I wanted but could not find a place for this quote from Carse's book "Perfect Brilliant Stillness." So I'm adding it here, as a kind of addendum.
"Say you had a dream or a vision and in the vision everything is streaming light. That's all there is, just light streaming . . . And then the light streaming shapes itself into a person who says, "I want to.be able to wake up and see the light." You look at this streaming light formed into a person-shape and say, "But what you are is obviously streaming light." The streaming light says, "No, I don't think so, I don't experience that. I feel very dark and alone and am in so much pain. Show me how I can see this light you are talking about." Meanwhile the streaming light formed into a person-shape is practically blinding you with their beauty and brilliance . . . (343).
Thank you Sean for your words today. It reminded me once again that as the Course says, you are always in the right place and situation. I try to keep in mind that there is no need to try to figure things out and make a plan for that allows the ego to take charge. It's hard to give up control but necessary if Peace is the goal. Sean, your words today were so direct and helpful even if for me some of them were hard to swallow. I so appreciate your insight.
I am often mindful of this sentence from the Course: "a healed mind does not plan" (W-pI.135.11:1). Very hard to accept that! The ego does love to be busy :)
Thank you for reading and sharing, April. We have been ACIM friends for a while now :) I am very grateful to share this path with you. 🙏🙏
Good morning, Sean. I am quite taken by the way in which you mentioned the void ALONG WITH the hope that comes after losing everything you think matters. It seems that you are saying, in order to have the eyes to see this hope in the abyss, one must come to God with "wholly empty hands". This emptiness....this pouring out....is it the simply the result of being in the void/abyss, or is there an action one must consider in releasing all that made us who we thought we were?! How does one do that? If you are able, can you share a little about what that looked like for you?
Your addendum in the comments resonates intensely. It kind of goes along with the experience of being able to see intense light in and of someone else, but maybe not as well for, and in, ourselves. In a beautifully symbiotic way, we need one another to reflect and see this light in ALL it's forms. My next question piggy backs upon my previous one: if one is in the void, no light to be seen or felt, with feelings of deep despair and darkness, how does one find the luminous reflection?
Questions aside, your work here reminds me I am not alone. I will never not be grateful for both learning and seeing that.
I think that passage from the text (about empty hands) is gently reminding us that we HAVE to enter the void - or the lonesome valley, pick your metaphor - and that there is no way to peace but through this. As the other passage I quoted makes clear, sooner or later, we all see the futility of salvation by any means offered by the world.
The dark night of the soul is no joke.
There is a bottom one reaches - a defeat, not a surrender, for there is no logic in it, no grace, you give up everything including even the possibility of redemption - in which one is finally sufficiently humbled to accept the helping hand that is never not being offered.
The void was a spiritual bottom for me. It wasn't really about the Course, by the way - or anything else the world appears to offer the lost and forsaken, all that is fundamentally neutral - it was about the self that thought ITS judgment mattered, ITS salvation mattered, ITS activities were paramount.
By destroying the last vestige of hope for that self, Carse basically facilitated the destruction of that self.
As he writes at his book's outset, it's "fine print:"
". . . if you do find yourself interested, and are able to
see past the words to understand at least some of what they
point to, you are likely to find it quite disturbing. Few people buy books on spirituality to be deeply disturbed, so consider yourself forewarned.
"And finally, if you read it anyway, and what is hinted at here resonates and is by some remote chance followed to its end, then that will likely also be the end of you. So again, a warning. With any luck, you will not come back from this with a life you can call your own; ‘you’ will not come back at all.
"There’s no way to know what the chances are of this happening, but the Upanishads say that “only once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up,” so there’s probably no need for concern. Probably."
You ask if is there "an action one must consider in releasing all that made us who we thought we were." The paradox is, there is nobody there to do the releasing, there is nobody there thinking anything. Eddies in the river, sunlight on the waves.
In the world - in the body - as ego frames those things - the stakes are high and we have to act. In the void, you see that none of it matters. Act or don't act. As Leonard Cohen sings in "You Want it Darker," "I didn't know I had permission/to murder and to maim." It's like that.
When there is nothing to do, and nobody to do it, then in that space, the cosmos is able to act creatively, because we are finally out of the way. We don't find the light; the light is there. It's what is when we stop resisting the darkness.
But even that is putting too fine a point on it, making it sound like if we just "let go" enough then voila! Instant peace, love and understanding.
Another way of thinking of all this is that the void is non-being; being and non-being are the cosmic binary. Being resists non-being; non-being longs to BE. Gazing at nonbeing is hard - it's confusing, it can lead to some very twisted places, it can literally take your life.
But it can also reveal being itself; it can reveal the Whole as a cycle of creation/destruction, and when we perceive that - which is more like a sensation, the way our body feels an ocean current pulling us this way or that - then a lot of the stressors associated with non-being naturally dissolved.
When the stressors dissolve - when the pressure to wake up or find the truth or perceive the luminous reflection is no longer meaningful - then the natural creativity of the cosmos, of what is, arises. Identity ceases to be a static label and becomes the flow itself.
