Awareness and A Course in Miracles

. . . on letting Christ be the light

Tara Singh says something very interesting in his little book The Present Heals.

Everybody has a solution, as if they are superior. It's nonsense having solutions. Do it this way, or do it that way - it's still activity, still the about! I would rather see how it is, that's all.

He is paraphrasing his teacher, Krishnamurti, who said of various spiritual disciplines, like vegetarianism or celibacy, do it or don't do it but get on with it.

But he is also extending the understanding inherent in A Course in Miracles that Christ's "perceptions are your natural awareness, and it is only the distortions you introduce that tire you" (T-11.VI.3:8).

Let the Christ in you interpret for you, and do not try to limit what you see by narrow little beliefs that are unworthy of God's Son. For until Christ comes into His Own, the Son of God will see himself as Fatherless (T-11.VI.3:9-10).

When we forget that we are God's Creation - extensions of Love, whose function is to "love in a loveless place" (T-14.IV.4:10) - then we are introducting "distortions" that cloud our vision. We trade reality for illusions. We start to think that we have problems that only we can solve.

You know, we get cancer or a relationship comes to an end or somebody shoots up a school or Monarch butterflies are endangered and we lose our inner peace or channel our inner social justice warrior or numb ourselves or whatever.

Tara Singh is not denying the appearance of those events, those circumstances. To our bodies, and its multi-faceted modes of perception, the world will always be real, whether it's an ice cream sundae or a car accident. Nor is he denying that thought is involved in the experience. He is just saying that there is a way of being in relationship with what is given that undoes the need for egoic involvement.

This "way of being in relationship with what is given" is a way of seeing, which has to do with letting the Christ in us interpret what is happening.

The God of resurrection demands nothing, for He does not will to take away. He does not require obedience, for obedience implies submission. He would only have you learn your will and follow it, not in the spirit of sacrifice and submission, but in the gladness of freedom (T-11.VI.5:6-8).

The invitation here - implied by Singh and somewhat more explicit in the ACIM text proper - is to notice awareness and learn the way we are more it than we are a body in a world.

After all, even the body (and the world it brings forth) is simply an appearance in and to awareness (e.g., T-2.IV.3:8).

I am writing this in the early evening. The horses are just visible in the pasture beyond dozens of towering sunflowers. The sky is full of slow-drifting clouds lit up like roses in decanting sunlight. Crickets sing; Main Street is empty, save for a couple of walkers talking quietly with each other.

Before I am grateful for this - before I call it "beautiful" - before I assert temporary ownership of it - before I label the various objects "horse" or "sunflowers" - what is it?

The secret to salvation in A Course in Miracles is that we need do nothing - including, especially, interpreting what is given (T-27.VIII.10:1). Stop telling yourself a story in which you are the central figure and your happiness or lack thereof the whole plot. Let Christ tell you a new story; let God speak in you as awareness.

I am leading you to a new kind of experience that you will become less and less willing to deny. Learning of Christ is easy, for to perceive with Him involves no strain at all (T-11.VI.3:6-7).

Notice what is given and give attention to it. This is all the Christ in you can do, because it is the only thing God is: awareness itself, in which everything comes and goes, rises and falls, appears and disappears.

Except you: you do not come and go. Awareness (or consciousness or Christ Mind or whatever you feel like calling it - the word is not the thing) does not come and go. When we see this clearly then we understand what the course means when it asserts that "God is as dependent on you as you are on Him, because His Autonomy encompasses yours, and is therefore incomplete without it" (T-11.V.12:1).

Thank you, as always, for studying and practicing with me.

Love,
Sean