Mari’s Blog
Recognition
2.1 What love is cannot be taught. It cannot be learned. But it can be recognized.
Sometime last month I read that the sun was at its closest point to the earth but that it doesn’t feel that way because of the angle. The sun’s proximity would be hard to believe (here in Minnesota) except for the sun’s glare. I’ve been aware of this as I start my day in a kitchen where I can’t escape the kind of glare usually reserved for freeway moments. The sun blazed through the window over the sink, and it would soon became clear every task I did would end up involving the sink or nearness to it. I’d turn my back and, with another step, I’d be in the spotlight again. But then….
I got caught by the rays created by a glass sitting on the counter. I got my camera out. Soon I abandoned the kitchen altogether, and started taking pictures of the shadows formed in the dining room. As I did this, I noticed how I could angle the camera in different ways to bring items washed out by the sun’s brilliance, into greater focus. Eventually this idea of the way 
things are seen got my attention and I began to remember all the different ways I’ve seen things throughout my life; how what I see has changed; how what captures my attention has changed. And . . . how frequently I haven’t known what it was that moved me but only that I was moved.
Often, when “seeing” is spoken of, it’s not about seeing a glass on a countertop, but more in the way Paul spoke of it in 1 Corinthians. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
I’ve asked ACOL’s new Facebook Group to explore their experience, to talk of how they feel rather than what they think, and I began to wonder. Do we know what we feel, or do we feel what we know? Jesus speaks of recognition a lot. As defined, recognition means “to know again.” And you know, I felt as if I’d hit on something.
Why, for instance, do I think spirituality, particularly ACIM, grabbed me in the first place? It was never a feeling of “Oh, this is good information.” It was never a feeling of enjoyment in the sense that I once enjoyed a good mystery novel. It wasn’t being attracted by a great writer, as I’d been so often. What was the feeling? And I’m suggesting it was a feeling I couldn’t see for what it was. All I knew was, “I want to stay here.” That’s the best way I can describe it. I did not want to leave the space I’d found myself in. With A Course of Love, I felt the same feeling only more intensely.
The feeling, I now feel quite certain, was one of recognition; of knowing again. Speaking of love, Jesus says in C:2.9, It is precisely the inability of your true Self to forget that gives you hope of learning to recognize love, and, with that recognition, of ending the insanity you now perceive.
My early experiences began, actually, a great divide that felt like a divide between sanity and insanity. Inwardly, I had everything I needed. But outwardly? The world of society began to feel intolerable and overbearing. When I was engaged with “regular life” I felt, at times, as if I could go mad. I didn’t know what to do. I felt as if when I became the person who could engage in regular life, I was not in my right mind. That “two world” feeling was torture; like living in two incompatible worlds. Oh, the desire! The desire to live in a world of pure spirit! Oh, the longing to follow in that way! But was it possible for me to walk away from my family and all the love and … let’s say … striving and drama and events and obligations that family comprised? No. So I needed to find a way to end the division not by “leaving” the world, but by being a true self within it. Whew! What would that even look like? Feel like? Was it even possible?
I slowly began to see, to recognize, that it was possible. I’ll be sixty next week, and I’ll be talking on a “Beyond 50” radio show. I am looking forward to it because of this feeling of possibility, but also because of the feeling that each of us go through this process of wanting to leave the world behind, and having to find our way to live as who we are within it. By the end of A Course of Love, it is clear that Jesus is guiding us to find our place in the world, to bring love to a world in need. And some of that, for many of us, begins to come more easily with age. It doesn’t have to wait on age, but I know that I have become more allowing, more able to let go, and more capable and committed to ending the great divide and living in unity.
You can listen to the show here, on or after this Wednesday morning, February 11.
Social, political and spiritual impacts of being who we are
If you cannot claim at least a small amount of love for your own Self, then neither can you claim your power, for they go hand-in-hand. There is no “common good” as you perceive of it, and you are not here to assure the continuance of society. The worries that would occupy you can be let go if you but work instead for the return of heaven and the return of your own Self. C:16.26
I recently met (by phone) a new friend, Val, a gentleman who lives in Canada and has been both politically and spiritually active throughout his long life. I told him that I, too, am political as well as spiritual, and he said, “Well of course you are, Mari, you’re working class!” His quickness in saying that—I mean he didn’t skip a beat—surprised and gratified me, although I wasn’t sure why.
