On Turning Inside Out

November 23, 2013
by Michael
comments 8
Course Ideas / Poetry

I work away
in my castle of thought, jolly
as a clam, surrounded by
parchment stacks, withered ledgers,
flat screen monitors speckled
by looping video clips of the past-
(for research purposes)-
key chains full
of memory sticks, key chains full of keys
to foot lockers, desk drawers, leather-bound briefcases,
bulkhead doors, bicycle locks, motor vehicles,
and a big-wheeled red tractor that gurgles when it idles,
plus there are reams of photographs, black and white, Polaroid,
faded colors and faded histories that
require periodic inspection, renewal, and ramification,
gramophone recordings of
lectures given by early 20th century electromagnetical
savants and Eastern philosophers,
piles of discarded answering
machines- a heap of plastic and metal
extrusions growing wires- in which are hidden figments
of a time I used to think about often, and
cassette tapes, hand held or desktop voice recorders, notes
on stacks of legal pads, index cards tacked
into cork boards and white boards with scribbles
dry-aged into permanent artifacts
mounted on a fancy rotating white board rack
like DaVinci would have made.
My chair swivels, glides, rolls, boosts,
dampens, tilts, (groans), and locks.
Bare bulbs don’t flicker overhead because
I have excellent lighting.
In my castle of thought I sort ideas,
link them, wash them out, distress them, recombine them,
sift them, cut them into bits and reassemble the parts
into new configurations,
reconcile them, discard them, yell at them,
dance upon them, stomp on them,
send them away from me,
crush them with baseball bats and iron skillets,
fling years of long work cutting words
out from newspaper sheets and pasting them
into a short story on white construction paper
into the fire along with
a three foot stack of those scrap dung crinkled
processed bleached baked
word-encrusted wood fibers
from print factories in assorted cities whose
once current thoughts are now decades lost.

I am in the business, you might say,
of fabricating meaning.  I-

Wait…!  Shhhh….
Hmmmm…

(Look)

(I have never seen this idea before.)
(Or any like it.)

It has feet with little claws
not made for the smooth surfaces
ingenuity has produced.
Eyes like tiny black marbles that twinkle
and behold me.  A head that swivels.  Wings.
A body that quietly oscillates with
ancestral rhythms passed down
from generation to generation, the looping movement
of a completed story still not written.
It is surrounded by an invisible question.
It is… alive!

It flies!  Around my castle,
under my table, up to the vaulted ceiling,
a line that intersects my chandelier,
a curve unfolding within my archives,
alighting on the top shelf-
a moment of grooming,
a moment of taking in what is,
a chirp to no one, to every one,
and then out, whoosh!
There!
Along the far wall, a missing
stone block, a pixel that is gone forever
from the screen of my perimeter.

I have to say:
I very much want another winged idea to find me.
Next one that comes, I will
put it in the container in my chest,
like the tin man would,
so it can leave its silent question
in me like a ticking revelation
and I can experience the incurable
undoing of ingesting holy dynamite.
As it flies away
I will bask in a fever silence
in a heap on the floor leaning against familiar cold stones
as the smoke pours out of my ears.
Wiley Coyote turned into a blackened skeleton
with two eyes and a mouth
and it was funny.
But I have a suspicion- I think we will turn inside out
and it will be never-ending.  Flying ideas
will never run out.  Flying ideas
will find us forever.  Flying ideas
flying back and forth is who and what we are.

Today I will take a stack of journals
and baseball bats, discarded metal shelves
and the kind of twine I use to roll up
old maps and scrolls, and I will
build a contraption tall enough to stand on
so I can peek through that missing pixel
and see what’s out there…

Something Beyond Thinking Right

November 19, 2013
by Michael
comments 10
Christ / Course Ideas

The Truth is True.  That we can say for sure.  Beyond that, it gets kind of prickly.  Consider, for instance…

…when a being who has latched onto a thought that is out of accord with the Truth is enjoying a period of relative satisfaction, expansion, and accomplishment in the world, it might be noted by some that things are going well, and concluded by others that a general condition of harmony must therefore reign in the innermost sanctums of this being’s life.  After all, we understand the outer world to be an expression, or mirror, of one’s inner thoughts and beliefs.  When, on the other hand, a being who has latched onto a thought that is out of accord with the Truth is enjoying a period of relative poverty, difficulty, and diminishment in the world, it might be noted by some that things are going poorly, and concluded by others that various conditions of discord must reign in the innermost sanctums of this being’s life for the very same reason, e.g. inner thinking is mirrored in outer effects.

