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“And when the night is cloudy,
There is still a light that shines on me,
Shine until tomorrow, let it be.”
-Let It Be, Paul McCartney
Last week I attended an outdoor concert featuring one of those Beatles impersonator groups that have become so popular in recent years with my husband and a good friend. It was one of those perfect, rare June evenings in Denver; the purple mountain majesties still capped with snow. The heat relieved by a light breeze, the blazing sun partially obscured by towering, anvil-shaped clouds on their way to battering the plains to our east with hail rather than once again wiping out our newly transplanted tomatoes. Giddy with the sense of having dodged the torrent these concerts too often morph into, and transported by the rhythms and lyrics of our youth we sang, danced, drank, and ate, and–during intermission–even managed to converse.
My friend who is not on this path but nonetheless faithfully reads my blog and had just generously recommended it to a mutual friend also not on this path observed that she considered herself an agnostic, and didn’t think she would ever enjoy my “certainty.” By that I suppose she meant that she considers me a believer in our source: God/wholeness/eternal oneness; whatever you want to call it. I don’t think I have ever been called a believer before. Frankly, it left me a little flabbergasted. Feeling a little like an imposter, not unlike the way I began to feel growing up as a child, attending a mass whose exclusive message seemed so at odds with all I felt to be true despite colossal evidence to the contrary.
It didn’t occur to me then, but it occurs to me now, that I am not really a believer in the sense I think my friend meant, however enthusiastically I have embraced A Course in Miracles. I am not so much a believer in the divine as I am someone who has exhausted her belief in the brutality of the earthly dream I believe I have navigated for so long. A fellow doubter for whom the pain of seeking for myself in the world has simply become too much to bear. Someone who—by practicing forgiveness A Course in Miracles style day in and day out–has begun to experience moments of yearning for a better way interrupted, whole instants in which I feel absolutely completed; beyond all need and happily wrong about everything.
“And I am free because I was mistaken, and did not affect my own reality at all by my illusions. Now I give them up, and lay them down before the feet of truth, to be removed forever from my mind.” (From workbook lesson 227.)
I am not so much certain as I am finally growing into the welcome doubt that anything here will work, with help from a part of my mind I only recently discovered. By learning to look with that part of my mind on all I once thought I wanted and believed I am starving my faith that anyone or thing can fulfill me, as well as my belief in a separate self in need of fulfillment. Learning once and for always that there is absolutely nothing certain in this world, but that beyond this world of form there is a non-dualistic mind restored to wholeness I can always count on.
In a Course class I am teaching we have just begun Part II of the workbook that invites us to allow God—the symbol for perfect oneness the Course uses to ultimately undo our belief in symbols–to reveal itself. To suspend our disbelief, set aside our defenses as one of my favorite Beatle tunes—Let It Be—also entreats us to do. This shouldn’t be that difficult since my defenses have never worked very well for me. I have always been too in touch with the emotional pain in myself and others (as if there were a difference). And yet I am very resistant as I begin these revelatory lessons in the second half of the workbook to allow the “Love of God” to shine in me when I still equate the G word with the God we humans crafted, the God of most organized religions created in the ego’s image to reinforce the original myth of separation from perfect love, and our creator’s inevitable punishment.
Even though I am learning through attempting to live A Course in Miracles that the abstract, all-inclusive “God” the Course would invite us to join our minds with has nothing to do with the ego’s insane, worldly God, I am still on some level beyond my understanding too intimidated by that unconditional light; still too dependent on a false identity–however painful–for sustenance. Still too afraid of being obliterated by that light because of my belief in the selfish crime of coveting individuality over perfect oneness I can’t even remember. But despite my fear, the Course offers a gentle, practical path home that provides us with gradual glimpses of wholeness as we practice forgiveness and learn to choose love over fear. Heavily supported by the right mind that returns to our awareness when we turn away from the ego’s threats; thereby figuratively “calling on Him.” As we are reminded in Chapter 16, VI. The Bridge to the Real World:
“Fear not that you will be abruptly lifted up and hurled into reality. Time is kind, and if you use it on behalf of reality, it will keep gentle pace with you in your transition…Out of your recognition of your unwillingness for your release; His perfect willingness is given you. Call upon Him, for Heaven is at His Call. And let Him call on Heaven for you.”
This is my growing certainty: the world I think I find myself in, along with the self I think I find myself in, offers only pain, despite its ingenious, occasionally thrilling, always ephemeral disguises. The Course readily acknowledges that there are many paths home, and that we are all heading there; regardless of our chosen transportation. It claims only to be a shortcut for those of us engaged in the world. It came to two renowned psychologists (at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons) who were so not religious people–so not believers–and very engaged in the world. It uses the specifics of our lives in form–primarily our relationships with others–to undo our belief that specifics and others can in any way affect our peace of mind. It employs Christian terminology because it is so embedded in our Western culture, so entwined with our mistaken beliefs about what we are, so in need of undoing. As Course scholar Ken Wapnick often points out; we should read it like we read a great epic poem teeming with metaphor; rather than taking most of it literally.
Ultimately I suppose this is not a Course for people delighted with what they experience in the world and body. Despite its many breathtakingly passages pointing to a reality beyond this dream, this is a Course for people whose faith in the dream world’s promises has waned, for people who have absolutely had it with the world. Who have been clobbered over the head and clobbered others over the head at the ego’s bidding once too often. Who are ready to embrace the idea of trading the seemingly endless substitutions we have made for eternal, inclusive, universal love for the real thing. I am almost certain I am one of those people.
And so when the dream seems clouded by fearful guilt, I continue to choose again to be happily wrong, to forgive what cannot be; certain only that I can no longer be certain about anything I used to believe, including what I am. And in that certainty in all I am learning I am not, I begin to allow the healing light that shines on me, and you, and all– yesterday, today, and tomorrow—to return to our mind.
I am going away at the end of the week to visit colleges with my daughter and will post late next week when I return.
