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.

I could choose peace

The puppy had been up several times in the night; sick again. The fan on my computer had gone ballistic and begun channeling the sound of a cement mixer. My left eye that seems to take the brunt of mysterious allergies wouldn’t stop itching. Sleep deprived, worried about the dog, and infuriated by the computer’s drone I couldn’t seem to concentrate on the newspaper article I was trying to write. I couldn’t reach the vet to discuss Kayleigh’s condition either. I would have to drive over there yet again and spend another two hours waiting for them to examine her to the tune of canine torture emanating through those scary, steel doors. Waiting for them to prescribe new medications administered through tiny syringes almost impossible to get her to swallow that might or might not work to cure her intestinal problems.

“I could see peace instead of this,” today’s A Course in Miracle’s workbook lesson suggested. I wondered what he might be smoking.

The ego’s tirade had started a couple days ago, soon after reading that morning’s workbook lesson: “I have invented the world I see.” Although the Course teaches us the world is nothing more than an outer picture of the inner condition of buried guilt in the mind, I found its wisdom hard to absorb, and quickly forgot about it as I merged into the day’s many distractions and responsibilities.

My daughter had celebrated her 17^th birthday with a sleepover the night before. She and her friends lay jumbled on the floor of our rec room, limbs tangled like a three-dimensional Picasso. I tiptoed past them to the laundry room to discover my daughter had taken my half-dried load of clothes out of the dryer to accommodate her own. I switched them back. Upstairs my husband had begun cooking bacon, sausage, and waffles for the girls in the kitchen I had just cleaned up from the night before, even though it was almost 11 a.m. and they still showed no signs of stirring. On a right-minded day, I might have found it endearing. Instead I only worried about all those Thanksgiving vegetables I needed to prep for the crowd we were having. Now I wouldn’t be able to reclaim the kitchen for hours.

I took the dog into my office and decided to answer some work emails. But before I had even managed to open the first one, a slide show of grievances starring a diverse array of characters spontaneously launched itself on the screen of my brain. How could I teach A Course in Miracles when I couldn’t seem to stop projecting? When I couldn’t even remember the title of the day’s workbook lesson? When all I wanted to do was let someone (and it didn’t really seem to matter who) have it?

I am new to formally teaching the Course, and several of my students are completely new to studying it. I have tried to be as honest with them as possible about the Course’s take on this world we think we inhabit, within which we believe we interact with others, without scaring them away. But no matter how you spin it, it is not a pretty story.

A Course in Miracles is a spiritual psychology that explains the constant conflict humans find themselves mired in, and offers a solution for resolving it at the level of the true mind, the only place in which it can be truly resolved. According to the Course the world we think we navigate is really nothing more than an external projection of the mind’s inner experience of repressed guilt over believing it separated from and in the process destroyed the one love we are and have never really left.

We naturally feel guilty over the sin we think we pulled off and fear our creator’s retribution. This underlying fear motivates us to reenact on a personal level the ego’s original collective projection of an entire universe of fragmented, guilt-animated forms. Blaming others for our problems momentarily relieves the mind’s submerged torment, and, according to the ego, gets us off the hook with God. But quickly enough we feel guilty again and must start all over searching for a scapegoat onto whom we can cast our angry, frightened, guilty feelings. Even though none of it ever happened, the selves we think we are unconsciously believe it did and behave accordingly. I am trying to share with my students just how threatening the Course’s lessons designed to expose the concealed guilt in our mind can seem to these false selves fueled by an ego thought system intent on preventing us from ever recognizing the source of all our misperceptions.

The workbook lessons gently invite us to begin to question the meaning, purpose, and cause of our experience in this seeming world. They tell us we invented the world we see, that we could see peace instead of this parade of problems if we would learn to choose again for the part of our mind that does not take illusions seriously, the part of our mind that remembers our invulnerable unity. They encourage us to make no distinctions in our practice between inanimate objects, relationships, bodies, thoughts, traffic jams, bad hair days, sick dogs, computer glitches, wars, and natural disasters because all share the same purpose of concealing the repressed “sin” of separation. They ask us to observe a world of seemingly endless, differentiated symbols and entertain the possibility that returning to our one mind might result in something other than annihilation. To entertain the possibility that returning to the scene of the “crime” of taking the “tiny mad idea” of separation from love seriously might actually empower the decision maker to whom the author of the Course speaks. That chooser in our mind once chose to believe a lie but can just as easily choose again for the part of our mind that remembers the truth.

