Waiting on Miracles

The miracle is a shift in thinking in which thought aligns, however briefly, with Truth. This means that we are not indulging our narrative preferences – this is good, this is bad, I am this, you are that. We let those be, like blades of grass or floating contrails. They are no longer our concern. The miracle is both impersonal and factual, a shock to our illusory comfort (always predicated on preference), and a clear bolt of lightening in our self-imposed dark (always a consequence of preference).

Truth, in this instance, is neither an object nor a stance taken with respect to objects. It is not an opinion. Nor is it a stranger to us, nor even unfamiliar (like a friend we have not seen in many years). It is simply what is, the wholeness of being, the fullness of the moment. Nothing is excluded (not even possibility, not even the possibility of impossibility) because nothing could be excluded. It is in the nature of the space in which thought happens, or the luminous ground from which it emerges, though both those analogies are inadequate.

And anyway, those kinds of statements – “thought aligns, however briefly, with truth,” “the luminous ground” – are maddening to various degrees. Explanation often turns into justification, which doesn’t help anyone. A kind of gentle sustained attention to what is before us – both internally and externally – seems eventually sufficient. We begin to perceive the way in which how we see – again, both internally and externally – is conditioned, and thus partial. And what can partiality beget but segments, fractures, portions, partitions, et cetera?

It is important to note that we want to fragment life, at least in the sense that we are evolved in such a way as to facilitate fragmentation. Our brains naturally divide that which is perceived, the better to understand it and thus coordinate response and reaction, which is to say, functionality. I am not saying this is right or wrong – it is simply a fact. This is how thought works. The problem is that we pretend the fragments are the whole – that they are real and true. Life is so much gentler when we just let it all be, and see our partiality for what it is – which is simply a mode of seeing that is contained within the whole.

That is what the miracle (as we are using the term here, in the mode – imprecisely perhaps – of A Course in Miracles) does. That is what it is for. The miracle is the insight that fragmentation is not wholeness and – critically – that wholeness is unaffected by our confusion, by fragmentation. That is literally all the miracle does. Of course the context of the miracle will shift for all of us – some of us will experience it while meditating, some while hiking, some in the midst of a kiss. It doesn’t matter. The form of the miracle is the least interesting aspect of it; its content is always the same: fragmentation is not wholeness. Only Truth is true. Et cetera.

The miracle passes. It is temporary, a stop-gap. It is like a flash of light in a dark landscape that illuminates enough of the trail to allow a few more steps upon it. The further we go along the trail, the more frequent and sustained the miracles – these flashes, these lights – become. Eventually we are no longer walking in a darkness briefly interrupted but rather in a sort of twilight; and this twilight itself grows brighter and brighter; becomes luminous, and illuminative.

The miracle is that insight which – over time – renders itself unnecessary.

But we do not understand miracles: and they are necessary because we don’t understand them. This is to say that we can’t force the miracle – we can’t demand right thinking happen now. If right thinking were so easy or malleable – if it were so readily accessible, it if were so subject to our will – then we wouldn’t need help. We wouldn’t have invented philosophy, religion, psychotherapy, hallucinogenics, Tarot cards and so forth nor relied upon them so . . . But we are too tangled up. Therefore, if we are going to be become clear and coherent – if we are going to locate ourselves outside time and space – then we need help. The miracle is our help.

Concern yourself not with the extension of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do not understand. Nor do you do them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you do not do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship when you do not understand the miracle itself? (T-16.II.1:3-6)

When Nisargadatta was asked for tricks or methods or ways to Truth, he generally responded much like in the following exchange.

Question: Did you get your own realisation through effort or by the grace of your Guru?

Nisargardatta: His was the teaching and mine was the trust. My confidence in him made me accept his words as true, go deep into them, live them, and that is how I came to realise what I am. The Guru’s person and words made me trust him and my trust made them fruitful.

What moves me in this regard – this idea of trust from which so far as I can see, Nisargadatta never wavered – is simply that Nisargadatta eschews any prerequisite knowledge or experience. His guru said that he was “something changeless, motionless, immovable, rocklike, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss,” and Nisargadatta believed him, gave attention accordingly, and learned that his Guru was right. He was awakened to his true nature.

