Sean Reagan

As our study and practice of A Course in Miracles continues, our sense of ourselves as “special” begins to erode. This can take many forms – we are more patient with others, we laugh more readily at our “mistakes,” we don’t sweat the little things so much – but at some point it is always experienced as fearful and so we resist it. We cling to some shred of self, some fragment of egoic belief because it seems to minimize the fear. Unfortunately, that little piece is sufficient to extend our suffering.

What would your life be like if you related to everyone you met, and every experience you had, without specialness?

Every attack on our peace, without exception, arises because we believe we are separate beings – separate from one another and separate from God. We believe that yesterday’s experience is separate from today’s which is separate from tomorrow’s. This division permeates our belief system, rending everything into fragments.

What perceives itself as fragmented will naturally defend itself: that is what pieces do. They know they are not the whole, they know there are other pieces “out there,” that some of them are bigger and stronger and maybe even vengeful at the original break and so they defend.

It can be helpful to nurture a space in which it is possible to give sustained attention to what is – our thoughts and feelings, our relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, our goals as students, our answer to the perennial ACIM question “what is it for?”

In that space, I can see the way in which my sense of self is both perilously fragile and incredibly aggressive and vexatious. It is as if the faintest breath could brush it away forever and so it flails and rages up its own storm in a frantic (and ultimately doomed) effort to keep that faint breath away.

What does this look like? I’ll give you a personal example.

A couple of weeks ago, a student approached me after class. She’s never had me before, English classes aren’t her strong suit and so forth. She wanted to be sure she understood the poem we were discussing. We’re talking, it’s going fine and then she mentions that she shared the poem with another professor who made a simple comment that turned out to be very helpful.

I responded to that comment first with fear and then with righteous indignation. I watched my response happen (this is becoming much more frequent for me – the capacity to observe internal response to the external without actually needing to respond or engage with it). What if this other teacher thinks this is the wrong poem to teach? What if she thinks I’m an idiot? What if she talked to other faculty and right now they’re plotting to fire me because of this poem?

Then, in response to that fear, came indignation. If this student wasn’t happy in my class then fine. Let her take it with someone else. If some professor wanted to cop an attitude about the material I teach, then fine. I’ll teach somewhere else. Hell, I’ll go climb a mountain and eat nuts and drink rain water all while writing beautiful haiku in the mist.

This was all this very subtle. The tone of my voice didn’t change, my commitment to being helpful didn’t change. I never said a word about it to anyone. But it was there.

And that is what the ego is and that is how specialness works. If it can’t ruin us at the surface, it will percolate as far down as it needs to go so long as it can still be there. That’s what it means to cling to some shred of ego. It shows up very quietly, almost unnoticeable. But it’s still there. It is still operative.

The spiritual practice of A Course in Miracles is simply to see this and to offer it to the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to take it to a therapist or spiritual counselor, or act it out in the world of form, or write it down in our wellness journal. None of those things are bad or wrong. They can be very helpful in their way. They just aren’t required.

All we have to do is recognize specialness and see how it makes us miserable. That is all. And it will be undone for us because – even deeper than crazy, is our longing for peace and even deeper than that is our knowledge that peace is ours right here, right now.

It can be hard to hear this but it’s true: when we are ready to be done with specialness, then we’ll be done with it. Period. It’s not like dismantling a mansion with a toothpick – it doesn’t have to a long, tedious and arduous process. That’s just a choice we make. Naturally, we can make another.

So why don’t we just let specialness go?

Fear.

In that space of sustained attention I mentioned earlier, there is often a dim sense of fear, as if something is terrified of being seen or exposed. It’s not rocket science. If I let go of this self – this ego, this specialness – what will remain? What will “I” be? The ego cannot answer that question (because it does not know the answer) and so it always responds “death.” But in truth, A Course in Miracles assures us that “the death of specialness is not your death, but your awaking into eternal life” (T.24.II.14.4).

