I don’t want to be responsible anymore

The big house in the dream seems simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, although I know I used to live here and am apparently doing so again for unknown reasons. Hosting a surprise party for someone, although I seem to have forgotten who, a dirty little secret I’m afraid to share. I thought others were bringing the food and drinks but apparently I am in charge. The mother of one of my daughter’s friends arrives along with a few other women I supposedly know but can’t seem to place. I apologize and rush out to purchase appetizers and wine, attempting to reach various people (including my husband and daughter) to help me, without success.

Caught in traffic on my way to Whole Foods, I attempt a shortcut through the neighborhoods and become hopelessly lost. I pass a yard and notice an old acquaintance I have not seen in years sitting on a lawn chair conversing with neighbors outside a small refurbished Victorian home, and suddenly identify her as the guest of honor at this party I am apparently throwing. I’m not even sure I invited her! In a complete panic, I inexplicably make a U-turn and end up in a part of town I have never encountered before.

I find an Italian deli and try to order appetizers but the proprietors appear to be moving in slow motion. I realize I won’t have time to make it to the wine store and decide to buy wine from the Italians but everything is ridiculously overpriced and I can’t get anyone to help me with a row of unmarked bottles. My cell keeps ringing but I don’t answer it, convinced people are arriving at this other house–guests I allegedly invited—only to find no host, no guest of honor, and no food or drink. I am told it was all my idea, but an idea I don’t even remember having! The Italians just stare, dragging themselves around without speaking in their heavy, dark clothes in overexposed light, as if in a Bergman film. Overcome with dizziness, I feel I might perish on the spot from guilt.

“I don’t want to be responsible anymore!” I awaken, screaming in my head.

All week long, I have been secretly shouting this mantra. I don’t want to be responsible anymore! Not for setting up this interview, writing this article, shopping for and cooking another dinner for a family that never sits down to eat, filling out and copying my daughter’s athletic and community service trip forms. Not for taking the dog to the vet again, straightening up other people’s ubiquitous messes, making travel arrangements and setting up college tours for Spring break. I want you to be responsible for a change. Is that too much to ask?

But as I lay awake still shuddering with dread completely out of proportion to the circumstances of the dream, reviewing the ego’s litany of suffering at the hands of all those I felt unfairly responsible for, I truly understood the real responsibility I had been attempting to duck all my life. Responsibility for the original “sin” of separating from our source, an impossible, unconscious crime the Course tells us we try to atone for by blaming others; in this case by playing “the responsible one” in my relationships while mentally whining: “Why can’t you be responsible for a change?”

Desperately trying to prove to God through sacrifice that I could not have pulled this off; look how responsible (in a good way) I am and have always been. These other shiftless ones must have done it! And yet, in my heart of hearts, I knew I was the real guilty one. I believed I had run away from my father’s home and murdered him on the way out the door just like the Course says. A crime no amount of hand-washing or doing for others can ever fully expunge from my record.

Of course I was listening to the ego again, the wrong part of our one mind once more attempting to twist the Course’s metaphysics to make the error of my belief in the idea of separation real, thereby strengthening my special story of living as a fugitive from love here in this impossible dream of opposing interests. Intent on continuing to frighten me into its fold of specialness, the ego had omitted the only true message in A Course in Miracle’s creation myth: the separation from love never happened. Or, to put it poetically as the Course often does: “Not one note in heaven’s song was missed.”

Oddly enough I had been working with A Course in Miracles Lesson 93, “Light and joy and peace abide in me.” Sounds promising, doesn’t it? And yet it begins like this:

“You think you are the home of evil, darkness and sin. You think if anyone could see the truth about you he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake. You think if what is true about you were revealed to you, you would be struck with horror so intense that you would rush to death by your own hand, living on after seeing this being impossible.”

 

Beware these cheerful lesson titles that almost always go on to smack you up side the head with the flip side of our true, indivisible, eternally peaceful nature. The side the ego has convinced us will strike us dead should we ignore its advice and dare to look. Although these lessons often convey the truth about ourselves in our pre-dream state, they also attempt to meet us in the hell of the condition in which we seem to find ourselves dreaming our fugitive dreams of exile from love. Following the ego’s plan for salvation by denying responsibility for having separated from our eternal wholeness. Locking our guilt away in the recesses of our unconscious only to have it come spewing forth into our waking and sleeping dreams. Compelling us to compulsively cast it outside ourselves again by seeing it in someone else.

But I am learning I am not responsible for separating from and thereby destroying God and neither are you. There’s no need to commit hara-kiri over a crime that never happened. I am learning I am not the ego; I am the decision maker that chose to believe in and feel responsible for the tiny mad idea of separation and the consequences the ego convinced me loom. I am the decision maker that chose to feel responsible for something that never occurred, but can learn as I practice the workbook lessons and apply the Course’s principles in my daily life to choose a different teacher with a different interpretation of ultimately non-existent events.

“The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore, this self does not exist at all. And anything it seems to do and think means nothing. It is neither bad nor good. It is unreal, and nothing more than that.”

When I consciously choose to take responsibility for my projected guilt onto others back to the source of the original mistaken idea in our one mind, the Holy (Whole) Spirit heals my perception of this false, guilty self and the dualistic idea of responsibility and I experience our oneness. I need but learn to truly look with the part of my one mind that can truly see. By accepting my only real function of forgiveness responsibility for the root cause of suffering is removed from others, accepted in myself, and then instantly released as we join our mind with the Holy Spirit and gently smile at an ultimately incomprehensible, impossible dream.

I am entitled to change my mind

About eight years before I started studying A Course in Miracles and truly recognized it as my path home a close friend and fellow spiritual seeker gave me the big blue book. Someone had passed it on to her and although she recognized on some level that it held great wisdom, she just couldn’t get through it. “Read this,” she said. “Maybe you’ll get it.”

Skipping the introduction and preface in my typical rush to ascend I opened it to the first page of the text and read: “There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not ‘harder’ or ‘bigger’ than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal.” 

 

My heart raced. This gigantic tome was talking about miracles, defined by Webster’s as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” As someone actively striving for years to seduce the divine into intervening in human affairs I was thrilled. How many times had I sensed a benign presence guiding my steps? Just as I had always suspected experiencing miracles, regardless of size, was a piece of cake once you got the hang of it. This book would teach me how to cultivate that boundless power; enable me to summon it on command. My fingers itched as if clutching a magic wand.

I continued to read the Principles of Miracles in Chapter 1 but my mind soon glazed over. Undeterred (after all, that first paragraph appeared to say it all) I decided to come back to it later and skipped ahead to the workbook. It offered 365 lessons, one for each day of the year. I could do this, I told myself, already crafting a “to do” list of manifestations and transformations I planned to accomplish on a micro and macro level. Harnessing the power of the universe to intercede on my behalf and on behalf of those I loved; creating a kind of heaven on earth right here and now on the streets of Denver, Colorado.

