Solving Problems with A Course in Miracles

Yesterday, while mowing the lawn, I fell into a funk. I remembered a lie that I told many years ago. It was a big lie to somebody who is a relatively important and consistent part of my life. I’ve never been called out on it and now and then I remember it and wonder if I will be. It marks a low point in that particular relationship and I always feel bad when I think about it.

This is a post about solving problems with A Course in Miracles. Feeling terrible is not mandatory, suffering does not build character, and it’s okay to be happy.

I decided to look closely at the lie. I remembered the circumstances of it: the fear I felt in the moment, the anger. The person to whom I lied has not always been nice to me and has sometimes been affirmatively mean. There were people in the room who were supposed to have my back who did not. It was understandable that from a frightened and injured place, I made a mistake. It was defensive and really, who could blame me?

That is how the ego “solves” problems: it breaks them into little pieces. You think you’ve got a problem? You’ve really got fifty problems. And each of those problems? Yep. Fifty more in each of them. Looking closely at the lie only complicated my feelings. Maybe I felt justified in the lie but now I was mad at the people who were supposed to support me and didn’t. So I had to look closely at those relationships. You know what I mean?

It is a web from which we can never quite untangle ourselves. And the ego assures us that our “struggles” are sincere efforts to fix the problem. And so on and on it goes.

A Course in Miracles would end that. It teaches us that we only have one problem – our perceived separation from God – and that that problem has already been solved.

Everyone in the world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the solution that solves them all is to be accepted. Who can see that a problem has been solved if he thinks the problem is something else (W-pI.79.2:1-3)?

No matter what the problem seems to be, it is always the same problem: we believe that we are separated from God and thus must suffer the consequences. When I told the lie, it was because in that moment I did not accept that God and I were wholly one but rather apart.

But – and I think this is really the point I wanted to make – the lie is not the problem either. The problem was that while mowing the lawn, I felt separated from God. So I pulled a story from the past – one of my better ones for “proving” that me and God are on opposite terms – and used that to feel crappy.

Is that clear? I am trying to say that no matter what we are thinking – what movie from the past we’re playing (I told this crazy lie) or what fear of the future we’re indulging (I wonder when I’ll get caught lying and what kind of shame and humiliation I’ll feel) – the only issue is that in the present moment we have denied our fundamental essential unity with God. Period. There is nothing else to solve ever. Nothing else ever happened.

The temptation to regard problems as many is the temptation to keep the problem of separation unsolved (W-pI.79.4:1).

How do we solve the problem of separation? Well, it is helpful to remember that in course terms it has already been solved (see ACIM lesson 80). To experience the problem as solved . . . I bring my attention to the moment – me, the lawn, the mower, the neighbor’s kids, the chickadees, whatever. God is there – I don’t have to do anything. I just have to be willing to realize the truth. If that level of awareness doesn’t work, then I pray. I ask for help. Sometimes I literally fall to my knees and say, “help me for Christ’s sake!”

It takes some time, yes. And we all slip back into egoic modes of thought. But it’s okay. Keep trying. Pray and meditate. Study the course or whatever text or tradition appeals to you. One of these days, we’re not going to feel guilty anymore!

What Do You Do if You Skip the Daily ACIM Lesson?

A Course in Miracles is best understood as a course – a text with accompanying lessons and a manual for teachers. It is true that we can use these resources as we see fit – and that what works for one student is not necessarily going to work for another – but I also think that we are giving short thrift to ACIM if we get too casual about how we study and practice the course. In that light, people sometimes ask: what should you do when you skip your daily ACIM lesson?

I think there are two levels to answering that question: a practical sort of day-to-day level, kind of like telling somebody what to do when they forget their homework. And there is another level where we can actually learn something valuable and transformational because we skipped the lesson. If we choose to see it rightly, we are never not learning.

On the practical level, if you forget to do a lesson, just take a deep breath and resolve to remember tomorrow. If you forget tomorrow, then take a deep breath and resolve to get to it the next day. Very few students actually go through the full gamut of three hundred sixty-five lessons without missing one or two. And given that we are not supposed to become ascetics or monks, the ordinary events of our daily life are sometimes going to crowd in and overwhelm or obscure our practice it happens.

If you are serious about your study – if you are intent on making this your spiritual practice – then it simply does not matter that you are sometimes forgetful or casual. It is your willingness to continue – to return to the practice itself – that will save you.

Lesson 27 is very much to the point on what happens when we miss the application of a lesson – or some aspect of it.

