The Ordinary Luminosity of Being

There is a sense in which we think that awakening is special – that only a few ever achieve it, and that when they do, they are no longer like the rest of us but are lit from within by a rare and precious lamp. A lot of teachers, some well-intentioned, some not so much, contribute to this idea. Salvation can’t be sold, so we end up selling something else – images, ideas, methods. Suddenly the one doing the teaching matters: or the teaching matters: and we miss the luminosity that is naturally inherent in all of us as a simple condition of being.

Awakening is natural and simple: it is simply seeing what is, where “seeing” is not merely visual but a sort of gestalt of perception unconcerned with getting “all.” We might not recognize it as such, and we might be invested in it as something rare and complex, but that’s okay. What we think and feel is never as important as we assume it is, or presume it should be. No matter how many cool stories and myths we know about apples, an apple is still just an apple. I’m not saying apples aren’t amazing – they are, very much so – but their amazingness has nothing to do with what goes on in our brains.

What am I saying here, really? A Course in Miracles is just a course – that’s all. It’s not a religion and it’s not a way of life. You take the course – maybe you take it again if, like me, you’re kind of slow – but sooner or later, you finish it. And you move on.

This course is a beginning, not an end. Your Friend goes with you . . . Therefore obey your will, and follow Him Whom you accepted as your voice, to speak of what you really want and really need. His is the Voice for God and also yours. And thus He speaks of freedom and of truth (W-ep.1:1-2, 2:4-6).

What does this mean? Hell if I know. I can tell you what it meant for me – and what it looks like – but the intimacy of awakening is such that we must meet it alone. Indeed, a time comes when even the most eloquent and gentle of teachers grates on our sense of spaciousness. These days I can only bear Tara Singh in sentences, one or two only. It is enough.

I said earlier that awakening is natural. I mean simply that our natural intelligence and common sense are sufficient. Life – as being, as awareness of being, and as attention within awareness of being – is given to us in the same measure as every other form of life, including deer and black bears and violets and maple trees and so forth. All that is really required is to settle into what we are in truth. And if we look at that previous sentence closely, we will see: how can we possibly be anything else? An apple can’t be an orange, nor an orange a goldfish. Just so with us, and what we are in truth. Discovering this, and then deepening in and with it, is what it means to be joyful. It is the peace that surpasses understanding.

There is a tendency to think that other energies have to enter – that a divine project is required. Guardian angels, gurus, ascended masters and so forth. They don’t. And it is a relief to finally see this: to realize that life itself, precisely as we are aware of it right now, is sufficient. We can choose to read Wittgenstein or not. We can choose to meditate or not. Life accepts it all. Life has no preferences, one way or the other.

I went through a brief but difficult period where I resisted this for the simple reason that I wanted awakening to be more in the nature of a wild disco, a perpetual orgasm. But it is not. For me it is not. It is more like my walks in the woods before dawn: very quiet and gentle, very ordinary, and – when I am attentive and still – so lovely I can hardly breathe. What I had sought was always before me: what I longed for had been given to me at birth. Seeing it, I fall to my knees. Then I get up and keep walking.

A Course in Miracles merits our attention. It is a course worth taking, and taking with all of the energy and willingness we can give to it. Yet we need to be sensitive to the still voice within which at some point urges us to step outside the formality of the course. There is a time to learn and a time to bring our learning into application. Life is rich and variegated, and it is in that flux that we discover our wholeness, our perfection, and our joyfulness.

Of course, when I say perfection (et cetera), I am not referring to the temporary forms in which we find ourselves. Our bodies are fine – they are more than fine – they are neutral containers facilitating experience. But we can choose to identify with awareness itself – with this sense of being – and this is not conditional on a body, even as it is briefly experienced there. While our subjective experience of being and awareness end upon the expiration of the body, being and awareness – in the generic sense, in the fullest sense – continue. While this fact disturbs the ego, it is the essence of freedom.

Thus the ordinary: snow melt dripping off the eaves, prismatic in late afternoon sunlight, gray hairs, the sound of a deer bounding away through the snow, hot coffee while driving, kisses at bus stops, poems and songs and pictures. Thus the luminosity of being, the love of which we are composed: all of it at once: now.

Undoing Symbols in A Course in Miracles

We experience the world through symbols of both love and hate. For example, I think of the chickadee as a particular symbol of love, but really it is just a bird. The world offers itself to us fresh and new, over and over, but we interpret it, and then live by our interpretations. This is a stressful and destabilizing way to live! Much of our anxiety and negativity would dissolve if we simply met life as it is, without the intervention of symbols.