Which, of course, is poetic bullshit but I did say at the outset, words are no use here :)
One last thought. Posts like this feel less like "do this/do that" and more like "please don't give up on me/I promise I won't give up on you." I need that clarity in my practice - that sense of, we are here together, we are not forgetting one another, if you wander too far I will find you, et cetera.
Thank you as always, Jessica. As you know, I was not alone in the void. In that sense, one can say cheerfully, what void? Which maybe was the point all along?
Firstly, these words are a fount forced upwards from the ineffable. Thank you for taking the time to take unpack some of these difficult ideas a little further. I am grateful.
This is my first contact with Carse. Why is that?! Those warnings about what his words point towards are no joke. However, I quite intrigued.
Also, thank you for pointing out the difference between "surrendering" in the void and being "defeated." This seems like a KEY element in coming to the end of being. To surrender is still a being's action to do or not do something. Defeat is a whole different ball game.
I've been reading your posts and offerings for years, Sean. The message cradling all posts and teachings has always come across as a call to remember: we are not alone. I've seen some pretty dark places and maybe I haven't been to the bottom of the void yet . . . but at least I know for sure wherever I go, I am not alone.
Thank you for saying that, Jessica. Yes - the cry of the writing has always been: be with me. The cry of the reading sometimes too.
I don't write a lot about Carse because a LOT of stunting around nonduality ended when I read him; partly it's his style and partly it was just time. I got moved off what was (for me) the artificiality of the neo-advaitic material, and drop-kicked back into the Christian myths and ontologies, where Abhishiktananda-like, I wrestle with some very persistent angels.
You have been to the well, Jessica. I know this & have been served by it 🙏🙏
Thank you for your words. Thank you for extending and welcoming us here.
I love the reminder that to cherish awakening, the thoughts, the act, the shining promise, is yet another illusion in which we believe we are something we are not, that we have something more to do and somewhere else to arrive. And so we strive and try to make it holy until we realize that it is far from holy! The knowledge and acceptance that the pathways of the world lead to nowhere is, first and foremost hard to see, and second difficult to remember, yet alone accept. I’ve fallen asleep in this over and over. We are conditioned to believe that we must do something, and yet the course tells us this isn’t so. The course plainly spells out “you need do nothing.” I am often reminded to just relax. You have helped me to do this.
I’m grateful that you do not encourage spiritual bypassing and only examine the upside of acim and this path. Paradoxically, the downside, though painful and scary, only points is directly back at truth. "The course is simple--"It has one function and one goal. Only in that does it remain wholly consistent, because only that can be consistent."--but not easy--and we definitely need each other. I think it is helpful to point out and for all of us to see with clear eyes the bleakness, the hopelessness, the anguish, and the terror of gazing at the void—though existentially painful, it is but another illusion. If only we can remember, and if only we can remind each other and hold one another in this.
And to reiterate Jessica’s point, to recognize the “and yets”…there is something more.
The truth is that light and joy and peace abide in me, and you, and my daughters, my dog, and that pine tree. And even if I can’t sense it or don’t realize it, does not make it untrue.
Only truth is true. Nothing unreal exists and nothing real can be threatened.
The experiences of the void shared by you and others in the comments reminds me of the course text:
You have made much progress and are really trying to make still more, but there is one thing you have never done: Not for one instant have you utterly forgotten the body. It has faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet completely disappeared. You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, but it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend without awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return.
T-22.VII.1-2
This also reminds me of the dialectical opposition inherent in and of all things--darkness and light, separation and oneness, fear and love, illusion and truth. Somehow in reading this newsletter and the comments, the quote, “the depth of my sorrow matches the height of my joy" comes to mind. Experiencing both the depths and the heights as a healing of my mind has, at times, felt terrifying because of the truly cavernous depths of my fears and sorrows--mind you I recognize, at least faintly, that I am doing this to myself! And if I’m being honest after reading this post and other people’s experiences, the personal depths I have experienced, though harrowing to me feel shallow by comparison. I'm also wondering if perhaps depths and heights, and sorrow and joy at some point or somewhere converge into this sense of what is being expressed as a felt sense of nothingness. No thing. No choice. Maybe the only thing that exists in this place is I am?
The dialogue around emptiness, empty hands, letting go of the world reminds me of kenosis--the act of self-emptying, in which Christ is a supreme example. Your comment that being in the void and reaching the place of defeat, not surrender strikes me. Do you consider this as symbolic of a death of the ego? In writing this, I can feel the ways in which I cherish my self, this sense of self that feeds on struggle and attack and fear and hate for its sustenance.
The message that we are here to not only do the work but to also join feels important. It feels life-giving. It feels like Love. Yes, the work is hard, but that I am not alone, you are not alone and we are not alone and that we are here to join and search for one another is comforting. That you will search for me and I for you, that you will not let me go and I will not let you go, that one calls and one answers—we all benefit. What is more healing than this?
I'm so grateful to you and those you have commented.
"Fallng asleep" in the face of existential crisis is a beautiful helpful way to put it. It kicks me into the fairy tales and other narratives - e.g. Rip Van Winkle - but it also reminds me of this phrase from ACIM: ". . . the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to him waking up" (T-2.I.3:6).
