A Course in Miracles Monk

Anon wrote: If everything here is an illusion, why bother?

That’s a very common and important question.

I think if people knew the eventual outcome at the outset, they often wouldn’t. :)

What happens is the fruitlessness of the world and the ego’s “problem solving” and the pain of guilt eventually becomes intolerable for everyone.

In the words of the Course:

“An imprisoned will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more firmly established, it becomes a turning point. This ultimately reawakens spiritual vision, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict, which can become very acute. But the outcome is as certain as God” (T-2.III.3:4-10).

When things get too painful people search for answers. Sometimes even happiness. Many people begin ‘the search’ in the form of self-improvement. More sit-ups, more money, more smiles, gonna-match-my-china-set-with-my-curtains-for-dinner-parties.

Then one night you find yourself in an empty, dark dining room, your guests gone, your poor little 6-pack of abs rippling as you cry your eyes out.

The loneliness and confusion is overwhelming and you wish something, someone outside of you could just swoop in and magically rescue you. The fantasies quickly begin, and soon thereafter, the hunt for a mate. That doesn’t work out, so you improve yourself again so you can find the ‘right’ new-and-improved mate. The new mate is worse than the first, so you go for the ultimate mate… Jesus. Your self-improvement is now hitting the big-time. Spiritual self-improvement!

First it’s communing with nature, meditating with the trees as you read “The Celestine Prophecy” and dabbing rose oil on your heart chakra. Ouch! Oh yeah, you accidentally sat on your pointy quartz crystal. But that’s OK, because soon you’re off to your Monday morning “Conversations with God” group, and your Wednesday evenings “The Secret” group. Suddenly — forget Jesus! — there is a really spiritual dreamboat that is better than Jesus… at least they’re here! Right in the living room, leading the group. And Jesus has a halo, yes, but this person’s teeth are just soooo shiny… and they’re pointed at you! It’s the closest thing to a spiritual experience you’ve EVER had.

So that doesn’t go so well. At all.

So now you’ve sworn off the opposite sex, and now you’re serious about Jesus.

It’s time for… dah dah dee dah…. A Course in Miracles!

<the crowd gasps before a somber hush falls over the room>

Now this is something you can sink your teeth into! All those other paths you could pretty much figure out in a year or less. This one is going to take a lifetime! You’re going to get a PhD in spirit-TWO-ality, and your sheepskin is a blue book you get to carry around and show off wherever you go.

You find it takes a lot of work, this Course. And those infernal lessons! So you grind it out, not really understanding, but pretending you do (because “you’ve done a lot of spiritual work before coming to the course”, and everyone else taking this Course seems so intelligent, so advanced, so confident… and filled with zigzagging lingo that leaves you spinning… but you learn the dance, and become one of the zigzaggers. This comforts and suffices for awhile).

For as long as possible you’ve been ignoring the many lines in the Course that state you cannot understand anything… e.g. “You do not understand this, because you who are God’s Own treasure do not regard yourself as valuable. Given this belief, you cannot understand anything” (T-8.VI.8:10-11).

…And the lines which say the eyes don’t see, the ears don’t hear, the brain doesn’t think — well that’s just Jesus being funny. You don’t stop to ask what or who is reading the Course, and what or who is thinking about it.

And so you spin, and become dizzy, and fall down again. And then you recognize that though you thought you had begun, you hadn’t really. You’d been pulling quite a little “spiritual” number on yourself. After 10-20 years with the Course, you recognize you are only now asking for “another way”.

From this new perspective — that the Course is speaking to you as a mind, and that you don’t really understand anything — you find an honesty that comes to terms with the realization that you’ve been studying the Course for many years and have no real idea what a miracle is, what forgiveness is, or even how to do it, or even if you’re the one who is supposed to do it!

You are so frustrated you finally get honest and say, “Jesus, I don’t know what in the sweet hell I’m doing, all I do know is that I’m STILL miserable, and I’m so flippin’ tired of it. So flippin’ tired of it. That’s the one and only thing I know. Sorry, I have no idea about anything… other than I basically hate myself and everyone. Oh, and you! I hate you Jesus!”

That’s when, as your screams and tears of anguish subside, you hear a still, small voice within you whisper, “Thank you. Now we begin.” And now you cry from relief.

This is a dance we all know, whatever forms it takes for us individually. There are tail-chasing circles within tail-chasing circles, and we’ve all done them. But that’s what we do as Course students, or students of any path (even if that path is pathlessness). We chase our tail, get dizzy, fall down. Ask for for help. Get up. Fall down. Ask for help. Chase again.

Finally, at some point, we’re so dizzy that we just have to sit still, and we suddenly have an experience where we lose ourselves, just for a moment, and everything is different. Inexplicably different. Peaceful. For no reason. When we come back to ourselves it puts all the tail-chasing into perspective.

But we soon lose that perspective, and instantly, we’re back at it again. Until we’re not.

After a few (or many) of these loving/peaceful episodes, we understand that we can’t understand the Course.

That, or we’re just reading the Course one day, and we suddenly understand that the metaphysics are telling us we can’t understand, and that if we can understand that, then we finally understand the Course.