Symbols, in this instance, are another word for thought. The chickadee is in no way dependent on my thoughts about it. In fact, its entire existence is independent of what I think about it. But over the years I have read and studied and written in such a way that I really don’t see chickadees anymore. I see my thoughts about chickadees. I see my ideas. I see symbols.

I am not putting thought down. It is a natural effect of having brains, and it can be quite useful. I am grateful that thought allows me to read and contemplate Emily Dickinson, and bake bread, and learn new songs on my guitar. I am also grateful for things like toilet paper, sitcoms, prosthetic legs and axes.

The problem isn’t thought but rather that we take thought so seriously: that we think it is reality itself, rather than a set of filters and prisms through which reality reaches us. Once we are clear that we are dealing with filters and prisms – once we see both the symbol and the innate desire to keep using and making symbols – then generally we’re okay, because the power of choice is restored to us. That is, we can remind ourselves that the chickadee is just a chickadee, but also enjoy them as symbols of divine life and love.

With characteristic directness, A Course in Miracles suggests that clarity in this regard is essential to knowing ourselves in truth.

The symbols of hate against the symbols of love play out a conflict that does not exist. For symbols stand for something else, and the symbol of love is without meaning if love is everything. You will go through this last undoing quite unharmed, and will at last emerge as yourself. This is the last step in the readiness for God (T-16.IV.2:1-4).

How do we undo our reliance on these symbols?

It is enough to see them: to see that we are making use of them. Thus, what is called for is not a war against thought, or against particular aspects of thought, but rather a gentle and sustained awareness of how thought parses awareness into bits and pieces, arranging and rearranging them in a futile attempt to remake perfection.

It is important to simply see what happens when we stop trying to control life. It is tempting to decide in advance that we’ll be at peace or ecstatically happy or get this or that job. But fantasies of an idealized future are simply another set of symbols.

In essence, I am saying that we need to make contact with our preferred symbols and give attention to them. That’s all. We need to sit with them, and allow them to sift through us, and simply see what happens. This is hard to do! It can actually be quite terrifying, especially when we begin to look at our special love relationships and let them go. But we have to do it. Perhaps it is helpful to remember the confidence ACIM has that we will make it through.

Be not unwilling now; you are too near, and you will cross the bridge in perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace (T-16.IV.2:5).

Nisargadatta, when pressed to explain his method, he said simply that he trusted his guru. If we have taken A Course in Miracles as our path, then we are not confused by placing our faith in it in a way similar to Nisargadatta. Give attention to that which you love and that which you hate: make contact with thought and with symbols: to look in this way is to give attention to our symbols in a gentle and sustained way: looking becomes a bridge: and we discover that that “which awaits you on the other side, will give you everything” (T-16.IV.2:6).

Choosing the Right Spiritual Path

So long as we believe a spiritual path and practice is necessary, then a spiritual path and practice will be necessary. Thus, for most of us – certainly for me – it is essential to find something that is helpfully resonant and clarifying. It will undo itself in time – and we will see the silliness of ever believing there was anything to do or anywhere to go (in a spiritual sense, a religious sense) – but still. Until we are there, we are here, and so it is here to which we give attention.

What is the right path? It is a question of resonance. It is like falling in love: there is an element of mystery to it. It will challenge you, succor you, and inspire you. You will know, and you will also resist knowing, so some discernment is called for. We have to be intelligent and willing; we have to roll with the bumps. We have to be mature: we can’t be like kids spitting out the kale because it doesn’t taste like ice cream. The path arises – appears – and so we walk it, and give attention to our walking.

At some point, the helpfulness (or lack thereof) of the chosen path will be clear. We will perceive the way in which it is meeting your perceived needs: to be loved, to be at peace, to live a meaningful and productive life, and so forth. Often at that point, the path will no longer be perfect. Its twists and turns and thorns will be obvious, perhaps frustratingly so. But it’s okay. At that point, we are no longer in the honeymoon phase but the marriage. We are ready to make the commitment. It doesn’t have to be perfect because we are ready to learn about the love that transcends the shallow level of ideals (happy feelings, preferential outcomes, etc.).

How long does all this take? This finding the path, and walking the path, and learning whether it is a helpful path, and committing to the path? It depends. There may be a lot of stops and starts. We may go quite far along one trail before discovering a truer one. For me, there were several serious relationships before A Course in Miracles arrived and asked for my attention. All of those prior relationships were helpful in their way, until they weren’t. Seeing this, I gave my attention elsewhere. I was able to say “yes” to A Course in Miracles. It was on that path that I saw at last there is no path, and was able at last to rest in the natural grace of what is.