The suggestion the Course makes is that ths is a symbolic representation of the fact that "the world has not yet experienced any comprehensive awakening or rebirth," (T-2.I.3:7), which correlates Eden, the "pre-separation condition," the salient quality of which is that "nothing is needed" (T-2.I.3:1).
Our sleep takes the form of fearful resistance, or a willingness to indulge drama and distraction, or an emphasis on the body's wellness of unwellness, et cetera.
In a sense, the void is always there, and we are always gazing at it (we only have one problem! (W-pI.79.6:2)) and our lives becomes a conditioned means of avoiding looking at the scary thing that is always right there. It is not an error that our earliest narratives involve monsters.
Of course, the real invitation is not to look at the monster but at the interior fear for which the monster is merely a symbol.
I share your sense that Truth is true and is therefore not contingent on our acceptance of it. We don't make truth true; this is an incredibly comforting fact. Reality simply is. It is like gravity; I can deny it's existence all I want, I can study levitation spells of old, I can forget all about it and yet if I drop a bowling ball on my toe, then I'm going to howl in pain.
So - for me anyway - the rigor of the ACIM practice is the lived commitment to discerning what is true from what is false. Tara Singh was beautifully emphatic on this point: the cycle of problem --> solution is endless and serves ego; focus instead of seeing what is.
That leads to a very different outcome, as you know. Fear seen clearly dissolves naturally because it is not real, and what remains is Love.
All of which involves a refactoring of our understanding of identity - specifically, that it is contingent on, conditional upon, a body. Your quote from the text is perfect.
I do think it's important to remember that "forgetting" is not synonyous with "intentional rejection." I made this error for a long time, and used it to hold the Course at a distance. If we make a goal of forgetting the body, then we are subtly reinforcing the body. The work is to simply direct our attention elsewhere - through service, through devotion to reversing our perception of cause and effect, through dialogue (always dialogue ) - and observe how the body naturally recedes in importance and primacy.
Again, the Course doesn't deny the body (and advises us against this denial - e.g., T-2.IV,3:10-11), it just teaches that we are NOT a body. It's a subtle but critical distinction.
And then yes, one day the body is wholly forgotten, and when it returns we can wear it lighter. It's more like a comfy sweatshirt than, I don't know, a necktie and high heels? I don't dress up much :)
I think that the binary you point to is helpful. For me, the realizaton that the depth of the one is the height of the other makes them a cycle, a circle, the one feeding the other (in the same way that without destruction there can be no creation). This also implies that they are dialogic, which brings us back to the all-powerful essential idea of relationship, in which the one and the other actively remember what they are in truth. I wonder if the binary is not also an illusion. You seem to be hinting at this when you talk about how all this cashes out it "I AM."
The language I choose for writing about ego is less death and more nonviolence. After the void, I no longer felt so threatened by ego that I needed to go to war with it. I was able to enter into nonviolent relationship with it. I can feel and perceive ego now without feeling that I HAVE to listen to it. I feel accepting of its presence in me, its attempts to colonize my thinking, destroy what is beautiful and free and happy in me . . . and the answer is not hostile reaction (as you know, doing nothing is often The Answer) but rather a gentle nonviolent resistance grounded in Love. This is healing.
We have talked a LOT about this, you and I. I have no idea how one goes into the horror (internally OR externally) without a practice of nonviolence. It is such a gift because it is the memory of God and the assurance that "nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists" is true. Therefore, what is left to fear? The death of the body is just another illusion, a dream within a dream within a dream . . .
So far as I can tell, nothing is more healing that our willingness to join, and remember Love together, and bring it forth together, empty hand in empty hand :) Bede Griffiths called it the "ultimate goal of life," to . . .
" . . . reach that total unity where we experience the whole creation and the whole humanity, reintegrated in the supreme consciousness, in the One, which is pure being, pure knowledge and pure bliss, saccidananda."
When I was 11 or 12, I found myself (the mind?) having a brief unprovoked experience of what I then called *nothingness*, an excursion into some outer space-like chasm of absolute stillness and starless darkness—no, not even darkness, but the utter absence of light altogether—AND YET (!) there was at the same time a brilliance I cannot put words too. I was pulled by curiosity to stay with it until I got scared. Somehow, still tethered to a thread of observation, an uh-oh-I-better-go-back moment manifested and so I *returned* to what I called *myself * and got on with my little life though never having forgotten the experience . . . Some thirty years later I received a cranio-sacral session by a masterful shamanic therapist who left me on a treatment table alone in a purposely dark room after I had entered a deep non-verbal immovable state. Here, for a second time, I experienced this realm of *nothingness* but this time it was more pervasive and in a literal sense it felt life-threatening. There was a terror that I would not return because I *could* not return—I felt I had no choice this time and I think it had everything to do with being alone in that experience. It was an aloneness that was spectacular and unbearable. Fortunately, the practitioner eventually came back to the dark room and literally extended his hand. . . . I want to believe, am counting on your reminder, that we are all in this together. That we will not forget or forsake one another no matter how short or long we find ourselves walking in a lonesome valley. Thank you for this provocative sharing, Sean.