I know all this and yet, going through these workbook lessons again have once more forgotten the real cause of my seeming distress: the fear engendered by the suggestion that I hallucinated a world to cover my guilt, but could choose to see my mistaken projections through the lens of another teacher, a viewpoint that offers true comfort and release. I had felt so joyful teaching these early lessons the first few weeks and then suddenly hit a wall of resistance wherein I couldn’t remember the day’s lesson, let alone its  point, seemingly distracted by a stream of incoming annoyances. I had fallen into the trap of trying to demonstrate how happy and loving I am, rather than recognizing how difficult I find it to hold on to love and happiness.

I had fallen into the trap of believing I could judge my progress with this Course. Believing that days in which I couldn’t seem to stop projecting were somehow lesser than days in which I seemed to walk in an elongated holy instant. When, in truth, the workbook was working me, just as I had promised my students it would them if they sincerely applied it. Working to expose the underlying guilt we all share, the guilt we deny by projecting it outward and making it somebody else’s problem. The workbook teaches us to focus on those projections, to recognize how seriously we take them and how strongly we resist changing our mind about their purpose. But we can’t change our mind unless we first look outward, and we can’t see truly unless we ask for help from the part of our mind that can truly see.

This is a course in bringing our darkness to the light, not bringing the light into an illusory world based on a lie. But we can’t bring our darkness to the light if we don’t know it’s there. Jesus can’t help us use our lives as a classroom and our relationships as our curriculum if we won’t look with him at just how much we want to believe in a continual saga of unfair treatment at the hands of other people and situations seemingly beyond our control. We must turn to him for help in interpreting just how real we continue to make the error of separation even after years of practicing forgiveness and experiencing its mind-healing benefits. We must ask for his help again and again as we catch ourselves in the act of mindlessly projecting our fear outward. As if our lives depended on it, which, of course, the ego–unaware of a life beyond the false self it invented–believes they do.

As the “Light in the Dream” section of Chapter 18 of the text clearly explains:

“As the light comes nearer you will rush to darkness, shrinking from the truth, sometimes retreating to the lesser forms of fear, and sometimes to stark terror. But you will advance, because your goal is the advance from fear to truth. The goal you accepted is the goal of knowledge, for which you signified your willingness. Fear seems to live in darkness, and when you are afraid you have stepped back. Let us join quickly in an instant of light, and it will be enough to remind you that your goal is light.”

I had fallen into the trap of believing there was something out there intent on disrupting my plans, my pace, my peace, my practice, the spiritual makeup I apply to disguise how deeply ticked off I truly am by this whole state of affairs we call living, this fugitive identity my false self-accusation has erected. An identity that keeps me loveless and longing, seeking but never finding, frightened and exhausted.

But I could see peace instead of this. Workbook lesson 34 does not ask us to try to prove how peaceful and spiritual we are by projecting peaceful and spiritual images on our surroundings. It asks us to search our mind for what scares us, those people and situations that trigger us. It asks us to experience the painful emotions that surface as we do so and reassure ourselves as Jesus does that we could see peace instead of this if we will only look with him. Why? Because Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the part of our mind that holds the light of our eternal oneness illuminates and undoes our mistaken projection, healing our tormented mind and returning us in the holy instant to the peace of the one, indivisible love we are. Nothing outside the mind ever really changes because there is nothing outside the mind. But our burden lifts, our muscles relax. Our eyes and foreheads once more serene, we recognize our brother’s newly revealed innocence as our own.

“Peace of mind is clearly an internal matter. It must begin with your own thoughts, and then extend outward. It is from your peace of mind that a peaceful perception of the world arises.”

 

Notice that it says a peaceful perception, not a peaceful world. I could choose this.

 

To Do: forgive

I am a planner, a list maker, a “To Do” list junkie. Like my mother and grandmother before me I rejoice in crossing tasks off my list—to the point that if I’ve accomplished something not on that day’s list I add it on just so I can cross it off again. I know. Oddly enough, I also have never actually gotten to the bottom of a given list before creating a new one with a fresh set of goals to attempt to achieve. I am drunk on the idea of achievement, a slave to the ego in my frantic pursuit of doing yet always falling somehow short, a situation that keeps me rushing back again and again into the ego’s brutal ring.

 

But A Course in Miracles is teaching me a better way. I am learning to use my life as a classroom, the events that seemingly arise in my day to circumvent the possibility of ever getting through my coveted To Do list as the curriculum of forgiveness necessary for undoing my belief in this special identity with its unique problems to solve and tasks to complete. I awoke last week for example filled with ambition, adrenaline pumping, ready to tackle a hefty list of responsibilities:

 

            -set up interview

            -transcribe notes for newspaper article

            -work on website copy

            -prep for workbook class

            -yoga class

            -query agents

            -bids on gas fireplaces

            -pick up office supplies

            -drop health forms for my daughters’ school trip at doctor’s

 

My list sat accumulating importance on the bathroom counter where I leave it to greet me on awakening. I took our puppy out of her crate but before I could get her to follow me downstairs to take her outside she had an accident on the rug. The difficult task of housebreaking any puppy has been exacerbated in her case by a nasty bout of giardia that had scared us badly and left her severely dehydrated and on an IV just two weeks ago. But she had finished a second round of antibiotics and appeared to be on the mend. At least, until now.

