Intelligence Beyond the Brain

Is there an intelligence beyond the brain? What does it mean to say this? And if there is such an intelligence, can it be related to A Course in Miracles? Will A Course in Miracles introduce us to this intelligence?

When I sit quietly and give attention to what can be observed, I see that another energy is sustaining life and that it has nothing to do with me. The trees are not growing because of what I do. The birds are not flying and feeding and building their nests under my direction. The movement of the sun and the moon, the falling rain – it is all so consistent, all so beautiful and all so perfectly independent of my self.

All that does not rely on the brain at all. Long before our brains were inventing language and monetary systems and governments and agriculture and so forth, the flowers were simply growing and going to seed and growing again. The seasons were emptying into one another. The stars were shining, the ocean rising and falling

I am not playing word games: you can call it evolution, or biology or chemistry or whatever you want, and I am still going to ask you: is it not a form of intelligence? Is there not an order to it? We don’t have to leap into theology, which is just another abstraction. We can just stay with our observation of how simple life is, and how orderly, and how little it asks of us. It’s not about science and it’s not about narrative. It just is. And giving attention to it is a very liberating, very empowering gift.

If we discern between the activity of the brain and the action of life, then we are beginning to see that there is in fact another intelligence and that we are related to it. A Course in Miracles, like plenty of other spiritual paths, will point us in its direction but it cannot take us there. It is like the old adage: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. We have to recognize our thirst. We have to make the decision to slake it.

Giving attention to what is relieves our unfulfillment and restores to our mind the fact of its wholeness.

What A Course in Miracles calls the mind is not the same thing as the brain. It is something else. When we look into it, we see that mind is not readily measurable. It is not confined. It has qualities of the eternal and the infinite. Again, we don’t need to go into God and Heaven and all of that – that abstraction, that philosophy, that theology. All of that is fodder for conflict. But we can make contact with this intelligence, this energy, flowing through mind. It is the easiest thing to do because we are that intelligence. We are that flow.

“Flows” is the right word here. Mind is not an organ; it is not an instrument. It is more in the nature of a movement, a flow. It has tidal qualities, reflective properties. It is not concerned with survival or improvement or status. It is not ambitious or greedy. It wants nothing because it has everything.

These are just words, of course, and words are just symbols. They are not the thing itself but only relative approximations, always subject to error. It’s okay. We are not really trying to anymore to explain anything or even to understand anything here. We are trying to know the experience of peace and joy which naturally inheres in Creation and so naturally inheres in us.

We are moving beyond words, and beyond learning, in favor of experience. We are atoning. We are letting go our attachment to separation.

When I mentioned earlier the energy – the life – that infuses the sunlight which infuses the lilac bush which lights up my mind . . . That life or energy is not external to me. Nor, really, is it internal. Rather, it is me. And you, too. There is nowhere this life and energy is not. Its currents enfold everything and all things unfold out of it. Call it “ground” or “God” or “Brahman” or “flux” and what it is doesn’t change one bit. What a gift to know such stability and grace, to no longer perceive oneself as apart from it!

A Course in Miracles cleared a space for me in which it became possible to learn how to give attention and thus perceive that which lies beyond language, that which lies beyond form, and that which lies beyond perception. It related me to the intelligence that underlies the flow of life, teaching me that I am not separate from that life but rather flow with it and through it as it flows through me. You too.

So I am grateful, indeed, and my gratitude keeps me close to awareness of God. Nothing is disturbed, nothing is disgraced.

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.