That is a way to think about miracles: we are told that they are real, that will operate to awaken holiness (which is to say, authenticity, coherence, lovingkindness, et cetera) within us, and to extend it – and we are told that our job is simply to accept all this as true and go about our business. Let it be. It is enough to know the truth is given to us; we don’t have to also decide what to do with it, who to share it with, and so on and so forth.

Honor the truth that has been given you, and be glad you do not understand it. Miracles are natural to the One who speaks for God. For His task is to translate the miracle into the knowledge which it represents, and which is hidden to you. Let His understanding of the miracle be enough for you, and do not turn away from all the witnesses that He has given you to His reality (T-16.II.5:3-6).

I write sometimes about passivity – a kind of energetic passivity – in which one is giving attention without leaping via judgment into experience, in which the dualism of observer/observed is allowed to simply be. I don’t mean sitting around expecting miracles; I mean doing what is given us to do while trusting in miracles. Bake bread, walk the dog, teach the class, write the poem, shovel the path . . . and trust the miracle. Don’t think about the miracle – trust the miracle.

The insight will dawn, because it is already given. Inevitability is a kind of law here. Fun house mirrors don’t actually distort anything; they just seem to. So it is with perception: it’s askew, but it can be corrected. It can realign itself. Our efforts to get it to do so are always futile; we accomplish the most by doing nothing. Which is – sometimes, for some of us – the hardest thing. Hence the usefulness – albeit temporarily – of a practice: the lessons of ACIM, devotion to walking or art, love affairs with chickadees. The practice becomes a distraction, so that unexpectedly we become aware of what is already here and always was and we take note accordingly, miraculously.

The Sufficiency of Life

. . .  and am reminded that when we die nothing really happens: the whole loveliness of the world continues, the whole sufficiency of life – of us, together, one within the other – continues. Our subjective experience of life ends, yes, but nothing is contingent on our subjective experience – it is merely awareness in a particular form, and the particular is always folding back into the general, the ultimate, the absolute, forever subsumed in the whole . . .

Dust to dust, flowers into the earth (bluets leaving to reappear), waves into sea . . . there are little brooks I pass on my walk that eventually trickle into Bronson Brook, which in turn reaches the Westfield River, which in turn flows into the long blue ribbon of the Connecticut River, which in turn reaches Long Island Sound, a tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean, opening at last into the broad Atlantic Ocean . . .

No matter how we think of it, we cannot undo truth. Reason doesn’t change anything – it merely observes what is. Or rigorously observes what is. Death is built in – it is inherent. We know how to die, in the sense that we don’t have to teach our bodies what to do. They understand entropy perfectly! It is clear and natural, like rivers or flowers. Our cells are not lamenting endings or celebrating beginnings. It’s all just movement. It’s all just flowing.

We confuse our subjective awareness of the whole – of the flow – with the whole and with the flow – and this confusion is what A Course in Miracles calls “ego.” It is the idea that we are separate from each other in a real and substantive way, and that this separateness matters, matters deeply, so that what we are in truth – our self, our being – is thereby contingent on this separation, these apparent differences. And that’s okay – it’s one way to do it, one way to see it – but it’s not the only way. All A Course in Miracles is saying is that maybe there’s another way to look at it. That’s all. All a student of A Course in Miracles really does in the end is say yes, okay, I’ll give attention to this other way and see what happens. I don’t know what will happen but I am ready – with you I am ready – to find out.

Life is hardly so concerned with separation – with separate selves living separate lives, forging disparate meanings, clinging to ideas and ideals and so on and so forth. Life takes nothing personally – cancer, volcano eruptions, famine, pestilence. Life does not behold these events/objects differently than it does roses, orgasms, sunsets and chocolate. It’s all the same.

You can see it that way if you are willing. You don’t have to accept it – you can always go back – but still. You can see how simple life is, and how perfectly it takes care, how sustaining it is. It is not hard to do this at the level of the intellect. Attention reveals it to us: life is, and it is not contingent on us or our ideas. It contains them – enfolds them – effortlessly, perfectly. Our subjective experience is okay – life is not trying to wrestle it away from us – but it is merely what passes, not unlike the chickadee, not unlike the chickadee’s shadow on the snow as it flies into the pines. What passes is not the problem: but our attachment to what passes, which is a kind of resistance to flow, is a problem, simply because it hurts so much. Simply because it begets so much sorrow and grief. We can live that way if we want but really: seeing the truth of it, why would we?

