Letters from the Hill (#1)

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

What Emerges from Attention

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.

The Gift of Undivided Love

attention is the gift of undivided love,
effortlessly giving as it was given

attention yields discernment
which is to see clearly
what is
and on that basis
to separate the true from the false

discernment yields detachment –
detachment from outcomes and goals,
from having and not having –
detachment from the false –

detachment in turn
yields right action
which has as its essence
order and compassion
which are only possible
when one relinquishes
fear of reprisal
and hope of reward

consider the front yard maple –
in summer it accepts all the light
the moon offers,
and in winter all the snow
that will settle on its limbs

it asks for nothing,
takes only what is given,
and clings to nothing which passes

in this way
the truth reveals itself,
reestablishing as whole
what so long believed it was broken

Read by A Course in Miracles

One can make the argument that A Course in Miracles just means what it means – you get it or you don’t, and that’s it. It isn’t subject to interpretations. Certainly, this was Ken Wapnick’s position.

IP: You claim that you are teaching what the Course actually says. If you read a line from the book and then explain it, that has to be your interpretation, surely?

KW: I do not feel that the Course has interpretations. I think it says what it says. Now, you could ask who I am to say: “What I say it says, is what it says.” I think that is something people must decide for themselves.

IP: But you make that claim.

KW: I do. I say: “This is what it says.”

But this is very narrow view of A Course in Miracles specifically, and of human beings generally. I am grateful to Ken for a great deal, but that is a narrow view. It is narrow because you cannot separate the text from the reader: the text and the reader are in a relationship, the salient quality of which is its variability and mutability. This is true no matter who is reading or what is being read.

The suggestion I am making here reflects an ideal of reading – reader becoming creator by virtue of reading – essentially espoused (and perhaps bastardized in my own interpretation of it) by Roland Barthes.

To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it . . . the networks are many and interact without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language (S/Z 5 -6).

I am suggesting that to read A Course in Miracles (or any other text) with the idea that it has a fixed, immutable meaning is an error of magnitude that prevents us from seeing the text as it is: which is to say a dynamic and interactive process, that includes us because it desires us, because – in no metaphorical way – without us it does not exist.

I am suggesting that A Course in Miracles cannot be understood in terms of right or wrong. I am suggesting that the text you read today will be subtly different from the text you read tomorrow. I am suggesting that you are the text that A Course in Miracles is reading, the meaning of which emerges, or unfolds, from this very act of cooperative reading, which is not passive but creative, a sort of transcendent collective.

I am suggesting that truth is revealed not as a static final point in a book but as a fluidity, a textual flux that resists being known, so that the self, if we are going to speak of a self, is simply a divine emptiness perpetually flowing in and out of what is.

Charlotte Radler’s brilliant reading of Meister Eckhart (especially in Losing the Self: Detachment in Meister Eckhart and Its Significance for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue), moves helpfully – happily even – in this direction.

God is ultimately a projection of the human being’s wishes, desires and needs, and, thus, is an idol. The best way to honor God is, thus, to dive into a-theism and not to have a God, that is, to let God be nothing and exist in the same nothingness.

She goes on to suggest that Eckhart’s “mystical infrastructure” was not fixed but fluid, stable only in its instability.

God – and reciprocally the soul – is never statically frozen or enclosed as nothingness or One or Three or creation, but the Ultimate Reality is dynamically nothingness, One, Three and creation. This dynamic, dialectical movement, therefore, goes from absolute openness and liberation beyond being and nonbeing to an experience of openness and liberation in history and in creation, and back again.

So that is a way of thinking about God and reading that seems fruitful to me, that seems to get to the center of what we are doing, the center of the desire that calls itself spiritual.

Sometimes, the differences in our relationships with A Course in Miracles are small. Some people are happy to keep reading me because what I say is more or less consistent with their own understanding, or it confirms what they intuit about ACIM, or they like the emphasis on prose poetry, and so forth.

But sometimes those differences are very large – the way I don’t think the historical Jesus wrote or dictated A Course in Miracles, for example – and then we have to make a difficult decision. Are we going to try and force these other people into our personal way of thinking or can we just let it be? Just breathe and let be?

We need to be sensitive to the inclination – present in all of us to one degree or other – to proscribe readings of A Course in Miracles. If our ACIM practice is truly inhibited by what someone else is doing, then our attention needs to be redirected from the external – this person’s misreading A Course in Miracles – to our own unhealed perception that right and wrong exist and are meaningful and that we are responsible for applying them.

