Sean Reagan

It may be that we look at the external world as being full of lessons which, once learned, will undo that world in favor of peace and love. It is not the worst way to think about the world, but it is not how the world is undone.

Any investment in the external world and the life that is engendered by and through it will keep us yoked to that world’s yin/yang roller coaster of hurt and grief, loss and confusion, et cetera. To respond to anything – as a lesson, as an opportunity to be of service, as a wrong to be righted, as a form of hate to be translated into love – is to make it real, and to make one illusion real is to make all of them real.

For no one can make one illusion real, and still escape the rest. For who can choose to keep the ones that he prefers, and find the safety that the truth alone can give? Who can believe illusions are the same, and still maintain that even one is best? (T-26.VI. 1:7-9)

Yet that is precisely what we are doing when we insist on learning from experience.

One way we respond to this problem is to give up almost everything in favor of one or two special things. We are like children who, told to come out of the water because it’s time to go home, come into the shallows to our ankles but no further. It’s true we moved in the direction of leaving the water, but we are still in the water. In a practical sense, we are no closer to going home than when we were neck-deep and frolicking.

This special thing – this idol by which we obscure the Lord – is frequently another person, another spiritual path, or some form of activity like work or parenting or making art. It seems as if we can just be in this one relationship, or find that one perfect-fitting spiritual path (or the one teacher on that path), or do the special work that only we can do, then everything will be okay. These are “good” desires, “good” aspects of the world, “good” applications of self.

But even in their goodness they are harbingers of loss and death.

Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you, and will do so. Not because it has the power to hurt, but just because you have denied it is but an illusion, and made it real. And it is real to you. It is not nothing (T-26.VI.1:1-4).

Our belief that there is at least this one good thing worth pursuing and possessing reinforces the underlying error or illusion upon which every other error or illusion is founded: that there is a discrete self who causes things to happen and to whom things happen. The one “good” illusion becomes the gate through which the rest of them parade.

And through its perceived reality has entered all the world of sick illusions. All belief in sin, in power of attack, in hurt and harm, in sacrifice and death, has come to you (T-26.VI.1:5-6).

There is a point in one’s study of A Course in Miracles where this becomes obvious. We have fallen for the lie there is something out there upon which the truth is contingent – a lover, a belief system, a spiritual practice, a career, a calling. This realization can be very painful because no matter where we turn a nagging voice says “but that’s an illusion too.” Our spouse, our zafu, our exercise regimen, our political ideals, our poems and paintings. It’s like the Hindu practice of “neti, neti,” a sort of via negativa. Our lives become an apparent litany of “not this, not this.”

Because this experience can be sterile to the point of leaving no reason to live, we naturally succumb to the understandable temptation to forego it altogether. What’s so bad about an idol? How can a slice of raisin bread be bad? Even gurus enjoy an orgasm from time to time don’t they? And so forth. This is easy to do and often happens without our noticing it. Even a practice of “neti, neti” can become an idol, a thing to which we cling.

But eventually we get tired of the merry go-round and step off it. “I can’t keep even one illusion. There’s no such thing as a ‘good’ illusion. Fine. Now what?”

What is helpful is simply noticing what is happening. We realize that we have had an insight (there are no good illusions and so we can’t keep any of them), and that we are resisting its implications, and that this resistance is painful. Perhaps it is terrifying. Or confusing. We just have to look at this. We don’t have to do anything about it. We just give attention to what is happening. Judging it, amending it, making art of it . . . that’s all just more grist for the mill of attention.

Give attention and let the spiritual chips fall where they fall, which is all they’re going to do anyway. Let it all go, and watch as it does. Let it all come flowing back, and watch as it does.

How does this help? It helps in a few ways.

First, attention almost always brings us – if only briefly – to the present moment. And the wonderful thing about the so-called holy instant is that it does not contain the past or the future. There are no insights in the holy instant, there are no consequences in the holy instant, and so there are no personal reactions in the holy instant.

When you look closely and openly at what is happening, there is only what is happening – nothing else! It is such a clear and simple thing that we tend to look right past it. But it is always right here and always right now. So “not this, not this” becomes “only this. This this.”

Second, as we settle into a relationship with the holy instant (as outlined above), we begin to give attention to the underlying error of separation itself. We look at the belief that there is someone doing all this who can choose to stop it.

