Sean Reagan

So long as there is seeking, there will be people who appear to have answers, and who will share those answers as part of an exchange – for money, for worship, for intimacy and so forth.

There is nothing wrong with this. When questions are projected, answers appear. When answers appear, acceptance or rejection of answers appears. Acceptance and rejection both beget new questions.

It is sort of like the forest. Trees have leaves and because they have leaves, some or all of those leaves fall to the ground. When leaves leaves fall to the ground they decompose. From the resultant mould, new trees appear.

Seeking is just part of a cycle that includes finding. What is found is never enough and what is sought is never actually found.

There is nothing surprising about this. There is nothing right about it. There is nothing wrong about it either.

Rather, it is interesting in that cycle to see where our attention is going. Are we looking for answers? Playing with answers? Extending answers to others? What answers?

The appearance of answers is helpful because they point back to the questions being asked. Often, those questions aren’t the subject of attention because they are disquieting or disturbing and so they are quickly projected.

We hate uncertainty so we ask a special person to handle the questions for us. Sometimes we pretend to be that special person for others. Tara Singh called this the lovelessness of “I’ve got it and you don’t.”

But if we can get a good look at the questions, without the drama of gurus and guides, of right and wrong, then we are closing in on the source of disquiet itself. What is so painful about these questions that we don’t want to just look at them?

A Course in Miracles often shows up in people’s lives when they are ready to have a direct experience of God – that is, when they are ready to look closely at the appearance of separation (self here, God there) in order to learn that this separation is illusory – it appears real, but it is not real.

In alternately gentle and intellectually convoluted ways, the Course invites students to question the appearance of separation. Eventually this questioning reaches the questioner: who is doing all this asking? What is their real problem?

Those questions cannot really be answered in an external way. Certainly there are people who profess to answer them. Certainly there are religious traditions that profess to answer them. But the truth is that when you reach the questioner, you are alone. And the first thing the questioner says is, “we need help. Let’s get someone else in here. Who should we get?”

The questioner isn’t real – it’s more of a pattern or condition. It’s sort of like when you hit ctrl-alt-del: the computer doesn’t give you a a box of chocolates and long-stem roses. It doesn’t start crooning Bob Dylan songs. It shuts down. That’s what it’s programmed to do. It can’t do anything else. If we expect it to do something else, then we’re going to be disappointed.

The questioner just asks questions: it doesn’t really know how to question itself. It doesn’t even really care about answers. One can say things like “question questioning” or “question the questioner” but that just leads to an infinite regression. Those statements sound clever, but they don’t actually lead anywhere.

The suggestion here is to just sit with it – the questioner, the projections, the answers. All of it. See how it all runs without interference. The questioner questions and answers appear but if we are attentive, we see that this happens somewhat automatically. It’s as natural as shivering when it’s cold and sweating when it’s hot.

This is helpful to see! It means there is no need to attend to it. We can let it all be.

What happens when we are no longer rushing to know? What happens when we are no longer insisting on the prerogatives of the seeker? Where is the guru when the seeker is no longer seeking?

It may be seen simply that there is only wholeness naturally encapsulating questions and answers, seekers and gurus, Buddhas and Christs, trees and leaves, dogs and their walkers, and clouds at 4 a.m. that cover up a waning moon.

This wholeness cannot be objectified – it can’t stand outside itself. It can’t break into parts, one of which studies the balance and calls it “wholeness.” It can be gestured toward – skillfully or otherwise – but it remains both invisible and indivisible.

Often, we confuse “peak” experiences as being more “whole” than anything else. For example, in the ACIM community a lot of so-called students are deferential to so-called teachers who have seen lights or are in dialogue with ascended masters or been directed by Jesus to scribe supplemental texts to Schucman’s work.

The point isn’t that those things can’t happen – the point is that it doesn’t matter whether they happen. They are just experiences, no better or worse than washing a toilet, baking a loaf of bread, or kissing an old lady’s cheek.

Experiences come and go. Preferences come and go. Coming and going comes and goes. That is the nature of the whole. It is never more or less itself, and we are neither near nor far away from it.

this moon
is the only moon –
and yet the clouds and I
keep passing
it

Space is a helpful metaphor for what we are calling God – those of us prone to that word – but it is still just a metaphor. In and of itself it is not liberating. It is not that to which it points.

