Sean Reagan

Fear has been on my mind lately – the undoing of fear, which is healing – and in particular how one looks at this issue from the perspective of A Course in Miracles. Ending fear feels like a practical problem to me – like building a house rather than waxing poetic about the joy of home.

There are times in my practice – I think this is generally true for all ACIM students – when a particular issue or challenge comes sharply into focus. These can be frightening moments but if we can hold them clearly – without judgment or panic – there is a potential for helpful undoing.

Right now, for me, I am seeing with great and uncomfortable clarity, how scared I am of being wrong. It is a specific fear that permeates my life in profound and far-reaching ways. There is literally not a single decision I make nor action I undertake that does not have at its root this question: what if I am wrong?

Obviously, I can only be so fearful because I believe that a) it is possible to be wrong and b) that serious, even fatal, consequences attend being wrong.

I am very very scared of being wrong.

In looking at this, I can also see a few other, related issues. First, I can see that without having actually addressed this fear specifically, I have through the years given a lot of attention to the apparent causes of it in a general way. Either or both of my parents have been candidates. The Catholic church has been a candidate. Certain teachers who exerted a lot of influence on my intellectual and artistic development have been candidates. I read too much Thoreau at a sensitive age, et cetera.

Basically, I have always wanted to find the person (or institution) who is to blame, as if laying blame at someone’s feet will somehow absolve me of the problem (and of my own responsibility to solve it).

That is the very essence of projection and denial and it does not work (e.g., T-6.II.3:7-8, T-2.II.2:5).

The other thing that I have done is try to idolize right and wrong as a spiritual law and actually make the right decision. In other words, I keep telling myself there is a right thing I can do, and when I do do it, God will at last bless me, and the fear that attends being wrong will be gone forever.

This has a certain Holy Grail appeal to it. There is something secret and hidden and hard to find but if I can just find it, then all will be well.

The problem with that attempted solution is that it requires a God whose love and beneficence is conditional. And only the ego bargains – not God (e.g., T-7.I.4:1-2, T-8.I.1:5).

So this is what happens: we make contact with fear and with the ways in which we have been neatly avoiding dealing with it. And then what? The problem is still there, the old ways of ignoring it don’t work, and we want to be attentive students of A Course in Miracles. What do we do?

There are a handful of sentences that always antagonized me in Chapter Two’s Fear and Conflict.

The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate. At that level you can help it (T-2.VI.4:1-5).

I was frustrated by this for a long time because it seemed unnecessarily cold to me. When I am freaked out by fear – frozen through – why won’t Jesus just take it away? It seems to be the compassionate thing to do. If you’re beyond duality, resting in perfect communion with God . . . help a brother out.

But A Course in Miracles is not content with comforting us in our victimhood. It is not about feeling better while perpetuating the same cycles of confusion about cause and effect. It aims at a deeper healing.

Jesus is saying that he would rather help us solve the problem at its source, than commiserate with us about its symptoms. To those of us who can’t get past the symptoms – the external manifestation of fear – this is highly frustrating. But it is actually a deeply loving position to take.

A problem cannot be solved if you do not know what it is. Even if it is really solved already you will still have the problem, because you will not recognize that it has been solved . . . If you would recognize that your only problem is separation, no matter what form it takes, you could accept the answer because you would see it relevance (W-pI.79.1:1-2, 6:2).

So let’s say that I’m scared to do a certain kind of professional writing. It would take a lot of time, energy and attention and I wouldn’t be able to work on other projects. Our family needs the money and so the stakes feel pretty high. If I’m right, it’s cool, but if I’m wrong . . .

In the traditional mode of problem-solving, I say to Jesus: here’s the fear. I’m scared to commit to this particular form of work and writing. I’m scared to commit because it might not work and I really can’t afford to not be paid right now.

It’s important to see how the problem has been set up here. I’m not really talking about fear so much as the symptoms of fear – money and work problems. I’m invested in a particular form. The “help” that I am really after is an assurance that the writing will pay off – preferably in a winning-the-lottery way. Anything less amounts to an unanswered prayer, a scheming and unloving God.

