Sean Reagan

On the other hand, why not pick up A Course in Miracles?

When there is a sense of seeking – and of one who is doing the seeking, who is in charge of the seeking – then means and methods will appear as well. This is natural and availing oneself of those means and methods is okay. It’s more than okay.

Attachment to the means and methods – this is the way and the only way – begets conflict. But resisting means and methods when one is naturally drawn to them also begets conflict.

It is not necessary to take a stand for or against that which appears. So we are students of A Course in Miracles – so what? We could as easily be Zen acolytes or Catholic novitiates or sparrows on a tree in somebody’s yard.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “simply to live is holy.” This is such a lovely statement! It makes clear that holiness is uncontingent and unconditional. Heschel does not qualify “live.” He does not say to live “rightly” or according to the tenets of this synagogue or that church or as a vegetarian or anything else.

Being itself is holy. It is all the holiness there is. Nobody and nothing is required to complete it, just as nobody and nothing initializes it.

Perhaps seeking does not end when one finds what is sought, or learns the answer to some deep and complex question, but rather becomes comfortable with not knowing, with resting in peace with the impossibility of conclusions. Means and methods come and go; goals and outcomes come and go.

Somebody recently shared a saying from Shunryu Suzuki. He said that if one begins zazen with a goal of getting something – enlightenment, say, or inner peace – then they are involved in “impure practice.”

Perhaps. But can we also see that the possibility of an impure practice necessarily begets the possibility of a pure practice? The two are not separate. Can we see how Suzuki’s well-intentioned and compassionate directive implies that a pure practice is more desirable than the alternative and so itself becomes a goal?

There is no way out of this duality! That is the mystery, the joy, the paradox, the confusion and the utter, almost annihilating, frustration. There is only this. Not getting it is as impossible as getting it because there is nothing to get. Not seeing it is as impossible as seeing it because there is no “it” to see. Nor is there some central being or self for whom all of this might resonate or make sense.

There is nothing either correct or incorrect with saying or writing this, nor with reading it, nor even with adopting it as a stance against the inexpressible puzzle of existence. But please see that whatever one does can never obliterate the fundamental truth: what this is I cannot say, but that it is is beyond question.

A Course in Miracles works so long as one thinks there is something to do and someone to do it. When truth is at last allowed to be true – which is to see illusion as illusion – then the course is no longer necessary. If you take a bus to Boston, you don’t stay on board after it pulls into South Station.

The suggestion is that we give attention in a gentle and sustained way to the sense of a discrete empirical self to whom things happen and who makes choices and takes actions which cause other things to happen. That “self” is comprised of memory, desire, concept and sensation. We simply give attention to this welter as it rises and falls. No more and no less.

To be aware of all this as it arises in sensation and thought is sufficient – there is nothing else to do or see. Indeed, there is nothing else that could be done or seen. To clearly see “all this as it arises in sensation and thought” is to see through it. It is undone of its own accord.

“Undone” doesn’t mean that self and external world disappear (though their more pernicious effects may be alleviated); rather, self and world are simply seen for what they really are – appearances coming and going.  There is no longer resistance to them; there is no longer any desire to modify them, avoid them or cling to them. Illusion is seen as illusion; truth is seen as true.

Consider, for example, a person being sawed in half by a magician. If you don’t know that it is an illusion, you might feel apprehension as the “trick” unfolds. You might want to rush the stage to save the soon-to-be-dismembered individual. Yet when it is seen that what is happening is an illusion, the need to do anything about it ends. There is nobody to be saved. There is no cause for worry or alarm. You sit back and enjoy the apparent show, or leave and go to another show.

There is no suggestion here that A Course in Miracles – or any other apparent spiritual path or practice, broadly defined – is bad or evil or unhelpful. On the contrary. Just as one can be grateful for aspirin when they have a headache, one can be grateful for a spiritual path when “seeking for inner peace” arises. And, just as when we reach for aspirin and not a hammer when our head hurts, so we reach for resonant spiritual paths or practices when we are “seeking” God, Heaven, Nirvana, enlightenment, inner peace and so forth.

A Course in Miracles is a means in a context where means and ends appear to be real. In that context, the course cannot be an end. It is important to be clear about this. Often, we objectify a spiritual path or practice, which is to make an idol of it, and therefore become distracted from the here-and-nowness to which the spiritual path or practice actually points. Use the course so long as it is helpful. And when you are done with it, set it aside.

Give attention to what appears to be happening: the whole of it. Attention is the new teacher – it is the Holy Spirit, to borrow the language of A Course in Miracles. In attention’s uncompromising and altogether neutral luminosity the nothing-that-is-everything is surely and naturally beheld. This is the end of seeking; this is what it means to be at peace.

Trying to tease out the self, and make the self happy and productive in its apparent life, is like bucketing out the sea with a sieve. We can try to do it, and it might appear successful from time to time, but eventually the futility becomes clear. What then?

In essence, what we call “our” “lives” are in truth a participation in love. Love is our relationship with the whole through the appearance of countless parts; we give consent to this relationship through the gift of attention. To gaze deeply at a tree or a bird of a slice of bread is to see not yourself – that is too easy – but rather to see God, in which both you and the tree or the bird or the bread – in a mutual act of love – dissolve.

