwise we offer thanks for nothing . . . (W-pI.195.6:1-3).

Sure, you say. We are one. But it feels and seems and appears like we’re separate . . .

Yes. I hear that. It is an important insight. And really, to pretend otherwise is vain and pretentious. And we are past that now. We don’t wake to fake awakening or act out fantasies of nonduality or pretend we’re in an intimate 1:1 correspondence with Jesus, Yahweh, and the Buddha.

It’s good to be clear that we are having a dualistic experience. It’s good to remember that we are not alone in saying it. And it’s good – it’s more than good, actually – to give close attention to what the course asks of us next in the lesson.

Then let our brothers lean their tired heads against our shoulders as they rest a while. We offer thanks for them. For if we can direct them to the peace that we would find, the way is opening at last to us (W-pI.195.7:1-3).

Please see the clarity of that last sentence: it does not say that peace that we have or know or are. It says the peace we are still looking for. It refers to the peace we haven’t found. It envisions a future state that is not this present state.

You see? The course is recognizing that we aren’t there yet. We don’t get it yet. And it is no big deal. The sky isn’t falling, pits aren’t opening, and lions aren’t laying down with lambs.

So we can relax and get on with the other two sentences in that passage. We give thanks (sentence two) and then help our brothers and sisters rest (sentence one). We put the metaphysics and intellectualizing aside and actually help our brothers and sisters.

And isn’t that the part we all want to skip? It’s so much sexier to read Francisco Varela and Emily Dickinson, write Japanese short form poetry, see who liked our last post and who retweeted our last tweets.

Who wants to go donate a few hours at the local food pantry? Who wants to walk around the crappy parts of town and hand out coffees or blankets or bologna sandwiches? Who wants to visit a nursing home and read to someone who never gets visitors? Who wants to knock on doors for signatures for a bill that would ban pesticides that are harmful to bees? Who wants to do the dishes even though it’s not your night to do the dishes?

Tara Singh is my ACIM teacher because he brought the course out of the clouds. He ended the distractions of mysticism, psychic powers, ascended masters; really, he ended the ideal of special experiences altogether. He taught me that the earth is my home, not the sky. He taught me to garden and gaze dreamily at the stars, to enact local service and to go off to a quiet place to pray, to study critical texts and clean the bathroom.

shadow_prisms — my shadow gesturing at blurred prisms on the hayloft’s western wall

Lesson 195 never says this but it should: Act in the world with your body. Act in a way that helps other people. When you do this, the love and peace from which you still feel alienated, and the oneness that remains true even though you can’t really see it yet, will be revealed.

An ancient door is swinging free again; a long forgotten Word re-echoes in our memory, and gathers clarity as we are willing once again to clear . . . Walk then in gratitude the way of love (W-pI.7:4, 8:1).

So don’t sweat the comparisons. Let them come, let them go. Don’t sweat the impossible. Don’t try and mentally work out what it would mean to be beyond all that. If it’s your job to understand and help others understand, then that will happen. But right now – and perhaps for a long time to come – our job is to love one another, to help one another.

We are the lost and forsaken. We are the lost sheep. But it’s okay! Don’t look for home, don’t complain about how unfair life is, don’t lament your fate. Rather, with clear eyes, gaze about and see the widow, the orphan, the soldier, the prisoner, the refugee, the hungry, the frail, the abandoned, the hopeless . . .

They are here: help them. In simple nondramatic ways, be of service. See what happens next.

Love Comes Naturally

Yet it is natural to love one another. It does not take effort or discipline; we don’t have to be taught. Love arises in us as a condition of our being. You could say that we are love, and does it not feel true? Does it not feel like you did not say those words alone but in concert?

light_facing_east — facing east, surrendering

In the hayloft where I write three windows face east. Glass bottles line the dusty sills, prisms hang in the panes. At dawn, as the sun rises, the room fills with a glorious light; rainbows glide across the walls and floors. At times I cannot bear this loveliness and have to look way. Other times it makes me as happy as if war itself were forever dissolved, the hungry fed and the imprisoned set free.

