A Course in Miracles: Forgetting What We Know

Think but an instant just on this; you can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see (T-20.VIII.11:3-4).

Our task as students of A Course in Miracles is simply to choose the goal of peace. There is literally nothing else that we need to do. The means to reach peace, and the nature of peace, fall outside both our responsibility and capability.

Only the ego finds this hard to understand.

We could think of it this way. Imagine that we want to go to Boston. We don’t have to invent or create Boston – Boston is already there. And the means to get there exist as well – trains, cars, buses, bikes. Pick one and get on with it.

That metaphor, like all metaphors, is imperfect and clumsy but perhaps you take its point. A Course in Miracles is quite simple in its application. To the extent we find it difficult or frustrating, it is only because we still insist on taking charge of both means and end. We have the goal of peace, but we also have a goal of being in charge of what peace is and how to attain it. And goals that conflict cannot be reached.

Peace is already here. What obscures it is the idea that we have to do something to reach it, sustain it and so forth. That is the ego speaking. It tells us that we have to do stuff, and it has all kinds of suggestions. Yoga, vegan diet, another self-help book, meditation, kirtan, prayer seminars . . .

None of those things are bad – but none of them are good either. It is so important to see this! The question is never what are we doing, but rather what is our purpose in doing it. If our purpose is peace, then what we do will be a means to peace. If our purpose is to obscure peace, then what we will do will obscure peace.

In a way, peace is the absence of accomplishing and accomplishment. We give up on both means and end. We just want peace and we know that if we get out of the way, peace is what will emerge. Yoga is as good a long walk, a long walk is as good as sitting in the park, and sitting in the park is as good as watching television.

What happens when we get out of the way?

What happens when we stop taking thought so seriously?

What happens when we choose peace and – when we forget we have chosen peace – choose peace again? And again?

A Course in Miracles is one way to answer those questions. It is not the only way, or even the best way, but it can be a very effective way. Reading the text and doing the workbook lessons brings us back to the fundamental choice, and the only one we ever need make: do we want peace or the absence of peace?

Only two purposes are possible. And one is sin, the other holiness. Nothing is in between, and which you choose determines what you see. For what you see is merely how you elect to meet your goal (T-20.VIII.9:1-4).

So we choose peace. And then step gently aside. When idle thoughts distress us, we set them aside. We “merely close our eyes, and then forget all that we thought we knew and understood” (W-pI.rVI.4:3).

It is enough. It truly is enough.

A Course in Miracles: On Holiness and Truth

The holy do not interfere with truth (T-20.III.3:1).

I write by a window facing north. Robins are working a patch of earth beneath the dogwood tree whose blossoms have yet to soften and open. The sky is pale gray; rain fell earlier and may yet again. Beyond the early summer bird song and far off drone of traffic on Route 112, a chainsaw growls. It is never too early to shore up wood for winter.

When we give attention – gently, cheerfully, consistently – we begin to perceive the utter and unconditional equality of what is external. We begin to perceive it less as a compendium of life through which perception thumbs and more as a fluid whole which rises and falls within – not without – us.

That last insight – that what we perceive as external is in reality internal, is in reality one with us – emerges from the fact that what is external is not personal. Stars don’t shine for us. Forest trails don’t open because our feet are poised above them. What is simply is. It neither offers nor takes anything. It is wholly neutral and bereft of meaning. It is, and we are with it.

It’s nice to say that. But it is important to ask if it is in fact our experience. Do we know it because Tara Singh or Sri Aurobindo said it? Or Ken Wapnick? Or do we simply know it?

It is helpful to acknowledge the fact that we are not at peace. A Course in Miracles assures us that peace – here in this world at this moment – is possible (T-20.IV.8:1-3).

Nothing you need will be denied you. Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away before you reach it (T-20.IV.8:7-8).

Do we not want that? And do we not want to identify and undo that which obstructs this peace?