So we have to trust that. Trust is a by-product of a personal relationship with either Jesus or the Holy Spirit (or both). That relationship is what allows us to take a deep breath, drop down into the interior miasma, take another look at the seeming horrors of the ego and allow them to be undone. Peace is the sure – the inevitable – result. Trust that.

Another way to think about the ego is that it is a belief which attempts to usurp those creative functions that belong to God. We could say that the ego is a maker of illusions that aspires to be a Creator of reality or truth and it does so by trying to overthrow God.

The mind has a natural inclination to create, and the ego properly senses this. But this inclination cannot be wielded in attack, because attack is by definition divisive, and division denies the indivisible nature of what is eternally whole and perfect.

Attacks on God are insane, not because God is powerful enough to meet any assault with superior force, nor because God is vengeful and bent on retaliation. Attacks on God are insane because what is one cannot attack itself nor defend itself against such an attack.

This does not mean much to us who still live and think in a primarily dualistic framework, but that’s okay. We are using words to gesture towards concepts that do not readily lend themselves to explication. Truth is abstract and utterly generalizable; at that level, we can say that Oneness cannot go to war with itself.

Clearly, however, the ego can – and does – think otherwise. And there is a very specific way to work its wrong-minded (or non-Christ-minded) thinking: in all things (here in bodies, here in the world of form), ask with deliberation and intent: what do I want?

You are answering [this question] every minute and every second, and each moment of decision is a judgment that is anything but ineffectual. Its effects will follow automatically until the decision is changed. Remember, though, that the alternatives themselves are unalterable (T-5.V.6:3-5).

Few ideas are as helpful to those of us struggling with  illusion as this one: there are only two possible answers to the question “what do we want.” One is the ego, which we made through our belief in separation and the other is the Holy Spirit, which is God’s Answer to the dream of separation.

Always we are choosing between love or fear. Between peace or conflict.

We tend to approach our lives as if they contain a multitude of choices that literally shift and evolve from minute to minute. Some appear mundane – what do I wear to work – while others appear profound – how do I console a parent grieving their lost child. But all those questions emerge from (are symbols of) our answer to the only question that matters: ego or Holy Spirit? God or not God?

When we perceive ourselves as responsible for solving anything – from a mini fashion crisis to the apparent finality of death – we are tacitly acknowledging that the ego, and not the Holy Spirit, is the architect of happiness and peace. Only guilt and fear can follow from that premise.

A Course in Miracles might be understood as a simple means by which we restore to the mind its power of decision, by making clear to it how simple decision actually is.

Reality proceeds from its Creator as surely as a snowflake seeks a surface on which to rest, and just as peacefully, just as naturally. We are not responsible for it. I do not make the snow, nor the sun that plays across it, nor the prismatic light show that follows. I merely choose to give attention to the whole of it, and joy is the natural result.

So it is with God and Creation. We do not make it. We simply say yes to it and it is given to us, whole and sparkling and pure. We choose the Holy Spirit.

I was walking with a friend recently, snowy back roads at twilight. While our spiritual paths are different, our general sense of what it means to be spiritual – what the goals are, what the work is, what the results are – is quite similar. Our talks are almost always fruitful.

We were talking about how as one’s relationship with God deepens, the simpler one’s external and temporal existence becomes. Problems are not so vexing; one’s sense of necessity softens. For example, this winter I have to come to regard sunlight on snow as perhaps the loveliest and most dazzling light ever created, and it is given to me on an almost daily basis. My attention to it has intensified to a white heat; my gratefulness in those moments is boundless.

I am only able to perceive winter light this way because I have changed my mind about beauty and giving. And that, I said to my friend, is the textbook definition of a miracle according to A Course in Miracles.

She said – less in response than simply thinking out loud – “they really need to change the name of that thing.”

Beyond a willingness to change, nothing else is required. Love will always do the rest perfectly.

