Whatever Happens Next

Notes on what happens when you forget what happens next

The end of October and the beginning of November have been birth and death for me since I was a little boy. It’s the way the landscape flares up and then dies nearly all at once. The brilliant foliage masquerading the bleak gray of gathering winter, and the bleakness intimating something vast and beautiful but hard to see.

Which is a poetic way of saying that I have been distracted from writing in favor of gazing at the landscape which is - because it is always - our shared heart revealing itself in form. Falling asleep last night I thought, it’s okay to skip a newsletter. But this morning, with coffee out by the horses, watching the sun rise over hills on the far side of which Emily Dickinson lived and wrote, I thought, no.

I want to connect with you. I always want to connect with you.

Last week I published a long essay on my site about how together we are Christ and thinking otherwise is a fundamental error that we are called - literally you and I are called - to correct. What I’m going to share today is a less polished version of this essay about nonduality in an ACIM context, which feels related.

It’s possible I’m repeating myself.

A Course in Miracles is in significant part a study of cause and effect (e.g., T-2.VIII.2:4). It suggests that our state of being is an effect of how we see that state (T-21.VII.7:7-8). It invites us to look closely at our mind, giving attention to the way thought arises and what happens as a result of that arising.

The suggestion is that we are confused about what thought is and how it works, which effectively dulls our mind and saps its creativity and power. We fall asleep and dream unhappy dreams.

We think our suffering is real.

The "sleep of forgetfulness" is a fantasy that we are separate from God (T-16.VII.12:4). It is a defense against remembering there is nothing we need defense from. Its sole function is to teach us that separation is a cause and not an effect, and that we are its effect and cannot possibly be its cause (T-27.VIII.3:4-5).

The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself . . . miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo" (T-27.VIII.10:1, T-27.VIII.11:6).

To believe we are separate from God is to intentionally forget what we are in truth (and then forget that we forgot). We deny our agency, our creativity and our potential for love. We see ourselves at the mercy of external circumstances. Everything we do is a reaction to the external.

This is why we take the external so personally and seriously - its politics, its economics, its cultural values and ideals, and even its weather. We control none of it, and yet all of it happens and affects how we think and live and play and relate.

Separation means seeing ourselves as effects incapable of causation. Maybe we are doing okay and maybe we aren't but the cause of our okayness or lack thereof is always external. It's because we're meditating or eating vegetarian or got a new job or had an affair or whatever.

We can't fix this problem by substituting a new set of external conditions any more than we can fix it by recalibrating the old ones. What happens, happens. Sometimes we inherit a million dollars; sometimes we get cancer and die. True happiness means not seeing a difference between those events.

But how, right? Like, it sounds great, that liberation, that willingness, but how?

Here is my answer, the best I have right now: you have to go to the well. You have to climb the mountain and pray all night at the summit. You have to risk the desert and go lampless into the soul's great darkness.

You have to understand the terrible beauty of Thérèse of Lisieux’s suffering. You have to understand the total surrender of Abhishiktananda.

You have to find yourself, and then you have to find the Love that self was made to obscure and hide. That is what Thérèse and Abhishiktananda were doing (and Emily Dickinson too, much more successfully).

I am not saying you have to it in an Indian cave for months on end or die of Tuberculosis in a nineteenth century French convent. Those are - as the course would put it - extreme teaching examples (T-6.I.11:6). But they are examples, and they are instructive.

Therefore, look for your self.

We do not need books or courses or gurus or churches or therapists or anything else to do this. We just have to want to find ourselves more than we want to remain lost.

Most of us are happy to be lost. Most of us are happy with scraps of joy and fleeting moments of peace.

But there comes a depth in all our suffering - a point in the pain - where we ask the Thetfordian question: there has to be a better way - and enact the Schucmanesque reply: let's find it together.

In truth you and your brother stand together, with nothing in between. God holds your hands, and what can separate whom He has joined as one with Him? (T-22.V.3:4-5)

You are obvious to yourself (W-pI.39.1:4). You cannot be lost or undone, only hidden and denied (W-pI.191.4:1-3). A Course in Miracles is heir to a pair of religious traditions (Christianity and Advaita Vedanta) that both name The Ultimate "I AM."

Find “I AM.”

And then find that upon which “I AM” depends.

That step is really important. A lot of us, when we find ourselves - as consciousness or awareness, as a thought in the Mind of God, as Brahman or the Whole or whatever - stop.

There is a lot of bliss and other enticements in the "one-with-everything" insight. You can stay in that vibe - or chase that vibe - for lifetimes.

But if you look, you will see that "I AM" is contingent. Consciousness is contingent. Even God is contingent.

That insight begets an existential crisis that varies in duration according to our willingness to basically be totally and utterly undone - to let go of the comforting illusion of God-is-Love and all of that - and just float or fall.

Nothing is hard to look at.

In order for there to be something, there must be nothing - what something is not. “Is” and “Is Not” are like a cosmic switch endlessly throwing itself. If we focus only on I AM then we miss the nothing that is I AM's opposite and which allows I AM to exist at all.

That is why Nisargatta encouraged folks to pursue the "I AM" while also making clear that "I AM" was “the first error.”

Consistently and with perseverance separate the ‘I am’ from ‘this’ or ‘that’, just keep in mind the feeling ‘I am’ . . . the ‘I am’ is the first ignorance, persist on it and you will go beyond it.

Why is "I AM" the first ignorance>

Because it chose sides! "I AM" masquerades as All and yet the Void - the utter emptiness of All, the non-existence of All - is always right there.

This, incidentally, is an error that A Course in Miracles makes as well. It acknowledges something and nothing, but then it chooses sides.

Nothing and everything cannot coexist. To believe in one is to deny the other. Fear is really nothing and love is everything. Whenever light enters darkness, the darkness is abolished (T-2.VII.5:1-4).

Ask youself: what if darkness and light, nothing and something, can co-exist? What if they have to co-exist? What if their co-existence is existence?

When you look closely a pine tree, you do not notice that your seeing denies everything the tree is not in order to make the tree. In a sense, you "call" the tree out of nothingness into somethingness.

Try it now. How is there a tree without the sky? Without the word "tree?" Without a flower or a horse to contrast it with?

It's not a crisis! It's not a problem to be solved. It's an experience to be savored and explored. It is an experience to be shared.

When you go past the oneness of something and accept the dynamic relationship of something and nothing - and see it in action, and see that everything, including your separate self - just appears and disappears, then you are home.

Hopefully I will be there too! But maybe I will still be distracted, out drinking coffee on a bale of hay in the barn or murmuring to the horses as the last stars fade from the sky. Be patient and wait!

Whatever happens next, I want to share it with you.

~ Sean