The Past

“…perceive a brother [every person you encounter] only as you see him now. His past has no reality in the present, so you cannot see it. Your past reactions to him [them] are also not there, and if it is to them that you react, you see but an image of him that you made and cherish instead of him.” Question your illusions, “ask yourself if it is really sane to perceive what was, as now. If you look upon your brother [this way], you will be unable to perceive the reality that is now.

“You consider it ‘natural’ to use your past experience as the reference point from which to judge the present. Yet this is unnatural because it is delusional. When you have learned to look on everyone with no reference at all to the past, either his or yours as you perceived it, you will be able to learn from what you see now. For the past can cast no shadow to darken the present, unless you are afraid of the light. And only if you are would you choose to bring darkness with you, and by holding it in your mind, see it as a dark cloud that shrouds your brothers and conceals their reality [as Christ, as spirit] from your sight.

“This darkness is in you [in your ego small self, not in them. Of course it is within them, too, when they abide with their ego small selves instead of their big Selves as Christ/spirit].”

“To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present. The cloud that obscures God’s Son to you is the past, and if you would have it past and gone, you must not see it now. If you see it now in your illusions, it has not gone from you, although it is not there.”

Thou mayest

In John Steinback’s East of Eden, a powerful story of choice, lust, love and redemption, he has one of the characters, I think it was a Japanese man, long-time friend of the family, say, by way of explanation for, and resolution of, all the conflict, “Thou mayest.”

Thou mayest. In a family dominated by a strict, fundamentalist father who believes in the literal interpretation of the bible, natural desires and needs take on the extra weight of heavenly censure. Everything – love, sex, passion, hope, is temptation and must be resisted. Guilt accompanies almost every thought and action. Loving and innocent motives become twisted and conflicting. Not, Thou mayest, but Thou shalt not.

The characters struggle with one another, find some peace after great suffering and pain, and achieve a vague awareness that their conflicts, especially their inner conflicts, what they’ve been struggling against, aren’t necessarily temptation. They can be, but fundamentally their needs and emotions are neutral, not either good or evil, but with the power to be either good or evil depending on the heart and intentions of the individual.

In fact, perhaps not neutral at all, but actually good. All the natural human emotions - love, sex, passion, hope, aren’t temptations at all, but actually good because they’re ‘natural’ and therefore God given. Good because if God is love and original sin is a mythic metaphor created by the ego to explain its birth, then all of God’s creation is meant to be good, when seen without the ego, when we choose to see it with spirit instead of the ego. Thou mayest, not Thou shalt not.

I think Steinback is saying that the fundamentalist interpretation of the bible popular when he was writing, just after the turn of the previous century (and still popular today), had the metaphysics inside out, upside down and backwards. There is no devil to tempt us and God is love. Thou mayest. We do have a choice, to awaken to our reality as spirit or remain asleep in the fear and horror of the ego illusion. The Tem Commandments were not about Thou shalt not, but about Thou mayest. What Thou mayest means to me is that God is saying, it’s only a dream, your reality is with me, you are still with me, you are eternally my child, live from that space with that knowledge.

Thou mayest - we need not fight our natural emotions – love, sex, passion and hope, but experience them as blessings and opportunities to choose to awaken to our reality and everyone’s reality, as spirit. If I honor myself and you and everyone as spirit, “I need fear no evil [nor do no evil] for Thou art with me.”

Thou mayest is not an ego message, it’s a God message! It’s not a license to kill or indulge or commit mayhem. It’s an invitation, a plea really, to get our bloated nothingness out of the way; to hide nothing from God, not one spec of pain or fear; to let go of what we think we know (what we’ve learned with the ego), of our belief in sin, guilt and mistakes and give it all over. Its permission to live fully as spiritual beings (surrounded by other spiritual beings) having earthly experiences.

Not making guilt real

“You cannot dispel guilt by making it real, and then atoning for it.” This is good advice, especially when I’m feeling weighted down by mistakes; beating myself up for the horrible things I’ve done, and for the way I’ve mistreated and possibly crippled my wife. Its one thing to fuck yourself up, but fucking up somebody else, feels unforgivable; especially when that person is fundamentally good and innocent and sweet. How’s that for making the guilt real? I know I have to let go of my mistakes, that dwelling on mistakes is dwelling in the past and the past is over, if I will let it be over, and that now is the only time I have to act.