I am beginning to think this is bollox, at least in a certain oft-used variation on the theme.  I think the principle is over-simplified in its application, and this leads to distortion of its true meaning or potential.  I need, obviously, to explain why, as I think for many spirituality is thought to offer the promise of an ability to “manifest”, “secret”, or otherwise “bring into being” conditions favorable to our happiness and well being.  In short, the notion exists that spirituality might assist one in exerting a modicum of control over what arises in our world.  Many of us believe and have read and been taught that it is through inner transformation that we transform the world around us.  I subscribe to this viewpoint, but I think it is too often applied in a vacuum with respect to a larger picture or context in which we exist.

The fact that one of two virtually identical persons who are vulnerable to being blown over by the wind is not presently being blown over, and the other, who is caught in a wind storm, is being blown over, does not mean the first is invulnerable and thinking properly about the wind, and the second vulnerable and thinking improperly about the wind.  The fact that one is caught in a wind storm and the other is not, is not the result of blind fate or pure chance or circumstance, but nor is it due to what they were thinking about while eating breakfast.  When we attempt to measure our progress by the yardstick of daily events, I daresay all of us are doomed to come up against a really, really tall speedbump at some point.  They call those walls.

The first difficulty is that many of us retain our right to perceive ourselves as separate beings, separate from one another and separate from the whole, and thus separate from the Truth, or what is, and we try on those terms to implement the whole “bringing into being” proposition by being real peace-loving, straight-thinking separate beings.  Since we can never control or influence what is outside of us, separate beings can never really exert much influence over anything.  To be separate is to be isolated from the only power there really is, which is our unity, or Truth, or Love, or whatever you wish to call that which is precisely and fully what it is regardless of what we choose to label it.

The reason I say all of this is that sometimes we get caught in the wind storm, and we think there must be something for us to take a look at.  Something within ourselves to fix or figure out.  We must have thought the wrong things at breakfast, or when we had that argument, or when we were a child, or whenever.  Other times we are not caught in the wind storm and we think we’re on track.  We may even think we’re thinking the right things, the good things.  We’ll think these two states are different, and what I think I’m beginning to see is that they’re not.

A being who has latched onto a thought out of accord with the Truth can have a good day, or a bad day.  Days lived in separation are but the passage of time, however.  Winning the Super Bowl and spending your first night in a homeless shelter are, at some level, the same.  The beings measuring their progress by the yardstick of daily events might view these two days as radically different.  Christ views them as identical.  Being in the wind storm or not being in the wind storm is not the issue.  Joining as one with the wind storm is our challenge, and joining with each one who is in the storm, and with each one who is not.  This is a tough pill to swallow, but it is starting to make some sense to me.  I am reminded that Jesus says in A Course of Love that he doesn’t really think like we do.  He’s not trying to focus His mind on having good days.  He’s not trying to think the right thoughts to produce more of something He is lacking.  He’s not interpreting any events or conditions as meaning He’s got some work to do on Himself.  He said in A Course of Love that basically His thinking is like a process of discovery, of receiving, of encountering joyous surprises.

Our world could be such a world.  In unity.  In unity, I daresay the wind would no longer lie outside of us, and thus a type of harmony seldom glimpsed or understood would reign.  If we experienced unity with the wind, we still wouldn’t control it.  We wouldn’t turn it off or on at our whim.  We wouldn’t measure our progress by what it did or didn’t do.  We would simply want the same things as the wind.  There would be things that we, and the wind, wanted to become together, and we would live in a never-ending process of discovering and becoming those things.  I don’t think it is more complex than that, but I don’t know how to get from here to there.  If I lived in the Phillipines I would have been blown around like everyone else.  I think if I had gone into the reactor at Fukushima I would have gotten sick, too.  This frightens us, and makes us want to be special so we can protect ourselves- so we can be in the right place at the right time through our correct thinking, but this very desire isolates us from transcending the game of separateness and all of its attending fragility, fate, chance, and distorted powers.

In A Course of Love Jesus encourages us to develop a relationship with the unknown.  That way it can speak to us.  I think He is onto something.  Do you see what I mean?

Looking Beyond Meaninglessness

November 16, 2013
by Michael
comments 8
Christ / Course Ideas

For nearly a fortnight this little outpost in the electronic landscape has been a purveyor of radio silence- a dot of ink indistinguishable from the backdrop of the night sky.  Only an expert in this tiny slice of the night sky would have noticed the absence of a star in the heavens, the one eclipsed by my corpuscle blot of quiet.  Jesus, for instance, standing in a meadow beneath the night sky, observing the vast, banded glow of the Milky Way, would notice this miniscule sign, and then put on the headphones that listen to the bug we installed together on the inner wall of my heart.