Thank you, Susanna. Those experiences matter very much to me. I had several near the beginning of my ACIM practice - one in particular while moon-gazing in January at 4 a.m. or so deep in the forest. The self evaporated; the stillness was so pure; total oneness then . . . some part of me wanted to possess it, claim it, own it. And it ended then.
Abhishiktananda talks about the mind before "I" enters - when we are so little and everything is vast and undifferentiated and then . . . "I" comes on. And then conditioning begins, the desire of the "I" not to be lost in the undifferentiated vastness . . .
Ken Wilber is very good on this point in The Atman Project and Up from Eden.
I appreciate your emphasis on fear in the second instance - the being alone and also the sense of not being in control. Am I reading that right? That you had no choice? That feels very significant to me, coming up to the truth of choicelessness and recoiling. Tara Singh wrote often that choice is the last illusion.
Carse, who apparently hovers over this thread, writes that "There is no thing to attain, no where to go. There is only acceptance of what is, on the deepest possible level, and even that only happens if it happens" (252).
I am reading your poems . . . we will talk soon I hope . . .
That’s right, Sean. I had no apparent choices in this limitless stillness. I was immobile and mute, though better to say “immobilized” and “muted” --but by what or whom I cannot say. In this stillness I was unable to will anything to happen since what I thought of as “my will” was dissolving thoroughly into a vast Will I could not call my own—as if I ever had a will of my own in the first place? All the instruction and practice I had about aligning one’s small will with God’s Will did not prepare me for this incomprehensible ride. . . I was, still am, actually a more rattled by the fear in the aloneness than the aspect of choicelessness. Something about surrender is knocking at my door.
In any case, I’m grateful you’ve introduced this subject, Sean. As unwieldy and uncomfortable as it is (for me anyway) I think it’s worthy and necessary to explore. I’ll take a look at what Ken Wilber has to say, as well Tara Singh, and what others are adding to this intriguing thread.
I have found that fear to be instructive - the fear of joining the cosmos, whether through death or some cataclysmic insight - instructive. It took me a long time to see the degree to which a lot of my practice was just reinforcing te underlying error of separation, not challenging so much as reifying it under the guise of "serious spiritual work." Those moments of breaking - that apparently are not self-induced in the traditional sense (brought on my somatic work, entheogens, whatever) - feel like gifts. I don't think we - I am thinking here specifically of the ACIM community - spend enough time talking about what is hard about this work, what is terrifying, what is destabilizing. Not talking makes it hard to be effectively supported and to offer helpful support. So I am trying to redress that or be present to it.
Thanks, Susanna. I'm grateful to you and others for sharing. More and more I see the work as communal.
Of David Carse, David Carse often says, "who carse?" Ha ha.
He wrote a book about nondualism - he was a student of Ramesh Balkesar - had a plant-based awakening. I feel a great deal of kinship with him, though he is completely uninterested in being my teacher. Still, his work was profoundly helpful, in the sense of precipitating a real existential crisis. I love him very much.
Sean im in A void,not an unpleasant one but a void nonetheless. How do I describe it it's empty its It's neither pleasant nor unpleasant it's just where I am. I don't want to read anymore I don't want to study the course I don't want to do any lessons I don't seem to need anything.Fear has gone and with it guilt and shame. I think the best way to describe it in one word nothingness I am in a well of nothingness with no needs no desires just nothing.I think you will understand where I am Sean I think you will thank you anyway
When I began to leave the void (I am thinking of the spring and summer of 2020) one thing tht occurred was that I began to feel like a ghost. I felt as if nobody could see me, as if I were drifting through the world without a function. I was ghosting my life. Things were not dark but gray.
Yet there was cause in that space - there was a sense of, okay, if this is what life is now then I am going to at least be of service. I'm going to be kinder to Chrisoula, more present to the kids, I'm going to throw bread to ducks, I'm going to smile at strangers.
I think I am asking: in the space in which you find yourself, is there choice still?
Sean i don't know what happened,l replied to your reply but it mustn't have been sent. Im still not able to manage the technology. Anyway I don't feel alone since you posted that last one. You asked me if I was happy and I didn't know how to answer you until now. My answer is I'm not unhappy I have accepted my self and where I am and I feel no desire for anything. Over fifty years of searching and this is where I am. Truly I never knew what I was searching for anyway. I was aimlessly trashing about but came to see all I wanted was to be freed of shame and inferiority. It was a horrible life I couldn't look a dog straight in the face and lesson 93 gave me hope. I so identified with it. But now the shame is gone hope is not needed,and im in a desireless void. Thank you for being a friend.
You are welcome, Sean. Our sharing means a lot to me. I have been writing for years and you and some others have been with me since nearly the beginning. We are friends and we are also more than friends; we are brothers remembering the perfect love of our Father in Heaven. I would be lost without you, Sean 🙏🙏
I wanted but could not find a place for this quote from Carse's book "Perfect Brilliant Stillness." So I'm adding it here, as a kind of addendum.
