The Experience of Inner Peace

. . . and the end of uncertainty

This sentence often comforts me: "There is no answer; only an experience" (C-In.4:4).

It’s found - all seven words of it - in the introduction to the Clarification of Terms in A Course in Miracles. Its simplicity underscores an important tenet of the course: it is a deeply practical curriculum that facilitates an experience of inner peace that is not contingent on intellectual understanding. Words only get us so far.

Nor is this a new idea. Saint Paul made a similar observation in his letter to the Philippians.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (4:6-7).

This passage was in Helen Schucman's mind when she was helping create A Course in Miracles.

If you are afraid, you are valuing wrongly. Your understanding will then inevitably value wrongly, and by endowing all thoughts with equal power will inevitably destroy peace. That is why the Bible speaks of "the peace of God which passeth understanding." This peace is totally incapable of being shaken by errors of any kind. It denies the ability of anything not of God to affect you (T-2.II.1:7-11).

Nor was it a one-off. It comes again a dozen or so chapters later.

The peace of God passeth your understanding only in the past. Yet here it is, and you can understand it now (T-13.VII.8:1-2).

A Course in Miracles is clear: God’s Peace is a gift already given, yet its presence and effects are obscured by fear. This is why we need a course; this is why we need a teacher.

So if we look again at the first sentence from the Clarification of Terms, what do we see?

In context, that sentence is a gentle but specific rebuke to our attempts to reduce the course to a matter of theological or philosophical debate and speculation. The egoic mind likes to take sides. It likes to ask questions that cannot be answered. Told that our separation from God is impossible and illusory it asks: Just how did this impossible thing happen? To whom or what did it happen? And so forth.

Those questions - and questions like them that dog our study of the course - cannot really be answered. They have no answer. Asking them - which is to invest in them - is only a form of delay and resistance. It’s a form of wrong valuation. A Course in Miracles urges us to let those questions go and turn instead towards direct experience. It reminds us that our only concern is "Atonement, or the correction of perception" and that "[t]he means of the Atonement is forgiveness" (C-In.1:2- 3).

A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. It is this experience towards which the course is directed (C-In.2:5-6).

The point is not that understanding what the course teaches is irrelevant or unhelpful. Or that you can’t do deep dives into Humberto Maturana or Marianne Sawicki. It is a question of context. For example, forgiveness in ACIM parlance means overlooking error, not confirming its existence by negotiating an agreement to overlook it (e.g. T-2.III.4:1). That’s different than what we typically understand in the world. So it is helpful for us to understand this.

But if we stay at that level of understanding - if we get very skilled at using words to talk and write about that understanding - and wordiness is all we’re practicing - then we may miss the actual lived experience of forgiveness. We are going to miss what it is like to actually not perceive error in another, and we are going to miss those moments when others see us absent our errors.

Seeing others in the fullness of our shared innocence - and being seen that way - is a mystifying, glorious and transforming experience! Logic and study can lead us to the door but cannot, in and of themselves, create or otherwise substitute for it.

We have to actually forgive, and we have to actually allow ourselves to be forgiven, all as A Course in Miracles envisions.

Perhaps it is like riding a horse. A good teacher will talk to you about horses - how to be safe around them, how to communicate with them, how to be sensitive while on them and so forth. But that lesson is not helpful if you do not sooner or later mount the horse and ride.

We want to be sensitive to this. A Course in Miracles was midwifed and edited by trained academics and intellectuals. Helen, Bill and Ken were smart people with a lot of formal academic training. It is easy to slip into and set up camp in that mode. But that mode exists specifically to facilitate the direct experience of inner peace, and it is to that latter aspect of practice that we are called to turn. If we neglect it, it's like ordering a hot fudge sundae and getting only an empty bowl. We need the bowl, sure. But we really really want the ice cream.

For me, this often sugars out as a fear of the ordinary.

It is often easier to study the course, talk about the course, and have peak experiences of joy and camaraderie with other students of the course, then it is to simply turn my attention to the day-to-day experience of being. Just being in all its up-and-downness, all its this-and-thatness. But it is there - in mortgage payments, breakfast dishes, meetings, parenting, funerals and baptisms, scary headlines and comforting sitcoms, vacation and coming home from vacation and so forth - that A Course in Miracles finally and fully becomes us.

Day to day - moment to moment - where is our practice? How is it functioning?

The answer to those questions can be answered very simply: are we experiencing peace or are we experiencing an absence of peace?

The fruit of practicing A Course in Miracles is inner peace - a deep and abiding interior peace that includes but does not depend upon the intellect. It is a gift from God that is made real in experience when we actively give it away.

It is okay if we are not feeling peace. It's not a crisis. That is why we have been given such a clear and direct course. That’s why the Holy Spirit is always gently directing us away from analysis and towards experience. If we are not feeling peace, then we simply give attention to the experience of not knowing peace. We simply look into it, without rushing to solve it or understand it. This is what it means to turn something over to the Holy Spirit - we hold it in awareness in a quiet, gentle and nonjudgmental way.

What happens when we are attentive in this way to what is happening in our lives?

To be in the Kingdom is merely to focus your full attention on it . . . Reality is yours because you are reality (T-7.III.4:1, 3).

The peace of God dawns. Slowly perhaps, but ray by ray - in time to the body we yet believe we are - peace comes. It fills us the way sunlight fills a prism. And what remains in the wake of these moments of peace is not a body or a self but peace itself. What remains is the gift, perennially giving itself to itself. That’s the happy dream we can share, nearer than we can imagine.

Thus, our intellectual study of the course - rigorous, thorough, and devoted - finds its fullness in application. It finds its fullness when we commit whole-heartedly to make it the cornerstone of this apparent human experience. Over and over we look closely at what happens and arises - the good moments, the bad moment, and the many moments in between - and wait patiently on God's gift to clarify and reveal itself in each and every one of them.

Rest in the Holy Spirit, and allow His gentle dreams to take the place of those you dreamed in terror and fear of death. He brings forgiving dreams, in which the choice is not who is the murderer and who shall be the victim. In the dreams He brings there is no murder and there is no death (T-27.VII.14:3-5).

It is not necessary that we understand how this will happen. Its happening is not contingent on understanding. Rather, it is contingent on our willingness to be present to what is given in the moment. The best our thinking can do is demonstrate the need for an alternative to thought. Perceiving the need for that which comes from beyond the range of thought or sensation, we begin to give attention. We give attention - here, now - so that the deep and abiding peace of God’s unconditional Love will illuminate us.

And it does. That is the promise and it has yet to go unkept. Give attention to peace, and peace will become you, always and forever.

~ Sean