The absence of peace – of a quiet, consistent and generous joy – simply reflects our ongoing attempts to interfere with truth by making it more true or differently true or even false.

These attempts are essentially thoughts, especially thoughts taken for our personal body and personal experience. We want the sun to shine now and not later. We want the house to be quiet. We want a vacation here and not there, now and not then. We want this or that person’s attention. We want somebody else to leave us alone.

Our litany of wants – which together compose our fantasy of a perfect life, a holy life, a life of truth – is nearly endless. Variants spiral this way and that like weeds. We are always bargaining with disappointment. I didn’t get what I wanted today, but tomorrow I will. I’ll do this and get that.

And on and on it goes.

Much of this wanting and bargaining happens outside the immediate range of awareness. We don’t notice it. The only evidence we have it exists is our unhappiness – the absence of peace that flows forever unaffected by what appear to be external people, places, things and events. It’s like the wind. You don’t see the wind – you see its effects rippling the lake’s surface or swaying the crowns of pine or tossing leaves at the sky.

It is not critical that we come face to face with this wanting and bargaining – these endless adjustments we insist to making to truth. It’s okay if we do – if it happens that way – but it’s not critical. Rather, it is critical that we become aware that wanting and bargaining are active within us, that we perceive their ruinous effects and, on that basis, choose to be finished with them.

“Being finished” in this case simply means to trust that seeing what is dysfunctional is itself healing. To be holy is not to fix anything or improve anything or amend anything. It is simply to rest attentively in the present, allowing what is true to be true. When we do this, truth naturally shows itself: our vision is made right by it. Healing is not a doing, but rather a natural effect of not doing.

[The holy] look on [truth] directly, without attempting to adjust themselves to it, or it to them. And so they see that it was in them, not deciding first where they would have it be. Their looking merely asks a question, and it is what they see that answers them (T-20.III.3:3-5).

So we go about our day, then. When it is time to make dinner we make dinner. When it is time to call the in-laws we call them. We go for walks, balance our checkbooks, weed the garden, visit the library, and change the oil in the car. We write by the north-facing window. The only difference – the essence of our practice as students of A Course in Miracles – is that we do these things while giving attention to our awareness of Love. Is it there? If not, then our work is simply to realize that we are yet clinging to some idea that we can make better what God made perfect. And that is a silly idea – it’s not sinful, it’s silly. When we see it clearly, we can let it go. Why hold on to silliness, especially when doing so is painful?

More and more I realize the importance of simply being present to what is happening. It doesn’t matter what is happening. It matters that I am present to it. And, for me, presence and attention are synonymous. The rest is done for me, because it is already done. The Truth is here: God has offered it. What is left is simply acceptance, and acceptance is simply the choice to place nothing personal – nothing at all – before truth.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 194

My practice of A Course in Miracles is grounded in the ordinary. It finds itself in what arises day-to-day – baking bread, mowing the lawn, writing poetry, drinking tea with Chrisoula, and walking and talking with my children.

The course is efficient and practical. The attention I give to it on its terms is returned to me with a surfeit of graceful interest. The gift that we were given in creation is revealed; the truth of “I need do nothing” becomes a fact, a sure foundation upon which inner peace both rests and extends.

Lesson 194 of A Course in Miracles neatly captures this emphasis on what is ordinary, this benevolent practicality, and the luminosity that naturally attends when we are no longer looking for drama or magic or any other kind of special personal experience. The lesson urges us to place the future – and be extension, the past and present – in God’s hands. When we do, we rest in peace ourselves.

Then is each instant which was slave to time transformed into a holy instant, when the light that was kept hidden in God’s Son is freed to bless the world. Now is he free, and all his glory shines upon a world made free with him, to share his holiness (W-pI.194.5:3-4).

But the poetry and eloquence of the course belies the grounded nature of this transformation. When we resolve to place our lives in the hands of God, and bring our attention to this placement throughout our day, then the effects are felt here. The effects are felt now.