Getting to this intellectually matters because then we can begin to bring it into application. The level of intellect is like a seed that the loam of experience turns into flowers. That is the function of reason! If we understand a truth is true, then even if it’s hard, even if it’s confusing, even if it is contrary to what we have long believed, then we will accept it. We will align with it. The fruit of this alignment may take time to emerge, but it will emerge. We are never truly in error. Once we perceive the whole, the fragments – the reflections – inevitably restore to awareness the grace of source.

I say it and I say it in order to remember it: you already know it. But you are kind to listen to me, whose wordiness is yet a step on the path-that-is-not-a-path to the home that is home because nobody ever left it. You are patient and kind: and my gratitude bounds forth on the grass accordingly.

Depression, Expectation, Liberation

. . . thus, it is good to be clear about the nature of our expectations: when I am an awakened being, it will look like this. It will feel like this. Others will respond to me in this way. And so forth.

Expectation, even though it is directed at the future, is predicated on the past. No – it is the past. That is where our ideas come from. We met or read about someone who professed to be awake, and we began to associate and free-associate. Over time – all that reading and studying and watching videos and going to workshops in the interest of enlightenment, of spiritual liberation, et cetera – those associations become a sort of fixed object: the awakened self. Our awakened self.

Thus, awakening – which is not a future event but a present cognition of a present reality – is largely or altogether missed because it doesn’t fit our prearranged ideal. Our seeking constructs a model that neatly, nearly perfectly makes finding anything impossible. We are too busy reading A Course in Miracles, or studying the 20th century advaitists, or meditating, or admiring our vegetarianism, or writing about awakening and so forth.

None of those things are bad in and of themselves, of course. It’s just that in the ultimate sense, A Course in Miracles isn’t any more significant than Danielle Steele. Consuming life in the form of plants isn’t morally superior to consuming it in the form of a chicken. And so forth. Yes, yes, we have to make decisions and live some way, but the point is that awakening is not contingent on those decisions. Awakening is not conditional. It is not contingent on any external appearance or construction or circumstance. Our belief to the contrary is what makes seeing this simple truth impossible.

We could put it this way: what we are in truth is altogether unaffected by our decision to eat meat, or to have an affair, or to be an ACIM student rather than a Buddhist, or to write poetry rather than ad copy for Budweiser, and so forth. Life does not stop because of our ideas about life – because of our standards or preferences. It doesn’t even change because of those ideas. It just is.

. . . truth is constant, and implies a state where vacillations are impossible . . . happiness in changing form that shifts with time and place is an illusion that has no meaning (T-21.VII.10:5, 13:1).

A little over a year ago I had an insight about giving attention, which subsequently and profoundly transformed my practice which, in turn and time, changed my experience of self and other. About six months after that insight, in the midst of its burgeoning effects, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that it was time to stop being so desperately and frantically consumptive, especially with respect to spiritual and philosophical texts. The time for learning was over; the time for application was now.

I beheld the clarity of Tara Singh.

The only Truth is “What Is.”

Only in Truth duality ends.

In thought, concept, dogma, belief systems, there is always conflict.

If you cannot harness the energy of a Truth, then you only know the words.

(Gifts from the Retreat 16-17)

I became determined to harness Truth: and I am here to tell you: Truth is like a horse that misses us and secretly wants to come home. It will not resist our harness. It draws vividly near even as we become aware of our desire that it drawn near. How lovely! How accommodating!

How infuriating!

Because slowly – slowly but certainly – I began to get angry. Deeply angry. At first I didn’t understand it; perhaps it was just a prolonged mood? But then I began to see that what had once delighted me – the chickadees, the black bears, the tracks of the moose, games within language, the fall of the light just so – did not any longer. Or rather, I saw through the loveliness, saw through the delight. The loveliness of these objects was not compromised, but their meaning certainly was.

