Mari’s Blog
Beloved Companions
I don’t get the impression that Jesus is going to suddenly appear in the clouds and take over the world and thus solve all our problems. Jesus is depending on us to work out the details as we create the new world. The people beyond ego with truly open hearts are like yeast, we have now to saturate the world and convert it with nothing but our love. Dr. Monte Page (from an article entitled, ACIM, ACOL and the Second Coming.)
A few weeks ago I sent an email to Joyce Page, wife of Monte Page, a retired professor who wrote the first ever review of ACOL as an ACIM sequel. He had Parkinson’s disease and no longer used email or could read much, so I wanted him to know he could listen to the audio of A Course of Love. Joyce replied, telling me that he had died earlier this year, and that she’d thought to tell me but then it skipped her mind. Yesterday, I received a promised copy of his obituary and a second article he’d prepared but not published.
I sat with it yesterday, reminiscing about how I “knew” Monte, a relationship carried on solely through writing, dating back about ten years. I remember that he sent me the story of his life, a huge thing like a ream of typing paper bound with a spiral. I wonder what I did with it and if I’ll find it as I sort out the corners of my life. I can remember very little of it. A young man…doing a young man’s seeking. That’s what I remember. And that it touched me.
As I fold these items back into their envelope, I feel the yen to write to Ross, a New Zealander living in Vietnam with whom I’ve shared writing in a much more intense way for about six or seven years. Both he and Monte contacted me because of A Course of Love. Over the years there have been many contacts, but only a few women and men who’ve been as close—and with each it’s at least partially because we share a love of writing.
I get on my laptop and tell Ross about Monte and how amazing I find it that his wife thought of me at all. I never met either of them. Seeing his picture with his obituary, Monte looks nothing like I imagined. I would have guessed him to be bald and tidy, straight as a fence post, dignified and scholarly. But he has a shock of white hair, full beard, gleaming forehead, pear-shaped face and square teeth visible in a very friendly smile. I recall that one of his students, fond of him but out of touch, wrote me to ask how to reach him. My reflection on Monte fills me with appreciation, which is why I suddenly must write Ross before my day gets going. I need to share how the feeling of appreciation extends to him—before anything else gets in the way.
Later, coming home from church and dinner with my mom, I pull the car into the garage, walk down the driveway, and pick up the mail. There is a letter from the man I always refer to as “my poet friend Elliott….” I am so happy to get it. With him, too, years and years of writing, many letters in many envelopes. Many poems. A box of our correspondence in a desk drawer in the cabin; treasures. Not just the letters in the box, but the companionship. I find my notepad, still filled with notes from New York and lists checked off. I turn to a blank page and, pen in hand, go sit outside in the cool of the evening to read and to write.
That was yesterday. I arrive in the cabin this morning with the intent to share from Monte’s article. There is another blazing sun on the rise. I plug in the percolator and sit with my back in the corner, facing away from the sun, finding myself pulled, instead, into an exploration of companionship. It’s what I have in these friends, what I desire to offer, what I feel when I read ACOL and other favorite books—journals particularly. I know what I mean by companion, but can I describe it? What is it?
I turn from my table and reach back to the top drawer of my desk, drawing out my dictionary.
companio, literally bread fellow—he who eats of the same bread, com-with, plus bread. companion: a person who accompanies another
Next I look up accompany
To accompany means to be together with a companion and usually connotes equality of relationship
What, I wonder, does my Course say about being a companion? I do a search in A Course of Love.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow:
You travel lightly now where before you walked in chains. You travel now with a companion who knows you as you are and would show your Self to you. C9.9
I sit. Stunned. This is what Jesus has been to me. How could I have forgotten that he refers to himself in this way, or what he says. This is it: a companion knows you as you are and shows yourself to you. And yes, how perfect. A companion snaps your chains and lightens your load.
How do companions do this incredible thing they do?
I have “The Intimate Merton” nearby. I pick it up. My eyes drift over a page written in June, 1966:
The old life is habit that no longer exits…
I went to bed like a good little monk at eight o’clock…
I sit on the porch and deliberately refuse to rationalize anything…
I kneel down by the bed and look up at the icon…
Solitude as act: the reason no one really understands solitude…
In his journals Merton is like me, a human being living his life; being, sensing, feeling, thoughtful. As he shares himself with me, he shares myself with me. He accompanies me. In knowing him, I know myself. I share in the common “condition” of humanity and its quest to surpass itself, and I observe the ordinary becoming extraordinary.