There He would hear the following signal: sleep-sleep-work-sleep-work-work-work-sleep-sleep-work-sleep-sleep-work-work…  He would understand.  This is what a fortnight spent with a sinus infection sounds like on the inside.

He would also understand the questions the changing seasons of our lives generate- the questions fostered by both the short term unpredictabilities and the longer-term weathering of time.  And He would recognize these are both but cover stories for the still deeper transformation unfolding in our hearts.

One of our deepest questions is: how do we relate the two seemingly real threads?  How do we correlate the external whorling to the inner experience of being?  When the inner warmth wanes, and we find ourselves walking (seemingly alone) on a narrow street punctuated by the sputter of spent lamps and streaking, hungry cats, how do we get the inner glow back?  When the inner fire is strong, how could the external whorling not have settled down?

Unexpected difficulties foster questions of causation.  A nuisance illness begs the question: if my practice cannot control this, how futile is it really, as a defense against the things I really fear?  Has something gone wrong?  You see, having recognized that the world as we know it is attended by suffering that cannot be explained or solved by rational dialogue, by committee or expert, by anything we know about, (other than Love), my strongest feeling- the type of feeling that comes to your rescue when you are suddenly confronted by danger, the type of feeling that means surely an archangel has entered the moment you inhabit with sublime power- is that Love is the only plausible solution.  This is the principle to which I return, like a ball thrown periodically into the air.  If this doesn’t work… then what?

An unexpected and unwelcome whorling in our lives begs the question: is Love really working?  I confess having succumbed briefly to the notion that such a question deserves an answer.  It didn’t stay with me long this round, and the truth is that it doesn’t deserve an answer.  The part of us that begs this question doesn’t need to be treated as an equal.  This is our core difficulty: we treat nothing at all as an equal to Everything.  We haven’t yet fully given up our own interpretations…  The unwelcome sort of unpredictability in our living- as opposed to the joyous, creative unpredictability of discovery- is symptomatic of the places within us where we still carry this question: what if Love doesn’t work for this type of problem?  All the weight we carry in our lives is in the form of this uncertainty.

This uncertainty interrupts the correlation between the inner and outer worlds.  It is like static on the line that binds one to the other.  While we entertain this question, the external whorling is cut off from the cause within us, free to evolve as if under the direction of some foreign power.  But there is no foreign power.  Meaninglessness arises when we assign the whorling a cause it doesn’t possess, and thus isolate ourselves from meaning.  So long as we are willing to entertain the question, “what if Love doesn’t work for this type of thing?” we will experience the whorling results of meaninglessness.

It is one thing to forgive this question when the offending symptom is a ramified head cold, a harsh word, a broken cell phone, or a fender bender, but when it is a typhoon, a flood, the loss of a loved one, a war, or a shattered economy it seems more difficult to look past meaningless and back into Meaning.

My experience is that this Love is a feeling within us that is larger than the whole world.  I have never encountered a circumstance into which it couldn’t quietly flood, if I would but invite it.  Sometimes offering this invitation is easier said than done.  Yet Love waits patiently for our return, knowing there is really nowhere else for us to go.  Moment-to-moment we give ourselves back to it.  As we do, we wonder if anything is happening.  All this looking for evidence of progress- it is time to give that back to Love as well…

A Dangling Becoming

November 2, 2013
by Michael
comments 6
Christ / Poetry

I cling yet to the known,
no longer panicked, but
bemused by the early
warning signs of my precipitous departure,
dangling auspiciously
over the side of this ledge,
fingers clenching the last tufts of
what has been
as I hang in a state of
white-knuckled longing
for what will be,
waving gently
to and fro
over all of space
like a piñata
awaiting the strike
of some holy timber.

This reluctance
to all out surrender,
to relinquishing my grip
on what might have been,
to accepting all of what is,
is the last fear
any of us will ever face.

I think
the thing to do is relax-
to close my eyes and
notice the clouds swimming past
above and
now
below me,
to savor the inevitability
of my present position:
this final reenactment of
the separated man’s
inherent insolvency.

Near the end, we
all become this living question:
why be afraid of
what cannot be avoided?
Then we become the answer.