What do I mean by that? I mean that I was finally seeing the content behind the form: and the content was nothing but all the junk I projected: thoughts and memories and ideas and stories and landscapes and images and sounds and themes and this and that and holy Christ what an ugly tangled mess it made. Every time my heart leaped and my voice rose in song, this enormous ruinous welter of the projected self, of the self-made self, presented itself, and I fell silent. The chickadees and cardinals, the black bears and moose, the birch trees and fire ponds, the moon and the stars, collections of poetry and black-and-white photographs of my grandmothers when they were young . . . all of it was hostage to the ego, tortured by the ego into a desperate attempt to keep itself going.

In other words, what I had called joy was a lie with a singular goal: perpetuation of the separate self, regardless of the resultant tides of guilt and sorrow caused thereby.

If you seek to separate out certain aspects of the totality and look to them to meet your imagined needs, you are attempting to use separation to save you. How then could guilt not enter? For separation is the source of guilt, and to appeal to it for salvation is to believe you are alone . . . to experience yourself as alone is to deny the Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to attack reality (T-15.V.2:3-7).

I was angry because I did not want to see the truth of what I was doing, because to see the truth of it, was to know that one had to give it up. And how could I do that? How do you jettison a lifetime of specialness? How could a chickadee be just another bird? How could my writing about A Course in Miracles be just more blather? And so forth.

Please do not rush to tell me that I am wrong here. Or that it will all be okay. Please do not prattle about how special relationships are translated into holy relationships and so forth (T-15.V.8:1). I have read that, too. I have prattled thusly. I am saying something else here, or trying to. I am saying that we must meet experience where it is, which meeting requires rigorous honesty, and that to call this meeting unpleasant may be to understate the case dramatically.

I am saying that when we at last perceive the illusory nature of the world, that some of us must go through a period of anger and regret and bitterness. I am sure there are those who skip lightly through this stage and struggle with others, but I am not one of them. It hurt, and the hurt did not instantly or readily dissolve. And, because it hurt and kept on hurting, resistance entered.

Resistance takes many forms, one of which – for me the most cunning and resilient of which – is an interest in its many forms. I just love to study my apparent failures under the guise of getting better someday. Yet as soon as we are focused on form, we are distracted from Truth. Not permanently but presently, which is entirely sufficient unto the ego’s needs.

Thus, if I felt that consumption of spiritual texts was no longer called for, I doubled down on my study of them. Nisargadatta, Martin Buber, Shih-t’ou and so on. If the Holy Spirit said zig, I zagged, and when the Holy Spirit said zag, I zigged. I extended the proverbial middle finger resolutely, unrepentantly. Suck on this, Jesus. Pressed to admit that chickadees were neither lovelier nor holier than grackles or June bugs, I wrote a ten-thousand word treatise on the sacred blessing only chickadees could impart.

And oh how it didn’t work. And oh how I began to depress, to become depressed, my stumbling reduced to a crawl, my crawl reduced to blindly clutching fistfuls of dust. Nothing worked, and the unworkability of it bled slowly through my life – my work, my relationships, my walks, my wordiness. I couldn’t go forward as I was called to go, and going back wasn’t any better. Everywhere I turned I saw the same bleak possibilities, no one of which struck me as palatable, passable, viable. In no metaphorical way, my prison became very clear and very tight. I fell asleep to the clinking of chains and woke to the utter absence of light in which every moment was a recitation of my death sentence.

Now it is important to acknowledge that this condition is in its way a blessing – from the outside looking in it is a blessing – but it cannot possibly be perceived as such from within the experience. A prison is a prison; the willing prisoner and the informed prisoner and the optimistic prisoner are still prisoners.

Shih-t’ou said:

The spiritual source shines clear in the light;
the branching streams flow on in the dark.
Grasping at things is surely delusion;
according with sameness is still not enlightenment.

It is important to see that the prison is constructed of ideals: thought makes it: it is thought itself. The world isn’t doing anything to us – life is just life, impersonal and neutral, flowing and evolving, unconditioned by the past and unaffected by the future. But our thoughts and perceptions – the workings of our so-called inner life – when unacknowledged, these become the dense web of illusion in which our entanglement becomes the very essence of loss and grief and confusion. It cannot be said enough: we confuse our thoughts about reality for reality. Stop giving thought such primacy – let it be the equivalent of bird songs and waterfalls and eighteen-wheelers a mile or more away – and everything will settle quite nicely.