A few days later I saw a question from one of the members of ACOL’s new Facebook group: How can we impact the reality of global consciousness to create more love for everyone? My first thought was that he was asking a question that would bring responses of action—spiritual, political—didn’t matter. (I don’t think I ever responded to the question! I’ve been seeing that one of my difficulties with Facebook is that things gestate in me and I don’t even know what I really want to say until a week later when, on FB time, the whole subject is old news! Thank goodness for a weekly blog.) Anyway, these two comments came together and got me recalling the yen I felt, a few years ago, to be more politically active. I attended Andrew Harvey’s Institute for Sacred Activism and briefly connected with Occupy St. Paul. A little later I “discovered” feminism, joined NOW and, about the time I thought I would attempt to do something about the plight of single mothers in this country today, I got discouraged. I got discouraged almost before I began. Political inquires (nonetheless solutions) were so steeped in bureaucracy that I knew if I tried to operate within that realm, it would swallow me whole.
It wasn’t that I didn’t feel A Course of Love was a great contribution that would have an actual effect in the world, or that I didn’t eventually come to rest within my own sense of “what is mine to be and do,” yet I’ve never regretted that excursion and have lived, since then, with the sense of how what is ours to do comes out to greet us. I held as my examples Terry Tempest Williams and Tim McChristopher and, since that time, have found that for most people deeply committed to their work for the land or the future, you can see where some experience created a swell they rode into the activist parts of their lives. What they did in terms called “activism” became something they couldn’t not do. I trust if there is ever something active that I “can’t not do” . . . I will do it!
And this all comes back to experience and to feeling rather than to thought. Each of us have things we “can’t not do” that are not compulsions of guilt. A Course of Love was (and is) one such thing for me. Caring for my grandson is another. Both are matters of the heart.
In the Prelude (to ACOL), we hear of the many forms of pain and horror that we experience here, and of the “equally distressing life of the purposeless, where hours pass endlessly in toil that is the cost of your survival here.” (p.29) This, I feel, is my connection between Val’s “Of course, Mari, you’re working class;” the question about global consciousness; and life as it’s so often being lived by those who can do little more than survive. Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” made it widely known, more than fifty years ago, that no one can operate optimally when they are in fear for their survival. Jesus tells us too that this fear won’t serve us, but sometimes this call to let go of fear, in this particular area, can feel too unrealistic to be accepted. We may even feel slightly chastised in The Prelude for all that we “set aside” while we earn our living. But maybe this is the result of the new time we live in.
When A Course in Miracles entered the world, many more people were able to do more than “earn their living.” Many more people lived in equality and had opportunities to follow their callings, or their dreams, or their hopes for work that would give them fulfilling lives. The ensuing decades have not been kind to the working class or the poor. The “heart” seems to have gone out of the political agenda (if not the rhetoric). The structures that have been built to aid society have been ego-driven structures. And maybe, as Jesus indicates in the Treatises and Dialogues, we have entered a new time when the knowing of the heart will be the only power strong enough to collapse the old physical and mental structures and make room for the new. We are assured that those being born now are being born into a new time. Together we can move toward “a future yet to be created.”
We are the pilgrims called to this creation of a new land, a new future. To do this, we must simply “be who we are.” I love this quote from Howard Thurman which gives “being who we are” a most relevant and poignant meaning: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go do that, because what the world needs, are people who have come alive.” Each time I recall this Thurman quote, someone immediately comes to mind who I see as living it. Today it was a woman I knew as a customer when I owned a coffee shop. She had been fascinated by bees all her life and she pursued that passion. Back then (early 2000’s) she was becoming a much called upon authority, as honey bees, so crucial for pollinating our food and flowers, were just beginning a mysterious mass die-off. As we each listen to our heart’s calling, and respond in wholeheartedness, we will give what is needed to create the promised future where heaven and earth are one. Being who we truly are is our greatest humanitarian, social, political and spiritual act. We are now, about the work of ending the divide between our humanity and our divinity, and this is an act of becoming new ourselves. We leave behind the call to be saved through worthiness (being good) or ascension (higher states that take us “out” of the world), and love who we are enough to join the world in truth.
I can get passionate about this. About how crucial it is to the future, that you and I accept who we are, and the gifts we have to give the world. Not accepting ourselves, Jesus says, “Is not humility, but fear,” and it is so true. When I think of what has caused me the most fear in my life, it is being who I am. Daring to be who I am. I hope that if you haven’t thought of being who you are in connection with letting go of fear, you will give this some attention, and turn from this undercover fear and into that risky and dizzying act of daring to be who you are in truth.