Oh, the folly of youth.  About a third of the way through Part I of the workbook my enthusiasm waned. Try as I might; I couldn’t seem to discern the instructions for miracle making. Instead the lessons focused on enticing me to question all I believed about the external world and my relationships. Although they contained many promising statements such as “God goes with me wherever I go,” “My mind is a part of God’s. I am very holy,” and “I am the light of the world,” they also seemed preoccupied with the meaninglessness of my experience and overlooking the bad behavior of others; advice that smacked of denial, a habit I was trying to break. Then again the constant use of the “G” word rankled. I preferred names unlike the unstable divinity that had so terrified me in the Catholic Church, monikers such as “universe” or even, in a pinch, “love.”

Ultimately, the first time around, I just couldn’t seem to connect questioning the nature of my relationships and external experience as the workbook recommended with the happiness that had seemed so elusive in my daily life. With the deep sigh I had become famous for among those who knew me best, I placed the book back on the shelf in my office beside other metaphysical publications also destined to fail me, my burgeoning library of spiritual disillusionment.

Years of seeking passed. I mastered the principle of the law of attraction enough to manifest moments of happiness and success but always the long awaited arrival of what I thought I wanted delivered only the most fleeing pleasure. Literally within minutes of receiving a desired external result I found myself craving the next accomplishment or resolution. Hooked on solving the next problem in a relationship caused, of course, by someone else.

Manifesting soon lost its luster. I couldn’t seem to stay focused. I longed for something else I couldn’t name, a longing I began to admit I had always carried and seemed to have come in with. A longing that nothing external—not romance, success, money, adventure, parenting, or creating—had ever fully satisfied. The well of deep loneliness at my core I had covered up for so long suddenly revealed itself. A person could drown there. Terrified I called out again for help from the universe, love, whatever. That mysterious presence I had been missing so deeply as long as I could remember.

Through a series of coincidences the answer came this time in the form of that same big blue book collecting dust on my shelf for so long. Now I was ready to really listen, to admit I did not know; that nothing I had tried had worked. I found a Course study group. I started reading the text and doing the workbook again. I still craved miracles in form but eventually, admitting again and again that I did not know and asking for help, I became aware of the critical ego in my head raging 24/7 against everyone and thing seemingly responsible for disrupting my peace of mind.

That painful awareness motivated me to begin to accept the one problem the Course identifies as the cause of all human suffering: the belief that we have separated from God/the one eternal love and wholeness we forever are in truth. And to gradually accept the one solution, turning our mistaken perception over to our whole mind. The part of our one mind that followed us into the dream of uniqueness and competing interests but knows the separation never happened and simply smiles at our mistaken perception. The Course calls this process of withdrawing the repressed guilt we project onto others with help from the memory of wholeness in our one mind forgiveness. Over time, tempted again and again to perceive myself unfairly treated, I asked again and again for help; this time to truly understand forgiveness. To learn to apply it in all my relationships; to harness its extraordinary power in an ordinary life.  

Today, six years later in a class I am teaching about forgiveness I find myself considering workbook lesson 89 in the review sections I also used to skip in my rush to ascend. “I am entitled to miracles,” I read, grateful for the understanding that I am entitled (with help from my inner teacher) to change my mind about all I believe is happening to me.  Forgiving has given me a better grasp on the Course’s definition of a miracle which has nothing to do with milking gifts from the universe or coercing a dualistic God or his emissaries to intervene in our behalf.

Why did that symbol of the awakened mind represented in Jesus choose to call this A Course in Miracles? Maybe because no one would read it if he called it A Course in undoing the ego thought system by changing your mind. Or maybe because he knew the word “miracle” is like catnip to those of us who seek, a way to coax us in the door that we might stay long enough to let him teach us what we really want.

Defined in Dr. Kenneth Wapnick’s glossary as “the change of mind that shifts our perception from the ego’s world of sin, guilt, and fear, to the Holy Spirit’s world of forgiveness;” the miracle occurs when I catch myself following the ego’s plan for salvation. Holding someone or thing seemingly “out there” responsible for disrupting or enhancing my peace of mind to keep me from returning to our one mind and choosing again for truth.

The one problem and the one solution lie side by side. When I remember I am entitled to change my mind, and with our right mind’s help, actually do it, I receive a glimpse of the real world beyond the clouds of guilt and judgment obscuring true vision. In that moment of perfect union and completeness all longing ceases, ancient hatreds fall away, the heavy burden of this unique existence lifts, and a peace beyond all understanding–the peace of our one, true nature–returns to my mind. And in ways I still cannot comprehend but am beginning through daily experience to trust and welcome anyway, to all minds.

Love makes no comparisons

Normally things seem to slow down after the holidays and I savor burrowing bear-like into my den. I sleep in (for me that amounts to first light around 7 a.m.); read, putter around the house, watch movies, and dig out the crock pot to whip up the kind of comfort fare so compatible with truncated days and elongated, chilly nights. The phone doesn’t ring as much as usual, social engagements dwindle, and emails and work projects grind to a halt, allowing the introvert in me to languish content, seemingly free of the usual external pressures. Not this January.

This January has been downright insane, or so the ego frequently insists in its 24/7 fireside chats. Incoming phone calls and emails bring constant new demands and my social calendar appears to have spiraled out of control without my participation. I have done a lot of mental whining about this and yesterday finally succumbed to that attacking voice in my head, awakening to dizziness, nausea, and a weak cough on a Monday morning when I had planned to get so much done. Finally carving out the down time I needed by demonstrating through my apparently diseased body that I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Unable to think straight or interact I turned off the computer and cancelled a lunch I’d been looking forward to with a dear friend I don’t see often enough. I took my rightful place on the couch with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, a pot of ginger tea, and my little lap dog to indulge my suffering with an episode of Desperate Housewives, that long-running satire about the ego’s triumphs and tribulations lived out through special relationships run amuck on a superficially idyllic Wisteria Lane.

In this episode, Susan and Gabby become obsessed with their children’s ratings at the snazzy private elementary school where Susan teaches art and her son attends classes with Gabby’s daughter. Hoping to prevent parents from engaging in the kind of competitive behavior over their kids’ status parents all too often exhibit, the school has named the math and reading groups after animals and refrains from disclosing the hierarchy of what it means to be a giraffe, a leopard, or a chipmunk, for example. New to the school, Gabby tries to wrestle the information out of Susan, who believes she can discern where students fit academically by the level of their artistic ability in her class. She implies that Gabby’s daughter is in the lowest group, launching Gabby into a full-blown ego attack in which she sets out to break the code by photographing her daughter and her friends’ homework assignments and comparing the level of complexity.

We laugh at such ridiculous antics because although most of us wouldn’t go quite that far to prove our children’s superiority (and through association our own), most of us have engaged in just such petty fantasies in our heads. While we may try to deny and conceal the form of our compulsion to compare, the content rings true if we are honest with ourselves. All comedy springs from this place of poking fun at the human condition. The condition in which we believe we find ourselves marooned here on a planet of opposites and opposition fighting to distinguish ourselves from the pack. To “save” ourselves from the consequences of our own repressed guilty impulses at someone else’s expense.

