None of us
really knows
what kind of stunt
Creation
is going to pull next.

The thing to do
is avoid being
reactionary.
If you like to fly,
for instance,
put on your
leather aviator’s helmet,
your trusted goggles,
and a long, flowing white scarf.
Then sneak into the
Situation Room
and thrust up your hand
to volunteer.

Don’t worry,
They’ll know for what.

Who are we?

It is perhaps the fundamental question of both science and religion, and certainly of what we call “spirituality”, a catch-all word with which I resonate in steadily decreasing degrees as time passes.  Spirituality is all too often a repository for that which fails to fit nicely into one of the generally accepted practices for knowledge cultivation in our dominant cultures.  Definitions aside, for most of us I think the essential purpose of our own unique inquiries, however we choose to categorize them– inquiries which are for each of us both holy and deeply personal– boils down to achieving freedom from suffering or at least an interpretation of suffering in which deep meaning in our lives is obtained and sustained despite the difficulties

When I was first trying to make sense of things, I had but one governing premise to steer me: there must be some way of seeing in which all of this makes sense, or more accurately, is meaningful.  From there I began doing what a person of my particular birth station and proclivities would do at a state-funded institution of higher learning: I went to the library.  Raised a Catholic, I knew step one was the expansion of my database of world views.  Other people had their own experiences, and they wrote them down.  I could see what they had to say.  I attended a talk on Hinduism.  I read about the Mayans and the Native Americans in particular, and indigenous people in general.  I read books on Buddhism and meditated.  Buddhist reading kind of stuck early on because it was so different, because it pointed to something tantalizing that I couldn’t quite bring into focus, and because I felt a certain permission to practice without wondering if I was doing it right.  That seemed to lie at the heart of the practice: to sit, and be present.  I supplemented the sitting with confounding myself with its written teachings.  I was patient, and methodical, and desperate, and strove to understand as deeply as possible.

A corollary to my one guiding principle– that there must be a way of seeing in which life is a meaningful endeavor– arose fairly quickly, and that was the assertion that people everywhere were being true to their own experiences, viewpoints and teachings.  Different people from different parts of the world weren’t out to dupe all the other parts of the world.  People are people– by and large truthful, sincere, passionate and loving.  I developed this idea further into the premise that people who radiated authentic, loving Presence were not inventing their experiences.  The result was that I was left with all sorts of conundrums.  How could this be true, and that?  How could this experience over here be interpreted in light of what is being taught over there?  On the one hand, it was pretty easy to weed out the big stuff, like assertions that one religion was right and its followers destined for glory, while everyone else was doomed to eternal damnation for their folly, but the core question of who I was had yet to be fully answered.

An obvious difficulty of making sense of Eastern and Western thought is making sense of who is present in those cultures.  In the West, the self is a given, and in my Christian upbringing, the “I” of me continued after death, on into eternity, in either heaven or hell.  In my admittedly limited readings of Buddhism, the self and the world around it were described as somehow illusory in nature, and the sought after nirvana was not a place at all it seemed, but a way of perceiving, an emptiness that is full, something at a right angle to my entire previous experience.  This degree of discord was exciting on the one hand, and debilitating on the other.  Moments of grace came from the inner tussle, as when I thought about Jesus’ famous line, “Father forgive them, they know now what they do,” in light of the notion that misperception was a fundamental cause of suffering, and realized there was no discord.  If I could see things properly, I thought, I would be able to forgive even my killers.  The idea that Jesus was the embodiment of a powerfully actualized way of seeing and knowing, a way that had perhaps fallen through the cracks of religious oversight over the years, began to take root within me.  But gaps remained.

For someone raised a Christian, the notion of eternal life is a difficult concept to ditch, and doing so comes perilously close within the structure of that particular worldview to suggesting that we die and that’s it.  There’s scant middle ground to stand upon.  I found that even the idea that my awareness would not end, but would rather be “absorbed” by an infinite pool of Godhead– one of those efforts at reconciling the particle and the wave– failed to satisfy.  If a little company gets bought out by a big one, it’s not necessarily cause for celebration.  Something is lost, some independence, some freedom.  Likewise, having gotten some mileage out of contemplating quietly this concept of living emptiness that is the true essence of an illusory reality, I found myself loath to pitch that from the equation as well.  It was bringing peace, and deeper understanding.  It was alive and transformative within me.

The notion that there is no eternal soul was difficult to ditch for other reasons as well, such as reading about the stories of Near Death Experiences, or reflecting upon the beliefs of indigenous traditions in which links to ancestors, often very specific ancestors who are known by name and who periodically speak through synchronicities that are delightfully in-character, are sustained to the point of being nearly tangible to an outsider.  I have had the opportunity to participate in ceremony and felt a power that could not be denied.  In keeping with my first and only principle, it was impossible to conclude these links to beings alive in the spirit world were simply delusion, just because another world view suggested otherwise.

Things eventually came together for me with discovery of A Course in Miracles, and later A Course of Love, because there I found both a way to unify and maintain the truths I felt lived within these various sets of views, or practices.  Here was a deeper dive into the way of seeing and knowing that Jesus had sought to share with the world, a nudge to see beyond illusions of form and ego, a way strikingly similar in many respects to what I had learned trying to make sense of Buddhism and other world views.  Also, the words came from Jesus, and this suggested a continuity to his presence within the heart of humanity, and an accessibility that felt like the unbroken chain of connection I had witnessed in Native American pathways.  There was something eternal– an immutable presence, a lineage, a cup over-flowing continuance.  I found a way of understanding in which eternity and emptiness might coincide, their seemingly disparate dimensions linked not by word tricks or clever definitions, but through a deep understanding of perception and knowledge.

If I have learned anything, it is that reality lives between the lines.  I now think that what is called a self cannot be intellectually understood.  While the fundamental issue we face is that of knowing our true nature, our true identity, as without this knowing misperception remains, this is not the type of knowing the mind alone can either achieve or carry.  A fundamental obstacle to authentic knowing that is presented in A Course in Miracles and in A Course of Love is the long-held, fundamental misperception of separateness.  This is a starting point for the experience of self that colors falsely nearly every experience, and I saw in hindsight that it was the core misperception that had maintained the wedge between my efforts to stitch together truth wherever I found it.  Separateness is a stance that occupies the mind, and so it is a stance the mind cannot wrestle free of on its own, without invoking the heart, for the mind alone cannot conceive of unity.  Unity is not a concept, but a living reality.

In unity, we don’t have a purely individual identity, but a shared one.  Our identity is Oneness.  This is who we are, who I am, who you are.  Oneness.  We are each Oneness, walking around.  We are each other, the sea, the sky, the caterpillars, the birds.  There is naught but this, arising.  We are Christ, the Buddha, and the White Buffalo Calf Maiden, or perhaps, to try using words a few different ways, we each live in them, as they live in us, and yet we are uniquely who we are.  I carry all beings in my heart, as you do, for we all carry and continuously give birth to one another, and there is no separation between us, and yet each of us are unique differentiations– unique expressions– of all of us, of all that is.

In A Course of Love, Jesus says, “We exist in the embrace of Love like the layers of light that form a rainbow, indivisible and curved inward upon one another.”  Later, he says, “Love is the source of your being.  You flow from Love, an outpouring without end.  You are thus eternal.  What flows from Love is changeless and boundless.”  There is an unchanging, timeless and eternal core that lies at our root, a solid ground on which we can depend, and that is Love.  It is ever-fertile and never-ending.  Simultaneously, nothing can flow from Love that is separate from any other outpouring of Love, and so all are indissolubly bound to all.

But what of the individuality we experience?  Is the individual wholly illusory?  Jesus says, “Expressions of Love are as innumerable as the stars in the universe, as bountiful as beauty, as many-faceted as the gems of the earth.  I say again that sameness is not a sentence to mediocrity or uniformity.  You are a unique expression of the selfsame Love that exists in all creation.  Thus, your expression of love is as unique as your Self.  It is in the cooperation between unique expressions of Love that creation continues and miracles become natural occurrences.”  While the ego, the notion of being a kingdom unto oneself is illusory, the Self held in unity is not, but the Self held in unity has its deepest roots in Oneness.

Here is where it ultimately comes together for me.  With the desire for unity in our hearts and minds, with unity itself as our vantage point, we realize that Love has a purpose for each and every being, and that it is an eternal purpose.  We are joined in unity outside of time and place.  We join in unity at the heart of it All.  Love doesn’t become a being as a way of commenting on the weather– what she says is never subject to circumstance, never obsoleted by time’s passing.  All Meaning is eternally valid.  Mark Twain, for instance, in unity, is a living reality, alive within us, alive within Love, never-ending, as we live in him.  He is not gone, or carried in memory alone.  He did not exist “then”, in a different way than he does “now”.  We are not joined with him in the past, or he to us in his future.  We are joined in unity.  We are what is.

The fear of being absorbed and subsumed is, I think, a false one, a misperception of who we are right now.  It is the way a kingdom unto itself thinks about losing a separateness that never was.  As we heal our perceptions, and realize we each live in and through one another, that our wholeness exists only in the holy relationship of all to all, and that one could not be without the other, the fear of being lost or misplaced, or melted down for reprocessing, vanishes.  We realize how deeply meaningful is our connection to other beings, that we are sustained in and by them, that they are the very nature of our existence, as we are theirs.  Relationship is the nature of all nourishment.  I think to understand this fully, is to discover the type of gift each being, each expression of Love truly is.  It is unspeakably rich, knock you over rich, bring you to a dead stop in the Gold Medal 100 meter dash rich.  Each are given to each, that each might live.  We are given unto one another.  The fear of being lost is nullified by the realization that all beings are giving you life, and you them.  Which being whose holy presence is the sustainer of your Life would you judge unnecessary?

For whom would Love issue a recall?

The Self is a shared phenomenon giving rise to countless unique and continuously embraced and enfolded expressions.  Nothing is lost.  Only added unto, for Creation is still occurring, right now, and we are the reason, the way, and the Life.

* * * * *

PS – This post was inspired by dialogue with the insightful Miss M over at SeeingM…  Thank you, M, for the discussion and shares…!

Night breezes
tickle the chimes
we hung,
then rise
through the leaves above,
rinsing away the day’s hours,
then rise
to graze upon
the earthen rays streaming
from the crowns of trees,
then rise
to gather in counsel inside
a vast cocoon of starlight.

Underground,
the bees are sleeping,
their dreams sparking
along the synapses of flower roots.
Tomorrow they will harvest the nectar,
discovering the return of all that was given.
Life is neither plain nor mysterious.
Even a bee is a doorway,
a hidden passage.
All beings are such a circle,
a hoop that never repeats–
a night breeze blowing,
and a visible, holy need.
Sustenance is never-ending,
a line of waves continuously reaching the shore,
a field of stars by which to navigate.

