Sean Reagan

In terms of A Course in Miracles, a special relationship is any relationship (with anything though we tend to think of it as between people) that we use as a substitute for Oneness with God. It might be a special hate relationship, in which we feel justified in projecting hate and anger onto someone, or it might be a special love relationship, in which we believe that only a special person can meet our needs. Though they look quite different in form, both follow from the same error: that our separation from God can be healed (or solved or amended) through an external relationship.

So, in a sense, when we are talking about special relationships (with a person, a landscape, an artist, an object, etc.), we are talking about what we are always talking about: we can’t fix an internal problem of perception by rearranging what is external. The problem of perception is internal: that is where the problem must be accepted and that is the only place where it can be solved.

A Course in Miracles suggests that all special relationships can be transformed into holy relationships – that is, relationships bent on truth, in which Oneness is revealed rather than hidden or hindered. So the issue isn’t about giving things up – becoming celibate or fasting or never haunting another used bookstore or voting for the right candidate. Rather, it is about learning how to see, or perceive, differently.

This healed perception is not limited to a particular relationship; it is more pervasive, more broadly applicable – it touches everything. But it does seem to come into existence through particular relationships. So it behooves us to give attention to these relationships, to give them a close and sustained look – no matter how uncomfortable or distressing that looking might be.

To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold dear. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure but it will jeopardize your learning (T-24.In.2:1-2).

All our relationships hinge on ideas of value – they reflect what we consider necessary to survival and happiness and all that. Thus, when we question those relationships, we are really questioning our values, in particular those that might not harmonize with our ideal of ourselves as spiritual, generous, loving individuals and so forth. This is the part of A Course in Miracles that a lot of students tend to gloss over – the looking-at-our-blocks-to-love part. We can put it off a long time, but ultimately there is no way to peace but through what seems to block peace.

Questioning in this case is akin to looking at something with the Holy Spirit, and it really just means the willingness to honestly consider our motivations, goals and agendas and so forth. And we have to do this for the relationships that work and for the ones that don’t. We have to remember that both flow from the same error (that what is external can be causative), and it is that error that we are trying to see clearly in order to correct.

I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to get too worked up about this. Nobody should feel guilty for having a special relationship: it’s part of the deal with bodies. We all want to be held, kissed, fed, walked, read to, whatever. The problem isn’t that we have those needs, but rather that we become attached to them as means by which to either heal or perpetuate separation from God.

So what do we do? We give attention to each relationship in each moment as it happens.

Let me give you a personal example.

The other night the coydogs started up. We live on the cusp of deep woods and you can hear them in their packs – it is a bloody sound anyway but sometimes you also hear the animal they kill screaming as it dies. I don’t like it but I grew up with it. But my wife, Chrisoula, really hates it. It makes her want to check the kids, the cats, the chickens . . .

Anyway, I was reading and the howls started, and Chrisoula was in bed, and I thought: “I should go in and just be a comforting presence.” And I saw that on the one hand that was a very beautiful sentiment that Chrisoula would really appreciate. But on the other hand, I also liked how heroic it made me look – how deserving of praise – and then I thought that maybe I even deserved a little sugar for being such a thoughtful husband.

You see? Very quickly this potential kindness becomes about me: my need for praise, attention, gratification, and so forth. It becomes special.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! We just want to see those motives. Seeing them means we are no longer lying to ourselves. We aren’t stuck in the illusion, but rather are moving into or at least towards the light of understanding. So we can laugh at ourselves – “man, I can be selfish” – and then, with a minimum of drama, just go and be helpful.

When I see clearly the egoic action, then I can utter a little prayer and go do the right thing without bringing all the specialness into it.

I am not saying I have this down perfectly – you can ask Chrisoula if you doubt me – but I am saying that this can work if we are patient and attentive and are willing to keep a relatively good sense of humor about it.