Christ’s eyes are open, and He will look upon whatever you see with love if you accept His vision as yours . . . (T-12.VI.4:4)

“God” in this context does not mean a discrete Creator or a divine first cause or an anthropomorphic entity lording it over his subjects from afar. It means simply the impersonal truth or love that is beyond both expression and measurement. In its vastness, its utter stillness and silence, it is contingent on nothing. We don’t speak of it with words and we don’t encounter it in or through the fractious regression we call the self.

It is as impossible to not know this truth as it is to speak of it clearly and unmistakably. Even our insistence on objectifying it – as a thing to be known, labeled, learned, or consumed – neither harms nor dismisses nor obscures it. Truth remains forever true. Our greed, confusion, loneliness and aggression are like ripples in the smooth surface of a stream, coming and going, rising and falling. We don’t mistake the eddy for something other than the brook; why mistake the appearance of the world for something other than the unknowable Mind of God endlessly spilling over and into and out of itself?

. . . your banishment is not of God, and therefore does not exist . . . You are at home in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to reality (T-10.I.1:7, 2:1).

And really, to say even this much is to say too much. We are already awake. Yet to say less is not necessarily better. We cannot feed each other with the word “bread,” yet by it we might see our way to yeast and wheat and water. The shared table replete with divine loaves is often where we remember there is no such thing as hunger. So it is with this intimately ineffable mystery we name for the moment “God” and approach through what we call “self.” All we are really talking about is Love. Or Emptiness. Or Truth.

And really, who cares what we say? What is nomenclature but another ripple? When our feet burn we leap into the cool waters that flow before us, and learn there is neither fire nor water, nor one to distinguish between them.

From time to time someone will say that there are no doctrines or methods or paths by or through which awakening happens. There is just this perfect awareness presently manifesting as multiplicity. There are countless variations on this concept; it’s a staple of the contemporary nondual movement.

The fly in the ointment is that saying “there are no doctrines or methods or paths” is itself a path. It is – as virtually everything is once we resort to language – dualistic. No-path is only possible when there is a path. When we declare that we’ve got it, and that it can’t be found by any method, then we’ve implicitly declare a method – the method of renouncing all methods. We are on the way of no path, which is a path.

It’s better to simply accept that as soon as we start talking about awakening, no matter how efficient or eloquent or well-intentioned our speech is, we’re merely babbling. Language is fun and interesting, and it can be helpful in its way, but when we take it literally it becomes distracting blather. The difference is one of investment – specifically, who is investing in what.

The thing is, people want to hear this stuff and so there are people who are going to say it. The one begets the other. You and I – right here in the text – are proof of that. But this mutual arising is not inherently problematic. We don’t have to fix it so much as just let it be. We might compare it to viewing a garden – we have a preference for yellow chrysanthemums, say, and yet the garden is full of yellow, red, orange, purple and white chrysanthemums, and other kinds of flowers to boot. So we just focus on the yellow ‘mums. We get off on what we get off on, and let the other flower watchers tend to their preferences. No big thing.

But we can make it a big thing! We do this by insisting that yellow is the best color and then striving to not see all the other colors save to disparage them. We might start coming up with internal justifications for this effort – write books and blog posts. We might start trying to persuade others to only see yellow, to join us in advocating yellow. If we can make it a movement then we can start giving purveyors of non-yellow flowers a hard time. We can get rid of everything that isn’t yellow! And won’t life be dandy then.

All this can happen very subtly. It shows up for most of us from time to time, in varying degrees. I’m hardly immune. And the thing is – again – there is nothing wrong that we’ve discovered that the way to oneness is to see there is no way. I wrote something similar in my notes the other day – “the only insight required is that no insight is required.” There’s nothing wrong with saying it or even believing it.

But when it rises to the level of attacking others – under the guise of helping them or otherwise – than it does behoove us to give attention in a gentle sustained way as to what is really going on. We’re not bad or evil, but we are maybe indulging distractions that cause conflict.

A Course in Miracles puts it this way.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true . . . Truth cannot have an opposite . . . Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false (W-pI.3:1, 5, 9).

Thus, we can say the truth is true without effort. No amount of doing, non-doing or undoing can change this simple fact. You can share it, not share it, sell it, twist it, ignore it and it won’t change. It is unaffected altogether by you and me because we are just appearances within it. Just as a reflection in a pool can’t cause a ripple, you and I can’t disturb the clear stillness of Truth.

So within the context of believing that we are separate actors with volition and all that, what is to be done?

If you’re awake, then let your waking be. If you’re asleep, let your sleeping be. Whatever you are calling this experience – this beingness, this humanness, this whateverness – just let it be and see what happens. Just give attention to what is happening – the people on paths, the people arguing in favor of paths, the people wondering if there’s any such thing as paths, and the welter of your response to it all.

Make contact if you can with the self who cares about these things, and wants to be right and sure about them, and who believes there are other selves who, like us, have a choice in such matters. You might make a discovery that will lead you to an inner peace that surpasses understanding. Or maybe you’ll just fritter a few hours away in quasi-meditation. And that’s okay, too.