Our fundamental work is
neither hidden nor obvious:
the joining of night and day,
the linking of all and none.
True desire shows the way.

Together, we incubate this world.
We incubate in this world.
Down along the shore, at night,
we meet where the breeze blows in off the sea
and winged dreams fill the sky.
The hinged doors on our hearts open
and the day’s memories are released
from cages of interpretation
to plunge into darkness
and carry their messages home.
Hollow,
endless,
becoming, we
await our dreams’ arrival,
as one by one they alight
to coo in our chest
and build nests
for the coming day.

At noon then, a sandwich.
Yes, please.  I would like more coffee.
A smile has come back to me.
A ray of sunlight strikes the table with Meaning.
I have an Idea that hatches
inside of my hollowness
then rises
in a single line up towards the rafters
like the smoke of a single
cone of incense,
then rises
along the slanted peak,
exploring the deeply cracked topography
of old wooden beams,
then rises
to huddle briefly around a single, forgotten nail,
then rises
up into the sky
where it is caught by the wind,
and taken.

The instruction to
just be myself
resulted
in a pretty
meandering
to-and-fro
up-over-and-down
there and back again
maybe, but maybe not,
should I educate
myself better
or get a few more
life skills first
type of thing
until one
day when I
was brushing
my teeth
I came to a scrunchy halt,
arm cocked like a frozen piston,
and I looked into the silvered plate
hung on the wall, the one
framed by garishly bright lamps
poised to illuminate
the Self with unflinching malice,
and I looked back at my Self,
and into me,
through the
paste bubbles,
dribbles and chalky rivulets,
and out the other side,
and I saw that
more than anything
I could ever be or do
or have
in this world,
I desired to be
part of something
Beautiful, True and
Everlasting,
something involving
Everyone.
I had to resist
a sudden need to
hunch over as
my upper body
spasmed in the attempt
to laugh and cry
all at the same time,
oblivious of the fact
that my mouth was full
of minty suds and a grooming implement
I could choke on
if I wasn’t careful.

It’s like being a river, I thought,
staring into those eyes,
like being one true tear
with Everything in it
that finds its way to the sea,
like being a leopard on the horizon
at dusk, framed by the rising moon.

I would have kept going– (maybe)–
but luckily this other part of me
spoke up that day,
that crazy one
you love to death
but try and hold in reserve,
who frankly
you need to speak up
sometimes, like
when you’re consumed
with trying to just be Love
in the face of a gale force wind
bearing barbecue grills,
gazebo roofs, garden sheds
and small cars.
He says:
Like a human being, maybe,
you trippy idiot?

Yeah, I thought,
my forearm still cocked
and locked
in position to buff a molar
and suddenly wanting
to scrub the smile
right off that smart alec’s face.
Like that.

Once you get
over that hurdle
of wanting to spontaneously
become a moonlit leopard
or a jujitsu master
that doesn’t need to eat food,
it gets a little
more straightforward.
Like, for example,
next day I was minding
my own business
reading poems
by the river
when Hafiz shows up,
says gently,
you could try
writing one, too,
you know…

Our perspective of the world underwent an abrupt overhaul with the development and experimental validation of quantum mechanics, and like whorls in a cloud chamber flung from the site of a detonated photon, a legion of metaphysics spun-off from the diverse array of interpretations and suppositions the field inevitably engendered.  I remember, vaguely, when I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters while taking high school physics.  It was a sufficiently beautiful experience to propel me into a nearby university that fall as a declared physics major.  After a successful year I decided to shift into engineering, thereby cutting my minimum required stay in academia by half, content in the fact that I could reflect upon the essential nature of the universe and of my self with a good book and a meditation cushion, with or without a PhD.

Today I feel vindicated in this regard.

I have also come to cringe when I see the admittedly mind-boggling quirks of physics used as explanations for the bedrock of identity and being, the existence of consciousness, or the freedom of will.  I think that is a slippery slope, and that you cannot derive the glorious and timeless character of Rumi from a science that permits, within very narrow ranges, uncertainty, or that has demonstrated a “spooky” connectivity at a distance through entanglement.  I think it is quite the other way around, and that we find within science the traces and patterns of the very essence of who we are.  Connectivity, for instance, is primary.  It is a given.  It is real.  And the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is but one of countless avenues through which the reality of connection reveals itself to us.  Something vast and invisible is at play– not a he or she, not a God with a beard, not us alone and certainly not an other, not a thinking intelligence as we understand it, but a Love that gives of itself like a sunset, an apple, a human being, a blue bird, and two photons whose inter-being knows no distance.

It is in the spirit of the latter, as Creation being literally festooned with relics of its own innermost nature, that I love to poke around in the findings of science and consider the multiply-layered potential meanings of what is on display.  As an example, a few years ago I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing physicist Mendel Sachs in his home– yes, I pretty much asked him to invite me, a stranger, into his home for a coffee table discussion of his work– and one of the great takeaways was his pointing out that Einstein chased after the theory of relativity out of an insistence on the notion that truth is true, and that if something happens in the universe, there must be a way to translate its appearance from any one reference frame into any another so that the two observers can ultimately agree on what occurred.

This is beautiful!

The theory of relativity is like a universal translation device, enabling two viewers of the same event with radically different relationships to it– e.g. diverse physical points in space, rates of motion towards or away from the event, etc.– to realize they agree completely, even though at face value they each witnessed something seemingly very different.  The speed of light is constant because it is a mathematical necessity of the translation device, and time and space– which make sense only in their durations– are seen as a language for expressing what occurred, rather than reality itself.  When the language is properly understood, the meaning in all reference frames is the same.

Recently I was thinking about quantum mechanics, and asking myself, what might this crazy branch of physical-theoretical phenomena be showing us?

The double-slit experiments, of which there are many forms, some of which are very intricate and could only be performed in the last decade due to advances in experimental technology, have as their beginning the behavior displayed when monochromatic light passes through two slits located close together.  The light emerging from each slit diffracts to form an arc, like the ripples in a pond spreading out from a tossed stone.  The two sets of ripples overlap– imagine two stones thrown at the same time– and when the light hits the far wall there are places where it is very bright, and places where it is very dim, since the light waves add together where they coincide and cancel each other out where one is a crest and the other a trough.

This is classical physics, not quantum physics.  Now imagine the intensity of the light source is turned way down, and the wall is equipped with photodetectors.  The photodetectors “click” when a single particle of light, a photon, hits them.  What is observed is that the bands of light and dark we saw on the wall are the result of a shower of countless individual particles that, one-by-one, strike the detector in various places.  The individual particles, en masse, construct perfectly the structure we had attributed to waves.  This has been observed countless times as, click by click, as slow as you like, the interference pattern of the wave is reconstructed.

How is that possible?  How is it that a single particle, which surely must travel through one slit or the other in a straight line, could wind up five or ten degrees off course?  It appears that an individual particle somehow interferes with itself as if it were the original wave of light striking both slits, and forming the two sets of ripples and the subsequent interference pattern, and yet each photon ends up striking the photodetector at a single, discrete location.  Each photon yields but a dot.  It is the sum total of which over time yields an interference pattern.

This is difficult enough to comprehend, but the experiment becomes even more of an affront to common sense when a detector is placed at each slit to tag photons as they pass by.  When these “marker detectors” are in place, the photons are indeed found passing through either one slit or the other, not both, as one might expect of a trustworthy little particle, but now the interference pattern on the final detector disappears!  In its place, the photons all strike the photodetector in one of two relatively fixed locations, each the product of their respective slit, as if the photons are now flying through one slit or the other in a straight line for their target.  The wavelike interference pattern has vanished.

To circle back to an earlier point regarding the spin-off metaphysics of quantum mechanics, at this point some would say the experiment demonstrates the way in which the notions of subject and observer break down in quantum mechanics, and even go so far as to suggest that human consciousness, through observation-participation, causes wave functions to collapse and thus interacts directly with reality.  I think human consciousness is far more directly enmeshed with reality than by going around all day collapsing wave functions, but I think scientifically the experiment simply doesn’t support such a conclusion.  A person standing in the room will see an interference pattern on the wall, regardless of what they are thinking, until the “marker” detectors are added to the experiment.  Without the additional markers, the experimental behavior of the light will not change, no matter how much intentional wave collapsing your average person attempts to project upon the scene.  I’m not suggesting such a miracle is impossible, but it’s not obvious from the mathematics of the theory…  So it strikes me that the key to collapsing the wavelike behavior at each slit is the rearrangement of the experiment in such a way that different information is extracted from it.  When we force the experiment to tell us which slit the photon took, it will.  Otherwise, freed of such a constraint, it will dance for us.

What does this say about us and the nature of this universe?

I think for starters it reveals the way in which the individual and the whole are indelibly interwoven, and mutually supporting.  The interference pattern observed in the double slit experiment is a wavelike behavior that, in quantum physics, arises as an emergent phenomena, constructed of the paths of countless individuals.  When an individual particle allows itself to follow its own path, simultaneously responding to and embodying a relationship with the underlying field– by “interfering” with the underlying virtual wave– it follows a path that is at distinct, yet nonetheless integral to and revealing of the whole.  Something unexpected arises encompassing all particles.  There is an individual for every path, and from the relationship of every path to every other path, wholeness.  Likewise, the path of each individual is informed by an interference with, or relationship to, each and every other path through the field– or said differently, through relationship to the whole itself.  Each path is born of trust in being an individual, a trust which arises out of relationship to the whole.

For me the experiment also suggests that our insistence on measuring and judging the nature of our journey every step of the way collapses both individual and collective possibility, and impedes the natural unfolding of what we, as individuals and as a unified field, are desiring to express.  When we insist on judging progress, on maintaining “normalcy”, and on controlling the trajectories of our lives by knowing where they are aimed, we close off our relationship to the unknown, lose touch with the other trajectories around us, and the whole pattern dies to uniformity and mediocrity.  The end result is two disconnected patches of light, duality, an either-or existence.  When our lives are informed by mystery and intuition, however, and we allow what is latent within us to emerge organically, we contribute to allowing a new and beautiful wholeness to emerge.

I think this is what Jesus meant in A Course of Love when he suggested that being ourselves, and making the unknown known through our very lives, would author a new world.  A pattern will emerge on the wall, with each individual in his or her perfect place, each a unique and distinct arising of the entire field.  This isn’t the product of effort…  There are no measurements to be made…  We simply respond to the relationship that binds us to every other, and to the whole.  Together, we are a wave.  The wave is all of us, together.  Each one of us is a unique expression of the whole, and yet the whole is simultaneously all of us.