Then we put the book down and think about it for awhile. Trying to understand how we could understand that we don’t understand. Then we get dizzy again. and so on……… until we become less and less intellectual, and just allow the content of the Course to wash over us. That’s the message we tune into now. Not parsing the Course line by line, highlight color by highlight color, but by hearing the unending lovesong beyond its words.

Anon: Now if you really just want out, the only way to “get” “out”, is to stop caring, wanting, having aversions, desires, you know the schtick. To drop ALL projects. All happiness projects. Give up completely. Then you are “out” and beyond suffering. Old news.

Agreed. The Course comes at this from a different angle; the outcome is the same, but the process is a little different. It states that you can’t not want things. That you can’t not have happiness projects on the go. That’s the nature of the ego.

So the process becomes to watch these thoughts, goals, motivations etc, and not judge yourself for them. To notice what they are costing you (the very thing they were designed to seek). You finally hear the ego’s dirge, “Seek but do not find” in full audio, and yet you notice you continue to seek, despite having an awareness of the fruitlessness of it all.

That’s when you know you’re really insane. That’s when you realize you actually don’t want to be happy. You’re aghast, shocked, and feel a bit sick to your stomach, but that’s when Jesus, over in the corner, starts doing his little happy dance. He’s waited a long time for this. For awhile you hate him for this.

So now you practice watching this whole new level of insanity (that was always there, but is only now being allowed into your awareness). It’s hard to look without judging it — it makes you mad. It makes you want to blame God. Or someone! It makes you want to do the lessons over from scratch — this time to perfection. It makes you want to revisit the question, ‘How did the impossible occur?’ Anything to avoid having to look, and give up your specialness.

But you get over that, and stick with it because the part of you that actually wants peace is starting to feel more and more like home, and you don’t like to be away from it like you used to. You now find yourself smiling a little at just how messed up you are. How crazy you are. It’s almost affectionate now, like thinking of your crazy old aunt who wears her fuzzy slippers to bingo. So?? Being crazy only hurts if you take it seriously. And, yes, we’re still serious, but we’re now learning not to take our seriousness seriously.

So we do what we’ve always done, but now we do it with Jesus… without judgment. Sometimes, anyway. And the difference is palpable.

Without attack, the guilt subsides. As the guilt subsides, our need to leave the mind subsides, and we begin having experiences of our mind, but now, as the love in our mind, not a guilty body projected by a guilty mind.

These experiences are wonderful, but on some level, at times, also scary. So we notice ourselves getting serious again, and taking our seriousness seriously, and we feel royally stuck. There seems to be no way out of our pain… until we are no longer willing to tolerate the pain, and in that instant we remember that not taking our seriousness seriously was peaceful. Duh! How could we have forgotten, we wonder!

And we do this again and again, until the spaces in between disappear……… until all that is left is love. Then Love Itself.

Anon: There is no You behind the you, that’s an infinite regress of egos also. There’s no There beyond the there and even the Here is.. poof.

From the perspective of the Course there is no Me behind the me, but there is a Oneness behind the me. As I forgive the experiences of my split mind, my right mind, while not Oneness itself, brings a comfort heretofore unknown, and an assurance, and a confidence, and a trust. These are built into the right-minded thought system, just as doubt and confusion and hopelessness are built into the wrong-minded thought system.

The peacefulness of the right mind becomes increasingly attractive, and we have the experience as bodies (for most of the journey) — although it is only happening in the mind — of joining with the right mind a little at a time, until we fully join with it by fully saying “no” to the wrong mind. It is not us, as we know ourselves, that does this, but that is our experience as minds, so long as we need to deflect our identity onto a body.

Having fully joined with the harmlessness of the right mind, we fully release all identification with the body and world and the thought system of separation. Whatever the decision maker joins with, it becomes. When it is fully joined with the right mind it recognizes there is no longer a wrong mind to choose. It recognizes the nothingness of the ego. And with nothing to choose between, the decision maker itself becomes purposeless and disappears into the nothingness whence it came. And all that is left is Heaven. A Oneness joined with One, which we can never understand apart from it.

For now, it is enough to experience the peace of the right mind, a little more and a little more and a little more…

Anon: And I ask you again, why the need for ACIM?

Because we still believe in separation, and even when the decision maker begins to recognize that maybe it no longer wants to identify with such a painful thought system, it takes a bit of time to walk away from it, as there is still a bit of glitter in the rear-view mirror… and the big bright light up ahead is hard on the eyes and still a bit scary, for now at least. So the Course becomes a kind of benevolent bedtime story for children still afraid of the dark.

For those of us who think this way, and that’s everyone who thinks they are ‘here’, a gentle road map is a kind reflection of love until the road and the map both disappear into the heart of God.

For some, A Course in Miracles is that gentle road map.

—-

P.S. When I talk about ‘Conversations with God’, or ‘The Secret’, or any of the behaviors above, I don’t mean to infer they (or the people who practice them) are ‘less than’ A Course in Miracles (or its students), nor make fun of them. A Course in Miracles is just one symbol amongst many whose source is our right mind. Our right mind can take anything, A Course in Miracles, or a phone book, or a cheeseburger with the works, and use it as a symbol to return us to the love within. I used Celestine Prophecy –> Conversations with God –> The Secret –> as examples simply because it’s such a common and therefore relatable progression for Course students that I thought it might make some people smile in recognition.