"Say you had a dream or a vision and in the vision everything is streaming light. That's all there is, just light streaming . . . And then the light streaming shapes itself into a person who says, "I want to.be able to wake up and see the light." You look at this streaming light formed into a person-shape and say, "But what you are is obviously streaming light." The streaming light says, "No, I don't think so, I don't experience that. I feel very dark and alone and am in so much pain. Show me how I can see this light you are talking about." Meanwhile the streaming light formed into a person-shape is practically blinding you with their beauty and brilliance . . . (343).
Thank you Sean for your words today. It reminded me once again that as the Course says, you are always in the right place and situation. I try to keep in mind that there is no need to try to figure things out and make a plan for that allows the ego to take charge. It's hard to give up control but necessary if Peace is the goal. Sean, your words today were so direct and helpful even if for me some of them were hard to swallow. I so appreciate your insight.
I am often mindful of this sentence from the Course: "a healed mind does not plan" (W-pI.135.11:1). Very hard to accept that! The ego does love to be busy :)
Thank you for reading and sharing, April. We have been ACIM friends for a while now :) I am very grateful to share this path with you. 🙏🙏
Love,
Sean
Good morning, Sean. I am quite taken by the way in which you mentioned the void ALONG WITH the hope that comes after losing everything you think matters. It seems that you are saying, in order to have the eyes to see this hope in the abyss, one must come to God with "wholly empty hands". This emptiness....this pouring out....is it the simply the result of being in the void/abyss, or is there an action one must consider in releasing all that made us who we thought we were?! How does one do that? If you are able, can you share a little about what that looked like for you?
Your addendum in the comments resonates intensely. It kind of goes along with the experience of being able to see intense light in and of someone else, but maybe not as well for, and in, ourselves. In a beautifully symbiotic way, we need one another to reflect and see this light in ALL it's forms. My next question piggy backs upon my previous one: if one is in the void, no light to be seen or felt, with feelings of deep despair and darkness, how does one find the luminous reflection?
Questions aside, your work here reminds me I am not alone. I will never not be grateful for both learning and seeing that.
Jessica
Hi Jessica,
I think that passage from the text (about empty hands) is gently reminding us that we HAVE to enter the void - or the lonesome valley, pick your metaphor - and that there is no way to peace but through this. As the other passage I quoted makes clear, sooner or later, we all see the futility of salvation by any means offered by the world.
The dark night of the soul is no joke.
There is a bottom one reaches - a defeat, not a surrender, for there is no logic in it, no grace, you give up everything including even the possibility of redemption - in which one is finally sufficiently humbled to accept the helping hand that is never not being offered.
The void was a spiritual bottom for me. It wasn't really about the Course, by the way - or anything else the world appears to offer the lost and forsaken, all that is fundamentally neutral - it was about the self that thought ITS judgment mattered, ITS salvation mattered, ITS activities were paramount.
By destroying the last vestige of hope for that self, Carse basically facilitated the destruction of that self.
As he writes at his book's outset, it's "fine print:"
". . . if you do find yourself interested, and are able to
see past the words to understand at least some of what they
point to, you are likely to find it quite disturbing. Few people buy books on spirituality to be deeply disturbed, so consider yourself forewarned.
"And finally, if you read it anyway, and what is hinted at here resonates and is by some remote chance followed to its end, then that will likely also be the end of you. So again, a warning. With any luck, you will not come back from this with a life you can call your own; ‘you’ will not come back at all.
"There’s no way to know what the chances are of this happening, but the Upanishads say that “only once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up,” so there’s probably no need for concern. Probably."
You ask if is there "an action one must consider in releasing all that made us who we thought we were." The paradox is, there is nobody there to do the releasing, there is nobody there thinking anything. Eddies in the river, sunlight on the waves.
In the world - in the body - as ego frames those things - the stakes are high and we have to act. In the void, you see that none of it matters. Act or don't act. As Leonard Cohen sings in "You Want it Darker," "I didn't know I had permission/to murder and to maim." It's like that.
When there is nothing to do, and nobody to do it, then in that space, the cosmos is able to act creatively, because we are finally out of the way. We don't find the light; the light is there. It's what is when we stop resisting the darkness.
But even that is putting too fine a point on it, making it sound like if we just "let go" enough then voila! Instant peace, love and understanding.
Another way of thinking of all this is that the void is non-being; being and non-being are the cosmic binary. Being resists non-being; non-being longs to BE. Gazing at nonbeing is hard - it's confusing, it can lead to some very twisted places, it can literally take your life.
But it can also reveal being itself; it can reveal the Whole as a cycle of creation/destruction, and when we perceive that - which is more like a sensation, the way our body feels an ocean current pulling us this way or that - then a lot of the stressors associated with non-being naturally dissolved.
When the stressors dissolve - when the pressure to wake up or find the truth or perceive the luminous reflection is no longer meaningful - then the natural creativity of the cosmos, of what is, arises. Identity ceases to be a static label and becomes the flow itself.
Which, of course, is poetic bullshit but I did say at the outset, words are no use here :)
One last thought. Posts like this feel less like "do this/do that" and more like "please don't give up on me/I promise I won't give up on you." I need that clarity in my practice - that sense of, we are here together, we are not forgetting one another, if you wander too far I will find you, et cetera.
Thank you as always, Jessica. As you know, I was not alone in the void. In that sense, one can say cheerfully, what void? Which maybe was the point all along?
