A Monk’s Life: Welcome to the Monastery
All students of A Course in Miracles are Monks.
It is not our outward appearance, worldly occupations, or living circumstances that bestows this title, but rather our inner practice. It is our life’s work, this practice of observing our ego without judgment. The miracle. Forgiveness. No one can do it for us; we, along with the help of our inner teacher, must each do it on our own, in our own way, through our own set of symbols, within our own process.
Neither the process nor the practice requires that we live in a cabin on a mountaintop, in a monastery, or all alone.
Our monastery is the mind, and our decision maker is the monk.
When we live with mindfulness, when we observe our decisions, we are as monks on a mountaintop even as we speed along a freeway, or navigate crowded throngs in a bustling metropolitan city.
Our body need not be still for our mind to be still. We watch the movements of our decision maker swing pendulously from the right mind to the wrong mind with the consistency of a grandfather clock, but we do it with quiet eyes, inner eyes. We watch the hands of our inner clock “going ’round and ’round in a perpetual cycle.” Eventually we notice a mind that once was discontented, which thrashed about in clouds of complexity, become “a contented and simple mind.”
“The goal of Buddhism is liberation.” So, too, is it the goal of A Course in Miracles. Liberation from projection, differences, selfishness, grievances, judgments, self-accusation, crucifixion, and separation.
The process can be summed up in this simple statement: “What is going out is the flame of craving.” We crave our individuality and special relationships. Our little gap, our little fence, our little self, our little kingdom. Littleness. And when it becomes too painful, we seek another way, and begin to find our Self again.
Through our daily devotion to the practice of forgiveness, the ardent flame of specialness flickers and is quietly extinguished before the Great Rays of true Brotherhood.
We are all monks who walk this path.
Welcome to your monastery.