What worry can beset the one who gives his future to the loving Hands of God? What can he suffer? What can cause him pain, or bring experience of loss to him? What can he fear? And what can he regard except with love? (W-pI.194.7:1-5)

The line at the supermarket is too long – we place our future in the hands of God. Our child is struggling at school – we place our future in the hands of God. We do not have enough money to pay the mortgage – we place our future in the hands of God. We are teacherless, partnerless, lost, confused, scared . . .

We place our future in the hands of God. No more and no less. It is enough.

There is nothing that we encounter in our day that is not shadowed by our fear of the future. Everything that we do as bodies in the throes of the egoic belief system is shaped by the past in anticipation of an improved future. And what has this mode of thought brought us but pain? Pain with intermittent relief from pain, sure, but still pain.

And A Course in Miracles comes along and offers us a way out of this cycle. It offers us a new thought system, and a method by which we might surely attain it. It dissolves our ruinous engagement with time not through personal understanding but through our willingness to “let the future go, and place it in God’s Hands” (W-pI.194.4:5).

This is literally a practice! It is an action that we take when faced with fear, guilt, anger, lust, greed, grief and so forth. The circumstances of our pain don’t matter. The apparent cause or causes don’t matter. Nothing matters but that we place the outcome – and the attendant feelings – in God’s hands. And when this placement becomes “a habit in [our] problem-solving repertoire,” then we will know at last salvation and peace (W-pI.194.6:2).

It is important to see that we are not made perfect by this practice. We don’t become Buddhas or ascended masters. Our bodies continue to be bodies – hungry, lustful, capable of fatigue, subject to emotion. Biology and neurochemistry proceed apace. But we are no longer ruled by those material externals. We do not fight them; we merely look beyond them.

[H]e who has escaped all fear of future pain . . . is sure that his perception may be faulty, but will never lack correction. He is free to choose again when he has been deceived; to change his mind when he has made mistakes (W-pI.194.7:6-8).

That is a description of you and I today – right now – if we choose to accept it.

Do you see the loveliness in it? The absence of consequences? The gentle practice by which we are led away from the world of guilt and fear and into love and forgiveness? It is so simple. I am not saying it is easy – I would be a liar if I did – but I am saying that it is simple. And I am saying that it is a transformation bequeathed to us over and over. And all we are asked to do is try to remember – moment by moment, day by day – to surrender our personal ideals and expectations and ideas of improvement. All they have ever done is bring us to grief.

In the end, Lesson 194 is the manifestation of the new way promised us by A Course in Miracles. We place our future in the hands of God and together learn that “only good can come to us” (W-pI.194.9:6).

←Lesson 193
Lesson 195→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 186

Salvation of the world depends on me.

Ask yourself: when told that salvation of the world depends on you, does not a chorus of internal voices begin to clamor in various degrees of consent and disagreement? Anticipation and resistance?

And hearing those voices – and not pretending they are not there, and not playing favorites amongst them, or otherwise dismissing their effects – can we begin to give attention to what, if anything, can be encountered beyond them?

Our true self cannot be discovered in thought. We aren’t going to think our way to the Truth. This does not make thought bad or unnecessary; only superfluous to Truth. We can think our way to baking brownies or clearing trails or driving to Chicago, but we cannot think our way to Reality.

So there is a presence beyond our egoic response to A Course in Miracles, that tends to us as we sit quietly, willing to experience it.

Our self-made roles are shifting, and they seem to change from mourner to ecstatic bliss of love and loving. We can laugh or weep, and greet the day with welcome or with tears. Our very being seems to change as we experience a thousand shifts in mood, and our emotions raise us high indeed, or dash us to the ground in hopelessness (W-pI.186.8:3-5).

This self can save nothing – salvation is not contingent on it in any way. Rather, salvation is contingent on our willingness to be led beyond this tiny self, this fragile construct of thought and feeling and language.