I am fragile,
but when I shatter–
as I must, and soon–
a warmth will remain.
You will find me again.
That is the most dazzling magic.
This realization comes
while standing
at the edge of this life,
looking down,
hovering weightless–
a sand grain witness to a vast sea.
Each arriving wave softens
the distance into which
my longing stretches.
I am readying to dissolve.
Together, can we cover the Vastness?
Or will I buckle, split us into two,
and tension the crossing.
Hummingbirds don’t even
slow down when they cross the beach.
That is the nature of forgiveness–
to abandon every interpretation
and put oneself beyond reach of land.
In some moments, I know if had to,
I could absorb everything,
because I would never have to.
It is then that my arms would be Yours,
my face the sweetness You inhabit.

To migrate across the sea,
they must abandon
the weight of their conclusions
and travel light.
The darkness guides them,
protects them, wraps around them,
whistles through them, swirls in their lungs,
and creeps inside their chests
to insulate their steadily pounding hearts
with a silence that will never falter.
A lifter with a spotter like that
will shatter himself every time
and the world will drink him in.
He will awaken at dawn–
empty and nameless, visible.

Thoughtless, delicious, raw need
draws from darkness
the very feeling by which they are sustained.
Likewise, we can become what is most needed,
though long have we feared becoming that type of agency.
No more.  My conclusions are scattering.
At noon, I scraped them into a cup
and sprinkled them over the side.
The outgoing tide took them.
Uncertainty
ensures the thread of the sacred
can never be lost.  Solidify it,
hold it in your hand, and know it not.
Set it free, and it will fill all of space,
and you will glimpse your own arrival.
I have no thoughts that matter anymore.
You spoke once, and I came into existence.
That feeling will carry me across the water.
I but stagger here, glimpsing the way Your Memory
flickers through every moment, beckoning.
I will fly until I shatter, far from land.
I will fly straight for the night when You call.
Can that be enough?

This post has its roots in a number of threads that have woven through my awareness over the course of the past few weeks, and which as an ensemble beg a few of the questions I try to tackle.  One of the delights of open-minded dialogue is its ability to reveal how little we know about the subjects regarding which we thought the opposite was true, and in making the discrepancy apparent, to inspire us to take a fresh look at the ideas we are carrying and the questions we are asking.  It is a process that, if engaged with willingness and joy, I see potentially continuing without end, as we are swept gently along a flowing river of conscious awareness of steadily deepening and expanding proportions.  I have great respect for the meandering direction of awareness, and think that as the mind is freed of attachment to conceptual identification, the river flowing through it brings gifts from unknown places upstream.

Beautiful pieces come together.

As a first point of backdrop, this fall a new three-in-one edition of A Course of Love (ACOL) will be published.  (The Course of Love consists of three books: A Course of Love, The Treatises of A Course of Love, and The Dialogues of A Course of Love.)  As a successor to A Course in Miracles (ACIM), I think ACOL has enjoyed a lukewarm reception by the ACIM community to date.  An obvious question is why?  What is different about it?  There are any number of related questions and possible answers I won’t try and tackle here, but this question of what is different about ACOL is a thread that forms a delicate knot with a thread about non-dualistic philosophies I’ve enjoyed following with my friend Hariod.

Hariod has a wonderful blog about what she describes as contentedness, which I don’t believe I’m incorrect in stating has its roots in cultivation of non-dualistic awareness.  I’ve greatly enjoyed reading and contemplating her views and shares, and recently found myself trying to explain what ACIM was all about—what overlaps there were, and maybe were not.  I found it difficult to address the subject very well.  Something about the conversation made me want to be thorough and scholarly, and careful to be true to each stream joining the river despite winging it on a limited budget of time.  I think it is generally accepted that ACIM is, at least to a very significant extent, a non-dualistic course aimed at training the mind to perceive in ways that engender peace, albeit an approach steeped in theistic terminology.  But is it just your basic non-dualistic philosophy dressed up in Christian terms?  Are all of the distinctions with non-dualistic philosophy just window dressing, or is there an essential and valuable distinction to be considered?

These nagging—in a very good way—thoughts coincided (though not perhaps in linear time!) with Marga’s recent post about the mystical roots of Western Civilization that contained a video interview with Peter Kingsley and some description of his book Reality.  Not having read the book, or reviewed any more of Peter’s work than was contained in the post and video, I may be misapplying or misinterpreting his work entirely, but for the purposes of this post it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that the post acted upon thoughts latent within me and activated them, and I found myself thinking about the concept of “self” in the West, and of the concept of the “self” in the East, and of this idea of a constructive interplay between East and West.

Within my own thought constellations, I tend to think of non-duality as having its roots in the East, and of the notion of discrete selves (e.g. eternal spirits) as the primary units of existence being more of a Western philosophical vantage point—one which has perhaps been spun in a negative light of late with so much emphasis on “non-self” and rooting out the “ego”.  Discovering an author who portrays Western Civilization in a positive light, suggesting its roots lie in a conscious effort to activate holistic sensation and awareness, helped to precipitate within me an awareness of where some of the hesitancy I experience in exclusively embracing non-dualistic philosophy may lie.  It is not that I find any points of objection within the basic non-dualistic worldview; it is more that I feel there is something more to this experience we’re having in this realm than I perceive non-dualistic philosophy as exploring.

(I reserve the right to retract statements such as the one above, of course, as my experience of these things deepens, which is precisely why these discussions are invaluable.)

I think this nebulous something more may explain ACOL’s relationship to ACIM.  I think this something more is what is emerging as a fuzzy inner yearning catalyzed by my dialogues with Hariod, and what is responding to the tickle of encouragement I found in Marga’s post about Peter Kingsley’s work.  I think this something more is an unnecessary void that arises when East and West are not enjoying a healthy exchange within me (and all of us), when self and non-self are not engaged in mutually enhancing cohabitation, when God and Nirvana seem at odds with one another.  These threads all collide for me as questions about creativity, purpose and power.

There is a way in which I sense that the practice of non-duality can become an exercise in passivity, which is not to say that I think this is the intended or even a desirable outcome, but I do see it as a temporary and superficial mode of understanding and expression that seems to arise.  If suffering arises from misperception, principally expressed as identification with a self that isn’t “real”, then turning the intensity of that self down to zero on the volume dial can perhaps lead to an experience of peace.  If the world is an illusion, then discounting one’s experiences within it as “just illusions” and dialing down the volume of the world’s cantankerous proddings can likewise result in a diminishment of drama and discord.  These approaches strike me as those many have taken, and I sense and feel that there is something essential within us that is also dialed down in the process.  Something powerful, natural, and good.  Something necessary.  Something we wouldn’t have despite all we’ve been through if it wasn’t somehow the point.

What is that something more?

I’m whittling it down here to purpose.  There is something beautiful and healing I find in non-dualistic approaches to awareness, to recognizing that we are both experiencer and experience, both individual and whole, both unified and distinct.  This way of seeing brings us into contact with a reality that resides at the deepest core of our being, where concepts of self break down even as self is the only window we have for gaining a glimpse into what both holds it and lies beyond.  It’s a bit like flying a space shuttle to the sun.  The vehicle, at some point, has got to go, but it’s the only one you have for getting close that brilliance.  So, that reality we can never be without… that we discover within but not separate from what is without… what is it up to?  What are we up to?  What would a field of healed beings create?

One of the real gifts I found in the three books of A Course of Love was confirmation that Creation, which is a word I would perhaps equate to the ground of reality that is experientially touched through non-dualistic awareness, is moving.  Creation is afoot.  What’s more, Creation is afoot within us, as us.  Our existence is neither optional nor necessary, but it is the movement of Creation.  I think that our return to non-dualistic modes of perceiving unlocks our ability to move in harmony with the whole, and to become conscious embodiments of Creation’s unfolding.  And there is, in that, tremendous power we have yet to fully embody I believe, though I should perhaps say I only really speak for myself.

This is not to suggest that Creation, or a “Creator”, exists in any way apart from us, but it is to say that our awareness has long been cleaved from its original and most natural domain in unity.  Our awareness has been abstractly disassociated from its origin, and the volume on our power supply dialed down as a result.

Near the end of the Dialogues of A Course of Love, we wrote together, “What we have called illusion is this simple nothingness of existence without relationship to God, and thus existence without relationship to the power of Creation.  The illusion is an illusion of simply being.”  It is worth noting that at this point in the Dialogues this illusory condition of simply being is described as a state in which creation happens to us, a state in which separateness is the dominant mode of perception and as a result we are removed experientially from the most essential nature of our existence.  Also, God at this point in the text is not an outside intelligence, force or being, but the relationship of all-to-all, a relationship that dwells within and through each of us.

And what of purpose?  A paragraph or two later we wrote, “…your acceptance of the truth of who you are and who you can be is essential to the accomplishment of our mission- to the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.”  This is it!  This is the something more not explicitly found in ACIM or is lost within its emphasis on other aspects of ego dismantling that were urgently needed therein, and which is not often emphasized in my encounters with non-dualistic philosophies and practices: the notion that we are inherently creative, that Creation itself is purposeful and that we share in that purpose, and that we are literally in the midst of transformation of heaven and earth.  Creation is happening in real time, flowing in from outside of time, and we’re it’s agents on the ground.  We are dreaming up a healed earth—a heaven expressed through this plane.  Not a separate heaven, or an abiding peace that comes with departing this plane, but a present reality powerful enough to transform every lack and poverty, to heal every wound and rift, to modulate our every experience and to supply our every need.

I think when duality is healed and our perceptions corrected (an Eastern contribution?), the field by which we are distinctly embraced and held– even as we are the field itself– is found to be alive with creative purpose, and we are integral to this creative expression (a Western contribution?).  That is the something more that imbues my day with meaning, because while it is tremendous to discover the pathways to personally sustaining peace of mind, it is intensely meaningful to recognize in each encounter the opportunity to lay a brick in a new world.

And I have to stop here because I don’t know what the next parts are yet.  All I know is Purpose is not an individual thing, though it may take on a variety of individualized expressions.  But you probably do know, and I can’t wait to hear about it…

I met Jesus
while crawling
on my belly
beneath a rock,
scratched and bleeding,
panting with the effort
to catch a single drop of dew
with my swollen tongue,
straining to taste its coolness
before it swelled,
and gravity plucked it
out from under me.

I’d been trying the same stunt
every morning at this spot for three days.
Now I was too weak to move on.

At the last moment, I hesitated.
It was like the whole world hit pause–
as if my need had been temporarily interrupted
or I had been tapped on the shoulder
by a boy with cracked eye glasses,
asking for directions to the bus stand.
I saw minuscule, swirling motion,
the unfolding of light into color,
and the vision of an Ocean, dancing.
For a moment, I was Empty.