I also think that we get better at this as we go, the more we do it. And the more we do it, the more far-reaching the helpfulness goes. Things that used to distract us for hours don’t. And when they do distract us, we remember quicker that there is a way out, that peace is not a distant goal but a present reality presently unrecognized.

I am not afraid of the fact that I have these special relationships – with my wife, my children, people who read me, Emily Dickinson and Max Ernst, New England, black bears, chickadees, writing, and on and on and on. Nor am I afraid that future special relationships may develop: new artists to love, new poets, new pets, new friends, new trails to walk . . . That is the nature of life in a body, and I see no reason to resist it because when lived through a lens of attention and awareness it becomes not this life but Life itself, no different than the holy and beautiful one that you live.

That is really where we are going with all this specialness: we are going to where we see past the pale specificity of form to the abstract wholeness that is Love itself, infusing everything without exception or qualification. We are just slowly learning that it’s all one thing and we are it.

That is the transition from specialness to holiness: it is not trading one external form for another – this partner for that one, this diet for that one, this landscape for that one – but rather seeing beyond specificity altogether. We already know how to do this, but we need to be reminded. Attention to the details will reveal to us the gift that was given to us in Creation that we might – sooner rather than later – return to God.

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The problem is never the specific feeling I am having – I am angry, say. Rather, it is the belief system from which the specific feeling reflexively arises. Ultimately, that is where the problem is solved. That is where we will find Saint Paul’s “peace that surpasseth understanding.”

In A Course in Miracles, this means that we are always choosing between the ego’s belief system, which reflects separation, or the Holy Spirit’s, which reflects wholeness and unity and love.

The ego has a purpose, just as the Holy Spirit has . . . your mind has the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects. But again, remember that both are in you (T-5.V.1:2, 4-5).

The poetic and religious language of the course can obscure  its simple truth: we contain two thought systems which give rise to radically different experiences of self and world and other, and our feelings attest to which one we are choosing.

We all want to manage and minimize our negative feelings – that’s natural. Quite often there is a lot of good in it. We feel better emotionally, think more clearly, make more skillful decisions and so forth. We can learn more about how our internal mechanics function. All of this makes us better servants unto our brothers and sisters.

But we often don’t see that the positive feelings (which we tend to prefer) come from the same place, the same belief system. It is easy to chase a rush of endorphins and call it spiritual growth. “I’m closer to Jesus,” “I’m really healing.” But in truth, we’re just relying on the same egoic belief system. As the course observes, “Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of peace” (T-8.I.3:13).

We have to see the unconditional nature of that sentence: every response is a call to war, even those that temporarily make us feel better. So long as we are invested or attached to the ego’s belief system, and the spectrum of feeling emerging from it, then we will not know peace. Period.

So those ego-based feelings are always going to see-saw back and forth – good, bad, happy, sad, angry, content and so on. The extremes might soften, and the form the feelings take will surely change over time, but unless the underlying belief system changes – unless we deliberately choose the Holy Spirit – then we are always going to be surfing emotional ups and downs and never knowing a sustainable inner peace.

Gandhi acknowledged this. He said often to his followers that despite his practice of ahimsa, nonviolence, he was capable of anger, of perceiving injustice, feeling abused and all that. It wasn’t that he had escaped those emotions, but rather that he had mastered his response to them. He wasn’t run by them, wasn’t carried away by them.

So those negative experiences, thoughts, feelings and so forth are not, by themselves, going anywhere. Even Gandhi recognized this. Some other energy or action has to come forth.

The question is: can we get clear about the belief system from which the specific feelings arise? And can that clarity relate us to peace – a peace that is without opposite, that we can’t put into words, that we can’t – at least right now – even comprehend?

To give oneself over to the ego’s belief system is to deny oneself the natural grace that is the inheritance of Creation, forever and always offered to us by God, or Love, or What Is.

We have to be willing to look at what is happening internally – when we are angry, when we are joyful. This is to say that we have to be willing to practice A Course in Miracles – do the lessons, embrace its ideas – bring it into application, as Tara Singh would say. And this is hard because it isn’t all light – it is shadow, too, hard work, and sometimes tedious work, and we can’t delegate it, and when we are doing it, nobody else can be there with us.

