Dancing with A Course in Miracles

. . . notes on the communal nature of salvation

I

But why am I telling you this story? You were there.

II

In early Fall of I think 1988, I finished a long shift at the bagel shop where I was a baker and walked seven miles to the Champlain Valley fairgrounds to see Bob Dylan.

In those days, I obsessed over Dylan the way most people obsessed over the Dead. I saw a lot of shows, traveled between them, had a good sense of set lists, when Dylan was on and when he was not. It was the most religious thing in my life.

The air that night was sharp and just shy of cold. Stars wheeled in circles overhead. People were attentive and laidback, sixties hippies and their late eighties progeny. I floated at the margins, observing.

The encore - as was often the case in those days - was "All Along the Watchtower." Dylan always said that after Hendrix covered "Watchtower," he (Dylan) basically covered the Hendrix cover. It was loud and raucous; everyone was dancing. I pushed my way to the front to see Dylan more closely, got about fifteen feet away and stood stock still before my idol.

And then someone kicked me.

III

One way to think about our practice of A Course in Miracles is that we are moving from an object-oriented spirituality to a process-oriented spirituality.

Object-oriented spirituality is when (for example) you accept Jesus into your heart and you're saved, game over. Jesus is the object, you've got the object, so that's it.

Object-oriented spirituality can also be subtler. When I was playing at being a Buddhist (a few years after that Dylan show), I had a lot of "objects" in my apartment making clear to everyone that "the man who lives here is a Buddhist." Even now, my prisms and crystals and hand-made rosaries are external reflections of my spiritual study and practice.

Object-oriented spirituality isn't a crime against God or nature. We all do it. But sooner or later we see how it's inevitably a form of the lovelessness of "I get it and you don't," which Tara Singh warned against. The object obscures the deeper work of questioning everything in order to get closer to the truth (e.g., T-11.VIII.3:8).

You wonder why you had never questioned the obvious falseness of separation and of one's own opinion. The tragedy is that one's opinions are not even one's own. I was astonished . . . There is no love, no peace, no truth, no gratefulness outside the Mind of God (Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 12).

Process-oriented spirituality is when (for example) you accept Jesus as a symbol that points towards the process of becoming radically creative, peaceful and nonviolent and you submit to that process. It's about transformation through learning and practice under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. You bring what you learn into application.

Forgiveness is an empty gesture unless it entails correction. Without this it is essentially judgmental, rather than healing (T-2.V-A.15:3-4).

Tara Singh called this transformation the flowering of the "capacity to receive," which is how we learn that we have something of our own to offer one another. Cooperation and sharing replace conflict and sides. But it's not a thing we do.

The transformation had its own divine way of unfolding. It was an awakening of impersonal intelligence that sees the world of ideas as meaningless and the world of nature with calm eyes. Out of this stillness emerges the recognition of our function on earth (Nothing Real Can be Threatened 12-13).

My ACIM practice, involves a lot of study and reflection. I think a lot, especially about thought - what it does, how it shows up, what it wants and doesn't want, what's there when it's not. I take notes, read books, meditate and contemplate.

Ideally, the end of all this analysis is insight - a "clarification" or "understanding" that comes at the end and which naturally induces a shift away from fear and towards love. That's what correction is.

The Holy Spirit holds salvation in your mind, and offers it the way to peace. Salvation is a thought you share with God, because His Voice accepted it for you and answered in your name that it was done. Thus is salvation kept among the Thoughts your Self holds dear and cherishes for you (W-pI.96.7:2-4).

And yet.

Sometimes people say to me, Sean you think too much. All those so-called insights are just momentary dopamine hit anybody gets when a puzzle piece falls into place. What you need to do is get out into the world and, you know, do something.

Which reminds me of the time I got kicked at a Bob Dylan concert.

IV

I assumed the kick was an accident. It was crowded; everyone was dancing. Kicks happen.

But then it happened again.

I turned and saw a woman I did not know and would never see again. She wore a long violet skirt; her black hair was loose and flying. And her anger at me was palpable.

"Dance!" she shouted. "Dance!"

People sometimes ask, who would you have dinner with - Jesus? Abraham Lincoln? Helen Schucman?

I would give anything to have a cup of coffee with that woman, whoever she was.

Dancing scared me. I secretly loved it but was so terrified of looking foolish that I never did it. I hurt my body a lot, and had no real concept of being gentle or kind with it, or happy in it. Besides, Dylan shows were not for dancing. They were for psychic intensity, tuning into the cosmos, getting right with your unified self, et cetera. I was a dangerous mess in those days. Dylan was the closest thing to church and salvation I knew. Those shows weren't about fun; they were about not falling into the abyss.

That moment only lasted a handful of seconds. Three things happened in it.

The first was, I saw her fury and understood that beyond the anger was a form of love. She was calling me into the world - she was inviting me to live with my brothers and sisters - and this was good.

The second thing was that somehow she saw instantly how lost and alone and screwed-up I was - she saw why I could not, in that moment, dance - and her eyes softened in a genuine and care-filled apology.

And third, and finally, we smiled at each other, slipping briefly into a space I would not see again for a long time - "true communion with the Holy Spirit, Who sees the altar of God in everyone" (T-7.V.11:6), at which altar you understand that "your completion is God’s, Whose only need is to have you be complete" (T-15.VII.14:8).

And then I walked away.

V

In the instant of experience, fantasy ends. I can imagine what it would be like to meet you, but when I meet you, imagination ends. You are here. You are you.

On the one hand this is so obvious as to barely need saying. But on the other, it points to a conflict at the heart of separation: fantasy as a defense against remembering what we are in truth.

Before I meet you you can be anyone: the love of my life, my new best friend, a devout student, the teacher I've always longed for et cetera. Before I meet you, you exist as possibility - my possibility.

But after I meet you, that ends. You are what you are which is different - which cannot help but be different - from what I dreamed you would be, fantasized you would be, needed you to be.

The simplest way to fix this conflict is to lay down the defense. Stop projecting. Stop treating the other as a character in your story.

For most of us - certainly for me - this is a process. It's the process of learning how to distinguish between ego and the holy spirit, projection and acceptance, and thereby coming to responsibility for happiness.

The blessing of the Course is the energy of love it imparts for you to share with your brother. What a joy to discover that the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit is in holy relationship. The holy relationship is the temple of God (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 13).

It's the process of realizing that if we want change, then we have to change. Together, we have to change.

But how?

VI

I was tired walking home that night. Ten hours on my feet baking bagels, walk seven miles to stand on my feet at a concert, walk seven miles back in darkness . . .

. . . but I was also happy. I was oddly happy. I'm sure I believed back then that I understood my happiness. I did not admit to confusion or unknowing in those days. I couldn't.

But when I look back now, I think I actually do understand it. I was happy because I'd gone to church and then got taken to church. It wasn't that the woman had saved me. It was that God had lifted both of us out of the shallows and into "the light of love shining as steadily and as surely as God Himself" (T-13.X.10:2).

Briefly we had lived the truth that "the Love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another" (T-1.VII.2:3). We saw in each other the Love that is the Name we share with God; we wanted nothing for each other but that Love.

And so, for a few minutes, alone on the streets after midnight, I gave myself over to the process of creating "the good, the beautiful and the holy" (T-1.VII.2:1), which is God's Will, which we share.

I skipped a little. On the last block some tension - some hurt - shook loose in me. I lifted my arms and I skipped. I doubt anybody saw and anyway, it didn't matter.

I danced, right? All the way home I danced.

~ Sean