I am a bullet
Love has chambered
into Her gun.
She awaits but a nod
and the trigger will be pulled.
When the holy timber
strikes me, there will be Light-
an incandescence,
a catching fire,
and as the shell I was
is discarded-
the piñata torn open-
the cocoon split asunder-
the stillness inside
will be released from its prison,
and take flight.

We don’t know where Love
is aiming Her gun, but
it doesn’t matter:
butterflies don’t fly straight anyway, and plus
I know you will catch me.

Two Beings on a Wire

October 27, 2013
by Michael
comments 8
Poetry

Wings aflutter,
like a curious dart
connecting invisible dots
across the sky,
a collage of
frozen frames- a beak,
a wingtip, an eye-
excerpted from whirling Possibility,
a solitary thrush
comes in for a landing
on a crackling braid of steel,
a stranded iron dance hall
populated by troupe after troupe
of Hertzian dervishes,
a fire brigade of
magnetic flowers
opening, blooming, and then
collapsing
into electric echoes.

Twenty stories above the desert floor,
head cocked and waiting,
grooves in the live wire clutched
in its tiny talons,
our thrush watches
the approach of another.

The sun melts onto the horizon
like a scoop of volcanic ice cream
softening at the edges, seeping
along the contours of the landscape
in glowing rivulets.

Together, they listen.
Deep in the wire,
down through its flowers,
past the roots and into its marrow,
are the harmonics of thoughts.
The pulsating wire is a conductor
connector
convergence-
traversing cities and towns,
routed in and out of homes, through rooms,
closets and kitchens, humming
in silent factories, postal offices,
server rooms, lighting panels, and
desktop lamps, its fruits plucked
and carried off in micro devices
that leave full and return hungry,
and always down past the roots
and into its marrow there gather
the whispers that leak from human hearts.
Wavelets of desire, of hope, of doubt,
of wonder, joy, and sorrow-
caught, received, accepted, taken in
and down,
into, within, along the buzzing channel,
ushered by troupe after troupe
of watchful electric dervishes they pass
directionless beneath the roots
of endless flowers
until they shunt down wires
sunken down, deep, into the earth.

Every memory, feeling, question,
impression, every quantum
drop
bead
of awareness-
is grounded.

The first thrush (Hafiz)
leaps into the air.
The second thrush (Rumi)
plunges forward into a diving swoop.

Beings such as these don’t need to sit
on a live wire to get the evening’s news,
but,
it is so delicious to sit with a friend,
to leap into the air and fly,
to be motionless, even as you are borne along
by the never-ending current of Life.

The First Step…

October 26, 2013
by Michael
comments 10
Christ / Course Ideas

The first step in accepting your True nature is to look up from what you are doing, to disengage from the volition that you have become, to take one step back from the thread of responsibility and longing to which you are responding, and consider that the space into which you have stepped is more real, more alive, and more “you” than any place you have previously occupied.  There is no encounter or situation in space and time from which you could not successfully conduct this experiment.  This consistency ought to tell us something, keeping in mind that only the Truth is wholly consistent.

The first step in accepting your True nature is to be wounded by Love, for Love cannot wound and the Truth cannot attack.  What is pierced is the veil of falsehood to which we have assigned the mantle “reality”.  This is not a wound that will heal, for it is not a wound at all, but a point of contact with Reality.  Anything that contacts Reality that is not of Reality ceases altogether in its apparent effects.  The pain of this wound is the contrast, immediately felt, between the fullness offered by Reality and the emptiness- previously taken to be an acceptable condition- of your former condition.  It is not the pain of Love, but the pain of having once lost contact with Love, now revealed.  One point of contact with Reality is sufficient to blow your cover, and end your futile ruse forever, and endings can be sad.  This one is not.  It is not an ending at all.

The first step in accepting your True nature is to consider that it is possible to have a True nature and still be you.  Reluctance to accept your True nature is predicated on the false premise that if you did, you would no longer be you.  Nothing could be farther from the Truth than the self who suspects that acceptance of the Truth will be its downfall.  The only self that will be annihilated is the one that never was.  You have nothing to fear in such encounters, for the “you” you would give your very life to keep, is your True nature.  It is who you are.

The first step in accepting your True nature is to acknowledge that what is not working doesn’t work.  Your mind, not to be outdone, will ask if there is a way that does work, and if you are sincere in your questioning and patient in your listening you will find yourself inexplicably becoming aware of that which works without working at all.  You see, working is not the way, for the Truth requires no mechanisms or maintenance or assembly- indeed, no means at all.  Only those things which are made are the product of careful processes or the outcomes of stepwise evolution, and the Truth was not made at all.  Neither were you.  What isn’t working is the self who is working on itself in order to become True.  It is too late for that.

