Projection and Extension in A Course in Miracles

In A Course in Miracles, extension is the opposite of projection. It is similar in form, but altogether different in content, and thus in effect. When we project, we are attempting to disown what is fearful and distressing. When we extend, we are blessing ourselves and others by offering love to them.

Another way to think of this is to say that projection maintains guilt feelings while extension undoes them. Projection is a survival mechanism of the ego while extension is a reflection of our willingness to allow the Holy Spirit to act through us in accordance with God’s will. The former ensures that we will continue to perceive ourselves as separated from God while the latter brings that misperception to an end.

In a sense, projection blocks our awareness of love – our memory of our oneness with God – and extension allows that love to flow again, establishing the essential fact of our indivisible unity with God.

Both projection and extension are internal. They happen in the mind. They are the mind’s decision to side with spirit or with ego, with truth or with deception, with Heaven or with hell.

This decision-making process is very subtle and deep, and almost always occurs outside the range of our immediate awareness. The way that we know what mind is doing in this regard is to give attention to the external world, which reflects our internal condition. If we perceive a world that is cruel and unfair, circumstances that make us miserable and lonesome, people who are judgmental and unkind and so forth, then it is safe to assume that we are not siding with the Holy Spirit but with the ego. We are projecting separation; we are not extending oneness.

It is critical that we accept responsibility for this decision. Nobody can do it for us, though good teachers can lead us to the place where the possibility of decision is tangible, real and immediate. Salvation is nothing but our decision to accept reality as God created it. Extension of that reality naturally and surely follows.

Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you . . . It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of him. It is impossible that happenings that come to him were not his choice . . . Suffer, and you [as mind] decided sin was your goal. Be happy and you gave the power of decision to Him Who must decide for God for you (T.21.II.2:6, 3:1-2, 5-6).

Thus, the issue is not really ever what is happening outside of us – that is never the level at which change is required. The issue is always internal. It is always the decision to choose either the ego or the Holy Spirit. What is external witnesses unto our choice and thus facilitates a helpful change of mind.

Essential to our practice of A Course in Miracles is the understanding that all of this learning and doing is merely in the nature of reenacting a drama that never happened. That is, we are not truly separated from God, and so all of separation’s perceived effects never happened either. In this light, both projection and extension are really just teaching tools that help restore to memory the fact of our abiding and creative unity with God.

The Kingdom is forever extending because it is in the Mind of God. You do not know your joy because you do not know your own Self-fullness (T-7.IX.4:1-2).

The miracle is that shift of mind that allows us to remember our wholeness, and to know ourselves as creations of God, creating as God creates, because anything else is impossible and cannot be. In reality, this is what is happening right now. That is why the course teaches us that we “have not failed to increase the inheritance of the Sons of God, and thus have not failed to secure it for [ourselves]” (T-7.IX.6:1).

So we are home: and we are also remembering we are home. It is not a doing but an undoing, and there is no pressure to succeed. Together we walk with Christ in a Light where sin is impossible and God’s forgiveness and love extends through and with us unto eternity. We light our way home: and home is the light we are.

Being Right vs. Inner Peace

My desire to be right – about the quickest way to Boston, about the ACIM definition of forgiveness, or what salad to eat at this restaurant* – is a reflection of my investment in conflict which is, in turn, a reflection of my continued investment in separation from God.

This is not a crisis! It is possible to give attention to the experience of wanting to be right – to look gently and clear directly at the impulse to perceive ourselves as separate from God, and at the further impulse to keep that perception alive and well. When we do this without judgment but with willingness to be forgiven and to share our perceived brokenness with the Holy Spirit or Jesus, we are healed.

It turns out that healing is not complicated. It comes peacefully and surely to any mind that desires it wholly. In a sense, to long only for the peace of God is to know only the peace of God. There is no effort or activity in it. We aren’t improving or fixing or amending or editing in any way. We are simply sinking into the Love of which we are composed.

This, then, is my practice: to give attention to the internal landscape – what winds are sweeping across it, what tides are flooding the shores, what fires are smoldering in its deep forests. Where conflict arises, it does so with my consent. My role know is only to see this and trust that a power greater than my own will tend to the dissolution of what I have made in error and fear.