A Course in Miracles speaks to us on the level of truth—the unified wholeness in which we continue to rest dreaming of exile and experimenting with hallucinated individuality–when it tells us that “love makes no comparisons.” But in this illusory world we take so seriously, on the level of form in which we believe we operate acting as mindless puppets of the ego thought system, we compare ourselves constantly. Why? Because it proves the ego’s belief that something different exists to compare. Differences mean we operate separately in different bodies with different characteristics and talents, limitations and agendas. Leading different lives of desperation, with different goals and story arcs of inclusion and exclusion.

“Comparison must be an ego device, for love makes none. Specialness always makes comparisons. It is established by a lack seen in another, and maintained by searching for, and keeping clear in sight, all lacks it can perceive. This does it seek, and this it looks upon.”

No wonder these housewives are desperate! We’re all desperate when we listen to the ego; desperate to seek and find a different solution to the perceived problem of specialness, a different outcome to the painful sense of lack and guilt we carry over the denied “sin” of separation. Desperate to prove a hierarchy of illusions reflective of the only one problem that exists; our belief that we have separated from the one love we are and in truth remain. Desperate to project the nagging lack of love we feel as a result and constantly deny on someone else. We do it through comparison.  

“And always whom it thus diminishes would be your savior, had you not chosen to make of him a tiny measure of your specialness instead. Against the littleness you see in him you stand as tall and stately, clean and honest, pure and unsullied, by comparison with what you see. Nor do you understand it is yourself that you diminish thus.”  

 

I have spent most of my life comparing myself to others favorably and unfavorably. Whether I seek to enlarge my false self in the trick mirror of another’s eyes or diminish my false self by ticking off its meager accomplishments and talents compared to those of other seemingly greater false selves this time around the intent and result are the same. Either way I am coveting the “littleness” of individuality I have chosen over the grandeur of my true, one, boundlessly loving and creative nature.

Whether I seek to reinforce my specialness with my child’s report card, the relative perfection or difficulty of my marriage, worldly successes, acquisitions, or failures; or to pinpoint exactly how far I have come in understanding A Course in Miracles in relationship to others, I am choosing fleeting pleasure or unique suffering over eternal happiness beyond my current understanding. That understanding returns to my mind little by little through the holy (whole) instant in which I turn away from the ego’s comparisons and awaken to the (whole) Spirit’s memory of a loving, non-dualistic self in which comparisons are impossible because there is no one with whom to compare.  When I choose to forgive I release all my beliefs about this false self and all those other false selves I think I see up there on the screen of my world, literally projected by my wrong mind. I am healed of my need to identify my child’s reading group and can once more smile gently with our inner teacher at a comic fiction that–thank God–could never really be.

The light has come

Last weekend I saw the movie A Single Man, the story of a gay college English professor named George living in Southern California circa 1962 and grieving the recent accidental death of his long-time, live-in lover Jim. Based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood, the plot follows actor Colin Firth through a single day at the end of which he intends to put an end to his unrelenting grief by committing suicide. With his usual endearing restraint Firth demonstrates the suffering of the ego thought system over the secret, albeit universal sense of isolation we all share caused by the mistaken belief that we have separated from our one source and in so doing forever destroyed it.

The movie’s title speaks to the deep loneliness we all carry as a result of that forgotten choice, if we are truly honest with ourselves. As a Brit living in the U.S. and a gay man living in a pre-sexual-liberation era Firth experiences himself so completely “outside” that the loss of his only real love leaves him little reason to continue. His one friend, Charley, a delightful British lush played by Julianne Moore, feels equally victimized by life’s circumstances and remains thereby incapable of providing any lasting support or solace.

The story of George’s relationship with his lover (actor Mathew Goode) evolves through flashback; in an early scene George answers the phone to hear about the car accident that killed Jim from a distant relative who explains that the family has excluded George from the funeral. The film captures the quiet, committed nature of the couple’s special, if forbidden, love. A love George credits with whatever happiness he has experienced in this world; the memory of which keeps him firmly rooted in the past and largely incapable of interacting in the present.  

As he traverses this final ordinary day made extraordinary by his hidden agenda we observe him again and again literally merging with the light in elongated moments (what the Course calls holy or whole instants) wherein he truly connects with others in spite of himself. A little neighbor girl, an admiring student who may or may not have more on his mind than ideas, a chance, chaste encounter with a male prostitute. In these and other scenes the movie’s stark; bordering-on-film-noir palette suddenly warms and softens. Buttery color returns to Firth’s face along with a smile as he momentarily chooses to look past his dire interpretation of his story and reconnect with the true vision of right-minded unity that transcends his tragic individuality.  

I am thinking about the movie A Single Man as I contemplate A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 75, “The light has come,” which begins so cheerfully:

“The Light has come. You are healed and you can heal. The light has come. You are saved and you can save.”

 

The lesson describes the “real world,” the Course’s description of the world we will experience once we have forgiven all our mistaken perceptions of unfair treatment, competing interests, and irreconcilable differences. “Today we celebrate the happy ending to your long dream of disaster,” it reassures us; even though most Course students aren’t exactly ready to start cracking open the champagne any time soon. For most of us the ending–that promised awakening from the illusory nightmare of exile–can appear far off even as we practice turning our dark perceptions over to the light of the Holy Spirit in our one mind where they burn away. Only to be replaced by another illusory attack seemingly launched from “out there” about which we must once more change our mind. That’s because although we could in theory instantly awaken, in practice we are far too fearful of retribution for the crime we believe we pulled off and far too attracted to the idea of specialness and the mad possibility that the future will somehow offer something better than the past. 

For most of us, the undoing of the ego thought system promised in A Course in Miracles through forgiveness is a process that appears to transpire over time even though on the level of truth the mistaken idea of separation from our source was instantly corrected. It meets us where we think we are, in the fragmented condition we think we are in. It teaches us to begin to associate the loss of peace we so love to blame on someone or thing external with an internal problem, the cause of all subsequent problems, that initial belief in the tiny mad idea of duality. It teaches us first to identity the decision maker in our mind that made that initial choice and can choose again to turn our mistaken belief over to the part of our mind that can heal it. When we do this we feel better, which motivates us to choose more and more for peace whenever we find ourselves in seeming pain. Practicing forgiveness the guilt in our seemingly split mind over the idea of separation is gradually healed until we have forgiven everything outside we have tried to use to hurt ourselves. The bogus individuality to which the ego clings dissolves in the light of our true, loving, eternal grandeur.

We reclaim that grandeur by seeing our relationships differently, by reaching out to others in the holy instant in which we choose true vision and experience the transformation of darkness to light. We find our grandeur as we symbolically extend a hand in our suffering to those we once held responsible and find ourselves instead grasping our own forever unified innocence.

What I love about this movie with Colin Firth (on whom I have always had a bit of a crush along with almost every other female of my generation) is the brutal emotional honesty he expresses through the character of George. A man who has come to the end of the dream to witness with an unwavering gaze the final result of the ego thought system. A man who has reached a point we all must eventually reach (to be motivated to awaken) wherein we recognize the true hopelessness of finding anything but fleeting happiness in this world. And then go bravely on to recognize that true connection with the only relationship that can endure and offer lasting love begins with turning our darkened images of others over to the memory of the light that continues to shine in our one mind.

