Thought, Awareness and the Ability to Comprehend

Spring gesticulated; fell back. So it goes in March: one day you’re jacketless and whistling back at Robins, the next you’re watching gusts of wind blow thin streams of snow beneath the back door. The chickens huddle in beds of straw and the dog looks back at you, as if to say: really? Even in this weather?

Yet walking is prayer for me: and prayer the way I extend toward God as God extends toward me, ever intent on restoring to my divided mind a memory of wholeness, our shared movement of reaching twining strains of an unbroken canticum novum. To say this, even poetically, especially poetically, is not nothing: when we give word to our insight, we effectively translate it to understanding, and thus lay a path in darkness, much like Hansel with his pocket full of white stones. The path is not the destination but it can move us towards the destination. At least it can help.

All this, of course is words – words purporting to describe a process that is ongoing, measurable, observable, susceptible to influence. But in a sense – an important one – nothing is happening. But in another, we are waking up to this nothing, and that waking resembles an event – an activity that is unfolding within time. We cannot escape that sensation. To our bodies, the world will always be real, just as to the machinations of our brains, thought will always seem as if it is just about to “get it.”

But Life is not containable: and it cannot be reduced to anything the body (which includes the brain) can grasp, the way it grasps baking bread, or paddling when in water, or adding three to three and getting six. Until we accept this we are going to proceed in circles. As soon as we render the Infinite in language – God, Truth, Pure Being, Shiva, Source et cetera – we have curtailed what cannot be curtailed. We are gesturing toward God, but the gesture itself is not God, even as it intimates God.

Sri Aurobindo said it was okay to do this so long as one appreciated the way that words appear distinct and sure but are in fact misleading and even violent in their apparent representation of reality.

He said that when we use language responsibly – which is to say, with burgeoning awareness of its limitations – then

[W]e begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity (The Life Divine 33).

There is a correlative in A Course in Miracles, which emphasizes that miracles are done through us without our understanding precisely what miracles are (T-16.II.2:4-6). This is not necessarily to denigrate the intellect but rather to move in the direction of understanding the natural limitations of its helpfulness.

You are still convinced that your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and makes it what it is. Yet we have emphasized that you need understand nothing (T-18.IV.7:5-6).

It cannot be said enough: we cannot think our way to salvation. But we can reason our way to seeing the futility of thought, the folly of repeating what has not worked, and the concomitant need for an alternative that operates in and through us, even as it is not of us. Thus we open: little by little: making a space for the Infinite that never left. Emily Dickinson is – as always – instructive:

The Absolute – removed
The Relative away –
That I Unto Himself adjust
My slow idolatry (488)

It is not imperative that we learn fast or thoroughly, for even learning can become an idol obscuring our awareness of God. But it is imperative that we question everything: learning and resistance to learning and the language that seems to envelope them both. Attention given – gently, consistently, in a sustainable way – to these things will never not finally reveal the fullness of which we are in truth composed.

Why I Switched to a Creative Commons License

Earlier this week I shifted the license on this website from a traditional copyright to a Creative Commons license, specifically an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. My reasons for doing this are important, and I want to share them.

I’ve been aware of Creative Commmons licenses for some time and, in spirit, I have always preferred them to the more draconian, commodified and separative alternative.

But in application, I almost always opted for the latter.

Why? Because I was scared. I was especially afraid of two related possibilities: one, that somebody would make money from my work while I was not (or could not), and two, that somebody would copy my work and present it as their own.

Indeed, copyright law emerged in our culture precisely to protect against those two possibilities. Many writers and artists see copyright as their only line of meaningful defense against intellectual theft. If you are making a living this way, the stakes are not insignificant.

My own interest in alternatives grew in direct proportion to changes in the markets for freelance writers. In the late eighties and early nineties when I was beginning to cut my teeth on journalism, you could write a story and publish it in multiple journals or papers. You owned the rights to it. A great deal of the viability for freelance income came from that reselling ability.

Moreover, it reflected a fundamental truth: that the writer was the one who had created the work – she or he had researched, reported, wrote and rewrote and so it was their work. Of course they could sell it and revise it as they saw fit.