Then hungrily, I drew near,
grunting with the effort
to pull my carcass across the sand.
I leaned close, extending
my tongue through crackling pain.

“Not like this,” He whispered.

I heard Him, and I stopped.
I squinted at the drop,
at its oscillating structure,
at its whirling, sentient equanimity.
“Brokenness cannot carry what I Am.
You must do it.  Carry me with you.”

Without thinking, I touched the drop
to the mouth of a little glass vial
I’d picked up from an abandoned car
and carried across two state lines,
a mesa, through a committee of sleeping vultures,
along an abandoned set of railroad tracks
and past the dotted pattern of a running wolf–
hoping my scent was carrying the other way.

After it was in the vial, I sat up,
and then I cursed my fool self.
I jeered at the rock and smacked
my own head with my fist
and cried until I shook up and down
in waving, detestable heaves.
I hated my self for what I’d done
and for my crippledness
and for letting that drop of water
talk me out of the one act
that could have saved my dried out bones.

But I found I could walk, and so I did.
He never told me where to go or what to do,
but He told me other things–
about how the hills were made,
and the ravines carved out,
and the most ancient dust congealed into a ball.

On the fourth day I asked Him,
“How come if brokenness can’t carry you,
but I can?”

He told me how the very place
we were walking on used to be a jungle
filled with white, tree-climbing monkeys
and tasty nuts the size of a small fist
and fleshy melon fruits and yellow flowers
and even though the sun was the same then
as now, the place was surely desolate as hell,
wasn’t it?

But later we passed a grove of trees that day.
And a hummingbird hummed like they do
and did a zoom-zoom jig in very air before me.

The next day I told Him I loved it,
all of it,
everything,
even if was a naked,
sun-baked,
parched,
man-eating
strip of rock and cracked dirt.

Then that night it rained.
I held Him close to my chest
and we sat under a rock and watched
and I filled a canteen
and at one point I got up
and did something part Navajo
and part Scottish and it
yanked me in two directions at once and
very nearly broke my ankle straight off.
When I stopped I saw
two families and a donkey
gathered at the top of a rise,
looking at me quizzically.

We started traveling together.

I told them about how the mountains
in the distance had been made from scratch
and how rivers used to flow right where we walked,
and one of the little girls found a white flower.
One of the men was sick when we started,
but I gave him my vial to carry and Jesus
told him how stars conspire to make bones,
and bones conspire to stand men up,
and standing men conspire to make dreams,
and dreams conspire to make stars,
and by the time He got through telling that,
the man was a sight better.

We found the ocean eventually,
after crossing the mountains
into hills full of fruit and game.
One day I looked down in the vial
and saw it was dry as a bone
and I half to panicked.

Then I heard Him laughing.

“When did that happen?” I asked.

“When you took me in,” He said.

“When did that happen?” I asked.

Then He told me a story about how
the wind blew for years and years and years
and storms flickered across the sky
and men and women without thoughts
sang up the whales and the heavens
and leather-skinned beasts with horns.

Jesus is just how it starts for some of us.
We carry Him next to us until
all distinctions are lost.
And then it just keeps going on from there.

Some nights are for forgiveness.

I can only let the mail
pile up for so long.
Then I have to open the notes
I’ve been sending myself
since who knows when,
and really drink them in.
Notice the handmade paper,
the choice of twine,
the careful hand-writing,
the postmarks from places
I never knew I’d been.
How did I get there?
When was I lost at sea?
I realize…
a distance has been opened,
and it’s measure is a sinking grief.
What good is being king
if you do not bless your subjects
with your holy presence?
The messages speak
using the only means available.
That strange body symptom,
that visiting sense of futility,
the disgust at my own needy efforts,
the pain of circumstance,
the fatigue of striving
for the one change that never comes—
these are the avenues desire walks.
I leave my perch to walk amongst them,
find my missing pieces,
wrap my arm around them
and hold them close.
Tickle their noses.
Shelter them from distance
and tell them stories
until they fall asleep in my embrace.

Some nights are for forgiveness,
for abandoning plans and
taking myself down to the water,
down by the sea to whisper
all night long to those parts of me
still far beyond the horizon clinging
to their little rafts in the wind,
desperate and confused,
wondering where I’ve gone.

This way…
Over here…

I love you…

The title to Peter Kingsley’s Reality is about one word short in my opinion—that word being “Check”—but is otherwise perfect on all sorts of levels.  It is at once ambiguous, provocative, presumptive, tantalizing, engaging, slippery, and so-simple-it-stuns, much like the work itself and the classical Greek philosopher-shaman-necromancers whose timeless wisdom Kingsley brings to light therein.  My favorite aspect of the title is that its simultaneous ambiguity and depth act together as a self-limiting rhetorical throttle.  This isn’t a title to drop into a five minute conversation with an acquaintance.  This is a title that, every time you wind up the gears to say aloud, perhaps with a small measure of pride as regards your current reading list, you realize is going to land you in a rhetorical pit of vipers.  Quite simply, it’s a title no one can explain—an entrée into a conversation no one can finish.  And yet it’s entirely accurate.

It’s just a book though, right?

I mean… right?!?

(I just read it so I need a little grounding…)

Well, of course it is.  Same as this is just a world all around us.  Same as I’m just a person and you’re just a person and that’s about the sum of what we need to know to get the logistics sorted out.  There’s one book and two beings.  We’ll just take turns.  Easy.  Hand clap, cheek cluck, waddle waddle, foot-stomp.  What do we need to know that isn’t obvious?  That isn’t staring us in the face with its tongue out, or winking to us through the window while we’re enduring the socially normalized opprobrium—lecture format—due any being who fails to properly paginate their prêcis?  Don’t we pay attention to what we’re doing!?

Indeed, attention may well be the heart of it.  Ninja attention.  Metîs.  This is the word I learned that traveled from the spring, to the river, to the ocean, to the sky, to the earth—into me, through me, up one side and down the other, then vanished.  Metîs is the mojo you need in order to disbelieve what’s right in front of you, to see through the light show that has bamboozled billions of beings, (there’s only One of us), and then at the very last, just before dismissing the whole of it as an illusion, to chuckle and shake your finger at the Double Agent we call Life.

I know that this…
this foaming sea of color and light…
is not me…
not me at all…
but still…
the most remarkable plumage of Being is on display…
something seems to be Happening here…
and where was I thinking of going again…?

At first I was slightly underwhelmed by Peter’s dramatic prose, by the way scholarship and research are pitched as acts of salvation, moments of elucidation snatched from the jaws of ignorance, and hungry jaws at that—jaws that have consumed lesser and more conventional scholars for the better part of three millennium.  He suggests that if we wish to understand Parmenides we had better be ready to leave everything else we thought we knew behind, or face the alternative of wandering deaf and blind through a few more shimmering turns of the cosmic wheel.  That part rang true, though, you see, and in the end Peter’s prose grew on me steadily as the book unfolded.  He tells a delicious story, and looking back there could not have been a sturdier vessel than story itself to bear us across the seas of time and drowsy witlessness that have divided us from our remarkable inheritance.

The masterful aspects of Peter’s writing were evident in the way I continuously found myself on the brink of revelation.  Then, when I put the book down and tried to look back upon the terrain I had just covered—to take in the majestic view, to tell it to myself so I wouldn’t forget it—all my words just scattered.  In one instant my mind was a herd of deer from every angle, the next moment a vacant glade.  A single acorn.  A man hunkered atop a stone wall, listening to the wind.  A heart tumbling into the sea.  I was the awareness of an entire meadow, the effortless, simultaneous comprehension of every flower, but by the time I turned from the text to take a closer look at the scenery through which I was traveling, it was gone.  It’s a good thing in the end that you have a tangible book to hold in your hand—a nice, heavy, well-formulated distraction to wrestle with while making the journey—so you don’t believe too much of what you see as you make your way to the Underworld.

I’ve had this experience before, encounters with a sublime understanding both obvious and intangible.  It was this feeling of recognition that made reading this book so enjoyable.  While Peter portrays the teachings of Parmenides and Empedocles as buried treasure, wisdom that has been lost for ages and passed through mind of scholar after scholar unnoticed like a sealed baton, it is nevertheless a treasure that is all around us.  What struck me most reading Reality was the connections that formed naturally with other moments of recognition sprinkled along my walk.  If it weren’t this way, if the book weren’t in the end stating the obvious, the teachings of the Greek shaman-necromancers revealed inside its pages would be proven false.  It is the fact that the treasure Peter unearths is so rich, so fleeting, so ephemeral and yet so clarion and unmistakable that suggests we are dealing with genuine power.

The genuine power of who we are.

I couldn’t help but notice the many obvious parallels to A Course of Love—the recognition of immortality through the window of this mortal frame, the injunction to return to the world from the places of purest being in order that we might live what we have discovered, the manner in which the illusory nature of our daily experience is transcended through inner witnessing of reality’s singular core, to name a few.  I could see plainly in the teachings of Parmenides and Empedocles the insights of the genius Walter Russell and his teaching that all motion is born of stillness, such stillness being the Universal Fulcrum from which all form derives its power of expression.  I suspect others would find countless similar threads and connections.

Like all good revelations, one leads to another until all the hands are joined and the circle is complete, until all existence is bound together both in and by the same hoop.  That sacred hoop is all around us.  All it takes is a little ninja attention to see it and make it real—to see through walls, to see through hatred, to see through disease, to see through time, to see Unity flowering in every moment.

And for a delightful joke to close this all out, click here…  Make your way past the advertisement, but please, my friends.  Please read with metîs…

I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend with my wife and her eight year old grandson, and we went to an IMAX film to see the story of Fred and Norah Urquhart, who spent much of their lives in a quest to understand the migratory path of monarch butterflies.  After several weeks of an extremely busy schedule at work and an annoying skin infection that has been insistent on delivering its message– a time in which even meditation has felt like squinting at my heart through wax paper, or running up an incline against the jet stream– the beauty and audacity of these little creatures (and the people who tracked their movements over decades) brought me to tears.

Sometimes you hang on for the ride, and take deep draughts of meaning when you can.  You hunt and hunt, and then somehow synchronize with it in a quiet moment.   Then you’re back in the crowds, clinging to that scrap of grace, drowned in snippets of conversation and cell phone photography.  Battery-draining flashes peppering a stuffed bison.