But of course – again, critically – it doesn’t make a whit of difference to say this. But to finally make contact with the seeming realness of it all – to stop pretending that the prison is a beautiful landscape, or a perfect kiss, or a great poem, or a clear star on the horizon in winter . . . To just see that we are entrapped by thought and haven’t got the first fucking clue how to get out . . . That is something.

In a sense I am saying it is very important to see hell as hell, and to really accept it as such . . . You will know you are there when there is no way out, no possibility of hope, when there is no intellectual comfort whatsoever . . . Don’t resist this but rather embrace it, in the sense of not trying to change it, or pretend it’s anything else. Don’t look for the crack through which the light seeps; just sink into the darkness.

If we do not embrace our hatred of God, then we will not be able to finally know God as Love. There is no way out but through the Hate and Guilt and Fear, all of which is hidden by meaningless dreams of Love, our cheap hymns to health and happiness that are grounded not in experience but wishful thinking.

Shih-t’ou said:

In the light there is darkness,
but don’t take it as darkness;
In the dark there is light,
but don’t see it as light.

So what happens? Here is what is happened for me, which won’t be what happens for you, because your path is not my path, even though we are walking together, calling to one another in darkness and fog, like hikers on the trail, separated by great distance, but perhaps it will still be helpful.

One morning you wake up and the prison is there: the hopelessness is there: the sentence of death life has laid on your bones chokes and strangles you and you wish only that the end would come, the sooner the better. And you say then from the rotting pit of your heart, from the wretched depths of what you have made of yourself, in a faint whisper no angel would recognize as language: “there must be another way.”

That was how Bill Thetford put it. Shih-t’ou adds:

Hearing the words, understand the meaning;
don’t set up standards of your own.
If you don’t understand the Way right before you,
how will you know the path as you walk?
Progress is not a matter of far or near,
but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way.

How simply the veils part when we stop insisting they be veils. How the jail cell dissolves when we make inquiry of the prisoner. How readily the path unfolds before our feet when we stop trying to go anywhere. And how soft your hand is in mine, Beloved, when I no longer beg to hold it.

Unaware of the Light We Are

In general, we are unaware of the light we are, the love we are. “Light” and “love” are just words, of course, which opens up all kinds of possibility for confusion and projection, but still. We don’t need to be enlightened; we need to see we are enlightened – naturally, right now, as is.

Yesterday I was sharing with someone and in the middle of the dialogue she said something – a few words, half a sentence – and I saw clearly that she was perfect. She was whole and perfect and there was not a single thing that needed to happen or unhappen. It was all finished.

Please understand I mean this in the simplest way possible: there was no light show, no angels, no mysterious voices or invisible choirs. It was all as plain and simple and easy as a hamburger. I just saw this friend precisely as she was in that moment, and she was perfect. It was as if I actually knew what I was talking about when I say there are no secrets, there are no mysteries.

Nor was this “seeing” a result of anything I do or don’t do. It didn’t reflect learning or study or diligence. It wasn’t a reward and it wasn’t a product. It was more in the nature of a happy accident caused by relative inattention. I mean that when we stop looking for it, there it is. And it was always there – it was always this – and this is it.

Yet this individual does not consider herself perfect. I know this because she says so, and we talk about it from time to time, our shared imperfection and what we are doing and not doing to rectify it. Psychotherapy, hallucinogenics, A Course in Miracles, 7-day sesshin, fasting, long walks in the forest, crystals and so forth.

Please forgive me a bit of intellectualism here, a bit of reason (where reason really needs to put on a propeller beanie and bounced around on a pogo stick). My first impulse was to try and convey this perfection to my friend. This was instantly followed by the realization it would do no good because there is really no way to translate vision into words. And finally, I saw with great clarity that we can only perceive in another what lies in us untended. The perfection was not my friend’s – and it was not mine – it was ours. My friend does not see the light in her; I do not see the light in me. But the light is there regardless.

Thus, for a moment – briefly – I too was perfect and whole. We were perfect and whole together, because that is the only way to be whole and perfect. And it passed, of course, which was okay, but its effects lingered, like the way the sky is still bright and lovely even after the sun has fallen below the horizon.

How happy I was, and am, to be in the company of those who give themselves that I might see at last I am not broken, not lonely, and not doomed. How amazed I am, and how grateful.

