Sean Reagan

In the meantime, I turn my attention to what works, which is only what I perceive as helpful. The world does what it does and the circumstances that arise accordingly are like waves I do not trust to hold me yet. Hence, the daily lesson of A Course in Miracles. Hence a walk into moonlit fields with my dog. Hence this, and hence you.

When we tend to what brings both solace and insight, we eventually learn there is only love, a sufficiency sustaining us within the many images and stories that together comprise “our” life. We can’t force this lesson. We can’t talk our way into what goes only wordless. We can only bring whatever order into our lives seems possible and fruitful, and then wait and see.

Forgiving dreams remind you that you live in safety and have not attacked yourself. So do your childish dreams become a sign that you have made a new beginning, not another try to worship idols and keep attack. Forgiving dreams are kind to everyone who figures in the dream (T-29.IX.10:1-3).

A dream is a dream of course, but a kind dream – a forgiving dream – is the last one before the longed-for, hoped-for dawn. It is the one in which the light begins to seep through, in which the lilting song of chickadees begins to faintly resonate, and in which waking becomes a gentle reality approaching as softly as the sun itself approaches, morning after morning, day after day. What did light ever do but whisper?

This is the space in which we stop demanding life accommodate us, and in which we begin to be grateful for whatever appears. We get the job or we don’t. The tea is warm or it’s not. Our gratitude encompasses every possibility equally, and renders them all the same. Joy enfolds us, swaddles us, it carries us here and there, resting us on shoulders that never fail or disappear.

We make soup, we cut the last of the bread a bit thinly to go around, and all of us eat by candlelight. The nineteenth century was yesterday; horses never die. At four a.m. or so the dog and I go back outside, moonlight on ice more lovely than I can manage, and yet I keep looking at it, and walking through it, and it is only moonlight on ice, and it is more than that, too. It is love reflecting back to me the love I am yet being swallowed by. Maybe one more coffee, one more page of the beloved text. Maybe one more letter to you, who never asked of me anything.

The past is gone; the future is not yet. Now am I freed from both (W-pI.214.1:2-3).

You see after a while that it is not you who are reading and writing, but rather you that is being read, you that is being written. Life takes care; nothing needs to be finished; nothing ever begun. How sweet those last filaments of light appear, how soft the last breeze as it carries the veil across the horizon as it becomes us.

I like how thought includes thou . . .

In time we have a practice, which is in the nature of attending to a relationship where the relationship is with all that is. In order to fully realize this relationship, we have to learn how to give attention to it, and then give attention to it.

Since it is such an intimate and personal relationship, we can only ever talk about our own experience. It is like saying that I can’t experience or live your marriage for you, nor you for me, but we can talk with one another about what being married means, and sometimes it helps to illuminate our own experience of that essential relationship.

Most students of A Course in Miracles have an intellectual component to their practice. This is helpful in order to unpack or unfold the course’s sometimes overly poetic and Christianized language. I know that is an offensive sentence for some of you and I apologize! I simply mean that awakening has nothing to do with Jesus and nothing to do with Christ. In fact, it doesn’t even have much to do with God, because God is just another idea that we have that interferes with our perception of reality, of life has it is. Even God has to go.

This is not to deny the helpfulness of A Course in Miracles, or of Christian language and imagery, or of metaphysical poetics. I would not have entered into relationship with ACIM had it not been for its semantic tenor and flavor. However, in the course of that relationship, we have to be sensitive to when we are becoming invested in its form rather than its content – snuggling where a bold walk in windy darkness is what is called for.

In a sense, A Course in Miracles is a kind of spiritual proxy, standing in for God until we are ready to let it go and fully realize the wholeness of life on our own. For me, that has involved a very specific undoing of concepts and images – a whole language, really – evolving out of the Jesus tradition. This has been troubling at times, and fucking hard sometimes, but the peace and clarity that subsequently attends is worth it. I can say with complete confidence that there is no idea you presently hold that you will not be happier releasing.

One studies and travels a long time looking for a certain hill to climb. And then they find it, and they sit at its base for years – interviewing those going up, interviewing those coming down. Sometimes gazing at the summit in wonder and fear; sometimes walking far away only to come back.

