Ending Projection Through Service

Projection is the foundation of our grief and sorrow. It gives rise to illusions which confuse our ability to redress problems where they actually are.

One way to undo projection, and by extension its pernicious effects, is through service to our brothers and sisters.

It is understood by most students of A Course in Miracles that the external world – from the smallest of its flowers to its most cataclysmic wars to our most beloved and intimate companions – is an illusion.

The illusion arises through projection. When we project, we dissociate from our own ideas or attitudes and place them on external objects ranging from people to places to weather events. That way, we are not the source of discomfort or fear or guilt; the external object is. We see the rain that cancels our picnic as the cause of our sadness.

It is this cause-and-effect relationship that underlies our experience of the world as illusory. We are sad because we have projected responsibility for our happiness onto an external object which is neutral and incapable of causing anything, much less sorrow.

When you project, you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated (T-6.II.2:1-3).

We can think of projection is a device that sustains our perception of separation from God. It is the means by which this fundamental dissociation is sustained. Thus, projection is an active and ongoing rejection of oneness. So long as it goes on, healing – and thus happiness and inner peace – are impossible.

The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth. such a rebirth is impossible so long as you continue to project or miscreate (T-2.I.3:7-8).

It is imperative that we bring projection to its end, and it is also our responsibility to do this.

How shall we end projection?

For many years, I approached the question of projection from the experience of self as center. I would examine my experience of being Sean in the world and consider everything as a projection. This ACIM teacher is my projection. So is my wife. This student is a projection and that cashier and both my parents and the neighbor down the street whose dog is always after the chickens and . . .

I tried very hard to look closely at these and the situations that arose in conjunction with them: my feelings, judgments, desires, biases. What I was willing to see, what I didn’t want to see. What was I disowning? How could I retrieve it?

There is nothing wrong with that approach. In fact, there is a lot that is helpful. Our careful attention to the external world as a sort of unconscious extension of the self can be very healing.

In time, however, I began to experience this dynamic differently. Significantly, I saw that not only were you my projection, but that I was also your projection.

This insight destabilized the personal I which appeared to function as the center from which literally everything else radiated. Suddenly, the center as such was everywhere. And as a result, my personal projections and perceptions became less important. I began to see in a deep and sustained way that we are in this together, and so our healing is entangled.

This is the beginning of awakening.

A teacher of God is anyone who choose to be one. His qualifications consist solely in this; somehow, somewhere he has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else’s. Once he has done that, his road is established and his direction is sure. A light has entered the darkness (M-1.1:1-4).

Here is an interesting and helpful experiment: go through your day thinking not about your personal growth and spiritual evolution but rather everybody else’s. Think of yourself as simply another illusion in their dream of separation and then be the best illusion you can possibly be for them.

If you do this, you will notice that you are far less focused on your own stuff – your disappointments, fears, obstacles, goals. You become more interested in other people – what they’re thinking and feeling, what they’re trying to do, where they need help and where they simply need to be left alone.

You will find it becomes natural to understand what they want from you, and then to give that to them. If you have not yet seen the face of Christ, this can bring that experience much closer in a tangible and pragmatic way.

Few things are as satisfying as helping our brothers and sisters step a little closer to God. It is both an honor and a privilege to be a speck of light in another’s dream. Thus, our work becomes being there for them as wholly and fully as we can. We give ourselves without reservation.

This is effective because our brothers and sisters are our own self. The gift we extend to them is the gift that we extend to our own self. We are not losing anything in service; rather, we are gaining everything, even when the at of service appears illogical or irrational.

When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless him. His need is yours. You need the blessing you can offer him. There is no way for you to have it except by giving it (T-7.VII.2:1-4).

When I stand in front of a class, I think: they have put me here. They made me. And I try to be aware of that as I teach – as I move around the classroom, shepherding dialogue, grading papers, answering questions and prodding them to go deeper or farther with this or that reading or insight.

When I sit down at the dinner table, I do the same thing. And when I attend meetings with municipal leaders. And when I attend holiday gatherings with extended family. And when I talk on the phone with fellow ACIM students. And answer emails. And . . .

We are never not able to be of service to those who long for awakening, because their longing is our longing, and by responding to it, we respond to our own self. It is natural and simple and the way is always clear. The path opens up before us literally as we walk it.

Remember the beautiful words Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Thus does Jesus encourage to see that we do not live in a world of strangers but rather a world of brothers and sisters who are our collaborators in salvation. Everything we do can be holy; everything we do can testify to love.

