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.

Learning to See

A Course in Miracles is simply an opportunity to learn a new way of seeing. Or – better maybe – an opportunity to learn a new way of being, one in which our relationship to thought and perception naturally aligns with life as it is, restoring us gently to the graceful love that is our inheritance.

The bridge (to the Real World) is nothing more than a transition in the perspective of reality. On this side, everything you see is grossly distorted and completely out of perspective. . . . (T-16.VI.7:1-2)

And on the other we gain “the understanding of where Heaven is . . . it will join with you and become one with you” (T-16.VI.11:1, 3).

While this transition is not necessarily easy (e.g., T-16.VI.7:4), it is simple.

Imagine for a moment that we are wearing glasses that discolor the world, magnify certain elements of it and block others as if they don’t exist at all. Someone comes along and says, “hey. There’s another way of seeing the world – a way that is clear and pure. Just take off those glasses.”

At first we would resist. But then we might secretly slip them down a little – peek over the top of the lenses – just to catch a glimpse of this “real world.” And then at some point perhaps we would take them off for a few minutes and look around.

At first, even though we would perceive the difference between the two worlds, we would be confused about their relative value. We might still prefer the old way of seeing – we have been wearing our dysfunctional glasses for a long time, after all. Probably we will put them back on. It’s familiar and comfortable. On and off, off and on . . .

I am never not amazed at how lovely a tree is, how instructive moonlight is, at the patience and kindness of brooks in full spate. This is the gift: this is what is given, and what gives of itself, over and over and over.

Awakening is like that. It is just like that. For me it is, and maybe for you as well. It comes in little flashes at first. We resist it. It comes and goes. It takes time for us to recognize and then choose Love. It takes practice.

The thing we want to be clear about is that nothing changes but the way that we see. The maple trees don’t change, our neighbors don’t change, vanilla ice cream doesn’t change, moonlight doesn’t change. But, because the way that we see changes, everything slips into its right place. We see reality as it is, not as we wish it was, and not as we insist it be.

That is all there is to peace. That is all there is to joy.

I write often about “giving attention.” That is just my way of saying that it is helpful (or is for me and may be for you) to be present: to just be still for a few minutes and notice what is going on. The more that I do this, the more I realize there is nothing to do: it is all being done. Being simply is, and it includes me naturally, and it includes you as well.

In an absolute sense, there is no practicing to this. We can’t be more or less than what we are. We can’t be anywhere else than where and when we are. But in the relative sense – in the ordinary course of experience – it is possible to discover this new way of seeing, and then – by giving attention to it consistently and gently – to deepen with and into it.

Life is both ordinary and luminous – the two qualities are really the same. I am never not amazed at this: at how lovely a tree is, how instructive moonlight is, at the patience and kindness of brooks in full spate. Life contains us: expresses us: and offers us over and over its glorious and unconditional love.

There is Nothing to Heal

It is not necessary to heal ourselves.
It is necessary to give attention
to what is broken
and loveless
where it is perceived.
The distinction between what is external
and internal will resolve itself
without our intervention.
Attention is merciful sustenance
because it is nonjudgmental
and incapable of division.
Its perfection is clear
and unhurried.
It responds to us
yet neither begins nor ends
with our intention.
To be attentive
is to consent
to be that through which
a necessary blessing extends.
Therefore,
let go of the investment
in a better self,
a happier self,
a lovely self.
Relinquish
your stranglehold on form.
Let what passes pass,
and in the subsequent space
of nonresistance
notice what does not pass
but only stays.
Discover again the wholeness
naturally encompassing
what we call the self,
what we call broken,
and what we call
loveless.
It is not necessary to heal yourself
but only to discover
through attention
that there is nothing to heal
and never was.