And yet war goes on. Hunger goes on. The prisons are full. The poor cut their pills into quarters. So my studies go on, laying me low, brushing me aside, lifting me up . . .

Why? What is the cause of this long sufferance? And what if anything shall we do to end it, you and I?

In A Course in Miracles, “separation” is the belief that we have an identity apart from Creation itself. But the course teaches that this belief is an error.

You have not only been fully created, but have also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in you. Because of your likeness to your Creator, you are creative. No child of God can lose this ability because it is inherent in what she is . . . (T-2.I.1:3-6).

In his essay Biology of Love, Humberto Maturana noted that “love is the grounding of human existence,” but acknowledged that we are alienated from this basic truth.

In the blindness that the negation of love creates in our living, we stop seeing ourselves as part of the harmonious interconnectedness of all existence in the unending dynamics of life and death, and we begin to live guided by ambition, greediness and the desire for control . . . we suffer because we become denied by the very same world and psychic existence that we are bringing about, as this is a world and psychic existence that denies the fundaments of our existence as loving animals.

Thus, as A Course in Miracles points out, “[T]he secret to salvation is but this: that you re doing this unto yourself” (T-27.VIII.10:1).

No matter what the form of attack, this still is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true (T-27.VIII.10:2-4).

light_and_love_and_miracles — light
and love
and miracles

We are loving beings who make systems by which our capacity for love – but not love itself, never love itself – is thwarted. And yet as we construct these systems, so can we also deconstruct them. We can give careful and sustained attention to what obstructs the free flow of love in and through our being and do the necessary work of clearing space, opening channels, and getting out of the way.

For it is work and it is not easy. It takes effort. It takes discipline. It takes time and energy, more than we might care to give. We have to learn to see the fundamental deception in a sustained way, which is the only way it can be dissolved. We have to see the deception of self-satisfaction – “I’ve done enough” or “I’m all done” or “It’s too hard / confusing / unrewarding.” It is the hardest step of all.

For the work is not to perfect our own being but to clarify it through service and contemplation so that the world itself – the collective that holds the individual as dearly as it holds the all of us – might remember its natural inclination to love. Tara Singh said to be fully awake was to be always learning.

A student has to give life for life.
Learning is to Be the Children of God.

(Tara Singh, The Voice that Precedes Thought 155)

ACIM_light_you_bring — the light you bring,
A Course in Miracles

So I go on reading the difficult texts. So I surrender to what I cannot understand, what yet baffles me, what ruins me and in my ruin lifts me up. So I open my eyes to loveliness and to that which would obscure and denigrate and end loveliness. For it is through the clear seeing of our own poverty and ignorance that the grace to learn is given. To awaken is merely to begin again, forever.

So this morning I come to the hayloft, and write this, and offer it to you, whose love is my salvation, and whose joy is my joy is our joy.

On Being Wrong (And What Comes Next)

A lot of my thinking over the past year rests on an assumption about observers, namely, that cognition and perception are observer-dependent, and thus cannot provide access to any absolute Reality or Truth.

Yet notice that for this assumption to justify the conclusion, it has to be interpreted as being actually real – that is, that the observer is a real object with real capabilities that can be known and measured.

But my conclusion states the precise opposite of that!

Is this clear? It is like I am saying “only the perceiving cognizing human observer is real – everything else is conditional, relative, uncertain, et cetera.” If one looks at it this way, it’s incoherent. It presupposes the reality of the body – of the observer – in order to argue that nothing is real (or certain or true . . . ). The premise undermines the conclusion.

So perhaps I am wrong, or at least deeply confused. Then what?

I might conclude that bodies are actually real and that the world they construct (via perception and cognition) enjoys an actual non-trivial correspondence to Reality. The dead really are dead and the living really do need to eat and sleep.