In this way, we are redeemed by the power of service. It relieves us of self-interest and make our lives a record of giving to each other. We have to be here for one another in active and loving ways. We do not enter Heaven alone or by degrees: we go hand-in-hand, and our going is Heaven itself.

The Veil Before Christ’s Face

It is important that we not confuse the veil that obscures Christ’s face with the face of Christ itself. The veil terrifies us; but Christ integrates us instantly and wholly into Love. So long as we are scared, even to the tiniest degree, we  behold the veil before Christ’s face, and not Christ itself. We don’t need to denigrate ourselves for doing this; it happens. It’s okay. We all do it. But we can help each other undo it, too.

The veil before Christ’s face is a symbol. It represents the fear and guilt that underlie our experience of separation from God and Love. Thus, the veil is not external, though sometimes what is external can help us to get a handle on where and how to look for it. There is a point in one’s practice of A Course in Miracles where the interior landscape begins to clarify and we can move around in it easier. So we know where to go to look at the fear and the guilt, and we know the safe spot to which we can safely retreat, regain strength and come back again.

This is the work! It is why we study the course – to learn how to look in a gentle sustainable way at the blocks that stand in the way of Love, which is to say: the fear and guilt that function as a veil obscuring Christ. Nothing else matters. Our income tax bracket, our broken marriage, the books we haven’t read, the bottles of booze people we love kill themselves in . . . none of it.

All that matters is looking at the veil in order to learn that the veil is not there.

The veil hangs dark and heavy and still – more like a wall of iron with terrifying faces painted on it in blood – inside of us. It’s there when we’re burying a beloved dog and it’s there when your child gives us a Valentine even though it’s April. The outside means nothing to it. Don’t look for the veil in what is external. Don’t look for anything there – not even Christ.

All we are learning to do – all this lifetime and this study and this practice is for – is look at the veil. And when we make contact with it, then all that matters is coming back to it over and over until at last we are ready to draw it aside and give attention to what it has long kept hidden from us.

The veil across the face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, they are all different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself that holds him off from you, and you away from him (T-31.VII.9:1).

This is not hard to understand intellectually. We are one and our failure to recognize this is the separation. So the atonement is simply the acceptance of our oneness. Our brothers and sisters are not apart from us and we are not apart from them.

We know this at the level of mental thought. But we do not feel it as the truth of our being. And so we do not live it. I look around the room as I write and you are not here. You are in your room, with your prayers and your books and your people. And thus I still labor under the illusion that my body and your body are what really matters. Thus do I perceive the gap that separates us as real. Leonard Cohen sang about this very beautifully in his song Closing Time.

I loved you for your beauty
that doesn’t make a fool of me
You were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there’s a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body’s really you

We get confused. The world seems so real to us. The way it tastes and feels, smells and sounds. The way other folks arise in it as friends and enemies and lovers. Parts of this world are so lovely, we can’t imagine giving them up. Parts are so horrifying, we can’t even allow ourselves to think about them. Our bodies please us one day but fail us the next. We try to understand it and figure it out and make it mean something, but it doesn’t. It can’t. Not consistently. This world was made to hide the face of Christ, not reveal it.

Sooner or later we see this function of the world and at last let it go. We close our eyes and grope for the hand within – the hand of Jesus, who leads us to the Holy Spirit, who perfectly enfolds us and leads us gently and surely to the veil that we have placed between the Love that is God and everything else and helps us pull it aside. Nothing is real except what lies on the far side of the veil. The whole journey was a dream: only this is real.

When one reaches this place, it is possible to become frozen for what feels like a lifetime. We find ourselves wanting another spiritual practice or a better teacher or improved life circumstances or another run with psychotherapy or a new exercise regimen. And all of this – however appealing, however apparently logical – is merely a form of delay. All any of it means is that we are going to come back to this moment again later. Why wait? Why postpone love?

If you are reading this, it is because you have done the work and found the companions who both guide you to the veil and then stand beside you while you decide whether – finally – to reach out and brush it aside. If my word counts for anything: there is no better time and we are not joined for any better purpose.

We do not need to be afraid of God any longer. We do not need to be separated from Love any longer.

Let us join together in a holy instant, here in this place where the purpose, given in a holy instant, has led you. And let us join in faith that He Who brought us here together will offer you the innocence you need, and that you will accept it for my love and His (T-19.D.i.9:6-7).

We stand with each other in order that we might each turn within and find the imagined source of darkness and pain. We are joined as one that we might look at guilt and fear and see it dissolved. The veil before Christ’s face is undone in our mutual service and attentiveness. And seeing it – and knowing our brothers and sisters stand with us, and that we are joined by the mightiest of companions – we at last are ready to undo it. We reach out with trembling fingers towards this last obstacle to Love: it shifts: disappears: and then . . .

