To know the Self, is to know everything. To comprehend miracles, is to be set free. To know Christ, is to know everyone. Where, then, to start? In an effort to adopt a right-side up approach from the get go, the End strikes me as the logical place to start. After all, it is an End which the Course (A Course in Miracles) assures us is the Beginning.
That Begending is a state of Knowledge. Knowledge does not require and in fact trascends belief. It is a state of completion, and yet of constantly becoming. It is a state in which the perception of needs is absent, and yet fulfillment is continuous. It is a state of Peace, and Truth, and Love. Consider this: Paul Pierce is not the only participant in this state who goes by the moniker the Truth. We all do, actually. (We just all spell it differently.)
The Course came to be precisely because the above description isn’t exactly jiving with the reality we perceive on a regular basis. It was given to help us get back there; actually, to remind us that we never left, we just thought we did. And I quote, “The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you are forever. It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed.” (T-8,VI, 9.6-7)
Uhh… Obviously.
So, if we’re ignorant to and not experiencing all the rights and privileges of the Knowledgeable, but we’ve never really left or changed, what’s this in between state? Is there something wrong with us? What’s this kryptonite-infused world outside of the Begending and how did we get here?
First, I think it is important to understand that just because you can look outside your window and see a tree, or a taxi cab, or a guard shack, or an ocean, doesn’t mean you’re in a place other than the Begending. The Begending is a state of being, and being is “a state in which the mind is in communication with everything that is real.” (T-4, VII, 4.4)
The fact that your physical eyeball receives photons bouncing off of a physical tree and translates them into signals that your brain manipulates does not imply that you have stepped away from the Begending. The experiencing of any lack whatsoever, does. Experiencing the sensations of being without Love, of being alone, of needing to protect something you hold dear, of being frightened, or of needing to ‘use’ a set of circumstances to your advantage, do.
We’re not outside of the Begending; we’re just temporarily having an experience that feels like we are. The Course describes this loss of connection as follows, “The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication.” (T-6, IV, 12.5)
We’ve simply lost touch with the heartbeat signal of Creation, of the Begending. Because being is a state in which the mind is in communication with everything that is real, and we have ginned up the experience of having dropped off the communication grid shared by all real things- e.g. Reality- we’ve naturally found ourselves quite at a loss to discern the real from the unreal. We can’t remember what anything means, or what its for. We’re not even sure what we’re for. That, my friends, is an awkward and quite painful place to be.
So, we’ve been makin’ it up!
We have been trying, in other words, to supply of our own volition that which in the Begending is always supplied for us, effortlessly and continuously: Knowledge. We’ve made great efforts to take over sole responsibility for deciding who we are and what the world is, to supply a definition for reality and to fill in that gaping void that opened up when we dropped off the grid. In short, we have concocted an entire thought system, logical and consistent in every way, with the one minor caveat being that its starting point is not the Truth.
Other than that, great job folks.
We’ve really outdone ourselves. Caught Creation with its pants down. Pulled a fast one. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo! Only problem is, we’re also the ones suffering, needlessly, for prolonging a choice that makes no sense. There’s only room in Reality for one Reality, and deep down we kind of know that. Not to mention, we’re pretty well boxed in over here by fear in myriad forms, unfulfilled longing, a fiscal cliff, the spectre of death, loss of loved ones, a barrage of experts, and quite possibly eternal annihilation. Well, who said there wouldn’t be a few hidden costs associated with being right? So what!?
So, that’s the harrowing pickle in which we experience ourselves. Apparently cut off. Quite possibly to blame. The victim of chance and circumstance. The heroes of our world. No map. Taking charge. Kicking ass. Drowning. Some good days, some bad. Hoping against all hope. Righteous. Forsaken. Sick. Healed. Champions and Losers. Embroiled.
The saving grace is that we are all wrong about our own Private Idaho’s. About a lot of things actually. We simply need to get our antennae back online and patch back in to Reality. Shoot up a flare. Cry uncle. Something. The Holy Spirit will work with whatever we give it.
Easy, right? Well, the 650-odd pages of the Course’s Text suggest there may be more to this than selecting which condiments you’d like on your sandwich. The way back, according to the Course, is an unlearning, or a forgetting, of the worldview we have taught ourselves. This journey without distance is an unwinding of an entire system of thought we have been developing over eons of time- our pride and joy!- that requires allowing false images of ourselves to be dissolved, that requires the relinquishment of judgment and the need to be right, that requires, in the end, that we make a choice for unity and peace, in order to end conflict and separation.
In short, this isn’t slapping a new coat of paint over the previous. This isn’t putting one more book on the shelf next to all the others. This isn’t about doing the most ‘good’ in the world. There are no diplomas to be obtained, forever vouchsafing our accomplishment should anyone call it to question. This cannot be faked, or put on for the evening and dry cleaned. The journey home to Knowledge is nothing short of a systematic, gentle, unequivocal, stepwise dismantling of everything we thought we knew. To make room for the Truth.
“The Holy Spirit, seeing where you are but knowing you are elsewhere, begins His lesson in simplicity with the fundamental teaching that truth is true. This is the hardest lesson you will ever learn, and in the end the only one.” (T-14, II, 2.1-2)
We resist, because we have taught ourselves that independence is far superior to unity, because we fear losing the self that we have worked so hard to make, because some things just cannot be forgiven, because we fear being tricked, because we doubt each other, because some people-places-times-abilities we have declared as special and kept for ourselves.
The Truth is true. We are forever integral, necessary, perfect and perfectly unique extensions of the timeless unfolding of Love that is the Begending.
And so, a blog begins.
Embracing Forever 