A Course in Miracles is not saying that approach to problems is a sin. But it is suggesting that there is another way – one that is more effective and more likely to yield the inner peace and joy we are after.

It is important for me to see – and to accept – that my focus on the external symptoms of fear are nothing more than a reflection of my willingness to be separate from God. In the passage I quoted, Jesus is saying that I am “much too tolerant of mind-wandering, and are passively condoning your mind’s miscreations” (T-2.VI.4:6). And he is asking if I am willing to consider that I am not separate, and thus become responsible for my happiness.

Our mind’s “miscreations” are essentially its projections, which are its thoughts that the body is real – that it can be sick, poor, abandoned and so forth. These thoughts are not real but so long as we focus on (tolerate) them, then we are distracted from the real problem which is always our decision to think apart from God, our “willingness to be separate.” So long as I see the problem in terms of money and writing projects and unpaid bills and so forth, I am miscreating.

All A Course in Miracles really does is help us retrain our minds to create, which is to think with God, which is to express or extend love. This isn’t something the ego does because there is nothing formal about it. This is about creation, and the ego is not a participant in creation.

How then do we apply this to what appears to be a specific form of fear – in my case, the fear of making “wrong” decisions?

First, we have to make a conscious decision to keep our focus on the real source of our fear, which is always our decision to be separate from God. This is hard to do! It is much easier to focus on what is external – the apparent truth that “right” and “wrong” are real and I have to choose between them and then pay whatever price is there to be paid, no matter how much grief it brings to me and my family.

This is part of the discipline of being a course student: staying with challenging psychological material at the inner level rather than projecting it. It takes attention and willingness and it’s not fun. There aren’t rainbows. It can feel stormy and dark for a long time. A long time.

Second, we have to try – no matter how much fumbling and stumbling is involved – to think with God. It is not a question of concentration but of accepting the fundamental equality and worthiness of all creation (T-4.IV.7:2).

Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have thought, and what you have not thought that God would have you think. Search sincerely for what you have done and left undone accordingly, and then what change your mind to think with God’s. This may seem hard to do, but it is much easier than trying to think against it (T-4.IV.2:4-6).

We want to remember  – to trust, really – that to think with God is deeply natural, while thinking against God is unnatural to the point of painful and terrifying.

Does thinking with God this way mean that our so-called problems will go away? After all, the Song of Prayer says, “There are decisions to make here, and they must be made whether they be illusions or not” (S-1.I.2:4).

Thinking with God – even the baby steps that we can manage at this stage of our development – brings us peace. Why? Because we are joining with truth. We are accepting – however dimly, however tenuously – the love inherent in us and in all creation. We are solving the problem at its source, rather than wasting time on the myriad of symptoms that arise and subside and arise again in the world.

It is true that when we are in this space of thinking with God – which is a space of peace – that we are less bothered by what is external. It is less real to us and more in the nature of an image we are looking at. The world doesn’t go away but it is transformed a little by our willingness to look with Jesus at the real source of our fear – our willingness to be separated from God.

And that is all Jesus is asking of us – that is all A Course in Miracles really aims at: a shift in thinking, a gentle adjustment in thought. It is hard at the outset – and might remain hard for a while – but if we can hold the course (pun fully intended), then peace is sure to attend.

One of the more challenging concepts students face in A Course in Miracles is the nature of physical healing. Given course assertions that the body isn’t real (e.g., T-2.V.1:9), and that all forms of healing its apparent ills are magic (e.g., T-2.IV.2:7, T-7.V.4:2), what is the status of physical healing in A Course in Miracles?

A Course in Miracles has clear roots in Christian Science, a nineteenth century religion that suggests sickness is an illusion that only prayer can heal. Both Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford had a relationship with that tradition in their childhoods. Thematic strains of Christian Science are evident throughout the text and workbook, particularly with respect to healing and atonement.