Krishnamurti and A Course in Miracles

I remember years ago picking up a copy of Krishnamurti’s slim but powerful book Freedom from the Known. Krishnamurti is a complicated figure, as likely to arouse conflict as anyone else, but I think beyond the level of opinion, his articulation of the human condition in relation to what might loosely be its spiritual search is clear and helpful. It is natural to ask what, if any, relationship can be found between Krishnamurti and A Course in Miracles.

In Freedom from the Known, Krishnamurti neatly frames the dilemma.

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to – then you will also see that this living thing is actually what you are – your anger, your brutality, your violence, your despair, the agony and sorrow you live in. In the understanding of all this is the truth, and you can understand it only if you know how to look at those things in your life. An you cannot look through an ideology, through a screen of words, through hopes and fears (15).

As soon as we say that is the truth – whether we are pointing to the Catholic Church or Islam or A Course in Miracles – then we are no longer talking about truth. We can accept this insight intellectually, of course – most of us are quite sophisticated about these things now – but that is different than understanding it at the level of mind, where change is actually possible, and where change must happen, if it is to happen at all.

On the one hand, I think Krishnamurti would have been quite dismissive of A Course in Miracles. It is a clearly Christian text and relies entirely on Christian ideas, images and symbols. To the extent that the course aims to undo all of this – and I believe it does – it still does it in the first place.

Krishnamurti urged his followers to a sort of radical attention. This is not so dissimilar to what quantum physicist and philosopher David Bohm taught in his work on dialogue and creativity. We need to make contact with thought outside the lens of the self: our judgments, our opinions, our feelings and all of that. We have to pay attention to the movement of both the observer and the observed.

Lee Nichol has written clearly and helpfully that this sort of engagement – the radical undoing that facilitates contact with Truth, with Reality – can only happen when one has done considerable work on themselves.

Bohm claims that the ramifications of the ego process – both individual and collective – are at the root of human fragmentation and suffering. At the heart of his dialogue proposal was the prospect that awareness of the movement of ego, willingly engaged in by a number of people simultaneously, might quicken insights into the ego process that could take much longer if approached only on an individual basis.

In other words, we have to work on who we are – we have to make contact with our own ego experience before we can begin to make contact with the Truth that it obscures.

This is very much in the wheelhouse of what A Course in Miracles teaches. Indeed, one could say that what A Course in Miracles is about is simply making contact with all the ideas and opinions and idols that obstruct our capacity to see and know Truth. Truth is given. When we see this, the need for learning is over.

Love is not learned. Its meaning lies within itself. And learning ends when you have recognized all it is not. That is the interference; that is what needs to be undone. Love is not learned because there never was a time in which you knew it not (T-18.IX.12:1-5).

This is what Krishnamurti refers to when he talks about the need to go beyond the level of teachers and ideology and words.

There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you – your relationship with others and with the world – there is nothing else . . . when we look at what is taking place in the world we begin to understand that there is no inner and outer process; there is only one unitary process, it is a whole, total movement, the inner movement expressing itself as the outer and the outer reacting again on the inner (Freedom from the Known 15, 16).

One of the charges sometimes laid against A Course in Miracles is that it is too dense and metaphysical and thus encourages an ultimately unhelpful intellectual approach. Certainly I have been guilty of this in my own practice. And yet, reading Krishnamurti often feels even more risky in this regard. He is clear what is needed – attention, freedom, courage and so forth – but somewhat less clear in what to do when we can’t seem to bring that about. In many ways, he was an incredibly disciplined teacher in refusing to allow his teaching to be codified or reduced to a system.

I don’t doubt a lot of human beings are okay with that. But others – and I am one – needed a better map. A more practical map. The Truth might be a pathless land, as Krishnamurti observed when dissolving the Order of the Star, but some of us need to pretend there is a path in order to figure out – sooner or later – that here is no path.

I don’t think Krishnamurti is especially helpful in that regard. I speak for myself of course. While I find his writing deeply inspiring and clear, I often fumble in their application. It was not so different from reading a lot of Christian mystics, from Saint John of the Cross to Thomas Merton. One felt such longing to be where they were and believed that such a longing could be satisfied and yet . . .

How? How?

This was caused Bohm to be frustrated near the end of his life with how his work on dialogue was being received and practiced. Certainly, it is connected to Nichol’s observations. If you have only a vague sense of where you want to go but no earthly idea how to travel or what direction to face or who to turn to for guidance, then you’re going to foment more of the separation and fragmentation that you want to avoid.