Monte, like myself and many others, found companionship of this sort with Jesus through A Course of Love. Jesus, in being the ultimate companion is like a “person” who you can relate to and hang out with and discover truth with, someone who talks and listens too, and who put it all in a book that you can’t forget and can’t remember, so that each time it can be like a letter from a friend, a surprise, a visit, a dialogue.
In his unpublished article, Monte Page begins by talking of the second coming of Christ. He quotes ACIM as anticipating this second coming without fear and saying, “the second coming is merely the correction of mistakes and the restoration of sanity” and that it “enjoins us to pray that the second coming will be soon.” Then he says, “The second coming is happening now right before our eyes.” He speaks of ACOL announcing the end of the time of the Holy Spirit and that we have entered “the Time of Christ; the time when many will recognize their nature as Christ.”
Christ is the goal of human evolution. We are at the dawn of something really new; a shift in the level of our collective consciousness that will transform the world.
Moving out of the time of the Holy Spirit to the Time of Christ, is about this human evolution. As we leave the time of teaching and learning, we discover many new gifts. I feel that the one that is going to continue to surprise me the most, and be one of the most pleasing, is this gift of companionship and the many ways in which it comes. Companions make me feel so damn lucky!
(With love and gratitude to Monte M. Page, emeritus professor of psychology, University of Nebraska, en-souled human, husband, father, and companion.)
Creating and re-creating
“Who is this “I” who writes?”, Joyce Carol Oates
It was Friday night when this “I” who writes began to form a blog post in my mind. It was a response to the woman (me) who has been writing the posts of the last month or so, the one who was full of exclamations about New York, and then last week had “Something to say.” I was feeling kind of mad at her. Didn’t like her much. I was feeling the stirrings of wanting/needing to get back to having nothing to say. Nothing to write. Just writing. That seems to be where the “I” who is the writer really gets her chance. That “I” . . . who wanders around in life, who meanders, who watches squirrels and bunnies (and a raccoon just the other day), whose attention is rapt, who watches the sun rise. The one who dwells intimately with herself.
I was dwelling “uncomfortably” with myself, wiggling my shoulders, scratching my head. Then I began to wonder, where does the “I” who is a writer go? Friday. Saturday. Sunday come and almost gone. Still nothing.
So I read a bit through my journal, trying to get an idea. (You see, I am tenacious, and I sincerely believe all creative people are and must be.) When I found this entry, I thought, what the hell, I’ll just share it. Share with you what it’s been like to record the audio of A Course of Love. It turned out to be the perfect thing to do:
May 7, 2015
The moon is hiding out behind the cabin in a spot I’ve never seen it in before. It feels low to the ground. Thankfully I do too. Hiding out. I don’t mind it.
Everyone is down the list from you, Lord. Or from the creative life. They’re so joined that I don’t know the difference. I’m happily reading a book called The Courage to Create, finding Rollo May getting in his own way, and yet still saying things I need. He says creativity is an “encounter.” He talks of how it uses a different side of the brain. How you forget to eat and time disappears. The “survival” mechanism gets turned off! Maybe that’s how artists manage to be poor artists.
In the house, The Embrace is taking forever. I was so happy last week, thinking what used to take me a week was down to three days. Afraid not. I must need to hear the Embrace over and over. That’s all I can figure. I need to feel held in “your” embrace. I am in need of truly feeling the support, the gentleness and the love. The sense of the benevolence of the universe of love. To really get the idea that I am not living within the same world, the same universe. The one that is full of cement buildings and people that would as soon do me harm as good. This has been demonstrated to me. I have moved in. I am not locked out.
Still, the feeling comes of not being able to rest until The Embrace is done. Can’t move on. Just plod away, plod away. Listen. Fix. Listen. Fix.
