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 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.

God’s Will is Freedom

Freedom lies in wanting only what God wills. When that is our condition, we can do anything, because we are not doing anything but rather God is willing through us, and our lives become expressions of God’s perfect love.

This is not something that we do: rather, it is something to which we give our consent, and then remain in a state of readiness and willingness. A kind of energetic passivity attends. When swimming in the sea, have you ever allowed yourself to sink? To be pulled by the always flowing tides? It is like that: a surrendering, a letting go, a sinking into currents not of our own making.

Resistance is not a meaningful reflection of freedom. The choice to hear another voice beside the one for God, the choice to hear it but refuse its message, and the choice to obey in part and refuse in another part are not aspects of freedom. A Course in Miracles points out that “[C]hoosing depends on a split mind” (T-5.II.6:6). So long as we are choosing between outcomes – one the basis of what we will get – then we are not truly free.

When our will opts for anything other than alignment with God’s will, it remains entrapped and enslaved. There is no compromise in this regard.

Yet we have cause for freedom here and now (T-26.VIII.9:3). A Course in Miracles offers us – through its curriculum, including diligent application of its lessons – a way to relearn freedom. It teaches us that we are already one with God and need only remember and accept this simple fact.

You cannot walk the world away from God, because you could not be without Him. He is what your life is. Where you are He is. There is one life. That life you share with Him (W-pI.156.2:4-8).

That is the singular truth to which A Course in Miracles is forever directing us: that we are already one with God and perfect freedom, happiness and peace is literally as far away as the next breath. It takes time for us to learn this, and to bring it into application, but that does not make it less true.

When you have learned that your will is God’s, you could no more will to be without Him than He could will to be without you. This is freedom and this is joy (T-8.II.6:4-5).

The degree we remain unhappy, divided, confused, lonely and in conflict is simply the measure of the degree to which we are trying to obey a will foreign to our own. That is not freedom and its reward is always death. The alternative isn’t really an alternative: rather, it is simply to stop doing what we are doing and give our attention to God, to Truth as God created it. That can sound unduly mystical or even elitist but it’s really not. Spend five minutes looking for God and God will consent to be found: in a light breeze, in a child’s laugh, in a tangle of violets, the scent of cookies, the kindness of a friend.

And in time, all these symbols will recede in importance, as we will understand that they are but mediators between God and our self. Seeing that there is no space between God and self, what use are symbols? A happy day approaches, beyond words and means; our willingness it come hastens its arrival.

Inner Peace Within Creation

Inner peace is understanding all things created as what they are – free of judgment, and the demands that judgment places on them (e.g., T-30.V.1:3-5). But forgiveness precedes understanding (T-30.V.1:6), and until we have made it our practice, we will remain confused about what we are, what our function is, and what the purpose of the world is.

Implicit in this truth is the fact that forgiveness is not an intellectual exercise. Reason can show us the need for it, but some other action – some other motivation – is what brings us to its application. This is something that happens here – in these bodies and in this world. It is highly practical. It is a skill that can be learned.

To forgive is to want only what God offers. It is to live in the faith that creation is sufficient unto life and that nothing need be added and – more to the point – that nothing can be added. When this is the guiding principle of our lives, our motivation shifts and our action becomes inspired.

What do we bring to a given situation? We bring judgment in the form of expectation – things should be this way, not that way. This has to happen in order for me to be happy, and that can’t happen. This person can be involved but that one can’t.

The ego’s imperatives thrive in darkness and secrecy is its fuel.

Sometimes when I look closely at my thoughts – the wordy ones at the surface, but the deeper ones too, the ones that stir like oceanic currents, outside the immediate grasp of language – I am shocked to see how subtle and yet non-negotiable my demands and rules and conditions can be. We like to bathe ourselves in light but so long as we hide this greed and selfishness, the light cannot extend very far.

So forgiveness is about getting clear with all of that – allowing ourselves to witness it with a loving teacher (the Holy Spirit or Jesus, in ACIM parlance) and not freak out about it. The ego’s imperatives thrive in darkness and secrecy is its fuel. Forgiveness is a way of bringing light to shadow in order to undo the shadow’s more pernicious effects.

We can’t think our way though that experience. It is more in the nature of sitting quietly and watching our thoughts, and dropping through them, level by level, to see what else is there. What drives us? What are our wants? What are we willing to do to satisfy them?

If the level of intellect were sufficient to undo all this, then we would have solved the problem a long time ago, and A Course in Miracles – and myriad other expressions of the perennial philosophy – would not be necessary. The intellect has its place but spiritual inquiry with a goal of undoing illusion is not it.

Forgiveness is a new way of engaging with – of giving attention to – thought. It is clarifying in its devotion to perceiving wholeness in place of fragmentation. It is unfamiliar at first, but as we bring it to bear consistently in our lives – all corners of our lives – it will become more familiar. It will become less frightening, less discombobulating.

And in its wake we will begin to understand what it means to be in – to be – Creation itself. This is not primarily a material experience but rather a state of mind in which we see only means to happiness and joy, a path to peace from which deviation is neither necessary nor desirable.

