Sean Reagan

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.

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.

The sin of Lucifer was called pride but in reality it was a simple error, a common mistake of thought to which we are all of us beholden: the psychological premise that what we are in truth is separate from what God is and that what God is is given unequally and that we are thus called to respond, react – to somehow rectify – the injustice.

But nothing is that isn’t God. Even a dream in the mind of God’s creation retains a trace of the Source from whence it has devolved. Even in dreams the Voice for God speaks, and where that Voice goes, knowledge of God goes as well. We are not bereft; we are not separate, even here. Even now.

It is critical to see this fact plainly and to question our inevitable doubt and skepticism with respect to it. The mind that questions God will answer itself, and the answer will be God, and it will also be nameless. We are moving beyond even the duality inherent in “oneness.” That is to say, moving beyond considering God as “not this but that” or as a unitary continent for many separate things.

Thus, we even have to question our acceptance. When we pass through doubt, when we pass through grief, and “get it” – realize we are there, It, one with the Godhead – we have to question that as well. We have to keep going. Questioning begets an energetic awareness that is never not revelatory. Properly understood, that which stops or ceases, that which can be defined and set aside and picked up later, is not the altar before which we will mutually witness the dissolution of self, other and altar altogether.

Over and over I fall (leap?) into the trap of believing that what is external will save me: some concatenation of circumstance, some lover’s lingering kiss, some ripe sum of money, some supernatural mystical event. So what? That is the nature of thought’s specificity. A rock dropped in a lake will elicit ripples, each ripple a natural extension of the cause by which it was made. I don’t cry out to Jesus over that; why approach thought any different?

In all things, give attention only to that which is present in all things. For example, if it is present during my morning walk but not while settling disputes about what’s for dinner, then it is not God. It is not there. If it is present while making love but not while grading papers, then it is not God. It is not there. And so forth.

Lucifer did not fall, nor was he pushed. He leaped. And leaping, believed that he landed, and believing he had discovered some space other than Heaven, rendered it a rude Kingdom over which to rule in grief. Moment by moment we do the same: we leap, we tell ourselves a lie, we believe it, and we defend our belief unto seeming death.

But it is given to us to stop leaping, to see a lie for the untruth it is, and to believe instead what is true. This is not a story though it often takes the shape of one, nor is it a poem, though poetry is a welcome home to it.

It is more in the nature of a love letter, one which writes itself as we read it and into which we willingly – even ecstatically – melt, to better become its wordiness, its inkiness, and its emptiness.

How vast and happy we are allowed to be, amid so many flowers blossoming, so many birds giving song . . .

Spring gesticulated; fell back. So it goes in March: one day you’re jacketless and whistling back at Robins, the next you’re watching gusts of wind blow thin streams of snow beneath the back door. The chickens huddle in beds of straw and the dog looks back at you, as if to say: really? Even in this weather?

Yet walking is prayer for me: and prayer the way I extend toward God as God extends toward me, ever intent on restoring to my divided mind a memory of wholeness, our shared movement of reaching twining strains of an unbroken canticum novum. To say this, even poetically, especially poetically, is not nothing: when we give word to our insight, we effectively translate it to understanding, and thus lay a path in darkness, much like Hansel with his pocket full of white stones. The path is not the destination but it can move us towards the destination. At least it can help.

All this, of course is words – words purporting to describe a process that is ongoing, measurable, observable, susceptible to influence. But in a sense – an important one – nothing is happening. But in another, we are waking up to this nothing, and that waking resembles an event – an activity that is unfolding within time. We cannot escape that sensation. To our bodies, the world will always be real, just as to the machinations of our brains, thought will always seem as if it is just about to “get it.”

But Life is not containable: and it cannot be reduced to anything the body (which includes the brain) can grasp, the way it grasps baking bread, or paddling when in water, or adding three to three and getting six. Until we accept this we are going to proceed in circles. As soon as we render the Infinite in language – God, Truth, Pure Being, Shiva, Source et cetera – we have curtailed what cannot be curtailed. We are gesturing toward God, but the gesture itself is not God, even as it intimates God.

Sri Aurobindo said it was okay to do this so long as one appreciated the way that words appear distinct and sure but are in fact misleading and even violent in their apparent representation of reality.

He said that when we use language responsibly – which is to say, with burgeoning awareness of its limitations – then

[W]e begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity (The Life Divine 33).

There is a correlative in A Course in Miracles, which emphasizes that miracles are done through us without our understanding precisely what miracles are (T-16.II.2:4-6). This is not necessarily to denigrate the intellect but rather to move in the direction of understanding the natural limitations of its helpfulness.

You are still convinced that your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and makes it what it is. Yet we have emphasized that you need understand nothing (T-18.IV.7:5-6).

It cannot be said enough: we cannot think our way to salvation. But we can reason our way to seeing the futility of thought, the folly of repeating what has not worked, and the concomitant need for an alternative that operates in and through us, even as it is not of us. Thus we open: little by little: making a space for the Infinite that never left. Emily Dickinson is – as always – instructive:

The Absolute – removed
The Relative away –
That I Unto Himself adjust
My slow idolatry (488)

It is not imperative that we learn fast or thoroughly, for even learning can become an idol obscuring our awareness of God. But it is imperative that we question everything: learning and resistance to learning and the language that seems to envelope them both. Attention given – gently, consistently, in a sustainable way – to these things will never not finally reveal the fullness of which we are in truth composed.