On that view, a path like A Course in Miracles – and other contemporary approaches to nonduality – are wrong. Embodied duality subject to time and space is the only God there is, and it doesn’t give a damn about our feelings. Kneel before the microscopes and telescopes! Pledge thy fealty to Feynmann!

On that view, religion and spirituality are only useful to the extent they modify our behavior in the direction of helpfulness, kindness, gentleness, et cetera. They ought to be evaluated the same way we evaluate pharmaceuticals – run tests under strictly monitored conditions, gather up data, and then go where the data says go.

A lot of us don’t like that but . . . what if it’s where logic and experience take us? Would that be okay?

Another possible conclusion is to realize that presumptions notwithstanding, we are still left with the observer. There is still this experience. If one explanation for it falls shy of accuracy, and another one doesn’t feel sufficiently magical or otherwise appealing, why not look for others?

Is it possible that a pure approach to nonduality is coherent? That is, to argue that there is only awareness with its unbelievably rich tapestry of experiences, including the one of being a human observer with her intimately dualistic worldview? That everything – from gravity to cancer cells to bullets to pansies – are all merely appearances in, to, and as awareness?

That even this self is an appearance? Even this precious apparent center alternately calling itself “Me” and “I?”

Often, faced with knotty dilemmas such as these, I fall back to shrugging. I can’t prove Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi and Rupert Spira wrong. Feynmann and Maturana and Nagel can’t quite totally convince me they’re right . . . So maybe the best thing is to adopt whatever posture works best. What’s right is what works!

What’s handy about that is it lets me skip the hard questions and instead focuses on defining “works” and how to go about accurate measuring.

Say I want “works” to mean “most efficient at securing a natural and serious happiness throughout the collective,” and I am going to measure it through happiness indexes, food security, statistics on global death by famine, war, disease et cetera.

From a nondual perpsective I can say, well, yes, all that are appearances in consciousness but . . . it makes me happy. And being happy seems to help me make you happy, so . . . yes. We’ll do that. Even if it’s merely appearance.

Is that enough? To just say “hey – nondualism works for me. YMMV. It’s all good!”

What about my neighbor who believes a patriarchal Christian worldview is what makes people happiest? And his standard for measurement is how many women are only able to do what their fathers/husbands/brothers allow them to do?

Must I do battle – epistemological or otherwise – with my neighbor? What if he tries to convert me? What if he tries to convert my daughter?

Or what if my neighbor is a physicist and she mounts a well-sourced, well-articulated rational argument in favor of simply accepting bodies as objects in a universe subject to physical laws. I can’t refute it. And it’s at least moderately predictable (in a Bayesian sense). Adopting it makes me more productive and efficient, and productivity and efficiency help promote this “natural and serious happiness . . . ”

Must I accept her argument? Must I put my crucifixes and tarot cards and A Course in Miracles away?

I don’t think these are trivial questions! Which is not to say they are all equally valid or even answerable. But they do seem to follow from my premise: which is that the premise I adopt viz. human observers may, in fact, be bullshit.

When faced with a seam in the foundation, it’s a good idea to take it seriously.

How do we know anything? How does knowing matter? Is there some degree of unknowing that is acceptable? What degree? Who decides? Who will help us? And how will we know?

Where do we go from here?

Beyond Boundaries

Yet perhaps we cannot go beyond names. Perhaps to even try is to descend into a state of infinite regress. “This tree is a white pine.” But before we call it a “white pine” we call it a “tree.” And before we call it a “tree” we call it “it.”

Can we reach a state beyond names? Beyond labels of any kind?

Most folks schooled in the contemporary neo-advaitic tradition would say “yes, we can reach a state beyond names.” We can be aware of “awareness” itself. Or “God” maybe, if one tracks the language of A Course in Miracles. “That which cannot be named,” “Presence,” “I am that I am,” And so forth.

But notice that each time we do this, we are using language. And language is always referential. And the word is never the thing. And the thing always has a name. And the name . . .

So the snake eats its tail. So this sentence is not the next sentence you read.

