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.
We want to be spiritual experts, masters of A Course in Miracles, Christian gurus unto those in despair and loss. And yet over and over we find that we are in despair, we suffer loss. We are the lost, we are the forsaken.
Faced with this poverty we go back to the start we maybe never left: we pray as children: we beg the Father for mercy and supplication. And some us – perhaps – see this crying out as failure and feel guilty accordingly.
There is – there is always – another way.
So we fall to our knees and beg God to get us out of this hard place in which we presently find ourselves, so what? So we pray to Jesus – literally to the executed peasant whose brief ministry ended over two thousand years ago – to ease our pain and suffering, so what?
It is tempting to think the wise and enlightened never sink to this level – oral prayers beseeching supernatural agents to benevolently intervene on our behalf. It is a problem in the ACIM community that folks are so intent on being well and wise and woke that they can’t accept their brokenness and anguish and confusion. They can’t meet their own self where and as it is.
I speak here from experience.
We are just people having this particular experience of being people, which includes – to varying degrees – pain and loss and confusion. Sometimes it hurts to be who and what we are. Sometimes it hurts bad.
It is not a crime to feel this way. And it is not a crime to turn to simple mental prayers as a response to these feelings.
Mental prayer is vocal and basic. It is the child calling to her father or mother. It is an urgent cry for instant attention, reflecting a primal need to be held in arms whose strength and presence are unconditional and beyond any doubt or question. Mental prayer arises from our interior desire to be perfectly safe, perfectly loved, perfectly fed, et cetera et cetera.
To be human is to have needs and when those needs aren’t met, to strive to meet them. Thus, part of being human is also to face the simple truth that those needs are not always met – sometimes to the point where our discomfort turns to anguish, inconvenience to crisis. Of course we cry out. What else could we do?
To turn to Jesus in dialogue – to literally ask him for aid the way we might ask a parent or partner or therapist – is a way of coming back to our bodies, to the nontrivial clarity of being itself. It reminds us of the stillness and grace that naturally inheres in this being, this way.
How does mental prayer do this? By helping us to simply breathe. We throw our plea at our image of Jesus – the brother who loves us unconditionally, who mediates for us the supernatural agency of God, who never says no or sees any problem as insignificant – and because he’s got it, we can let go and draw a breath. And then another.
And in the simple rhythm of breathing, which is simply to be, we remember some of the essential facts of this experience: that we are not alone, that everything passes, that there is always something we can do – for ourselves and/or for others – that can calm the raging storm inside us.
The goal is not to perfect our external circumstances. That will never happen anyway. Nor is it to perfect our interior psychological spiritual balance so that nothing can ruffle or frighten or disorient or trouble us. That isn’t going to happen either, not perfectly.
The point, really, is simply learn how to not freak out when our actual experience of being human deviates from our projection of what that experience should be. Sometimes the actuality and the projection line up fine. But frequently they don’t. We have to see this and not panic about it. Everything comes and goes. We want to be graceful and gentle about surfing the coming and going. That’s all.
So mental prayer is helpful to the extent it triggers some interior insight that in the fundamental sense, no matter how crazy or upset we are, nothing is happening that is new or wrong or permanent. It’s just life being life responding to life being life. It’s amenable, fixable, pliable. When we remember this, we remember that we are not alone and not deprived of our capacity to be – even in little, hardly noticeable ways – the healing we require.
Go for a walk, visit a neighbor, write a poem, compliment an activist whose work you admire, carry some canned goods to a food bank, sit quietly and compose a gratitude list, fill the bird feeder, do one thing on your to-do list, do something on someone else’s. Whatever. What hurts will pass; the hurt will pass.
It is a sign of spiritual maturity – not specialness – to accept and make use of prayer in the full breadth of its potential. Sometimes it is contemplative, sometimes transcendent, sometimes active. And sometimes it is the wordy gasping of the lost and forsaken, turning to a mythology they thought they had outgrown and left behind.
There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach (W-pI.132.6:2-3).
The Course makes no claim to finality, nor are the Workbook lessons intended to bring the student’s learning to completion. At the end, the reader is left in the hands of his or her own Internal Teacher, Who will direct all subsequent learning as He sees fit (preface to A Course in Miracles).