In the dream I am accompanying my daughter on a college tour. We are descending difficult to navigate metal stairs in some kind of towering outdoor stadium as high as a skyscraper, with each step almost as tall as we are. The whole apparatus shifts–more like scaffolding than a permanent structure–groaning and creaking, with our every move. The metal stairs are pebbled with tiny holes. A thin, wrought-iron railing to our right is all that stands between us and plunging to our death thousands of feet below. People keep pushing past us on the left, practically bolting down the swaying stairs. My daughter’s high heel catches in one of the holes on the step below and she stumbles. (I told her not to wear those ridiculously inappropriate shoes!) Her teammates on her soccer team call her Bambi for her tendency to trip on those long, lean legs of hers; Bambi, after the classic Disney film in which a little fawn loses its mother—I suppose that would be me–to a hunter.
The heel is stuck. The apparatus pitches and I can’t reach her to help. Somehow, my daughter extricates her shoe and continues down the stairs while I remain paralyzed with fear, simultaneously aghast at my inability to sacrifice myself to protect her. Suddenly the scene shifts as scenes in dreams inexplicably do. I am still on the same stair, but the other people have disappeared and so have the stairs below me, replaced by a kind of hammock of fragile webbed netting like the bags lemons come in at the supermarket. I cannot see what supports the netting on the other side. I know I am expected to crawl across it but I am so not Survivor material; there is just no way in hell I am going to risk it. Instead I turn and go back up the suddenly carpeted and indoor stairs. And I wake up; desperate to find the daughter I have once again somehow failed.
Things have been a little tense around here lately. My husband and daughter have not been seeing eye-to-eye. My days have been seemingly punctuated by their outraged outbursts. He feels she does not appreciate all he does for her. In his mind she is not stepping up to the many looming college, financial aid, and scholarship application tasks confronting us this summer, not adequately preparing for her ACTs and SATs, not taking the steps necessary to complete her required IB and college application essays. She feels victimized, persecuted, and misunderstood. Both of them are very talented at sharing their feelings with me.
When not listening to their complaints, I, on the other hand, have been further amusing our right mind by secretly trying to resurrect a recurring little fantasy in which my daughter and I–this last, nostalgic summer before her senior year in high school–get to do all those mother-daughter things we’ve been largely putting off since her adolescence hit so freaking hard. We will drive to Boulder, take a little morning hike around the Flatirons, indulge in a fabulous exotic lunch, and spend the afternoon window shopping on the mall, trying on nutty hats and glasses the way we used to and watching street performers fold themselves up and stuff themselves into little plastic cubes. We will get our nails done, see all those indie movies we never had time to, hit the public pool and read the same novels we will later discuss over the chocolate chip cookies and banana bread we will bake. I know.
Yesterday, the last day of a long weekend dedicated to honoring those who had sacrificed dearly to protect our American way of life, launching a summer of sentimental cravings for what A Course in Miracles calls our “special relationships” to comply with our fantasies; it all came to a head. My husband had had it with her. My daughter had had it with him. They both had had it with my disinclination to try to jump in and fix it for them as I once had only to be turned on by both of them like rabid dogs.
There were slamming doors, raised voices, tears. My daughter stormed out the front door. My husband stormed out the side. Our little dog ran around in frantic circles, licking my ankles. I sat in my office, the innocent bystander, reaching for the muscle of indignation only to find it disabled. What did these theatrics really have to do with me, I wondered? I could feel my husband’s fear that our daughter would somehow not make it to adulthood, somehow fail to take her place as a responsible, independent citizen in a world filled with irresponsible citizens; masking the real fear: that he had failed her. I could feel my daughter’s fear that whatever she did would never be enough to live up to her parents’ expectations. That she might not make it in this world; might not become the independent, responsible citizen we expected; masking the real fear: that she had failed him. And all at once I could claim the fear playing out in the characters in my dream—the sleeping and the waking one—as my own.
A deeply comforting line I had read in the introduction to Part II of the workbook came back to me then like a phrase of welcome music:
“I am so close to you we cannot fail.”
We have not failed each other, have not failed our creator; have not failed our one and only self. A self that remains seamlessly bound to its source. The notion that we have somehow failed our perpetual wholeness by selfishly declaring our independence is a bunch of hooey despite the ego thought system’s elaborate reenactments of individuals vying for control in a hallucinated world of dueling interests.
“We had a wish that God would fail to have the Son whom He created for Himself. We wanted God to change Himself, and be what we would make of Him. And we believed that our insane desires were the truth. Now we are glad that this is all undone and we no longer think illusions true. The memory of God is shimmering across the wide horizons of our minds. A moment more, and it will rise again.”
We cannot fail to return to God, that symbol of shared eternal peace and wholeness, because, as the Course tells us again and again, ideas leave not their source. Despite our impossible desire to experience ourselves as “other,” we remain one, resting in eternal, united love, dreaming our trippy dreams of exile. Despite the repressed guilt we carry over the belief that we have pulled off the impossible and must create a world of other bodies on which to pin the crime, the idea of guilt has never left its source in the mind. Our attempts to get rid of it by projecting it on someone “out there” will always fail us. But the moment in which we recognize a dream figure’s call for love as the same miserable call of the dream figure we identify with the dream vanishes, the credits roll, and we find ourselves transported with a gentle, compassionate smile to our right mind. A mind that sees only common interests and knows without question that our true unified nature has never and could never fail us.
When my daughter came home the ego attack had passed. We sat down together and reviewed the many daunting tasks she needed to complete. She admitted she had been feeling a little overwhelmed; I couldn’t blame her. I helped her break the tasks into doable pieces and set up a calendar. My husband drifted in from the backyard and we calmly reviewed the information we needed to collect to fill out the financial aid and scholarship applications. With a relieved sigh, the dog curled up and took a well deserved nap at our feet.
About four years ago I came to a place in my then two-year study of A Course in Miracles where I recognized I didn’t have a clue what the Course meant by forgiveness. I had been reading the big blue book, diligently practicing the lessons in the first part of the workbook designed to begin to undo the ego thought system; but I still thought there was a me at the center of it all. That earnest, Susan of Arc self of my childhood, a justice seeking, spiritually inclined missile of a me who had decided to take the high road in my closest, most challenging relationships. A me within whom the peace of God could shine; a me that could cajole the divine into intervening in my behalf, a me entrusted with the salvation of the world.