Of course, we sense a beyond or behind or above or overarching. Of course there seems to be an All. But that is just the nature of infinite regress to a human observer. We can lay our fingers on the pulse of infinity, press the folds of eternity to our cheek. It is all within us as we are within all and . . .

And we are back in language again, as if we never left.

There is no starting point. There can’t be. How can you claim there is something without claiming there is something?

There is only this, which can be objectified, externalized, talked about, thought about, named, shared, hidden, found, modified, framed, reframed and reframed yet again. It is turtles – excuse me, “turtles” – all the way down.

When I say there is only this – this this – it arises in part from the understanding that saying anything more in an absolute sense is prohibited. Not prohibited by some authority figure like God or Emily Dickinson, but by experience itself. It’s just how it is, or how it appears (and what, really, is the difference?) to a human observer.

Yet it also arises from desire – a desire inherent in language and in our bodies, which are actually not separate either from language or from one another. There is something that longs to be expressed and received, a mutual gift-giving that seems to be the essence of us, as if love were what bodies were for, or even what bodies are, maybe.

This longing includes by definition both self and other and it arises as a unity. My desire to speak presumes you: you are my desire.

Why get lost in the whether we call it dual or nondual, God or not-God, this or that or something else altogether? It is simply joy: our joy, given and received by giving again. And without the other – who could be our self – it is not.

On Descriptions of Spiritual Awakening

Heinz von Foerster once said – here paraphrased – that complexity is a consequence of language; it does not inhere in the world. I want to extend his insight and say that complexity is not a property of experience but rather is a property of descriptions of experience.

Basically, I am suggesting that experience happens – clear and simple to the point of purity – and then we describe experience and our descriptions are partial and relative to the individual observer and are thus complex. Often, what we say is literally incomprehensible to others, if not to ourselves, and vice-versa. It is like smashing a crystal, distributing the pieces, and then trying to describe how the shard fits a (now gone) whole.

Take our experience of a tree. Go sit by one or take a long look at one. Is there any ambiguity in the experience? Is there anything that is unclear? Even if you evoke gaps in understanding – “I don’t know what kind of tree this is” – the gap itself is clear. You know something is missing and how to describe its absence.

This clarity – which is inherent in experience – is often overlooked. Or perhaps I speak to my own confusion. But it is helpful to see that whatever is going on is always clear and direct: it is this experience, “this this” as I like to say. It is deeply present: utterly whole unto itself.

And then we go and talk about it! Then we describe our experience of the tree. We take the clear simple direct experience and atomize it in order to make a copy. That is what a description does: a bunch of details reassembled as a copy of the whole for purposes of dissemination.

If you are a professional forester, your description of the tree will be one thing. If you are a botanist, another. If you are a poet who has been writing under that tree for decades, another. If you are a photographer, another. If you are a squirrel, another. A nuthatch, another. And so forth.

Some of those descriptions will overlap but not always.
Some of them will be contradictory – the forester and the poet might vehemently disagree about the tree. Bipedal descriptions will necessarily be differentiated from those of quadrupeds or birds.

Perhaps the biggest impediment to nondual experience is the fact that a word and the object to which it refers are not the same thing. The word “tree” does not in any way look or act like a tree. Language always dropkicks us into this basic dualism. Indeed, we are only able to speak about nondualism by taking as our premise this basic division between word and object.

But maybe experience and description are in fact a nondual unity albeit without coinciding. Perhaps it looks like this:

Experience => Description / Experience => Description / Experience => Description / Experience => and so on . . .

That is, all description is an experience but is not a description of the experience it seems to describe. In other words, we experience a tree and then we experience describing the tree. Our descriptions are experience which are descriptions.

Once we no longer insist that description and experience align perfectly or truthfully in a static way, then the incoherency subsides. The description is not the thing. Yet it is a thing which may itself be described. In this way, description and experience flow with and into one another as a seamless whole. Maybe.