 

No need to share the gory details. Suffice it to say the puppy was sicker this time than ever. My husband and I took turns dealing with her and showering. I threw the towels and rug she had soiled in the wash and tried to console her. She shuddered in shame over her loss of control as I wrapped her in a fresh towel. I sat rocking her in my office. I was teaching A Course in Miracles’ workbook again and managed to read that morning’s lesson: “I do not know what anything is for,” answer a couple of emails, and wolf down an English muffin before I reached the vet when they opened at nine.

 

Kayleigh and I waited in one of the examination rooms that had become all too familiar in our few weeks together. A nurse whisked her off for tests. I had taken some copy to edit but Kayleigh’s weak screams as they poked and prodded in a back room blurred my vision. The nurse returned her to my lap and explained they were running more lab work. Kayleigh lay draped across my forearm. From the back room, the cries of a much larger dog—a retriever or a lab, maybe—pierced the stillness. It went on and on. Kayleigh cocked her head and gazed up at me, eyes filled with the other dog’s misery, as if beseeching me to intervene. “It’s OK,” I lied. She buried her snout in the crux of my elbow.

 

At last, the doctor returned. Kayleigh had once again tested positive for giardia, so positive they worried she might have contracted a drug-resistant strain. They were putting her on a couple medications to help treat the symptoms of her intestinal distress and had a call in to an organization that sounded like the animal version of The Centers for Disease Control for advice on what to do next. They would call me later that day. For the second time in two weeks, the fear of losing this animal I had so quickly come to adore washed over me.

 

I filled Kayleigh’s prescription, picked up more of the special diet, and drove home in a fog of concern. Once again in my office after almost three hours, I sat back down at the computer, Kayleigh in my lap. The To Do list imprinted in my ego brain beckoned, but words from the morning’s lesson called more strongly. “I do not know what anything is for.”

 

“You perceive the world and everything in it as meaningful in terms of ego goals. These goals have nothing to do with your own best interests, because the ego is not you. This false identity makes you incapable of understanding what anything is for.”

 

The self I think I am, Susan sitting here with this tiny dog, Kayleigh, has only one interest when informed by the ego: reinforcing the belief in that original separation that seemed to occur when the one mind forgot to laugh at the “tiny mad idea” of striking off on its own, appearing to fragment the one, whole, indivisible, eternal love we are and, in truth, remain. A love that has nothing to do with the specifics of my personal interests, goals, and accomplishments. Beginning to see the secret, mistaken purpose of those personal interests, goals, and accomplishments from the viewpoint of the Holy Spirit–the part of my mind that recognizes my illusions but does not take them seriously–is what the Course calls “forgiveness,” the only real goal I have in this world if I truly want (as I am learning I do) to awaken from this dream of exile from love.

 

While my work on the level where I think I reside has relative importance, and needs to command some of my attention while I operate here in a body on the level of form, I must learn to recognize it ultimately has no meaning on the level of truth. Its importance pales compared to the work of forgiveness designed to awaken me from a dream that, despite its dreamer’s achievements, never ends happily.  Kayleigh’s scant weight on my arm, I called to set up an interview and then began working on transcribing my notes for another article, asking for help from my right mind to accept the idea that I do not know what anything is for, including my derailed work day, including my puppy’s recurring illness. Inviting the idea that I am here only to forgive. And that when I manage to do so despite my frantic busyness designed to keep me mindless my life has real meaning, the only real meaning it can have.

 

After a while the vet called to say their advisor said there is no known drug-resistant strain of giardia. Kayleigh is just small, with an undeveloped immune system. They had two new drugs to try—could I come pick them up? Oh, and I would need to bathe her daily and once again wash all items and linens she had come into contact with.

 

I hugged my dog and looked at my watch. I had already missed the yoga class; not that I would leave Kayleigh like this anyway. I took her outside again. Then I put her back in her crate. Another front had moved in; the sky was birthing snow. It took us a lot longer than usual to get to the vet’s to pick up her additional prescriptions.

