Participation in Love

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.

The Way of No Path

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.

Yet Another Newsletter

I sent out another newsletter. If you are interested, you can sign up here or in the sidebar. If you’ve already signed up, it ought to have arrived. Let me know. I know not everyone is interested in yet another message cluttering the inbox, so no hard feelings. It’s just another way to keep in touch and think out loud together, if keeping in touch and thinking out loud is helpful . . .

This particular one reflects on on the ordinary but extraordinarily helpful work of “looking straight at all the interference and see it exactly as it is” (T-15.IX.2:1). Love is there – it is given – but our capacity for awareness of it is cluttered, most often by our insistence that we already know what love is and how to see it.

I wrote, in part:

The key word in that passage is “looking.” That is all we need to do. We are not called to “look and undo” or “look and change” or “look and analyze.” We simply need to notice those obstructions to our awareness of Love. Love is the given; we don’t invent, discover or restore it. Rather, we give attention to that which hinders our awareness of it. No more and no less.

So, you know, we just keep at it, the best we can. Sooner or later we see that all this attention and effort isn’t necessary, but until we see there’s no need for it, there’s a need for it. Hence my wordiness, hence your generosity in listening and sharing, and hence our slow but steady march to the Heaven we never left.

A Course in Miracles and Gratitude

The unhealed healer wants gratitude from his brothers, but he is not grateful to them. That is because he thinks he is giving something to them, and is not receiving something equally desirable in return (T-7.V.7:1-2).

This concept of relationships – giving to get and needing to come out ahead in the bargain – is very stressful. Yet it is also hard to see, especially when it is happening, and it is also hard to relinquish. In the first place, we are habituated to it. And in the second, when we question it, it is seductively logical and sound.

For example, if we sit down at the table and there is only one slice of pie, then you and I cannot both eat it. We are going to have to share it. Or fight over it. Or one of us will say “you eat it” and feel secretly pleased with our righteousness, or bitter that we always have to be the one to take the high road.

In terms of bodies, and in terms of the world bodies inhabit, there is really no way around that outcome.

It is very hard to be consistently and genuinely grateful in that scenario! In truth, we don’t want to be grateful because we are winning at someone else’s expense. And we do want a gratefulness that is not conditional on satisfying the body’s wants and perceived needs. As Bill Thetford once said, there has to be another way.

It is helpful to practice gratefulness, even when we are not feeling it – perhaps especially when we are not feeling it. A focus on gratitude when it seems that things are not working out, can be instructive. We are sick, we can’t pay the bills, someone we love has died, the car won’t start, the rose bush didn’t bloom . . .

When I say “practice” gratitude, what I really mean is simply to notice it. If we can’t find it, it is only because we are actively hiding it, which is a childish (but effective) form of resistance. When attention seeks gratefulness, gratefulness will be found. Why? Because the mind that seeks it is the mind that knows that where it is. And gratitude wants to be found. Gifts always do.

In this way we learn that gratitude does not need to be linked to anything external. There is nothing wrong with being grateful for a sunny day or a friendly email or a homemade molasses cookie or whatever, but gratitude is hardly so limited. It’s like the sky. It’s just there. It’s always there, but we don’t always notice it. Gratitude for what works is like a grain of sand. Gratitude for gratitude’s sake is the whole desert and then some.

When gratitude becomes us, it naturally extends itself. When I am grateful, I am relieved of the drive to get and become. So I am more available to those around me. I am more present and less judgmental. I see what is, rather than what I would have it be. I am not bent on getting something from you. I am not cultivating some gift by which I hope to elicit a certain response from you. I am not dwelling on what you haven’t said or haven’t given.

It is so much easier to be in relationship this way.

Gratitude ends desire’s rampages and the result is life-giving stillness. When we are in the presence of a brother or sister’s gratitude, it is like a weight is lifted from our shoulders. It is like a giant breath too long held is released. This gentle clarity is our reality. This lovingkindness is our home.

The mind we share is shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly they will be healed. Let your mind shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make them aware of the light in them . . . This is true communion with the Holy Spirit, Who sees the altar of God in everyone, and by bringing it to your appreciation, He calls upon you to love God and His Creation (T-7.V.11:2-3, 6).

Our practice of A Course in Miracles – our learning how to heal and be healed – is enriched when we give attention to gratitude. In particular, we can begin to loosen the notion that it is contingent on anything external. It does not spring into existence because of circumstances the ego deems fortuitous. It is the essence of what we are in truth.

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.