For example, in “Atonement and Eucharist” from Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy sees atonement as an end to our separation from God.

Atonement is the exemplification of man’s unity with God, whereby man reflects divine Truth, Life, and Love. Jesus of Nazareth taught and demonstrated man’s oneness with the Father, and for this we owe him endless homage.

And later yet she discussed the relationship between truth and error, in terms that – with fairly minor semantic adjustments – should be familiar to students of A Course in Miracles.

Love and Truth are not at war with God’s image and likeness. Man cannot exceed divine Love, and so atone for himself. Even Christ cannot reconcile Truth to error, for Truth and error are irreconcilable. Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus’ teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death by the law of Spirit, — the law of divine Love.

Eddy’s premise was that sickness was illusory and thus could be healed through prayer, through bringing one’s spirit into alignment with truth as God created it. Eddy contemplated specifically physical healing. Her own profound experience included healing from a fall.

Does A Course in Miracles make a similar case for that kind of healing?

It is true that some students of the course experience healing of this sort. I have heard and read testimony about skin cancer being healed, migraine headaches disappearing, addictions disappearing and more.

I have no reason to doubt testimony like this. It is entirely consistent with the release of guilt fostered by the course. Miracles heal the body because we are learning – through the undoing of guilt – that the mind, not the body, makes illness. What happens in the body merely reflects what is happening in the mind (T-28.II.11:4). This is as true of our sexual relationships as our relationships with food and eating.

The miracle is always about the shift in our thinking from ego to Christ, from little self to God. It has no other goal; and really, healing needs no other.

But – and this is critical – physical healing is not the ultimate goal of A Course in Miracles.

Yet half the lesson will not teach the whole. The miracle is useless if you learn but that the body can be healed, for this is not the lesson it was sent to teach. The lesson is the mind was sick that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused nothing, and had no effects (T.28.II.11:5-7).

The real goal of A Course in Miracles is to restore cause and effect to its rightful place. Cause lies in the mind and the physical world – from our bodies to other bodies to the weather to the sea to the distant stars – are merely effects that witness to what is happening in the mind.

As our mind heals – which is to say as it accepts its responsibility as a decision-maker that is choosing to think either with or against God, or Love – the real fruit is inner peace. That might show up as a miraculous deliverance from a fatal cancer diagnosis. But it might also show up as the grace to simply accept the cancer because the cancer is not real. So there is nothing to get worked up about. There is never anything to get worked up about.

We can’t fake this insight. Most of us think of miracles in terms of what we can get materially. That’s what we do! But A Course in Miracles slowly and surely redirects our thinking, aligning it with something closer to Truth, or reality. At that level, sickness is impossible regardless of what appears to be happening in the world. We heal by realizing this. We heal by realizing that at that level, there is no sickness or harm.

In other words, we lose our attachment to the symbols of hate and guilt that show up in the world. Whatever shows up is okay. It can’t shake our inner peace because our inner peace is not caused by what is external. It is reflected there for learning purposes, but reflections are not causative.

In this sense, the course differentiates – subtly perhaps – from Christian Science. This is not to say that one path is “better” or more “right” than the other. Either can be a useful path to salvation, to the realization of our fundamental unity. It is a question of what is most helpful to us at a given time.

But in terms of miracles, the miracle is always about the shift in our thinking from ego to Christ, from little self to God. It has no other goal; and really, physical healing needs no other.

Like what you’re reading? Consider signing up for my weekly newsletter. No sales, no spam. Just thoughtful writing about love and A Course in Miracles.

I have always questioned the wisdom of explaining A Course in Miracles, given the implied premise of “explain” – to give an interpretation of some fact in order to make it easier to understand – and its Latin root – “explanare,” which means to smooth out and render intelligible.

If A Course in Miracles is your spiritual path, then there is no “explanation” – there is simply a relationship that shifts and evolves as our capacity to remember truth – and to discern the true from the false – deepens. It is like falling in love. You can’t explain it – you do it, and make sense of it as you go, as best you can.