Awakening happens (and happens, and happens, and happens…)

Over decades of spiritual searching I have met a handful of people who claim to have awakened to the truth beyond the dream of separate interests, the lives we believe we are living in this world. Most have undergone spontaneous, dramatic shifts in awareness usually following a particularly traumatic experience such as physically dying for a few moments or coming very close to death. Others reached a point of psychological suffering wherein the realization that they could choose instead to experience wholeness finally dawned on them. These people went on to share their awakening with others, motivated to bring light to our darkness. But all too often they unwittingly fell asleep again. Hypnotized by the “specialness” of their experience they began to use it to elevate themselves above the masses, behaving as if they were somehow more deserving of the one love we share, somehow able to heal those less advanced and evolved, better equipped to hear the voice of love, in possession of the “secret” balm for what ails our broken souls.  

While there must be cases of this type of sudden, pure awakening in which the individual then remains awake in this world—“in it but not of it” and able to demonstrate the one love we never left–I have never personally encountered such an individual. But I have met many whose longing and searching for truth beyond the dream, whose internal determination to look honestly within has offered glimpses of our true nature, moments of clarity in which time and need vanishes replaced by wonder and the joy of certain unity, the welcome death of the ego. I, too, have increasingly experienced–most frequently as a direct result of practicing A Course in Miracle’s forgiveness–these “holy instants.” Before returning once more to a tumultuous venue of challenging relationships, preoccupation with physical survival; temporary fulfillment and success followed by disappointment and broken promises.

Why can’t whole, infinite love stay? Or, more accurately, why can’t we stay in that moment of awakened communion with the love we are, reunited with our true and only self? A Course in Miracles is the only path I have studied that answers and transcends that question, leading us beyond it by first inviting us to question all we believe about ourselves, the realm in which we seem to engage, and everything that appears to happen to us. By admitting we do not know what we are, what we’re doing, or why we’re doing it, we begin to scrape away at the false self and world we created to hide our true, shared light.

Why would we fear awakening to that whole, eternally loving truth? Because we believe we destroyed it. The moment the “tiny mad idea” of experiencing autonomy arose in the one child of God’s mind and we took it seriously, we experienced ourselves outside that mind, cast into darkness, convinced our seeming error in judgment had somehow obliterated our source. Overcome with guilt and terrified of retribution, we hungrily swallowed the ego’s plan of eliminating our guilt by projecting it outward into a world of constantly fragmenting, evolving, competing and opposing forms. And to make sure we never remembered we could simply choose again not to believe, we repressed the memory of that initial choice to separate, figuratively fell asleep, and completely forgot the awakened, invulnerable, eternal reality no idea however misguided could possibly threaten.

The heavy burden of that unconscious guilt and fear which surface in the guise of every negative emotion—anger, annoyance, frustration, depression, grief, impatience, etc.—weighs heavily on our hearts. So heavily we can’t bear it for long, and must blame it on others, or experience its return in the form of an outside attack from which we compulsively protect/defend our now fragile, finite, false selves. We (the decision maker that chose to follow the ego) also believe that our separate identities offer us something worth attempting to preserve as long as we can. That our “specialness” purchased at the cost of the one, indivisible love we’ve forgotten is worth the price of an unreliable, ultimately deteriorating, unique life punctuated by moments of both satisfaction and tragedy.

A Course in Miracles offers us a process for awakening from the nightmare of our mistaken belief; harnessing the very illusory forms the ego thought system uses to reinforce its tale of separation to undo our belief in it. Little by little, practicing the Course’s unique form of forgiveness that invites the decision maker to catch itself in the act of projecting, recognize the external attack/problem as merely an expression of repressed internal guilt, and choose again for the vision of the part of our mind that recognizes our illusions but does not take them seriously, our error is corrected. Little by little, day by day, as we begin to witness our mistaken belief that someone or thing outside can in any way enhance or disturb our peace of mind and recognize the suffering that belief causes the ego thought system begins to weaken.

Motivated by an increasing awareness of the pain our investment in separation has cost us we choose again, and again for truth, experiencing moments of awakening more and more frequently. Eventually, practicing forgiveness, our reaction to the movie of the outside world that once seemed so attractive and repulsive begins to fade along with our judgments. Old grudges, what the Course calls “ancient hatreds” slip away and we feel more balanced, kind, and tolerant. Something our spouse once did that drove us up the wall no longer rankles. A wave of appreciation washes over us as we notice something beautiful about our child’s spirit we had overlooked before.  An understanding that we all share the same mistaken belief and the same longing to dispel it replaces the details of our secret suffering and compassion begins to eclipse our experience of unfairness.