When we are settled on right and wrong and cheerfully applying those labels to people, places and things, we are taking refuge in the very lovelessness that A Course in Miracles aims to help us undo. It’s understandable, but it’s not exactly helpful. None of us are free from this impulse (to be right at another’s expense) but that is not an excuse for indulging behavior that is alienating and separative.

Please keep in mind that I am talking here about a relationship with a text. I am not saying that when someone says “all red lights mean go” you should hop into the car with them. I wouldn’t. But when it comes to reading, and understanding a vast tome of written, rewritten and edited words, and then bringing the resultant lessons into application, any possibility of black and white – this or that only – is just not possible. It’s like trying to read yesterday’s ripples in this morning’s lake; we deceive ourselves when we argue otherwise.

If you want proof of this, just have a conversation with anybody who seriously studies A Course in Miracles. Don’t get into what you think or what you feel, just make a big space in order to listen to their own practice and experience. Then do it with someone else. Then someone else.

By the time you reach the fifth or sixth person, you will see that A Course in Miracles is just a mirror into which we are all projecting our wishes, fears and desires. It’s like a picture of Ramana Maharshi, or the crucifixes I grew up with, or tarot cards. It’s just another object that people of a certain spiritual bent use to reflect back to themselves their preferred image of God and Heaven and inner peace and so forth.

Indeed, most of us don’t even have to inquire into other people’s experiences to see this. A close look at our own experience will reveal the mutability of the course. My own reading of A Course in Miracles has shifted substantially over the years. I don’t know many students (including Ken Wapnick*) for whom that’s not true. And once you observe the shifting nature of your own sense of the course, you realize that it’s not a holy scripture cast in Mosaic stone, but simply another spiritual text which can be brought to helpful or unhelpful application, depending on your readiness and openness.

Given that, why argue with anybody else’s interpretation? Or the way they choose to bring it into practice? Again, I can understand the impulse to argue because it springs from our shared belief in separate selves, which infects all of us, but that doesn’t mean we have to indulge it. If somebody wants ascended masters to lead the way, then go for it. If they want somebody who tells them “it’s this way or the highway,” then that’s great, too. We are where we are; there’s nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise. Indeed, pretending otherwise is the whole separation in a nutshell.

All we can really do is give attention to what works for us. Maybe A Course in Miracles is part of that and maybe not. Maybe it is now but it won’t be in a couple of months or years or decades. One of the affects of giving attention is the realization that we can’t give it for anybody else – all you can do is be as honest and open as possible with yourself, and what happens after that is out of your hands. Peace boils down to accepting that.

Over the years I’ve written stuff about ACIM that was true at the time – in the sense that it reflected my present understanding and inclination – but at which I now cringe. That is a lovely aspect of being a writer – you can see what you think, and you can also see what you thought. And it is very hard to take thought too seriously once you see how malleable it is and how often it changes. It’s like building a house on drifting sands.

One of the reasons I tried so hard in my early twenties to be a Buddhist, in the face of my ineptitude and stupidity, was because I had read that if you met the Buddha on the road, you were to kill him. I was so grateful for that at so many levels! I couldn’t even explain it. But it fed me in ways my native Catholicism (despite its relatively progressive flavor**) did not. It suggested to me that crosses and Bo trees were in the nature of waystations, not ends unto themselves, and that God – which even then I was trying to understand and perceive in terms of Meister Eckhart’s “unmanifest isness” – was not separate from anybody or anything but rather inherent in all of life, even unto non-manifestation.

It seems to me that as we become serious about encountering reality – whether we are doing this through Zen, ACIM, advaita vedanta, peyote, whatever – we sooner or later realize that we can’t place idols before reality. The truth won’t allow for it. And A Course in Miracles is an idol, a belief system that eventually we have to gently set aside.

Imagine that we have a broken tractor. For a long time, we ignore it. We are young and we think there is plenty of time to fix it. Then we decide we are going to get to it but first we have to pay off the mortgage on the farm or get the kids off to college. And then, when we are at last ready to fix it, we start reading about fixing tractors. We go to tractor-fixing workshops. Maybe we get a tractor-fixing guru. Time passes. Eventually we get around to holding the tractor-fixing manual (which is ACIM or the Mumonkon or Meister Eckhart’s sermons or whatever) in one hand while the other futzes around with tractor guts. But half-hearted effort yields nothing. We still aren’t serious. We still aren’t ready.

