The End of Looking for God

You can’t retrofit God into your experience. Nor can you expand your experience to include God. God is outside / beyond / unrelated to experience. The best you can do is realize this, and then stop trying. Give up on God, holiness, oneness, Christ, A Course in Miracles, the world in which they appear and the self to which they appear.

What happens when you do that?

And if you cannot do that, or do not understand how to do that, what can you learn about what is stopping you?

It is hard to see this (much less cheerfully accept it) but ego loves A Course in Miracles. Ego wrote A Course in Miracles! And edited it and published it and teaches it and studies it . . . The course is just another illusion in a simmering welter of illusion we call the world, which includes the illusion of a self in need of saving for whom spiritual programs like A Course in Miracles are – wait for it – Godsends.

Does this mean we shouldn’t read and study ACIM? No. But it also doesn’t mean that we should read and study it. Or that there is something fundamentally right – as opposed to helpful – about reading and studying it.

In a sense, the essence of “practicing” A Course in Miracles lies in taking it seriously but not literally. It’s just a dream, but for us, in the context of dreams, it can be helpful. Can you take the course seriously while simultaneously recognizing that it’s not real? That’s it just another illusion in a sea of illusions?

That, too, can be hard to get hold of.

People like to say, “well, okay, Sean. What is real?” And while the course does allude to reality, it does so in the context of making clear that our confusion on the subject is such that we’re better off focusing on clarity in confusion, rather than identifying what lies beyond confusion.

It’s sort of like we’re patients in a hospital, and we want to talk about what life will be like upon release, and the doctor is like “whoa! Let’s get you healed first and then we can talk about release.”

In other words, “reality” is a distraction from the basic work of just seeing in a natural, sustainable way that it’s all a dream.

What is God? You’ll know when you know. And when you know, the question will lose its importance and so will you. You’ll forget all about it – and yourself. God is neither in nor of the dream and thus is altogether beyond remembering and forgetting. Our work is to notice the dream, and accept that it’s a dream, and that’s it. The rest – whatever it is, whatever form it takes or doesn’t take – flows from that understanding.