Feelings, like thoughts, come and go. They are part of having a body – which includes the brain. In that sense, they are no more or less impressive than, say, our toe nails. We don’t get all bent out of shape when those grow and extend – we just trim them from time to time and carry on with life.

Or, to use another example, we don’t call a therapist every time we pee. We don’t bring God and psychiatrists and spiritual gurus into the mix just because our kidneys, ureters and bladder produced urine. The body does what it does and more or less we let it do that.

It is possible to experience thought and feelings in the same way – as natural and predictable byproducts of our human experience, no more an impediment to wholeness than sneezing in the presence of dust. It just happens. It’s natural.

In order to see this in a way that is transformative – that allows us to make use of it – that is helpful – we have to get past the feeling of anger (or happiness or greed or lust or whatever). We have to trace the feeling back or down to the belief system out of which is arises, which is its source. We have to see the ego’s belief system – really see it, because otherwise we won’t be sufficiently committed to make another choice. Unfortunately, there is no substitute for this, and no shortcut.

How do we do this looking? What does the looking “look” like?

Sometimes when I am angry – and I am not instantly carried away by it, or after I am sufficiently recollected – I will ask myself some questions: what assumptions am I making that make this anger possible? Or, what necessities am I presently idolizing or defending in order to feel this anger?

Doing this thoughtfully, attentively and willingly is what A Course in Miracles means when it asks us to look with the Holy Spirit, or give something over to the Holy Spirit. We want to investigate it, see it clearly, learn what we can, and not make the same error going forward.

So let’s say that somebody is mean to me – some student comes up to me after class and says “I really hate Emily Dickinson and it’s all your fault because you’re a terrible teacher and a rotten person.” Right away feelings of anger arise.

What are the assumptions behind that anger? Maybe that students shouldn’t be disrespectful to professors. Maybe that I am a nice guy and a good teacher and everybody should see that and only that. Maybe that anybody who holds an opinion about me that is contrary to the one I hold is always wrong or stupid or morally bankrupt.

And what are the necessaries that I am defending with or through my anger? Well, clearly I believe that it’s necessary I be treated a certain (good) way, and that this certain (good) way does not take into consideration anybody else’s feelings. My anger is not really interested in inquiring into the student’s state of mind, or what attention they might need, or the possibility they might be right in some ways, or anything like that. It is all about me – about Sean, my self.

What do those assumptions and necessaries have in common? They all point to a belief system that A Course in Miracles calls the ego’s belief system – a separated self in competition with other separated selves in a world of scarce (and getting scarcer) resources. Because I believe in that separated self, naturally I will defend it when it is attacked, and naturally I will take pleasure when somebody honors and adores it.

The ego’s goal is quite explicitly ego autonomy. From the beginning, then, its purpose is to be separate, sufficient unto itself and independent of any power except its own. This is why it is the symbol of separation (T-11.V.4:4-6).

So I want to see that, and more than that, I want to see how literally everything that flows from the ego’s goal, from its system – regardless of how I define it in a given moment – promotes separation, which is to promote discord and conflict.

To give oneself over to the ego’s belief system is to deny oneself the natural grace that is the inheritance of Creation, forever and always offered to us by God, or Love, or What Is.

That is why the course teaches us that “[t]he real conflict you experience, then, is between the ego’s idle wishes and the Will of God, which you share” (T-11.V.5:2), and makes clear that this is an illusory, not a real, conflict. (T-11.V.5:5).

So when we are stricken with anger – or grief or lust or sadness or ecstasy or whatever – it is an opportunity to heal not just the specific feeling but to look clearly, in a sustained and thoughtful way, at the belief system from which this feeling emerges. If we want to be rid of suffering, then we need to jettison the belief system from which it arises, which is always a system made solely to ensure and perpetuate suffering.

