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.

Awareness of God is Inner Peace

I walked twice today. Once because that’s what I do (it was chilly and dark and stormy) and twice because just after 1 p.m. the rain cleared and it was warm and sunny and sometimes one longs not for the hermitage but for the glorious light of God itself and seeing it right there, steps into it. Why not?

Chickadees and crows watched the dog and I go, singing a warning to those for whom two-feet and canines almost always mean danger. The trails were muddy and slick, still running with rain, and I slipped and fell more than once. The dog kept looking back as if to be sure I was okay. She is not used to unsteadiness in our walking. Nor am I really, but I am getting better at remembering to laugh.

As we went, I thought about inner peace – a phrase that has been echoing and reechoing in my mind lately, alternately annoying and delightful. Annoying because I used those words cheaply for far too long – long after I knew better – and delightful because there are no consequences and so it doesn’t matter if I used them cheaply or not. When we are ready to accept God, God is there – peace is there – and what went before is let go because it no longer serves. It is so simple and so liberating and so beautiful.

We truly are talking about a decision – a brief fold of the mind in the direction of love, or water assuming the shape of the doe’s print into which it falls. And we make it – we leap into the light like energetic monks, like love returning to love – and then . . . we fall back, slowly or quickly. It’s because we’re trying to fly on our own merit, not realizing that the sky was given to us in Creation, and we are already there. We are wings and sky and that mind that holds them both.

And yet how slowly we learn! And yet how lovely and spacious and embracing the world in which we learn! As if our happiness really were God’s will, and the chickadees and the rivers and the the pine trees God’s chorus, singing us the way home, one stumbling step after another.

A Stranger to Inner Peace

Part of seeing special hate relationships clearly is making contact with my impulse to be in competition with various brothers and sisters. My perception that I am locked in a struggle for survival, and that there are only a few winners, is why I am a stranger to inner peace.

Because God’s equal Sons have everything, they cannot compete. Yet if they perceive any of their brothers as anything other than their perfect equals, the idea of competition has entered their minds. Do not underestimate your need to be vigilant against this idea, because all your conflicts come from it (T-7.III.3:3-5).

What does it mean that we have everything, you and I, equally? Not at the level of cheap philosophy, not at the shallow level of feel-good spirituality, but in reality?

Earlier today I flipped through Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.

The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God (30).

I recognize this: the sentiment as well as the experience. It is why I am in the forest so often, so intimate with the wee hours, and rendering it all through the lens of wordiness. All that is truly the only church I know.

Yet the dogwood tree – or the wood ducks on the pond or the deer bounding away or the prismatic raindrops clinging to pine needles – are not in and of themselves God. Nor are they expressions of God.

They are reflections of inscape where one is either accepting or resisting God, that nameless and immeasurable isness that both infuses and contains perception.

This is why A Course in Miracles can say that “[T]o be in the Kingdom is merely to focus your full attention on it” (T-7.III.4:1).

This attention is not external – to blossoms, birds, dogs, trails. It is internal – to God or, when we are ready and willing, to our resistance to God. To look closely at one’s resistance to God is to remember God.

God has lit your mind Himself, and keeps your mind lit by His light because His light is what your mind is. This is totally beyond question, and when you question it you are answered (T-7.III.5:1-2).

Our perception of external beauty and holiness merely reflects the beginning of our identification with truth as God created it where God created it.

As this identification grows stronger and less fragmented and interrupted, our need for external reminders of God will diminish. There is no need to rush. Our exile becomes more and more lovely the nearer we get to its end.

It is not necessary to worry the metaphysical questions of what is real and what is illusion: that is what is given to us according to our readiness. What is necessary is simply to turn our attention in the direction of Love. No more is asked because no more could be asked.

In Relationship with Symbols of Truth

I do not believe that the historical Jesus dictated A Course in Miracles to Helen Schucman. Rather, I believe that Helen – in an action of profound love, profound willingness – accepted through the symbol of Jesus her real Self which, in conjunction with Bill Thetford, created the work that we now call A Course in Miracles.

Thus, the work itself – the books and supplements – represent a written manifestation of a personal relationship with Jesus that was intimate, deep and real. It naturally redounds to the benefit of those for whom ACIM is a good spiritual fit. My gratitude is vast.

This view seems most consistent with the course itself. The man named Jesus cannot be more real than you are, nor can he be special. There is nothing wrong with rendering him symbolic of Love, and entering into relationship with the symbol in order to better know that Love, but a certain clarity about that process is helpful. There are no exceptions to Oneness, and this includes Jesus.

However, our real goal is not to be right about the role that Jesus played in the writing of the course, but rather to make contact with the Love that he embodied, which is the Love that Helen embodied in her way, and which we embody, but perhaps dimly still, uncertainly.

So the question is: how do we begin to make contact with that Love? What is the bridge between the egoic thought system and the Thought of God?

I think the best answer, the most helpful answer is “through relationship.” More specifically, if we are going to use ACIM as our means, “through relationship with Jesus or the Holy Spirit.”

“Relationship” in this case should be taken literally. It is tempting to substitute the language of holiness for the experience of it (a substitution process that can tie you up in knots for decades, as I am only too happy to attest), but as I pointed out in the first paragraph, Helen’s relationship with Jesus was profoundly – practically – real. It was also profoundly productive. That’s what we want – an experience of relationship with Christ or God, through highly functional personal symbols (Jesus, Holy Spirit, Shiva, Source etc.), that infuses our day-to-day existence, rendering it creative and loving in deeply fructive ways.

The thing is, nobody can tell you how to have that relationship. If they are, then you are in relationship with them. And while that can be helpful in its way, and even desirable sometimes, it’s the not the relationship we’re after. I can read all I want about walking in the forest, tracking animals, identifying trees and flowers and bird songs, but if an intimate relationship with forest is what I’m after then there really is nothing to do but get out there and stay out there

A similar sort of principle attains to knowing God. We have to enter that which we desire. We’ve got to make space, prepare a place, extend an invitation.

We think of truth alone as we arise, and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our frightened minds with this:

The power of decision is my own. This day I will accept myself as what my Father’s Will created me to be.

Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be (WpI.152.11:2-6).

All that happens is that we are going to remember that we are already saved. It is simultaneously amazing and very simple, clear and familiar. “Oh, it’s this.” And we will slip in and out of it for a while, but never that far, because the slipping is just a mind wandering away for a few minutes. It is never not at home.

So I think it is helpful to make that relationship a focal point of our practice, understanding that we will ultimately know it as a relationship with our Self, which is not separate from anything – including Jesus, including God.