Explore your experience
We are not leaving the Self to explore, because the Self is the source and cause of exploration as well as the source and cause of discovery. And yet the Self is far more than you have experienced as yourself in the past.
The Dialogues, 14.2
Sunday is my day of rest. I come to my window at some point each Sunday and write about something that’s happened in my week. I like doing this. I get my bit of time to just . . . create whatever I create. I like photography, so I find that choosing a photo to go along with my post is also pleasurable. Besides posting here, I also post occasionally on a Facebook page. This, I will admit, I have not liked as much. I complain that I am too old for Facebook. I complain that I don’t get it. People don’t really connect on the darn thing, I’ve been known to say. Yet a few connections have been made, and so my publisher suggested that I would perhaps enjoy a Facebook Group. It would, he said, provide a place for deeper connections.
Before long, some basics went up to get the group going. It took me a while longer to relate with the way I would like to do a group. But then, when I got to that place—that place of feeling excited about what could happen, I was ready to make it “my own.” I did this a few days ago.
What making it “my own” means to me is doing it in a way in which I can truly be engaged with it. I don’t know about you, but with me, this has grown to be essential. I see it as part of the call of this Course to be who we are. It’s like doing what you’re doing from your heart—rather than because it “seems like a good idea.” Finding a way to do something “in our own way” means we’re listening to ourselves.
What got me to that place is the audio tapes I’m preparing of A Course of Love. I’ve written about them more than a few times in my posts. The experience of reading and listening to, or “receiving” them again, has thoroughly surprised me. I’ve also been sharing them with a few friends and we’ve been exchanging responses. What we each have discovered is that “listening” to the chapters (much more so than reading them) effortlessly turns off our thinking minds. As we spoke spontaneously of our experiences, we could see how our “reception” of the words began to connect and join our inner and outer lives. We began to explore our experience. It was the thought of that exploration that made a group appeal to me.
All the inner, spiritual, loving, or divine voices we hear are part of unity consciousness, which means they are not “out there” somewhere, but in us, in our hearts, which are our connection to all that is—love. The other voice we hear, the voice that denies the sound and tenor of love, is of the pattern or habit of the ego or of learning—of the way in which we were taught to learn. That voice is much more “out there” in the sense that it is part of the physical world. It is attached to form. It is linked to our thinking. Our thinking is conditioned, taught to us as we learned to speak. In order to hear the voice of love, whether it comes to us as our own, or in the form of a guide, is a matter of traveling back to love (as Jesus says in ACOL Chapter 19), unlearning as we go, all that we took on as we grew into separate, thinking beings that could listen only to the voice of our thoughts, or the thoughts of others. This is about discovering and exploring a new way of knowing that is at the heart of this Course and the reason for its coming.
I like the idea of sharing the audio tapes, and have been granted the permission and explored the technology that will allow it. I can link them to the group, one chapter at a time, and the group can then share the experiences they elicit. I’ll post more on this as it gets going.
A favorite passage of mine from The Treatises is one that says “a response is not an interpretation.” A response is about what is felt. We all need practice in expressing our feelings and responses. We can do that together. So . . . join if you’re interested. Share a bit about yourself as we get ready to start on this new exploration. And I’ll proceed toward setting up the audio, which will only be available here (until the audio book is ready for production).
From A Treatise on the Art of Thought:
The truth is the truth and not dependent upon your definition of it. A response is not an interpretation. A response is an expression of who you are rather than of what you believe something else to be.
… Interpretation but gives you opinions about those things that you experience. Response reveals the truth to you because it reveals the truth of you.
… The joy you have thought has come to you from an interpretation that is uniquely your own is as nothing compared to the joy that will come to you from a response that is uniquely you. T1:4.18-20
A direct approach
You were your Self before you began your learning, and the ego cannot take your Self from you but can only obscure it. (Prelude, P:43)
I started a post—one of my posts about nothing in particular—early this morning. It’s now nearly eleven o’clock p.m. and I’ve just completed my final recording of The Prelude that begins A Course of Love. Everything else had been recorded at least once, but not this. The Prelude is the lengthy and somewhat difficult opening to A Course of Love.
Everything else I’d intended to get done today fell victim to completing The Prelude. Since I’ve been doing these recordings, I’ve come to see how tenacious I am. I dig in. In fact, it’s pretty humorous, because as I started my day, I was writing about having the luxury of doing just as I please. Oh, this is a new sensation! I was puttering and getting the house tidied up precisely in preparation for my Sunday “time to myself.” Spending the whole day getting this recording done, wasn’t how I thought things would go, but it was doing exactly as I please, even if I have to admit that I did not expect it to take me so long. I could even elevate tenacious to devoted because that is true too—it’s just that the “worker bee” part of me that feels so compelled toward this work, IS at least as tenacious as my heart is devoted.