We are not separate from God – and God is not separate from us – but arriving at this truth is not an intellectual experience. We may later use the intellect to talk about it – to leave notes for those coming after (hence my eternal gratitude to Emily Dickinson) – but the wordy logic of the brain is not the operative mode. Forgiveness is. And forgiveness is the quiet breath of Creation itself, gently infusing our will with a desire to know (through remembrance) only God, and to release – however slowly – each aspect of self that impedes that remembering.

Leaping Into God, Singing As We Go

I think that what A Course in Miracles does for the serious student – because it is what any spiritual path will do for those who attend it with devotion and tenacity – is allow the space in which to discover – or recover, if you like – our fundamental unity with God. Our fundamental oneness.

It allows that space – but it does not mandate that we enter it, nor dictate what we are to do once we enter it. It’s important to see this. When we choose to become students of the course, we assume responsibility for what happens. Insight cannot be forced on us. So if we are going to learn anything – if we are going to see the internal horror show undone – we are going to have to bring some energy to it. We are going to have to give some energy.

What energy? We can’t talk our way to it. We can’t write or paint our way to it. The action is internal. It is a decision to accept that there is nothing to seek. It is the acceptance of “there is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God” (W-pI.200.1:5). If we make that the single fact of our lives – if we did – then the energy would be there. The world bends to love the one who knows there is nothing to find but God.

This is such a personal process. It is like my devotion to Emily Dickinson. Nobody else could take that step for me – nobody else can mediate her for me. You make the decision to enter what resonates and you don’t deviate from it. It’s scary because it’s like leaping off a cliff. What if I am making the wrong choice here? What will I lose? None of us escape those doubts. It’s okay. Dickinson herself said:

The Soul’s distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick calamity –

So I am saying that we need to find out if A Course in Miracles works. We need to find out if there is nothing to discover but the Love that is God. We aren’t talking about it. We are leaping into it, singing as we go.

A Natural Serious Happiness

Often when I am tired there is some slipping, as if the the energy necessary to sustain my fear and guilt and anxiety – that mode of thinking A Course in Miracles calls the ego – cannot be borne, and so is set aside, and in its place appears a quiet awareness, a natural and serious happiness.

And so I sit by the window as the sun is eclipsed by the horizon, books scattered around me, and stare not at the poems and prose but rather outside to where laundry strung along the clothesline fills with fading sunlight and wind, the sleeves of our shirts reaching for the sky, while beneath them, in flailing shadows, chickadees and mourning doves scavenge for seeds.

Does the mind clear a little? Or soften? Something happens.

The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. The Holy Spirit teaches that you cannot lose your soul and there is no gain in the world, for of itself it profits nothing (T-12.VI.1:1-2).

There is such a patient and reassuring loveliness in those clear simple sentences. We cannot lose our souls. Two thousand years we’ve been fighting to save them, enmeshed in a fierce battle with eternal stakes, lashed on by Cotton Mather’s stern prose and Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and it was all for naught. There was always another way. Bill Thetford was right.

A Course in Miracles comes along and says our spiritual warfare is an error. More, it is an illusion, altogether without effect. A wisp of cloud trailing off to nowhere. That which is does not set conditions. Therefore there are no consequences.

Can you imagine it? No consequences? If we believed it, we would instantly be at peace, our concepts of right and wrong not even a dim memory.

But we don’t believe it: we play at believing it. We say it – or write it – but it remains an idea, an ideal, a goal. We’ll get to it someday.

Mallow-colored contrails float through the deepening sky. Pine trees darken and mourning doves leave the shadowed limbs for day’s last meal. I think of Jesus faint with hunger in the desert, refusing the devil’s challenge to turn stones into loaves of bread, a way of saying he would not deviate, would only accept that which God offered.

When we say that’s what we want too, do we know what we are saying? Are we ready?

We are in the nature of love itself but in a state of forgetfulness, a self-induced trance, a misremembering of identity. We lose love in a moment of fear and then compound the error a thousand ways a thousand times. And all that is called for is a simple return to stillness – not even the return, really, but the willingness to return. How little would suffice to restore our minds to their natural grace.

And yet . . . Sometimes I forget even that much, gratefully charmed into dreary exile. A handful of violets in the shadow of wild rhubarb, vivid rainbows sparkling on garden quartz, chipmunks lecturing from the fallen gutter where they stow seed and hide from neighborhood cats . . .

Over and over I fall for the world – its images and narratives – and the self it reinforces by gathering all the loveliness in. I fall for it and my forgetfulness deepens.

Emily Dickinson warned me. Remember, she said, God’s table is

spread too high for us
Unless we dine on tip-toe.
Crumbs fit such little mouths,
Cherries suit robins;
the eagle’s golden breakfast
Strangles them.

What God or Gods would ask you to struggle for spiritual sustenance? Would offer it up so sparingly, so meanly? What God would force us to beg for crumbs so near to – and yet so far from – the bounty of Heaven?

And yet – somehow – the robins find their sweet cherries, the eagles their chickens and hares. What would strangle one suffices to fill the other. Perhaps it is not so bad . . .

