On Islam -- Happy Father's Day

Surrender is the most difficult thing to the ego to understand, because it is totally invested in what ACIM calls fighting God for His Authorship. We want to be original, and we want to be right, but (un)fortunately we are neither. While formal religions have little appeal for me, and Islam is no exception, I've often found solace with some of the Sufi wise men, from the ridiculous, like Mullah Nasruddin, to the sublime, like Rumi, or Tierno Bokar, and I've sometimes found beautiful and profound verses in the Qur'an (my favorite edition listed hereby). But most of all, the very word Islam is what inspires me, and I recognize in it the first step in the forgiveness process as A Course in Miracles teaches it.

Islam means surrender, and the very first step of the forgiveness process in the Course, is really to surrender the arrogance of the ego, and to open myself up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe Jesus could be right and I could be wrong. As long as I stubbornly maintain that I'm right, I cannot ever take back the projection of guilt on others and ask for help. And the miracle lies exactly in the fact that a shift, a change of mind is possible, by asking for guidance from the Holy Spirit and the right mind, in lieu of from our ego, which got us into trouble in the first place. As a refresher here are the three steps of forgiveness, the way out of conflict any time you see yourself getting stuck (again!):

1. "Would I accuse myself of doing this?" I.e. this means to question the validity of the ego's perception that some SOB out there is making my life miserable, and instead to entertain the notion that I might have something to do with it, and that what I'm accusing the other of is, in some different form, a secret self-accusation. Here is an applicable quote from the Course:
   "Forgiveness should be practiced through the day, for there will still be many times when you forget its meaning and attack yourself. When this occurs, allow your mind to see through this illusion as you tell yourself:
   
   Let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Would I accuse myself of doing this? I will not lay this chain upon myself. (ACIM:W-134.17:1-5)
   In other words, at this point I've taken my projection back, and because now the problem is not outside of me (where I cannot change it), but inside of me, so that I can now change it. And the way to change it is with a change of mind, what Jesus calls metanoia in the Greek of the New Testament.
2. Now comes the only decision, the only exercise of free will ever, having raised the ego's guidance to doubt, we are now free to ask for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and in the process freed ourselves from the ridiculous chains of having to know everything, or, more accurately, having to pretend to know everything, for now we have deferred judgment, and we are asking for Help from the one who does know everything, the Holy Spirit. The point of surrender lies in what the Course calls 'looking at the problem as it is' (ACIM:T-27.VII.2:2) and that passage continues with: 'and not the way that you have set it up.' Thus what we are surrendering is our problem definition, which then opens the way for the solution to arise. The ego would tenaciously hang on to the problem, because this defines its separate identity.
3. Now we leave it to the Holy Spirit. And what we learn subsequently is that it is not a sacrifice to surrender our judgment (or should we say our stupidity?) to Him, but it is the way out of the ego's Hell.

The guided meditation which Gary Renard offers in his workshops and books is also a beautiful way of reinforcing the forgiveness process, by starting and ending your day with a brief meditation in which you visualize a white light (God's Love) which slowly surrounds you, and you lay on the altar as your gifts to him all your childish definitions of what the problems are, and what the answers should be, thus making room for the Answer to show up, instead of continuing to kill yourself with thinking it's my way or the highway. Once you let go of those ego shackles, you can totally submerse yourself in the experience of God's Love surrounding you. This is the way to accepting the sonship, to seeking the second place to gain the first, to realizing that no-one comes to the father but through me - not Jesus as a person, but the manifestation of the Sonship as he realized it, and demonstrated it. The prodigal son, re-becomes the Son, by letting go of his plan for salvation, and accepting anew the Sonship as the only fulfillment possibility. In the end then, it is for the mind to let go of its mistaken belief in the ego, for the ego isn't anything except a mis-thought, a tiny mad idea, that makes us very unhappy as long as we maintain our allegiance to it, and waste our days in justifying it. Happy Father's day.