The experiences we have are shaped by the cognitive and perceptive capacities of bodies. We can’t fly like crows and we can’t live underwater like fish and we can’t calculate a billion chess moves in a single second.
We can build machines that help us do those things ( or actually do these things) but we cannot do them unaided. And even the machines we build are limited by what we can know and perceive. You can’t build a machine to do X, if you can’t conceive of X.
Thus, cognition and perception – impressive as they are – are limits.
Yet they are also generative, in that absent their function – including the constraints on that function – no world comes forth in which to do our living. That is, cognition and perception also bring forth the very environment in which we live and have our being. They shape the world, color it, order it, et cetera.
If somebody in the ACIM community disputes the existence of the body – as sooner or later almost every student does – then the question arises: how would you know?
That is, absent the cognitive and perceptual abilities of the body, how would you be able to experience – and then share that experience of – not having a body?
the body brought forth by the world the body brings forth . . .
In other words, it takes a body to imagine that one is not a body and is therefore free (of bodies and the world they bring forth).
That is not necessarily a dispositive argument, but still. I do not think these questions are out of place in the community of A Course in Miracles (though when I raise them folks often bristle). We do like the comfort of magical solutions. We do enjoy imagining ourselves as heirs to benevolent mysteries.
However, what we are really doing when we covet magic and mystery is claiming the special status of The One Who Knows, whose knowing is defined in significant part by the poor ignorant bastards who don’t know and thus fall outside the safe bounds of our spiritual fortress.
This, as Tara Singh pointed out, is a form of lovelessness. We all do it and so we are all also called to stop doing it.
A Course in Miracles is a symbolic text that if taken literally ends up confusing its students. Its primary author – Helen Schucman – more or less abandoned the project, leaving it to others to edit and promulgate. Some of those others conflated (knowingly and otherwise) their personal agendas with those of the course. A lot of the public energy in and around the ACIM community resembles a culture of naiveté and spiritual grift.
It is less like a quiet church in which to commune with the Beloved and more like a crowded noisy bazaar where it’s hard to think, not everybody has your best interests at heart, and the exits aren’t clearly marked.
Yet for all that, the course retains its fundamental ability: to introduce the sincere student to her own internal teacher, which the course calls the Holy Spirit, and which I call attention.
(Side note: of course you should ignore everything I say! What do I know?)
Attention is what allows us to gently see what works and what doesn’t and to deepen our relationship with what works while setting aside that which does not. Awakening is not a spiritual event but an ongoing sustainable process by which our thinking and being clarify in ways that reduce conflict. As conflict in its various forms abates, what remains is peace.
We are by nature loving, cooperative and inclusive animals, but it takes learning and practice to recover and hold this fact in creative and fructive ways.
This process is not – repeat not – a mysterious project involving mysterious agents and hidden causes that somehow do away with bodies and transport us to veritable Edens where we cavort with the similarly blessed.
Rather, the quiet happiness, the calm joy, the serious desire to be helpful and kind are embodied experiences that loosen the stranglehold our fear of loss – and fear of death as the ultimate loss – have on our bodies. That’s all. The course is helping undo fear but that undoing happens here, in and to and with the body in which our experience is brought forth from the world our body brings forth.
When the body – and its world – becomes as natural and lovely as a dandelion or a chickadee or a thunderstorm, then there is less to cling to and more to simply be grateful for. It is enough, truly. You can set about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, beating your sword into a plow and so forth. Or making puzzles, baking bread and going for walks. Or whatever lights your candle.
You can be freely and fully the loving animal you naturally are.
It is true that a kind of transcendence is being implied here. Emily Dickinson’s body of work (poems and letters) is a beautiful and complex exploration of this experience. But the transcendence is experienced locally! That is, there is the one who transcends and there is that which is transcended and . . . wait for it . . . they are the same! So the transcendence is less about rising above and more about perceiving the way in which our being is more in the nature of, say, a Mobius strip (or an Escher painting or a sentence like “[T]he reader of this sentence exists only while reading me”*).