The miracle, the change of mind forgiveness brings, happens over and over in our journey home, undoing our false beliefs and gently awakening us from the nightmare of competition with our source we have been reenacting in our relationships for so long. Awakening A Course in Miracles style is ordinary business, an accessible, practical process anyone can undertake by patiently learning to apply its simple teaching to every experience we seem to encounter in our daily lives, despite the ego’s fear tactics and active resistance. We don’t have to set our sights on awakening; it happens, and happens, and happens as we practice forgiveness anywhere, anytime, with anything we believe we interact. As the introduction to the workbook (the Course’s companion to the text that teaches us to apply its dynamic forgiveness process in our everyday lives) reassures us:

“Remember only this; you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy.”    

An untrained mind can accomplish nothing

When I first started A Course in Miracles’ workbook lessons six years ago I have to admit my mind glazed over every time I opened the book. I could barely absorb the meaning of a single phrase before I started mentally making grocery lists, puzzling solutions to a work project, worrying about what my daughter was or was not doing, rehearsing a conversation I knew I needed to have with a troubling colleague, reviewing the details of an argument I’d had with my husband, or slipping into an overwhelmingly sleepy trance.

 

I recently started the workbook lessons again with a class I am teaching and am amazed anew at how much these early lessons stir up the ego and bring me face to face with my ongoing resistance to the truth of what we are. I have done the first part of the workbook designed to undo the ego thought system maybe nine times, because I at least recognize that my investment in the ego needs undoing before I can even begin to fathom the revelatory, comforting messages of the second part of the workbook.

 

A Course in Miracles invites us to begin to view our lives as a classroom, our experiences and relationships as a curriculum, and the part of our mind that failed to take “the tiny mad idea” of separation seriously—that forgotten, sane part of our mind–as our new teacher. These early lessons meet us where we think we are here in the world of perception, ingeniously directing us to focus on and begin to question the distracting information our senses transmit to our brains—the ego’s “proof” that we pulled off the impossible and exist as separate entities. They remind us, for example, that nothing we see means anything, that we have given everything we see all the meaning that it has for us, that we are never upset for the reason we think, that we see only the past, and that our thoughts do not mean anything.

 

The ego recoils from these messages because they overlook its erroneous existence. If the ego mind does not exist, if nothing outside the one mind exists and the world and the body exist outside the mind as A Course in Miracles claims, then I, Susan, the self I think I am with all my special needs and problems, talents and handicaps; do not, in truth, exist. No wonder our minds wander, we grow sleepy, and we can’t remember the title of a lesson for more than thirty seconds. No wonder you don’t see people stampeding to bookstores to pick up their very own copy of this big, blue book, but you do see people buying up books teaching us how to manipulate, fix, improve, and attract in an illusory world of form.  It’s much easier to just keep denying our negative feelings, projecting them on others, and showing everyone how loving, happy, and spiritual we are. But it’s an exhausting charade that offers only temporary fixes. At some point we exceed our tolerance for pain and pretense and cry out for a better way. A Course in Miracles offers a better way. 

 

As Ken Wapnick enjoys reminding us, however, this is a teaching for spiritual infants. The exceedingly rare enlightened individual has no need for this teaching. Those of us who believe in and value our individuality over the one, whole, indivisible love we have never in truth left on the other hand must first unlearn everything the ego has taught us before we can welcome the love of our true, non-dualistic nature.

 

We who believe in and value our separate physical and emotional bodies and personalities above truth have bought the ego’s bizarre myth that we destroyed our eternal creator, deserve punishment, and must continually repress/deny responsibility for what we have done through the habitual, unconscious process of blaming other people and situations for our problems. In this way we magically hope to avoid the punishment we believe we deserve while simultaneously experiencing the rewards of playing here in the world of form. But no matter how much fun we may have on the playground, someone always gets hurt. No matter what a blast we have on the monkey bars, children always grow up, age, and eventually sicken, and die. This is what we’ve traded for eternal love, peace, wholeness, and creativity. This is how deluded we are. This is why we need a workbook to unlearn what we have willingly taught ourselves in an effort to keep the one love we have come to fear away.

 

Our one mind has been so well trained by the ego it has completely forgotten it has a mind outside the waking dream of separation we call life. Love in our current state is literally beyond us. Enter the role of the Course’s workbook lessons.

 

“An untrained mind can accomplish nothing…The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world. The exercises are planned to help you generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is equally applicable to everyone and everything you see.”

