More Course, 3, An Oldie, But a Goodie

From the Course: “Understand that you do not respond to anything directly but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you, you will respond as if he has actually done so,” overlooking the truth; and the truth is that how you see someone else, is how you see yourself. “There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense…. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes. Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him, for this and only this is what he is asking for.”

I get this; it resonates, deeply, I aspire to make it live in my life. Then someone cuts me off in traffic, or my wife asks a dumb question, or I hear the news and the Republicans are filibustering, again; or BP, with one of the worst safety records in the industry, is getting away with it again. I think someone’s got to pay, there have got to be consequences, punishment is good, send the Goldman people to solitary; so much for not responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help.

Yet the Course helps me know that when I become aware of how I’m interpreting events, how I’m feeling afraid and like a victim, I have to pause, not continue to justify my anger and ask Spirit’s help to see things differently, not from an angry place, as crimes needing punishment, but from a peaceful place as errors needing correction. It’s not that I let all these things go, it’s that I deal with it from a different place. I take responsibility for my interpretations, recognizing that they’re only interpretations and go from there. The horrible oil spill does need to be dealt with, but it’s best done in a way that is consistent with the Course’s idea, “Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to
him, for this and only this is what he is asking for.”

Doing this is difficult at first, but the more I do it, the easier it becomes. We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same, Carlos Casteneda said. The great thing is, we don’t have to beg God/Spirit for It’s help, we don’t need to kneel, we don’t need to plead, we simply need to align with the God within and experience our lives transforming, one step at a time. It’s a process, like building muscle - spiritual muscle, it’s cumulative, each time we do it, we do it better.

More Course, 2

So I read in the Course today: “Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God? You will accept only whom you invite. You are free to determine who shall be your guest, and how long he shall remain with you. Yet this is not real freedom, for it still depends on how you see it. The Holy Spirit [more on this later, but for now, the memory of God we took with us into the dream] although He cannot help you without your invitation. And the ego is nothing, whether you invite it in or not. Real freedom depends on welcoming reality, and of your guests only the Holy Spirit is real. Know, then, Who abides with you merely by recognizing what is there already, and do not be satisfied with imaginary comforters, for the Comforter of God is in you.”


“Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God?” No brainer, right? Except for the fear; the fear that God’s not really there; that even if It really is there, we’re not a part of It; we’re such terrible sinners, that God doesn’t love us and we’re totally unlovable because of all our wicked, nasty thoughts and deeds. That’s the ego talking. There’s only, either the ego or Spirit. If we’re feeling fear and guilt, we’re with the ego. Spirit holds no fear and guilt, so as part of Spirit, neither do we. Stop thinking with the ego and ask for Spirit’s help to shift to It.

“Only you can deprive yourself of anything. Do not oppose this realization, for it is truly the beginning of the dawn of light. Remember also that the denial of this simple fact takes many forms, and these you must learn to recognize and to oppose steadfastly, without exception. This is a crucial step in the reawakening [undoing]. The beginning phases of this reversal are often quite painful.”

Einstein said something similar when he said the most important question we can ask is, “Is the universe a friendly place?” The answer is, it is as we see it; we create our own heaven or hell. “Your life is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be opened,” Wayne Muller wrote. The idea is not just that what we experience is up to us, but that God is for us, the universe IS a friendly place and our lives ARE a gift to be opened, when we step away from the ego and our habitual way of being and identify with the still small voice within that speaks for our spiritual reality.

“As ordinary people in a difficult world we are asked to take the common place activities that occur to us hour by hour, and to discover the spiritual [power] inherent in them” - Harry Moody.

We are this beautiful gift but must become aware of it in order to use it wisely, not to do so would be to dishonor God. As we open ourselves to our spiritual reality, and take on more of the powers inherent in and around us, we release any ideas of lack and limitation and realize that the only limits are those we set. The clearer we are about our relationship with Spirit, the more confident we will feel about our lives, because our life experiences are a reflection of our consciousness.

More Course

Another great quote, this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson, says much the same thing as the Course does about the centrality of the undoing process – “Get your bloated nothingness out of the way of the divine circuits.” Don’t you love it? Doesn’t it resonate? Haven’t you experienced how well letting go can work for you? When we get our egos out of the way, not only do we feel much better, but creativity and other great things happen. Without the noise and static of the ego’s illusion, the still small voice - the reality of just plain being, the sense that we’re OK as we are, and don’t have to struggle and strive, can be heard.