. . . certain as the sun’s return each morning to dispel the night, your truly given function stands out clear and wholly unambiguous. There is no doubt of its validity. It comes from One Who knows no error, and His Voice is certain of Its messages (W-pI.186.11:1-3).

Our practice of this lesson, then, depends on our willingness to set aside our various mental, emotional and psychological images of the self in order to find out what remains. Because it is what remains that is the foundation of the world’s salvation. So we can ask: what stays when we release our insistence on this or that role for ourselves? Who are we when we no longer rush to define ourselves in terms of what we think the world needs?

We think that our ideas are a form of knowledge, aspects of truth, helpful pointers to a self that can eventually fit into the world and maybe even save it from itself. But this thought (regardless of the myriad forms it takes) is simply faith wasted in yet another illusion. We have to let it all go – our images of helpfulness, kindness, gentleness, willingness, love. All of it. Can we do that? Admit that we don’t know? Admit that we even our purest ideal of lovingkindness contains the rank seeds of selfishness?

It is hard. It is very hard.

And yet, to the precise degree that we can entertain it as a possibility, help is given. Help is there. It is like we are so busy drawing maps to lead us home that we fail to notice we are already are home. What is required is not effort, but gentle and sustained attention to the present, which is forever sufficient.

Thus, the question is not how do I save the world, or what do I need to do to save the world, but rather am I giving attention to the Voice for Love (W-pI.186.4:1)? Nothing more is asked of us because nothing more could be asked.

The ego’s many voices – its pretend logic, its passionate directives – will fade and disappear as we observe them without investment. What remains? What emerges from what remains?

Those are interesting questions; and it behooves us to be discovered by the answers.

←Lesson 185
Lesson 187→

Giving is What Matters

It is helpful to remember that as we become more aware of what A Course in Miracles calls the ego, we may feel the effects of egoic thinking quite intensely. Patterns of thought and behavior and feeling that went unnoticed before suddenly call attention to themselves. It is not always comfortable when this happens! It can feel like failure, like falling back down a hill we’ve spent a long time climbing.

But really, it’s okay. Crazed machinations of egoic thought are not new and, as distressing as they may seem, are no more or less important than anything else going on, inside or out. They are just another facet of the various landscapes to which we are giving attention. And it is the giving of attention that matters in the end; not the images to which attention is given.

The forgiveness process of A Course in Miracles is about looking clearly and – as much as possible – without judgment at what is going on. If we are sad, then we look at our sadness. If we are listening to birds at dawn, then we look at listening to birds at dawn. Nothing is excluded, and nothing is better than anything else. It’s all equal. It might not seem so initially, but sooner or later this equality reveals itself.

People ask me sometimes: what is the point? So I am looking at looking at a banana split – so what? That’s not spiritual. That’s not healing. Or they say that it hurts to look at so-called negative aspects of character – lust, greed, anger, dishonesty. We’re supposed to change that stuff – not just stare at it.

Well, yes. I appreciate that. I feel that way myself quite often. But the suggestion I am making is that giving attention – which is to say, looking with the Holy Spirit – is itself curative. There’s really nothing else to do. We don’t understand that, at least not initially. It’s too simple. We prefer drama – big insights, big shifts, and all of that. We want results. We want outcomes that make us happy.

But really, healing simply happens because we are being attentive, and what we are attentive to is not very important at all. There really is nothing more to do! And it’s impossible to do it wrong, because attention isn’t our creation. It’s just there, a kind of responsiveness forever present. So the pressure comes off a little. Life isn’t our personal responsibility. How hard is it to do nothing?

When giving attention becomes difficult – because we see how selfish we are, how impatient, how naive, or whatever – it is important to remember that this is a form of clarity! And clear seeing is quite literally the Holy Spirit in action. Our impatience or selfishness is no more or less valuable in this regard than a sunset or a grilled steak. Attention is not contingent on that to which it is given. Give the Holy Spirit an inch and then sit back and watch it take the miles.