Without giving too much of the ending away suffice it to say that George pulls something like this off, at least through enough transformative holy instants to ultimately change his mind about his plans and plight, and his harrowing sense of isolation. At least enough to change his mind about his interpretation of what seems to be happening to him, the Course’s radical definition of a miracle.

Only God’s plan for salvation will work

The dog was scheduled for spaying Friday morning. I dropped her off between 7 and 7:30 as instructed. It had taken about 20 minutes to defrost the car and scrape the latticework of ice that had enveloped the windshields overnight courtesy of the latest arctic blast. Kayleigh whimpered and shivered in my jacket as we got out of the car in the hospital parking lot. I once again pushed away a nagging dread that had plagued me all night as I waded in and out of sleep, the puppy mimicking my positions as she does when I allow her to sleep beside me. I had no problem with getting her spayed but something just didn’t feel right about this.

We waited in the short line with other groggy dog owners before I placed her on the scale. My anxiety increased as I noticed she had actually dropped a couple ounces over the holidays in her frantic efforts to please a houseful of people, weighing in at only 3.2 pounds. As I filled out multiple forms I realized they had whisked my little lightweight away without my even noticing, without even allowing me to hug her goodbye. Something just didn’t feel right about this.

I returned to my home office to read and practice that day’s workbook lesson, “Only God’s plan for salvation will work,” and couldn’t help but marvel anew at the author’s uncanny ability to illuminate the ego’s plan for our salvation/happiness in passages such as:

“According to this insane plan, any perceived source of salvation is acceptable provided that it will not work. This ensures that the fruitless search will continue, for the illusion persists that, although this hope has always failed, there is still grounds for hope in other places and in other things. Another person will yet serve better; another situation will yet offer success.”

Poised at the launch of the New Year I had been sorely tempted over the past week to once more invest in the ego’s insane agenda for external happiness that cannot last, that must—like the bodies and forms it appears to support—wither and die. This got me thinking about the special relationship I had immediately forged with my puppy. I had come close to losing her before and wasn’t sure I could bear it, despite the Course’s comforting words about the fallacy of individuality and the eternal comfort of our true nature. I pictured her tiny form sedated on the vast, cold, steel operating table like a spec of gravel on an airport runway. I pulled my sweater in around me as I returned to the lesson, seeking outside myself once again for peace. As if the Course itself were a panacea for my worry, rather than the choice of different inner teacher it offered.

“God’s plan for salvation will work, and other plans will not. Do not allow yourself to become depressed or angry at the second part; it is inherent in the first.”

 

Over winter break vacation I had taken a morning off from skiing with my family and friends to go snowshoeing, Kayleigh on my back in the new dog backpack my friend Darla had given me for Christmas. It was snowing, the light flat. I headed up the hill from the Nordic Center. As I climbed the undulating trails overlooking the town of Crested Butte a cloud of snow suddenly enveloped the steepled Victorian rooftops and the butte itself. In near zero visibility I trundled on a ways before stopping to savor the stillness, completely disoriented, completely OK with absolute nothingness. Steeped in an elongated moment in which I lost track of my body and my dog’s, the bondage of our seeming place in time and space, and the brutal myth of individuality. Although apparently lost, I felt found, swaddled in a deep sense of comfort and release, my usual fears of the elements and predators at bay. After a while, an anemic sun beamed through the milky sky and my bearings returned. I hiked for another hour or so before returning to our rental.

Now I sat in my office contemplating God’s plan for salvation: forgiving the illusion of this body, that body, and all bodies seemingly dueling for fleeting survival, and, in so doing, restoring the eternal nothingness of the whole, one, inalterable love we are. Versus the ego’s perennial “to do” list designed to keep us firmly rooted in a cloudy, frantic, frightening dream. The lesson goes on to invite us to ask God to specifically reveal his plan for our salvation by asking what he would have us do, where he would have us go, what he would have us say and to whom? When I first read these words, I had, like most students, taken them literally, believing that God knew about my unique fantasies. But as I continued to practice forgiveness, turning my projections over to the part of our one mind that remembers there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing to say because there is no “other” to say it to, I allowed a deeper experience of healing to permeate my mind. A healing that now helped me provide right-minded answers to these questions our inner teacher would have me pose to the God the ego would like us to believe we have forsaken:

“What would You have me do?”

 

Forgive.

“Where would You have me go?”

To the Holy (Whole) Spirit in my mind.

“What would You have me say, and to whom?”

 

Holy Spirit, please help me to see/experience everything in this dream with your awareness.

My concern for my puppy’s welfare, my belief that I could lose the one love we share that she so gracefully reflects back to me abated as I allowed my right mind to answer. A couple hours later the doctor called to explain that while trying to place the breathing tube into Kayleigh’s trachea before putting her under anesthesia she had begun coughing and they had not been able to fit the tube in properly. She was OK, but still loopy from sedation and very stressed out. It was too dangerous to proceed; they would have to postpone the spaying. I rescheduled a couple of meetings. Then I went back out into the cold to pick up my dog.

What does it mean to be happy?

I have just returned from a family ski vacation in Crested Butte, the quintessential Colorado ski town that despite its recent growing pains still evokes a place that time forgot. News is scare, cell phones and DSL signals unreliable, restaurant and retail service orchestrated to the beat of a different drummer. The gingerbread-style storefronts on Elk Avenue hunch beneath the weight of the season’s perennial snowfall much as they did a century ago. School buses painted with psychedelic scenes by local artists still blast Woodstock-era ballads while snaking their way up to the ski mountain carrying a curious cargo of Texans, Southerners, local families, Gunnison ranchers, and single dudes and dudettes intent on cobbling together an alternative, sustainable lifestyle.

I initiated the tradition of spending the week after Christmas here several years ago hoping to capture a saner way to ring in my least favorite holiday in a setting more conducive to introspection and renewal, surrounded by those I love. In the years that have followed, I have come to better comprehend the true nature of sanity and the folly of believing it has anything to do with time, venue, company, or an introvert craving contemplation. I am learning through studying and practicing A Course in Miracles that despite appearances life is merely a classroom for the lessons of awakening from this dream of separate interests, its relationships and circumstances the curriculum I use to undo the idea that I have any other function than forgiving my belief that any one or thing seemingly outside my one mind can in any way affect my true well being.

Last year, for example, I broke my hip on New Year’s Day walking too fast on ice in the parking lot of the local grocery store. An ordeal I later wrote about in this blog that forced me to consider the motivation behind my compulsive urgency as well as my need (even on the level of form) to separate myself from those I love. This year, my lessons seem more subtle, although the Course makes no such worldly distinctions among illusions. I have been teaching a class on the Course’s workbook and over the week considered Lesson 66: “My happiness and my function are one.” The lesson contrasts the world’s view of happiness, the result of getting what we think we want, with the Course’s version, the result of recognizing we have no idea what would make us happy and turning to a teacher that does know and can teach us.

