Making ACIM Pornographic
“Think you that you can bring truth to fantasy, and learn what truth means from the perspective of illusions? Truth has no meaning in illusion” (T-17.I.5:1-2).
The word pornographic is usually associated with nude bodies, but I want to use the word in a different way: Pornographic art is any form of art that appeals to our basest impulses. It’s art that titillates, agitates, shocks, and arouses. That easily excites the senses, or ensnares the intellect. It is the kind of art that splashes the surface water of our imagination instead of stirring it deeply from within. It calls up outrage or sentimentality, disgust or desire, rather than calling forth the transcendent — the sublime memory of love in our mind.
The Course is transcendent art, but when we make it about us as a body, we make it pornographic. When we use it to enhance our specialness, make it about us as a Course student and where we are on the ladder, make it about our many carnal (earthly) desires and fantasies, when we want to be a teacher of it, write best-selling books about it, become a celebrity Course figure, or seek to save the world with it, we make it pornographic. These perversions of the Course are attempts to make us shinier, more spiritual, superior, special bodies. In this way it becomes like everything else: just another part of our dream of depravity. A nightmare that separates God from His Son. Another ego meandering that vulgarizes our sense of Self.
The Course was not meant for this unholy purpose, it was meant to correct this purpose. When we read A Course in Miracles with our hearts and not our intellect, with our minds and not our brains, with humility and not specialness, it leads us from the personal to the impersonal. From form to content. From the the body to the mind. From specialness to sameness. From faithlessness to grace. From the specific to the abstract. From the pornographic to the sublime. This is the only way it can be truly meaningful in our lives; if it helps us to transcend them. To be undisturbed by nothingness. To live within the quiet presence of love in our minds. That is true art.