The first step in accepting your True nature is to observe the True nature of someone else.  In doing so, you will immediately recognize that there cannot, by virtue of the nature of Truth, be more than one Truth.  You will discover that you are True even as another is True, and that all are True together.  You may still enjoy fishing, or painting, or working on the metallic innards of motor vehicles, even as another does not, but this will no longer mean that you are different.

There are no second steps, for inevitability precedes even the first.

Not a Choice At All…

October 23, 2013
by Michael
comments 13
Christ / Course Ideas

Sometimes we lose sight of the sheer unprecedentedness of our awareness.  We are aware.  It’s a worthy subject of reflection.  Some would say, perhaps, that at one point in “time” there was no such thing as awareness, and somewhere along the way, there was.  Thinking this way causes my neurons to enter states of quantum superposition… and get stuck.  I can imagine unawareness, somehow.  As if it existed, and maybe still exists.  I know that seems an oxymoron, but I daresay most all of us can all relate to the human experience of being born- of a first memory.  A beginning.

At some point, for the vast majority of us, there is a discontinuity we feel at the very onset of whatever we think we are right now, that looks and tastes a whole lot like emptiness.  Out of nothing at all, seemingly, there came something.

(Has every possible form of awareness been aware already?  Or are we making this up as we go?  I think there is something limitless and perhaps open-ended about this whole Creation gig.  Another subject…)

Another one that makes my neurons go all into rapt catatonia is the answer that eventually comes to a question about Creation that goes something like this: why is it ultimately good?  That’s a half-hearted way of stepping up to the plate and saying, is Creation even good in the first place?

I mean, God is great and loving and wise and powerful, but… was that a choice?  Leaving aside for a moment the question about whether my belief in God is even valid, the question about whether or not God had a choice leads to corollaries like… did God have a bad attitude and create a buhjillion awful universes before the systematic genius logician in him finally realized there were certain principles, the adherence to which would provide the best possible outcomes?  Did God discover Love?  If so, did it exist prior to that Discovery?

These are the questions of a separated mind, by the way.  They are the questions of a mind that hasn’t yet accepted the inevitability of the Truth within it.  Such minds think like this all the time.  They think, the cookie could crumble in any direction here folks.  Haven’t you read the story of Schroedinger’s Cat?  The answer you’ve been waiting for, however, the one that causes my brain to enter previously unmapped states, is that there was never, ever, ever, ever a moment in which Love began, or was invented.  There was never a little bit of awareness that went up to the drawing board and flow-charted or sketched up a new invention called Love.  There was never an Act of Congress that said, Yup.  Good one.  We’ll be that from now on.

Never.  Love is not the product of design.

If your brain is not growing warm, you may not be with me yet.  Let’s restate the Truth in multiple forms that mean the same thing for a few sentences.  Love exists and always has existed and you can’t reach back and find that point of Beginning for Love like you can your individual personality.  Love never didn’t exist.  The possibility of Not Love never existed, and was never subsequently overcome by Love.

Another way to say this: Love is not the product of a choice.  That always puts my neurons into auto-de-fibrillation.

How great is that!?  We can’t even stick that one in our heads and reflect on it.  Not really.  You get vertigo, feel like you’re going to pass out, and then you get serious about having your blood pressure checked.  Snap!  That fast.

Love is not the product of a choice.

That means it’s Real with a capital R.  Everything that is the product of choice is flimsy.  We know that.  But Love is not the product of choice.  And this Christ business?  It’s about accepting this realization, and allowing it to be the foundation of who we are.  I think this is why Jesus said in both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love words to the effect that “there is nothing we need to do”.  Love is.  We exist.  We are Love.  We can’t do anything to make this so.  We can’t do anything to unmake this.  We can entertain beliefs to the contrary, and simmer in their effects in this temporal experience, but those experiences don’t change the fact that Love is.

Well, yeah, but God didn’t have to come up with you or I did She?  Maybe Love is real, but maybe we’re just temporary figments…  What can be made can be unmade, no?  Maybe we’ll just dissolve back into nothingness…  This is how beings who haven’t accepted the inevitability of the Truth within delay its acceptance.

(Stop it.)

(You’re aware, aren’t you?)

(Sometimes we lose sight of the sheer unprecedentedness of our awareness.)