Over the week, as I found myself once again reviewing the year and attempting to apply the lessons I again and again caught myself listening to the ego’s all-too convincing arguments. I had not met this or that writing goal. I still judged others, withheld love, and experienced periodic turmoil in my closest relationships. I still craved external approval that seemed in short supply. I had exhausted myself preparing for Christmas and once more felt like I had somehow missed the whole thing. I was fighting my annual sinus infection and couldn’t even ski as well as I had before the fracture. My hip throbbed and I still slept poorly. What kind of Course student was I?

“The ego does constant battle with the Holy Spirit on the fundamental question of what your function is. So does it do constant battle with the Holy Spirit about what your happiness is. It is not a two-way battle. The ego attacks and the Holy Spirit does not respond. He knows what your function is. He knows that it is your happiness.”

The Holy Spirit, that lofty name for the memory of our true wholeness that followed us into this dream of duality does not respond to illusions, but simply waits for us to look with him and choose again. The Course tells us over and over that we have only one function—forgiveness or choosing again for the Holy Spirit’s vision–and that learning to accept our function will bring us the only enduring happiness possible. Happiness that arises from the only real source of happiness, the one indivisible love we believe we destroyed but have actually never left. That one, stable love in which we continue to rest, dreaming of exile.

Forgiveness A Course in Miracles style has nothing to do with our pleasure or lack of it in this world. It doesn’t indulge illusory, romantic, chick flick endings. Instead it asks us to consider what happens after the couple sails into the sunset? How invested we are in denying our essential unhappiness that stems from the unconscious belief that we separated from love. How much we enjoy blaming our lack of happiness on someone else. What happens when our significant other fails to meet our needs? When a child we have nurtured hits puberty and seems to turn against us? When the worldly recognition we believe we earned fails to materialize? When an employer for whom we have “selflessly” slaved for years lays us off? What happens on the inside when the characters and circumstances in the projected-outside-the-mind dream fail us, as they inevitably do? We go ballistic, that’s what; compulsively projecting our anger on those we hold responsible for our suffering, acting out the ego’s script that keeps us from ever returning to the decision maker in the one mind that can choose a different teacher.

Forgiveness is the process that restores our mind to the eternally happy state of wholeness. If we choose not to forgive, we are choosing unhappiness. The only real choice is for the ego or the Holy Spirit, no matter how ingenious and tantalizing, upsetting and convincing the dream’s specifics appear to the body’s senses. Heaven or hell? Dream or awakening? Classroom or playground in which someone always gets hurt and someone always feels guilty and fearful of punishment? I am finally learning how much I really don’t want to be happy. How much I prefer chasing happiness guaranteed to fail me. How the pursuit maintains the ego’s secret goal of specialness while keeping me forging back into the world for yet another fix of fleeting pleasure, seeking for happiness where it can never be found in a future that doesn’t exist.

A section of the Course’s text called “The Happy Dream” offers us a very clear process for reclaiming the happiness we blame others for jeopardizing. It invites us to join our mind with the Holy Spirit in the “holy instant,” that place outside time in which the mistaken belief of separation and separate interests is healed, leaving only the loving happiness we share. It offers us a forgiveness prayer for whoever is “saner at the time” to apply to any seemingly “out there” relationship/problem.

If I have chosen the Course to lead me home, looked honestly, and recognized that all the world’s goals have ultimately failed me, I am the one that must catch myself once more siding with the ego’s insanity. I must remember that it only takes one mind to heal the illusion that there could possibly be more than one mind in need of healing. With this choice, I experience gratitude for the restored wholeness my relationships offer me when I change my mind about their purpose–from proving separation and opposition to proving eternal unity and common interests. I accept the holy instant of changed perception for myself as I remember I still love this seemingly challenging “other” because there is ultimately no other and infinitely only one inclusive love. With this recognition I begin to forgive myself for pushing love away, and develop compassion for everyone else experiencing the same miserable ego thought system which keeps them seeking for love and happiness in all the wrong places.

And so I will once more try to accept and allow my only real function, forgiveness, as I begin this New Year, turning the undoing of my false belief in separate interests over to a teacher that remembers what I really want. Knowing that the ego’s forever unfulfilled promises mean nothing, and that choosing that understanding brings me a little closer to awakening to real happiness with you.

Christmas as the end of sacrifice

I awoke this morning aching with an all-too-familiar melancholy that often cripples me in December. Sandwiched in between all the music and shopping, happy talk and sugar and striving to perfect and please. Despite a thermometer yielding welcome mild temperatures following a nearly two-week deep freeze. Despite a sun high in a sky blue enough to evoke Italian Renaissance paintings spilling pinkish light and casting deep, satisfying shadows. Despite a comforting silence as I allowed the dog who has not exactly gotten the hang of this walking on a leash thing to root away in the dry grass like a truffle-sniffing pig. Despite the perfect stillness that always seems to follow a day of high winds here in this dualistic world of competing interests. Despite squirrels darting hopefully about, hoarding for the future, I could feel winter’s bleakness in my bones today, the heaviness of the human condition, the suffering my choice for specialness continues to bring when I resist changing my mind.

And yet I am also thinking about light. The literal variety my neighbors have once again beat us to festooning their houses with, the tradition of lighting up the darkness at Christmas and Hanukah, and the hope of early civilizations enticing the sun to return to warm their fields. And the symbol of light A Course in Miracles uses to remind us of the one, abstract, whole, loving presence that still shines within our seemingly split mind. Despite our attraction to the darkness of continuing to exclude as we perceive ourselves excluded, to attack as we perceive ourselves attacked. Despite the ego’s appealing argument that we must curry favor to get our needs met here in this world through what the Course calls “sacrifice.” Giving to get in our special relationships; bargaining with those people, objects, and substances we continue to substitute for the real love we believe we catastrophically destroyed.

I am thinking about the idea of bringing the darkness of guilt that hides in my mind over that mistaken belief to the light of our right mind’s truth once and for always, releasing the weight of this seasonal sadness as the year winds down once more failing to deliver the perfect happiness my mind on ego continues to seek where it can never be found. I am entertaining the possibility of truly, madly, deeply surrendering the idea that I can ever find happiness in this world, resigning for good as my own teacher, and fully embracing the only teacher that can truly guide me home, and the only teaching I truly want to learn. What would happen if I embraced the light here, now, and forever?  Susan would disappear. And there’s the rub. Because a part of me still fears the light, craves darkness in which to hide, and simultaneously covets my unique identity; however unstable and no matter the cost.

How do I find the light when I still fear it? By beginning to recognize how much my mistaken belief in the original idea of separation has cost me, by learning to associate all my judgments of others, all my striving to complete myself with something or someone outside me with that original choice, and by learning through experience that when I bring the darkness of my mistaken illusions to the light in my mind that continues to eternally shine I am once more made whole, restored to and completed in the love I am. I do this from moment to moment with help from the part of my mind that remembers my perfect wholeness in what the Course calls the “holy instant,” that abstract place outside time where the guilt I have tried to deny by casting it on you dissolves in the united, eternal, indivisible love we share.