That Which Obscures

Even the articulation of “the present” – what A Course in Miracles calls the holy instant – is a concept, because both perception and conception require time. Whatever the present is – even if if is – it is obscured entirely by perception and concept.

And if we are honest, most of us, we will see that we are always perceiving and conceiving, and giving attention to what is perceived and conceived, and trying to shape this welter into some desirable spiritual insight or state. We are always thinking, and taking thought seriously, as if it were reality itself.

Thus, I write by the window and a chickadee rests on the snowy oak tree by the fence. It is a kind of loveliness and light to me; a harbinger of the holy instant, the now, but in fact it is none of that. It’s just another image, and just another response, no different than the countless others which I experience as “my” life.

What do I mean by this? I mean I identify the chickadees as this kind of bird and not another. I tap into a host of past associations – ideas, feelings, pictures – and choose those which manifest my special relationship with chickadees. This happens blindingly fast, of course, but it happens in time – it is important to see this and not deny it. It is many things as a result, but it is not the present.

The operation of our subjective experience necessarily renders the present a concept which we subsequently try to plaster onto this or that experience. This can be a very subtle movement but it is still a movement. We aren’t bad people or unserious people – we are simply trapped in the mind’s split which forces us into the subject/object paradigm. It’s not a crime; but it’s not very helpful either.

The old Zen master Huang Po said that mind cannot be reached by mind. The very act of trying – the very search itself – becomes the obstacle. We are dogs chasing our tails. Try to find the present – try to find your real self – and you are instantly precluded from both.

What is to be done then when doing anything at all is an impediment? I have no answer to this, of course. You can’t talk your way out of a paradox. “Mind cannot be reached by mind.” In my experience of A Course in Miracles, a relatively diligent study and application of the daily lessons brings one to this essential paradox of dualism – the gateless barrier – which, in a funny way, is sort of the beginning.

A sort of beginning in which a sort of equilibrium is called for, in which one is no longer trying to be “light” and “love,” nor “emptiness” or “egoless” nor any point in between. How one arrives at this balance is personal and intimate, reflecting the nothing-to-be-done-that-only-you-can-do, to paraphrase Tara Singh.

And really, to say this much is to say too much, but to say less would not necessarily be any better. Virtue and its opposite are apparently boundless. There is a chickadee on the oak tree, there is a storm that is not a storm, and there is a breath drawn that draws us, drawing drawing, and so forth.

Investigation and Grace

Investigation cannot be undertaken when one is sure of the result; a spirit of openness is necessarily inherent in investigation. We do not know what we will discover; if we did, then the investigation would be a recovery effort. Who knows does not investigate.

Just so, as we inquire into existence (into Self and Reality and Truth and whatever-else), we have to consider that we do not know what we will find. The answer or insight always arrives in a spirit of grace, facilitated by the investigation. We do the work and the work always inevitably reveals what is given.

On the investigative side of this experience, there is work to do, and it requires attention and diligence and willingness. But on the grace side of it, there was never anything to do, and nothing to discover. We are always already looking at what is given: there is nothing else to see, and nothing else with which to see.

These things can’t be planned. They can’t be accommodated or arranged. All we can do is respond to what happens moment by moment. We can do this skillfully or unskillfully, attentively or otherwise. Most of our lives reflect an inattentive drift through circumstance, with no awareness of the loveliness and simplicity that abounds, the beingness that longs to be beheld. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is. It is a consequence of conditioning, a way of thinking to which we are addicted but from which we can be liberated.

All we can do is give attention to what is: whenever we remember, for as long as we can, as gently and patiently as possible. There is nothing else to do, because everything else is done. It is. In the course of investigation, grace reveals this to us. For me, this revelation is slow and gentle, very much in the nature of the sunrises that I so often witness while or just after walking. It is never clear that anything is happening because the light dawns so slow and gentle and silent. But first it is dark, then it lightens, and then it is light. Just so our own experience.

Investigate, then. Make inquiry. Accept that A Course in Miracles asks nothing of us but that we question every belief we hold, and bring it into literal application. Embrace this. And then await grace: be confident in it, assured of it. Rest in grace as you rest in God: wholly and without condition.