But since my identification with all things me was what had gotten me into this mess of seeking and never finding–this hell of special, constantly competing and opposing interests in the first place–I was stuck. The Course was not working for me. My relationships had become more trying than ever. My professional life seemed fraught with constant rejection and disappointment. The world around me seemed headed for certain annihilation; just like the doomsday nut cases constantly proclaimed.
I was facing another birthday but I really had nothing to celebrate. The deep longing for something unknown and unnamed that had plagued me all my life seemed deeper and more futile than ever. And so I prayed to a God I still—cockeyed optimist that I remain–hoped to somehow find outside me somewhere peeking down through the constellations. A God I had not found in the church of my childhood or the many wacky venues I had sought him in since. A God I suppose I had hoped to find in the big, blue book but so far had not. I felt that I had come to the end of the proverbial road. I would either find what I was looking for in this book, or I would quit looking, give up, throw the book out the window, run over it with my car. Defect to the dark side.
And so I prayed to really understand what the Course meant by forgiveness. I prayed to learn how to practice it in my life. And I prayed to experience the title of my favorite workbook lesson 189: “I feel the love of God within me now,” because I at least recognized and was willing to finally admit that I did not feel the love of God within me; not even close. I did not even know what the hell the love of God was supposed to mean. I only knew I wanted to feel love, real love, love that would stay. I wanted to feel forever loved and loving, to reach beyond the rainbow of my needs, to finally find a better way of living in this world.
Over the next year, my birthday prayer was answered in unexpected ways. I suppose I had expected some kind of Hollywood transformation, a sanitized mystical experience complete with a sound track and angels from central casting. I had expected my vision to go all Disney on me, pastel clouds and song birds, heartfelt confessions from those who had wronged me. The kind of thing that would make most grown people want to puke. Instead I learned to step away from the cartoon, to really look with our inner teacher at the selfishness of the ego thought system at work in my so-called life. At the glaring differences I constantly tracked and measured between myself and others, the comparisons I made that always left one of us feeling slimed. Instead I experienced the burden of carrying this heavy pack of lies based on the original lie that we could have differentiated ourselves from our indivisible, loving source, and the incredible relief and release available when I finally chose-from moment to moment; delusion to delusion–to put the baggage down.
I learned in sharp contrast that when I was willing to resign as my own teacher I could finally feel the love I never left within me still. I experienced a self outside the hallucination of me; a self without agendas of any kind. I learned that the you the author of A Course in Miracles speaks to is not the ego self we think we are when we first pick up the book but the decision maker in our one mind; the part of our mind that first chose in selfishness to try to push its creator’s love away but can learn to choose again for selflessness. The part of our one mind that can learn to recognize that no one or thing outside the mind can destroy or enhance its everlasting peace in any way; can learn to experience the extraordinary, transformative power of no me.
I learned we are mind, in ways we totally do not understand here where we think we reside in the condition we think we’re in. Mind: a word whose closest translation on the level of form is heart. The truth of A Course in Miracles’ message of forgiveness does not reside in its gossamer pages. The power of no me does not stem from trying to wrap our heads around this Course. We need to wrap our heart around this Course. Not the heart of our ephemeral bodies but our one, enduring heart. When we do we return to the eternal present we have never left, the only place in which we can feel the love of God within us now.
“Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.”
In this season of great expectations; of final exams, graduations, weddings and anniversaries, failures and triumphs; chapters coming to a close and held up to the darkness of the ego mind for critical review. This season of glorifying personal differences, measuring current accomplishments and achievements against unspoken lists of ego goals; I have once again forgotten what I am; what I could possibly be without my relationship with someone or thing outside myself. I have found myself merely flirting with my right mind before diving back into the ego’s mosh pit of specialness for another excruciating romp. Once more blasting lyrics set to a vicious base lamenting the many ways in which others (including the ego self I think I am) have fallen short of my great expectations.
I keep trying to force the self I think I am to once more replay the ego’s tune of dueling interests. But in the moment when I have actually done what the Course asks, the whole instant of forgiveness in which I have held another harmless for my distress, heard the gentle call of our one healed mind, and known what the Course means when it tells us “Not one note in heaven’s song was missed,” I remember that this is the only music I really want to hear. When I turn away from all the illusions I have concocted to hurt me, I see the peace of God shining in everyone and feel God’s love within us all. This is the gift of forgiveness A Course in Miracles style, the answer to the only real prayer we could ever truly utter, the power and glory of no me.
And so I remind myself today that I got my birthday wish. I have felt the love I have never left within me; the all-inclusive love that returns to our mind when we forgive our illusions of specialness with help from our inner teacher. And having heard that call, I cannot bear to listen to this horrid static much longer because I know I can choose again for the song of forgiveness. And so I do.
“Every heart to love must come, but like a refugee.”
-Leonard Cohen
Last week I worked my daughter’s high school’s traditional breakfast for graduating seniors and their families held on the last day of regular classes before final exams. The PTO had asked parents of juniors to handle the festivities and I found myself stumbling into the cafeteria at 6 a.m. along with a handful of other bleary-eyed volunteers to set tables, fill vases with sprays of lilacs pilfered from neighbor’s yards, set out fruit and pastry, and pour orange juice.
At 6:30, as senior students and their parents descended on the buffet tables and a sentimental feeding frenzy began; I hastened to replenish supplies and remove rapidly accumulating debris. As I greeted several of my daughter’s dearest friends, among the group scheduled to graduate two weeks later, I struggled to conceal unexpected waves of emotion. This was not even my daughter’s class, and yet.
