Well, it's time to re-read Moby Dick. I've been promising myself to do so, but I think I finally will. When I read Jed McKenna's book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, which in some ways is a commentary to Moby Dick, I realized that it was too long ago since I read the book.

Jed's treatment of the book is absolutely refreshing, and is completely in line with the tenor of all of his books, which are full of humor, and make you want to throw the majority of would-be spiritual literature into the dumpster - oh what a relief! Let's have a sense of humor, folks!

Fundamentally, McKenna proposes that the Ishmael character in Moby Dick, who is the ostensible author, represents the observer aspect of the mind. He is there at the outset, and he survives the wreckage in the end, thus learning how the ego's self-destruction amounts to naught. In terms of the Thomas gospel, it is thus a reminder of saying 42 "Be passersby," or, in terms which A Course in Miracles would use, accustom yourself to the view from above the battleground (see ACIM:T-23.IV), where you're watching the action instead of haplessly thinking you are the action, this is the way to freedom for it helps us not to get taken in by the ego's drama, and making room for the discovery of who we really are, the dreamer of the dream (ACIM:T-27.VII), and not the hero of the dream (ACIM:T-27.VIII). To put it a different way, by identifying with the hero of the story, we forgot we were the director of the movie, and we end up believing our own lies, and by getting witnesses for my story, I try to keep myself convinced that it is real, i.e. I keep myself from waking up. Conversely the moment of waking up is a quiet one, in the eye of the storm, when we realize that all of the ego's death and destruction is just nothing, the blood is red paint, and by realizing that we realize this it just follows that we're not our ego. And this is certainly one reason that any attempt to help others by preventing the suffering prolong the agony, and thus does not help at all, but offers the ego another way out, which is not to say to be kind, cold, and heartless, but it does say don't buy into the story, for that makes it worse. Helping in this fashion is just another case of soft healers making stinking wounds, when the healing lies in our ability to make the other choice in the mind, and thus to know "I could see Peace instead of this." (ACIM, Lesson 34)

Thus Ishmael's realization at the end of the Moby Dick story, that the whole turbulent vortex of the ship going down did not suck him in, but he merely floats away and gets picked up by another ship, represents in a way the realization that it all was "much ado about nothing," to use Shakespeare's words. Seen that way, it becomes clear that Moby Dick is the story of Herman Melville's own spiritual awakening, in which he can see that the whole drama of the ego amounts to nothing, and in the end will "...fade into the nothingness from which it came..." (ACIM:M13.1:2). And so, the whole movie was naught but a distraction, meant to shift our attention from the mind to the world, and keeping us engaged fixing problems, without noticing they can't be fixed because the movie has already been made. The biggest clue for this in most of our lives comes from noticing one day that I set up similar problems all the time, and since I'm the only constant in the story, it may then dawn on us how and why the belief in an ego-identity in fact is the cause of the problem, and we are free to choose to no longer identify with it. Or, as the Course puts it in the Dreamer of the Dream section:

Now you are being shown you can escape. All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up. How could there be another way to solve a problem that is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved? Without the clouds the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed. (ACIM:T-27.VII.2)

Certainly, at the end of Moby Dick, it all disappears into the nothingness from which it came, the sea being the prime symbol for the unconscious. It was all a dream, and by accepting the atonement for ourselves, i.e. by learning that nothing really happened, as Ishmael does at the end of the book, we begin to realize finally that by choosing the Holy Spirit in lieu of the ego, we are giving up nothing and gain everything, which is another frequent theme in the Course, as in here:

Son of God, be not content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had deserted Him. Everything you made has never been, and is invisible because the Holy Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold, and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you have sought nothing. By making nothing real to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourself. (ACIM:T-12.VIII.6)