The gift of A Course in Miracles – to those for whom it is a resonant path and practice – is simply to bring us back into contact with the Holy Spirit, a teacher whose guidance is operative in every moment of the day. Whenever we ask, it is given to us to relax into the very peace that is our Home. We learn slowly – but we do learn – that we have not left God, and God has not left us.

*(Please note: this restaurant – and its website – are since gone. But it was a cool place to eat. All the sandwiches and salads were named after poets. Of course I ordered the Emily Dickinson sandwich . . . )

On Seeing Only the Past

I see only the past (W-pI.7).

The seventh lesson of A Course in Miracles is a beautiful way to reconnect to how practical and powerful the course is, and how readily it can be applied in our day-to-day lives.

What is the past but interpretation clung to in place of reality? When we see only the past, we are relying on our ideas about people, places and things – about life itself. This person is good, that flower is best, life is unfair. And all of that interpretation simply obscures reality which is always quiet, peaceful and flowing.

Our intentions can be very sincere and our desire all but perfect but it won’t matter if we are still only seeing the past. The past is always personal – it always reflects our goals, our investment in outcomes, our attachment to our feelings. We enshrine memory – we put it on a pedestal – and from that special place it blocks the Light that is God so that we seem to live only in shadows.

This habit of seeing only what is of the past can be very subtle. Many students of A Course in Miracles – certainly I am one of them – come to an intellectual appreciation of this lesson. Yes, yes, we say. The past impedes our experience of the present. We get it. On the surface, we are very devoted and committed. But deep down it is a different story.

So much of what feeds the ego is outside the immediate reach of our awareness. It emerges from the welter of Freud’s unacknowledged and unexplored cavernous interiors. We don’t have to go excavating for it – this is not a course in spiritual archaeology. But we do have to be vigilant to what is happening in the present. When we are not joyful and when we do not know peace, it is because we are separated from reality – which is to be separated from God – and we are separated this way because we have again allowed the past to intrude on our experience of God and love.

It is not my job to heal the past or even to uncover it. I merely need to be a faithful witness to the present effects of seeing only the past, and then to give those effects to the Holy Spirit, willing that they be undone for me.

Fortunately, to witness the present effect of seeing only the past is sufficient for healing.

This happens to all of us – separation, anxiety, fear, anger. There is no point in pretending otherwise and no point in feeling depressed or discouraged about it. When we practice A Course in Miracles – studying the text, doing the lessons, giving attention to forgiveness and love, and working with brothers and sisters to bring all this into fruitful application – we become increasingly aware of the gap between peace and conflict. We realize that we are invested in conflict – that we want it – and we perceive too the apparently vast space between our conflicted self and the peace that surpasses understanding.

This is a critical insight! Only when we realize how far we have to go, and how futile are the resources we call our own, that a real journey of healing and love can begin. And it will feel like a journey – it will resemble a journey – but the farther we go along it, the clearer it will be that we are merely traveling in place. We are merely remembering that we already have all that can be given, and that we are already home in Creation, where differentiation of any kind is impossible.

In other words, when I am tense and angry in a meeting, say, it is not necessary to dig into the past to find some similar incident or supposed cause. Analysis is not required! Rather, it is imperative I hold my tension and anger without judgment – to see them as mistakes in need of gentle correction rather than sins condemning me to an eternity in hell. When I do this, the Holy Spirit softly intercedes and dissolves the present conflict by bringing my attention back to the present, which A Course in Miracles calls a Holy Instant.

It is not my job to heal the past or even to uncover it. I merely need to be a faithful witness to the present effects of seeing only the past, and then to give those effects to the Holy Spirit, willing that they be undone for me. And they will be. And to that extend, my reliance on the past as a means of interpreting or understanding – manipulating, really – reality is diminished.

As this happens with greater frequency – as we gain confidence in our holiness and in the positive influence of our holy teacher – our stranglehold on the past will begin to diminish on its own. We will notice this in the sense that things which used to bother us – which used to cause us all manner of grief and anguish – are no longer such a big deal. We might not even notice them.

What happened? We learned to identify with the Holy Spirit – that’s what happened. We learned to want only what God wills for us.

That is our liberation. That is the field in which we awaken.