In western (and Christian) culture, we are accustomed to thinking of  miracles in terms of the suspension of the laws of physics, or really out-sized gifts from God. Jesus walked on water, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. We win the lottery. They are big events that always resolve in our special favor. Thus, when we are diagnosed with cancer, we pray for a miracle – which almost always means that we don’t die. And so forth.

But A Course in Miracles means something else entirely when it talks about miracle. A miracle is first and foremost an expression of love (See T-1.I.1:4, 3:2 and 9:2). Bill Thetford once described them as “the love that sustains the universe.”

It’s the shift in perception that removes the barriers or obstacles to our awareness of love’s presence in our lives.

So it is critical to see that this love is not external but rather “in” our mind. It is a thought (T-1.I.12:1), not an event. They are not caused by what is external so much as reflected there. Sunlight in winter has never not been astounding. But as I practice the course, I become less invested in the active egoic mind, and there is more space to simply appreciate what is given and so, like a blind man who suddenly regains his sight, I can actually see that light, sparkling and prismatic like the eyes of a thousand joyful angels.

And of course, that is not all that I “see.” There is also the cry of owls in the distance at three a.m. There is starlight in the February sky. My daughter playing fur elise on the piano. Homemade peach sauce over homemade vanilla ice cream. Cardinals at the feeder. Chrisoula’s laugh. Emily Dickinson poems received at deeper and deeper levels. The smell of cedar walking, and wood smoke back home while resting. Deer tracks. The brook humming beneath a thick sleeve of ice.

But all those are simply forms: a litany of things through which I can more or less consistently glimpse the love that is God, that is that-which-is, that is Source, Light, the Ground of all Being, etc. And thus perceived, these things lift me in turn, and from that space of gentle elevation, love extends readily and naturally through me. Miracles are not  something one does but more in the nature of something one allows God to do without relation to specificity of form. Thus, beyond a willingness to change, nothing else is required. Love will always do the rest perfectly. We just need to get out of the way.

Resistance to the title – A Course in Miracles – is premised on the idea that miracles are not internal shifts of perception in the direction of love, but great big external events that please and sustain the egoic self. When we accept that they are “expressions of love” unrelated to what is external (in the same way a mirror is not related to what it reflects), then the title becomes altogether accurate.

Thetford again:

At the time, I certainly didn’t respond positively to that title. However, when you get into the Course and then into the definition of what a miracle is, it does make sense. In fact, it’s the only appropriate name for the Course.

He is right, of course. There is no need to change the name of A Course in Miracles. Instead, there is a need to study it and bring what is learned into application. This takes a miracle: nothing else is needed.

In a footnote in Up from Eden, Ken Wilber observes that one element of his reservations about Hegel – who he otherwise considers a “towering genius” combining “transcendent insight with mental genius” – is that Hegel had no yoga, no “reproducible technique of transcendence” (638, 641).

To me, that is an interesting criticism. It suggests that no matter how capable we are of using our intellectual powers to parse spiritual, theological and philosophical texts and draw useful connections between them, some essential quality remains absent if we cannot bring those insights and connections into what Tara Singh called “application.”

In other words, what is the benefit of talking about a spiritual path if we cannot also walk it?

Often – both on this site and in related dialogues – I tend to come down on the side of walking the walk rather than talking the talk. I don’t want to become eloquent on the subject of salvation; I want to be saved.

And yet.

Wilber makes an interesting (and to my mind, related) observation about this issue. He points out that we often talk about spiritual ideas and material before we are able to practice or otherwise integrate it into our lives. He calls this a sort of “learner’s permit.” That is, by talking about it – even in limited ways – we learn that lightening bolts aren’t going to come flying from the sky, that this particular material is not transgressive or dysfunctional. We are given permission to engage.

In fact, the initial intuition of Spirit often, even usually, drives the individual to attempt to grasp, in mental forms, that which is actually transmental . . . He is laboring to reach the transmental through compulsive mental activity – an activity itself driven by his transmental intuition (The Collected Works of Ken Wilber, Volume Two, 651).