Down the hall from the IMAX is an exhibit about early humans and our five million years of evolutionary history.  My tears came from recognizing that butterflies have no reason to question their validity, no conscious bandwidth in which doubt about the necessity of flying south might reside, and when I look at the artist’s renditions of our ancestors I cannot help but think there were stages in our collective unfolding in which we were not really “thinkers” like we are today.  There was once no room  in awareness for the types of questions that can fester today.  I pictured beings that felt and loved and responded to circumstance, but perhaps without the depth of reflective awareness that we Homo sapiens possess.  And there I was… thinking… moderately uneasy about who knows what, a two-legged seed pod of the modern conundrum.

We stand on the threshold of perhaps the greatest leap in evolution I am capable of fathoming: the movement into form of the type of awareness that can both embody meaning, and be aware of it at the same time.  I conclude we are caretakers of meaning.  We carry it inside of us, knowing it not at times.  At the moment of its arrival, this is a stunning consideration.  I think this even as I carry my wax paper heart around with me wherever I go, attempting various resuscitative practices, returning frequently to the patient knowing from experience that these phases pass, usually concluding in revelation.

Back home, I sit to meditate and talk to this little skin dilemma, thinking about Amanda’s recent post on the wisdom of the body, thinking about five million years of eyes looking out into this realm, of one vision cascading into the next.  In the Dialogues of A Course of Love Jesus speaks about the movement from maintenance of Christ consciousness to its sustenance, a movement described as traversing the tiny remaining gap from image to presence.  We get a taste of the depths available to us, and then we skate through these periods of service interruption as we cross the boundary into full awareness, navigating times when we still occupy old habits and images.  It’s nothing we “did”, nothing we are “doing” or “not doing”, just an encounter with boundaries we once erected that no longer need be.

I take a breath and a whisper arrives from beyond the thread of thought I’m observing, something about shedding skins.  At once, the wax paper is gone, and I’m whole.  The spell is broken, and it happens in a flash.  A skin annoyance… a shedding skin… a realization there is an image to relinquish, a trying I have wandered into, a wax paper coating on my vision I have approached and witnessed.  I have slid into the thinking-trying mindset, and been nudged into awareness of it.  These moments can turn weeks of uncertainty into the recognition that a gentle force was guiding us all along through image to presence.  Five million years and counting, one subtle shift in awareness cascading into the next, the shedding of skins and concepts until meaning is all we have left– this is the migratory path of the human being.

The process of shifting identity from the false perceptions of the ego to the valid identity we all share in Christ appears, at least for me, to involve passage through states that closely resemble one or more of the following: a flock of large metal plates approaching both the speed of sound and the US Naval Artillery Rail Gun Test Range; a repeating dream in which you hike up the side of a mountain to audition for your dream job, don’t get the part, but meet a lot of astoundingly outgoing people who do; a series of days spent in slow motion wandering the desert in continuously degenerating circumstances without ever quite dying, and a thriller filmed by Alfred Hitchcock based on your life as it would be presented on Wikipedia.

These are transitory states that yield in due course of time– with no small amount of patient allowing of what is– to states of joy, peace and contentment, as well as a heightened awareness of what authenticity means, but while they’re in full bloom it feels a lot like playing chicken with your own destruction.  On the one hand, there’s the thought that these states are transitory and that their accompanying feelings are nothing but the unreliable residue of misperception, but if that’s incorrect, and their voices carry weight, then you’re actually careening on a constant vector of decreasing distance towards an inelastic collision with a poorly lit and imminently solid object.

If you’re crossing a stream by jumping from rock to rock, that moment of being suspended in mid-air probably feels a little awkward to at least some of the cells in the body who may have been ignorant of the game plan.  Likewise, I think our minds can get more than a little disoriented when we give our hearts enough freedom to set the course.  Our hearts know exactly where to go, and that’s what they do.  Our minds have no idea such a place exists, so they think they can’t come along.  Our minds are like dogs wearing the shock collars of our pasts.  In A Course of Love, Jesus suggests that healing this gap between the heart and mind is priority numero uno.

But how to have the experience we don’t know how to have?

The old approach was to put it on layaway– make this life either the last or perhaps one in a series of payments on that particular miracle, and treat death as the moment when the magician yanks away the curtain.  An aspect of A Course of Love I really enjoyed was the notion that we do not need to wait for death to experience unity.  In fact, it wouldn’t entirely be in keeping with the current druthers of Creation to do so.  In other words, experiencing life from the condition of unity rather than the condition of separation is not only an experience that is available to us, it is one that heals and transforms the world.  There is a certain desire rippling through Creation itself to get on with the next chapter of the story.

This is where my heart cheers.  Yes!!!  And my mind says, okay, so… what do we do?  Or on a bad day, arms crossed, prove it.  These transitory states of consolidating every residual ounce of fear and uncertainty into a brewing cesspool of emotion seem to be moments of complete failure, as if the test results are in and the Christ indicator dye came back negative.  But afterwards, when these storms have passed, they always feel as though they were incredibly tame– no more than the arising of the realization I’ve been chewing the same stick of gum for twenty-five hours straight and it’s time to chuck it.  There’s relief in getting that old flavor out of our mouths.

It takes me a while, but it’s becoming more obvious that this acceptance and expression of the true Self in this realm has very little to do with what my mind thinks it is doing, or should be doing, or thought it did, or any of that.  How we spend our time is not unimportant, but neither is it the means of unifying the heart and mind.  I’m sure there has been and will be fruit that arises from this holy union of heart and mind, but using time in an effort to produce fruit in evidence of the accomplishment will only yield a false positive.  And trying to earn what we’ve already been given is an idea on par with running the furnace and the air conditioner at the same time.  We can’t devise a plan, a regimen, to bridge that gap between the heart and the mind.  We have to desire it, and let it swallow us whole.

So my mind and I, we’re becoming increasingly accepting of the fact that we have no idea what we’re doing.  We’re imagining beauty before retiring in the evening, inventing mantras on the ride to work, writing poems when we feel inspired, sharing what grace we can find as best we can, and sinking a little deeper each day into the sensation of living in the absence of lack.  When the evidence of lack arises, we just back away slowly, feeling backwards through time to the last place we were when we knew our heart was fully present with us.  Then pick up from there again.

These impasses with non-existence are not failures, just a little coughing and sputtering as the engine is dusted off and ancient cylinders catch fire.  The condition of separation, which is akin to the condition of “learning”, is like setting the choke.  Once the engine catches, the choke is no longer needed and becomes an unnecessary and excessive restriction.  Learning brings us to the brink of discovering who we are, but cannot carry us across the line.  As the engine rumbles to life, at some point we have to accept… we’ve ignited… and release the choke… and let some power flood through us…

A self is a heavy burden
to carry with you
across the desert.
Despite being invisible
and weightless in principle,
it is the often overlooked,
but necessary battery
of accoutrements
that are required to
render the self
manifest and functional
that take their toll.
There is the steamer trunk
full of historical data, for instance,
with its rather robust
coefficient of sliding friction
across the hot sand–
the modern take on an old classic,
a ballistic nylon upholstered
carbon fiber case
with kevlar bottom
and shattered mounts
where the useless spindled wheels
lopped off in the last existential crisis
once resided.  The trunk
contains all of the
maps, slides, instruction manuals,
theory books, server racks,
fold-out solar panels,
instrumentation, servo motors,
coiled wires, oscillators,
piezoelectric crystals,
spy glasses,
solar flare almanacs,
pirated algorithms,
notes to self by self,
torn out journal articles,
scribbled judgments, conclusions,
and prognostications that
the self has accumulated
over time.

Without those,
the leather bound
book of procedures
with the locking gold clasp–
procedures such as the
Instructions for
Masking the Scents
of Your Passage
From Skulking Bands
of Rabid Coyotes, or
The Stepwise Chymical
Reactions Used in the Production
of Rattlesnake Anti-Venom–
would be all but useless.
And without that book, well…
as the rules of a self dictate,
all would be lost.

It is the self, after all,
who takes care of things–
keeps track of how many steps
are taken in a day,
weighs the count against
your physical capabilities
and the weight of what
lies ahead, understands
the quantity of calories
required to facilitate
your continued progress,
maintains the log
of the distance
already covered.
(If only the book
contained a procedure
for determining
the distance remaining…)

A self is a heavy burden
to carry with you
in such a place,
too much, in fact–
an assurance of failure,
notwithstanding the fact
it’s sole stated purpose
is to the contrary.

What remains
when the self is discarded
is a field of experience
consisting of a desert, a being,
and a need that has been
released from its shell.
The being and the desert
will feel the need and respond.
Stars will feel the need
and twinkle to life in the skies above,
raining ten thousand years
of possibilities upon the
being and the desert.
The earth below the desert
will feel the need
and place those possibilities
in her timeless womb.
At dawn, the being will walk
over the next rise
to find the stone
placed there by the desert.
The being will tap
on the stone
and the stone
will yield water
from the earth.

Neither the being
nor the desert
nor the water
nor the stars
nor the earth
will think of this
as a sign
of worthiness,
or a product of chance,
for it takes
a self to entertain
that sort of interpretation,
and there are none to be found.

Instead,
there will be
a field of experience
consisting of a desert, an earth,
a being, a stone, the stars, water,
a bird,
and a need.

It is not hard
to imagine what happens next,
for this is how it began
and always will be.

One of the core concepts of A Course of Love is contained in the statement, “There is no loss, only gain.”  While there are a number of contexts in which this sentiment offers an opportunity for a deepening understanding of what is meant by the term unity within the Course, recent events in my own life as well as events observed in the lives of those around me have led me to reflect upon its relevance to the types of changes that threaten to strip away a particular way of life.

It is one thing to speak of being fearless and taking on the challenges we pick out for ourselves, and another to apply it to changes that seem to strike without our consent and dismantle core elements of our lives– changes such as the closure of the local mill in which a person has spent the better part of his or her adult life working, the loss of the family farm in the face of drought and the pressures of worldwide commoditization, the dissolution of a child’s family as his or her parents pull away from one another, or the forced abrogation of one’s cultural heritage by the ruling authority.

Where is the gain in these events?

How does one assert trust in what is, when the particular vehicles that once served as conduits of sustenance, love and meaning crumble around us?  Sometimes I think it’s even worse when they but threaten to crumble, and manage to cling to an indeterminate state, teetering and gasping, their fate held in some invisible balance.  That’s when the certainty so easily proffered during a boon starts to feel real dry in the throat– hollow and parched.  Should we accept what is coming, and just move on?  Or is this the moment we’ve read about… the time to make our stand?

What does trust even look like in these moments?  Does it look like unshakable trust in a particular outcome?  Is acceptance of what seems apparent in the trends a lame resignation, the first in a series of sliding tumbles that reinforce our limitations?  If we were fearless, committed and clear in our intentions, could we turn the tables?  What if we gave ourselves wholly to the pursuit of an outcome, and failed?  What if we bet the last resources at our disposal, and came up empty-handed?  What does trust mean, when suddenly one is encircled by a platoon of such risky alternatives?