Love,
Sean
Firstly, these words are a fount forced upwards from the ineffable. Thank you for taking the time to take unpack some of these difficult ideas a little further. I am grateful.
This is my first contact with Carse. Why is that?! Those warnings about what his words point towards are no joke. However, I quite intrigued.
Also, thank you for pointing out the difference between "surrendering" in the void and being "defeated." This seems like a KEY element in coming to the end of being. To surrender is still a being's action to do or not do something. Defeat is a whole different ball game.
I've been reading your posts and offerings for years, Sean. The message cradling all posts and teachings has always come across as a call to remember: we are not alone. I've seen some pretty dark places and maybe I haven't been to the bottom of the void yet . . . but at least I know for sure wherever I go, I am not alone.
Peace and pace to you.
Jessica
Thank you for saying that, Jessica. Yes - the cry of the writing has always been: be with me. The cry of the reading sometimes too.
I don't write a lot about Carse because a LOT of stunting around nonduality ended when I read him; partly it's his style and partly it was just time. I got moved off what was (for me) the artificiality of the neo-advaitic material, and drop-kicked back into the Christian myths and ontologies, where Abhishiktananda-like, I wrestle with some very persistent angels.
You have been to the well, Jessica. I know this & have been served by it 🙏🙏
~ Sean
Sean,
Thank you for your words. Thank you for extending and welcoming us here.
I love the reminder that to cherish awakening, the thoughts, the act, the shining promise, is yet another illusion in which we believe we are something we are not, that we have something more to do and somewhere else to arrive. And so we strive and try to make it holy until we realize that it is far from holy! The knowledge and acceptance that the pathways of the world lead to nowhere is, first and foremost hard to see, and second difficult to remember, yet alone accept. I’ve fallen asleep in this over and over. We are conditioned to believe that we must do something, and yet the course tells us this isn’t so. The course plainly spells out “you need do nothing.” I am often reminded to just relax. You have helped me to do this.
I’m grateful that you do not encourage spiritual bypassing and only examine the upside of acim and this path. Paradoxically, the downside, though painful and scary, only points is directly back at truth. "The course is simple--"It has one function and one goal. Only in that does it remain wholly consistent, because only that can be consistent."--but not easy--and we definitely need each other. I think it is helpful to point out and for all of us to see with clear eyes the bleakness, the hopelessness, the anguish, and the terror of gazing at the void—though existentially painful, it is but another illusion. If only we can remember, and if only we can remind each other and hold one another in this.
And to reiterate Jessica’s point, to recognize the “and yets”…there is something more.
The truth is that light and joy and peace abide in me, and you, and my daughters, my dog, and that pine tree. And even if I can’t sense it or don’t realize it, does not make it untrue.
Only truth is true. Nothing unreal exists and nothing real can be threatened.
The experiences of the void shared by you and others in the comments reminds me of the course text:
You have made much progress and are really trying to make still more, but there is one thing you have never done: Not for one instant have you utterly forgotten the body. It has faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet completely disappeared. You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, but it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend without awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return.
T-22.VII.1-2
This also reminds me of the dialectical opposition inherent in and of all things--darkness and light, separation and oneness, fear and love, illusion and truth. Somehow in reading this newsletter and the comments, the quote, “the depth of my sorrow matches the height of my joy" comes to mind. Experiencing both the depths and the heights as a healing of my mind has, at times, felt terrifying because of the truly cavernous depths of my fears and sorrows--mind you I recognize, at least faintly, that I am doing this to myself! And if I’m being honest after reading this post and other people’s experiences, the personal depths I have experienced, though harrowing to me feel shallow by comparison. I'm also wondering if perhaps depths and heights, and sorrow and joy at some point or somewhere converge into this sense of what is being expressed as a felt sense of nothingness. No thing. No choice. Maybe the only thing that exists in this place is I am?
The dialogue around emptiness, empty hands, letting go of the world reminds me of kenosis--the act of self-emptying, in which Christ is a supreme example. Your comment that being in the void and reaching the place of defeat, not surrender strikes me. Do you consider this as symbolic of a death of the ego? In writing this, I can feel the ways in which I cherish my self, this sense of self that feeds on struggle and attack and fear and hate for its sustenance.
The message that we are here to not only do the work but to also join feels important. It feels life-giving. It feels like Love. Yes, the work is hard, but that I am not alone, you are not alone and we are not alone and that we are here to join and search for one another is comforting. That you will search for me and I for you, that you will not let me go and I will not let you go, that one calls and one answers—we all benefit. What is more healing than this?
I'm so grateful to you and those you have commented.
Thank you, Kimberley. This is so helpful.
"Fallng asleep" in the face of existential crisis is a beautiful helpful way to put it. It kicks me into the fairy tales and other narratives - e.g. Rip Van Winkle - but it also reminds me of this phrase from ACIM: ". . . the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to him waking up" (T-2.I.3:6).
The suggestion the Course makes is that ths is a symbolic representation of the fact that "the world has not yet experienced any comprehensive awakening or rebirth," (T-2.I.3:7), which correlates Eden, the "pre-separation condition," the salient quality of which is that "nothing is needed" (T-2.I.3:1).