I awoke this morning feeling unloved and unloving, separate and sad, following a weekend in which I experienced the most extraordinary healing. My family and I picked out our Christmas tree, strung it with lights, decorated it, and went on to decorate the entire house without a single sharp word or slamming door. I did not once mutter as I dusted off the singing Christmas bass or talking Santa Claus head my husband continues to find hilarious. No one got upset when the lights didn’t work and my husband disappeared into the labyrinth of Home Depot, the place my daughter once accused him of secretly holding a second job because he spent so much time there. My daughter did not roll her eyes once as I obsessively rearranged the figures in our crèche. It didn’t bother me at all when she failed to hang the ornaments to swing freely; I did not even feel compelled to re-hang them.

We worked together methodically amid the clutter, now and then joining in with the carols my daughter picked out, sipping Cokes and Vitamin Waters. At one point, standing beside my daughter and reaching to hang the Eiffel Tower ornament my friend Beth had given me years earlier the unified peace we all share washed over me and I could feel my child’s arm reaching in tandem as my own, our seeming separate bodies irrelevant in the truth of our oneness. As the hours passed, our perfect Christmas expectation-riddled script at last abandoned, the darkness set in outside and our tree sparkled with new LED lights. Our puppy asleep on the velveteen tree skirt, we treated ourselves to sushi takeout.

And yet, I awoke this morning siding with the ego again, mentally blaming others for yet another winter of my discontent, the slide show of the year’s unfulfilled wishes and broken promises flashing in my head. Having once more mistaken the classroom of this world for a playground. Having forgotten that playing may satisfy children for a while, but only learning the one lesson of forgiving the incredible belief that anyone or thing outside my mind can jeopardize my essential happiness delivers the mature and lasting love I crave.  

Fortunately I have experienced the ego’s backlash before and am learning not to take it seriously. After all, I made it all up. I am learning that I want to hold you harmless; I want to stop buying, wrapping, rushing, baking and striving to win back the love I think I have forsaken, and love to accuse of forsaking me. I want to be whole and healed. I want to see things differently. I am learning that anything other than perfect peace of mind reflects that original albeit unconscious choice I made to push love away; but I want love back. I really have nothing to lose in choosing again for the only love that actually exists, and everything to gain. Nothing outside my mind can make me feel better or compromise the peace I am. The prison door remains open. When I choose your release; I am finally free. This Christmas, I am learning I truly want to:

 “…give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt you. Let yourself be healed completely that you may join with Him in healing, and let us celebrate our release together by releasing everyone with us…Make this year different by making it all the same. And let all your relationships be made holy for you. This is our will. Amen.” 

  

What I have learned from my dog

Over the past few months the idea of getting a dog had blossomed in my mind. My daughter had begun to drive and would be a high school senior next year. College loomed. I also sensed my troubled relationship with our aging cat Daisy Mae drawing to a close. She had begun behaving like a person with Alzheimer’s; I would catch her standing at the base of our neighbor’s porch gazing upward, as if trying to figure out why someone had switched the façade on her people’s house. Although I had grown terribly allergic to her dander and long since given up on her seemingly erratic (often almost feral) ways her sudden vulnerability drew me in, along with my own need to forgive. I stood at a distance–she had always seemed more receptive to me that way–softly entreating her to come home. Semi-aware that I was not speaking literally; she seemed genuinely ready to pass on, almost transparent in the buttery autumn light. I suddenly wanted more than anything to let my grievances against this completely innocent creature go; and asked for help to do so.

When she went missing a few days later my husband and daughter insisted she had merely hidden in someone’s garage again, but I knew better. After a week had passed, we suspected she had simply crawled off somewhere to die, and hoped she had not met the more violent fate of our neighbor’s cat, recently devoured by a coyote. Over the next week, denied the closure of a proper burial, we left water and food outside the garage and inside the boiler room for our ghost cat. And then, as the image of her began to recede in our psyches like a photograph developing backwards, erasing itself, devolving into white light; we found Kayleigh.

I had been researching breeds online and become quite smitten with maltipoos (Maltese and poodle mix). Despite their embarrassing popularity among Hollywood starlets, they were extremely compact, intelligent, friendly, playful, calm, portable, and hypoallergenic. As much as I love large dogs, we needed a low-maintenance animal we could lug with us on our many weekend getaways. Maltipoos seemed perfect in every respect save the price. We could not justify dropping a couple thousand dollars on a dog. And then, browsing one night on the internet, I found an ad for a 12-week-old Maltipoo that fit our budget, placed by a family in a nearby suburb. In the picture she was stepping into a puddle of sunlight, staring directly into my eyes from underneath shaggy black-and-white waves. I emailed back asking if we could see her the next day. The following morning; the person who had placed the ad responded that he had someone else interested from up north, but would call if they decided to pass. I offered to drive over immediately and he agreed. The puppy we later renamed Kayleigh (which means “party” in Gaelic and aptly describes her celebratory personality) bolted into our arms and hearts and has never left.

Her prior family had bought her from a breeder a couple weeks earlier and grown concerned their two-year-old child might inadvertently hurt the tiny dog; hence the low price tag. And although we would soon drop a bundle as she battled giardia and other intestinal infections for several weeks after joining our family, and later experienced a serious allergic reaction to her vaccinations, her robust spirit continues to belie her initially delicate physical strength. Tonight we will together attend our first puppy training class, an event we have twice postponed because of health issues. I watch her sleeping in her little bed in my office, head resting on her cloth piggy toy, and can’t help but wonder who is really training whom as I reflect on all she has taught me about our true loving nature in our brief time together. Lessons such as:

1. I am loved, you are loved; he, she, and it are loved: Kayleigh knows loving is her only real function. Feed her; she will lick you and wag her tail. Look at her; she will lick you and wag her tail. Come home; she will lick you and wag her tail. Talk to her; she will lick you and wag her tail. And as much as your mind on ego would like to believe you are the only one for her; she will do the same thing for anyone.

2. Love sets no conditions:  I do not hold Kayleigh responsible for her mistakes in the same way I hold human beings responsible. I suppose I believe she does not share the same ego-fueled human thought system that automatically assumes ulterior motives. As A Course in Miracles teaches, every other individual shares my same unconscious guilty feelings over having separated from our source and my same need to get rid of those feelings by blaming them on someone else. For whatever reason, I hold Kayleigh exempt from that hidden agenda. I always give her the benefit of the doubt. When she has an accident on the floor; I speak to her firmly, clean it up, and forget about it. I don’t get mad at her because I see past her mistake to our essential innocence.

3. Giving and receiving are the same: I tell Kayleigh I love her. I pet her, I hold her, I talk baby-talk to her, I cuddle her; I am a veritable love machine around Kayleigh; freely doling out the love I too often withhold from others for fear of rejection or indifference. We never disagree. We never argue. She never rolls her eyes at me. She never judges. I cannot fail around this dog. In the trick mirror of her eyes I am always welcome and adored. No matter what I do or say she licks me and wags her tail (see number 1).