That paradigm began slowly shifting until it reached a point where writers were creating a piece of work, selling it – often for less than they’d gotten decades earlier – and surrendering all their rights in the process. A company would buy a story for me for a thousand dollars and then run it in multiple mediums they owned. It was out of my hands.

My friends on the management side of the equation argued that they had no choice. Journalism was dying a death of a thousand cuts. They had to maximize their earning potential. And freelancers were an easy target. I began to wonder: is there an alternative?

When I published poetry – regardless of where it was published – the terms were almost always the same. The publisher got a one-off right to publish the work and then all rights reverted to me. Sometimes they paid me – in money or copies – and sometimes they didn’t. I was grateful for the chance to share my work, but even more grateful for the integrity that accompanied the process.

When I began to write on this website, I didn’t give much thought to copyright. Legally, once you create something, the copyright inheres in you. The legalese you attach only puts the world on notice; it doesn’t automatically affect your rights.

But as more people began to visit, and some of them to “borrow” my posts or significant parts of my posts, I started to wonder: how do I respond to this?

I was cognizant of the lawsuit initiated by the Foundation for Inner Peace in an effort to protect the copyright of A Course in Miracles (FACIM’s take is at least in part represented here). I understood the impulse in a sense, and the legal issues, but it also struck me as wrong-minded in some ways. It wasn’t just about copyright, but trademark, too. People were being told they couldn’t advertise notice of their “A Course in Miracles study group.” The issue seemed to be about control of the message as much as the means by which the message was being transmitted. I don’t know that I could have – or would have – handled the situation any differently, but I certainly gave that possibility some thought.

Of course, the Creative Commons licenses empower creators. They are legally sound and binding, and they are utterly flexible. They take full note of the media publishing culture in which we live. They do not disempower artists; they empower them. Essentially, they recognize the role of the creator as the master of her work, while allowing her to facilitate the kind of sharing and modification that seems fair and reasonable.

Yet each time I moved in that direction, I got scared. I’d put it off. “Don’t be naive,” I’d tell myself. “You’ve got something special here. It’s okay to protect it.”

Eventually, that word – “special” – seeped through. Indeed, it was the whole problem. I had a special relationship with my writing and I did not trust you – or anyone else – to respect it. And the only way to defend myself against your greed and hypocrisy – because you were obviously going to plagiarize me and get rich doing so – was an aggressive strategy of copyright enforcement. All rights reserved and don’t think for a moment I’m afraid to use it.

Of course, that is not a very satisfying way to live or create. Defensiveness – always a byproduct of specialness – never is. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that this was a chance for me to practice faith and to put my money where my mouth so long had been. My values called for a more flexible, generous and progressive approach to ownership – one that reflected an underlying belief in oneness, faith in my brothers and sisters, and a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.

So I mad the switch. And instantly – because it was the right thing to do and the right time to do it – I felt an instant rush of peace and gratitude.

Am I saying that you should follow suit? Or that others who are still using traditional copyright are wrong-minded idiots blaspheming Jesus and Buddha? Or that FIP and FACIM were evil and greedy for initiating legal action with respect to possible copyright violations?

No.

It is important to do what is right for oneself – and what is right for you may not be for me. Such is the nature of forgiveness. Sometimes it takes us a while to learn what is right and longer still to bring it into application. There are no mistakes. It is important to tend to our own garden and let our neighbors tend to theirs.

In other words, it’s not about being right universally but particularly. In this instance, under these circumstances, X is the right thing to do. So I am going to try and do it. I may learn there is another way to go in the future. I may go back to what I did before. But right now, this is where spirit is most resonant.

And, really, that is where we want to be – as writers, artists, teachers, students. We want to be where Spirit most resonates.

Thank you, as always, for sharing the way with me.

The Death of Specialness

As our study and practice of A Course in Miracles continues, our sense of ourselves as “special” begins to erode. This can take many forms – we are more patient with others, we laugh more readily at our “mistakes,” we don’t sweat the little things so much – but at some point it is always experienced as fearful and so we resist it. We cling to some shred of self, some fragment of egoic belief because it seems to minimize the fear. Unfortunately, that little piece is sufficient to extend our suffering.