Yet I miss writing so much! It’s not that I’m not thoroughly engrossed in the audio. The thing it does is it’s taking me out of my life while at the same time it is providing insights into it. It’s like “it” . . . or you . . . are transforming my life without me having to work at it. It is inexplicable. But that is the way with creativity. This chapter, of all chapters, had to be re-created. It has to be what it is and it has to be a new expression of what it is—through me.
I suppose, Lord, if I were to start writing well, and not want to stop, I’d never get the audio done.
I trust that the “I” who writes, will return, if not tomorrow or next week . . . then when this “I” who writes, is done being this “I” who records.
A response on illusion
As the wholehearted, you have it within your ability to do what those who live their lives with a split mind could never do. You have it within your ability to mend the rift of duality, a state that was necessary for the learning of the separated self but that is no longer necessary. The mending of the rift between heart and mind returned you to your Self. In the same way, the mending of the rift of duality will return the world to its Self. D:3.5
Earlier this week, I was forwarded a missive written by Gary Renard in which he mentions A Course of Love by name. His “letter” to interested parties was generally about some comments made at the end of the ACIM conference in New York, and led to his defense of the FIP (blue book) edition of ACIM. He wondered why anyone would be interested in anything else, including the supposed “continuation” book, A Course of Love, especially when ACIM is “a complete and unique non-dualistic thought system.” He calls these “course alternatives” unnecessary imitations, and suggests sticking with the real thing and accomplishing its goal of awakening.
Two people recommended that I respond in my blog today, and I have chosen to do so; not because I have any problem with Gary speaking his mind but because Gary also mentions that I “incredibly” said “in public” that I don’t believe in the illusion. This is true. That the “illusion” has become something to believe in makes no sense to me. In my understanding, non-duality is about accepting the both/and nature of reality . . . which is next to impossible to see through the ego’s lens. After my years with both Courses, I recognize the “ego’s world” as illusion. That is all.
Oddly enough, as I’m recording A Course of Love as an audio book, the chapter that I am currently working on is Chapter 19: “Oneness and Duality.” The happenstance of that coincidence, (I am where I am in the project for a reason) has, more than anything else, guided my response.
Before I provide a few quotes from Chapter 19, I’ll just share with you some of the ways that ACOL is so good at helping us to get beyond the very basics of what produces dualistic thinking:
A Course of Love rejects having an ideal and/or false images.
It speaks only briefly of enlightenment, calling it enlightenment “without judgment.”
ACOL doesn’t say “you will get there” but you’re already there (already accomplished).
It doesn’t say you need to study or apply effort to achieve anything, but rather that ceasing with these practices is necessary.
Jesus says no one can teach you what you really need to know. You can’t get it intellectually, and that your either/or thoughts are inconsistent with the both/and of the truth.
He says the mind alone cannot take you where you want to go and when the mind fails to achieve its goals you might let go and surrender to the way of love.
He says the heart at the center of who you are can hold it all—all your feelings, yearnings, imaginings.
You are not separate from anything and need not reject anything but the false self (ego).
ACOL doesn’t encourage seeking. It proclaims a finding.
ACOL does say that you are not who you think you are.
ACOL says that when you get beyond who you think you are you can know who you truly are.
Jesus says that when you get beyond the ego and the world the ego made, you will be a true self, see a true world, and create a new world.
At A Course in Miracle’s end, in the Epilogue to the Clarification of Terms, we find (5.):
Let us go out and meet the newborn world, knowing that Christ has been reborn in it, and that the holiness of this rebirth will last forever. We had lost our way but He has found it for us. Let us go and bid Him welcome Who returns to us to celebrate salvation and the end of all we thought we made. The morning star of this new day looks on a different world where God is welcomed and His Son with Him. We who complete Him offer thanks to Him, as He gives thanks to us. The Son is still, and in the quiet God has given him enters his home and is at peace at last.
When I read that, my heart feels a sense of promise. Why should it be such a surprise that we are asked, now, definitively, to turn from the ego and rebirth the Christ in us and in the world? To, in union and relationship, turn to each other and see the Christ revealed? By the end of ACOL, Jesus implies a most perfect non-dualistic alternative to illusion—a combining of our humanity and divinity in a way that allows us to truly be here now. And he is so confident in this joining that at the end he says to put the book away and go be it.