In and Out of the Hologram, Vivace

As promised, Gary Renard introduced us to his "Arten," aka Cindy on the "Happy Dream" Cruise, and this continues the important story line of his living experience as a demonstration project of the holographic nature of our experiential world which A Course in Miracles proposes. At the end of his first book as Arten and Pursah made it clear who they were in relation to Gary -- having been the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus in the past, while Gary himself had also been Thomas -- they also made it clear that not only would he be Pursah (a woman) in the next life, but he would end up marrying Arten, however Arten in his current lifetime would thus be a woman, who at that time he had not met yet. At some later time Gary reported having met the current-life persona of Arten, and that her identity would be disclosed in the third book, Love Has Forgotten No One, and also that she would participate in this year's Caribbean cruise. And so, having participated in the cruise, I've also met Cindy. Apparently Gary knew she was Arten before she did herself, but she was comfortable with it coming out in this fashion, and she seems to play the part really well. Meanwhile the really nice thing is that they do not make a big deal out of this, for they realize fully that this is all merely part of the dream reality. Needless to say undue hoopla about past life memories can become a major distraction, if it is exploited by the ego to make us somehow special, as is discussed in the Course in the Manual for Teachers, in the chapter 'ARE "PSYCHIC" POWERS DESIRABLE?' here:

The answer to this question is much like the preceding one. There are, of course, no "unnatural" powers, and it is obviously merely an appeal to magic to make up a power that does not exist. It is equally obvious, however, that each individual has many abilities of which he is unaware. As his awareness increases, he may well develop abilities that seem quite startling to him. Yet nothing he can do can compare even in the slightest with the glorious surprise of remembering Who he is. Let all his learning and all his efforts be directed toward this one great final surprise, and he will not be content to be delayed by the little ones that may come to him on the way. (ACIM:M-25.1)

The bottom line here clearly is that since with more and more forgiveness our fear level goes down, and we may well remember some of these abilities including past-life memories, which heretofore in our current living experience had been repressed, but if our ego gets ahold of them and starts exploiting them, we take our eyes off the ball, and forget the one responsibility we have as students of the Course, i.e. accepting the atonement for ourselves. And so, as always, the point is to leave the rest of it to the Holy Spirit, including the use of any such new found talents. Gary gave us a funny description of his own association with the group of Return of the Revolutionaries, which seems to be very prone to inspiring people to take this much too seriously--and again we are reminded of the joke that seriousness causes reincarnation. If nothing else, one thing that should give us pause is the fact that very few people volunteer for past life memories as Hitler, Attila the Hun, or Judas Iscariot, whereas the more popular roles seem to be in high demand. From the point of view of the Course it should be evident that the lifetimes in which we were villains of various sorts are very important lessons indeed, to make us aware of why the ego thought system is really a thought system of murder, which perhaps we would rather give up. For similar reasons, we strongly repress all memories of lifetimes in which we were something that we hate in this lifetime, e.g. men/women, black/white, Jew/Arab, etc. while the very fact that we hate it so much only means one thing, namely exactly that we were it, and do not want to know, so we project it out there in the world as an object of our scorn.

In the discussions in the workshop some interesting points about all this came out, and I would like to summarize them here in my own words. With a look ahead to the new book, Gary pointed out that Arten and Pursah had given him a demonstration of the "in-between" life, the upshot of which clearly was that, just like our own dreaming experience happens in seconds, but within the dream seems to cover vast stretches of time, the in-between life is typically really short, and moreover our "next" lifetime is not necessarily "in the future" in the time scale we tend to conceive of if we focus on our life as bodies in the world. In other words, you could be having a few hours in-between and then continue in a lifetime that is 100 years from now, or 2,000 years ago, the selection of which is predicated on what is the most helpful as classrooms for your progress on the road to salvation. Likewise, within the script we are currently in, we cannot so much change the script as shift to another dimension, based on the forgiveness lessons we have learned. In the end it is really not much different from going to Blockbusters and deciding between a horror movie or a comedy. In that sense the "hologram" is not much more than a large multiplex cinema, where I can see lots of different movies without ever leaving the building, and we only leave the building when our forgiveness lessons are done. And from one lifetime to the next we can change sex, religion, race, etc. so we shift from man to woman, from Muslim to Christian, from Jew to Arab, from black to white an vice versa. All of this makes lots of sense, since the atonement process is really about forgiving our apparent differences in the world and coming to realize experientially that we are the One sonship, that appears as many only because we have embraced the separation thought, the ego, and conceive of our living reality/experience accordingly.