I have been writing about the experience of looking for the hill, and finding the hill, and not climbing the hill for a long time. But last summer I began to climb it, and the higher I go, the less there is to say. And it is a relief, let me tell you. For one who long substituted wordiness for wisdom, wordlessness is a blessing. I would sleep in its arms forever. Some day I will.

This is a metaphor, of course. There is no hill. There is only the idea that we constitute a self separate from reality, from all that is, and undoing that erroneous idea is simply to look closely at it – to give attention to it – and see what happens. Over and over. Day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. What else can we do?

It doesn’t matter what else is going on. I am still baking bread, still stumbling around in the pre-dawn darkness with an old dog, still reading over my head, still writing a ridiculous amount of words every day, still parenting, still feeling happy about this and scared about that. I am still being an all around half-assed idiot. Life goes on; our job is just to notice, which is to say, to let it be through the gift of attention.

When I wrote recently that it was possible to see the face of God and live, I was thinking of Bob Dylan’s amazing song I and I.

I and I
In creation where one’s nature
neither honors nor forgives
I and I
One says to the other,
no man sees my face and lives

He is riffing off Exodus 33:20 – “And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” – and John 1:18 – “No one has seen God at any time” – and 1 Timothy 6:15-16 – “He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see . . . ”

Biblical counter-examples abound; I am simply observing a persistent theme of God as an object (with agency) that is distant and incapable of being known. I am asking – as you are asking in your way, and as Dylan asked – what does it mean to be in the world in an attentive way when one is bent only a relationship that seems evasive to the point of impossible?

There is no answer! Or rather, the answer is our awareness of the question itself without rushing to answer it. It is being itself, which is what you are right now, without effort or analysis. You can talk about the hill all you want but your words will never be the hill. They will never be the walk itself. You can get obsessed about maps to the hill – A Course in Miracles, Zoroastrianism, past life regression therapy, Tarot, whatever – but as the saying so helpfully goes, the map is not the territory. Sooner or later you have to face what it means for you to climb the hill and then climb it.

Right now you are looking at the Face of God, which is a fancy and metaphorical way of saying that you are looking at life itself. And you are okay. You are not dead, you are alive. You are meaning looking itself, life reflecting on itself. This is not a mystery. It is not a secret shared only with the worthy. Your natural intelligence and devotion and common sense are perfectly sufficient. You don’t need to learn anything else. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t have to crawl a thousand miles across cut glass on your hands and knees.

I am saying all this because part of being is me saying it and you reading it, where writing and reading are one fluid movement. Do you see it? How could it be otherwise? Can you find the end of life? Not your personal subjective experience of it, which will end naturally enough, but the end of life itself? Did you invent attention? Or awareness?

We are each of us held by life in the way the chickadees are, and the birch trees, and twelve-string guitars, and the Oxford English dictionary, and the southern coast of Ireland, and moonlight. Stop pretending you can stand back from it all – stop falling for the old lie that you are life’s sole perceptive center. If that makes no sense, or if it makes intellectual sense but isn’t a felt experience, then just give attention to it. Just look at what you are – what you are feeling, thinking, believing, seeing, sharing. In the welter you call the self there is a single light, like a star in the far reaches of a dark and tumultuous sky, and it will literally answer every question you have. It will be you.

And that is me slipping into the sugar of poetry, which means it is time for me to shut up. Thank you for reading; keep in touch, please. I need you.

How I love you!
Sean

We could say that the self emerges from attention, in the sense that what it gives attention to and how it gives attention become the self, or what we are – for now – calling the self.

If we are inattentive, then the self will be a sort of mess. Whatever enters is taken without question, without discrimination. Disorder prevails, attended by feelings of fear and guilt. We sense that things are not right and that we are responsible but we don’t know what to do to fix it.

This is how we live, most of us. We aren’t bad or stupid. In fact, in some ways, we are especially sensitive and willing, very much engaged with our natural intelligence and common sense. That is how we are aware that something is off. But we still don’t know what to do. And we still think we’re responsible for finding a solution.

The problem is always that we are not seeing Life properly. We are like explorers holding the map upside down, studying pocket watches instead of compasses. Or like dancers holding our hands over our ears and wondering why we can’t hear the music.