Our sleep takes the form of fearful resistance, or a willingness to indulge drama and distraction, or an emphasis on the body's wellness of unwellness, et cetera.
In a sense, the void is always there, and we are always gazing at it (we only have one problem! (W-pI.79.6:2)) and our lives becomes a conditioned means of avoiding looking at the scary thing that is always right there. It is not an error that our earliest narratives involve monsters.
Of course, the real invitation is not to look at the monster but at the interior fear for which the monster is merely a symbol.
I share your sense that Truth is true and is therefore not contingent on our acceptance of it. We don't make truth true; this is an incredibly comforting fact. Reality simply is. It is like gravity; I can deny it's existence all I want, I can study levitation spells of old, I can forget all about it and yet if I drop a bowling ball on my toe, then I'm going to howl in pain.
So - for me anyway - the rigor of the ACIM practice is the lived commitment to discerning what is true from what is false. Tara Singh was beautifully emphatic on this point: the cycle of problem --> solution is endless and serves ego; focus instead of seeing what is.
That leads to a very different outcome, as you know. Fear seen clearly dissolves naturally because it is not real, and what remains is Love.
All of which involves a refactoring of our understanding of identity - specifically, that it is contingent on, conditional upon, a body. Your quote from the text is perfect.
I do think it's important to remember that "forgetting" is not synonyous with "intentional rejection." I made this error for a long time, and used it to hold the Course at a distance. If we make a goal of forgetting the body, then we are subtly reinforcing the body. The work is to simply direct our attention elsewhere - through service, through devotion to reversing our perception of cause and effect, through dialogue (always dialogue ) - and observe how the body naturally recedes in importance and primacy.
Again, the Course doesn't deny the body (and advises us against this denial - e.g., T-2.IV,3:10-11), it just teaches that we are NOT a body. It's a subtle but critical distinction.
And then yes, one day the body is wholly forgotten, and when it returns we can wear it lighter. It's more like a comfy sweatshirt than, I don't know, a necktie and high heels? I don't dress up much :)
I think that the binary you point to is helpful. For me, the realizaton that the depth of the one is the height of the other makes them a cycle, a circle, the one feeding the other (in the same way that without destruction there can be no creation). This also implies that they are dialogic, which brings us back to the all-powerful essential idea of relationship, in which the one and the other actively remember what they are in truth. I wonder if the binary is not also an illusion. You seem to be hinting at this when you talk about how all this cashes out it "I AM."
The language I choose for writing about ego is less death and more nonviolence. After the void, I no longer felt so threatened by ego that I needed to go to war with it. I was able to enter into nonviolent relationship with it. I can feel and perceive ego now without feeling that I HAVE to listen to it. I feel accepting of its presence in me, its attempts to colonize my thinking, destroy what is beautiful and free and happy in me . . . and the answer is not hostile reaction (as you know, doing nothing is often The Answer) but rather a gentle nonviolent resistance grounded in Love. This is healing.
We have talked a LOT about this, you and I. I have no idea how one goes into the horror (internally OR externally) without a practice of nonviolence. It is such a gift because it is the memory of God and the assurance that "nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists" is true. Therefore, what is left to fear? The death of the body is just another illusion, a dream within a dream within a dream . . .
So far as I can tell, nothing is more healing that our willingness to join, and remember Love together, and bring it forth together, empty hand in empty hand :) Bede Griffiths called it the "ultimate goal of life," to . . .
" . . . reach that total unity where we experience the whole creation and the whole humanity, reintegrated in the supreme consciousness, in the One, which is pure being, pure knowledge and pure bliss, saccidananda."
Thank you, Kimberley.
Love,
Sean
Spot on Sean 🙏☘️💚
When I was 11 or 12, I found myself (the mind?) having a brief unprovoked experience of what I then called *nothingness*, an excursion into some outer space-like chasm of absolute stillness and starless darkness—no, not even darkness, but the utter absence of light altogether—AND YET (!) there was at the same time a brilliance I cannot put words too. I was pulled by curiosity to stay with it until I got scared. Somehow, still tethered to a thread of observation, an uh-oh-I-better-go-back moment manifested and so I *returned* to what I called *myself * and got on with my little life though never having forgotten the experience . . . Some thirty years later I received a cranio-sacral session by a masterful shamanic therapist who left me on a treatment table alone in a purposely dark room after I had entered a deep non-verbal immovable state. Here, for a second time, I experienced this realm of *nothingness* but this time it was more pervasive and in a literal sense it felt life-threatening. There was a terror that I would not return because I *could* not return—I felt I had no choice this time and I think it had everything to do with being alone in that experience. It was an aloneness that was spectacular and unbearable. Fortunately, the practitioner eventually came back to the dark room and literally extended his hand. . . . I want to believe, am counting on your reminder, that we are all in this together. That we will not forget or forsake one another no matter how short or long we find ourselves walking in a lonesome valley. Thank you for this provocative sharing, Sean.
Thank you, Susanna. Those experiences matter very much to me. I had several near the beginning of my ACIM practice - one in particular while moon-gazing in January at 4 a.m. or so deep in the forest. The self evaporated; the stillness was so pure; total oneness then . . . some part of me wanted to possess it, claim it, own it. And it ended then.