It is not a mistake to look at our feelings – the seemingly bad ones, the seemingly good ones – and and inquire into them as a way of discerning their source. Only then can we meaningfully choose a new source – one that was not made by us to keep God at bay, but rather was made by God to unite all beings as one and thus reflects a perfectly clear, peaceful and helpful love.

The first lesson of A Course in Miracles teaches us that meaning is not inherent: it does not reside “in” the dog, or the table, or the stack of books, or the picture of our children laughing at the beach. Nothing that we see – ever – means anything (W-pI.1).

And of course we could easily extend the lesson: nothing that we hear means anything. Our partner humming Con te Partiro while making breakfast, chickadees singing in the dogwood tree, the rooster howling from atop the compost.

What we smell means nothing: the butterfly balm so tall and bountiful this year it brushes the bedroom window, the first garden potatoes fried in olive oil from Chrisoula’s family’s grove in Greece . . .

What we touch, what we taste . . . All of it.

Meaning is what we give to these things: it is not naturally present in these things. So meaning is not external: reality is not external.

Tara Singh said that if we see “something” – a dog, a cup, a cloud – then we have made an allowance for fragmentation, because rather than seeing Creation in its perfection we are seeing bits and pieces of it, and judging them this way and that, and then believing that our judgment accurately reflects reality – we are just telling ourselves “how it is.” That is the role of the self – the world approves. But if we are going to remember our oneness with God, it won’t do.

You have to see that you must die to the “self.” If you have that burning need to awaken, your relationship with the Course changes. But if you are casual, you read it over and over, and it won’t transform your life. You can’t be casual and say the Course doesn’t work (A Gift for all Mankind 61).

In a real – not a symbolic but a real – way, I am not separate from the hummingbird at the window which is not separate from the butterfly balm before which it hovers. But to know this – rather than say it as an idea that we can either accept or reject – requires some energy that is not just intellectual, not just physical.

When we see that meaning is what we give, and we see that we are confused and unhappy, then we become willing to accept a teacher who can show us what meaning truly is and where it can truly be found. We surrender our own ideas in favor of the One who knows, and instantly we come to peace.

The first lesson  could free you from all you know. You make a mistake in believing that other people’s abstract theories are your own thoughts. If you gave it space and attention, you would realize that what you know is not real, that you are subject to your conditioning (A Gift for all Mankind 122).

That is what the first lesson is offering us: the undoing of our egoic belief system so that we might discover the awareness – the gift implicit in our capacity for attention – that we are in truth.

It begins by recognizing – in a tangible way, an active way – that what we have to deal with is interpretation, which is internal, and projected.

We are so accustomed to accepting that what we perceive with our bodily senses is “real” and that this reality is inherently – on its own – meaningful. We say “wife” or “son” or “New England” and think that we are talking about love, paternity, and geo-cultural landscape. We assume it is all “out there” and thought is just reporting it all as it is.

But “wife,” “son” and “New England” are ideas loosely enveloped in words. They are interpretations – internal movements – and thus reflect beliefs about reality rather than reality itself. So we have to question them – look at them closely with the Holy Spirit – and out of that inquiry discover what true meaning is and where it truly resides.

Nothing I see . . . means anything . . . The statement should merely be applied to anything you see . . . use it totally indiscriminately (W-pI.1, 1.3:3-4).

The absence of conditions – the absence of any “allowance for differences” (W-pI.1.3:1) – is what makes this lesson so radical. I think that if we were to apply it without judgment or expectation, then it would be sufficient to awaken us, to remind us that we do not sleep but are awake in Christ.

Why? Because it would bring to an end our reliance on what is external – we would no longer confuse all that with cause, and would instead make contact with awareness, and in that new condition – spacious, pliant, open, creative – begin to experience (to know) reality itself.

Awareness is not interested in information about things. Awareness is not only of this physical world; it is of the Source behind the world. Awareness brings something of another dimension to the three-dimensional human being. Only when we come to stillness can we know awareness (A Gift for all Mankind 88).