You will probably miss several applications, and perhaps quite a number. Do not be disturbed by this, but do try to keep on your schedule from then on (W-pI.27.4:4-5).

That gentle admonition – and it is gentle indeed – leads me to the second level learning raised by the question of skipping or missing ACIM lessons: there are no consequences. It is worth repeating: there are no consequences.

If you look closely at lesson 27 – and it is hardly the only lesson that states this or its equivalent – you will see that Jesus is very clear. You cannot make a mistake. There is no examination. There are no conditions. And because of that, there are no consequences. You don’t have to be worried, you don’t have to compare yourself to other students, you don’t have to build yourself up or tear yourself down.

You simply have to practice the course to the best of your ability, without stress or anxiety. It is outside every aspect of our lives in the world.

That is a revolutionary idea! We are so invested in being right and reaping the benefits and, conversely, of being wrong and suffering the consequences. It is so ingrained in us and it is such a source of worry and fear and guilt. And the course is teaching us that this kind of thinking – right and wrong, good and bad – simply doesn’t exist. It’s not real. There is tremendous liberation in that.

So don’t worry if you miss a lesson. Remember that you have already passed this course. You are already a teacher of God ready to save the world. Your remembrance of this simply beautiful fact is only a matter of time. Come back to the course. Come back to the lessons. Choose again, in confidence and love.

Joel Goldsmith and A Course in Miracles

Many students of A Course in Miracles are aware of the degree to which reading Joel Goldsmith can be a nurturing and helpful experience. Goldsmith was a twentieth century Christian writer whose view of Jesus and the gospels – and, indeed, the whole range of Christian theology and imagery – was deeply inflected by his study and practice of Christian Science (an oft-unappreciated influence on ACIM), as well as a generosity and mysticism that tends to reflect Eastern spirituality. Goldsmith perceived life in terms of its wholeness. When one realized – or remembered – this wholeness, they simultaneously realized the way in which they were that wholeness. Thus, in what Goldsmith (and his followers) called “The Infinite Way,” one was not separate from God but was contained in and by – and existed through – a pervasive and everpresent God. God is everywhere and all things all the time: as are we, when we remember.

There is neither beginning nor end in or to that which we call God and by our calling are made whole.

In that light, there is not a great deal of theological space between Goldsmith’s work and A Course in Miracles. Hence the interest that students of the one path tend to show in the other. Some spiritual and religious traditions don’t mix well with the course even though they seem a natural fit. Buddhism is a good example. At the surface, it seems to mirror many key principles of the course: the role of past lives and evolving understanding of spiritual principles, training the mind, a goal (or no-goal, as it were) of awakening/reaching Nirvana. But in practice, the two diverge quite radically. There is much less formality and rigidity in the application of A Course in Miracles (especially with respect to behavioral proscriptions) than you often see in Buddhism.*

That’s not really true with respect to Goldsmith’s Infinite Way. He died before the course was made public and so never encountered it personally. But I think he would have recognized that the Jesus with whom he interacted and the Jesus channeled by Helen Schucman were coming from the same place. Both had a “Vedantic Christianity” feel to them, a phrase that Bill Thetford used to describe his sense of how the course fit into popular religious frameworks. No doubt part of this is attributable to their shared influence of Christian Science, a tradition to which the course owes a great deal of its core ideas and sensibilities.

Yet in another way, Goldsmith is quite different from A Course in Miracles. His writing was his writing – while his books often include sections that are channeled, they are by and large his own language attempting to explain his own experience of God and Jesus. This is a significant difference from how Schucman described the origins of the course. Regardless of how one feels about ACIM ideas, it is very hard to argue that it is not an impressive piece of writing. It has a depth and gravitas often associated with scripture or literature. Although the word “channeled” can be tossed around too lightly – and in the case of A Course in Miracles is largely synonymous with “inspired” – there is no arguing that the work Schucman and Thetford created together has a timelessness and beauty and consistency that is remarkable, no less so because of its helpfulness.

In the case of Joel Goldsmith, the writing quality is more sporadic. I don’t mean to criticize him unfairly; certainly other readers will have different views. The Infinite Way is his most readable book. The others are less memorable. But in fairness to Goldsmith, he wasn’t trying to create masterpieces so much as simply share his ideas as widely and readily as possible. He was evangelical in that sense. And in that sense, his work is also a departure from the course. Neither Schucman nor Thetford took personal credit for the work they created and they were slow and reluctant to share it. Goldsmith is always the author of record, and he was always trying to reach as many people as possible.