Then, one day, we realize that we know how to fix the tractor but we need both hands and our full attention to do it and it is time now to do it. So we put the manual down, and we stop thinking about fixing tractors, and we just go to work on the tractor before us.

My sense is that a lot of students who read Tara Singh, or who find my own half-assed study of the course helpful, are at the point where they are ready to put the manual down. In a sense, they already have – it’s on the ground by their knees – but they are  still thinking, should I just take one more look? You know that I do that, because I am always bringing someone new to the table: David Bohm, John Sherman, Meister Eckhart, Emily Dickinson. Just one more writer, one more text . . .  And it’s okay – it’s more than okay – but it’s not precisely the readiness that is required.

I am saying – as Tara Singh said with a lot more gravitas, clarity and poetry – that there is no point anymore in manuals or delay or resistance. It is time to fix the damn tractor. We know how to do it, we’re just scared. We’re not even lazy – we’re just scared, and our fear takes on all these different forms of resistance. But who cares? Fix the damn tractor. Just fix it.

The point – what I meant to say a couple thousand or so words ago – is simply that we can’t really fix anybody else’s tractor, and any time we spend trying to get others to fix their tractor, or switch to a different tractor care manual, is just another form of resistance. It’s another way of avoiding our own Massey-Ferguson. You can be the smartest person in the room, the one that everybody listens to, but if your tractor’s broken, then so what?

I can’t – because nobody can – possibly account for the unique form your story and journey assume. You have all these ideas about Jesus and the Buddha, and all these images, and you have done this and that as a faithful person and as a fearful person, and you have suffered in this way but not in that way, and you have made these mistakes and had all these different relationships through the years, all these loves and calls for love, and all of that shapes and colors the text that you read, whether it’s A Course in Miracles or Conversations with God or The Hobbit. The way the text arrives for you is so intimate that it is actually as if God were briefly manifest, briefly entering you, a slick line of mercury electrifying all your blood. You just have to meet it there, you have to let it happen just so, because – in a very literal way – it is letting you happen. It is all one movement.

There is no space between you, your reading of the text, and the text. We like to pretend there is, but there isn’t. If you look very closely at what is going on in an interior way, then you will see this. And once you do, the whole point of lecturing others because they aren’t hewing to the same intellectual spiritual line you are just evaporates. There’s no basis for it. And thank God! If there were, we’d spend all our time “helping” others and never getting around to fixing our own tractor.

We have to hunker down. When I say “we” I mean “me.” It is clear to me that the time for study is over, despite how good I am study, and despite how much I love it. It is at this point a form of resistance. I studied the maps not to draw them from memory but because I wanted to enter the territory and see what it looked like outside of cartography, outside of pictures, outside of someone else’s description. When you and I look at a mountain, we do not see the same mountain. Only by honoring our distinct visions can we climb it side by side, each in our own way reaching the summit together.

 

* I am aware of the potential for hypocrisy here. I am judging Ken Wapnick in order to write a post about not judging others based on their interpretation of A Course in Miracles. Physician heal thyself! But it is important I think to see that the problem isn’t really saying somebody is wrong. Rather, it’s believing that we’re right in doing so. That is, when we elevate our opinion or interpretation of a text to a settled “truth.” Agreeing and disagreeing are what interpretation is; it’s when we deny that – when we pretend that our interpretation is the real and only one – that we start to run into problems.

** When I say “progressive” here I mean my own particular application, which arose from a specific family and academic environment, both of which hewed to a fairly liberal understanding and application of Catholic doctrine. I am deeply grateful for that tradition and consider it a sound foundation, despite the considerable distance I have put between it and myself.

One Mind and A Course in Miracles

When we say that we are “one mind” or “there’s only one of us here,” we are not talking about discrete material reality. We are not going to trade these bodies for spirit cloaks, or for angel bodies, or prismatic spiral nebulae or something like that.

Rather, when we talk about “one mind,” we are really talking about content: at that level, it is possible to see that there really is only one mind because we all have the same shared content.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that ideas do not leave their source – when we share them, they stay where they are (T-26.VII.4:7). If we think of the one mind in terms of content, then we can see that we are not really sharing anything in the sense that I have a slice of pie and offer you half. It’s all already there! So what we perceive as a new idea is more like light reaching us from a lamp that was always there. We are remembering what we always knew, albeit dimly.