(Sometimes we lost sight of the fact that Love is without precedent.  It is a commonality worth reflecting upon.  May your neurons quiver in indeterminate states of grace.)

The End.

Boyhood Ontology and the Promise of Salvation

October 19, 2013
by Michael
comments 5
Christ / Course Ideas

Time capsules are intriguing.  Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it.  Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess (for some) and lent itself to a slightly more sedated pack of third graders in the afternoon’s spelling lesson, but all in all it was a curious experience worth having.   I’ve been party to one or two of these events, but have never quite remained sufficiently in the loop to know if any of the nuts we squirreled away were ever uncovered.

Time capsules of the mind, now… those are an entirely different phenomenon.  I can remember thinking as a boy- what will I be like when I’m eighteen?  What about when I’m thirty!?  That was forever away…  I can remember distinctly hoping my thirty year old self would look back and remember that moment, so we could connect the loop- leap across that gap in our own little game of timelessness.  I’m not sure I looked up at the precise moment, but I remember setting a few traps like that in time, and undoubtedly have sprung a few.  Sometimes, if I don’t have a good science fiction book handy, I imagine my current self setting little time bombs for that little boy.  Retroactive.  From the future to the past.  That one leaves you a little woozy.  But, seriously, if it works, it surely works in both directions…

When that second grade you zings off that missal to your thirty year old self, it truly feels like you’re writing to someone who is alive in that moment- you, but not you.  Me, but not me.   (Is this what it means to experience being as Christ?  As the Buddha?  As a poet in Shiraz inscribing echoes of Love onto parchment?  To be and to not be all beings?)

I distinctly remember a moment when I was standing on the cracked concrete sidewalk, in the cool night air of winter, scanning the heavens for Orion’s Belt, and thinking to myself- I just have to be good for about eighty years, plus or minus, and if I can pull it off, I’ll probably get into Heaven, and then I can relax.  Whatever comes, I told myself, I can endure it.  I have to.  This was not just a stray thought.  This was a young mind doing its best to assess the situation, buck up, and face reality.  Such a trip.  If you were raised Catholic, and you somehow- however this stuff happens- had a proclivity to acknowledge the existence of something greater than the breadth and depth of your individual personality, this is the position in which you would find yourself.

Luckily, I had parents who had already questioned the notion that an enjoyable eternity was only the province of the few, or the select, elect, whatever- and they disabused me of the belief that any shortfalls would leave a permanent scar, or that a loving God would set up a game with rules such as this and then send the sheep to slaughter, thus lifting the immediate pressure that seemed to be part and parcel of being.  (Hey, pressure is pressure.  As Dr. Seuss had long established through my childhood Seussian character of choice, the elephant Horton, a consciousness is a consciousness, no matter how small…)

Later, however, I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t “learn” everything one “needed” to learn, in lieu of the one strike rule, I could have another life- as many as it took, actually- to get things right.  This, as it turns out, was simply another form of the original ontological conundrum with which I had previously grappled, because, you see, I wasn’t all that interested in coming back.  Laying on my bed in the mid-80’s, sweating, hearing the city’s diverse sirens calling to the night, and wondering what in the hell was going to prevent the Russians from launching their nukes, had left me somewhat less than impressed with this world.

I was back to square one.  I need to get this right the first time, or else I’ll have to start over, and what if I don’t start the next life with any more knowledge or wherewithal than I started this one?  Odds are, I’ll backslide.  All things considered, I had a pretty good start this time.  Childhood in a middle class American family.  No domestic abuse.  I need to make this happen now…  I’ll undoubtedly not be so fortunate the next time.  I know enough statistics to have figured that one out.  (This logic is flawed, so don’t buy it, BTW.)  (Here you can see the desperate need for time capsules that somehow transcend the single life.)

And so, these layers of misperception and insanity are still being shed.  The Course in Miracles was tremendously helpful to me in discerning truth from illusion, and reality from unreality, but it is quite possible to read the Course in a way that suggests that, given that Reality is someplace other than this world we’re in now, this life I have and know here is still second best to something else.  And that’s sorta’ what I did.  Pretty much.  (Yup.)  This life was good in as much as it could be used to learn peaceful ways of getting out of it forever.

This world… is a problem…  That’s an undercurrent that runs through all of this.