Don’t the wise people we admire avoid these situations altogether somehow…?

All of these questions, I think, lie on the near side of embracing the statement offered at the outset, “There is no loss, only gain.”

My inner responses of late to the rather minor wobbles in my own life highlight the extent to which the experience of separation, as opposed to the experience of unity, leverages the ever-changing flow of creation into the deep-seated feeling of crisis– usurps the ever-present stream of grace and twists it into the mirage of existential threat.  When we find ourselves facing life in the arena of risk and threat, egoic perception has established home field advantage.  With the whole stadium clamoring for a decision, for an identity-forging act of will, it is all but impossible to hear the gentle whispers of unity.  This is the state from which the ego, or the experience of separation, derives its (non-existent) power.  This is when its offer of seeming protection is most tantalizing and attractive.  This is when the insane idea of forging a truly independent existence, an identity born of its own efforts and accomplishments, is most alluring.

Do you see what your trust has brought you?  Is it not time to give up these fool games and idle dreams of freedom, and buckle the @#$% down?

Never mind that you’re already about as buckled as buckled gets…  Seldom does the drive to succeed and accomplish– to strive and overcome, to engage and outwit, to assert our strength and will– burn brighter than in these moments.  We can come under incredible interior pressure to make a decision of magnitude, and while it is entirely true that our relationship with the heart of creation begs for a response, the distortion of the moment precludes any genuine response, leaving only the barren field of choice.

Choice… barren?

In A Course of Love, Jesus describes the experience of unity as being one that is free of choice.  What is the difference between offering a response, and making a choice?  Everything, I am discovering.

Choice is the means of navigating the experience of separation, the primary mechanism we use to establish ourselves as the cause of who we are, the evidence that we are responsible for our own lives, a power unto ourselves.  Choice is what we are faced with after eating that psychedelic fruit in the Garden, the fruit that turns our vision of the world upside down by shifting the experience of meaning and identity from the seamless expanse of being to the stories told by our personal histories and accomplishments.  Choice and blame arise together, as everything occurring in such a world must be the product of someone’s choice, and if the choices are not the right ones, things go wrong.  And loss is epidemic in a world based upon choosing.

A response is not a choice, but a communication, an act of relationship, a movement rooted in trust.  Trust is implicit in offering a response because in relationship each response is a movement that alters the stance of all participants.  All of what is moves together.  A response shifts the totality into new terrain.  One response evokes another.  What arises from response cannot be known in advance, and responses don’t have the same repercussions as choosing.  A response isn’t an attempt to make something of ourselves, with the possibility of success or failure, but the offering of what one has to give.  In this there can be no failure.

Choice has no place in unity, where the nature of our being has already been determined.  How could choice matter, when our identity is no longer up for debate?  Fueled by the recognition that there is no loss, only gain, and freed of the need to make the right choices, thereby demonstrating our prowess at navigating this upside down realm of separation and loss, what response would we offer?

Recent events in my life served the function of popping the vacuum sealed lid of a small glass jar of fear I had been carrying around in my coat pocket.  I smacked dab into some real world events—moments of indeterminate outcome surrounded by a steadily gathering mob of foreboding consequences—and you could hear the audible inrush of air as the jar was pried open.  Out spilled vestiges of a future I had sworn to abandon, puzzle pieces of a compromised self, and a lackluster world absent of meaning—a world without a floor populated by people whose faces had been replaced by magazine clippings.

Feeling caught between two unfortunate choices, each inhabited by its own particular breed of inner kryptonite, my difficulties metastasized until even the pauses at the poles of my breath had been taken from me.  Each end of my being had become a dull ache.  You try to reason your way through these quaggy mires, but the biggest shortfall of the mind is its inability to recognize when the situation has eclipsed reason altogether.  It’s like being a man standing in the midst of the Great Fire of London with a half-filled canteen in one hand and a brochure about safe-making campfires in the other, unable to stop trying to mentally rearrange the canteen, the piece of paper, and the water in such a way as to put things right.

That doesn’t sound all that bad really—just kind of foolish.  That’s not me, we say.  That guy with the brochure’s just an idiot.  But to keep shuffling the canteen and the paper around while being slowly burnt, and to feel the intense pain of it but to still be unable or unwilling to turn and make a run for it… what is that?  What keeps a man rooted in such a place?  Is it bad to want to extinguish the fire?  What’s wrong with wanting to wave the wand of peace?  Is it bad to keep hoping an answer will come?  Is it fearful to retreat?  Is it a failure?  A regression?

What if the people you love were in a structure swallowed by the flames two blocks away?  What if they might still be alive, and it’s impossible to tear yourself away from your spot, despite such pain?  What if the journal that contained every important thought you ever had was also in that house?  Pain is precisely this sort of conflict.

A burning face.  Tear-filled eyes.  An inaccessible heart.  A heart filled with bitterness.

This is the quaggy mire from which I have emerged.  I’ve reached the other side, but I’m not the same as I was, for the dissolution of this particular entangled state brought home to me the distinction made in A Course of Love (ACOL) between the time of learning and the time of discovery.  My experience also revealed the importance of the passages contained in ACOL related to the release of bitterness and the desire for reward.

Bitterness is inescapable when we’re confronted by those circumstances from which we can neither run nor hide, situations where it seems that our losses and our love are seemingly intertwined, where justice and compassion seem unable to co-exist.  It’s so easy to forget that any such experience is rooted in false premises, particularly when something we view as necessary or vital to us is threatened.  When our visceral feeling is that something is wrong—when that little jar of fear has been pried open—it’s nearly impossible to bring the mind out of its recurring analysis of the situation, to keep it from continuously retracing its steps through a situation utterly devoid of answers.

This class of situation is the way we’ve brought ourselves the gift of learning.  We use these intractable difficulties as both the motivation and the means of revealing to ourselves our deepest lessons.  But what if we don’t need lessons anymore?  What if that age old instinct is over-applied?  What if you’ve looked yourself in the mirror, seen the worst you have to offer, blessed it, and now it’s time to let it go?  How do we stand in the freedom and power that resonates at the core of our being if every situation is a reminder of what we’re missing?

On the day this fever broke, I spent some time in seated meditation focusing on forgiveness.  Inexplicably, a few hours later, without any reasons as to how or why, the difficulties lifted.  The weather shifted.  In place of a shaken sense of self I possessed a brewing confidence—a confidence without reasons or evidence, a confidence I could not possess while perpetually learning my lessons…  The thing about this particular departure of weightiness was that it was devoid of reasons, events, and histories.  It was devoid of clarity about how and why.  It was simply forgiveness.  An acceptance, and a friend who helped me to see that standing in the fire was not a defeat.  Maybe that’s just who I am right now.  If you need to stay close to the place you once lived, stay close to it.  Without the bitterness, it’s simply a choice.  Without the sensation we won’t be complete until we learn what needs to be learned, it’s a moment of revelation.

In the few brief days since the cooling of my proverbial jets, it has been a joy to confront situations that just a few weeks ago would have put me on my heels.  It has been a relief to know they aren’t signaling me to take a look at something that needs adjustment—to feel that twinge of self-doubt and let it fly along, to know the perfection within me and within all of us is already complete, and that the encounter is simply a moment with which to work.  I’m not going to say I’ve conquered fear, for I’m not sure that you can, but it has become clear that fear results, at least in part, from viewing circumstances as some type of evidence about who we are.  When we realize that no event, no circumstance, no action of those around us has any ability to define us, we are free of them.  This is the type of fearlessness I’m closest to mustering.

Burrowing through difficulty requires a certain mindset—the mindset of learning.  Learning isn’t bad, but learning ends.  Recognizing there are no right choices to be made, no outcomes that offer accomplishment, no victory to be had either in avoiding the fire or in enduring it, then we are finally free to speak with it.  Our power is no longer forsaken.  We can stand in the fire and be burned, and it won’t mean a thing.  This is simply what we have chosen to be, and we are free to choose again.

Free in every moment to choose anew.

This year I realized that in so many ways, I have scarcely begun.  The difference this time, is that having orienteered my way around the mountain in a great and unwitting circle– riding out storms and then reveling in the graceful vacuum of their departure, plotting the next day’s course based on a strange mash of signs, principles and self-argument, being nourished by glimpses of colored bird and flower, by moments of heartfelt communion with the vision of a snowy summit– this discovery of my old bivouac site is a reason for laughter.

A yearning that once meant everything to me has been seen through entirely.  The punchline is plain to see in the cold ashes of last year’s fire.  The once hot embers have mixed with the vastness of night, with the compulsions of day, with wind, mud and rain, and now seedlings of grass are poking through like stars in an underworld sky.  I have returned to find this place already taken back from me by the embrace of life’s unshakable ebb and flow.  I have a memory of a place that is no longer.  It was given for a moment, and has been dancing with the whole of the universe ever since.  I danced, too, that night, with everything, and then I too, felt the relationships and pulls of life move through me.

Returning to the start, I realize I have always been there.  I realize how carefully I was held in my imagining of everything else.  I realize how far I aim to reach, how meaningful each heartfelt feeling truly is, how each one touches every point in the galaxy.  Returning to the start, I realize also how filled with notions I was, and remain, and how those notions spun around and flipped over and moved in and through one another all year long, as if responding to a chaotic magnetism.  Yet here I am.  Back at the ashes of last year’s beginning.  Building a new fire.

Beginning.

Walking in a circle isn’t a bad thing.  Walking in a sacred circle around our Self is the ceremony of one year.  We walk through hopes and fears, through dreams and desires, through choice and consequence.  Walking through the doubts and trials of experience is the way we catch a glimpse of what was never at risk, as if our notions must be perturbed by the baton of experience in order to vibrate far enough from their protective posts at the periphery of our world to reveal a glimpse of what was always invulnerable within us, quietly tucked inside.  Walking in a great circle through seasons and storms is the only way to understand we carried the entrance to the heart of the mountain with us, inside of us, with every step.

Having moved through such transient experience, only to arrive at the beginning, we see it.  Without guilt or blame or shame, we laugh with it.  Because we see it without the baggage of what has already been, and perceive what is truly offered, it is a joyous discovery.  It… is the truth of us.

How many glimpses does it take, though, before we willingly trade all that we have made for all that is offered?  What led me off the trail, into the trees perhaps, in search of some wisp of magic?  What fears kept me from walking the next bend, and caused me to set off backcountry on my own, avoiding what I merely thought lay ahead, but was truly always within me?

