When I began this blog I wrote about A Course in Miracles, and then, A Course of Love. And then there was a very interesting, and very fun poetry phase. After this I started working on fiction writing. Writing and rewriting (and rewriting) stories for submission to literary outlets took up much of the time previously available for blogging, and then I wrote a novel (which is still figuring out how to make its way into the world), and now I’m full of feelings. . . . But few words. (Not counting today, I guess!)
Feelings, though, are important. As Jesus said in A Course of Love, “When feelings are shown, or made visible, the new is created. This has always been the way of creation. Each blade of grass, each flower, each stone, is a creation of feelings. All you need do is look about you to know that feelings of love still abound. Beauty still reigns.” (ACOL D:Day18.11)
I believe this is so.
What is it then that our feelings are creating? And did our feelings create the stones, the trees, the rivers? Whose feelings are we talking about?
In addition to being a writer and a person of mystical persuasion, I am an engineer. I started college as a physics major, but when I was invited to sit in on a staff meeting at the tokamak fusion research laboratory I was doing some work-study hours in, and saw the professors laboring under the pressure of securing grant funding for their department, the sensation of being a highly educated subsistence farmer set in and I decided to do something that utilized physics and mathematics, but didn’t require a decade of training to begin competing for fickle government funding. I could always read about quantum mechanics and black holes on my own.
What’s interesting is that the part of me that relies on the profound integrity and reliability of natural phenomena does not feel threatened by the part of me that believes the universe and all it contains are the product of feeling(s). I suppose it’s interesting because to many, if not all of us, feelings are the very antithesis of repeatable, reliable phenomena. It seems profoundly unlikely a universe such as we occupy could be the product of feelings. And even if it is, there’s the far from trivial matter of observing in our own lives that how we feel—no matter how much we simply desire an outcome, or despise an individual, or wish some condition would change—the world doesn’t seem to respond in accordance to our whim.
So how does this all work?
While this could easily present as a bit of a conundrum, I don’t think the resolution is all that complicated. An essential component of my thought on this is that what we call the natural order—the stones and grass and trees and the star fields they rode in on—are the product of unity. And when I say “unity” I mean the timeless, dimensionless, solitary and undifferentiated manifold of Being in which all that manifests has its root. So this was not the creative outcome of how “I” felt or feel in a passing sense, or how “you” felt or feel, but of how the pervasive, progenitive, primordial unity felt (and feels). The Native Americans have this right, I think: They call this the Great Mystery. We’re all part of that Great Mystery, but how we feel when a traffic light turns yellow at the last second and someone dives in front of us with a right-on-red maneuver, and the very eager utility van riding our rear bumper is signaling with a series of threatening hitches that nothing but breaching the intersection will do—this is not the feeling I’m talking about. (These feelings do have creative effects, I think, but not of the magnitude I’m speaking about here.)
The second thing is that while I believe we are each integral to the unity whose initial creative feelings gave rise to the profoundly reproducible phenomena we enjoy today, I also think that in the process of occupying creation as individuals–i.e. coming into form–we lost touch with the fundamental unity that remains, to this day, our true nature. I think we fail to acknowledge how profoundly difficult the project of embodiment really was, or is, particularly when it had never been tried before. Let’s say you are taking scuba lessons and it’s not going well. It is a very different set of challenges to be in love with the fundamental nature of existence when you are experiencing unrelenting hypoxia in a body with which you have identified, than when you were enfolded in an undifferentiated sea of Love that contains no threats whatsoever, no time or place, and no particular needs.
As a brief aside, I also think that in the midst of our proverbial drowning in form, as we labored against the constraints of materiality, it only seems reasonable that certain protections were put in place. Love is very good at this. You don’t want beings in the throes of their own nightmares to be wielding unlimited creative power. (Reference the movie Sphere with Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone for a powerful modern proverb on just this very point.) (This—Love’s benevolence and response to the unexpected—is an interesting point to which I may return in the future.)
That said, if A Course of Love is correct, we are reaching a time in which we are fairly proficient with our scuba gear, and the sensation of threat can largely be set aside. We can, in fact, become conscious embodiments of the very same sensations that produced mountains, kraken, and nebula, only not so that we can create mountains, kraken, and nebula—that’s already been done—but to create a new form of experience within this plane in which we reside. We can embody Love itself: the truth of who we are.
Jesus says in Day 22 of the Dialogues of ACOL that we are “the expression of the unknown, and the only means of the unknown becoming known.” As we discover the reality of unity within ourselves, he suggests it is as if we’ve discovered a great secret we long to share. But how do we do this?
He offers a suggestion:
“The simple answer is that you must express the unknown that you have touched, experienced, sensed, or felt with such intimacy that it is known to you because the knowing becomes real in the making known. It is the only way it remains real. You know union in order to sustain and create union by channeling the unknown reality of union into the known reality of separation. You realize that you know the unknown and you desire to make the unknown knowable. You realize that you have known a place where nothing but love exists, where there is no suffering, no death, no pain nor sorrow, no separation or alienation. You sense that if you could fully express this place of union, if you could abide there, if you could share this place in an aware and conscious state, that you would bring this state into existence in the reality in which you exist.” (ACOL D:Day22.7)
This, I believe, is the project in which we are all immersed. We live within the ongoing creative experiment whose aim is to manifest, in form, the reality we have all once known in which only love exists. That this world has not achieved this on a large scale before is plain to see, but our history is not a referendum on the possible.
The truth is that our feelings have created. The suffering and sorrow born of the feelings of separation—that moment of very bad scuba that created a not insubstantial wobbling of the continuous communication with the heart of our being on which the awareness of love relies—have created an experience of might makes right, or scarcity and division, of suffering, pain, and death. New feelings (revealed), born of our acceptance of unity with the unknown, have the power to reshape the form of what is.