I know the action to take now, when I feel the guilt is to let it go and turn it over to spirit. “The Holy Spirit dispels guilt simply through the calm recognition that it has never been…. As you look upon yourself and judge what you do honestly, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless. Yet consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity.”

This means that the thing to do now is to understand that guilt and the idea of time itself are of the ego - my bloated nothingness, and to get my bloated nothingness out of the way of the divine circuits, not by making guilt real, but by giving it to the Holy Spirit. I can feel the guilt and see it, making it a little bit real, but rather than dwell on it, and wallow in it - making it very real, I’ll give it over. In fact this turns out to be therapeutic.
“Do not hide suffering [guilt and mistakes] from His sight, but bring it gladly to Him. Lay before His eternal sanity all your hurt, and let Him heal you. Do not leave any spot of pain hidden from His Light, and search your mind carefuly for any thoughts you may fear to uncover. For He will heal every little thought you have kept to hurt you and cleanse it….”

Inner Guidance

The guidance is so essential! Without fresh, wholly well meaning input, I would continue to do what I always did. That’s how we are; creatures of habit. The illusion is a self-fulfilling prophecy, we get what we expect to get. Fear and its sisters prudence and due diligence, keep us locked into our habitual ways of being. Indeed, that’s what the illusion is; it’s not that I’m not here, don’t have a body or there is no world - that’s true at the metaphysical level, but at the everyday physical level I am here.

The illusion is thinking I know what things mean, can interpret on my own, can teach myself. Reality is that I only know what I know, what my family, culture and experiences have taught me - a very narrow, tiny bit of stuff I’ve abstracted from all that I might know. And I’m often wrong! My family had it wrong, my culture’s wrong and I’m wrong. I’ve been operating on incorrect premises. Oh, I can get by and do better than get by on what I know, but, like the people who used to think the world was flat, I’m wrong and I’m limiting myself.

The great thing is, if I realize I’m wrong, I can open to getting it right, or at least more right. That’s where the fresh, wholly well meaning input comes in. It helps me undo the illusion. Fresh, ‘cause it’s new to me and not weighted down with my BS, or as Emerson said, “my bloated nothingness,” and wholly well meaning, because it has nothing to prove, and wants only the best for all concerned. This input is what the Course calls the Holy Spirit and what most of us call our souls.

The Course says that when we slipped into the dream/illusion of separation, even though it ended the instant we slipped into it, a little piece of our spiritual reality, a memory of our oneness with God, came with us. This is where our guidance – the fresh, wholly well-meaning input, comes from; the still small voice of our souls. It’s with us always, everybody has one, it represents a fresh, non-earthly way to experience things, and it is wholly well meaning.

Tuning out the distractions of the ego illusion, enable us to hear the song our souls are constantly singing. No struggle, no effort, just a non-doing undoing by letting go and changing the channel from fear and the ego to love and spirit. The ego will struggle, frantically, and its raucous screams will shake us, but it is not who we are. Breath into it, allow it to wash over you; know it is meaningless, only your bloated nothingness slipping out of the way of the divine circuits. If you shift your focus, the raucous shrieks will diminish and the song of your soul will be more audible.

Effortless efforting

It occurs to me that I might be misrepresenting the fundamental message and intention of the Course with my talk about how well it works in my life, and could work in yours. The Course clearly states that it’s intent is not to make life better here in the world, but to help us wake from the dream of an illusory world, to the reality of eternal peaceful life as spirit; that it’s either the real world of spirit or the dream/illusory world of the ego. That the dream becomes better as we follow the Course, is epiphenomenal – a 25 cent word I don’t get to use very much which means, side effect.

In other words, I don’t do the Course to make the illusion more comfortable, I do the Course to awake and attain the real world of spirit, and as I do that, the illusory ego world becomes more tolerable. Doing the Course undoes the illusion. I don’t attack or challenge the illusion, I just do the Course. Here, again, is that subtle, Zen paradox, about non-doing or effortless doing. It’s amazing and comforting, not so amazing really when you think how really it all comes from a single source, how the Zen ideas, as well as the fundamental core of all faiths, are so similar.

So, I’m resigning as my own teacher, trying, but not too hard, to not struggle and force things to happen in the world. Of course, I’ve got to work, eat, take a crap, stay healthy, be amused, that’s what we do here. But I’m trying to do it all with spirit, with guidance, not taking it so seriously, to feel my reality as spirit in each moment and in each activity. The goal isn’t to cross another item off the to-do list, feel good and avoid pain; the goal is to feel my connection with spirit, to realize my, and your, oneness; to truly, deeply experience the idea that the obstacles ARE the path.

