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.
What is the source of all this? How does it come about? Is there only God? Only Mind? Only Consciousness? Maybe many Gods? Many Gods being mind being universal consciousness?
Asking what the Source is may be less helpful than simply asking how things work and then trying to tweak them in the direction of coherence and functionality (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team).
I have asked these and similar questions for a long time. In my spiritual and cultural circles, these types of questions consistently and regularly arise.
Notice the way that a question begets an answer which in time begets another question. It’s good to ask questions but it’s confusing – sometimes violently so – to think that our answers are some kind of “end” or “conclusion.”
Mostly there is just this going on going on. As Gertrude Stein so aptly put it, “there is no there there.”
It is possible when posing the what-is-the-source question to slip into an endless loop hallmarked by watered-down Rumi quotes, A Course in Miracles, Eckhart Tolle, confused applications of the double-slit experiment, Nisargadatta’s rambling and just . . . call the loop itself is the answer.
But there are other ways. One of them is to reframe the basic question from “what is the source” to: what is this? What is this world? This self? This experience?
That is, rather than look for origins or absolutes – rather than look for answers that purport to end in some ultimate way the questions – just try to better describe and understand what is actually happening.
For me, this approach has been more interesting and helpful. It offers a way out of the loop by shifting focus from specific points within the loop to the loop itself.
And at that level, it has been helpful not to rush or assume and/or prioritize certain goals but rather to go slowly and just attend the process. Questions seem to require answers but do they? What do we really want to know? And is questioning the best way to learn it?
Although it is possible to have a sort of meta-experience – oneness, ecstatic union with the Godhead, awakening, enlightenment (note how the name and description of the experience varies with the cultural context in which the experience arises – this is a clue!) – knowledge of “reality” as such is actually beyond our capacity to know.
Again: reality (the ultimate, the one, the truth, the ultimate one truth et cetera) is beyond the range of our perceptual and cognitive abilities and so reference to it is neither helpful nor necessary.
If you can’t get there – because there is no there there – then you can stop traveling. You can be here, which is all the where there is.
To set the question of ultimate reality – The Source, say – aside can seem quite dramatic, especially for those of us who have devoted significant time and energy to meeting/embodying/knowing this Source. But the grounds for doing so are coherent and not unduly complex.
Knowledge is structure-dependent. That is to say, perception and cognition are limits. They are bounds. What appears to us as the world is framed by – made possible by – our organismic capacity for perception. An ant, a butterfly, a sunflower and a grain of sand all perceive a vastly different “world” than a human being does.
Given this non-controversial (but also non-trivial) observation, what grounds do we have for a) assuming that our perception is anything other than relatively correct and b) that our perceptive and cognitive abilities are the ones that are aligned with reality?
It’s not that we can’t handle the truth; it’s that we are by definition closed to it.
Note, too, that the way that we perceive the world guides – makes possible – how we respond to it: by talking, sharing, loving, arguing, et cetera. And this responsiveness also differs according to the context in which it arises.
That is, a communist woman in 1930s Russia is going to have a different experience than a male middle class consumer in the United States circa 2018. Thus, we have matriarchies and capitalism and Christians and – diving down a level – politics, societies, economics, religion. These are invented concepts by which we explain and interact with the perceived world. The one makes possible – and reifies – the other, but neither is a 1:1 correspondence with the Truth or the Whole. They are just organism-specific modes of being.
When one sees that clearly – and then accepts it as a basic fact of this embodied experience – then the spiritual quandaries and big metaphysical inquiries – become a lot less dramatic. They don’t press as hard; really, they stop pressing at all.
The point is that we perceive and cognize – we do our living in – a world defined by the organism we are – and then explain and interact with that world using the language and mythology – the narrative – of the dominant group of organisms in which we appear and do our living.
There is nothing wrong with this! It is natural and mostly beneficial. Where the fly meets the ointment is that we tend to forget that this world and way of living in it is not written in stone, is not some stable singular truth. We forget that the living we are doing is basically A way of living rather than THE way of living.
And then we double down on this forgetting and end up deeply invested in and attached to the mistaken belief that the living we are doing is true or at least intimately correlated with truth – and so all those who are living differently are, to varying degrees and with varying degrees of moral culpability, wrong or false.
That’s why it’s easy to keep chickens in torturous conditions and then kill them, or chop down trees for yet another shopping complex, or enslave people whose skin is a different color, or murder people who decline our invitation to worship a different God or what-have-you.
So if we stop asking after some external Absolute Source – God, the One, the Divine, the Beloved – and simply ask after how things work, then all that dysfunction and incoherence will reveal itself. It’s not mysterious or even difficult.
But it does ask something of us: it asks us to give attention: to be attentive. It asks us to remember that we are not pinnacles or centers but processes. Ripples observing the river, if you will, where the ripple cannot see the lake where the river begins, nor the sea in which it ends.
So what we end up doing when we give attention in a coherent way is undoing the forgetting of the separating that we are doing when we are incoherent and inattentive. Giving attention and being coherent requires study. It requires discipline and reflection. And it requires local action – changing the way that we shop, vote, grow or don’t grow plants, interact with animals, make art, raise kids and so forth.