What would your life be like if you related to everyone you met, and every experience you had, without specialness?

Every attack on our peace, without exception, arises because we believe we are separate beings – separate from one another and separate from God. We believe that yesterday’s experience is separate from today’s which is separate from tomorrow’s. This division permeates our belief system, rending everything into fragments.

What perceives itself as fragmented will naturally defend itself: that is what pieces do. They know they are not the whole, they know there are other pieces “out there,” that some of them are bigger and stronger and maybe even vengeful at the original break and so they defend.

It can be helpful to nurture a space in which it is possible to give sustained attention to what is – our thoughts and feelings, our relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, our goals as students, our answer to the perennial ACIM question “what is it for?”

In that space, I can see the way in which my sense of self is both perilously fragile and incredibly aggressive and vexatious. It is as if the faintest breath could brush it away forever and so it flails and rages up its own storm in a frantic (and ultimately doomed) effort to keep that faint breath away.

What does this look like? I’ll give you a personal example.

A couple of weeks ago, a student approached me after class. She’s never had me before, English classes aren’t her strong suit and so forth. She wanted to be sure she understood the poem we were discussing. We’re talking, it’s going fine and then she mentions that she shared the poem with another professor who made a simple comment that turned out to be very helpful.

I responded to that comment first with fear and then with righteous indignation. I watched my response happen (this is becoming much more frequent for me – the capacity to observe internal response to the external without actually needing to respond or engage with it). What if this other teacher thinks this is the wrong poem to teach? What if she thinks I’m an idiot? What if she talked to other faculty and right now they’re plotting to fire me because of this poem?

Then, in response to that fear, came indignation. If this student wasn’t happy in my class then fine. Let her take it with someone else. If some professor wanted to cop an attitude about the material I teach, then fine. I’ll teach somewhere else. Hell, I’ll go climb a mountain and eat nuts and drink rain water all while writing beautiful haiku in the mist.

This was all this very subtle. The tone of my voice didn’t change, my commitment to being helpful didn’t change. I never said a word about it to anyone. But it was there.

And that is what the ego is and that is how specialness works. If it can’t ruin us at the surface, it will percolate as far down as it needs to go so long as it can still be there. That’s what it means to cling to some shred of ego. It shows up very quietly, almost unnoticeable. But it’s still there. It is still operative.

The spiritual practice of A Course in Miracles is simply to see this and to offer it to the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to take it to a therapist or spiritual counselor, or act it out in the world of form, or write it down in our wellness journal. None of those things are bad or wrong. They can be very helpful in their way. They just aren’t required.

All we have to do is recognize specialness and see how it makes us miserable. That is all. And it will be undone for us because – even deeper than crazy, is our longing for peace and even deeper than that is our knowledge that peace is ours right here, right now.

It can be hard to hear this but it’s true: when we are ready to be done with specialness, then we’ll be done with it. Period. It’s not like dismantling a mansion with a toothpick – it doesn’t have to a long, tedious and arduous process. That’s just a choice we make. Naturally, we can make another.

So why don’t we just let specialness go?

Fear.

In that space of sustained attention I mentioned earlier, there is often a dim sense of fear, as if something is terrified of being seen or exposed. It’s not rocket science. If I let go of this self – this ego, this specialness – what will remain? What will “I” be? The ego cannot answer that question (because it does not know the answer) and so it always responds “death.” But in truth, A Course in Miracles assures us that “the death of specialness is not your death, but your awaking into eternal life” (T.24.II.14.4).

So we have to trust that. Trust is a by-product of a personal relationship with either Jesus or the Holy Spirit (or both). That relationship is what allows us to take a deep breath, drop down into the interior miasma, take another look at the seeming horrors of the ego and allow them to be undone. Peace is the sure – the inevitable – result. Trust that.

The Ego’s War with God

Another way to think about the ego is that it is a belief which attempts to usurp those creative functions that belong to God. We could say that the ego is a maker of illusions that aspires to be a Creator of reality or truth and it does so by trying to overthrow God.