Abhishiktananda talks about the mind before "I" enters - when we are so little and everything is vast and undifferentiated and then . . . "I" comes on. And then conditioning begins, the desire of the "I" not to be lost in the undifferentiated vastness . . .
Ken Wilber is very good on this point in The Atman Project and Up from Eden.
I appreciate your emphasis on fear in the second instance - the being alone and also the sense of not being in control. Am I reading that right? That you had no choice? That feels very significant to me, coming up to the truth of choicelessness and recoiling. Tara Singh wrote often that choice is the last illusion.
Carse, who apparently hovers over this thread, writes that "There is no thing to attain, no where to go. There is only acceptance of what is, on the deepest possible level, and even that only happens if it happens" (252).
I am reading your poems . . . we will talk soon I hope . . .
Love,
Sean
That’s right, Sean. I had no apparent choices in this limitless stillness. I was immobile and mute, though better to say “immobilized” and “muted” --but by what or whom I cannot say. In this stillness I was unable to will anything to happen since what I thought of as “my will” was dissolving thoroughly into a vast Will I could not call my own—as if I ever had a will of my own in the first place? All the instruction and practice I had about aligning one’s small will with God’s Will did not prepare me for this incomprehensible ride. . . I was, still am, actually a more rattled by the fear in the aloneness than the aspect of choicelessness. Something about surrender is knocking at my door.
In any case, I’m grateful you’ve introduced this subject, Sean. As unwieldy and uncomfortable as it is (for me anyway) I think it’s worthy and necessary to explore. I’ll take a look at what Ken Wilber has to say, as well Tara Singh, and what others are adding to this intriguing thread.
I have found that fear to be instructive - the fear of joining the cosmos, whether through death or some cataclysmic insight - instructive. It took me a long time to see the degree to which a lot of my practice was just reinforcing te underlying error of separation, not challenging so much as reifying it under the guise of "serious spiritual work." Those moments of breaking - that apparently are not self-induced in the traditional sense (brought on my somatic work, entheogens, whatever) - feel like gifts. I don't think we - I am thinking here specifically of the ACIM community - spend enough time talking about what is hard about this work, what is terrifying, what is destabilizing. Not talking makes it hard to be effectively supported and to offer helpful support. So I am trying to redress that or be present to it.
Thanks, Susanna. I'm grateful to you and others for sharing. More and more I see the work as communal.
Love,
Sean
For any who might be interested, you can download David Carse's "Perfect Brilliant Stillness" in pdf format from https://www.perfectbrilliantstillness.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Book-from-PerfectBrilliantStillness.org_.pdf
Thank you for this link, Kathy! :)
You're welcome, Jessica!
Sean, so glad I read the entire message. But who is David Carse?
With appreciation,
Ginny
Of David Carse, David Carse often says, "who carse?" Ha ha.
He wrote a book about nondualism - he was a student of Ramesh Balkesar - had a plant-based awakening. I feel a great deal of kinship with him, though he is completely uninterested in being my teacher. Still, his work was profoundly helpful, in the sense of precipitating a real existential crisis. I love him very much.
Sean im in A void,not an unpleasant one but a void nonetheless. How do I describe it it's empty its It's neither pleasant nor unpleasant it's just where I am. I don't want to read anymore I don't want to study the course I don't want to do any lessons I don't seem to need anything.Fear has gone and with it guilt and shame. I think the best way to describe it in one word nothingness I am in a well of nothingness with no needs no desires just nothing.I think you will understand where I am Sean I think you will thank you anyway
Hi Sean,
Are you happy? Are you at peace?
When I began to leave the void (I am thinking of the spring and summer of 2020) one thing tht occurred was that I began to feel like a ghost. I felt as if nobody could see me, as if I were drifting through the world without a function. I was ghosting my life. Things were not dark but gray.
Yet there was cause in that space - there was a sense of, okay, if this is what life is now then I am going to at least be of service. I'm going to be kinder to Chrisoula, more present to the kids, I'm going to throw bread to ducks, I'm going to smile at strangers.
I think I am asking: in the space in which you find yourself, is there choice still?
~ Sean
Sean i don't know what happened,l replied to your reply but it mustn't have been sent. Im still not able to manage the technology. Anyway I don't feel alone since you posted that last one. You asked me if I was happy and I didn't know how to answer you until now. My answer is I'm not unhappy I have accepted my self and where I am and I feel no desire for anything. Over fifty years of searching and this is where I am. Truly I never knew what I was searching for anyway. I was aimlessly trashing about but came to see all I wanted was to be freed of shame and inferiority. It was a horrible life I couldn't look a dog straight in the face and lesson 93 gave me hope. I so identified with it. But now the shame is gone hope is not needed,and im in a desireless void. Thank you for being a friend.
You are welcome, Sean. Our sharing means a lot to me. I have been writing for years and you and some others have been with me since nearly the beginning. We are friends and we are also more than friends; we are brothers remembering the perfect love of our Father in Heaven. I would be lost without you, Sean 🙏🙏