I have not always been such a crybaby. In childhood I cultivated what I came to refer to as my stone face—modeled after a photograph of a statue in a book of Greek mythology I read in fourth grade–at the many wakes and funerals I was forced to attend as a result of my large, extended tribe’s alarming and frequent tendency to perish without warning. The stone face also came in particularly handy during adolescence when dealing with a variety of authority figures. From those in my kitchen and classrooms to those in uniform fanning out at anti-war rallies other authority figures insisted I was too young to attend. But last week in that cafeteria the mask that had served me so well all those years ago appeared to have gone permanently missing.
As I watched dazed looking parents photographing their soon-to-be headed for greener pastures spawn, I saw only my daughter grinning up at the camera with her bagel, only my daughter clasping the cap and gown she had picked up that morning to her chest and clowning around with pals, only my daughter wondering aloud how it had all passed so quickly—the whole year a blur, really—how she had waited so long for this moment, and yet. Only my daughter who had confessed but weeks earlier that she just couldn’t wait to go off to college, free at last to make her own decisions, to find her people; free at last to mine the treasure of the true self she had been seeking all along, a self the world so far had seemed so hell-bent on preventing her from excavating.
I downed water and pulled myself together. I did my best to act normal—always a stretch–smiling and hugging and snapping family pictures. I helped clean up and take out trash. Back at home I considered A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 182: “I will be still an instant and go home,” a breathtaking description of the largely unconscious albeit universal sense of loss we carry over the belief that we have forever forfeited our eternal childhood home, the home of our one, true, and only self beyond the ego’s shameful dream of separate interests.
“We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find; not recognizing what it is he seeks. A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind.”
The lesson goes on to describe the hero of the (ego’s) dream’s journey to find fulfillment in a meaningless venue designed to make real the ultimately impossible idea of individuality triumphing over indivisible, inclusive, everlasting love. The nagging self-doubt we experience as a result and attempt to repress by donning our masks of stone while secretly blaming the authority figures of our earthly childhood for imprisoning us far too long.
“Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. Others will deny that they are sad and do not recognize their tears at all. Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream. Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?”
That would be my mind on ego, again, of course. As I watched my daughter’s friends that morning on the threshold of reenacting the ego’s story of striking off on its own, and considered my daughter’s approaching senior year and, with any luck, graduation, I asked for help from the eternal child in our one mind–that symbol of our enduring, invulnerable defenselessness we carried into the dream–to see clearly. To observe the feelings of loss already flooding my mind on ego, feelings generated by the belief that the eternal love we share could be somehow shattered. Somehow potentially diminished by a child heading off to begin her own journey in discovering that we will never find the forever-loving self we think we lack in a world designed to prevent us from accessing the part of our mind that remembers we have a choice outside the confines of linear time in which to experience our true and only self.
“When you are still an instant, when the world recedes from you, when valueless ideas cease to have value in your restless mind, then will you hear His Voice. So poignantly He calls to you that you will not resist Him longer…”
No one is literally calling to us, of course. It is merely the call of our true and only self we hear when we stop listening to the ego’s 24/7 spin of separate interests purchased at the expense of enduring unity. I need only call on the strength that lingers in my mind for help in observing my choice to believe I am losing a part of myself along with my daughter’s impending departure. When I do so; loving awareness of our unalterable connection returns and all fear and guilt vanish. A connection that has nothing to do with the war of independence waged within every parent-child relationship here in a world that reveres the impossible idea of independence.
Gazing through the whole spirit’s lens, I see a photograph replete with shadowy images of “special” love developing backwards into the brilliant light of our true, non-dualistic source. And I remember I am already home along with my daughter despite the dream’s apparent story arc; always have been. Even as I observe the ego strengthening in her as she prepares to seek her worldly fortune outside the mind, and begin at last–through practicing the Course’s forgiveness day in and day out–to weaken in me. So that there are elongated moments these days in which I find myself reaching for the muscle of judgment, control, and autonomy only to find it—like a mask I once wore in childhood for protection from imagined pain—happily disabled.
“In that instant He will take you to his home, and you will stay with Him in perfect stillness, silent and at peace beyond all words, untouched by fear and doubt, sublimely certain that you are home.”
I woke up the same way I had gone to bed: in pain. I had recovered nicely from a hip fracture a year-and-a-half earlier, what doctors like to label “a traumatic injury” involving a severe fall on ice during a family vacation. But unconsciously compensating for my compromised left side ever since had thrown the rest of my body out of alignment, resulting in unrelenting pain in my right hip and lower back as well as my left shoulder; home to several decade-old injuries. I finally sought help from a chiropractor who snapped multiple bones throughout my neck, shoulders, ribs, pelvis, and hips back into place, explaining that it might take a few sessions to convince my muscles to stop protecting an area of my body no longer in need of their services.
As I lay in bed registering a déjà vu of twinges and throbs I asked for help from my right mind to recognize them for what they are: but another ego ploy to keep me distracted from returning to the one mind and choosing again for peace. It was Monday morning, a fresh start. Today, I vowed not to be deceived; not to make a go of navigating this minefield of a world alone. Today I would call on the whole spirit in my mind–the part of our one mind that holds the memory of our invulnerability and innocence intact–for help with interpreting every illusion that pesky magician of an ego would tempt me to take seriously. I would scoff at the ego’s shadowy projections. They would not interrupt my peace today.
In the bathroom I learned from NPR that the oil spill in the Gulf had already invaded fragile wetlands and contaminated wildlife, and heard more about the horrific fate of the men killed and injured in the explosion that caused it. Obama had nominated his pick for Supreme Court sure to trigger another feeding frenzy among Republicans, and financial markets were still reeling from a possible contagion caused by the potential bankruptcy of Greece.
In the hallway my husband informed me that a local teenage girl had narrowly escaped causing her own death and the death of several others when she rolled her SUV while texting at a busy intersection near our daughter’s school. He had copied the newspaper article and was trying to convince our daughter to read it. Our daughter was attempting to convey her dismay over a neighbor’s lab once more dashing across the street and into our yard while our daughter took our maltipoo out for her morning constitutional. This had happened several times and we were naturally concerned that one of these days we would not grab Kayleigh in time to prevent the lab from delivering a killer bite to her tiny jugular. After all, another wayward lab had nearly killed our next-door neighbor’s dog only a few weeks earlier.