Most of us – most of the time – conflate this “someone” with the self we believe we are. “Sean” is projecting this and that, so an improved “Sean” will choose to stop projecting. “Sean” is obsessed with being right, so a more insightful and less possessive “Sean” will become more interested in just being happy.

But “Sean” – and you, too, whoever you are – is just another illusion. “Sean’s” body is just as illusory as any body “Sean” perceives. Those discrete selves who seem capable of so much activity are just more projections. They are just another bright shiny reflection that disappears when grasped at.

This is all the separation is: the belief that the projected self is responsible for what happens. Once that belief is gone – and it goes when even mildly challenged – what remains is peace. What remains is Truth.

The section of A Course of Miracles that is the focus here (The Appointed Friend) encourages us to adopt the Holy Spirit as our “Friend in truth” (T-26.VI.3:4), appointed by God (T-26.VI.2:7), who will bring us “gifts that are not of this world” (T-26.VI.3:5). Doing so will help end our habit of choosing among illusions.

This can be a helpful construction but please see the way that it sustains the underlying dualism it aims to undo: that there is a self who needs a friend, without which friend, the truth will remain forever at bay.

So the suggestion I am offering is that a point comes when even the Holy Spirit is an illusion, when even that apparently harmless ideal becomes too painful an obstruction to manage. If it is helpful, okay. Use it. But if it is not, it’s not. Don’t be afraid to go there. The text which offers us this special “friend” is simultaneously teaching us that eventually we’ll have to go beyond this friend. What did the old hymn say?

we got to walk this lonesome valley –
we got to walk it by ourselves.
Ain’t nobody else can walk it for us –
we got to walk it by ourselves.

In this way – as happens so often when one closely reads the text – A Course in Miracles undoes itself and points to an experience that cannot be mediated and cannot be controlled or directed, not even by the course itself.

So give attention to the one who gives attention. Can you find the giver? Can you find the source? Can attention turn around on itself? Can you find your true self? Can you find that which never changes? Is not subject to events? Is not bound to response? Has no preferences? Perceives no difference that would make judgment possible let alone desirable?

If we undertake our inquiry into this self patiently, gently and honestly, then we will see that the source cannot be found. We cannot grasp the self. It always slips through that which would hold it, without ever quite leaving or disappearing. Because we cannot find it, we make substitutions for it, the most notorious of which is God.

But knowing God – knowing the Absolute, however one defines or labels it – is beyond the limits of our faculties. Our perceptive capabilities, our intelligence and learning, our memories and dreams, our cultural affluence and dynamic social fabrics can at best point in the direction of that which cannot be perceived, studied, known, shared or otherwise made real. It is beyond real and unreal, and even saying that little is saying too much.

These posts often drift into poetic abstraction. That’s okay. It’s one way of alluding to that which cannot be alluded to. In the absence of pure truth, we make do with conditional references. In a world of broken legs, who doesn’t need a crutch?

Yet the post also aims at a practical teaching: to suggest that one give attention without any expectation of a result that can be conveyed in language or via the senses, while simultaneously trusting that a result will be given. Nothing simpler can be imagined than to simply notice what is happening, where noticing does not exclude frustration, confusion, forgetting, resisting, denying and so forth.

Look, and you will see Christ looking back at you, and there will no longer be a looker and a looked-at, but only looking itself, and it will be enough. It will be all there is.

We are apt to think that self-improvement matters: that we are in a state of becoming that can go in any number of directions and that this state is subject to a personal power of choice.

In general, spiritual seekers almost always want to be better people – kinder and gentler, slower to anger, given to love and healing. It seems like a foolproof goal. Who would argue with kindness and gentleness? Not me.

I do gently observe, however, that ideals – even when professing love and healing and the end of anger – are a distraction from a simple truth.

That truth is that at any given moment you are capable of profound love and kindness; you can be the very light of the world. That power inheres in you.

You don’t have to become what you already are.

Of course, if it is that simple, then why are we not all Gandhi? Why is the world not a veritable garden of Eden? Why has MLK’s dream gone fractured and unfulfilled? Why is there still hate and anger and suffering?