The mind has a natural inclination to create, and the ego properly senses this. But this inclination cannot be wielded in attack, because attack is by definition divisive, and division denies the indivisible nature of what is eternally whole and perfect.

Attacks on God are insane, not because God is powerful enough to meet any assault with superior force, nor because God is vengeful and bent on retaliation. Attacks on God are insane because what is one cannot attack itself nor defend itself against such an attack.

This does not mean much to us who still live and think in a primarily dualistic framework, but that’s okay. We are using words to gesture towards concepts that do not readily lend themselves to explication. Truth is abstract and utterly generalizable; at that level, we can say that Oneness cannot go to war with itself.

Clearly, however, the ego can – and does – think otherwise. And there is a very specific way to work its wrong-minded (or non-Christ-minded) thinking: in all things (here in bodies, here in the world of form), ask with deliberation and intent: what do I want?

You are answering [this question] every minute and every second, and each moment of decision is a judgment that is anything but ineffectual. Its effects will follow automatically until the decision is changed. Remember, though, that the alternatives themselves are unalterable (T-5.V.6:3-5).

Few ideas are as helpful to those of us struggling with  illusion as this one: there are only two possible answers to the question “what do we want.” One is the ego, which we made through our belief in separation and the other is the Holy Spirit, which is God’s Answer to the dream of separation.

Always we are choosing between love or fear. Between peace or conflict.

We tend to approach our lives as if they contain a multitude of choices that literally shift and evolve from minute to minute. Some appear mundane – what do I wear to work – while others appear profound – how do I console a parent grieving their lost child. But all those questions emerge from (are symbols of) our answer to the only question that matters: ego or Holy Spirit? God or not God?

When we perceive ourselves as responsible for solving anything – from a mini fashion crisis to the apparent finality of death – we are tacitly acknowledging that the ego, and not the Holy Spirit, is the architect of happiness and peace. Only guilt and fear can follow from that premise.

A Course in Miracles might be understood as a simple means by which we restore to the mind its power of decision, by making clear to it how simple decision actually is.

Reality proceeds from its Creator as surely as a snowflake seeks a surface on which to rest, and just as peacefully, just as naturally. We are not responsible for it. I do not make the snow, nor the sun that plays across it, nor the prismatic light show that follows. I merely choose to give attention to the whole of it, and joy is the natural result.

So it is with God and Creation. We do not make it. We simply say yes to it and it is given to us, whole and sparkling and pure. We choose the Holy Spirit.

About Calling It A Course in Miracles . . .

I was walking with a friend recently, snowy back roads at twilight. While our spiritual paths are different, our general sense of what it means to be spiritual – what the goals are, what the work is, what the results are – is quite similar. Our talks are almost always fruitful.

We were talking about how as one’s relationship with God deepens, the simpler one’s external and temporal existence becomes. Problems are not so vexing; one’s sense of necessity softens. For example, this winter I have to come to regard sunlight on snow as perhaps the loveliest and most dazzling light ever created, and it is given to me on an almost daily basis. My attention to it has intensified to a white heat; my gratefulness in those moments is boundless.

I am only able to perceive winter light this way because I have changed my mind about beauty and giving. And that, I said to my friend, is the textbook definition of a miracle according to A Course in Miracles.

She said – less in response than simply thinking out loud – “they really need to change the name of that thing.”

Beyond a willingness to change, nothing else is required. Love will always do the rest perfectly.

In western (and Christian) culture, we are accustomed to thinking of  miracles in terms of the suspension of the laws of physics, or really out-sized gifts from God. Jesus walked on water, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. We win the lottery. They are big events that always resolve in our special favor. Thus, when we are diagnosed with cancer, we pray for a miracle – which almost always means that we don’t die. And so forth.

But A Course in Miracles means something else entirely when it talks about miracle. A miracle is first and foremost an expression of love (See T-1.I.1:4, 3:2 and 9:2). Bill Thetford once described them as “the love that sustains the universe.”