In the kitchen as I did the dishes my family had neglected from the night before I made the mistake of asking my daughter–overwhelmed with end-of-the-year academic and extracurricular responsibilities–if she would be home for dinner, and got the look. I made the mistake of asking my husband–consumed by unpredictable work and extracurricular demands—the same question and got the middle-aged male version of the look. Once they had gone, I reached down for my dog—unhinged by a weekend of undisciplined frolicking with my husband and daughter–and got the young canine version of the look.
I carried the dog nestled like the filling of a burrito in her little bed into my office, set her down on the floor, took a swig of coffee, and opened the big, blue book to the day’s A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 190.
The ego sat bouncing away on my bad shoulder.
“You’re invisible,” I said.
It rolled its eyes in a perfect imitation of my daughter.
“ ‘I could choose joy instead of pain,’ ” I read.
“Seriously?” the ego said.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Really? And when’s the last time you were joyful?”
Against my better judgment I tried to think. Certainly practicing the Course had made me calmer, more peaceful, less apt to judge and attack, more likely to catch myself when I did, and generally more willing to let others off the hook. I did not sit in front of the television renouncing political figures as I once had. I did not lose it navigating recorded phone hell with large organizations, waiting in endless lines, or stalled in city traffic. I did not take it personally when my family neglected their dirty dishes as they often do, seemed to sabotage my efforts to train our puppy, or gave me the look. But, joyful? Not so much.
“My sentiments, exactly,” the ego said.
“Bye, bye,” I told it, and delved into the lesson instead.
“Pain is a wrong perspective,” I read. “When it is experienced in any form, it is proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen aright. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form? It witnesses to God the Father’s hatred of His Son, the sinfulness He sees in him, and His insane desire for revenge and death.”
My morning vow to allow only my right mind’s perspective had galvanized a threatened ego to present me with an array of painful problems seemingly out of my control. But studying A Course in Miracles and practicing its forgiveness—looking with my right mind at what thankfully could never be–had helped me learn to identify my mind on ego. It had taught me that pain in any form—from my hip to my government to my environment to the eye-rolling in my kitchen—shared one purpose: to convince me I had indeed pulled off the crime of separating from eternal, loving oneness.
“Peace to such foolishness!” I read. “The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. There is no need to think of them as savage crimes or secret sins with weighty consequence. …It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain.”
And what determines my thoughts? My choice of inner teacher. When I (the decision maker in the one mind that has never left its source) choose to listen to the ego I am convinced the world outside and inside this apparent body has gone to hell. But when I choose and actually allow the light of my right mind to shine away the shadows of the ego’s ugly magic show I remember that a sleight of hand means nothing unless I believe in it.
The ego would even have me question the true joyfulness that returns to my mind when I choose the whole spirit’s unified perspective of common interests. A joy unrelated to this false self preoccupied with a body of pain. It would have me measure that gentle, loving, knowing against the fleeting, adrenaline-fueled passions of a physical and psychological body addicted to a roller coaster ride of pleasure and pain that keeps it constantly searching outside the mind where real peace and joy can never be found.
“And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven. Let our gratitude onto our Teacher fill our hearts as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world.”
The many varieties of pain I had embraced so far that morning receded. I shut the book and went about my day.
I had been interacting with a website related to a recent work project when I completely lost my mind. (I know. Again.) I had received a number of email notifications asking me to respond to various site postings about the project’s status but could not seem to follow the thread of the generalized requests or interpret the messages which appeared and vanished with maniacal abandon every time I navigated away from the current page. I know I am dating myself here because, in such cases, my teenage daughter does not take it personally. She merely pauses mid text–ipod dangling from elegant ear–to stab madly at the larger computer keyboard. Then she answers a few more texts before awaiting the next command. I, on the other hand, have been around long enough to recognize a threat when I see one.
As I sat at my desk wracking my brain for solutions; attempting to respond while paralyzed by the fear of revealing myself in so transparent an arena as the technological idiot I remain despite earnest efforts to develop a meager skill base I completely shut down. My IQ plummeted. I could no longer discern the question let alone frame an answer. Although my daughter had walked me through her best guess as to how to respond, I was not comforted. “You have lost it all,” the ego gravely whispered, dressed in his undertaker costume for the occasion. He was also sorry to inform me that I had made a fool of myself in the process.
“Step away from the computer, Mom,” my daughter, long wise beyond her years, entreated, before fleeing my office for a demilitarized zone. But I just sat there, waiting for someone to come and zip me into a body bag.
“Let us not fight our function,” A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 186, “Salvation of the world depends on me,” advises. “We did not establish it. It is not our idea. The means are given us by which it will be perfectly accomplished. All that we are asked to do is to accept our part in genuine humility, and not deny with self-deceiving arrogance that we are worthy. What is given us to do, we have the strength to do.”
Apparently, I had been fighting my function again. Mistaking it for meeting the obligations and upholding the reputation of Susan, rather than accepting my true and only function of forgiving the illusion of Susan, her champions and adversaries; overlooking with the right mind’s help the ego’s myth of individuality purchased at the price of celestial homicide.
When I stop fighting my function, stop believing I have any other function in this dream but to awaken through forgiveness, resign as my own teacher and welcome the memory of uninterrupted wholeness the right mind offers, I am able to accept and experience my impenetrable identity as the one child of God I remain along with everyone else seemingly “out there” cavorting on the screen of this world. As the Course reminds us, again and again: “ideas leave not their source.” I could not have left my eternal home despite my wild imaginings. My true identity has nothing to do with this dream figure invented by the ego along with all other dream figures to preserve a fantasy of individuality and competing interests designed to reinforce a mistaken belief that ideas can leave their source.