So, you know, Tara Singh writes something profound and transformational and I respond to it: “Oh! I never thought of that, that way! But now I know! Thank you Taraji!” But you see, all that has happened is that the one mind grew a little bit clearer, a little bit brighter. If I project a unique or special wisdom onto Tara Singh – if I pretend that there was a spiritual lack in me that he filled from his personal store of spiritual abundance – then I am denying the one mind. I am pretending that Singh has something I don’t. But if I think of the insight I acquired from him as more in the nature of a light going on – one that was always there, just dimly – then it’s not such a big deal. It’s my idea, too. And yours. And so on.

We tend to think of spirituality in linear terms: So-and-so is enlightened, so-and-so is getting there, and this other so-and-so hasn’t even really started the journey. Or some of us are in the middle of the ladder of prayer while others are at the top rung. We all do this but I question its efficacy. I don’t think it reflects reality but rather a pervasive (even pernicious) view of reality – a sort of competitive, consumeristic view. The hierarchy abounds, and we celebrate the spiritual hero who stands alone on the altar – whether it’s Tara Singh, Ken Wapnick, Eckhart Tolle or the local priest or rabbi.

A better way to see it is that we all compose an enormous circle (whose center is everywhere) that is always moving and always in flux. One can be here or there in the circle, but no part of it is superior to another. So Tara Singh occupies this region of the circle, and Saint Augustine occupies this part, and you are here and I am there but we are all composed by and composing the same circle. If a light goes on here in the circle, then it reaches there. So when you awaken a little because you are reading somebody, the insight isn’t flowing from their mind to your mind, but is akin to a light flowing through the circle. You might think of it as dawn: the slow beautiful tides of sunlight gently flowing across a darkened landscape, brightening it bit by little bit.

Now, it is important to see that ideas, too, are physical in a way. Most neurophysiologists would say that an idea has material components: chemical, electrical, and so forth, and that these are measurable. So, in a sense, ideas are another level of the material – a very subtle level, but still.

But while we can measure the brain’s activity, and thus see when thought is creating pleasure or fear, say, and while we can do this in very nuanced ways, we are still not able to see the content of the thought. I mean, you can hook me up and say, well, Sean is very happy right now. You can see it here in this image of his brain, and it shows up in these chemicals in his body and all of that, but you can’t say whether I am happy because I am remembering an old dog or dreaming of a new one.

Eventually we all see as a result of our practice that there are no problems externally: it is all about our thoughts. That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that we can only be hurt by our own thoughts (W-pII.281.1:5).

And that is what I mean by content: and that level is available to all of us, and it is a shared level. We aren’t aware of all of it, but so what? You aren’t aware of all of your personal thoughts either – until somebody asks you to recall the birth of your daughter, you aren’t walking around thinking of the birth of your daughter. But it’s there. And that is true of what we are calling the “one mind” too – all of the information is there, all of it is shared, and all of it is available to all of us.

This is just a way to think of it – maybe it is helpful and maybe it isn’t. I’m not trying to argue with anybody who’s happy taking another approach. God knows I have a long way to go myself. But I am saying that when I give attention to how thought works, and how projection works, this is what I see. I see shared content that readily transcends or flows through what we are calling material containers (bodies, brains, etc.). I see that in very simple and practical ways, there is one mind, and that its salient qualities are love and what flows from love – peace, balance, sanity, equality and so forth.

Of course, the only way to make contact with this one mind is to stop projecting our own specialness (and the specialness of others) onto it. That’s what gums up the works. Hence the emphasis A Course in Miracles places on ending projection as the way to liberate our brothers and sisters and our selves (e.g., T-9.VI.3:1-5). Hence David Bohm’s emphasis on suspending judgment as a critical facet of dialogue. To wit:

If we can all listen to each other’s opinions, and suspend them without judging them, and your opinion is on the same basis as anybody else’s, then we all have ‘one mind’ because we have the same content – all the opinions, all the assumptions. At that moment, the difference is secondary (Thought as a System 204).

Of course, this was why Tara Singh repeatedly emphasized that life was not personal.

For the wise, the externals are never the issue.
Action always starts
with one’s own internal correction.
It is the action of Love,
independent of personality,
that effortlessly transforms relationship.
There are beneficient forces at work in Life.
(Love Holds No Grievances 10).

