Living A Messy Life
On ACIM and leaving "right" and "wrong" behind in favor of "what helps . . ."
A major premise of A Course in Miracles is that we are seeing things wrong, and that this "wrong seeing" is the source of suffering, ours and everyone else's.
Your upside-down perception has been ruinous to your peace of mind. You have seen yourself in a body and the truth outside you, locked away from your awareness by the body's limitations (W-pI.72.8:3-4).
"Upside-down perception" is what happens when we listen to - when we see through the eyes of - ego. To be egoic - self-centered, unaware, focused on survival, on getting and not giving - is to be "wrong-minded."
There is, of course, another way.
"Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place. This is the final vision, the last perception, the condition in which God takes the final step Himself. Here time and illusions end altogether (C-1.5:2-4).
I appreciate the confidence of the narrative here, but in truth the course is often confusing because it's trying to combine some very difficult thought systems - Platonism, Freudianism, Gnosticism, Christianity - under the rubric of "curriculum." Sometimes we end up with an unsatisfying binary: we're either listening to Spirit or ego and there’s no middle ground. It's the "one-mindedness of the Christ Mind" (C-1.6:3) or nothing.
This rigid binary is temporarily pleasing because it's easy to conceive and feels pure. A or B, choose! Or as Bruce Springsteen put it, "It's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line."
Yet this binary also facilitates what Tara Singh called "the loveless of ‘I get it and you don't.’"
The binary appeals to us because it confirms something that we rarely look at in a serious or sustained way: that we believe we are the one who get it, who deserve to get it, and everybody else not only doesn't get it - they don't even get that we've got it. So they aren't sufficiently deferential to our spiritual genius and accomplishment. Or, worse, they actually think they’re the accomplished spiritual genius.
"There's only one of us here," the proverbial ACIM teacher cheerily says and everyone - including the course teacher - silently responds "and that one is me."
There is - or did I say this already - a better way.
Many feminists teach us that this purity, this binary, is deceptive. It's a form of violence even, because it effaces Love. As Donna Haraway puts it in her essay "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies," to be fully, responsibly, creatively and lovingly human is to be always . . .
". . . engaging in the always messy projects of description, narration, intervention, inhabiting, conversing, exchanging, and building. The point is to get at how worlds are made and un·made, in order to participate in the process, in order to foster some forms of life and not others."
Try saying that to Ken Wapnick or Tara Singh and see how far into their graces you get.
The point is not that Haraway is right and Ken and Tara Singh are wrong, or vice-versa. It's that the whole "right vs. wrong" binary is only helpful up to a point, and then we have to find what's differently helpful.
Eventually, as students of A Course in Miracles, we realize that the way out of the grand illusion of body and world, self and other, is not to deny it but to lean into the whole "messy project" of it.
That is, it is in the very context of body and world self and other, that our need for that context eventually dissolves, taking with it the context.
Still, as one of my teachers is fond of saying, "But how Sean?"
The answer is: with each other, helping each other.
Eternity is one time, its only dimension being "always." This cannot mean anything to you until you remember God's open Arms, and finally know His open Mind . . . Accept your brother in this world and accept nothing else . . . You will never know that you are co-creator with God until you learn that your brother is co-creator with you (T-9.VI.7:1-2, 8-9).
It’s important to appreciate how much in that quotation rides on "in this world . . . "
“How” really does mean figuring out how to live in a loving way with everybody in the world. And it's not the ones we hate that pose the big challenge, because we do love the grandiosity of forgiving or overcoming evil.
No, it's the one who chews too loud at dinner. Or fires up the leaf blower a tad too early on the weekend. Or doesn't take your veganism sufficiently seriously. Or just makes you feel bad about yourself in a way you can't quite put your finger on . . .
In other words, our savior is always right in front of us, because the problem is never the particular brother or sister and what they are doing. It's us.
You are the common denominator in all the parts of your life that don't work. There's only one of us here who doesn't understand that saying "there's only of us here" is the whole problem of the world.
And yeah, that kind of sucks. Awakening is sexy, oneness is sexy. I'd much rather be kicking back with beautiful angels in Heaven, discussing metaphysics with Plato, and occasionally being called by Jesus to consult on who should and should not be saved down in the world he and I are too good for.
But alas I'm not. I'm here in the world where the work of love is humbling and mundane. Salvation is closer to doing the dishes rather than leaving them. It's closer to listening to my kids and students and neighbors when I'd much rather run my mouth and tell everybody how it is. It's understanding that cursing the flat tire doesn't relate in any way to changing a flat tire.
Et cetera et cetera and so on.
And this would truly be unbearable save for one simple fact: you are here with me.
I mean that literally. There are hundreds of subscribers to this newsletter, and you are the one nodding because you understand. You get it. And because you get it, I'm not alone. And because I'm not alone I can remember love.
. . . you remember creation wherever you recognize part of creation. Each part you remember adds to your wholeness because each part is whole. Wholeness is indivisible, but you cannot learn of your wholeness until you see it everywhere (T-9.VI.4:4-6).
And then - suddenly - doing the dishes et cetera stops being a chore unworthy of a child of God and becomes the very means by which the Peace that surpasses understanding envelopes that child and reminds them that it is orders of magnitude better to give than to receive and that giving is how they receive.
For which - which is to say, for you - I can only thank God.
~ Sean
As always, I'm enjoying your artful expressing. I had to come back to this newsletter, and at least copy this one focal sentence for me, of fractal inclusion - of even our imagining attempts at (unrecognized) exclusion: "There's only one of us here who doesn't understand that saying "there's only of us here" is the whole problem of the world."
Thanks Sean! This line still has me laughing....... Awakening is sexy, oneness is sexy. I'd much rather be kicking back with beautiful angels in Heaven, discussing metaphysics with Plato, and occasionally being called by Jesus to consult on who should and should not be saved down in the world he and I are too good for.
Love your insights brother!
Larry