There is a real risk that we will find ourselves wanting to move on from this or that path not because it no longer serves but because it is serving us too well. Before awakening becomes fluid and peaceful it is often rocky and challenging: it brings us into deep and sustained contact with all aspects of the self, not just those that we like to share publicly. So again, discernment is needed. Am I moving on because the going has gotten too hard? Or am I genuinely being called to this new path?

None of these questions are easy, and none of them can be answered by anyone else but ourselves. Friends and fellow travelers abound but they can’t walk that lonesome valley for us. It is helpful to see and accept this, and to become responsible for it.

There is no such thing as an objectively right way to awaken from the dream of separation. There are subjectively right ways, but not objectively right ways. It is imperative to give attention to our own experience, to be grateful for those who travel with us – briefly or otherwise, intimately or otherwise – and to be as patient and nonjudgmental as possible with all our brothers and sisters. Awakening to oneness is really a matter of becoming responsible for awakening – our own, not everyone else’s.

I want everyone to be happy in a natural and serious way. I want everyone to feel creatively united to everyone else. Those are just words, and words are always a pale substitute for love, but we have to try. Loneliness and guilt, fear and anger, emptiness and regret are not inevitable. It is possible to leave their pernicious effects behind, and to dwell in a calm and quiet gracefulness. To that end, sustained and gentle attention given to the particular form of our spiritual search is always helpful. The answer wants to be found: even now it whispers our shared and precious name.

On Remaining Teachable

Being teachable matters in the sense that we don’t know what we don’t know. Reality is that which contains all possibility (all potential) equally, including the possibility of impossibility. Since the only answer is “there is no only answer”, sitting around and admiring sunlight on snow (or rain on tulips or what-have-you) is all there is. You can’t go wrong consenting to happiness.

Many years ago I interviewed a very intelligent scientist, the chair of the science department at a nationally-recognized university. He told me that in fifty years human beings would know everything. Everything. There would be no more mysteries, and nothing left to discover.

I love science very much, and have great respect for those who can’t be bothered with haiku and sonnets, but that comment struck me (then and now) as foolish. It is impossible to know what we don’t know, which naturally obviates the possibility of knowing everything. We can always say “what next” or “what about” or “what if.” We can always look at a conclusion and postulate its extension or expansion. As my father used to say with respect to trout fishing, “there’s always another pool up ahead.”

Being teachable simply means that we are humble with respect to – on account of – what we don’t know. It means that we accept the possibility of what we don’t know. This is a kind of openness in which what is – call it Christ, God, Holy Spirit, Life, Source, Brahman, Ground of Being or whatever – the divine et cetera – teaches us effortlessly because we are it.

This is a course in how to know yourself. You have taught what you are, but have not let what you are teach you. You have been very careful to avoid the obvious, and not to see the real cause and effect relationship that is perfectly apparent (T-16.III.4:1-3).

“You have not let what you are teach you . . . ”

To be a student in this way requires a sort of active passivity: a willingness to give attention to experience (both internal and external) without leaping in to name everything and insist that its lesson arrive at this or that conclusion, produce this or that result. The challenge here is our conviction that the self – what we are in truth – is what we do. And what we do too often obscures what we are.

You are not two selves in conflict. What is beyond God? If you who hold Him and whom He holds are the universe, all else must be outside, where nothing is (T-16.III.6:1-3).

It seems relatively clear to me that dictating formal prayer or meditation practices can quickly become oppressive, where being “right” about the particular form substitutes for actual insight or learning. By the same token, I have come to understand that my morning routine (especially my devotion and relative fidelity to it) – rising early, walking the dog, sitting quietly in darkness, then studying, then writing – has become a rhythm through which – or by which – the Ineffable reveals itself.

In other words, discipline and routine may well be called for, helpfully called for, especially in the sense that they undermine the egoic need to make things new and exciting over and over. The ordinariness of life is somewhat paradoxically its most rippling luminosity, but realizing it as such cannot be forced: we have to let life teach us: we have to allow it to reveal itself.

This revelation – the diamantine glimpse of reality – is a sure thing but it does help to meet the conditions of learning. If you ask me what those conditions are my answer is: I don’t know. But if you give attention to your life – gently and consistently – then the conditions will naturally emerge and you will be happy to meet them and, in time, you will be awakened and – sometime after that – you will realize you always were awake, and that it’s no big deal either way.

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.