Learning to See with You

Notes on working with the Holy Spirit

When we look inside, what are we really doing? What is the relationship between healing and looking within?

A Course in Miracles suggests that healing is about undoing blocks to our awareness that Love, not fear, is our inheritance. These blocks are forms of ignorance - biases, assumptions, denials, fantasies, et cetera.

The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance (T-in.1:6-7).

Blocks are ways of thinking that obscure reality. They are confusions arising from what David Pearce calls a "fitness-enhancing perceptual disorder." Basically, the separate self is an illusion that facilitates the extension of life.

Lots of religious, philosophical and psychological systems and practices aim at undoing this illusion. We want a direct relationship, a direct connection, with life. We want to know Love Itself, not whatever imitation we come up with on our own. The suggestion is that Love knows better than evolution what ought to happen next.

When we look within, we are trying to see the illusion as an illusion. But our starting point changes what we see. That is why Krishnamurti - with whom Tara Singh studied so closely - emphasized that "freedom is at the beginning." We have to be free to choose or everything that follows will be obscure, tainted and confused.

A Course in Miracles constantly invites us to consider with what teacher are we looking at the world. Who are we asking to help us understand life's meaning? Who are we asking to help us figure out what we should do? Who is teaching us how to be in relationship with one another?

The ego tries to find them in yourself alone, because it does not know where to look. The Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself you cannot find yourself, because that is not what you are. Whenever you are with a brother, you are learning what you are because you are teaching what you are. He will respond either with pain or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following (T-8.III.5:6-9).

Tara Singh said that if we start with our imperfections and sins and errors and so forth then we risk cycling through endless repititions of self-improvement. The illusion of separate interests is untouched.

But if we start with our reality as Love, then whatever comes up - whatever character defect, sin, mistake, confusion or lack - can be undone. It can be let go.

It’s a subtle but important distinction, and understanding it can yield big effects in our practice.

Really, Tara Singh is saying, choose the Holy Spirit. The only way to see through the illusion of separate interests - to undo it once and for all - is to look at it in love, which form of looking is the Holy Spirit.

This is not easy and it's not always fun either. It really is work and it can take time before it becomes joyful work. It's more like therapy than prayer. On the inside it looks and feels like therapy but on the outside it looks like meditation. We sit with the Holy Spirit and we work stuff out in dialogic exploration.

The "stuff" is the all the same - neither ego nor the Holy Spirit can choose the "stuff" - but the way that we see it is what allows our relationship with it - and through it, with one another - to change.

One of my favorite parts of writing and reading together with you is that it helps me remember to always invoke the Holy Spirit. It's a practice, one we can become skillful at. Our skillfulness becomes the medium of undoing, and the undoing brings us to joy.

Thank you, always, for helping me remember how to see.

~ Sean