That is what giving attention is: it is coming to stillness, because there is nothing else to do, nowhere else to be. No matter what arises – desire, anger, ambition – we stay with attention until we grasp that nothing exists outside – or independent of – this gift of attention.

So we do the lessons whole-heartedly, and humbly: not as experts, not even as doers, but as students willing to let everything go in order to learn. And each lesson contains within it the potential to awaken us: which is merely to be reminded of our fundamental, uncompromised and eternal wholeness. And our gratitude – for the gift of remembering wholeness, for the simplicity inherent in wholeness – naturally extends itself. It becomes everyone’s gift, endlessly given.

The body (which includes the brain, and all the brain’s activity – thought, memory, logic, language, etc.) doesn’t know this, though when given gently over to the Holy Spirit for learning purposes, it can hold it. It can reflect wholeness, in the way a hummingbird can reflect it, or roadside chicory, or fresh-baked bread, or the slow curl of breakers off the sun-swept sea at dawn.

Emily Dickinson knew. She is still teaching us, who are willing to listen.

. . . Earths, grow thick as
Berries, in my native Town –

 

My basket holds – just – Firmaments –
Those – dangle easy – on my arm

When we see that meaning is what we give, and we see that we are confused and unhappy, then we become willing to accept a teacher to show us what meaning truly is and where it can truly be found. We surrender our own ideas in favor of the One who knows, and instantly we come to peace.

It is so beautiful, so complete. Peace makes everything else secondary and trivial; you see it is an illusion and you can’t be part of it. You can’t be involved anymore. You trust the divine order of existence. And therefore, man-made fears and conditioning, likes and dislikes end – all duality ends (A Gift for all Mankind 69).

All the Holy Spirit really does is show us that God – that Love – is here, right now, and that we are composed of it – composed by it. What else but stillness could abide in us so?

The witnesses for God stand in His light and behold what He created. Their silence is the sign that they have beheld God’s Son, and in the Presence of Christ they need demonstrate nothing, for Christ speaks to them of Himself and His Father. They are silent because Christ speaks to them, and it is His words they speak (T-11.V.17:6-8).

It is okay if we are not there yet – more than okay, really. Honesty about our experience, which is also honesty about our goals and intentions, is the beginning of Truth. I am simply saying that if we give attention to the lessons – to our practice of A Course in Miracles, as and where it is- then the rest will follow naturally, will appear almost magically, because is it merely what already is. Our willingness makes it so.

It is a mistake, I think, to approach A Course in Miracles as if it were merely a light-hearted picnic en route to the Gates to Heaven. It is not that an emphasis on inner peace and joy is wrong per se, but that it can distract one from the actual forgiveness inherent in the course’s healing process.

To adopt A Course in Miracles as one’s spiritual path is to undertake a serious and challenging interior journey from grim forgetfulness to remembrance of God. It is to look closely at an interior landscape and thought system that resists being looked at and literally stops at nothing to avoid being seen for what it is.

Why does it so viciously and tenaciously defend itself from being known? Because it correctly perceives that to see it is to to simultaneously see what it is not and – because our longing for God, though hidden, is greater than our longing to be separate from God – exchange it for Truth. The ego knows it is doomed when we see it offers us nothing but pain.

Grandeur is of God, and only of Him. Therefore it is in you. Whenever you become aware of it, however dimly, you abandon the ego automatically, because in the presence of the grandeur of God the meaninglessness of the ego becomes perfectly apparent (T-9.VIII.1:1-3).

A Course in Miracles, through the text, workbook and Manual for Teachers, restores to our memory God’s grandeur, and the ego is dissolved accordingly.

But it does not go quietly nor willingly! And, for most of us, it does not go without the help of a devoted guide. Thus, the course, in addition to providing a means by which to remember God, provides a friend with whom to bring that means into application.