Approaching the course in that spirit can be very helpful.

On the other hand, the inclination to “explain” A Course in Miracles – or to want such an explanation – is understandable. The course does not immediately present itself as being especially accessible or even comprehensible. One can feel drawn to it and yet still need assorted hands to hold while making it their practice and bringing it into application. That is simplifies and clarifies over time – not unlike a diamond emerging from carbon – is cold comfort to those still struggling to get some sort of manageable grip on it.

A Course in Miracles teaches that the separation from God is nothing more than the belief that our will and God’s will are not the same (T-9.I.7:9). If this is true, and if we are honest about the sometimes vicious and always shifting nature of what appears to our will, then it must follow that we are something other than what we think we are – these bodies with specific pasts and stories and dreams and all that. But what?

The answer to this question is actually less interesting and important than undoing that which blocks our awareness of what we are. Really, A Course in Miracles aims at undoing those blocks, first by giving us a Guide (the Holy Spirit) who can both see and see beyond those blocks, and second by teaching us how to give attention to those blocks, raising them into awareness where they are undone by our Guide.

The purpose of this Guide is merely to remind you of what you want. He is not attempting to force an alien will upon you. He is merely making every possible effort, within the limits you impose on Him, to re-establish your own will in your awareness (T-9.I.3:6-8).

What we are is not a mystery or a secret, but it is hidden. And we are the ones who hid it and who refuse to accept – through denial, through projection, through sheer stubbornness and so forth – responsibility for this decision. So in effect we are trying to solve a problem that we made, and trying to solve it without looking at ourselves.

So long as we still perceive a separate self who is acquiring some arcane knowledge or figuring out some obscure puzzle, then we are still confused.

David Bohm saw this very clearly in his essay The Observer and the Observed.

Somewhere “back in the back” is somebody who is observing what is wrong but he is not being looked at. The very “wrong” things which he should be looking at are in the one who is looking, because that is the safest place to hide them. Hide them in the looker, and the looker will never find them (On Dialogue 82).

It behooves us to be clear about this, because it is literally the end of our confusion and suffering. This is precisely what A Course in Miracles means when it teaches that the secret to salvation is simply that “you are doing this unto yourself” (T-27.VIII.10:1). This is why the course can assure us that all problems, no matter what their form, are solved in the same simple way.

Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is like the rest. He sees no difference where none exists, and He will teach you how each one is caused. None has a different cause from all the rest, and all of them are easily undone by but a single lesson learned. Salvation is a secret you have kept but from yourself (T-27.VIII.12:1-4).

Thus, inner peace lies simply in remembering our decision to think apart from God and then making a different decision. This decision to be separate was made – and is made – internally, and if we cannot “find” it, it is because we are still intent on hiding it. We are still intent on blaming the world for our problems, and making God a remote and capricious taskmaster.

It is okay to do that – the offense is not against God – but it will hardly make us happy, joyous or free.

This is why A Course in Miracles places such emphasis on our relationship with the Holy Spirit, the still quiet Voice inside that remembers wholeness and aims only to lead us back to it. The Holy Spirit begins this process by reminding us always what we want: inner peace, love, joy, ecstatic union, Heavenly unity, oneness with God, nirvana, et cetera.

If we are clear that we want to be happy, and see that we are not happy, then we can begin to inquire into whether there is a way to be happy now. The answer is “yes,” but it hinges on our willingness to accept a new way of thinking, one which brooks no division between our will and God’s.

It is easy to intellectualize this. It is easy to say “I get it,” without actually making the change. There is not really a “self” that “gets” anything. So long as we still perceive a separate self who is acquiring some arcane knowledge or figuring out some obscure puzzle, then we are still confused.

I have written about this before. The oneness that we experience when we drop the egoic self, and empty our mind of all but the knowledge of God, always ends when we try to make that experience our own. That is, there is a moment when I see the experience as separate from me, a thing to be desired, or an accomplishment for which “I” deserve credit, and then it is gone. It is over.