This is where A Course in Miracles is especially helpful. It is a course! It is a year-long class that one can take at one’s own pace and return to as necessary. Its sense of order – a text, a workbook, and a manual for teachers – is precisely the sort of framework that can move one to that place where understanding and following Krishnamurti can actually bear fruit.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false (T-16.IV.6:1-2).

Thus, however much one disparages guides and authorities and teachers, one can also be grateful that some helpful ones exist. A Course in Miracles has proven a critical system in helping to clear my mind of the detritus that clouds truth. It is as we dissolve those clouds – according to a sacred rubric, guided by the Holy Spirit – that we begin to understand at last what Krishnamurti was getting at.

To be able to look at this seems to me to be all that is needed, because if we know how to look, then the whole thing becomes very clear, and to look needs no philosophy, no teacher. Nobody needs to tell you how to look. You just look (Freedom from the Known 16).

We must be true to ourselves. We must be honest. And we must be rigorous. If we need help, we need to ask for it. If one teacher does not work, then perhaps another will. Krishnamurti and A Course in Miracles can be a good fit. There are others. You know.

A Course in Miracles: If You Knew Who Walked Beside You

walking
we always walking with one another . . . that which is holy and helpful walks beside us . . .

A Course in Miracles is a challenging and rigorous spiritual path. It demands a level of attention and willingness that often feels foreign to us. It is not about seeking truth or beauty, but about finding those beliefs and idols that stand in the way of truth and beauty – and that level of seeking can only be undertaken by the very determined. Indeed, absent the help of others – including symbols of Love like Jesus and so forth – our practice would be impossible.

Here is how Helen Shucman’s Jesus puts it in A Course in Miracles:

Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it. If you knew Who walks beside you on the path that you have chosen, fear would be impossible (T-18.III.3:2-3).

It is perhaps impossible not to conceive of the course as resembling a path on which one journeys. It is implicit in the human condition: we evolve, change, move in this direction or that. Narrative evolves both to explain and entertain.  And so, until we are able to grasp the simple fact espoused by Krishnamurti – that truth is a pathless land – then we have to work with metaphors and symbols.

That is why the Jesus we encounter in the text and workbook can teach us that he “walks” beside us, as does the Holy Spirit. Indeed, they are our guides out of the world of paths and progress. Without their sure guidance in which to place our trust, we would be permanently lost in fear and guilt. We would be caught in an endless loop of lovelessness.

You do not know because the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it . . . You go toward love still hating it, and terribly afraid of its judgment on you. And you do not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have made of it (T-18.III.3:3, 5-6).

One of the things that we should not fear is our reliance on symbols – right symbols can be used to undo falsity. That is, if we approach our lives and our spiritual practice with Jesus and the Holy Spirit (themselves symbols), then all symbols can be converted to helpfulness. Everything we have made – the world, our bodies, other bodies – can be used to undo what we have made. Beneath all the hell and misery through which we stumble bereft, remains a single flicker of love. It is enough to redeem us.

. . . your goal is the advance from fear to truth . . . Let us join quickly in an instant of light, and it will be enough to remind you that your goal is light (T-18.III.2:2,5).

How do we make contact with the one who walk beside us?

It is simple: we reach out to one another. We make the way lighter for our brothers and sisters and we allow them to do the same for us. Jesus said it two thousand years ago: whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me as well. He is saying it now as well.

You who hold your brother’s hand also hold mine, for when you joined each other you were not alone. Do you believe that I would leave you in the darkness that you agreed to leave with me? In your relationship is this world’s light (T-18.III.4:1-3).

We are not alone. The way appears fearful indeed – and the work perhaps beyond our capability – but we are joined by those whose love and light will replace our meager efforts and sustain our wavering faith. Look no further than the one who stands beside you – in the grocery store as you shop, in the bed where you sleep, in the woods where you pray. Love is with us always in the form of our brothers and sisters, as we are love unto them.

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What Does A Course in Miracles Teach?

Someone asked me the other day: what does A Course in Miracles teach? And I foundered trying to answer it because everything I wrote seemed bent on making the course attractive to new students or me attractive as a Course writer. How hard it is to be honest! How hard to accept how little the truth asks of us – simply that we let it be.

There is a natural tendency to glorify so-called spiritual paths and to credit ourselves just for walking on them. In my own life, I did that most acutely with Buddhism. I wasn’t serious about it. I didn’t want to do the work. I liked the idea of being Buddhist – and I liked the local Buddhist culture a lot – but it didn’t resonate in a deep way.