In A Course of Love Jesus talks about the laws of man and the laws of God, and how our hearts are the cause of experience itself, but our notions– the constructs and beliefs of our minds, which adhere to either the laws of man or the laws of God– determine their felt character.  The thought system to which we adhere defines the boundaries of our experience.  The thought system to which we adhere defines what is for each of us, real.

Thus, what is needed to eclipse suffering is an experience of the reality of the thought system of truth.  For with this experience we would at last discover, and accept, the solid ground on which we have always stood, knowing it not.  No more circling, looking for signs.  No more wondering if it could be, or have been, another way.  No more uncertainty and doubt, as our notions are flipped up, down and around by the weather of circumstance.  Only truth.

Getting beyond a thought system can be harrowing work.  We may wander around the mountain a few times, returning to the beginning.  With each return, however, we see the gifts that have accrued in our pack: the gift of seeing what our allegiance to a particular thought system has brought us.  I see now how frequently I was pulled into dilemmas of thought this year: how I compared my experience to others, how certain I was at times that I would be more fulfilled through certain accomplishments, how my thoughts provoked me into feeling wronged or on the outside of what I deserved, how the laws of man demanded that I take particular types of action against another, how the laws of man goad us into feeling we are not living if we’re not risking it all for something, how the laws of man provoke us into moving swiftly to protect an advantage, an insight, or a dream, how the laws of man compel us to protect and defend– in short, how the laws of man insist we must always be on the look-out, always vigilant, always seeking for the moment or achievement that will make us into something true, to protect against that which could destroy us.  Neither concern is meaningful within the thought system of truth.

The beginning is a point, a marker, and each time I return to it from one wild goose chase or another, I have the chance to remain.  I have the chance to sit with the fire for a little while, to remember after a few long nights of thoughtless detoxification how to hear its whispers, how to commune with every point in space at once.  I have a chance to remain, and keep the embers hot, and make a place for friends to gather.  For I know that in the end, the experience that shatters the past somehow involves a fresh vision of everyone, a sharing back and forth of the truth, like the passing of a cup of living waters.  None of our responses to the laws of man matter, or make us who we are in the least.  Compassion is knowing no one is who they think they are, or are trying to be or not be.

When we remain by the fire, others show up.  They literally materialize out of the night.  They were already there, waiting.  In the laws of God, our secret realities merge, and one by one we realize we’ve all been circling back to the same fire, looking for one another, looking for the only reality that matters, for the spark we find alive in each of us.  It is not that the laws of man limit the actions we would take in this world– that the world would be a better place if we were all fit for a Nike commercial– but that the laws of man blind us to one another, blind us to the certainty that can only be found in the reality flowing through every single heart.

The last half of this year, and the last two months in particular, have reduced the aperture of my life down to such a tight radius that I feel as though I’ve been scanning the field of experience and possibility one dim pixel at a time.  There’s not much plot to derive from such a view– not much context or depth with which to work.  Day and night are shades of brightness, but little more.  Is it night again, or just cloudy out?

Is that the alarm?  Already?  What about dreams?  Do I still have dreams?  Who has dreams any more?  People who can afford to shut their minds off at night and use the time for something besides catching up on the minutes of the previous day and assessing their potential impacts on events six months out… they have dreams.

What can do this to a person?  What forces can result in such a contraction?

Being busy.  Feeling busy.  Feeling burdened.  Being poured from one day into the next like a slinky tumbling half out of control down a staircase that has been lowered down from the sky.  In my case it has been the influx of professional responsibilities that will wait on no man, with financial consequences should they not be attended to in a timely manner.  This may sound wholly unappetizing, but the particulars are not where to focus, as a similar contractive pressure could have been brought on by any number of situations with other types of forcing functions– needing to get the harvest in prior to a turn in the weather, tending to the wounded or dying around the clock in a makeshift field hospital, working double shifts for weeks to fix the electrical grid after an ice storm, being the de facto caregiver for an elderly parent who is losing their rational faculties, being a single parent with children at home and any number of jobs outside of it, or simply having your house blown away by a violent atmospheric outburst.  The mind has a tendency to rank these in some order of severity, but I encourage you at least for my purpose here to treat them equally, as circumstances or inciting factors that focalize our lives, and trim the fat from our wandering minds.

As Jesus says in A Course of Love, our lives are our curriculum.  Life is what’s happening.  Life isn’t what happens when we’re done attending to what needs be done.  That’s a modern notion rooted in images of success and desire that often breeds resistance to what is.

Regardless of how you rate these various circumstances, the main point is that sometimes things get busy in ways we cannot control.  The conceptual life to which we were trying to attend, that version of life we were trying to invent or distill from the one we already had, that one is cleaved from our conscious reach.  We are honed to a functional point.  We find ourselves in continuous service to the needs of the moment.  There can be a certain relentlessness to it, though if we’re paying attention we will also find moments of beauty and grace interwoven throughout– like the way a brilliant yellow moon settling down onto the horizon near the end of it’s nightly journey shone upon me like a great, full eye during a 4 AM commute through a wintry wasteland, catching me off guard and flooding me with a thousand whispering reminders of what lies beyond the single pixel view.

If we’re not careful, these are also the times when we will be ambushed by the sensation that something is wrong.  Something isn’t right is a thought form all too easy to endorse.  Whatever philosophies regarding cause and effect that we carry around inside of ourselves will be badgering us at peak intensity levels to take stock, and take action.  Look!  Here’s a story about a person who created the life of their dreams!  All it takes is a few upgrades!  We, too, can get back on track with the types of lives in which we can flower, make a difference, or follow our passion!  Be all we can be.  We all want to maximize, and take our shot.  No one likes being derailed.  Such responses can hide the deeper meaning and purpose of these experiences, however– can render us insensitive to the holy messages they convey to us.

It is not that the dreams or passions towards which we grow are unattainable or problematic, but that we must be brought to the point where we can see what hinders their realization.  We must be delivered into a face-to-face encounter with whatever hidden machinations aren’t working, so that we can choose anew.  So Life, ever compassionate, presses upon us.  Pressure refracts the ideas of our lives into their individual colors and paints them on the wall for closer inspection.  And as we squirm under the pressure, we see just how strange some of the ideas are that we have carried.  Reduced to a shrunken point of tenacity, we find our anger.  We find out who or what to blame.  We find out about our doubt or shame.  But the holiest of our desires, too, press up from within against the cover-slip our live’s boundaries, like the cytoplasm of the inner life to which our magnified focus has been drawn.  Their beauty and possibility comes into focus.  As we yearn to reach for the fruits of this sanctified fire within us we discover where our reluctance has been hiding.  We discover our fears, and they also are magnified, and become tangible– like a choking heaviness in our center.

We reach the point then– the sacred fulcrum at our center– from which new forms of experience are possible.  Jesus suggests in A Course of Love that when we are free our hearts will be the cause of our experience, but that so long as we remain trapped within the thought system on which illusion rests, we experience the illusion and the suffering.  What our hearts know and desire is unable to fully arise as the cages of our thought systems establish the boundaries and parameters of the possible.  When we ask to break free of these cages, then I think sometimes we are dragged into this slow motion world.  Everything slows down so we can pick the lock…

Today, in a brief window of time in which I’ve been able to rest and allow my vision to stretch out a bit, I find I am immensely grateful for the past few months.  Yes, in moments I have wanted to abandon the ship of circumstance, or at the very least make a righthand turn.  Yes, I have been confused and disappointed, uncertain and overwhelmed, contemptuous of my own stagnating efforting at times.  But it has also whittled me down, and brought me to intimate contact with something that’s always present, even in a single pixel of reality.  Ask for Love, and you will be obliged to take a tour of the ways you distance yourself from it, and you may find your life is reduced to a single pixel you can square off with.  Inspect that pixel very carefully, for you may find Love looking back like a full moon flooding every corridor of eternity with soft light.

We do well to remember in times like these: one healed pixel is all it takes…  We don’t need to fill an entire screen.  Just one pixel will do.  For there is only one pixel, anyway, and it is everywhere…  Always…

This post is part of a series of posts written by several bloggers in answer to the Blog Challenge hosted by Linda Litebeing, and I thought it would be a great way to look back upon the last year.  The warmth of the holiday season has provided a nice envelope of peace and cheer from which to reflect on a year that, as Linda pointed out in her invitation, has not been without challenges.  And yet so often it is these challenges that do bring the greatest blessings…

What lessons did you learn?

Since discovering A Course of Love I have been drawn to the notion that the function of all learning is to bring about authentic knowledge of who we are, of our true identity.  Once this is known, not as a concept or as a belief, but as knowledge itself backed by experience, then the need for learning is complete.  We are released of our conceptual cages, freed to be who we are without conflict or division.  Not because we are perfect, or better in any way than we once were, or than anyone else, but because our identity finally rests on truth.

This year has brought me many experiences where I have noted the pattern and conditions of learning recreated in my life– circumstances that have triggered sensations of lack or incompleteness, of doubt and uncertainty, of frustration and desire for some form of accomplishment or another.  As the calendar year winds down, however, I am also seeing the beauty in this process, and noting how such circumstances have indeed brought about a deeper appreciation for who I am, and who we all are.  Learning is always perfect and profound, while it is needed.  And it is needed so long as I maintain a concept of myself, an ideal against which to compare, a vision for myself to attain through devotion or service of some sort.

I have witnessed the conflict and discontent within myself, and sensed the ways in which it is softening through the path of experience.  I think the greatest lesson I take away from this past year is a greater acceptance of who I am, less the world, and of the circumstances in which I find myself.  I feel as though I am leaving 2014 with the realization that so long as learning is required– so long as I cling to a particular concept or brand of fear– there is nowhere I need go but where I am to work with it.  Things are splendidly okay, even when they’re not.  So many games of chicken with our fate compel us to seek out something else, and I am thankful to have come full circle without moving, to discover beautiful inklings of the depth and purpose all around me.

How did you serve others?

This can be a loaded question can’t it!?  It can take me right to the heart of a question some of us grapple with during the time and conditions of learning: am I doing enough?  Should I be doing something more?  Shouldn’t I be spending more time doing x, y, or z?  Couldn’t I be making more of a difference?  Several of the other participants in this challenge whose entries I have read have made reference to the idea that their greatest service has been in allowing themselves to be who they are– the idea being that the daily practice of offering the gift of our time or presence to others, precisely where we are at, is truly a service.

This really resonates with me, as I am realizing that anything we do that comes from a notion of what we should be doing will lack the essential ingredient, and anything that is truly offered from the depth of our being has the capacity to resonate profoundly with others.  The opportunities have been all around me this year, as due to challenging times we’ve had extended family living with us to varying degrees throughout the year.  I’ve driven kids to soccer games, helped with homework, cooked meals, and most importantly, been able to deepen relationships by sharing and creating space for those who’ve needed it.