And he was certainly prolific! If you consider his books and audio lectures together, there are literally hundreds of opportunities to partake of his thinking. His books were often culled from his lectures and presentations and sometimes have a cobbled-together feel to them. There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. I think Goldsmith was a genuine man whose experience of Jesus was authentic. His desire to extend that experience was also authentic – and helpful, too. But it has a different literary quality than ACIM. And, in the end, I think a different effect, too. For example, Goldsmith often told students that “God must become an activity in our consciousness.” People, he said, governed their surroundings “by the nature of what is taking place in you consciousness.” A Course in Miracles does not focus so much on consciousness as a phenomenon in which or through which God appears. It uses the word mind more and emphasizes the degree to which that mind is not embodied.

I often recommend Goldsmith’s book The Infinite Way to people. It is a fairly straightforward read and the most succinct and clarified expression of Goldsmith’s teachings of the many I’ve read. It is justifiably his most famous and popular book. And it is a nice adjunct to A Course in Miracles. Reading it often sheds light on some of the ideas contained in the course – notably the idea that we are already one with God and need only remember that fact. Goldsmith was a big advocate of meditation and prayer, both of which he considered the means by which we reestablished our awareness of our unity with God. He advocated for frequent moments of prayer – throughout the day turning to God in vocal prayer, intensely focused meditation on ideas contained in traditional biblical scripture. By doing this consistently, one would gradually be transformed. Eventually, your faith in God – your capacity to be at one with God – would transcend every other aspect of existence. There would be nothing else.

It is always good to ask about the wisdom and practicality of combining spiritual practices. While I think it is clear that reading Goldsmith is not going to completely confuse most students of A Course in Miracles, it is possible it could delay the awakening experience anticipated by both methods. If you are taking a bus to Boston, and then you stop to take a different bus to Worcester, and then in Worcester grab another bus to Boston, you’re going to get where you’re going but you are extending the time frame considerably. Why delay? A Course in Miracles is very clear and simple: it is a course, not a spiritual path. One reads the text and does the lesson to the precise extent doing so is helpful. The course is deeply pragmatic. It is clear about how it asks us to interact with it.

There is less of that clarity with Goldsmith! With ACIM, if we are attentive and disciplined, we are going to finish the course and move on to what is next: an evolving relationship with the Holy Spirit as our guide and teacher. Again, this is not to criticize Goldsmith so much as to point out that he and the course do diverge in this important way. I think it is good to give oneself to the course for a year. It is not such a long period of time and a certain wholeness of devotion can yield helpful results. If we can be focused on that, we open up some space in which our relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit will deepen and become increasingly dynamic.

Of course, that “still small voice” inside might urge you to read Goldsmith now. And there is nothing really wrong with that and much that can be good and useful. Given the broad similarities between his material and the course material, it is understandable that students of one and the other often cross over. Some cross-pollination of ideas and practices is probably inevitable; indeed, it is probably desirable. No spiritual tradition has a monopoly on truth.

So read with discernment – Goldsmith and the course. Read prayerfully. Don’t rush from one to the other and back. Both would teach you that you are already home in God. In the end, the work is not to do the reading but to accept the lesson the reading teaches and make it the whole of our being.

*I am aware that to speak of Buddhism as such is itself misleading. There are many schools and traditions within Buddhism, many of which differ greatly from one another. A Course in Miracles tends to be more insular; this is another distinction between the two.

Forget Your Inner Feelings

From time to time I talk to students of A Course in Miracles who feel bad that they still experience guilt and anger and fear and sorrow and whatever other icky emotions you can name. How can it be after all the lessons and study and prayer? Aren’t we supposed to be deliriously happy all the time? Attended by ascended masters? Personally visited by Jesus? How is it that we’re still exhibiting all those nasty human traits? We should be angels by now!

I hear that. I have days where my expectations of spiritual growth or nirvana or what have you get in the way of peace. I eat too many potato chips and think, a holy man wouldn’t have done that. Or I space out in front of Netflix. Or I am insufficiently worried about nuclear war or too casual about banking regulations. It’s always something.

That is the egoic self at work. It likes problems – personal problems, global problems, problems on sitcoms, problems with the neighbors. It just chews through them like bears in a blueberry patch. It is especially fond of the spiritual ideal – our personal image of the holy man or woman. It can toy with the self for years with that image, that ideal. Maybe lifetimes. It’s quite a cycle. I’m not holy but I want to be holy so I’ll do this thing which is holy and okay now I’ve done it and I’m not holy so I’ll try this other path . . . It’s tiring! And like hamsters on the proverbial wheel, we never really get anywhere.