And given attention – that is, given the teacher A Course in Miracles pledges its students – one cannot help but see this and know this is in a natural and serious way.
It is always hard to talk intelligently and clearly about this material, especially because one experiences it – and extends it – in such deeply personal ways. I hope you will forgive my clumsiness and tendency to prattle.
*Borrowed from Douglas Hofstadter’s book Metamagical Themas.
A Course in Miracles often strikes me as a fringe-y element of a fairly typical cultural drift currently happening in Christianity. There is a move away from rigid standards and institutional practices and toward something a bit more mystical and flexible and generous, somewhat like Buddhism in its transplanted western expressions.
The onions, whose skins and ends will be tossed on the compost which in turn will become the soil in which new onions will grown, whose skins and ends will be tossed on the compost . . .
More heaven and less hellfire. More commensality than exclusivity.
People often describe my spiritual position as atheistic, which is understandable. After all, I frequently say there is no God. Yet in general I don’t embrace that label, for the simple reason that my thinking has been so deeply influenced in both content and structure by Christian writers and practices. It feels irresponsible to not acknowledge and accept this.
I tend to think of “God” as a nontrivial idea implicated in my experience of self and world, one that I can neither wholly ignore nor fully embrace. A fundamental reflexivity abounds, kind of the way I throw onion skins in the compost which a year or so later becomes the soil in which new onions are planted whose skins will be thrown on the compost . . .
On and on it goes until you realize what’s interesting is not the “it” but the “going on and on.”
On this view, A Course in Miracles becomes a sort of literate, vaguely academic, Christian expression of nondual mysticism with Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God-as-Father loosely riding herd on an embodied process. I think more rigid ACIM practitioners – Ken Wapnick comes to mind – would object to this characterization. They may even be right. What do I know?
But the question is always about what is helpful. That is, what is the use to which so-and-so is being put? what works?
In my experience, the course eventually nudged me out of ACIM and into contemporary neo-advaitic communities (Leo Hartong, in particular), where I was fortunate to meet some very smart and patients folks who professed to be in a state of oneness, one without another, et cetera.
I enjoyed those dialogues very much! It was a helpful learning environment for me, even if – to the chagrin of the friends I made there – I eventually moved on. A lot of the ground on which contemporary nondual logic and lexicon rests turns out to be pretty thin gruel when examined closely. That’s okay. There are thinkers – Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Louis Kaufman, David Bohm, to name a significant few – who provided (for me, anyway) the requisite maps and gear.
Nondual experience or awareness or insights – however one wants to phrase it – are certainly available. However, contrary to popular belief and received wisdom, they are not ends or products so much as beginnings or processes. And they are inherent in the human experience as it is experienced.
It is – again, in my experience – a question of knowing what to look for and, perhaps in a way, of knowing how to look.
Thus, even as I’ve drifted a fair bit from ACIM proper, in a lot of ways I’ve come closer to the inner peace and stillness the relative absence of which drove me to the course in the first place. The route I took was circuitous and sort of counter-intuitive but it was certainly functional. To extend the analogy from yesterday, if you set out to climb a mountain by Trail A and end up bushwhacking your way to the summit, so what? The summit’s the summit.
Thus, my answer to whether A Course in Miracles was – is – helpful is an unqualified yes, albeit with a story attached. Really, what else could it be? So it is not my intention to tell anybody to bail on the course but rather to ask in a serious and reflective way: is it helpful? Is it working? And then give attention to the answers and let them direct you accordingly.
The other day I said to a friend that A Course in Miracles was sort of like the last way station before I set out for the summit. I hunkered down with it, I learned a lot, made contact with my inner teacher, made contact with some external teachers like Tara Singh and Ken Wapnick and . . . moved on. Went up the trail.
Historic postcard of Mount Ascutney in Vermont. Still and forever my favorite mountain, both to climb and to admire at a distance.
My point was that nobody lingers at the way station. You do what you need to do there and then you move on. Sure you can linger. Yes the company can be great. And yes, there’s no penalty for staying. You can spend your whole life at the way station – the world won’t end.