4. It never happened: Dogs know you are upset; they just don’t know why. Like the Holy Spirit/right mind, they can see the illusion of the accident they just had on the rug, for example, they just know it’s not really a problem in truth. They will patiently wait until your ego attack passes. Then they will lick you and wag their tail (see number 1). Then you will hold them harmless (see number 2; no pun intended).

5. The value of observing ourselves: Dogs cause grown people to refer to themselves out loud in the third person as in “Bring Mama the piggy,” and “Mama loves you, yes she does; she just wishes you would do that outside instead of on the rug.” This is great training for witnessing the selves we think we are from the perspective of the decision maker in our mind that chooses between the ego’s perception of competing interests and the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of our perfect wholeness.

6. The ego is insane: Dogs know we are rarely in our right mind. When we try to cajole them to do their business outside as the thermometer hovers at minus twelve degrees they dig in their heels and wait until sanity returns and we dig out the puppy training pads again. After they do what they must do, they lick us and wag their tail (see numbers 1 and 2, no pun intended).

7. Forgiveness offers everything I want. As I look past Kayleigh’s seeming mistakes; as I hold her harmless in the light of our one mind, I am freed from the burden of my need to project. I know her tiny form in my life is not the one love beyond the dream but a mirror providing a generous glimpse of our unalterable, united perfection; only the eternal attraction of love for love. I don’t expect her to make me happy and yet through her demonstration of boundless giving, she does. Holding her to my chest outside time in the holy instant, the one love we are returns to my mind. I notice the same loving behavior toward our dog in my husband and daughter, and find it deeply endearing. Kayleigh is teaching us to appreciate and even risk demonstrating the one love we remain and yet so often hide from each other, and from ourselves. Grateful tears well up in my eyes. She licks me and wags her tail.

I can’t get home without you

All week long the individual I still believe I am has felt periodically slighted, criticized, interfered with, excluded, and/or misunderstood by loved ones and those it considers close allies. (Don’t even get it started on those it considers adversaries.) The nonstop, often jarring Christmas music emanating from retail store speakers doesn’t help. Neither do sub-zero temperatures, icy roads, already obese to do lists further bloated by holiday chores, disrupted exercise, eating, and sleeping routines, and more social obligations than any introvert can reasonably be expected to handle. Like a small, overtired child pushed to the max, it doesn’t want to play with you anymore. It doesn’t want to share. It doesn’t want to negotiate or cooperate. It doesn’t want to tolerate. It wants to push all the pieces off the game board, throw itself on the floor, yell, and kick its feet. It wants someone sane, calm, and loving to pick it up, take it home, and fix it hot cocoa. Home, alone, away from all you nut cases.

As an A Course in Miracles student I am beginning to recognize the impossibility of satisfying my true and in truth only desire to make it home to eternal wholeness–beyond my impossible cravings for support and solace in this world–without you. I am also beginning to recognize the mistaken belief at the root of my isolationist impulses. When “the tiny mad idea” of separation arose in the one child of God’s mind and our one mind took it seriously we believed we destroyed the infinite unity we in fact remain. Seemingly cast into a dream of opposing, fragmenting forms competing for survival we continually search outside our apparently individual psyches for relief from the internal pain of our mistake. We find that temporary relief by projecting the repressed guilt we experience as a result of separation outward, blaming something or someone outside for our loss of peace, and then pleading with God to rescue us from the treadmill of sin, guilt, and fear we can’t seem to escape on our own. But the real God, the one love we remain fused with in truth, knows nothing of our distress because the problem never happened. Enter the blessing of A Course in Miracles’ forgiveness.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that a part of our mind transcends the ego’s hallucinated universe of competing interests generated by the belief in separation and the need to protect our seemingly differentiated selves from God’s retribution. The Holy Spirit/right mind holds the awareness of eternal, unified love for us. We can learn to turn away from the ego’s constant rant of vulnerability and hear instead the calm, quiet voice for love that reminds us that “not one note in Heaven’s song was missed.” The separation never happened. We really have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by accepting this. The Holy Spirit teaches us the benefits of acceptance when we remember to engage it. We, the decision maker that chooses between the two thought systems, “need do nothing” except accept atonement for ourselves by choosing for the part of our mind that believes in atonement.

All this may sound rather lofty and spiritually inflated. In truth, forgiveness, the tool we use to turn our mistaken perception over to the Holy Spirit, is dynamic and practical. It does not entreat us to refrain from blaming others for our problems. It teaches us to recognize how appealing we find blaming others, how real incoming attacks seem when interpreted through sensory apparatus designed to prove their reality, and how unhappy our judgments make us. It asks us to watch ourselves as seeming stressors arise and inevitably escalate. To take responsibility for our mistaken illusions back to their source in the guilty ego mind, acknowledge our error, and choose again for help from the part of our mind that gently smiles at the absurdity of the idea of error. When we do this we step out of time in the “holy instant” and receive the grace of uninterrupted, eternal union. Our misperceptions and grievances burn away in the light of infinite, indivisible love; and our mind heals. Completed, beyond all external need, our perception of everyone and everything transforms and we experience only the comfort and deep release of restored unity.

I can’t get home without you. That’s what my loved ones and colleagues, frigid temperatures, inadequate snow removal, and unfortunate holiday musical arrangements have taught me once again this week.

“You will never give this holy instant to the Holy Spirit on behalf of your release while you are unwilling to give it to your brothers on behalf of theirs. For the instant of holiness is shared, and cannot be yours alone.”

 

The ego’s fear of the disintegration of the only self it knows, and punishment for the impossible crime of separation, keeps it defending this faux, finite self created to protect against the wraith of God while perpetuating its special interests. But I am not the ego. Despite my ongoing resistance, I can find a sane, loving part of my mind to lead me home. I need but focus on my curriculum. I need but notice my mistaken interpretations of the problems and perpetrators I have created to keep me from returning to the source of the only real problem in the one mind. I need but remember I want to go home, and so does every single other nut case “out there.” We all share the same miserable, repressed belief in guilt, the same fear of punishment, and the same compulsion to blame others. And we all share the deep longing to return to the boundless comfort of our true nature. The loving hand that guides us home is always patiently extended at the border of our mistaken illusions. I find it again, along with our unwavering innocence, by extending my hand once more to you regardless of what the ego would have me believe you have done.

What does it mean to be whole?

“My mind is a part of God’s. I am very holy.”

 

“My holiness envelops everything I see.”

 

“My holiness blesses the world.”

 

“There is nothing my holiness cannot do.”

 

“My holiness is my salvation.”

 

A Course in Miracles workbook lessons 35 through 39 invite us to consider the nature of holiness or wholeness. I have practiced these lessons before, and found them deeply comforting. Not so much this time. As I began to truly consider the idea that “my mind is part of God’s,” an anxious hum arose in my ears. I found it challenging to hear the lesson’s words over the ego’s interfering static, and even more difficult to concentrate. I felt suddenly drugged; confused and groggy. Once again I had trouble accessing the “mind” the Course addresses, the decision maker that believes it pulled off the “crime” of separating from our one, unified source from the brain that supplies me with a steady fix of three-dimensional walking, talking, interrupting, annoying, distracting, approving, rejecting, attacking, defending images upon whom to pin my peace or lack thereof.