In every situation and without exception the ego would have the self I made to keep this dream alive interpret the information its senses transmit as evidence of an unreliable, confounding, hostile world that never delivers the goods for long. When I listen to the ego I am intoxicated with fear, convinced of my own guilt, terrified of exposure, and desperate to pin it all on an external source rather than claim responsibility for a mistaken belief in need of correction. But in every situation and without exception when I accept my true function of forgiveness by calling on the strength that remains in my mind I am released, no longer paralyzed with fear and frantic to protect against a virtual world.
When I accept my only function of forgiveness I remember I have simply once more chosen for the ego’s dire interpretation of the events transpiring on the screen. But I can choose again with help from a loving inner teacher to remember that the problem of technological difficulties has nothing to do with incomprehensible electronic demands. The problem–like all problems in a world made mad by guilt in the mind–remains my unconscious belief that I have separated from my source and must deny responsibility for it by blaming someone or thing “outside” the mind in an effort to avoid the punishment I think I deserve.
A Course in Miracles defines siding with the ego’s puny concept of vulnerable individuality as the height of arrogance, versus the true humility of accepting atonement—the truth that the separation never happened and we remain resting in God dreaming of exile. A dream from which we can gradually awaken by practicing forgiveness every time we are tempted to hold someone or thing “outside” responsible for our loss of peace.
When I relinquish the ego’s arrogance and choose in true humility to forgive I remember I have never left my indivisible, loving, eternally protected source. My only reputation lies outside this nightmare, beyond all possible threat. It has nothing to do with a technologically challenged writer glued to a screen rife with assaults and demands reflective of seemingly endless individuals with seemingly endless expectations and potential judgments.
Our function has nothing to do with the specific forgiveness opportunities that seem to arise at warp speed on the screen of our individual lives. One is no more or less threatening, more trivial or monumental than another. The Course does not make distinctions within the “hierarchy of illusions” the ego has concocted to convince us the dream is real. Our self-worth does not hinge on an email notification. It does not depend on a romantic partner, a boss, a parent, a child, a bank account, a talent, or an award for a job well done. Our self-worth derives from our source, the source we have never left, the source that could never and has never failed us. The source we will awaken to 24/7 once we have applied forgiveness to everyone and thing we still believe can destroy or enhance our peace.
We save the world by withdrawing our belief in the world of guilt in the mind. We withdraw our belief in the world of guilt in the mind by holding the person or situation we perceived responsible for our personal distress harmless. We hold the other harmless by turning our mistaken projections over to the part of our mind that sees only the truth of our shared innocence.
“Salvation of the world depends on you who can forgive. Such is your function here.”
My precocious daughter was not yet one when she threw her first tantrum. This may have been the last time in our 17-year history together in which I was actually prepared for a developmental stage. She had rolled over, sat up, talked, and walked months before the books claim most children do, and so I had been reading ahead about tantrums common during “the terrible twos,” the possibility of their premature arrival, and how to nip them in the bud. The thinking at the time advised picking your child up, removing her from the situation (even if that meant abruptly leaving a public venue), and placing her in a quiet place for a “time out,” holding her if necessary—a veritable Mommy straight jacket–until the storm of her emotional anguish over not having her needs instantly met, passed.
We were picking up take out from our favorite Chinese Dim Sum restaurant at the time. I had already paid the bill and was attempting to interest my daughter in the tank of lobsters she normally found fascinating when she suddenly attempted a half gainer out of my arms. When I set her down she threw herself on the floor, writhing, screaming, and kicking in a meltdown so impressive and classic I secretly wondered if she’d somehow gotten it from TV. Stepping up to the parenting plate once again months before expected, I carried her out of the restaurant as the theatrics continued, and sat holding her and talking softly as the rain drummed against the roof of my car until her cries subsided. Sanity restored, we returned to the restaurant to pick up our food and drove home. She never threw another tantrum like that, and quickly learned to put herself, her stuffed animals, and Mom in a time out when we needed it.
I need one now. Lately I cannot seem to keep up with apparently incoming demands on my time. The faster I work, the more work arrives for my attention via email or phone until I feel like Lucille Ball in the classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel take jobs in a candy factory to prove that working outside the home is easier than in. Pieces of candy I am expected to deal with appear to be speeding by on the conveyer belt before I can get my hands on them. I don’t remember the last time I got to the bottom of my cherished “To Do” list, something the ego swears used to happen regularly. My personal life, too, seems to have spiraled out of control, with more social activities than one introvert can successfully field, leaving me feeling breathless and inadequate.
Then, too, I am more than usually sensitized to time’s passage as each new chapter in my daughter’s coming of age story unfolds. As another school year screeches to a halt, as she begins taking her SATs and ACTs, exploring colleges and watching her best friends–mostly seniors–graduate, I am deeply aware the coming year will likely provide a series of “lasts.” That each school event we attend, each holiday we celebrate, will—fate willing–be Kara’s last at home before she takes the next step in her passage through the dream and leaves for college. There are so many things I wanted to teach her that I never got around to. The many ways in which I have fallen short as a parent, have found it impossible to keep up with my daughter’s meteoric trajectory through childhood and adolescence; seem, at the moment, too much in my face. But further grist for the mill of the ego’s use of time, described in A Course in Miracles Chapter 15’s The Two Uses of Time as:
And all the waste that time seems to bring with it is due but to your identification with the ego which uses time to support its belief in destruction. The ego, like the Holy Spirit, uses time to convince you of the inevitability of the goal and end of teaching. To the ego the goal is death, which is its end. But to the Holy Spirit the goal is life, which has no end.
When we listen to the ego as I have caught myself doing once more; there is never enough time to escape the guilt over the original sin of separation acted out in the theatre of our lives. We can never project our guilt onto someone or thing “out there” fast enough to prove our relative innocence. We are Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory attempting to trick the boss into thinking we can keep up, only to have the boss speed up the action to prove otherwise.