Let’s move forward with the promise of this beautiful epilogue at A Course in Miracle’s end, and with the new beginning offered in A Course of Love. From the Prelude:
You were your Self before you began your learning, and the ego cannot take your Self from you but can only obscure it. Thus the teachings you need now are to help you separate the ego from your Self, to help you learn to hear only one voice. This time we take a direct approach, an approach that seems at first to leave behind abstract learning and the complex mechanisms of the mind that so betray you. We take a step away from intellect, the pride of the ego, and approach this final learning through the realm of the heart. This is why, to end confusion, we call this course A Course of Love. p.43-44
For anyone interested in more, here are a few quotes from ACOL, Chapter 19: Oneness and Duality, that fill out the more practical side of this approach.
C19.15 …It is difficult for you to accept that what you most need to know cannot be achieved through the same methods you have used in order to know about other things. And, increasingly, you are willing to exchange experience for second-hand knowledge and to believe you can come to know through the experiences of others. Yet, in the case of coming to know what lies before you now—coming to know your own Self—it is obvious that another’s experience will not bring this knowledge to you, not even my experience. If this were so, all of those who read of my life and words would have learned what I learned from my experience. While many have learned much of others, this type of learning is but a starting point, a gateway to experience
C19.16 To think without thought or know without words are ideas quite foreign to you, and truly, while you remain here, even experiences beyond thoughts and words you will apply word and thought to. Yet love has often brought you close to a “thought-less” and “word-less” state of being, and it can do so again. As you join with your own Self in unity, all that in love you have created and received returns to its home in you, and leaves you in a state of love in which the wordless and formless is very near.
C19.17 [O]neness and unity go together, the unity of creation being part of the oneness of God, and the oneness of God part of the unity of creation. A mind trained by separation can have no concept of this, as all concepts are born from the mind’s separate thoughts.
C19.24 The concept that in oneness there is no need for blame or guilt or even for redemption is inconceivable to the separate mind. But not to the heart.
We have found the way of wholeheartedness, of heart and mind joined in union. We are being brought home and co-creating Heaven on Earth. Let us go out and meet the newborn world, knowing that Christ has been reborn in it, and that the holiness of this rebirth will last forever.
An expanded view of Love
No lessons learned without love touch your heart. No lessons that do not touch your heart will accomplish anything. C:24.4
A Course of Love returns us to the idea that love gives reason its foundation. As soon as we begin A Course of Love, we see we’re asked not to use our usual means of taking a course, but instead to let our heart be our eyes and ears. A willingness to do that is really all that is required, because once our hearts become central, we easily realize that our hearts have their own way of knowing, and that it is a knowing that it is essential—a knowing that we crave and yet possess. The heart’s knowing is the source of our longing for freedom, of our desire to love and be loved, of our appreciation of beauty and justice, and of our devotion in relationships. To be who we are in a way that does not disregard either our humanity or our divinity, a way that does not disregard each other and the world, we need to start with our hearts. If we do that, our minds will join with our hearts in wholeheartedness, and our reason will be compassionate as well as intelligent and inspired.
Since Mother’s Day is a somewhat arbitrary holiday that often relies on the “sentiment” of love, I thought it would be a good time to mention this expanded view of love.
The world evidenced by society, by education that has become training for jobs, by the goals that are instilled very young—goals that are about achievement of the good life (as defined by intellectual or professional achievement, wealth, power, or even consumer goods), is a world that holds love separate from all “but” those nearest and dearest. Love is just not particularly relevant elsewhere. This love-less and practical society suggests the acquisition of a “good life” that is not easy to see through, and a way of living that can’t be reversed until there is an awareness of the limitations such a life imposes. I believe these “limits” that are not seen, are what are found within special relationships . . . until we see them. Awareness is key. When we see through them, our love expands and we are released from our prior limits! Not from the “actualness” of relationships, but merely from their “specialness.”
When our hearts are deeply touched, our longing for a life of love does naturally extend, and is
given space in which it can be remembered, imagined into being, and demonstrated newly. The giving up of special relationships, asked of us in this Course (as well as ACIM) is one of the hardest ideas to accept, and yet has more to do with expanding our reach than with limiting it.