The lesson invites us to reflect upon attributes of the individual self we think we are, the personality that interacts in an illusory world of form, the seemingly fragmented piece of the “Sonship” A Course in Miracle’s teaches us to ultimately transcend. The lesson asks us to use various adjectives–negative and positive–to describe this fractured self. And follow each description with the declaration that we remain a part of God, healed and whole. The exercise works on a subconscious level to undo our identification with the ego thought system we allow to run us. A thought system that has convinced us we have not only pulled off the impossible feat of dividing the indivisible; our very survival depends on compulsively projecting our “sin” outside the mind, blaming it on something or someone in a mad effort to avoid our creator’s retribution. When under the influence of the ego, we behave like projecting machines, compulsively blaming the first person or situation to cross in front of our sensory apparatus for compromising our fragile peace. Sometimes, we turn the projector on our own bodies; blaming our false selves for our alleged crime and in the process experiencing physical or psychological pain.

As I wound my way through five days of the holiness lessons my emotional and physical unrest appeared to escalate. So did the “incoming” assaults from a world I experience outside our true mind. So did my own attacks on the physical and psychological body I still think I am. Although I have been seriously studying the Course for some time and committed to practicing its unique form of forgiveness, I once again seemed to have trouble contacting Jesus/Holy Spirit/that part of our one mind that has never forgotten what it means to be whole and would share its knowledge if we would allow it. I asked, but nothing answered. A steady stream of outside attacks from loved ones, colleagues, and circumstances appeared to continue. The lesson’s message of wholeness seemed to mock me. My wholeness did not envelop everything I see; I mentally complained; but my brokenness certainly did.

 

 Seriously? I whined, by the time I got to lesson 37—My holiness blesses the world. While I had no real trouble blessing the inanimate objects we are asked to include—I was raised Catholic, after all–I had issues with blessing my growing hit list of individuals “out there” intent on derailing my spiritual practice despite my dedication to awakening.

Because I had been practicing the Course long enough to understand there is no one really out there, I felt caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, paralyzed by the unconscious fear of true joining with our one inner teacher but no longer able to fully accept the ego’s paranoid sob story either. And I, the decision maker, came face to face once more with our true, denied self-loathing. Useful information; I tried to tell myself. But the lessons weren’t over yet. The next day, I tried to entertain the possibility that there is nothing my holiness cannot do. This lesson, in particular, entreats the decision maker to reclaim the power it believes it forfeited out of a false sense of self-preservation. It invites us to entertain the possibility that despite our vivid dream, we remain resting in an all loving, unified, eternal, whole love that retains the only power that truly exists:

“Your holiness, then, can remove all pain, can end all sorrow, and can solve all problems. It can do so in connection with yourself and with anyone else.”

Our true wholeness can eliminate all sorrow, pain, and problems because in truth, they don’t exist. The lesson asks us to search our mind for any problem we see involving ourselves or anyone else and then reassure ourselves there is nothing our wholeness cannot do. Why? Because nothing ever really happened to disturb our wholeness. Despite their tantalizing and ingenious forms, our problems and all problems are actually impossible.  

I did my best to follow the lesson’s directions but kept forgetting to practice and found it particularly difficult to apply the idea to someone else’s seeming problem as directed. I discovered I couldn’t understand how others saw the situation in which we disagreed because I believed it was possible to see things differently. When, in truth, we all share the same miserable belief in the sin of separation and the same compulsive impulse to get rid of it by pinning it on someone else. I wondered if maybe that was what Jesus was inviting us to see. There is truly only one mind in need of healing because there is truly only one mind. I found that comforting, as always. I stopped fighting; stopped worrying about what the lesson meant. I merged with wholeness in the moment I gave up the struggle. My death grip on the ego relaxed and I was healed, outside time, completely cleansed of all external need. But the fear must have arisen again because I soon enough found myself observing another seeming attack, this time from someone with whom I am almost always in agreement. “What wholeness?” the ego asked. I wanted to smack it, too.

By the time I made it to Lesson 39: “My holiness is my salvation,” at the end of a long holiday weekend; I was exhausted from celebrating and entertaining and had developed an eye infection; hip, toe, and elbow issues. The introverted self I think I am inwardly screamed for alone time as I cleaned up the house and fought off a cold. “If guilt is hell,” the lesson began, “what is its opposite?”

“Innocence,” the decision maker said.

“Heaven!” the ego shrieked. Yikes–the scene of the crime! The separation really happened; I could feel it in the pit of my stomach, despite the Course’s reassuring words.

“We have already said that your holiness is the salvation of the world,” I read. “What about your own salvation? You cannot give what you do not have. A savior must be saved. How else can he teach salvation?”

“My point exactly,” the ego said.

I tried to ignore it but couldn’t help but question how I could formally teach A Course in Miracles without accepting salvation for myself when all it took was a change of mind about what I really am and where my wholeness really lies? Again I asked for help; this time to stop pushing the memory of God’s love away. I did what the lesson asked. I repeated the idea that my unloving thoughts about _________and ____________ and ___________ were keeping me in hell but, “My holiness is my salvation.”

I didn’t believe it, I didn’t understand it, and obviously I didn’t want it; but I did it anyway. And I got through my day, at least aware that there was another way of looking at these experiences that seemed so hell-bent on messing with my peace.

Fortunately, ACIM meets us where we think we are on the level of form here in our dream. On the level of form we must learn to get very good at identifying the ego in action and asking for help from our one mind that does not take the dream seriously. We need to be patient with ourselves when we stall out in the process of letting our illusions go, and recognize the fear fueling our paralysis. The Course’s author, symbolic of our one awakened mind, demonstrates great patience with us. We can certainly learn to be just as tolerant and forgiving with ourselves and our process of undoing. When we fall off the forgiveness wagon we should not berate ourselves for being mistaken and afraid. We should merely pick ourselves up and ask again for help from our right mind to know true forgiveness. That is why we are here; our only real function.

The Course tells us “I need do nothing” on the level of truth. Meaning the seemingly individual self I believe I am doesn’t need to do anything because, in truth, the mistake of individuality never occurred, so there is nothing to do. Sometimes I get that. More often, I find it difficult to grasp in the day-to-day trenches of apparently separate interests with which I find myself contending. Either way I simply need to turn away from the ego’s scary slide show and tune into my right mind’s whole vision. I do that when I am ready. Once my fear of the unreal subsides with help from the part of my mind that knows I have nothing to fear I see only common interests again; the one longing to awaken we all share. 

Today I awoke to Lesson 40: “I am blessed as a Son of God,” feeling empty, cleansed, purged. Another toxic layer of false belief expelled; an open vessel for the one, whole, eternal light that has never stopped shining. Realizing I do not know what it means to be blessed as a child of God, but am willing, and able, to learn. And in that willingness am once again made whole.