This is practical stuff; it works, you can experience it. You don’t have to take someone’s word for it, or quote a ‘holy’ book, it’s not about being dogmatic, having faith in illogical beliefs like virgin birth, or trying to prove something. When you undo your investment in the ego’s illusions, including having to be right about the nature of God, when you stop the chatter and the bull and get centered, you’re open to input from the ‘divine circuits’.” This is so for everyone – Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, Jew, fundamentalist, Hindu, whatever, the divinity is within each of us, whether we know it or not, accept it or not; each of us is a child of God, connected to divinity. We need to make space for this reality to emerge, to develop a personal relationship with the God/Reality beyond dogma and rules that is already there, inside, waiting for us, that each of us is a part of.

As Ernest Holmes has said, we don’t have to put this divine energy into ourselves and each other, it’s already there. We simply – and oh boy, it’s not so simple – have to remove the blocks to It’s flowing, blocks which we ourselves, our beliefs and culture, have put there. Undoing the blocks begins by acknowledging this situation – that divine energy is there, within each and every one of us, no exceptions, and that we tend to deny, block and barrier it.

The Course in Miracles

From time-to-time, I’ll be blogging about A Course in Miracles, which I have been taking for the last 22 years, and every once in awhile understand – no, that’s not fair, I understand a lot of it at an intellectual level and feel a deep resonance with almost all of it on the emotional and physical levels. I guess my ‘difficulty,’ my hesitation in saying I understand it, revolves around operationalizing it - living it on a daily, hourly, moment to moment basis. I’m not operationalizing it, experiencing it, as much as I’d like to, so it feels like I don’t understand it.

But I do understand it and am writing this to better operationalize the Course for myself, and to introduce new people to it by taking things from the Course that will resonate - make sense, seem intrinsically true and worthwhile, even without fully understanding the Course’s metaphysics. For example: “…we no longer tolerate the dishonesty of believing that our problems come from somewhere else [outside us]. Honesty does not apply only to what you say. The term actually means consistency. There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; and no word lacks agreement with another. Such are the truly honest.”

Now to me, not only do those ideas about honesty and self-responsibility resonate, they are inspirational, and among my highest life-long aspirations. I want to share such ideas, hoping they will resonate with you, too. I think they are ideas whose time has come, that we need to operationalize now. To give these ideas more heft, my posts will include explanations of the Course’s metaphysics. Please keep in mind as you read my posts, that I am not an expert on the Course; I’m only sharing a lay person’s interpretations.

The Course says that it’s either God or the ego. God (that amorphous all-encompassing all-inclusive resonance of life, not Zeus nor the Zeus-like ‘Father’ of much Judeo-Christian dogma) or the ego. God is reality, the ego, illusion. Our experience is that either we’re with God or the ego. Our reality and the truth about us is we’re at peace, one with God, a part of God, dreaming that we’re separate from God (an impossibility), here in the world, and that if we think we’re here in the world – which I do and you do, then we’re with the ego in the illusion.

The ‘miracle’ in the Course’s title is our experience of awakening, with spiritual help, from the illusion of the world and experiencing our reality as part of God. When that happens, which it does often, it feels like a miracle. The experience of awakening and the ability to awaken – to perform ‘miracles,’ resides in the mind of every human being; it’s available to everyone; no special rituals, initiations or training required. The miracle occurs each time we’re able to experience, to know at a very deep level, our reality, our oneness with God; to experience and understand that God did not create the world, is not watching us nor keeping score and the duality that we experience here – the good and evil, the love and hate, pain and bliss, are not of God, but of the ego.

The world arose when the ego offered the tiny mad idea that we could separate ourselves from God, that our reality, our true bliss as undifferentiated parts of infinite oneness was too boring and not enough for us, that something more was needed, and we accepted that idea. The world arose from a decision we, not God, made to accept that tiny mad idea. But in truth, nothing could change our reality and oneness, so we are asleep with God, dreaming we are here. Just as when you had a bad dream as a child and your parents were in the next room, knowing you were safe in your bed, so God knows we are safe and with It. It was our choice for the ego, a decision made in our minds to dream, that we, with spiritual help, must undo. That is what the Course teaches, how to get the spiritual help, undo the decision we made and awaken to our reality. Honesty and self-responsibility are part of the undoing process.