Lastly, there is the important implication of the Course that all of the perceptions within this holographic time/space framework are in the mind, including our own body, therefore it becomes blatantly clear how and why it is possible to experience these shifts, that otherwise seem inconceivable to our conscious awareness which has projected the neat linear appearance of ourselves in time, with a past and a future, and which we call our life. And the shifts within this life to different dimensions with different outcomes are again no different than a DVD with multiple endings to the movie. Thus we do not perse change the script with our actions, as it is already made, and all of our actions are in the pre-recorded script, but by forgiving we can shift to a different experience. Or, as the Course puts it:  "Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world." (ACIM:T-21.in.1:7)

Out of the Course Ghetto

There is a temptation among students of A Course In Miracles to seek to congregate with like minded people, and then they naively assume that this means other students of A Course In Miracles. Discovering the fallacy of that notion sometimes leads to quite a bit of consternation. The fundamental conundrum is the same as when Christianity went wrong in proselytizing, and substituting joining with Jesus - in spirit - through following him in his example of living truth, and instead of joining with him, they went about gathering people, and developing the church, which leads to another experience of separation in a different form. The whole thing replays itself when people get hung up about the Course community, as if it actually means something, or worse, they want to select a therapist based on their presumed studies of the Course, at which point I usually turn it into a joke and ask them what they're going to do for a dentist, a plumber, a cobbler, or a car mechanic?

A particularly ugly variant is when in a couple, one of the partners starts working with the Course, and becomes convinced that they should find a partner who is more interested in their spiritual endeavors, and with whom they could do the Course, which is kind of an extreme form of the misunderstanding what the Course is all about, which should really start and end with the idea that it is only about what's going on in my mind, my own spiritual hygiene. It in no way involves doing anything with anybody else on the external level; it is about forgiveness, and the observation of whether someone is doing the Course or not is merely another way of seeing differences, which in turn is just another way of not seeing that the sonship is one, and the ego has us by the short ones all over again. On a practical level, discussing the practice of the Course is usually easier and more productive simply with other fellow travelers on this path or any other path, and not particularly with people we're closely involved with. We will most likely encounter some others along the way, whose experience with the Course may be similar to our own, but since the Course is a lifelong process, and we go through many growth phases with it, the fact that someone else is studying the Course in their own estimation really means nothing. What makes a Course student? Someone who is running around with a certain blue book with gold lettering? Or someone who practices what it says, which you can't tell from the outside?

So the notion of a "Course community" is largely fallacious, because the Course is really a self study program in which the therapist/teacher is Jesus, as a presence within, who is present to all of us whenever we want to. The only real communication lies in the learning from him, by extending forgiveness, and realizing that communication only happens by getting our ego out of the way, and making room for the Holy Spirit. In the Thomas Gospel, Jesus expresses this in Logion 108 as follows: Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person. Thus is the only true joining found in entering what the Course calls the Holy Relationship, through which we can experience our oneness with all of the sonship. In Gary Renard's books this is seen as the "J Underground," symbolic of a joining in realizing that there is indeed another way, and that there is a way out of the madness of the world. That inner joining with our brothers through forgiveness is the measure of meaningful progress in the Course, and has nothing to do with anybody studying the Course or not in form. The only meaningful definition, given in the Course, is that anyone who has completed the workbook, is a teacher of God.

Letting go of the superficial notion of a community, as congregating with people, with all its tendencies to ghettoization, and focusing on the inner joining through forgiveness instead, is the first step on this path. On a practical level I've come across this phenomenon in the marketing of my own book--no it's not a Course book, at best it's a book about Jesus, which takes inspiration from A Course In Miracles, from Gary Renard, from the Thomas Gospel, etc. And again I'm encountering the problem in Holland, with the preparations for a new introduction of Gary's books into Dutch, starting with a new translation of The Disappearance of the Universe. No, it's not a Course book; to say so would limit its market. I have met too many people who have found the Course through Gary's work, and between the intriguing title, and the even more intriguing subtitle of "Straight Talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness," this has gotten many people interested in Gary's story. The text on the back also does not mention the Course, except indirectly, although some of the endorsements do. Most importantly the autobiographical dimension is the story of the book, and Gary himself does not know of the Course at the outset of the book, which is the whole point, so by positioning the book as a Course book, one would exclude the larger part of its potential market, as experience has shown. And no, do not read anything into the expression "Straight Talk," Gary voted for Obama.