We can pursue our impossible dream faster and faster—as fast and earnestly as we possibly can—and even then it will never be fast enough. The dream is always just out of reach in front of us, forever unattainable in a fearful future; just the way the ego likes it. And even when we temporarily “realize” our dream–that magic parenting moment, a job perfectly executed–it morphs again into something bigger, better, more complex and demanding. Even the fleeting pleasure of “realizing” our dream never solves the “problem” of our past belief in a choice for separation from our eternal loving source, or our compulsion to project our unconscious guilt over that decision outside ourselves to stave off future retaliation; to hold someone or thing “out there” responsible for our internal loss of peace in an illusory world played out in an illusion of time.
The good news? We can choose again for a teacher that remembers that the “problem” of separation was instantly corrected the moment that “tiny mad idea” arose in the one child of God’s mind. We can put ourselves in “time out” by joining with our one loving inner teacher in the eternal present, “the holy instant of our release” in which we remember that no one or thing can divide us from the love we never left. That we are all stuck in the same crazy candy factory when we listen to the ego. That the busyness that appears to devour the hours of our days, the pivotal events that appear to measure a child’s inevitable journey away from home toward adulthood have nothing at all to do with the truth of our shared nature and are never the cause of the problem. Attempting to battle the problem of guilt cast outside the mind when we chose for the ego in the first place remains the only problem here where we believe we find ourselves in a projected world spiraling out of control. And the solution is always the same: choose again for the instant of sanity in which our wholeness is restored through A Course in Miracle’s radical forgiveness.
“If you are tempted to be dispirited by thinking how long it would take to change your mind so completely, ask yourself, ‘How long is an instant?’ Could you not give so short a time to the Holy Spirit for your salvation? He asks no more.”
Hope may be “the thing with feathers” but—no offense Emily Dickinson—things with feathers fly away. And die. I learned this lesson early. As a little girl, I built a hospital for wounded creatures in the woods, ministering to abandoned baby birds and wounded butterflies with generally tragic results the adjacent makeshift graveyard served to accommodate. While I buried most of my patients, one small robin with a wing issue actually recovered. One day it leapt from my hand and circled away. I watched it rise in the sky with self-righteous elation until I realized it wasn’t coming back. When it disappeared behind a cloud I rushed home, locked myself in my room and cried.
I have been thinking about the word hope, defined by Webster’s as: “a wish or desire accompanied by confident expectation of its fulfillment” and asking for help from my right mind to accept that no one or thing in this world has ever or can ever completely fulfill my expectations. Especially not those people I hold especially responsible for preserving my peace of mind by meeting my expectations; what A Course in Miracles calls our “special relationships,” those closest “others” with whom we forge unspoken bargains for meeting our needs. People like my daughter, who I learned over the weekend had betrayed my trust, as teenagers will.
I have the personality of an oldest child, intent on following rules, co-mingled with a generational urge to topple every symbol of authority that appears to thwart my treasured autonomy. (I came of age in the 70s after all, and still sometimes find myself waxing nostalgic for phrases like “hell no, we won’t go!” whenever I feel somehow herded by the prevailing culture into submission.) And so I am always at war with myself. Except when it comes to my daughter, where the oldest, rule-abiding and enforcing child always prevails.
Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say I discovered she had lied about her whereabouts and what she was doing. Although nothing horrible ensued as a result, it could have, my ego fretted, happily enumerating various graphic scenarios. I was outraged, even though I recalled having done something similar at her age, and might have shown a glimmer of compassion. Instead I chose to guilt trip; reviewing all the sacrifices I had made for her, all the earnest parenting I had done. Feeling more and more guilty; I began to berate myself. How had I failed her? I wondered aloud. What had I done to deserve this, I did not have to say. My message was clear. Look what you have done to me despite all I have done for you.
“This is not about you, Mom,” she said. And she was right. Even as I spoke, a part of me recognized nothing I had said had any bearing whatsoever on the real problem or solution. I begged for help from my right mind. I held her as she cried. I stopped talking, and started listening. She hated high school, she said; hated being dependent, hated not being able to make all her own decisions. She just wanted to fast-forward and be in college where everything would be OK—that unreliable thing with feathers again.
I told her I had felt exactly the same way, but you can’t fast-forward through life. You have to look at and deal with what’s in your face, even when it takes on the sickening slow-motion quality of an accident. You have to make decisions and, when you make poor ones, self-correct. I said all the things a mother is supposed to say, including that there would be consequences, even as a part of my mind watched gently, fully aware it was all a bunch of hooey.
Later, still vacillating between the ego’s fearful litany of “what if?” and “how could she?” and right-minded awareness that she had not betrayed my love because there was no my to betray, I opened A Course in Miracles to Chapter 17, The Call for Faith, and read “…you did not believe the situation and the problem were in the same place. The problem was the lack of faith, and it is this you demonstrate when you remove it from its source and place it elsewhere. As a result, you do not see the problem. Had you not lacked faith that it could be solved, the problem would be gone.”
I had identified the situation with my daughter as the cause of my distress. Even though the Course tells us again and again that the real problem is always the same: my belief that I actually separated from the one eternal love I am, and exist as an individual dependent on an outside environment for my physical, emotional, and psychological well being. My attempt to project my guilt over that belief outside myself by experiencing it as an incoming affront, disappointment, broken promise, betrayed confidence, breach of trust. My faith in my daughter’s body and faulty adolescent logic was misplaced. But what has that ultimately got to do with her or me? How can it possibly affect the truth we share, or the one love we remain?
“If problems are perceived, it is because the thoughts are judged to be in conflict. But if the goal is truth, this is impossible. Some idea of bodies must have entered, for minds cannot attack. The thought of bodies is the sign of faithlessness, for bodies cannot solve anything. It is their intrusion on the relationship, an error in your thoughts about the situation, which becomes the justification for your lack of faith.”
Through practicing the Course’s forgiveness in which I recognize with my right mind that the only thing I need to forgive is my belief in separation I am learning that placing my faith in any body including my own is always misplaced. But placing my faith in forgiveness is always justified. Turning my error in perception over to the truth of my right mind is always rewarded. I am relieved and released when I remember with help from my loving inner teacher that all calls for love—my daughter’s, my husband’s, my clients’, my neighbors’, my fellow Course students’–are my own. And that answering them will never fail to release me from the enervating burden of that thing with feathers.