This is actually a tricky question to answer. In the spiritual circles with which I am most familiar, the tendency is to say something like “our gift for love – our identity as love – is obstructed by a habitual tendency to deny its existence.”

In other words, we make the apparent absence of love a problem to be solved – specifically, a problem that we have to solve.

We subtly shift the focus to the self that wants to be loving and has work to do (overcome the habit of ignorance, end the denial et cetera) in order to achieve a future state of lovingkindness.

Most religions and spiritual practices – often unwittingly, sometimes wittingly – encourage precisely this sort of shift-in-focus. There is and has always been a vast market for postponing love. It probably won’t go away anytime soon.

I want to make a suggestion that can seem overly simple and insufficiently spiritual, especially for those of us whose language and focus revolves around Jesus, the Buddha, awakening, nonduality, et cetera.

The suggestion is this: put aside your quest for God or enlightenment and simply be helpful. Eschew spiritual drama for clear and common sense-based acts of love.

I am suggesting you give attention to that which makes you smile more. To that which allows you to listen more. I am suggesting that you give attention to common ground rather than gaps in the ground.

I am suggesting you keep this as simple as possible. If your goal is to be kind and gentle, start with yourself – eat well, rest well, play well and work well. Opportunities to be kind to others will naturally arise. You will recognize them.

It’s okay that those opportunities seem tiny or insignificant. They aren’t. Love is whole. There is no such thing as a small or ineffective or insignificant act of love. So don’t reach for the brass ring; just do what is in front of you and trust that it’s sufficient. It is.

Just let service happen. Of its own, it will flower and lift you – enlighten you, awaken you – with it.

I am also suggesting that you already know how to do this – and where to do it – and who to do it for and with. It is not a secret and it is not a mystery.

There is nothing radical in this suggestion and there is nothing new in it, either. It’s Saint Francis and Bodhisattva vows all over again. We know it and we know we know it.

You are always looking right at love, and it is always looking right back at you.

So the point isn’t to be radical or new: the point is to discover that love is both natural and present and that service-as-an-expression-of-love is our natural vocation. It is the end of effort and becoming; it is the advent of a still, sustainable and serious joy.

Life will go on with its ups and downs. People we love will die and people we love will have babies. Parades will be rained on and other days the sun will be so bright the frisbees will throw themselves.

Current events will go on, too. Policies we admire and support will be enacted; policies we fear and oppose will be enacted. Politicians we admire will disappoint us; politicians we despise will surprise us.

It’s okay. Let that which comes and goes come and go. Opportunities for love don’t pass and your ability to be loving doesn’t either. Spirituality – so-called – runs by itself. Let it do its thing and you do your thing: discover and explore and make manifest your ability to be selfless and loving – the very light of the world. There is nothing else to do, and only you can do it.

There is something about A Course in Miracles that brings out the academic in many students. It brings out the intellectual. The text is both abstract and complex in its consideration of big subjects like God and time and reality. In the ACIM community there is a lot of energy around being right and wrong – which teacher we read, which edition we read, whether we partake of other spiritual traditions.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of that. If you are interested, and have some facility for it, asking big questions, exploring complex texts, and talking the material out with others can be fun and interesting. I do it often.

But unless our goal is to be professors of A Course in Miracles, the intellectual approach is not – in, of and for itself – sufficient. It is like the oil and the wick without a flame to set it alight.

When my father died, it wasn’t my intellectual understanding of the course that helped me. Indeed, as he died and for many days after, my philosophical clarity and open-mindedness – the sum and substance of all my scholarship – just vanished. I did not reach for it and it did not offer itself.

I remember watching and listening to Dad breathe his last breaths. Would I be okay? What would it be like to live in a world without my father? Was he in pain? Was there any last thing I could do for him? It was all an unknown future and it was only seconds away.

But I wasn’t scared. Each time one of those “big” questions arose, it was gently answered by an awareness of the loving relationships that comprised “my” life. In course parlance, these were special relationships that were transformed into holy relationships because they were no longer about what one could get, but about what one could give.

I knew that my wife, Chrisoula, was with me. In those moments I perceived her less as a body – less as “my wife” and more as an unshakable ground enveloping me in a way that went beyond my ability to describe. I knew that my children were with me – that they would trust me to help them understand what was happening and find a way through it, however hard or confusing it got. All the love was present; nothing could undo it.