But it’s important to be honest. If we’re on the mountain because we want to reach the peak, then what is the point of making the way station our home, spiritual or otherwise?
Why not go where you want to go?
A Course in Miracles is a course – you take it, you take it again if that’s helpful or necessary, you study it carefully to be sure you’ve got it, you help other students and let yourself be helped, you listen carefully to your teachers . . .
And then you move on.
I was confused about this for a long time. I wanted the course to be my home, and I wanted course students to be my tribe, forever and always with a neat little bow.
But A Course in Miracles is not a spiritual path. It’s not a religion. It’s not even a community really, because it is so intensely personal. It’s just a self-study course that you can take or not take. So take it or don’t. But if you’re still dogging it twenty years later then it’s possible you’re indulging some confusion or denial.
If somebody wants a church or a meditation practice or something like that, there are plenty of options. There’s nothing wrong – and a lot helpful – with availing ourselves of them.
But that’s not what A Course in Miracles is about. You take the course and then you get on with your life. You make contact with your teacher, and that’s that. It’s like taking an accounting class. You learn the rules of accounting and the supporting math and then you go become an accountant.
If you are still taking accounting classes ten years later, and if you are struggling with the material, or if you’re taking them because you like the other students or whatever, then maybe accounting isn’t for you.
A Course in Miracles is no different. If it’s not helpful, then great. That’s good to know! But if you feel some calling or attachment to it, and if you read a line like “you make contact with your teacher, and that’s that” and you don’t know what it means then maybe you should ask some questions.
1. Why don’t you know?
2. Have you really and truly given the course all your attention and effort?
3. If not, why not?
4. If not, is it coherent to re-take the course?
5. If not, is there some more helpful course or tradition or practice of which you might avail yourself?
Always keep in mind that A Course in Miracles is simply one form of a given curriculum (e.g. C-in.2:5-6 and T-in.1:4) . There are others. Don’t sweat it if you’re being called to find out what those others are. Think of it this way: somebody in some other form of the curriculum needs you. Don’t waste time; find them. Help them. Be helped by them.
So that was what I meant: you take the course, you move on. But the friend with whom I was speaking asked a good question. He didn’t ask about the way station thing. He asked about the summit.
“So did you reach the summit?”
I laughed. It was a good question.
The summit (and the mountain and the way station and A Course in Miracles and the self and . . . ) are just analogies. They’re just a way of thinking, to those for whom thought is the mode. They are real analogies – real symbols – and they have some utility, but . . .
Nobody is really climbing a mountain at the top of which is God. Nobody is ascending a ladder to Heaven.
There is no God. There is no Heaven.
There is only this.
A Course in Miracles didn’t teach me that. It didn’t wake me up or enlighten me, as folks tend to use those terms. Really, it just helped me ask some very good and important questions (questions that were very personal to me and to where I was at with the whole God and Jesus thing) and then gently – with rare exceptions – pried me open so that I could receive the answers.
Those answers begat questions the course couldn’t answer – questions the course wasn’t designed to answer – and so I had to ask them elsewhere. Really, that is what it means to make contact with your teacher. You go where the questions say to go. In my experience, that is what the course does – it makes the next step or two clear.
There is no end to questions, and that is a nice thing to learn. When you learn it, you can relax about being right. You can relax about missing anything. You can relax about finding the One True Right Answer. Questions arise, answers arise, and then more questions arise. It’s okay. It’s more than okay.
No matter how intense you are, or how carefully you study, or who you allow to help you . . . questions arise. Answers arise.
In other words, there is no one answer that undoes anything. The undoing happens of its accord. In retrospect it sometimes appears as if there were some external cause – the temple bell going off just so, Jesus alighting on a nearby pine tree and setting it afire. But mostly it’s just the slow cessation of resistance, the emerging willingness to let be. You make a pot of coffee. You go for a walk. You write a poem or ride the horses or steam some broccoli . . .
There is nothing wrong with getting all intellectual and wordy about God and awakening and A Course in Miracles. I do sometimes, because it’s natural and fun and interesting. Better women and men than me have done the same, sometimes to a very helpful degree but still. It’s not right in any absolute sense.