Two thousand years ago, Jesus said that even though two sparrows are sold for a penny – valued so cheaply by the world – “not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”

True enough, said Dickinson. But:

God keeps his oath to sparrows,
Who of little love
Know how to starve!

What have we taught ourselves in our long separation? What hunger have we named our own? What Gods have we created to cast a blessing on such a dubious enterprise?

The same year (1861) that Dickinson was telling us it was time to rethink God, she also modeled what such rethinking might resemble. She pronounced herself “Inebriate of air,” drinking “a liquor never brewed,” a veritable”little Tippler/Leaning against the – sun,” astounding saints and angels with her casual proximity to Heaven, her confidence that she owned a place there, as we all do, without qualification or equivocation.

Indeed – still within that close sequence of poems (195, 207, 213 – 1999 Belknap Press Reading Edition) – musing on the open secrets of the skies passed to hills, from hills to orchards and from apple trees to daffodils, she told God he could keep those secrets because “it’s finer – not to know.”

She might have also said  that we already know and merely need to remember it. Certainly, she remembered it. Her poems and letters are a map that we might remember too.

A Course in Miracles says that our remembrance is not far off.

A little while and you will see me, for I am not hidden because you are hiding. I will awaken you as surely as I awakened myself, for I awoke for you . . . Trust in my help, for I did not walk alone, and I will walk with you as our Father walked with me (T-12. II.7:1-2, 5).

This is not the Christ of crucifixion and sorrow – whose fatherly God builds such exclusive tables – but rather the Christ with whom we share a mission to “escape from crucifixion, not from redemption” (T-12.II.7:4).

So I close the books; I turn from the north-facing window and walk to the south. A quarter moon, softened by a faint bower of mist, hangs a little above the treeline. For a moment you could convince yourself it was trying to decide: should I fall or should I stay?

It falls; its light fades. Mourning doves and chickadees retreat to hidden nests, the laundry is collected. Wordiness is a pale approximation of the Love I am bent on recollecting but for now it has to do. Dickinson knew. We are “trudging to Eden, looking backward,” she said. We are making do with crumbs, for now. We are seeing our hunger anew, going where it takes us.

A Way Of Thinking For Which We Are Responsible

One of the aspects of ego about which we are mostly in denial is the fact that we like it – it works for us – and so we don’t want to give it up. It took me a long time to see this in my own experience. I still struggle with it.

If you look closely at your sorrow or anger or whatever, you will eventually see that it is not causally related to what you perceive as external – other people, places and things. It is, rather, a way of thinking for which you are responsible.

When I first began to see this it was very exciting. It made a lot of sense. So on that basis there was a lot to be thankful for.

However, when we realize that we are responsible for the way that we think – for the choices that we make in this regard – there is often a sudden vacuum. We can no longer blame external conditions for our problems – the way we were raised, the standards of our culture, the dictates of biology and chemistry.

In a way, that is what the ego is – an insistence on looking outside of us in order to find a scapegoat for our loneliness and pain. And now we are seeing that this doesn’t really work. In fact, we are seeing that the real cause of our pain and loneliness and all of that is caused by this habit of projection, this insistence on looking outward.

For me, it was – and it still is in many ways – very difficult to accept responsibility for choosing to think with God.

“Choosing to think with God” in this case really means nothing other than to want only what God offers me in any given moment. If you think about it, that is a very radical statement. It is the complete opposite of what the world teaches and what the ego teaches. So it requires attention to the interior state. It requires patience and willingness and even a certain stubbornness. A graceful intensity, maybe.

If we put aside our goal of being happy or productive or right, and instead focus on making contact with truth as God created it – on God for God’s sake – then certain changes are going to occur, and not every one of them is going to be pleasant, at least not initially.

It can be very disorienting to willingly lay aside the thought patterns and habits that constitute the ego. It is liberating but we don’t necessarily experience that liberation as peaceful or even reasonable. It can feel very scary and destabilizing. The familiar can be an inviting cage.

This is why there is a period – perhaps a very substantial one – in which we vacillate. We step into the Light and dance for a few minutes and then flee back to the familiar shadows. And then we creep forward again. Over and over.

There is nothing wrong with getting used to the Light of Christ – or God – or whatever-you-wish-to-call-it – slowly. You can take it as slow or fast as you like; that is what time is for. But when we see what is happening – and perceive that there is no choice other than this, and that salvation hinges on it – we can maybe begin to devote ourselves to accepting that Light, to really being in it.

I do think that honesty is critical, though. There are a lot of impediments in my practice of A Course in Miracles – I am deeply invested in being “right,” I hide behind intellect and eloquence, I equivocate with my teachers and so forth – but I am also honest about all that. I try hard not to lie. Of course I am not perfect in this, but still. Willingness, not perfection, is what is required.

Honesty allows a little space in which our right or healed mind – the Holy Spirit, in course parlance – is able to be heard. It is what allows us to perceive that there is another way, a better way. It is what allows us to begin undoing blocks and to practice being responsible for our mind.