To get done is such a satisfaction! It has me pumped-up enough to want to just sit down and knock off a new post. Or maybe I’m tired enough that I’m a little more clear in that odd way that is like being punch-drunk and goofy but at the same time direct. Because The Prelude carries the clearest message possible that Jesus is speaking most particularly to those who have taken A Course in Miracles, and it’s the beginning of him being very clear about the need to leave the ego behind. In fact, I love this simple statement:
[T]he teachings you need now are to help you separate the ego from your Self. (P.43)A paragraph earlier he asks, “Why do you seem…not to have advanced, or to have advanced only a little bit, when your willingness is mighty?” and then he answers: “Only because you have not vanquished the ego.”
A Course in Miracles spent so much time helping us to understand the workings of the ego, that to give up “working on the ego” or “vigilance of the ego” in favor of attention to a true Self, feels rather odd. But it’s clearly time. “You learn,” Jesus says, “and then you let the ego come and take all you have learned from you again and still again.”
The Prelude begins: This is a course in miracles.
It ends this way:
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 real of the heart. This is why, to end confusion, we call this course A Course of Love.
This is what I really want to say. It’s time to leave the ego in the dust. Let’s let love do this for us. Let’s just give up and give in to love.
Salt and Sin and a Second Half
“God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything….”
Richard Rohr
In the second half of life, we leave behind the self we made, for the Self God made, the original self. We move out of the shallows and into the depths. We leave the old familiars and embrace a mystery that is not of the mind but of the heart; that is not abstract, but Real and present in us. And then we are asked to live it into our lives. I get reminded of such things in the strangest of ways.
I went to the store for Mom yesterday before church. She had a modest list. Twenty-two dollars worth of cheese, bananas, lettuce, TV dinners. I bought salt. I bought more than salt, but this was Morton’s blue canister with the girl with the umbrella and yellow dress on it. We haven’t had Morton’s salt in the house for a while and I missed it. The girl, the yellow banner tells me, is 100 years old this year.
This morning, as I walked past the kitchen counter where I left the salt last night, I started thinking of how emblems, logos, and packaging were the pre-reading way we joined the grown-up world. When I was a very little girl, Mom could say, “Margaret, go get the salt for me,” and I would know where to look and how to find. It’s a kind of familiarity that is craved. Pretty soon it grows into the desire to know what others know; to feel part of things. It extends to friends. I was of the first Barbie doll generation, and Barbie quickly grew family members and friends. Although I never had a Midge or a Ken doll, to not know who they were would have been an embarrassing lapse. I see it now in my grandson for whom there is so much more to keep up, and who finds it exceedingly pleasurable to be familiar with what his friends are familiar. To “not know” is to be out of the loop.
In the same way, many of us became familiar, quite young, with all kind of ideas to which I give the designation, like Morton’s salt, of “old familiars.”
Richard Rohr’s book, Falling Upward holds a reference to that old familiar, “sin.” He says,
“Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things….” Recently having completed the audio recording of ACOL’s Chapter 8, I was reminded of how Jesus speaks of the way our thoughts and emotions mask “the language of the heart.” They “bury stillness,” he says, “deep beneath an ever-changing milieu of life lived on the surface.” (8.7) That surface level is where all of our old familiars abide.
Rohr has written one of those books that, for me, complements and helps me to deepen my understanding of A Course of Love. Falling Upward is a book in which I find common reference to the uncommon journey, the “further journey” as he calls it…away from the “old familiars.”
His book is pretty well dedicated to an idea of a second half of life. And that’s the way I see A Course of Love too. There is the first half of life, a life of ego building and achievement, of valuing the mind above all else, of seeking and following. And then there is the second half…. Rohr admits to having found that “many if not most people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life.”
So I’ll back up and complete the little gem I shared at the top of this post and that Rohr shared just before his description of sin. “God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures.” If you go to the depths of anything, he says, you begin to “knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it.” You begin to move from belief to knowing, deep inner knowing, which is the movement we are called to in A Course of Love. Rohr says that we are “summoned” to this further journey. In ACOL, Jesus calls us to the heart by way of homesickness and desire for our true selves, feelings that we can follow to our own inner depth.