When Bohm pointed out that the observer and the observer were not separate in a meaningful way, he was not trying to be religious or spiritual. Quite the opposite. It was simply a fact one could give attention to, see clearly as a problem, and then solve. Jungian analyst and writer James Hillman was looking at the same problem (and imagining a similar solution) in his beautiful and provocative essay The Thought of the Heart.

The first person singular, that little devil of an I – who, as psychoanalysis long ago has seen, is neither first, nor a person, nor singular – is the confessional voice, imagining itself to be the unifier of experience. But experience can also be unified by the style in which it is enacted, by the images which form it, by its repetitive thematics and by the relations amid which it unfolds. It does not have to be owned to be held (34, emphasis mine).

A Course in Miracles is a deeply Christian and Freudian expression of the perennial problem of the separated or dissociated or divided self. It also envisions a solution. Pick any of the course’s central ideas – study any of its lessons, any one of the sub-sections of the text – and give the whole of your attention to it and you will at last see the problem you have made and, because you are at last seeing the problem as it is and where it is, it will be undone.

If we can imagine letting go and being happy, then we can let go and be happy. That is the Holy Spirit reminding us what we want.

But we do not need to limit ourselves to the course, any more than we need limit ourselves to Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or psychotherapy or walking every day in the forest before it is light. The form in which we look at the problem does not matter. Our willingness to look in a sustained and open way – without deviating, without wandering – is what matters.

Krishnamurti said that when we perceive the limitations of our thought – what in A Course in Miracles we would call the egoic self, what Bohm would say makes and sustains the division between observer and observed – some space opens in which it is possible to discover something new.

Thought is limited and whatever it does will always be limited because in its very nature it is conditioned. When thought discovers for itself its limitation, and sees that its limitation is creating havoc in the world, then that very observation brings thought to an end . . . then there is space, and silence (This Light in Oneself 108-109).

People object sometimes when I bring in these other sources and suggest that, allowing for different mechanics and semantics (e.g., Jungian psychotherapy is a mechanically different approach to separation than the workbook of A Course in Miracles, and Krishnamurti’s linguistic premise is different from that of A Course in Miracles) they are really saying the same thing. But they are! They are all saying that we have made and sustained an internal division, that this division is manifest in our thought, that it plays out in what we call the world, and that it causes us grief and pain almost beyond measure. We are doing it! And so we can undo it.

But we need help. That is the state of things. So A Course in Miracles comes along and offers us a way to see the problem and suggests – rightly, in my experience – that to see it clearly is to undo it. It is not the only way, but for some of us it is a very helpful way. The question is, are we ready? And if we are not, okay, we are not but then why not? What blocks remain? Can we give attention to them now – bring them to the Holy Spirit – so that we might be reminded again of the only lesson we need to learn:

This is the obvious; a secret you kept from no one but yourself. And it is this that has maintained you separate from the world, and kept your brother separate from you (T-27.VIII.13:4-5).

Part of the deception is that this is difficult, requires expert external interventions and takes lifetimes. Those things may be part of the awakening process but they are hardly prerequisites. Life will awaken us now if we are ready to awaken. Why? Because we cannot truly be unawakened. We can only think we are – we can only insist that we are, and hide or ignore all the evidence to the contrary.

Look then at what insists is must not be looked at: give attention not only to what arises but to what you pretend is not arising. The truth hides in plain sight, right where we left it. There are no mysteries and no secrets – and there is nothing to do. We are playing an old game and we are tired of it. We are like gamblers bored with cards but unsure what will happen if we abandon our so-called winnings and leave the table.

Here is the hint: if we can imagine letting go and being happy, then we can let go and be happy. That is the Holy Spirit reminding us what we want. That dim sense that joy is possible and peace is not a dream is the Voice for God calling us to choose again: to think with God: to be at last the home we always sought.

Like what you’re reading? Consider signing up for my weekly newsletter. No sales, no spam. Just thoughtful writing about love and A Course in Miracles.