There is a simple fix in the nature of a correction, but we can’t see it. We are inside the error looking out, and from within the error, what would save us appears dangerous, while what keeps us lost and forsaken appears as salvation. This is why we are stuck in guilt and fear, and this is why it seems so hard to navigate out.

For me, seeing this began as an intellectual exercise. I studied the problem from many vantage points until it clarified and I could say it – or write it – the way I did in the preceding paragraphs. It is like redrawing the map based on the sentences of those who have gone a bit farther than you, who maybe left behind a sentence or a line that caught the light just so.

That is one way to begin, but it’s important to see it as a beginning. We are apt to assume that intellectual understanding equals application, the whole picture all at once, but that’s not true. We actually have to practice. There are a lot of nuances and subtleties in practice that we don’t encounter in books, and that can only be resolved through actual relationship with what is.

The question – however you choose to phrase it – is always: what are we in truth? If we are bodies, then it makes sense to be very protective of them. It makes sense to fear death. It makes sense to pursue pleasure while avoiding pain. If we are the stories we tell about those bodies, then it makes sense to cultivate experiences that render well in narrative.

But it seems on examination that our bodies are not ourselves, and that the stories we tell are neither being told nor telling us. They are more like fluttering veils masquerading as walls, as the body is simply a present mode of experience, where the experience has neither a beginning nor an end, and no particular investment in containers.

I say “seems” because – again – it is very easy to say all this. And it is okay to say it, but not if we are still pretending that the word is the thing. Not if we are using our wordiness, however it manifests, to project an undoing we have yet to see to undone. It’s like I can say “kiss” but it’s far more wild and intimate to actually give and receive kisses. I mentioned dance earlier. We don’t want to just study the waltz – we want to get out on the floor and waltz until our hearts break, until stars come crashing through the ceiling, cluttering the floor up to our knees.

About a year ago, I became intensely intimately aware of the way in which attention was both perennially present and responsive. I was in a relationship with attention, but I hadn’t really known it until then. Seeing it clearly meant becoming responsible for the relationship, for my own presence in it. I began to give attention to attention.

Attention is non-local and non-temporal. It is always right here right now. It is responsive but not subordinate. We don’t make it. The gentler and more sustained we become with it, the larger and more welcoming it becomes with us. Its effects are not predictable save that they are never harmful. It is impersonal.

I think if you notice your own experience of attention, and stay with it, you will see all this as well.

Attention becomes a practice because it undoes what is false which in turn reveals what is always and forever true. Truth is true while falsity is the always-shifting cover that obscures it. For me, this insight has not been in the nature of a singular prismatic explosion, Christ and the light rushing the ramparts all at once. Rather, it has been in the nature of cleaning and polishing a window: the light comes in slowly, almost imperceptibly. You think: why didn’t I do this before?

I kept trying to be a priest when all I needed was a janitor.

To be attentive is to be discerning. We inquire into what arises and decline to identify with it simply because it arises. Let be, let be. We sit quietly and look: nothing clings to us because we aren’t grasping. In this way, the self becomes something vital and alert and welcome. In a sense, it becomes attention itself, while in attention specificity and multiplicity become transparent, and Wholeness emerges to continue prying us open.

In my experience, this is not immediately perceived as a positive or healthy or even pleasant thing. It is discombobulating because we are discovering that the foundation upon which we have erected both self and world has about as much heft to it as a slip of cloud trailing away after a storm. Indeed, the world and the self begin to take on the tenuous characteristics of slips of cloud too.

And really, there is nothing for it but to simply come back to the seeing of it over and over. Give attention to attention giving attention. Attention is always there, it is always attentive. If we allow it to drift in the direction of guilt and fear, then that is what we will perceive ourselves to be. But if we direct it away – any other way – then we will perceive ourselves as that. When we get shaky, thinking that we can’t possibly let go of this whole elaborate get-up, we can always just rest in attention. It is never not welcoming us by virtue of its responsiveness which is it the simple condition of its presence.

I am saying in a way that what happens is that we start to breathe a bit and realize that there’s no rush and nothing to do anyway. The question of the self answers itself in such a quiet and gentle way that we forget it was even a question. Once we reach the presence of attention, the guilt and fear are over. We might not know they are over, and we might go back and forth indulging them for a while – even a long while – but so what? Home is home, even when our back is turned, even when we’re a thousand miles away.