Resign as your own teacher

The ‘working’ and doing what it takes to allow spirit and our extraordinary, metanormal capacities to shine through, is essentially inner work, self checking and monitoring, a mindfulness, an awareness of what we’re thinking and who we’re thinking with, either ego or spirit. For example, if I’m thinking/feeling alone, overwhelmed, angry, anxious, I’m with ego and need to shift to spirit. The Course and indeed most of Murphy’s material says it’s almost impossible to shift away from ego on my own, help is needed. The Course says pure spiritual help, what it calls the Holy Spirit, is necessary; Murphy’s stuff agrees but suggests that the spiritual help can also come through other people. Either way, the bottom line is, as the Course says, and I love this, I have to resign as my own teacher.

“You have learning handicaps in a very literal sense,” the Course says. “There are areas in your learning skills that are so impaired that you can progress only under constant, clear-cut direction, provided by a Teacher Who [the Holy Spirit] can transcend your limited resources. The learning situation you have placed yourself in [the imagined separation from God/Spirit] is impossible. Poor learners are not good choices as teachers, either for themselves or for anyone else. Your [the ego’s] learning goal has been to not learn. The ego’s rule is, ‘Seek and do not find,’ ‘try to learn but do not succeed.’ Every legitimate teaching aid, every real instruction and every sensible guide to learning [and these are all around us, many in forms we would label ‘bad’ or ‘difficult’] will be misinterpreted. The aim of your teaching is to defeat itself, what can you expect but confusion?”

“But perhaps [no ‘perhaps’ about it!] you do not realize , even yet, that there is something you want to learn, and that you can learn because it is your choice to do so. Resign now as your own teacher. This resignation will not lead to depression. It is merely the result of an honest appraisal of what you have taught yourself, and of the learning outcomes that have resulted. Under the proper learning conditions, which you can neither provide nor understand, you will become an excellent learner and an excellent teacher. Your learning potential, properly understood, is limitless because it will lead you to God. You need offer only undivided attention [thus the mindfulness and self monitoring]. Everything else will be given you. For you really want to lean aright, and nothing can oppose the decision of God’s Son [you, me and every person – we, all of humanity are, in the Course’s context, God’s one son].”

Extraordinary metanormal capacities

For me, the power in the Course doesn’t come from it’s ‘sacredness’ or any other extrinsic thing about it, but from its intrinsic, inherent usefulness – it works! The more I follow it, the better my life gets. That’s why I’m sharing it with you; and that’s why I share other things. I’ve found that thy work for me [and others] and thought it might work for you, too.

I’ve been reading another book that has much the same impact and deals with much of the same content as the Course, Michael Murphy’s, The Future of the Body. Murphy musters vast amounts of evidence from prehistoric times to the present, suggesting that evolution is going on within each and every one of us right now, and moving human beings in the direction of more frequent everyday manifestations of extraordinary metanormal capabilities. In other words, every person alive on the planet now and in the past, is, and has been, a vector for evolution, and can, with discipline, training, faith and commitment, tap into latent inner powers that have seemed supernatural.

Grace, for example. Murphy says that grace, the Buddha nature, Hasidic joy, Hindu moshka, etc, is not a supernatural gift dispensed by a supernatural, external deity for the deserving few, but a natural, ever-present inner reality, equally available to all. Wow!
Imagine, having the ‘blessing’ of grace as a constant reality. How cool, how good! How different our individual lives would be, how much healthier, peaceful, joyous and productive; and society, too.

Grace is one of the extraordinary ‘metanormal’ capacities that evolution is bringing into increasing daily manifestation. Again, we can’t sit back and wait for evolution to do it, but knowing that it’s there for everyone, and then ‘working’ and doing what it takes to allow it to shine through, is quite different and much more empowering than believing that it’s dispensed by some whimsical deity to the faithful few.

In other words, the gift is given, it’s there within each one of us, waiting to be opened. Our purpose is to open it, and the other ‘gifts’, to open it ourselves and help one another open it. Murphy quotes Philip Novak, talking about the Buddha nature as about “not so much on our attaining it, but on our not obstructing its continuous salvific activity…. Far closer to the truth than the notion that grace is absent is that it is always and everywhere present…. We remain blind to the graceful immanence…failing to draw on its power.”