This is such a simple idea – we see only the past – and yet there is such a profound opportunity for healing in it. In all things, at all times, give attention to the way in which the past is seeping into your perception and shaping your conclusions and driving your behavior. Simply see it: take notice of what is happening, and what its effects are. The essential conflict will be clarified: we are given the Kingdom now, we are blessed in reality now. We are being tapped by God on the left shoulder and stubbornly looking to our right. It’s funny when we see how obstinate we are, and how forgiving God is, and how easily the apparent mess is corrected.

It truly takes very little to shift our attention from wrong- to right-minded thinking. What is hard is seeing the need for it – that is where the egoic mind/self is most aggressive and wily. The impulse to think we’re doing fine, making progress on our own and so forth can be both pervasive and persuasive. But once we have established the need for releasing the past as the only way to fully dwell in the Holy Instant, it is largely done for us. Really, we are simply seeing reality, which is not dependent on either our perception or interpretation to be real.

In any case, there is no power that can withstand our mind’s decision to return to love, to return to the holy present that in reality it never left.

Questioning Ourselves in A Course in Miracles

Part of my practice of A Course in Miracles revolves around questioning – questioning myself, questioning my practice, my motivations, my goals. I don’t do this to be mean or judgmental. Sometimes that happens, of course. But mostly it is undertaken with the Holy Spirit, and the objective is simply to ensure that I am not wandering too far from the path that will lead me home. It is a way of being vigilant against mind-wandering.

The text and workbook lessons of A Course in Miracles often encourage us to be vigilant in this regard, always with a goal of deepening our relationship with the decision-making mind. This can be a long process, subject to fits and starts, and not without its moments of confusion and misapplication. That’s how it goes in the world of form! But that is okay. When we make the decision to utilize this spiritual tradition as our means of awakening, all else needed will be given in time. Indeed, questioning is sometimes the means by which both the need for the gift – and the gift itself – is revealed to us.

Critical to this process of questioning is the habit of doing it with a power that is not oneself – that is, doing it with the Holy Spirit or Jesus (or another spiritual symbol if that is more helpful). When we venture into unhealed neighborhoods, a healed guide is not thing to have! It helps ward off the subtle patterns of egoic thinking that can neatly unravel our progress and learning.

So questioning, then, is a form of vigilance – of form of accepting the gifts of God rather than resisting them. It is not the only form of vigilance – prayer, meditation, walks in the forest, Emily Dickinson poems et cetera abound – but it is a helpful one. It reflects our faith that we are not bereft, that if we slip we will be helped upright, and that no adverse consequences attend the appearance of our imperfection. For we are just as God created us, and this is all that we are bound to remember, and all that we need to remember.

Undoing Ego Through Attention

It is important to remember that the ego is something we made – it is our project, our construct – and so we are enabled to bring it to an end as well. This makes no sense at all from an ego perspective (forever bent on its own preservation), which is why we need the help of A Course in Miracles in seeing what the ego is and how it can be undone. Ego, it turns out, can be undone through attention.

Help is simply the action of asking for help. Help is the insight that our own resources are futile and cannot be truly helpful, and so on that basis are set aside in favor of the possibility that there is – as Bill Thetford so fruitfully remarked a good half century ago – another way.

Help is not of us. It is really nothing more than seeing and accepting that simple fact. As soon as we truly relinquish our stranglehold on doing and acting and directing, then help – very useful help, very powerful help – is there. It is already given, a simple fact that all our activity and busy-ness obscures.

The ego opposes what it perceives as helplessness and surrender. It resists fiercely any movement on our part to to give ourselves to God. Its resistance can seem very logical and reassuring; that is why there is often a sense of risk involved in the spiritual life, a sense of danger.

We have to be willing to leap off a cliff in order to learn we cannot fall – nor journey in any meaningful way – because we already are what we seek, and what we are is one. There is nothing to go to and nothing to leave.

Don’t be afraid of the ego’s apparent tenacity and seeming ingenuity! It is just a product of your mind and reflects nothing more than a misguided application of that mind’s power.

Rather, simply give attention to the ego’s machinations, to how it works, and give attention as well to the flickers of holy light beyond it. When we do this gently and without judgment, we naturally begin to perceive the wholeness of which we in truth composed.