Now I’m coming to question this belief.  I’m questioning the belief that this world is a second best scenario.  (I cheated and read A Course of Love, so it’s not like I walked out into the desert and relied solely on a batch of ontological gedanken experiments to come to this conclusion.)  True, it’s not Reality, but it’s something Reality cooked up.  I’m not talking about the world as it lives in our misperception, but the world as it could be as a living expression of our holiness.  (There is a difference.)  The Word wants to be made flesh.  The Word wants to be heard.  I’m starting to consider that one’s ability to view the world as a first best way to express what lives within us, is in some way a litmus test for one’s ability to see with the vision of Christ.

I’m not saying, at all, that the world is the be all end all.  But once one discovers what is True, and that the world isn’t needed to make the Truth true, or me Me, or you You- once one frees the world of all the pressure that has been put on it to be Reality- it is freed of the chains that bound it.  It is free to be remade.  It is free to be what it was originally intended- the miracle of Love in motion.  To set the world and ourselves free, we have to see Reality as Reality, and the world as the world.  And when we perceive correctly, the world is no longer a place to be feared, no longer a place to endured, no longer a place sure to deliver nearly unbearable heaps of suffering and difficulty.  It will be the place… where we will tell each other the story of who we really are…

As I inch towards full acceptance of this grace that is daily extended to me, and to us, I am unlearning a core belief that has been at work within me since I was a small boy, that there is something wrong, or something that could go wrong, and that I’ve got to make something of myself to avoid this fate.

Superposition

October 16, 2013
by Michael
comments 7
Christ / Poetry

You…
Is that you?
Inside of me?
I can feel you
passing from one world to the next,
the way the sun passes between the days,
with shadows fleeing from the brilliance.
I go about my day.  You go about yours.
We are entangled without intersection.
What do you call this superposition?

I looked but you were gone.
I saw moonlight beaming on a field of curled grass
and a wooden hatch-
another one of your invitations-
an outcropping in a buttery-colored quiet
whose suggestive features annulled my future.
This image-
it was the best my mind could fashion
of the emptiness into which you plunge.

I want to be destitute, like you,
weightless, so hollow I can
float through history, so weak
I can hold but one moment-
the One with all of us in it.

You live in between us,
in worlds with no shape or depth
that have no end.  No beginning.
I am a cave in which you dream,
the wall on which you paint.
I am your aftertaste.

I can feel you inside, perpetually vanishing.
But you must have been here to depart.

I discovered
my heart is an answering machine,
a magnetized recording of your Presence.
I’ve saved all your messages.
I press Play, and listen to hour after hour of silence-
weeping.  You never hang up.
Lifetimes pass as I listen,
poised on the brink of your Meaning.
What do you call this superposition?

You press against me like the wind against a sail.
Where are we going?
Please… carry me across this sea.

Is that you?

Obstacles to Choosing Love

October 12, 2013
by Michael
comments 6
Christ / Course Ideas

One of the more challenging topics for me to write about recently was the topic of suffering, and the idea that what Jesus describes as “the choice of love” can end suffering.  It was challenging because I could anticipate resistance to this idea, even as I wrote about it.  I could anticipate potentially alienating a reader or two, (and when you have three readers, all of whom you value dearly, this is indeed a risk), because I can see why this notion could be controversial.  It is controversial even inside of my own self, but in being so, it feels like the frontier where uncertainty and mystery are slowly doing their work of unveiling new understanding.

Because the topic generated some wonderful dialogue, and because the dialogue really gave me a chance to examine my thoughts and beliefs on the notion with added depth, I would like to return to it.  I’d like to say that it is not my goal with this blog to say outlandish things for the sake of doing so, or to pretend I’ve got it all figured out.  I don’t.  However, it is my intent to explore concepts that ring my heart like a bell, and cause me to take notice and closely examine what I’m thinking, what I’m thinking that I’m thinking, and what those inescapable heart twinges are trying to tell me that I’m actually thinking.

This notion of ending suffering by choosing love is one of them.  It needs more room to breathe within me.  It requires more exploration.

I think this topic is controversial because it is easy to experience as being threatening.  Why is that?  Two things are obvious to anyone who has ever inhabited this planet and possessed an awareness of self and other: one, we’ve seen people in the world we know are suffering or who have suffered terribly, and two, we’ve suffered and/or are suffering ourselves to whatever degree we care to admit.  Let me add one corollary: many, if not all of us, at some level are doing our best to make choices that limit our suffering as well as the suffering of others.

So, the notion that a choice of love could eliminate suffering is threatening because it implies that there is something I could have done to reduce the suffering of myself and others, which I haven’t done yet, and therefore, I’ve screwed up- in fact, am arguably screwing up right now- and it also implies that I must not have made some sort of choice of love in the past, and I know I’ve been doing my best to be a loving person.  THAT is one they can’t take away from me.