Often, when we give attention in a sustained way, we end up giving attention to attention which, in a certain sense, closes the loop, somewhat the way a serpent swallows its own tail. One catches a glimpse then of what perhaps cannot be spoken of in language and yet – oddly – longs to be spoken of in language. Else why would this very paragraph exist? Why would you be reading it?

(And what loop have we closed – me writing and you reading – here?)

So we hold description loosely, as we hold experience loosely, and give attention in gentle and sustainable ways. We see what we see: we extend it: extension becomes us seeing what we see.

Dialogue as Love

Recently I wrote this sentence:

There is no other way because we are already what we seek: are already the very home in which we long to rest.

It was in the same paragraph as this little gem:

We are love.

Sigh.

deadfall — Deadfall past the horse pasture . . .

I try to be careful when writing that way. It’s not that the given statements are wrong per se, but that they are poetic in a way that allows for – perhaps even instigates – confusion. And the goal now is to be less confused. Better things happen when confusion abates.

If you read those sentences – now or back when they were first posted – did you like them? Was there a little shiver of yes? A little mental click like finding just the right puzzle piece? Certainly there was for me. Else why would I have written them?

“We are love” and “we are already the home in which we long to rest” are resonant because they link the self (“we”) to a couple of powerful words: “love” and “home.” And it’s a favorable association.

Language has power. Certain words and phrases resonate for us, often intimately. There is no way around this – it inheres in the human experience – and so all we can do is give attention to the experience of resonance and see what, if anything, reveals itself.

Often, we conflate interior congruence – that little shiver of yes, the joyful mental click – with the actual truth of the proposition. That is, we read “We are love” and it feels good and so therefore it must be true. But we don’t actually inquire into it: we don’t test it, we don’t tease its many strands into the open, we don’t look for alternatives, we don’t examine our biases.

And there are plenty of true facts that don’t instantiate any interior frisson in the first place. “Groundhogs have four legs.” Yawn. I mean true, but . . . yawn.

So there is something special about some words and it’s worth digging into this to figure out what exactly appeals to us and whether in our happiness we are accepting a level of confusion we should really be opposing.

Take a word like “love.”

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as love. When someone says “love,” they intend for the word to cover their personal felt understanding of ideal human behaviors, social obligations, historical patterns, et cetera.

“Love” is just a symbol that points to a welter that no single syllable in the universe could possibly reliably contain. It’s like saying that reading the word “wet” feels the same as swimming at night in the sea.

You have two choices when I use the word “love.” First, you could enter into dialogue with me. You could start by asking: “what do you mean when you use this word?” And then work with me for however long it takes to understand what I mean with what I say.

To be in dialogue this way requires time and patience and care. It is demanding. It is form of service, perhaps. To give attention to another human being in the deep way of truly aiming to understand what they mean when they say “love” . . . is itself – as I understand and use the word – an act of love.

The other option – the default option and so the easier option – is to correlate my use of the word to your own interior welter. That is, you implicitly assume that I must mean what you would mean if you had used the same word. A lot of our human communication is predicated on just that kind of assumption.

The problem arises when my use of the word and your use of the word are so apart they could almost be different languages. Then, every subsequent move in our communication only widens the initial divide. We fall further and further apart even as we think we are moving in sync. A lot of our human problems arise from just this kind of ongoing error.

Why do we accept accept this division? Why do we refuse to see it is an error? Why do we deny its ruinous effects?

These are important questions.

What matters is not the word that we use but rather the person who uses it. When we are in dialogue, what works is to see the whole person before us, and to be aware of what it is in us that prohibits us from seeing who is before us. Words are helpful in that meeting – that mutuality – that bringing forth of love – but they are just words. They are not that to which they purport to point.

Our practice is to live lightly with language, ever aware of that to which it points, and unafraid to do the hard work of bringing clarity to confusion.

The work is to go slowly and be careful – to be filled with care – with respect both to our wordiness and the wordiness of others. What do we mean when we say “home” or “love?” What do others mean? How shall we know?

How shall we be in dialogue, you and I?