Tara Singh was right: it is not enough to learn. We have to bring what is learned into application. There is no other way and only we can do it.
Thus, it is not enough to be tolerant of the other! Given the other, we have to see the specific way in which our thinking and being creates – inevitably makes necessary – the other.
We must become responsible for the way that we are thinking and also the way in which we are not thinking. This is the work and there is really no other work. Whatever else we are doing – parenting, teaching, gardening, cooking, dancing, walking, sleeping – we are attending to the undoing of the line of thinking by which the other arises and our conflict with them becomes real and consequential.
Peace abounds but it must be enacted and embodied. This is what we are doing – whatever else we are doing – here and now.
Reading and studying – taking, say – A Course in Miracles was basically a way of organizing my thinking with respect to answering that question. Naturally, it eventually became a way of gathering with those who were also using it to organize their own thinking with respect to answering that question.
So in a sense the course was basically a way of reifying thought itself, under the guise of shifting the contents of thought, without actually answering (or even addressing, really) the question.
That is incoherent.
You could imagine someone who is hungry, and who knows she must prepare a meal, and who opens the cupboard and begins moving the ingredients around without actually cooking. Perhaps if the flour is on the top shelf and the sugar on the bottom . . . Perhaps if the salt is placed in a position of prominence . . .
But never any bread. Never any soup.
Eventually it was clear this shifting, this organizing (and corresponding reification of incoherence) was not an answer to the question but rather the question from another perspective, which is to say, the same old question still unanswered.
But also, it is good to be clear about that, and one can be grateful to the context within which clarity dawns, without confusing that context for the light itself. Indeed, that is one way A Course in Miracles works.
That is coherent.
* Well, there were lots of questions, but they were mostly neatly helpfully included within that question. That question is actually not that hard to answer, especially once a) the need to reframe it becomes obvious and b) the ability to reframe is assumed (or remembered, maybe, or recalled even).
God knows of justice, not of penalty (T-29.IX.3:6).
Any sentence in A Course of Miracles can be the clear bell which summons us from a dream of separation and conflict to the quiet stillness of peace and fellowship.
This sentence from The Forgiving Dream (in The Awakening) will serve that function if we give it the space. The text of A Course in Miracles, like all the holy scriptures, from Ecclesiastes to Newton to Emily Dickinson, blossom in the nurturing light of attention.
That sentence exists – in the text and in this moment – so that we might remember that we have not been judged and found wanting by God. That is not what God is. No penalty attends us. Therefore, there is no need for self-defense through projection or attack of any kind. We can breathe. We can feed one another. We can give one another shelter.
Those seven words are a blessing and a promise: they bless us with forgiveness by assuring us that despite our interior fear and psychological fragmentation we have done nothing wrong; and they promise that we have something to offer our brothers and sisters: the very same forgiveness, which is seeing them in the light in which God sees us: innocent and in need of neither defense nor justification. We are each the other’s servant: here to help, because we are ourselves helped.
Those seven words intimate that together we might remember – even if only faintly, even if only briefly – the love by which the wholeness of life is given to us so that we might give it away in turn. Because we are loved without condition, we can love without condition. What else could Heaven possibly mean?
It is helpful to set aside time to remember our own holiness, our own perfection, our own capacity to be a healing presence in the collective. Not as a routine or a habit. Not as an obligation. Rather, we simply sit quietly in sunlight, or by a window while it rains, and let all thought come and go, taking with it its dreams of judgment, its dreams of terms and conditions, its dreams of who is welcome and who is not. We let that go and give attention to what remains without worrying too much about what – if anything – remains.
Letting all thought come and go does not mean to not have any thoughts: it means to see thought for what it is: images that arise in the mind, the way clouds are reflected in a still pond. No more and no more less. A thought only has the power we give it; if we simply watch it pass, then it passes.
Attention is not beholden to thought; thought is beholden to attention. It is important to see this. The world is saved and made safe(r) accordingly.
It is not necessary – nor possible really – to dwell forever in some meta-spiritual state of radiant inner peace. The laundry needs to be done, dinner needs to be made. Gardens need to be planted, deadlines met, dogs walked. It’s okay. This, too – this welter, this experience of being complex in a complex world – is just stillness from another angle.
It is like if you hold a prism one way it’s just a chunk of glass. But if you hold it another way, then rainbows dance all around you. But the prism is always a prism. Light is always just light.
So it is with the self; so it is with awakening. Seen one way it’s a state of radiant calm and certainty. Seen another, it’s a busy life being surfed with equal parts equanimity and when-will-I-get-to-sit-down.
That is the justice of God: that which appears is always simply that which appears. It is never better or worse than any other appearance. It is the same love through a different lens. We don’t even have to switch lenses.
There is no penalty because in the ultimate sense there is nothing to be right about and nothing to be wrong about. We aren’t at risk of condemnation. There is neither judge nor jury. There is no executioner. There aren’t even charges against us.