A lot of people end up in a space of inner peace and stillness based on nothing other than common sense and simple attention.
Some folks get there because of religion. Or a good psychotherapist. Or the right combination of hallucinogenics.
Some people just get lucky.
That’s more or less what I said to my friend in response to his “did you reach the summit” question. And he replied – because he knows me and because he loves me and because it was the best thing to say in that moment – that I was full of shit.
And we both laughed then and kept walking. Our dialogue moved on to other subjects.
In a sense, it is true that I am full of shit, but in another sense, I am full of light. Whether it’s shit or light you see really depends on what you need. On my end, it’s all the same. Or rather, it’s shit or light depending on what I need – the I think I am at a given moment, engaged and interfacing the way I seem to be engaged and interfacing with the world . . .
Often when I write these posts I feel some sorrow that whoever reads them is not here to walk with me. It is often easier to talk through this material, which often just means seeing that there isn’t a lot to say. But walking and talking (especially on mountains) is fun. And really, when we are finished with the whole awakening and God and ACIM stuff, then we can move on to the real work: feeding hungry people, ending violence, learning and teaching sustainable ecological practices . . .
Okay but how does this work? How does this “undoing” take form? How does it avoid slipping back into the nonduality loop? How does it not become more mere spiritual navel-gazing? Or semantic Vedantic cleverness masquerading as wisdom?
Fair questions!
Play a game. Imagine that you could only ask one more question for the rest of your life. You can learn one more thing. What would it be?
Often, when I play this game myself or with others, the question is some variation of: how I can be more helpful? Where “helpful” is consonant with “loving,” “useful,” “forgiving,” “creative” et cetera.
In other words, when push comes to shove, ruthless honesty generally compels us to see that what we are really about is not ourselves but the collective – the all-of-us-together being all-of-us together. It doesn’t always work out that way, and we seem endlessly capable of forgetting it, but in the end, we are as Humberto Maturana says in Biology of Love, “loving animals.” We want to give to one another. We want to love.
So it figures that given a last chance to learn anything, what we want to learn is what will make us more loving.
Once we are clear that what matters is not our own spiritual shindig but rather the grandly inclusive shindig we are all of us throwing and sharing in right now – making love, making bread, making shelter, making art et cetera – what new questions arise?
In my experience, these new questions tend to be more pragmatic than abstract. The metaphysics fade. The word games are displaced if not dissolved. If we are serious about enacting our desire to feed hungry people, then our question is: how do we feed people?
And then our question breaks down yet further into helpful chunks: who is hungry? What are they hungry for? Where are they? How do I get food to share with them? How do I execute the mechanics of sharing, where “mechanics” means gathering food, delivering it, ensuring timeliness, cleanliness, freshness, consistency, funding and so forth.
Naturally that leads to new new questions: has somebody already answered these questions? Where is the knowledge housed? Rather than invent the wheel anew, can we just assist with an already-existing wheel?
And so on and so forth where “so on and so forth” includes feeding hungry people, learning how to keep feeding them, and then sharing that learning in order to generate a sustainable communicable practice of love within and for the collective.
When we are serious about solving problems for the other, then we are going to be focused locally, which means we are going to have to be in communion locally, and we are going to have to give up some modicum of control locally.
We are going to do all of this and we are going to just see what happens. And what happens will happen, and we will respond again, and something new will happen . . .
And in this we are always just trying to think in a new way – not in a self-as-center way, not in a humans-as-god-like way, not in a God-will-do-heavy-lifting-way, not in an I-know-what-works way, not in a look-at-how-special-I-am way.
We are just seeing that we don’t have all the answers, that we aren’t sure of all that much and so need to go slowly and humbly and cautiously, that “right” is always relative, that “perfect” or “best” tend to obstruct – sometimes fatally – “better.”
Love is natural but there are a lot of obstructions, many of which masquerade as wisdom and intelligence and reason. We have to be careful.
It is going to take a long while but I think the language of spirituality and religion are mostly defunct and need to be gently retired so that a new way of thinking and relating can come into being. We can hasten that evolution of clarity and peace simply by giving attention to what arises and responding to it gently and with care.
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?”