That night, driving home from the hospital with my family, there was a big soft moon in the summer sky. A lot of our drive was along a river: I would look at the moon, then at the river rippling with moonlight, then at the moon again. There was a clear and simple sense that what passes, passes, but that something remains. There was no need to name it – God or Love or Truth or Awareness. It was sufficient that it was unmistakably present. I was held by it; we were all held by it, the living and the dead alike.

My practice of A Course in Miracles is – relatively speaking – intellectually rigorous. That is not the only way to approach the course, nor even the best way, but for me it it is a helpful and natural way. I read deeply and widely, reflect carefully and then, when it seems to be all worked out, I rip it up and keep going.

The suggestion here is not that my response to my father’s death was especially graceful or unflawed. There was – there remains – sadness and confusion. Life goes on; the body has its experiences. I stumble along like everyone else.

Rather, the suggestion is that the intellectual work of studying A Course in Miracles is basically prefatory in nature – it matters, but it’s not all that matters. It’s not even most of what matters. You can do a lot of work to put up a tent, but then you get in the tent. You don’t put up another one.

Looking at the moon, then at the moon’s reflection, and then at the moon again was a kind of exercise in perception pointing to a deeper truth. The one image was not separate from the other; if one was absent, the other was absent as well. Concepts of causation and division dissolved. God is not something from which we fell or literally separated from a long time ago. God is more in the nature of that from which we rise and to which we return, which rising and returning functions as an appearance.

Lesson 223 of A Course in Miracles puts it this way.

I was mistaken when I thought I lived apart from God, a separate entity that moved in isolation, unattached, and housed within a body. Now I know my life is God’s, I have no other home, and I do not exist apart from Him. He has no Thoughts that are not part of me, and I have none but those which are of Him.

Some people like the image of a wave. It rises from the ocean and falls back into the ocean. It looks briefly separate – its own form, its own movement – but it is always only the sea.

I like eddies in a brook myself. If you look closely, you will see that the current is really many little currents – they spin off here and there, they create other currents, they merge with those currents, reemerge from them. But they always dissolve back into the larger flow from which they arise. They are always just the brook seen a certain way.

It is good to read ideas like that and agree or disagree with them. It is good to dismiss them or take them to heart. But what is really lovely and stunning is to see it for oneself: not as someone else’s idea that we learned in a book, but as a clear and simple fact of our own experience.

I point here to the difference between a lived fact and a remembered or projected fact. The former is what A Course in Miracles calls “knowledge;” the latter, “perception.” Our academic study will refine our perception; it can be a critical component of our “purification” (as in “[M]iracles are everyone’s right, but purification is necessary first) but sooner or later we are brought into relationship with holiness itself. Holiness – wholeness – presents itself.

A better way of saying this is that we become aware of the holiness – the relationships – by which our natural wholeness is unobscured. This holiness – manifest in these relationships – is already extant. It is already given. We don’t “do” anything – it’s not about learning or prayer or doing good works. Rather, it is there – it is present, unconditionally so – and the effect of its being clouded is gone.

We might think of the moon: its light is a fact whether it is hidden by clouds or on the other side of the earth. We don’t create its shining, we can’t “move” clouds or rearrange the earth’s position in space to make the shining better or clearer or more “here right now.” But we can “know” the light is there, and sometimes we can see it clearly, which confirms our knowing. In time, we no longer need to literally “see” the moon to know it is there. It is there.

Lesson 69 says this about what it is given and our awareness of what is given.

Have confidence in your Father today, and be certain that He has heard you and answered you. You may not recognize His answer yet, but you can indeed be sure that it is given you and you will yet receive it.

So we have to be the ACIM student that we naturally and presently are. We have to take the teacher we are called to take and work with them. We have to live the life that right now appears before us. Nothing needs to be explained or even understood. The gift of our attention to that which is showing up is sufficient; it is more than sufficient.

Life in the world naturally include adversity, frustration, pain and loss – sometimes intensely so. That is okay. Our study of A Course in Miracles does not relieve us of life. Rather, it opens us up to life so that we can perceive it as it is in fact, as it is in truth – absent judgment, absent special narrative, absent personal goals.

The secret, if there is one, is simply that what we call “God” is in fact nothing other than this: this this.