My brother you are part of God and part of me. When you have at last looked at the ego’s foundation without shrinking you will also have looked upon ours . . . I give you the lamp and I will go with you. You do not take this journey alone (T-11.In.4:1-2, 5-6).

In a sense, those words are metaphorical – Jesus is not actually going to show up with an oil lantern and escort us through our personal Boschian drama, the way a friend might walk with us through the streets of Boston or Baton Rouge with a flashlight and map.

On the other hand, if we cannot take those words literally – if we reduce them merely to a good idea – then we are quite likely bereft. So a question emerges and presses on us: How do we make contact with Jesus in a real and practical way with respect to “looking at the ego’s foundation without shrinking”?

To be with Jesus is not acquisitive but rather receptive. Why? Because he is already here: our inquiry of him makes it so.

The answer has to do with the reverence that naturally flows from giving careful and sustained attention to that question, which in part has to do with not rushing to answer it. It is easy to substitute intellectual verbosity for spiritual experience. One way to avoid that trap is to willingly stay in the insecurity of not-knowing, which in a sense is to trust not knowing – or to trust that we are not alone in the state of not-knowing.

In his Commentary on Jesus and the Blind Man, Tara Singh observed that “a sincere question has the ability to relate you to life instantly and brings you to the direct perception of Reality” (79).

Thus, it is not necessary to know but rather to inquire of Jesus in a serious and attentive way, and to bring all of one’s desire to awaken to bear on the inquiry. In a way, it is reminiscent of Lesson 27 in the ACIM workbook: “Above all else I want to see.” Think of nothing but your yearning to see, says Jesus, and vision will be given you because it is already given to you. But be honest: what else will you think of? What else do you want?

The real question is, how often will you remember? How much do you want today’s idea to be true? (W-pI.27.4:1-2).

So it is a question of our commitment, of the energy that we are ready and willing to bring to our practice. Part of studying A Course in Miracles means facing our unwillingness to practice A Course in Miracles. We are asked to give vision priority amongst our many competing desires (W-pI.27.1:2). Tara Singh said that when we do that – when we sincerely give attention to Jesus – then we are met by Jesus in the present moment, and there is nothing metaphorical about it.

If you are present, then the Master is here, because what He said is eternal and always accessible. In the present, the past and future meet. Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (79).

To give our attention to Jesus without expectation – I will perceive him this way, he will answer this way, et cetera – is to become radically open and Jesus responds to that openness in a real and tangible way. Our reverence – which is a form of gratitude that simplifies and purifies attention – makes it possible.

Nobody can give attention for us, and the internal egoic drama that must be undone will feel utterly personal for a long time. Yet a state comes when we begin to perceive – beyond the specificity of images an idols – the fear and guilt that is common to all of us and shared by all of us. But before that, we have to share the seeming specificity of our spiritual journey with Jesus. We look at what we are frightened to look at, and we ask him to look with us and – when we are ready to no longer be alone – he will be with us, and his presence will be transformative at every level. His presence is a transformed way of seeing; He is vision.

From insane wishes comes an insane world. From judgment comes a world condemned. And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth, with mercy for the holy Son of God, to offer him a kindly home where he can rest a while before he journeys on, and help his brothers walk ahead with him, and find the way to Heaven and to God (W-pII.325.1:4-6).

Thus, I don’t want to avoid the work of looking at the ego’s foundation, however intimidating and even terrifying it might seem. It is essential to our shared freedom, because only by looking at the foundation can the rest of the egoic edifice be toppled.

I also want to be clear that this work, this looking, is not a solo gig: A Course in Miracles repeats over and over that Jesus shares the way, that the Holy Spirit is within us, and that you and I are walking the path to Heaven together. Those are words that point to an important truth: we are not alone in any way and our companions are our salvation.

It is not necessary to know in advance what it means to avail oneself of Jesus’ help and to be so helped. In fact, it is more helpful to simply rest in the not-knowing. To be with Jesus is not acquisitive but rather receptive. Why? Because he is already here: our inquiry of him makes it so.