What blessings did you receive?

I’ve touched on a few above.  Realizations about ourselves and our internal obstacles or resistances to love are always blessings, as are opportunities to deepen relationships with those around us.  My wife’s recognition of who I am, and support, is an ongoing blessing that spans far beyond the time it takes our little planet to circumnavigate our nearest star.  In addition, through blogging I’ve been brought into contact with some amazing and passionate people, and it has enriched my life considerably.

(I was also gifted a sample pack of Liga Privada cigars and Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day.  Blessings come in many forms.)

Was there something you lost that turned out to be a blessing in disguise?

Leaving the obvious aside– e.g. my mind– the loss of a professional comfort zone left the ground feeling wobbly underneath me, but brought to light various fears and sources of discontentment that had been idling within me in a manner that allowed to me process them in my own time.  Likewise the inclusion of more family members in our home on a regular basis has also brought various changes in the status quo, such as losses in refrigerator space, limited access to clean drinking glasses, a strange curtailing of the quiet, inadequate space for both cars and snow banks, and of course a contraction of time itself, but these shifts were all rendered moot by the unexpected gifts of being part of more lives in an increasingly meaningful way.

 Did you receive any “gifts” in terms of powers or skills?

No.  :)

I did, however, set a new personal best by making an order of chorizo nachos disappear in under five minutes.  And I wrote a lot more poetry than in any previous year of my life.

* * * * *

Linda is up next with tomorrow’s entry.  Happy Reflection Times to all.

I love me some Treatises¹.
Mmmm-mm!
I love me some Jesus breakin’ it down,
makin’ that holy road clear.
I love me some Truth expo-zishuns!
I love me some brotherly tutelage,
some way pointin’,
some little bing-bang dose of reality checkin’.
I do, I do, I do–
I do love me some Treat-sies…

* * * * *

¹In the second book of A Course of Love there are four Treatises, the first of which is entitled “A Treatise on the Art of Thought.”  The first time I read these particular offerings I bored through them like a hydraulic-powered, diamond-tipped drill rig cutting through frozen tundra.  This is what you do, after all, when just hours before, in a far more desperate version of yourself that was flying over a particular swath of unexplored terrain in a sputtering helicopter equipped with state of the art, second-hand geological x-ray devices, necromancing paraphernalia, and other treasure-hunting apparatuses, you discovered to your considerable surprise a big huge X marks the spot engraved into a a few hundred square acres of real estate, along with a note on a stone tablet laying on the ground right at the vertex– a note signed by your own heart, oddly enough– that says Drill here, Mac.  When you encounter revelations of this order of magnitude, certain safety procedures, long-tested customs of geotechnical investigation, and rules of personal decorum are indiscreetly nullified.

Two years later, now that I have finally gotten the drilling fluid, sprayed dirt and bulletized caribou dung off of my safety glasses and nearly completely rehabilitated my trigger finger, I realize I may have– may have– not availed myself of all the life-affirming, eternity-beckoning, suffering-and-delusion-conquering content that was deposited there.  Lucky for us, when you read with such reckless abandon, you don’t actually rip the words right off the page, so you can, in point of fact, glean enough of the idea to get yourself going, and then go back and review them once again in light of all that has occurred in your life since that first tumultuous encounter.

So, relatively recently I had the exquisitely good fortune of reading A Treatise on the Art of Thought for what was likely the fourth or fifth (hundred) time.  I kind of knew it hadn’t fully computed the first time I had read it, but over time had become pretty convinced it had in fact rubbed off on me quite substantially.  Then, after six or eight weeks of professional gang-bustering with an intensity and a magnitude that had narrowed my cardio-cognitive wherewithal down to a single pixel, I read it again and walked out of the room feeling like a human who had just hatched from an egg.

You know the difference between the moment when you encounter a beautiful idea, and it rings your heart like a bell, and the moment when you realize you had the whole thing backwards, and it is your own nature that was sounding the idea in the first place?  And pretty soon you realize it’s a breath of insight, flowing in and out of your like the tides?  If not, you will.  If so, thank you for standing by me during all those presumptuous eons.

The Art of Thought is both parts simultaneously– allowing oneself to be rung by every single experience in a beautiful way, and simultaneously recognizing that you are a bell uniquely suited and desiring to ring beautifully into every single experience.  We get our bells rung (by grace).  We ring back, for we are bells (of grace).  And then of course, as we all start allowing ourselves to ring, in the lovely tapestry of sound that emerges, we clue in: oh(!), this entire tapestry of sound, all of that is who I Am.  And then you starting ringing right along, naturally and without forethought, with all sorts of delightful tones and harmonics tailored specifically to the instant in which you find yourself.

Now, maybe you can see: you can’t ring like that by thinking about how you should be ringing all the time.  You can’t ring like that by constructing ring models out of your past experience and worldly knowledge so that you can predict how best to ring to impact the experience in ways that you also thought long and hard about being the best and highest good ways of impacting it.  It’s already too late by then, and you’ll botch it anyway.  And you can’t ring like that by having pre-tested rules about what types of rings to offer in certain situations. All of that… is how we used to roll…

The Art of Thought begins with hatching from an egg and discovering you don’t need to upgrade your bell to a newer model, or fix any of its cracks, or hold it differently when the time comes.  The Art of Thought begins by appreciating the fact that you were created by the same Bell Maker who created the sunset that rang you last night, and that as such you are equally a majestic and endless gift given to all beings.  I daresay we may feel differently and respond differently, were we to enter the room knowing we are each the warmth and mystery of a sunset turned loose upon the world.

How do you tell a sunset it’s not doing it right?  How do you even think that?  How or why then, would we ever apply such logic to ourselves?  Well, you wouldn’t, after you realize and accept the nature of your Self and the nature of the sunset are the same.  This appreciation is the Art of Thought.  Jesus acknowledges that we are thinking beings, but that does not mean we have to come up with all the thoughts– or even could if we wanted to.  The really, really good thoughts are given, the way water is given to a river, the way a rung bell reminds us we are all bells ringing.  Through the Art of Thought, we can come to realize and experience this.

(Mmmm-mm!  I do love me some Treatises…)

I haven’t picked up A Course of Love for a while, but picked it up again the other day and flipped to a “random” section.  I ended up opening to a page that was late in the Treatise on the Personal Self, which is a section of the Course describing the way in which the personal self becomes a living representation of the True Self—the latter being the identity we all share in unity.  Through the dialogue and exchanges I’ve enjoyed here with you, as well as with those in other areas of my life, this notion that we share an identity but differ in our representations of it has slowly taken root as genuine experience.  It is truly delightful, a warm resonance that resounds across the planes of our differentiation.

But I’m also still a locomotive tumbling across the sky on a daily basis.  So what gives?

Since comparison of my life and experiences against an ideal version thereof, or against the experiences of others, has diminished nearly entirely in its ability to provide navigational assistance, all I really know is that my life is my life.  I can only feel it.  I can’t really describe what it means.  I simply feel its tugs and pulls, its mandates and pressures, its joys and profundities.  While I know there are assignments of meaning and value I have made that somehow give rise to the constellation of forces that collectively induce the tidal rhythms of my experience, generally speaking the specifics of how my stance as a being resolves into the geometry of my path remain unknown to me.

In moments of comfort with this confusion– this mystery– this sensation of flapping in a gale force breeze feels as though it is a vantage point closer to the heart of what’s happening than any other I’ve held.  Not perhaps, as an accurate representation of the heart of what is, rather as a threshold experience of emerging from the grip of the illusory.  I am most comfortable right now when I’m not trying to make sense of what it is.  Simultaneously, the demand for wood-chopping and water-carrying are at an all-time high.  The village needs six cords a day cut and stacked, hot baths in the morning, and water for cooking.  Who can deny the validity of these needs?  In the professional arena of my life, I’m in the midst of a challenge of a larger scale than I’ve shouldered before, and it asks a lot.  There are many moving parts, none of which are in any one person’s control, and penalties for failure to deliver.  There are people who could be disappointed, people who could be marginalized, and people who may need to be confronted.

I see the situation as simply being the outcome of human thought patterns.  It’s the great set-up, this bit of circumstance.  It’s our deepest opinion of what is, enacted in microcosm.  The thoughts we’ve carried collectively and traded back and forth for so long regarding scarcity and consequence, authority and power, and fitness and survival resolve into these taut webs of inter-relationship.  What better place to practice surrender?  This surrender, though, isn’t a self-serving absolution of responsibility.  It isn’t a walking away from the village.  I think it’s more a holy restatement of what is happening.  The trick, I’m seeing, is that this isn’t a moment to say, “Ah, well, none of this matters, anyway.  It’s all a dream.  I will go over there and create a more peaceful one.”  It’s the opportunity to stand at the center of the maelstrom, and allow all of its elements to be renamed, with Love guiding my view.

A couple of passages in A Course of Love jumped out at me.

“Miracles are not the end, but merely the means, of living by the truth.  Miracles are not meant to be called upon to create specific outcomes in specific circumstances.  They are meant to be lived by as the truth is meant to be lived by.  Not because you desire an outcome, but because it is who you are and because you realize you can no longer be, live or think as other than who you are in truth.  This is how thorough your learning must be.  It is a learning that must not change to fit the circumstances of illusion but be unchanging to fit the circumstances of the truth. [emphasis added]”

“You must no longer see illusion for it is no longer there!  This is how you must live with it.  You must live with it as you once lived with the truth.  You must find it unobservable! [emphasis added]”

I see in the passages above the request that we live with the courage to deny the perception of threat or loss, regardless of circumstance.  That we embody this so fully we do not even see them arising!  In part, I think this requires that we do not place boundaries on our giving or our receiving– that we let the imminent needs of our lives touch us, not as signs of portents of difficulty, but as the poor and the hungry within our own hearts who need to be fed.

I think what our lives ask of us is complete commitment to what is.  It can be a deeply discomforting request, because we want to hold certain parts of our lives in reserve.  We want to keep them safe for ourselves.  Our special times.  Our special places.  Our special practices.  But if we divide our lives into the domain of the unholy and the holy, we will forever be broken under the strain.  Out there in the maelstrom are the needs we haven’t met, the parts of ourselves we haven’t welcomed back and embraced.  Maybe flapping in the winds, I remain available to them.

I have undoubtedly tried to be too much for too many at times, and likewise very often have been too little in others.  I have argued with circumstance.  I have been ground down against the possibility of failure, confrontation and rejection.  There is more grinding to be done.  But I am beginning to sense that what remains will be gleaming and restful, even in its continuing movement.  I think I am in the moment of my eventual undoing, and it is good.