Consider a ceramic tea pot. In late morning, after we have finished our tea, it rests on the counter. Space is precedent to the pot – without space, the pot cannot “be.” Space “holds” the pot; the pot occupies space. It fills a tiny amount of space there on the counter.

Yet the tea pot also contains space – a tiny amount of space is inside the tea pot.

In this example, we are the tea pot and space is God. Space is the divine. We are this form that exists within the divine – we are contained, or held, by the divine – and yet we simultaneously contain the divine.

When the tea pot breaks – or is filled with tea – or is put away in a cupboard – what happens to the space that contained and is contained by it? Nothing at all. It’s still there.

Just so with what we are calling God and just so with what we are calling our “self.”

Metaphors (like space and tea pots and God) are linguistic constructs and not meant to be conclusive or dispositive. Rather, they (hopefully) helpfully point at that which cannot be contained or referenced by linguistic constructs.

Here it is helpful to paraphrase Ryokan, whose take on the traditional Zen story of the finger pointing at the moon is so richly clarifying.

You know the story – the novice asks her master to point to the moon. The master points at the moon in the sky and the novice stares at the teacher’s finger and says, “how beautiful the moon is.”

Here is Ryokan, somewhat paraphrased:

You stop to point
at the moon in the sky
but your finger is blind
unless the moon is shining.

One moon, one careless finger pointing –
are these two things or one?

The question is a pointer
guiding a novice
out of ignorance as thick as fog.

Look deeper!
The mystery calls and calls:
No moon, no finger –
nothing there at all.

The metaphor in this post – space and the tea pot – is the pointing finger that Ryokan so cheerfully demolishes. The invitation is to “look deeper” – to give attention to what is showing up without rushing to label or define or compartmentalize it. See the “space” that is neither “space” nor “no space.”

Or don’t see it. Ryokan’s “point” is that looking and pointing – and even the moon itself – are neither real nor not-real, neither here nor not-here. Whatever this is, it is not contingent on understanding or application. In a sense, that is liberation – the recognition there is nothing to do and nobody to do it and yet apparently doing happens.

Eventually you see through the details that seem to comprise your life. The lovers, the friends, the roads, the jobs, the poems. The this and the that. You see how it all comes and goes, rises and falls, clarifies here and blurs over there. You see how on close observation edges and seams aren’t actually discernible. There is only this experiencing, which knows it is experiencing. It’s strange and lovely and luminous, the way the ordinary is when one is attentive.

We live now in an old parsonage on Main Street. The village around us is full of people. Dogs are almost always walked on leashes. A half mile that way is a river that whispers at night and by dawn floats through the field in tendril streams of mist. Just beyond is a line of hills, the far side of which appeared to Emily Dickinson. At night I dream of the old house and the old trails and my dogs, all gone now as if they really were just a dream.

Some simplicity and clarity attends when one realizes that A Course in Miracles is simply a course – a curriculum with a beginning and an end. You take it – you maybe take it again – you enter into this or that relationship with teachers and fellow students – and then . . . you shuffle along. Or stride maybe. Or not. God waits only on the end of waiting.

Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven . . . because you can find nothing else. There is nothing else. God is All in all in a very literal sense (T-7.IV.7:1-4).

Which Emily Dickinson knew all along, saying of Heaven’s locale:

To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –

And so it is, at last.

When one consents to know Heaven – to give over all hindrances and reservations that preclude knowing it, which is simply to no longer do battle with them, which is simply to see there is no self to direct any engagement with them at all, good or bad, right or wrong – then Heaven is simply what is because it always always was what is. Clear and fine, like corn tassels in a light breeze, or a crescent moon in a late winter sky, or a chickadee’s two-note spring song coming from over the hill . . .

Well, that is a way of saying it. There are others. Why shut up when you can cheerfully sing, however nonsensical and misdirected the song? For what else does one fall in love with chickadees? We aren’t getting anywhere because what we are is beyond coming and going, beyond singular and plural, beyond even subject and object. It’s this – this this – regardless of whether we can articulate it.

what we are together
can never die

never arrive
or improve or go away

who cares
if I can’t explain it

I can’t explain moonlight
in apple trees either

and yet the one keeps shining
on the other

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.