 

Every workbook lesson shines the same wise light on all our experiences, illuminating the truth that lies beyond our illusions. As we apply our learning to our experiences we begin to see all our problems and difficulties from minor annoyances to major catastrophes as mere demonstrations of the only real problem—our belief that we could have separated from our indivisible source. We begin to spiritually mature and our split mind begins to heal. By learning to accept responsibility for our mistaken perception and observe it from the viewpoint of our enlightened inner teacher our faith in the ego’s lies erodes and we experience glimmers of the eternal light that lies beyond the façade we made to block our awareness of love’s presence. As we learn to look with our inner teacher, to alter our perception of everyone and everything through the Course’s forgiveness, our investment in the meaning and value of our singular identity slips away.

 

Despite our unconscious resistance the workbook lessons work to correct our mistaken perception if we apply them. We all resist, we all forget, our minds wander and become preoccupied with meaningless thoughts. We grow distracted and sleepy. Sometimes we experience a full-blown ego attack, projecting all that bottled up fear and guilt on the first poor sucker to cross our path. Regardless of the form it takes, it helps to recognize resistance for the fear of love it represents, gently forgive ourselves for our mistaken perception as we would a terrified child, and return once again to the lesson for the day.

 

As the workbook introduction points out:

 

“Some of the ideas the workbook presents you will find hard to believe, and others may seem to be quite startling. This does not matter. You are merely asked to apply the ideas as you are directed to do. You are not asked to judge them at all. You are only asked to use them. It is their use that will give them meaning to you, and will show you that they are true.”

 

The workbook lessons teach us that when we resign as our own teacher, when we turn away from the ego’s 24/7 rant of competing interests and unfair treatment, the deeply comforting memory of completeness returns and we find ourselves in the miracle of the wholly instant, the eternal present. The place outside time where we pause a moment before rejoining the infinite love we have never really left.

 

Of course, we grow frightened again of disappearing into the primoridial broth the ego has taught us means death. We grow frightened again by the ego’s fairy tale of a God intent on punishing us for running away from home. But as we journey through the workbook, applying the lessons to the content of our lives with the help of our new inner teacher, our belief in the ego’s lies weakens without any additional effort on our part. We need only suspend our disbelief and follow the lessons’ directions.

 

“Remember only this; you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter or decrease their efficacy.”  

 

  

For the love of God

As a child I would sit in church trying to feel God’s love. From what I had gleaned so far, hell and our church of the Immaculate Conception shared a lot of common attributes. Both were temperature-challenged. In winter, the furnace clanked and wheezed like a train anxious to pull away from the station as we sat sweltering in our winter coats atoning for our many transgressions. In summer sweat on the priests’ foreheads rained into the communion chalice and stained the armpits of grownups’ garments.  Like the inferno I feared spending eternity in if I didn’t manage to pull myself together, church stank from all that comingled incense, sweat, and guilt. People suffered there, the living, breathing variety as well as the ornamental. From a statue of Mary mashing a snake with her bare feet–which, despite her beatific expression could not have felt good–to Jesus nailed to a cross above the altar, crowned with thorns, bleeding for our sins, and peering down at us with beseeching eyes I could not bring myself to meet.

 

As a child I would sit in church trying to feel God’s love despite its similarities to our Catechism’s hell. Sometimes I felt it for a moment, on my knees, fist to heart, transported by the rhythm of a Latin phrase. More often I only felt the rage rising in me again at the injustice of my brother fiddling with the hymnal beside me, swinging his feet, making those little sucking noises by drawing spit through the hole where his front teeth used to be. Our mother staring straight ahead between us, her hand a vice closing on both our wrists as if I, too, had misbehaved. He was wearing that stupid clip-on bowtie; my brother, making that face like Stan Laurel in Laurel and Hardy in his efforts to cajole our father into cracking a smile, our mother’s hands on our wrists to cut off our circulation. I was not a bad child, all things considered, even saintly at times, but who could expect any reasonable person to feel the love of God through the haze of such completely justifiable hatred?

 

I have been thinking about the early years I spent trying to feel the love of God sitting on a hard pew in a hot church surrounded by my family, and the decades that followed searching for that elusive condition in one venue after another. Obediently following the ego’s orders of “seek but do not find.” Only recently–nearly six years in to practicing A Course in Miracles–have I begun to glimpse what I am learning cannot exist outside my mind. Although I still catch myself wanting the external form of what passes for love in this world, I have trained my mind to recognize my mistake as it arises from moment to moment, and, in so doing, begun to understand, accept, and allow my only purpose in this dream: healing my mind about where love really resides.

 

“The real world is the state of mind in which the only purpose of the world is seen to be forgiveness…The value of forgiveness is perceived and takes the place of idols, which are sought no longer, for their “gifts” are not held dear. No rules are idly set, and no demands are made of anyone or anything to twist and fit into the dream of fear. Instead, there is a wish to understand all things created as they really are. And it is recognized that all things must be first forgiven, and then understood.”