Here’s a better approach – one consistent with the teachings of A Course in Miracles: don’t worry about your inner feelings. Don’t worry about matching up to any ideal that you project. That’s just static. It’s got nothing to do with what you are in truth and nothing to do with realizing that truth.

Just let it go.

Take a look at section seven of the seventeenth chapter of the ACIM text. The subject is the need to be faithful – in our brothers and sisters and in our selves. It is teaching us that only the mind can solve a problem – as soon as a problem appears unsolvable it is because we have decided that the body is going to be part of the solution. But take special note of how the course addresses this particular body/mind confusion.

. . . bodies cannot solve anything. It is their intrusion on the relationship, an error in your thoughts about the situation, which then becomes justification for your lack of faith. You will make this error, but be not at all concerned with that. The error does not matter (T-17.VII.3:5-8).

The emphasis in italics is mine. The course takes for granted that we’re going to confuse body and mind. And it doesn’t care! It’s not relevant. It has nothing to do with waking up. Can you sense how liberating this is? How it frees us entirely and forever from consequence? The activity of the egoic self – it’s about me and my progress, me and my improvement, me and my standing in the community, and so on and so forth – is a given. And it’s without effect.

You can relax. You can breathe. You don’t have to resist those “bad” feelings. They’ve got nothing to do with anything that matters.

Use not your faithlessness. Let it enter and look upon it calmly, but do not use it (T-17.VII.5:3-4).

You can substitute “anger” for faithlessness. You can substitute “lust.” You can substitute “indifference.” Whatever you name those feelings which you judge as negative and which you have decided impede your waking up to Oneness in God, plug them into that phrase. And be very clear about the directive: you can let those feelings enter – don’t fight them in any way, don’t get all alarmed and panicky about them – but don’t make use of them. That’s all. It is like Gandhi said so many years ago – it wasn’t that he didn’t have anger in him. He did. He just chose not to identify with it. And in that choice, he was liberating from having to act on it in any way.

Your anger (or guilt or fear or whatever) is not a problem – your belief that your anger is a problem is the problem. So let it be. Let the inner feelings come and go and don’t freak out about them. Stay focused. You want to be peaceful and loving. You want to be in the Kingdom of Heaven. Okay. That is the goal. That’s all you need to do.

The Stillness Inherent in A Course in Miracles

One of the things that A Course in Miracles has done for me is it has cleared some space in my mind. That’s kind of weird statement maybe – mind isn’t really bounded physically. But by practicing ACIM – studying the text and the lessons, following certain teachers whose practice most challenges and buttresses my own – there is some quiet that enters. There is some stillness.

For many years in my early and mid-twenties, I had aspirations of being a Buddhist. At the same time, I was deeply invested in Thomas Merton and other Christian mystics. Yet I was largely incapable of sitting still. And my mind was in constant motion. When I look back – I was in Burlington, VT in those days – I don’t know that I ever really sat still and just appreciated a flower, say. Or a sunset. Or a simple talk with a friend. The energy was always frenetic, always intense.

Even as I settled into adulthood – becoming a lawyer and journalist, a father and husband, a homeowner and all that – there was still a sort of craziness to my life. I had dreams of stillness but it was very hard to actually realize it. Even when I first began to practice ACIM – the daily lessons in particular – it was hard. The lessons would say devote fifteen or twenty minutes to this and I would get nervous! That’s a long time to sit still and think about one thing.

You know, we are who we are and it’s no good fighting it. I think part of the problem was that I was so invested in becoming. I couldn’t just accept that I had this interest in stillness that couldn’t manifest. I couldn’t just let it be the way it was. Why not? Because I had decided in advance who I had to be and what that being was going to look like. I was in my own way.

And that is what the course seems to have gently helped undo. It’s not that the thoughts aren’t there – and it’s not really that the desire to become something (a famous course teacher! the best student ever! this! that!) is gone – but that whatever “I” am is just not ruled by those energies any longer. There’s a lot of peace in just letting ourselves be crazy. I don’t know exactly how to tell you to do it, but if you can detach a bit and just watch your thoughts, it can be quite a relief. You see the stream of your thinking and you realize, “wow. No wonder I feel crazy all the time!”