So we give attention. We don’t worry so much how it feels or whether it’s working or what results we’re getting. We don’t really know anyway. It is the gift of attention that matters. No more than that, and no less. We rest in giving: we become giving. And it’s enough; it’s more than enough.

Precious Steps

Go out in gladness to meet with your Redeemer, and walk with Him in trust out of this world, and into the real world of beauty and forgiveness (T-17.II.8:5).

I woke sharply at 4 a.m. and by 4:05 was outside, leaving the eastbound dirt road for old potato fields slick with ice from sleet yet pelting my shoulders and face. The dog led me into the forest like she did in the old days, and we went all the way to the old feeder pond, making too much noise to catch deer or geese. Even after I fell in to my knees I didn’t right away turn back, for something in the darkness and stillness called to me, a thrumming deeper than blood, a wordless hymn into which I am gently disappearing.

Attention is alive. We are not its maker, though its application does rest temporarily in our dream of free will. The welter of Life – from thought to sensation to image to the cold pond sucking at my thighs – is naturally lit by the interior lantern of attention, going where we ask it go, its rays falling where we say to them “fall.”

If we have a problem, we can inquire into its origins and resolution. If we fall to our knees in gratitude, we can study the pattern and movement of our gratitude. We can listen to the softening of the sleet to rain, or to eighteen-wheelers leaning on their jake brakes where 143 dips toward the dingle. When the light rises – pale and gray, a shroud enfolding pine trees and maple – we can look at it, and at what emerges dimly through it.

Nothing more than gentle and sustained attention is asked of us, because nothing more could be asked, because there is nothing more that we could give. When we stop insisting Life be this or that, when we stop setting goals and demanding outcomes, and when we stop hurrying as we could outrun stillness, as if we could really want to outrun it, we see that Life happens, and that we are included in this happening, and it is – all unto itself – sufficient. No – it is more than sufficient: it is lovely and peaceful, and within it a natural serious happiness becomes us.

I am not saying that we won’t do things: write poems, feed children, volunteer at the shelter, teach classes, paint flowers, run for President, go to the bank. We can and we will. Rather, I am saying that our perception of those activities will soften. It won’t linger on them. They will no longer be held as critical manifestations of a personal self, but simply as eddies and swirls in the flow of Life, no one of them more important or beneficial than another.

Attention reveals this radical equality to us: attention restores what is always given to our awareness. This is what A Course in Miracles means when it talks about our relationship with the Holy Spirit.

The great Transformer of perception will undertake with you the careful searching of the mind that made this world, and uncover to you the seeming reasons for you making it. In the light of the real reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will show you there is no reason here at all. Each spot his reason touches grows alive with beauty, and what seemed ugly in the darkness of your lack of reasons is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity could be without a hidden spark of beauty that gentleness could release (T-17.II.5:2-5).

I walk each day in order give attention to this “hidden spark of beauty.” It arrives in my thoughts, my fantasies, the sensations attending the body I am briefly making use of, and the landscape through which the body briefly perceives the flowing and flowering of Life. To see it truly is to see that it is given – it is already here, right now – and nothing can be either added nor taken away. No thought, no dream, no event, no person could possibly be other than it is right now. How liberating to perceive this, even for a moment! The insight touches us and the light remains.

And having been so touched – which is to be illuminated, enlightened – how happy we become. We know that there is only one blessing, and that it is inherent and inclusive, a natural radiance transcending even our most ambitious dreams of what love and truth might be.

This loveliness is not a fantasy. It is the real world, bright and clean and new, with everything sparkling under the open sun (T-17.II.2:1-2).

This is the gift that our attention reveals to us: the Given that never leaves, never changes, and is never conditional. Thus my walks each morning, as far as the dog will go, and thus my writing each morning, as wordy as wordiness allows, and thus your beautiful holy presence reading – which is not a solitary enterprise at all but a joining, a completing – for which I am never not thankful, and never not croaking these clumsy sentences of praise.