Attention reveals to us that our separate lives are in fact more in the nature of a collective: at readily accessible levels, we are one. In order to realize this, we have to stop projecting our own ideas and opinions outward: we have to stop judging life. This is a literal application that we are called to make moment by moment. For example, when we think that someone is behaving wrongly at work or in our family or in the public sphere, we have to see the judgment inherent in that thought, and become responsible for seeing what is unloving through to love itself. No matter what action we take or don’t take at the material and external level, we have to to the internal work of coming to impersonal love.

This is hard work! And opportunities for practice abound, at least in my life. I am never not astounded at how selfish, mean-spirited and casual I can be. But I’m not alone, of course. Eventually we all see as a result of our practice that there are no problems externally: it is all about our thoughts. That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that we can only be hurt by our own thoughts (W-pII.281.1:5).

So, you know, there is nothing especially mystical about this, which can come as a let down! It is really about the hard work of loving in a loveless place, and about becoming responsible for own unlovingness. We don’t have to solve our unlovingness – but we do have to see it, and we do have to become willing to be done with it. Until we sincerely reach the Thetfordian insight – there must be another way – then healing will remain simply another projection, a good idea that we polish alone, cherishing the secret dream of specialness.

Loving in a Loveless Place

Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place (T-14.IV.4:10).

This is a powerful sentence from A Course in Miracles, neatly summarizing the curriculum’s emphasis on the miracle as a shift from fear towards love, and our ongoing responsibility to bring forth love with our brothers and sisters.

It requires humility and open-mindedness. We cannot do it alone.

We think we know what to do in our spiritual lives – what grace is, how it is given, to whom it belongs, where it is received, the best way for us to respond to it, engage with it. But do we?

Our emptiness and grief – in a word, our suffering – is ongoing, like a great tide against which we forever struggle in fear that we will be swept away. Our insistence that we know – what love is, what God is, what we are, what truth is – is precisely what threatens us. Our pretense unto knowledge is the emptiness that forever predicts and ensures our suffering. “We” cannot push back on this intimation because “we” are “it.”

The self that we imagine is real – the self that knows what is what and what to do – is the very source of our suffering. In this sense, Heaven can be understood as no longer mistaking a confused idea about what we are for the truth of what we are. We don’t know. But if we accept this simple fact then joy and inner peace abound.

Before you make any decisions for yourself, remember that you have decided against your function in Heaven, and then consider carefully whether you want to make decisions here. Your function here is only to decide against deciding what you want, in recognition that you do not know (T-14.IV.5:1-2).

Walking in forests and fields, alongside rivers and up and down mountains, reflecting on my study of A Course in Miracles, I learned that Life goes on without my intervention or participation and that this is okay. It is more than okay. I did not create life; God created life. But I did make a lot of ideas about life, and then fall in love with those ideas, and give them all my attention.

But life is not what we think it is, even as it contains – or, better, holds loosely – our ideas about it. God is indifferent to our seeming confusion, because what we actually are cannot be confused. Indeed, if we could accept this – that God does not agree that we are suffering – then our suffering would dissolve on the spot.

Decide that God is right and you are wrong about yourself. He created you out of Himself, but still within Him. He knows what you are. Remember there is no second to Him (T-14.IV.4:5-8).

If we remember that God is Life (e.g., T-14.IX.4:5), then the full passage quoted above need not be mysterious or complicated. Life surrounds us – holds us within it not as separate beings but as life itself – and in that understanding, we see at last there is nothing to do or learn, and that even consequences are illusory. Tara Singh  spoke of this insight as the grace that lends itself to our fruitful practice of A Course in Miracles.

There are no consequences – hence, in reality, no reaction. What an astonishing discovery: truth unfolds like a flower within the mind emptied of itself! The duality of punishment and reward, on which society is based, begins to crumble before your very eyes. Even the vanity of the loveless “I know and you don’t” slowly starts to fall away. A new vitality, the inner conviction of your own reality emerges – a clarity that begins to dispel thousands of years of misbelief (Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 12).

Thus, to “love in a loveless place” means only to recognize and remember that we who were given Love in Creation have forgotten Love and so must be taught to remember it. We must receive it again: we must yield to Creation which is forever and always offering itself to us.

And all this means is to give attention to what is appearing at this very moment. It is to be intentionally aware of life in this moment which excludes nothing and neither sets nor accepts any conditions. In this moment, everything is perfect – even our resistance to perfection is perfect.

When we decide not to decide we have made the choice that restores to our awareness the reality of God’s love. And then, by virtue of that love, the “loveless place” is transformed to Heaven.