Finding the Light by Analyzing the Darkness

Here’s something from an older post that I need to remember now as I get hung-up on the spread of Stand Your Ground laws and the mentality behind that, the inane Republican political campaigns and the failure of the President to live up to his promise.

You can not find the light by analyzing the darkness. What manifests is what we place our intention and focus upon. The pop idea, deep in our psyches, that suffering evokes evolution, is as ineffective and perverse as the idea that violence can bring peace, or lack can manifest plenty. It’s time to stop justifying pain and suffering as a necessary ‘evil;’ neither is necessary, nor evil. Until we come to that realization, it will continue to be easier to witness, experience and condone the unthinkable than it will be for us to enter the kingdom of truth. If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. Doing the same things and expecting a different result is a good definition of insanity.

More Guns

More on guns from the Christian Science Monitor 3/12/12 issue by John Yemma: Since the last Supreme Court decision, “a slew of state laws have expanded access to firearms and the freedom to carry them in public.” This scares me, very much; makes me think violence and danger are increasing, and the ‘law,’ not only can’t stop it, but is enabling it.

Though he wasn’t speaking of guns, but of Bruce Springsteen’s new album, on Wednesday, Leonard Pitts said something that enhances this scary sense of out of control danger for me: “In a nation where corporations are people and fetuses are people, actual people could not catch a break, nor even much in the way of empathy. It is from the heart of this disconnection, this chasm between America that is and America that ought to be, that Springsteen issues his report.”

“In years to come,” Yemma says, “it appears there will be even more guns in more hands in more places than ever before. No one can say for sure if that will make society more, or less, safe.” Well, to me, given the flowering of anger and rage and extremism, it’s a no brainer – more guns equal less safety. “The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence argues that easy access to firearms is the reason almost 100,000 people are shot or killed in the US each year,” Yemma says.

Then goes on to say, “But do we blame the gun or the person?” Even Yemma does that silly, false moral equivalence that passes for good journalism – the over-simplified, wrong-headed ideal that there are only two sides to a story, both of equal validity, when in reality there are many sides, and stories are more complex than the so-called journalists want to or care to explain.

Hard to believe the same guy that wrote, “Guns have one purpose. They don’t cut rope, drive nails or propels baseballs. They are built to kill or maim,” also wrote,
“do we blame the gun or the person!” Duh!! The so called ‘objectivity’ inherent in the “do we blame the gun or the person,” statement is a huge part of the difficulties Americans are facing as a society.

Things are often very complex and grey and there are often no easy answers, but when there are easy answers and things are not so complex and grey, we need to say so. The easy access to guns is dangerous; just as the lack of civility is dangerous. Period! “With more and more citizens armed, and alienated,” Joy-Ann Reid wrote in yesterday’s Herald about the Trayvon Martin case, “the ordinary prejudices that sadly still afflict our society can become deadly.”

Guns

From the Christian Science Monitor 3/12/12 issue by John Yemma: “Guns have one purpose. They don’t cut rope, drive nails or propel baseballs. They are built to kill or maim. Firearms are central to almost every conflict, crime, uprising or peacekeeping mission. Governments use guns to maintain order. Rebels use them,” to create a new order.

“There are more guns per capita in the US than in any other nation. Some people like guns for hunting, target practice, and skeet shooting. If you have a gentle nature, though, you probably abhor firearms. Every time a confused young person opens fire at a school, a worker assaults co-workers, a stray bullet enters an inner-city home…every one of those violent acts is a powerful argument for locking guns away.

“If you believe in the right to self-defense and liberty, however, you probably see gun ownership as natural and just. Every assault, home invasion, robbery or hostage taking is a powerful argument that a lawfully armed citizen might have been able to stop the crime.

“The balance between public safety and individual freedom is not easy. From the Revolution through the settling of the frontier to the 21st century, guns have been embedded in the American experience. The Second Amendment to the Constitution appears to enshrine the right of individuals to own and carry firearms. In 2008 and 2010, the US Supreme Court issued landmark rulings that ensured possession of firearms for lawful purposes.” More tomorrow.