Oneness and A Course in Miracles

What is it like to be a Mind?

A Course in Miracles teaches us that we have access to two teachers, each of whom has a goal of teaching us what we are in truth. Both are experienced as voices or mental entities to which we give attention.

Here, the word "teacher" is synonymous with "interpreter." The two teachers - one is ego, the other the Holy Spirit - interpret perception. The world and body appear and our chosen teacher tells what we are experiencing and teaches us how to respond to it.

The Holy Spirit teaches us how to be peace-filled and happy by extending peace and happiness to all life. The ego negotiates “acceptable” levels of fear, guilt and hatred, thus entangling us in misery and grief that may or may not end in death.

One promotes communion and cooperation. The other promotes conflict and competition. One nurtures; the other tortures. Et cetera.

For some people this is an overly simplistic division. A Course in Miracles is not for everyone, nor should it be. But I have found this binary a helpful means of gently waking up from the dream of specialness and sacrifice. The course is as illusory as everything else, but it can be - if one chooses - a means of recognizing illusion, which is the first step in remembering what is true.

The mind can be right or wrong, depending on the voice to which it listens. Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place . . . Wrong-mindedness listens to the ego and makes illusions; perceiving sin and justifying anger, and seeing guilt, disease and death as real (C-1.5:1-2, 6:1).

I want to elide the question of what the Holy Spirit is, what ego is, and how we can consistently discern between them. Those questions are important (read the linked posts if you’re curious), but there's another question lurking in the quoted passage: who or what decides which teacher to listen to? Who or what identifies the two voices, evaluates them and then chooses one over the other?

Because ego and the Holy Spirit are perspectives. They are ways of looking. They are frames, like choosing one mode of therapy over another. The mode you choose helps you define the problem and find a solution. But it’s not what you are.

So again: perspectives for who or what? Ways of looking for who or what? Frames for who or what?

The easy answer (because it's right there in the passage) is "the mind." But "mind" is abstract - ask ten people what it means and you'll get ten different answers. And even if we can reach a consensus, it still leaves unexplored the experience of being mind, of knowing mind.

Can you experience mind before it chooses a perspective? A frame? A story? Is this even possible?

This is an ancient question that occurs and reoccurs in many religious and philosophical traditions across many cultures and epochs. It's relatively easy to talk about (especially now that we have texts by folks like Rupert Spira, Nisargadatta, Tolle et al) but the experience itself still seems tricky (almost as if writing isn’t as helpful here as we’d like).

By the way, A Course in Miracles more or less side-steps this inquiry by emphasizing the teacher to whom we listen. The assumption is: if you choose the right teacher, then the rest will follow. And it does! Learning to perceive ego and the Holy Spirit as perspectives and then choosing one based on the experience of happiness and peace it offers does eventually take us to the well.

It's just that the well-reaching happens after the course has grounded us in our choice for the Holy Spirit over than the ego. In a sense, the course is a pre-requisite for awakening, rather than awakening itself.

I point this out as an interesting aspect of what it means to be an ACIM student. How shall we think about oneness? Talk about it?

But it is also interesting to actually go into the inquiry. Who is the chooser? How do you know?

And if you are feeling ACIM-orthodox, try this: who does the Holy Spirit say the chooser is? Who does the ego say it is? Which answer do you prefer and why?

Love,
Sean