The course teaches us that we aren’t these bodies but we aren’t these thoughts either. I think if you can get a little distance from what seems to be boiling in your brain, you’ll see that it’s true. And really, what happens then is that you encounter stillness – it becomes real for you. Thought drives us – we’re like hamsters on their wheels. But when you get into the space in which thought happens, it doesn’t have the same effect anymore. You aren’t bouncing from one crisis to the next, one challenge to the next. You aren’t stuck in an endless loop of problem-solving.

I spent a lifetime longing for that – the simplicity of quiet, of real stillness. And it came finally when I stopped trying to find it and simply became aware of what is. Through my practice of A Course in Miracles, I learned how to pay attention. And stillness was there waiting for me.

Dialogue and A Course in Miracles

Often when I talk about dialogue – having one, being in one, et cetera – what I am talking about is simply an intense and focused exchange between two people with similar interests. That is, you and I have a shared language – Christian, ACIM and so forth – and we are both devoted to direct experience of waking up in/to/through God – and we are trying to accomplish that to some degree by sharing with one another. Our dialogue resembles one part of a long walk to a shared home – clearing the trail, say. So it is helpful that way. Or it can be.

I don’t think this is precisely what David Bohm had in mind when he explored and wrote about dialogue, though I think he would perhaps have been supportive of it. But a Bohm dialogue envisions a suspension of judgment – a willingness to try and observe what is happening in oneself without acting on it – that is quite a tricky needle to thread. If you try it, the first thing you will see is that the idea of a goal becomes quite tenuous. So if the talk is ostensibly about, say, the role of forgiveness in A Course in Miracles there is a good chance it won’t remain there. Or that it won’t move much in traditional terms. You won’t get anywhere in the intellectual sense, the furthering of ideas sense.

There are two things going on here. The first is simply recognizing the value of deliberate, thoughtful and analytical sharing between people who are trying to end their seeming separation from God. This is valuable because it deprecates mystery and ensures that the focus is on the self. It is very easy to stay in the poetic and mythological language of A Course in Miracles. You can really savor it and get into it. You can talk about how Helen Schucman was the next best English writer to Shakespeare. And when you get tired of praising the prose, you can get into how the course revises critical metaphors like “crucifixion” and “Heaven” and critical stories like the one about Adam and Eve.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that – but it may not be terribly helpful. Certainly as anybody who has poked around this blog knows I have spent – and will no doubt continue to in some ways – a lot of time looking at the course in just that way. But getting all devoted to the course is simply to make an idol of it. On some level that is true. I think most students do it, to different degrees, and so I think sooner or later all students have to undo it.

So the dialogue I have been practicing and exploring lately – which is not precisely Bohmian dialogue – has its goal to get closer to the ground from which A Course in Miracles springs. It doesn’t denigrate the imagery and language and mythology and so forth; but it is trying to get past it to the underlying structure. There are, for example, a lot of debates about Jesus in the course communities – whether we are dealing with the historical Jesus, Helen’s personal Jesus, the idea of Jesus, or something else altogether. And what I am saying now is that that is not a very important thing to worry about. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to settle that to figure out how to practice forgiveness. You really don’t.

Please keep in mind that I am not saying those ideas are altogether extraneous – they’re not. It is important to respond to what calls us. But it is also helpful to remember that we are aiming to wake up. If you look at the last lessons of the course you will see that they are not in the nature of conclusion, but beginning. The course is really more about setting up a base camp if you will, then about scaling the summit.

So what I am doing now is going slowly. I am not restricting myself to the course. If I encounter people who are adept in some other language and mythology, then I enter into dialogue with them. If they are okay with it, of course. Always I keep the focus on my experience. The teacher is not “out there.” Yes, some books are helpful, and yes, some people are helpful too. I relate with some of you quite deeply because you have done so much work and it so helpful to me.

But ultimately, we are waking up. We are ending, to the highest farthest degree possible, our separation. We are remembering or reclaiming or re-establishing oneness. To do that, we have to see what is going on inside of us. We have to find what is broken in us. We have to observe the ego – how thought works, how habit forms, how we react and respond to thought. We have to redefine the journey: what is really important? What is everything for? Do I want to be right or at peace? Nobody can do any of that for us. It is hard work – perhaps consuming many lifetimes. Yet I want to claim it now. I want to clarify and simplify.

Dialogue helps. It may not yet be true Bohm dialogue. It may never need to be that. But it is still helpful. It brings about some peace and some gratitude. That is something.