Sean Reagan

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.

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.

At some point, as serious students of A Course in Miracles, we need to understand that the Holy Spirit is simply a metaphor for right choosing – or the action of our right mind – which we could also call right perception – and that although the rightness is real, the Holy Spirit is itself a symbol. “I” am not possessed – gently or otherwise – by a foreign agent created by God to be my guide from madness to reason.

When we imagine that Jesus or the Holy Spirit are separate agents – somehow removed from us in time and space – we slip into a well-intentioned but ultimately fruitless dualism. This is an evasion of our responsibility and our potential for inner peace. We need to see beyond the metaphor to the reality at which it points. We don’t want to confuse a map of the way home for home.

When A Course in Miracles advises us to let the Holy Spirit choose for us which path to take in any and all situations, it is really making a statement about the fundamental equality of all paths, and the futility of judgment.

Even simpler, ACIM is saying to us:

1. Your familiar way of thinking, feeling, reacting and deciding doesn’t work;

2. There is a better way;

3. You already know the better way;

4. Chill out – breathe – and let the better way reveal itself.

Say to the Holy Spirit only, “Decide for me,” and it is done. For His decisions are reflections of what God knows about you, and in this light, error of any kind becomes impossible. Why would you struggle so frantically to anticipate all you cannot know, when all knowledge lies behind every decision the Holy Spirit makes for you? Learn of His wisdom and His Love, and teach His answer to everyone who struggles in the dark (T-14.III.16:1-4).

If we read that passage closely we see that when we relinquish the power of decision, then what happens becomes a reflection of God’s knowledge and “error of any kind becomes impossible.” We are liberated from consequence, and our liberation is shared – it touches all our brothers and sisters.

A Course in Miracles gently insists that the other way is already here, right now. And so we stop looking for alternatives and rest quietly in the sureness that God’s gift will reveal itself in Creation. It’s not a question of finding what’s lost but rather seeing what is.

This experience is simply the decision to access the part our mind that is “part of the Christ Mind” (C-6.4:1). It is not separate from us in any way. It is not a mystery to solved, a ritual to be perfected or secret to be divined. It is inherent in us; it is us. That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that we are the Holy Spirit’s “manifestation in this world” (C-6.5:1). We are the Holy Spirit and we know the Peace of God when we choose to let go of the ego’s habit of judgment which always serves only its own imagined needs and wants.

But how do we do this?

First, we have to see that at the most basic and simple level we are not joyful with the ego’s machinations. Our lives are not working.

Thus – second – we calmly and patiently give attention to what the ego is and how it works. We observe our habit of selfishness and aggression and so forth. In doing so, sooner or later, we begin to see how shallow and rootless what we call the ego – what we call the self – actually is.

When we have accepted our misery and looked at its perceived cause (the ego and its decisions), then we naturally enter the Thetfordian space: we see and declare and accept that there must be another way. And so our attention shifts: we begin to give attention to this other way. The ego says we are meant to seek for it and gladly encourages us to become spiritual searchers. The ego loves a project! But A Course in Miracles (or another spiritual path or practice) gently insists that the other way is already given. It is already here, right now. And so we stop looking and rest quietly in the sureness that God’s gift will reveal itself in Creation. It’s not a question of finding what’s lost but rather seeing what is.

Sometimes when I write or talk this way – the Holy Spirit and Jesus are just metaphors – people get upset and defensive. It’s okay. I am merely witnessing to what works for me – to what has been helpful for me. It may or may not be helpful for you, and you should not be shy about either questioning me or simply moving on.

It is always the ego who insists there is a right way and a wrong way and refuses  to abide by those who choose against what it considers right. But the Holy Spirit only sees a multitude of equal ways because all of them lead in the end to the knowledge that we are already home in God, in what is. No journey was needed because no home was ever left.

We are called simply to allow Truth to be true. We are called to gently witness unto reality, understanding that awareness is reality’s only condition. We are called to embrace the equality of all our brothers and sisters, from bluets to squirrels to people, past, present and future. It is all there, all given, and the Holy Spirit knows this because we know it and because we and the Holy Spirit are simply this knowing, briefly manifest in bodies, briefly manifest in ideas.

A miracle, as that word is brought to application by A Course in Miracles, is not a cause of anything but rather an effect. It is an effect of a decision to give attention to the present moment without bringing either the past or the future into it. The miracle denies nothing and accepts the wholeness of whatever arises. Thus peace, thus joy.

Each day, each hour and minute, even each second, you are deciding between the crucifixion and the resurrection; between the ego and the Holy Spirit (T-14.III.4:1).

We are given the power to choose between peace and conflict, which decision is internal and altogether unrelated to what is external. What is external has nothing to do with anything; it is merely a canvas on which our thoughts leave faint trails of either joy or sorrow, according to our internal decision. The external is the trail of wind across the lake, faint ripples bearing witness to the greater passage. The miracle serves us by witnessing unto how we have exercised our capacity for decision in favor of love.

The miracle teaches you that you have chosen guiltlessness, freedom and joy. It is not a cause, but an effect. It is the natural result of choosing right, attesting to your happiness that comes from choosing to be free of guilt (T-14.III.5:1-3).

“Choosing right” in this instance relates only to what is going on inside of us – at the level of thought, and the levels that are beyond thought. “Levels” is a misleading term, because it suggests both a physical space (in “here” and out “there) and a linear progression from conflict to peace. But if we give attention to thought, we will see that there is a great deal beyond the egoic chatter that seems to define and contain and restrict us. And that “beyondness” – somewhat like descriptions of the material universe – is forever expanding. Its limits are literally incomprehensible. We cannot reach the end of what is within.

“Thought” in this case does not mean ideas or what can be rendered in language: that is the surface, that is the shallows. We can’t think our way to what A Course in Miracles calls the thoughts we think with God (W-pI.51.4:4). As Tara Singh pointed out in Nothing Real Can Be Threatened, God’s love is “a state superior to thought.”

There is no peace or love at the thought level. Thought merely projects the outer world of unreality and lives in that abstraction (164).

Nor is this a new idea limited to ACIM. Consider, for example, William Samuels.

In its most intellectual presentations, metaphysics merely states the impossibility of an actual fallen state; but, alas, it still leaves us attempting to play the part of a self-righteous pseudo-identity healing a personal view of the universe, calling everything seen “via the senses” a dream “that isn’t going on in truth,” and it leaves us still having to see the nothingness of that dream . . . there is no peace in this (A Guide to Awareness and Tranquility 54).

When we choose – however briefly, even unintentionally – to let go of this pseudo-identity (which is the egoic self), then we know peace. The miracle enters perception as a witness unto this “right” choosing: we feel it – a sense of happiness, quiet contentment, inner peace, a singular desire to continually serve our brothers and sisters. And over time, the miracle teaches us – because we are not nearly as complex and mysterious as we think – to choose rightly more and more often for no other reason than we really like how miracles make us feel. Reflexively, we do what makes us happy. We are, it turns out, naturally inclined to grace.

Attention to the truth of this speeds up awakening. When I talk about giving attention, I am simply saying to be aware of when miracles are and when they are not and then be miraculous. Work miracles. Be miracle-minded. We can’t learn this through the acquisition of facts or ideas, but we can see it and bring into application, not unlike learning to swim or play guitar or bake bread.

All of which is to say that there are neither secrets nor mysteries. There are only miracles attesting to the power of choice upon which all our joy is founded.