 

This latter statement echoes A Course in Miracles early workbook lessons that invite us to suspend our disbelief and embrace the possibility that nothing we experience, none of the information our senses so obediently transmit to the ego’s brain, has anything to do with our true nature. Our experience in the world of form can never deliver the love we continually seek, fleetingly find, and forfeit again and again in this trippy dream of exile we continue to feed to prove our uniqueness. We must learn to allow the undoing of all we know to experience fear’s opposite, the indivisible, eternal love we remain.

 

Lately as I practice forgiveness, allowing that old mistaken rage at my brother for keeping me from winning God’s love to surface and asking for help from the part of my mind that knows we remain one despite the seeming solidity of attacking figures in the dream, an acute awareness of my buried desire to push away God’s love, the one love we are, has also surfaced. I am noticing as I go through my days, allowing people and events to either enhance or diminish the self I think I am; something interesting about what I really want. Even when love’s reflection genuinely arises, even when my husband or daughter extends the one love we are to me in the holy instant, I often turn away. Real love, love you can count on, the eternal, whole, unalterable, unconditional variety we have never left but secretly believe we destroyed still scares the hell out of me! That is where I am at this moment in my journey home. Even though the part of me that always watches now, the decision maker in my mind; is learning from experience that it will feel better if it chooses again for truth I continue at times to choose for pain by turning away from the presence of love that forever lingers in our mind.

 

I believe in the Course’s radical form of forgiveness, I have experienced its benefits, I continue to teach it to learn and yet I am still at times unwilling to forgive myself for my reluctance to allow the peace my whole mind offers. Sometimes I am still that little girl on her knees in church beating her chest and wishing she could instead use her fist on the kid beside her who actually deserves it. I still at times oscillate between blaming others and blaming myself for a crime that never really happened. That’s how afraid I am of disappearing into the void. That’s how convincing and appealing this individual body still seems, navigating a world that means something, a world in which having loved and fought, won and lost, lived and died, means something.

 

A Course in Miracles does not ask us to look at how loving we are, but to begin to notice  how unloved and unloving our thoughts, how ultimately futile our efforts to find stable, permanent peace in an unstable, impermanent thought system that arose from the unstable, impermanent idea of separation.  Fortunately the Course offers us an internal guide that meets us where we think we are in this illusion. A guide that knows our every fear but also knows we have nothing to fear. A guide that remembers what never happened, and what has always been.

 

The author of A Course in Miracles knows we in bodies can’t believe this by ourselves. It speaks to us as a loving older sibling to a small child writhing in her bed, enduring a nightmare, on her knees and beating her chest to stave off the punishment she has coming for her murderous thoughts toward her brother. Our inner teacher metaphorically rests his hand on our feverish forehead, quieting our torment, whispering to us from outside the dream that we are, have always been, and forever remain safe, whole, loved, and loving despite the erroneous information our senses continue to propagate. Resting to the music of our guide’s voice our trust in the forgiveness process strengthens, our horrific nightmare gradually morphs into a peaceful dream, and we come a little closer to opening our eyes for good.

Recalculating forgiveness

It has been a slow few days here on the forgiveness front, a little lull in the attack-defense cycle during which I have reveled in actually reading the Course again while the ego cooks up its next oral argument for some thing or one “out there” intent on destroying or enhancing the self I consistently forget I am not. In the meantime, I am savoring A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 71: “Only God’s plan for salvation will work,” and considering the idea that we have a direction in this life, some preordained destination; destiny, fate, call it what you will. The idea that the self I think I am has somewhere special to go, some special plan to fulfill, some grand, special scheme in which to fit, my special piece in the puzzle of the universe to deliver. That tiny mad idea.

 

I am thinking about the tantalizing (to the ego) idea that we have a direction in this seeming life, and how I have spent a good deal of my time on this planet both figuratively and literally in the driver’s seat of a vehicle getting lost, frantically worrying about getting lost, and secretly rejoicing in getting lost. Although I pride myself on an intuitive sense of direction that has helped me navigate ancient European cities and the warren-like back streets of medieval Italian hill towns on foot I have been known to disappear for hours on straight country roads in Colorado. Desolate stretches interrupted only by bobble-headed prairie dogs and imaginary, lunging Indiana Jones-scaled rattlesnakes whizzing by in my peripheral vision.