It’s the shift in perception that removes the barriers or obstacles to our awareness of love’s presence in our lives.

So it is critical to see that this love is not external but rather “in” our mind. It is a thought (T-1.I.12:1), not an event. They are not caused by what is external so much as reflected there. Sunlight in winter has never not been astounding. But as I practice the course, I become less invested in the active egoic mind, and there is more space to simply appreciate what is given and so, like a blind man who suddenly regains his sight, I can actually see that light, sparkling and prismatic like the eyes of a thousand joyful angels.

And of course, that is not all that I “see.” There is also the cry of owls in the distance at three a.m. There is starlight in the February sky. My daughter playing fur elise on the piano. Homemade peach sauce over homemade vanilla ice cream. Cardinals at the feeder. Chrisoula’s laugh. Emily Dickinson poems received at deeper and deeper levels. The smell of cedar walking, and wood smoke back home while resting. Deer tracks. The brook humming beneath a thick sleeve of ice.

But all those are simply forms: a litany of things through which I can more or less consistently glimpse the love that is God, that is that-which-is, that is Source, Light, the Ground of all Being, etc. And thus perceived, these things lift me in turn, and from that space of gentle elevation, love extends readily and naturally through me. Miracles are not  something one does but more in the nature of something one allows God to do without relation to specificity of form. Thus, beyond a willingness to change, nothing else is required. Love will always do the rest perfectly. We just need to get out of the way.

Resistance to the title – A Course in Miracles – is premised on the idea that miracles are not internal shifts of perception in the direction of love, but great big external events that please and sustain the egoic self. When we accept that they are “expressions of love” unrelated to what is external (in the same way a mirror is not related to what it reflects), then the title becomes altogether accurate.

Thetford again:

At the time, I certainly didn’t respond positively to that title. However, when you get into the Course and then into the definition of what a miracle is, it does make sense. In fact, it’s the only appropriate name for the Course.

He is right, of course. There is no need to change the name of A Course in Miracles. Instead, there is a need to study it and bring what is learned into application. This takes a miracle: nothing else is needed.

On Gratitude and Reverence

I have been thinking of Tara Singh’s reverence for Helen Schucman, the scribe of A Course in Miracles. He was not confusing her with God, nor implying she was special in the sense of deserving a pedestal or medal. Rather, he was deeply grateful to her, and he was not afraid of gratitude’s expression.

Taraji often spoke about his relationship with Schucman. She insisted he keep a gratitude journal. And later, she asked him to teach A Course in Miracles which, despite his reservations, he did. He placed the course at the center of his life and allowed himself to be guided accordingly. Really, what else is there?

Gratitude is not a list – it is not mental. It can start that way – that is why Taraji kept a journal and later encouraged others to do so as well. We make the list and we see how it grows and then – if we are attentive – something happens. We enter the actual space of gratitude. It becomes our reality, not merely an ideal to which we aspire.

When I am grateful I am in love. There is no other, no better way to say it. There is no significant difference between love and real gratitude. There is an energy to gratitude that naturally shifts my focus from myself – what I need, what I can get, how I am going to get it and so forth – to what I can extend. And it turns out that when I am grateful there is always something to offer. Gratefulness extended is love. The only way to have it is to give it, and it multiplies accordingly.

Reverence is an extension of this right perception of gratitude. When we realize that we have everything, and that our only joy is in giving it to our brothers and sisters, we see that God is in us in a tangible way, as we are in God. This is why I say often that we take the chapel with us everywhere, and that God is never silent within it. Given that profound, beautiful and altogether holy truth, how can we not be reverent? How can we not long in each moment to fall to our knees in joyous prayer?

This life is sufficient unto our longing to awaken to what we are in truth and to our real home in Heaven. No improvement is required and no additions are needed. The interior teacher has all she needs to show us the way to the hidden chapel and the secret altar because they are everywhere always. Nothing is truly hidden and nothing is truly secret. There are no mysteries.

Gratitude is never not appropriate and reverence will never fail to relieve us of all imagined burdens. When you are ready to know peace, you will know it because it is what you are and against such a glorious reality no illusion can long endure.