Answering Your Call

Remembering my Self in you

In a lot of ways I don't think teachers are a thing but in another way, a nontrivial way, I have had teachers. So I have to be humble. I have to be grateful.

I have to be honest.

In both his writing and in the learning relationship I attempted to vain to build with him David Carse destroyed awakening for me. The concept of it, the goal of it, the dream of it. The hints of it and the glimpses. The experience of it. He destroyed awakening by pointing out it was just another thing, like going to Fenway Park or voting for Bernie Sanders. Like clipping your toenails or following Jesus.

He drove me on my knees to this passage of A Course in Miracles:

The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way except the pathways offered by the world. And learning they led nowhere, lost their hope (T-31.IV.3:3-5).

Before Carse, awakening was the pathway to peace. After Carse, there wasn't even that illusion.

Everything in my spiritual life had sugared out to awakening through A Course in Miracles. And then everything died in it. What was the Course but another "pathway offered by the world?"

Even the Course had to go. Even the Course.

The bleakness of that space - the grim nihilism, the hopelessness and loneliness, the grief and anguish - is hard to put into words. There is no consolation there; there is no salvation.

It is dangerous to gaze into the void. People go mad doing it. They grow bitter and cruel. They forget everything except the void, forget to eat or sleep, turn to dust, blow away.

Sometimes they push others into the void. Sometimes they push themselves.

I don't wish it on anyone.

And yet.

Hold onto nothing . . . forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-pI.189.7:3, 5).

And yet: the night ends. The river joins the sea.

What is one remember it is one.

Nothing can prevail against a Son of God who commends his spirit into the Hands of his Father. By doing this the mind awakens from its sleep and remembers its Creator. All sense of separation disappears (T-3.II.5:1-3).

What undoes separation exists outside of and prior to language. It is prior to experience, including the experience of awakening. The nearest I get these days is muttering "Love holds everything" but even that feels trivial.

A Course in Miracles is serious work. For some of us it comes to that. For me it did. It's why I write the way I do, day after day, year after year. We are not meant to do this work alone, and we have to do this work. One way or other we have to find each other and join.

"I will not leave you alone, come join with me."

There is nothing else to say, only we can say it, and we will say it for exactly as long as it takes us to remember that what we are in truth cannot be alone.

. . . I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. That is why I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, then the loneliness is gone. You cannot maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are not alone (T-8.I.2: 4-7).

Jesus can say that but you are the one who who is reading this, right? You are the one for whom it was written. Is it clear then? You are the light of the world. You are the one who calls, and you are the one to whom I answer.

Thank you, always, for joining with me.

Love,
Sean