I think a great starting point for digging further is to take the threat away from this questioning, so we can be truly open to what emerges.  Jesus offers repeated advice in A Course in Miracles we’d do well to heed in moments like this.  One piece of advice goes like this: never be afraid to correct a simple error in perception when it is blocking your view of something great and glorious.  We think errors mean something- that they define us, that they’re real and lasting and must be offset by paying a price.  We hold others accountable for paying this price when (in our judgment) they’ve screwed up, and (if we’re a good person of course), we pay our dues when we’ve screwed up to even up the score.  Jesus doesn’t buy any of that logic.  None.  Zip.  Zero.

He says, look at it this way: you were incorrect.  That’s not so bad.  If you had been correct, your world would be miserable, indeed.  But because you don’t get to decide these things, and God already decided for you that you are perfect and exist forever in a state of grace, that is where you exist.  You can keep pretending you don’t, in the effort to avoid being wrong, in order to prove you were right, but you just keep living an illusion as a result, and enjoying all the rights and privileges associated with it- like suffering, separation, nuclear disasters, and a world fit for a tragic rewrite of Catch 22.  Or… you could accept that you simply made a mistake.  No big deal.  No harm, no foul.  Just start the engine before you try and drive off next time.  You’ll get there faster, and you probably won’t even swear once.  Accepting correction is not admitting we’ve been wrong…  Right and wrong are not part of this conversation…

With the threat of being wrong put aside momentarily, some obvious questions arise for me.  Could the choice of love really eliminate suffering?  If so, how?  And if there’s an answer to that question, why haven’t I done it!?  And what about everyone else?  What good is it to be free of one’s suffering, if all the people we love will still be in harm’s way?  It doesn’t seem right or fair to be blissed out while major segments of the world are going down in flames.  THAT is surely selfish…

(Aha!)

It’s no good to be free of suffering by ourselves, is it…  I agree.  This idea, however, that we could be free of suffering, yet separate from others, is a wholly distorted bit of logic.  We suffer because of separation.  There is no such thing as being free of suffering and being alone or separate from anything.  This is the message of Christ: return to your Home, return to Love, return to your Self, return to Unity…  Abandon separation…  This idea that we could somehow accept an end to suffering, by choosing Love, but the price we’d have to pay would be abandoning those we love, is the logic of the insane.  Our logic.  I think this type of thinking prevents us from really making a choice of love.

There are some related thought forms that also keep us rooted in place, and one in particular that Jesus points out in both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love: specialness.  We may believe we have found love in particular forms, in particular relationships, in particular settings or hobbies, or in particular identity-building endeavors.  We’re afraid love will demand that we give up everything we’ve learned and value, because we sense, I think, at some level that this choice of love really does have the power to change everything.  We’re afraid of change, and afraid of losing the few precious manifestations of what we call love that we have managed to find and hold onto in this mad world.

So this choice is daunting…

We’re afraid it will isolate us.  We’re afraid it will leave us in an even worse condition of lack.  We’re afraid it will cost us the few shreds of meaning we’ve managed to find in this world.  And we’re afraid there’s no going back.  Better the devil we know…

But this choice of Love is nothing like we fear.  It is not at all about loss or isolation of any kind.  Love asks for no sacrifices or austerities.  Jesus is one example of the true nature and power of this choice.  He did not shrink in making this choice with the whole of his being…  He is alive today- right now- in any and all hearts who would have him.  He is distant from no one.  As a man, he could be in the room with a few persons at a time.  As Love, he is everywhere he is called in an instant.  The choice of love is not a choice to abandon or leave behind.  It is a choice to embrace all…  And many of us know others we would speak of in similar terms- beings to whom we call who are available to answer.

All those shreds of meaning to which we cling, those elements of our lives that make us special, they don’t build us up.  They shrink us down.  They limit and constrain us.  They keep us living in the same house as our suffering.  They prevent us from choosing Love, and sharing it with everyone, forever…

To choose to be free of suffering is not to walk away, or leave behind, but to usher in, and join together.  To undo falsehood.  To accept what is.  To live by what is real, joined with all.  The miracle, I think, is that this isn’t a choice any of us can make alone…  It seems that way, perhaps, while we are still on the near side of it, but we don’t get to decide the nature of what lies on the far side.  Only God does.  Let us be grateful for that…