In contemplating these things on this eve of Mother’s Day, I am wishing you each heart touching moments as mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sons, and husbands. And I don’t mean greeting card moments. I am wishing for us each to see and feel universal love in the most intimate of ways, to extend the love and the awareness of love’s reach we have gained into the world, and . . . to give, within our families, a love that gives our home “here” its foundation, and renews life with its limitless reach.
Revisioning
What hampers new beginnings of all kinds within the human experience are ideas that things cannot be different than they once were. T3:15.2
It is spring! Only one week ago, I was looking down from the airplane at the ground of my home town, seeing nothing but the drab colors of pre-spring. In a matter of days, lovely, sunny days, spring has sprung. It is no wonder I am thinking of new life!
It is also Sunday and I get to create. As onerous as it can feel when I have a deadline, or no particular inspiration with which to start, I still have the feeling of “get to.” This is time I’ve set aside. It is as anticipatory as my grandson’s play dates.
Still, sitting down empty-minded, I pick up Joyce Carol Oates to get myself in the mood, and there is nothing but ideas. Ideas upon ideas. Lovely and orotund language that calls me to little more than increasing my vocabulary.
Then I turn the page:
“The queer passionate impulse that overtakes me, as I write, to tell the story; to complete an emotional or psychological or narrative unit; to finish something that is begun . . .. None of this can be unique to me but must reside very deeply in us all . . . trying to plumb some ineffable center, some essence, the more profound for being so very secret.” (399)
Have you ever noticed that you get no inspiration until something touches on what was already there?
To finish something that is begun. To bring it to completion. New life is also about endings. Each
new beginning seems to take in all the endings and beginnings of the past. I look out the window at the sun rising and this point seems mute. I sit within the homeliness of the cabin. The bare bones of it like the individual life, essential and ephemeral; lasting and passing at the same time. Joyous and melancholy. The both/and of a rich life.
I decide to look up the use of both/and in A Course of Love. There are only a few instances where I thought there would be many. Yet the “feel” of such acceptance is contained throughout.
The both/and of endings and beginnings have been inspiring my reflection since my return from New York. With a little remove from the whirlwind of it, I feel as if I have identified the source of my fervor: The desire for new life. It is in me and it is in many. The desire is palpable. It has arrived. It is contagious.
The beginning of new life arrives as “feeling.” The feeling puts you on notice that this is a happening. Your new beginning has begun. It began inside of you and it is bursting to become manifest. Change on a grand scale, change to the very nature of the self described by the words human being (T3:15.16) is predicted. Jesus says this calls for forgetting, and for letting go of limitations. But before he gets there, he also accepts our stories:
You are a thought of a God. An idea. This thought, or idea, is what you seek. It can be found only at its source. Its source is love, and its location is your own heart. Think a moment of a novel or movie with no plot. This would be the same as saying that there was no idea brought to completion within the pages or on the film. In God’s idea of you is all that is known about you. God’s idea of you is perfect, and until now your form has been but an imperfect representation of God’s idea. In God’s idea of you is the pattern of the universe, much as within a novel, movie, piece of music, invention or artistic idea is the completion of the pattern that will make that idea a masterpiece. An idea is irrevocably linked with its source and one with its source. There was no God separate from you to have this idea of you. You were birthed in unison with God’s idea of you. . . . Acceptance of your birth in unison with God’s idea of you is acceptance of your Self as co-creator of the pattern of the universe, acceptance of the idea or the story that is you. (C.26.22-23)
I love that last line: acceptance of the idea or the story that is you.
We, in all our various stories, are part of this happening. Yes, we are closing out the old even as we become the new. But “the new” feels so inclusive of “who we are,” of the stories that are ours. This “narrative” has been missing from much of new spirituality, as if “the story” has no bearing on what is or is to be. I, at least, see the story as part of the uniqueness of who we each are and of what we each will bring forward. The re-writing of our stories can also be essential, and part of how we find ourselves newly. Yet re-writing does not mean deletion or invention. It means re-vision. Visioning newly. As we leave learning behind, such ways as revisioning become tremendous means of discovery, and sharing what we discover, is an exceptional means of enhancing our union in relationship as we create the new . . . together and as one.
