At times it felt like a reality TV program entitled A Course in Miracles Survivor. There were nine of us students on the island to start, plus two facilitators, long-time Course teachers Lyn Corona and Chris Dixon. We joked that the 12th member was Jesus/Holy Spirit/our right mind, and in truth could feel that presence strengthening in us as we did the hard work of looking at the ingenious hurdles our belief in the ego thought system threw our way, fortified by the lifelong work of Ken Wapnick, founder of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (FACIM).
We had together embraced the first two-year curriculum offered by the School of Reason (SOR) for teachers and aspiring teachers of A Course in Miracles, a program designed to apply Course wisdom in our daily lives, while moving deeply into portions of the Course and related materials most concerned with recognizing and undoing the ego thought system. We “lost” three students along the way. One realized it was not the right time for her, another, a long-time student of both Buddhism and the Course, eventually identified the former as his chosen path. The third discovered he had many more spiritual roads to travel on his way home. The Course does not bill itself as the only return to truth. We bid them a fond farewell, knowing we would meet again in wholeness at the end of the road.
Last week, we “survivors” assembled to celebrate the completion of the beginning of the journey without distance the Course refers to, a metaphorical voyage of awakening from a dualistic dream of separate interests to unity. The Course calls our everyday experience in the dream–our interactions with others, the events and situations that provoke us to attack or defend–our curriculum. It teaches us to use these very challenges to undo our belief in and attraction to individual interests.We are all “teachers of God” when we demonstrate this kind of forgiveness. But we had intentionally taken it a step further by committing to join in our learning and healing, and to share our experience with others.
We spent our first semester studying and listening to Ken Wapnick’s comments on the “What It Says” portion of the Preface and other CDs, examining the early text chapters, and creating and presenting our own diagrams and interpretations of the two thought systems and the creation myth upon which the Course’s teaching relies. Our resistance to “getting it” was strong. The last thing the ego wants us to do is examine the dynamic of sin/guilt/fear it set in motion when it convinced us to believe in the “tiny, mad, idea” of separation from our source.Some of us reported falling asleep during study. Some became visibly confused in class. Some grew defensive. There were times when I experienced all of these states, along with an overwhelming terror of presenting. On many occasions I compared myself unfavorably to other students. On others feelings of unbridled competition reared their ugly heads. I learned to recognize them for what they were—defenses against the truth—and do it anyway.
In between classes I continued to watch my attraction to holding my husband and daughter (what the Course calls our “special relationships”) responsible for my loss of (or return to) peace. Asking—more often pleading—to recognize my projected guilt over an impossible rift and choose again for the part of my mind that remembers our invulnerability.
In our second semester we began preparing and presenting portions of the text and teaching a workbook class for new ACIM students. I begged for help with my fear, did it anyway, and discovered just how heavily supported we really are. “I am so close to you we cannot fail,” Jesus tells us in the introduction to Part II of the Workbook, and reminds us again and again throughout the material. But I had never really heard those words, or allowed the deep comfort they offered in answer to my deep longing, until I started to teach and finally understood that teaching and learning really are exactly the same. I found through presenting to my colleagues and later to new students not only a bridge across my own terror of public speaking but a bridge over the troubled waters of this world back to my right mind. Over time, feelings of competition and comparison, the ego’s story of individual specialness began to weaken. And I began to notice not only the way the ego retaliated following my exploration/presentation on a particular Workbook lesson or Text section, but the way in which I created specific lessons in my life to strengthen my forgiveness practice.
Over our break last summer for example, assigned the Song of Prayer and Psychotherapy
pamphlets and complementary materials on the Course’s teachings around healing, a routine CT-scan discovered a “lesion” on my liver identified months later in a second scan to “confirm stability” as a harmless birthmark. The fear that gripped me during that interval allowed me to deeply delve into my investment in this body/identity and fully experience just how attracted I am to this world of separation from our source and this persona my mind created to keep me here. I realized how much I wanted to make the original error of separation real, and began to learn to truly forgive my investment in specialness. I embraced the truth that I will die, everyone I love will die; that is what body’s do, and began to allow the idea that I am something beyond all this, something vast and whole, impersonal, unalterable, and steadily loving. Something I really want to remember. I don’t have to wait to die to understand this; I can awaken to it now, moment by moment, as I practice with my right mind overlooking what never was, as I begin to really believe that “nothing real can be threatened.”
During the first class of our last semester we set the following intention for the final leg of our journey together in the SOR: “Our scattered goals blend into one intent: we want the peace of God!” Then we embarked on a detailed investigation of the Course sections on “The Laws of Chaos,” and “The Obstacles to Peace.” We spent so much time on the latter that it began to feel like the movie Groundhog Day. For one reason or another I kept being asked to present on the subsection involving “The Attraction of Pain” and the culmination illuminating “The Lifting of the Veil.” During my inquiry of the former I fractured my hip, and saw exactly how I used physical pain to separate from others and reinforce the ego’s sob story of unfair treatment. I was able to see and release that idea almost instantaneously, and found to my astonishment that my husband and daughter appeared loving and helpful during a long recovery that would have launched pre-Course Susan into a meteoric meltdown.
While studying The Lifting of the Veil, in which Jesus explains the collective nature of our return to wholeness, I also began to see how much I want to exclude others from my journey home. I looked closely at the constant ego temptation to congratulate myself on my Course understanding versus what my mind on ego considered the mistaken versions of Course students and teachers who viewed ACIM as a kind of self-help, law-ofattracting, manifesting-your-destiny tool. I learned to catch the ego attempting to hijack the journey, and ask for help in remembering the singular nature of the mind. In the world of perception there is still only one split mind that chooses between the ego’s illusion and the Holy Spirit’s memory of truth, one split mind in need of healing. It is not in my best interests to use ACIM to separate if I want the peace of God.I cannot get home without taking my illusion back to its origin.
Practicing forgiving my belief that my husband and daughter could disturb my peace eventually expanded to include everyone and everything seemingly “out there.” Not always I am sorry to report. Not even most of the time. But more and more. I wanted the peace of God, after all, had committed to my colleagues to find it. Colleagues who also found themselves staring down their own particular demons in their particular curriculum, learning to identify the one problem, and apply the one solution. At some point, bolstered by the loving, forgiving support of comrades equally dedicated to waking up, my desire to return to God outweighed for the first time my desire to hide in the illusion, and I began to notice an increased awareness of the choice available in each moment. I could no longer get away with choosing the ego for very long. It hurt too much, and besides I had begun to actually believe in the idea that we return together or not all.
And so we survivors go on forgiving. We did not want to use the term graduation because the real school, like everything else in our dream of exile from the one love we truly are exists only in our one mind, along with the one teacher we carry with us and can always turn to for clarity. Nevertheless joining together in form to honor our mutual dedication, reflect on our journey to date, and re-strengthen our commitment feels right.
As we met last week Lyn and Chris transformed a corner of Lyn’s apartment building penthouse into an elegant dining oasis complete with crisp linens, fine crystal and cutlery, and clusters of lilies. Flowers symbolic of the peace always available to us when we turn away from the ego’sendless boasts and gripes and meet in stillness with our inner teacher to smile gently at our error and allow our truth. To my mighty companions in forgiveness in the SOR, the survivors and those who decided to heal their minds elsewhere, and to everyone everywhere longing for unity I raise a toast of appreciation and a hand to grasp. We return together regardless of how the details of our maps vary. Thank you again for your growing willingness to open your eyes despite your fear, to take our teacher’s hand, and to continue to find our innocence together.