It wasn’t until I was nearly forty that I was ready to be grounded in a spiritual path – to study the scripture, listen to the teachers and integrate a practice with my daily life. I’m hardly immune to the fantasies and prattling that characterize a lot of ACIM, but I’ve managed to stay attentive to it, and relatively disciplined, and so in a stumbling sort of way, I have made a space in which it can function.

One of the harder aspects of the course is coming to terms with the fact that it is rigorous and demanding, and that the work we are called to do is not especially sexy or appealing. We are not seeking the beauty of Love itself but rather those blocks which impede our awareness of Love itself. That is its core teaching.

And those blocks are ugly, stubborn, repellent, cunning and quite frequently terrifying. But if one is going to practice A Course in Miracles, that is the work. That is what we do.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false (T-16.IV.6:1-2).

It is fun to think of ourselves as truth-seekers and bringers of the light and all of that. It’s fun to call each other “brother.” But ACIM is not well-suited to clubbiness (all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) and sooner or later we have to see that we aren’t really bringing light but shadow. We have to see that what this particular path calls for is not truth-seekers but people who are ready to a) look at the obstacles to truth and b) accept a guide who can undo those obstacles.

I am slowly coming to appreciate this in a very deep way. The truth is given – it is there. We don’t have to become pilgrims in search of anything. But if God, or Love, is present – right here, right now – then why can’t we see it or feel it or know it?

To be a student of A Course in Miracles is to be ready at last to focus like laser on that question. We are done looking for God. We take on faith that God is. We are ready now to consider the mind that has arranged to not only obscure God’s isness but to make even looking at that obscurity a dangerous sin. It is not for the faint of heart.

Thus, A Course in Miracles teaches us that the atonement is simply the recognition that Love is given. It dawns in our mind as we gently seek out the clouds that block it and allow Jesus and the Holy Spirit to undo them for us. It is the marriage, not the month’s rapture, to paraphrase the poet Jack Gilbert. It is the work of a lifetime. And when we begin it in earnest – and begin to sense those first faint glimmers of light – no other work will satisfy.

A Course in Miracles: Please Take Notes

Often when I step back a bit from A Course in Miracles – disentangle myself from its metaphysics, the demands a sincere ACIM practice makes (or seems to make) – I am struck by its simple origins. It began when two people agreed to try and find a way out of mutual conflict. And it began too with willingness with respect to relating to Jesus.

“This is A Course in Miracles. Please take notes.” That was the first clear directive that Helen Schucman recieved from what she initially called “the voice,” and what she later identified as Jesus. What follows is well-known. She did take notes – quite faithfully, in a sort of stubborn way – and shared them with Bill Thetford.

Relationship – with Jesus and with one’s brothers and sisters – is the ground of the Course. Its helpfulness is premised on being open to our healed mind (symbolized by Jesus and the Holy Spirit) and extending love to others.

In time we learn those two forms of love – listening and loving – are not separate but more like two sides of the same coin.

So we can learn a lot, I think, simply by focusing on that ideal of relationship, that powerful early example the scribes offer of kindness and willingness. It wasn’t that Schucman and Thetford set out to create a new spiritual path, or become popular gurus, or get rich off a vedantic revision of Christianity. It was simply a desire to be kinder and gentler in relationship with others.

And – importantly – it also reflected a willingness to hear Jesus and then do what was asked. This is as true of Thetford as Schucman. As she says in the preface, Bill had his “special assignment” too.

Thus, if we look at the origins of the Course, we might ask where we are in respect to it: are we working diligently at being nicer to people, especially perhaps those people to whom we don’t really want to be nice? Are we making space in our life for a relationship with Jesus, one that is not premised on answers to our questions?

Maybe we can ask: if Jesus asked us to “takes notes,” would we?

Of course, we are at different places with respect to how this works – and even how it ought to work. I know that. The Course meets us where we are and it’s no use pretending otherwise. Often I think I’m half a step away from Heaven and then I’m gently reminded how much work remains. It’s okay. You reach a point where the expectation of divine reward subsides a little. You trust that what is happening is what is supposed to be happening. The ego’s ranting and raving becomes a little less influential. There is some space in which peace is not a stranger.

Perhaps it is never a bad idea to keep things simple. For me, sometimes, that takes the form of stepping back from the Course, looking at it more generally and more gently. I try to avoid heavy duty analysis in favor of gratitude. I come away remembering that all that is really going on here is that a) I am learning to be in relationship with my right mind and b) I am learning to be in relationship with you. The one facilitates the other.

And truly, that is the work of a lifetime.