In a way, a lot of this website can be understood in that light – an attempt, through mental activity, to give form to a spiritual process.

Indeed, when I look at my own spiritual experience – especially since I became a student of A Course in Miracles – it is clear that intellectual effort and (dim to be sure) understanding often precedes a more abstract, less formal awareness of spirit, or God.

The clearest example of this might be the workbook lessons of A Course in Miracles which, even as they are themselves somewhat abstract and poetic in form, offer a concrete daily means by which to realize atonement for oneself. They consistently invite us to apply course principles to the facts of our lives – circumstantial challenges, difficult relationships, confusing desires, etc. In this way, they serve as the “yoga” that Wilber believes Hegel lacked.

But I’d like to offer a more specific example.

When I first began to study and practice the course, I was drawn to this idea of the world being a dream, or an illusion. Saying this to people made me feel radical and intense and special. I drove my wife nuts for about six months with it.

Of course, as anyone who gives more than a glancing look at the text or spends any time with the workbook lessons knows, that sort of casual (reckless, even) approach to the course quickly becomes fruitless. If the world wasn’t real, why was Chrisoula upset and – more to the point – why was I unhappy to be a source of stress to her?

When we can’t lie to ourselves any longer, the truth is able to emerge. And so I began to try to understand what the course meant when it talked about the world this way. It was unequivocal: the world is not real (W-p1.132.8:2). Yet that was neither my intellectual understanding nor my practical experience. In truth, I was baffled by the assertion and even scared of it.

I couldn’t feel it, so I did the next best thing: I studied it mentally. I read Ken Wapnick. I read Gary Renard. I discovered Tara Singh and read him hungrily. Singh pointed me to Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Bohm, Bohm to Wilber, Wilber to Whyte and so on. I read both widely and deeply, and began to write about my evolving understanding as well.

I learned that the idea that the world was not real was not unique to the course – that it existed, in different forms, in any number of religions, philosophies and sciences. Somehow, I was liberated by that. The sense that there was both cross-cultural and cross-disciplinarian support for the idea meant that A Course in Miracles wasn’t out to lunch. Rather, it was merely one particular expression of a perennial idea.

Thus, I was able to breathe again. I was able to give some acceptable mental form to an otherwise frightening and inaccessible idea. As a result, I was able at last to begin to experience it – dimly at first, then with increasing intensity and clarity – as a spiritual truth.

And the truth was simpler than I’d thought but far deeper and more vibrant.

Thus, I have begun to appreciate the wisdom in Wilber’s insight. We need both the intellect and the yoga (the technique of transcendence). We need the text and the workbook. We need to give space and attention to ideas so that we might integrate them at levels other than only mental or intellectual.

It is okay, in other words, to use our intellects with respect to A Course in Miracles, or any other spiritual path or tradition.

Of course, what works for me, or makes sense to me, may  not for you. I don’t want to suggest otherwise. I often say that A Course in Miracles, like all true scriptures, meets us where we are and goes with us as far as we are able, and that is a deeply and intimately personal experience. We can light the way for one another, and from time to time we can even carry each other, but we cannot be substitutes for each other’s learning.

Tara Singh pointed out that words “are to be brought to realization” but that most of us are content to remain in the status quo, only nudging the perimeter of our spiritual comfort zones.

The next step is:
“not to learn but to be.”

We have to bring the learning to its appointed end.

You are the Christ.

(The Voice that Precedes Thought, 244-45).

It is imperative that we not fall into the trap of believing that our learning is an end in itself. If it does not help us to separate what is false from what is true – and thus to know the truth of “Nothing real can be threatened/Nothing unreal exists” (T-in.2:2-3) – then it is useless. But in the same way a spoon can help us dent a bowl of ice cream, or a saw allow us to clear another stretch of field, the intellect can help us to realize “its appointed end,” our remembrance of ourselves as Christ.