 

When I lived in California in those pioneering days before cell phones, I would head out on the highway to interview someone outside city limits only to end up hours later feeding dimes into a phone booth while struggling to get my bearings from a set of oil rigs perched like grazing dinosaurs on a bald hillside somewhere in that great valley that still supplies most of our nation with year-round produce. (Wherever, I came to think of it, in true valley girl vernacular.)  I attracted similarly handicapped companions. My friend Beth and I once headed out of town to a yoga retreat in the Sonoma Valley–a reward for another successful bout of quitting smoking–and ended up somewhere outside Sacramento after following a sign to a stand selling almond-stuffed olives we just had to try. (A wrong turn we only discovered when run off the road by a trucker, rudely interrupting another of our scintillating conversations.)

 

But I digress the way I do. I am thinking about the idea of getting lost and not getting lost and the many forgiveness opportunities it has offered me in my marriage of nearly twenty years. My husband is a man who believes in maps. I am a woman who believes in following my muse and, when she fails as she inevitably does, driving until I find a gas station and someone to ask. Maps have a purpose, of course. Early American and old European versions make frame-worthy art. But, although I am perfectly capable of reading them I find doing so at best a terrible distraction and at worst, a life-threatening obsession. In a driver’s seat the map-dependent sacrifice safety in their fixation with arriving at a pre-ordained destination, struggling to unfold, read, and re-fold said maps while balancing a steering wheel between their knees, refusing to listen to verbal directions from well meaning passengers. They do not speak the language of “left and right” and “probably just around that bend” with which I am content and fluent. Even on a hike, the map-dependent will stop every few yards on clearly marked trails to verify their location like newly arrived aliens, driving their map-adverse spouses to constantly climb and return, climb and return, like loyal albeit bored-to-tears dogs.

 

But I digress the way I do, on roads and trails and on the page. Enter the handy little device that has transformed our family’s road trips over the last couple years: the Garmin GPS portable navigation system, a gadget I resisted but have come to embrace as a metaphor for releasing to the Holy Spirit my belief that I know where I am going on any level. For those of you unfamiliar with the wonders of this contraption, you attach it to your windshield and type in the address of your destination. You select a voice from an array of international male and female possibilities (my favorite is a Brit who sounds like the actor Colin Firth but my husband prefers a woman with a French accent we call Fifi) and off you go. The device offers those of us with auditory preferences the verbal cues we crave to prevent interrupting our ruminations on passing views while appeasing the map-dependent with a depiction of their vehicle traversing the route on a tiny screen, the opportunity to star in some kind of twisted, virtual road trip game.

 

Although I admit I initially met the introduction of this latest toy into our vehicle with a fair amount of skepticism I eventually recognized its value on a symbolic level and have come to–if not entirely revere forfeiting control of my journey—at least understand that I may be better off deferring to an outside guide privy to information I do not have. Like the right mind A Course in Miracles constantly encourages us, the decision maker, to choose for, our Garmin knows things about where we are going we do not, and would never lead us astray, on purpose anyway.

 

Far from a perfect analogy, of course, because there are times when the Garmin is wrong, a victim of mistaken programming. The Holy Spirit on the other hand is never wrong, and, unlike the ego, never the victim of anything. The Holy Spirit in our mind holds the memory of our true direction: returning home to the one, indivisible love we never left by awakening from this dream of separation. Still, I have come to admire the Garmin’s manner in patiently leading us back when we have once again deluded ourselves we know better. Should we fail to take its advice, it never scolds but simply tries to follow our latest mistake in the dream, to make itself once more available. “Recalculating,” it says, scanning to find us where we think we are in this world headed nowhere, and adjusting the route accordingly until we choose again for the path that will take us home.

 

All destinations I have sought and continue to seek in this world reflect my wish to make the ego’s plan for salvation real. The plan depends on always seeking outside myself for some person, place, or thing to make me whole, an impossible plan designed to fail us. “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.”

 

Despite their celebrated differences, the map-dependent and the map-adverse both blindly follow the ego’s plan of seek but do not find, always hoping the next destination will deliver the thrill of a lifetime and only becoming more and more lost in an illusory world. “For what could more surely guarantee that you will not find salvation than to channelize all your efforts in searching for it where it is not?”  The ego cherishes both the notion that it knows where it is going, and the secret, denied desire to become hopelessly lost in an external, combative reality designed to keep it permanently unaware that it has a mind able to choose again for the Holy Spirit.

 

Like the Garmin the Holy Spirit in our mind knows things we do not. Like where we think we left and where we’re really going. It doesn’t beat us over the head with this information but, like our handy little Garmin, waits for us to ask and then suggests another way. Like the Garmin the Holy Spirit encourages us to catch ourselves when we have run amuck, to recognize our error could not have occurred outside the mind in a hallucinated world, and to recalculate, returning the error to the source of the mistake in the mind and choosing again for a corrected route home, the only place we really want to go.