It is a wonderful thing to find oneself in contact both with the frantic activity of the ego and the deep well of the mind out of which the ego was made. The ego insists we can choose between these two seeming options and argues ferociously in its own favor. But the love inherent in our mind is not up for a vote, and our allegiance to it is beyond question save for when we are “thinking insanely” (T-7.VI.9:2).

What you are is not established by your perception, and is not influenced by it at all. Perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact. They are problems of understanding, since their presence implies a belief that what you are is up to you to decide (T-7.VI.9:3-5).

The ego is wrong – just wrong – and there is nothing to understand in it, nothing to correct in it, and nothing to share in it. Let it go and it is gone.

Thus, I walk in the forest morning after morning – I read and study and write during the day – I cook for my family at night – and in all of that I ask over and over to be shown my helplessness in order that I might at last say yes to the self I share with you in Creation, that together we might settle into a shared gift of attention, the sure promise of which is remembrance of God.

Healing Begins In Honesty

I’ve been thinking a great deal about honesty lately. I say “thinking” –  “feeling” would be a better word. “Looking” might be better yet. I am learning that healing begins in honesty.

Jesus said “let your yes mean yes,” and I like to repeat that, and preach on it, but it’s fair to say my yes is almost always conditional, almost always shifting ground, and even sometimes at war with itself.

This inconsistency – this dishonesty – is taking place at a fairly deep level, a fairly hidden level. It is in the nature of inauthenticity, and reflects only fear.

This is what happens in our practice of A Course in Miracles (or any serious spiritual path or tradition). We forgive and forgive, we study and study, and then one day – like turning the corner in a forest and coming on a bear – you hit this wall. It’s no good to pretend it’s not a wall, no good to quote the course, or any other spiritual platitude. You can’t fake your way to Christ.

I am talking here about little things: subtle things: things so slight you barely notice them, and yet the whole separation is contained in their execution. I mean being asked by Chrisoula how my day was and playing up certain angles to elicit sympathy. Or writing about my morning walks without really exploring what Jung would have called their “shadow side,” a darkness of which I am perfectly aware, because I prefer thinking of myself – and would prefer to be thought of – as some kind of Thoreauvian mystic with a clear channel to the divine.

A few weeks ago I put some Chinese characters up on my website – they stood for miracle (well, maybe – I don’t speak or read Chinese so maybe they stood for jelly doughnut) – and after a week or so I thought, who am I? I’m not Chinese. I’m not a Buddhist. I’m just trying to capitalize on the whole Eastern mysticism Zen thing.

So I took it down – and replaced it with an image much more spiritually and culturally resonant – but still. We think we’re beyond being shallow or vain and then Jesus says gently, “not so much. Not yet anyway.”

I am working on putting a few books together, and while reviewing proofs came upon a line that read: “I made contact with Christ/outside of history.”

And my first response was: the hell you did.

And the my second was: Oh, Sean. You mean well but you are such a blowhard.

And then I just laughed – at the poem, at myself, at the whole welter of intention and function and brokenness and love. What else is there? Maybe I did make that contact and I forgot. Maybe I made that contact and I’m scared to consistently own up to it. It doesn’t really matter.

But I do want my yes to mean yes.

We have to be patient with ourselves. There’s nothing to be gained by reliving the spirit of crucifixion over and over. We’re beyond that now. We’re into the resurrection now – why pretend otherwise?

Being dishonest – fostering internal dissonance – is not a crime against God. No punishment awaits outside the one in which we already live: the pain of believing we are separate from God. So it’s okay in the sense of no consequences, but if we want to wake up – if we want to know inner peace and joy in a real way, a sustained way, an unchanging way – then we are going to have to look at our priorities. We are going to have to make some changes.

Really, we are going to have to figure out how to live with the single goal of truth. I think it is in the nature of a decision: I am going to live my life wanting nothing but what God gives me. That is a radical statement. And maybe I can only mouth the words but not  yet mean it. Okay. I can still be honest about that, right? I can say “Okay, I’m not there yet but I want to be. I am willing to be.”

And that counts. It really does.

It counts because healing begins when we are honest and clear about the need for healing, whatever form it happens to take. This includes our capacity for self-deception. There is no other way. It all has to go on the table so that all of it can be undone.