My husband appeared to be having words with me. He had received this nifty new coffee maker as a birthday gift. It brewed single servings of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate from pre-made packets; the perfect solution for our on-the-run family.
I usually brew a pot of decaf each morning including one scoop of regular French roast; my caffeine quota for the day. My husband had returned from Costco with a supply of beverage packets including half-caf single servings for me.
But I didn’t like them. I prefer dark roasts and hated to squander my meager caffeine allotment on substandard product. When he noticed I had ignored them—in the middle of a trying work week and perhaps overdue for a stiff cup of Joe himself–he appeared to have a meltdown that quickly escalated as ego meltdowns will from the specific: “You don’t like the coffee I bought you,” to the abstract:
“You never like anything I buy you.”
“You’re impossible to please.”
“You always…”
“Why can’t you…?”
“Even the dog thinks you’re…”
Dragging our adorable little dog into it really was the last straw, the ego pointed out.
As I charged out into the morning sunrise headed for the nearest Starbuck’s to order my venti three-quarter decaf light room Americano in retaliation a part of my mind recognized I was at it again. Mindlessly attempting to momentarily relieve the buried guilt in my mind by projecting it outside myself. Once more following what the Course calls “the ego’s plan for salvation” by denying responsibility for the original belief that I had separated from God in the first place. Experiencing it in the form of a secretly welcome “unprovoked” attack by an angry husband; conveniently throwing my relative innocence into sharp relief.
This is my mind on ego, I reminded myself as the Course teaches. How many times had I been here before? Did I really want to swallow this picture of unfair treatment I had painted over a freaking cup of coffee? To disrupt my morning with the counter-attack my mind on ego craved even more than caffeine?
“There has to be another way,” I remembered. Silently repeating the phrase A Course in Miracles collaborator Bill Thetford had uttered to Course scribe and colleague Helen Schucman all those decades ago at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. The question that had invited the Course’s answer from our right mind in the form of a radical spiritual psychology advocating a unique form of forgiveness in the first place.
“There has to be another way.”
Bill’s earnest words echoed in my head, catapulting me into an entertaining, right-minded fantasy. I had heard an NPR story the day before about the Trust for Public Lands’ efforts to rescue the Hollywood sign and surrounding acreage from encroaching development. I had always been drawn to images of that sign and, as a child, had even vowed to climb it one day; a yet unrealized dream. With Southern California still weighing heavily on my brain following our recent spring break tour of prospective colleges with our daughter I now imagined myself sitting atop that very sign with Jesus, peering down on the self-aggrandizing chaos of Los Angeles; discussing the seemingly more pressing case of the self-aggrandizing chaos in my own kitchen.
“That man is a saint,” Jesus said.
Not exactly what I was hoping to hear.
“Sorry, you asked.”
I smiled. I suppose I had. A Course in Miracles teaches us that what we’re really asking when we cry out for help is to see (experience) all that appears to be happening to us differently. When we choose against the ego’s drama of attack and defense that appears to have hijacked our peace of mind, we automatically become right-minded, taking the seeming external problem back to its internal cause and correction in the mind.
We see with Christ’s (a symbol of the embodied awakened mind used in A Course in Miracles) “vision.” A way of seeing that has nothing to do with the body’s senses made to reinforce a dualistic world invented to defend against the whole, uninterrupted, eternal love we believe we pushed away. We see the error of our guilt projected onto another body, recognize it as our own mistaken call for the love we believe we squandered, and answer it by holding the other harmless, allowing us to re-experience our own shared innocence.
I sighed. “I suppose he has put up with a lot over the years,” I said, thinking of my husband. How my penchant for strongly brewed dark roast coffee was really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I had been born opinionated, after all, and still had a lot of opinions. Still tended in one way or another to make them known.
“Right?” Jesus said. “And that girl of yours.”
“Wait a minute.”
“You were just thinking about her.”
My mind had in fact been wandering. Reviewing my daughter’s most recent lack of regard for my delicate feelings. That tone in her voice. That roll of her eyes. That toss of her beautiful hair.
“She’s been a good sport from the day she came in,” Jesus said.
Easy for you to say, I thought. I mean, colic; the complete inability to nap. Rolling off the bed at a week old—infants were not supposed to be able to do that–and nearly scaring me to death. Getting kicked out of day care at six months, I mean. And that was just the first year. I could go on.
“You could.”
“But I don’t really want to, do I?”
“Not so much.”
I smiled. The Course tells us Jesus doesn’t know about this world. That asking him for specific advice is akin to asking him to make the error of our perception of competing interests real. And yet in answer to Bill and Helen’s cry for help with a troubled relationship in a conflicted environment he spoke. And he continues to meet us where we think we are in the condition we think we’re in if we let him. On this particular day, I needed to picture him in the flesh, speaking to the individual I had again mistaken for my real self even as I reminded myself this could not be.
When we catch ourselves feeling unfairly treated by what the Course calls our “special relationships,” those people we have chosen to meet our expectations for special love and special hate–to ultimately fail us as all partners do–we can always choose again to look with Jesus. When we do we figuratively rise “above the battleground”–as the Course puts it–where nothing seems quite so serious anymore. Where we can look beyond the movie of unrelenting special interests playing out in the smoggy valley we call life to the reality of our true nature where we remain eternally awake, supported, and complete, dreaming of fragmented exile. And learn to gently smile at our folly.
“The overlooking of the battleground is now your purpose. Be lifted up and from a higher place look down upon it. From there will your perspective be quite different…And the perspective coming from this choice shows you the battle is not real, and easily escaped. Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless. And it is over when you realize it never was begun.”
“That man really is a saint,” I said.
“Right?”
“And she’s a good kid.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” he said.
“Yeah. But you say that to everybody.”
Jesus smiled. “Pass the popcorn, would you please,” he said
NOTE: Check out my recent interview with renowned Course teacher, author, and scholar Dr. Kenneth Wapnick on our new website: www.schoolofreason.org. Click the “Media” tab.
