You can go home again

You can go home again

“We know nothing. You are now up to speed.”
-Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau, Pink Panther 2

In the set I constructed in which to act out my coming of age there are many flags and many fences. Stone walls that once protected revolutionary freedom fighters from the Red Coats continue to dissect weed-choked territory, proclaiming old victories and bemoaning old slaughters. Signs boast first roads, Benedict Arnold’s sneaky ways, and the random honor of our nation’s founder George Washington bunking down on plank floors for the night. Ranch and modular homes sporting design elements swiped from the few majestic colonials that prevail from those days of brazen independence crowd lime-tinted hillsides. But our forefathers’ dreams of perennial liberty notwithstanding, houses and bodies still sicken and die despite their inhabitants’ best efforts.

I have just returned from visiting my family on the Hudson River forty plus miles north of New York City. Normally we descend on my parents’ cabin hugging the Canadian woods at the state’s northern boundary but a combination of exorbitant airfares and erratic summer work schedules this year converged to bring us all together at my brother’s home, the remodeled ranch house I grew up in. I had not spent time in this revolutionary war town in decades and had ample leisure to reflect on both a nation’s impulse to free itself from Mother England’s tyranny and my own reenactment of that universal urge.

My father still refers to my initial move to California in my early 20s as “when you took off,” and often measures family events before and after in relationship to that phrase. That I bolted 30 years ago means little; that I was the only one of our tribe to do so means a lot less than it used to—to me at least. Maybe because I now understand that despite the superficial differences that once loomed in my adolescent mind, the only real separation that could possibly divide us never occurred, although like all of us here dreaming of exile we continue to reinforce its consequences in our split mind.

A Course in Miracles calls the relationships we most cherish and abhor—those with our parents, children, siblings, spouses, romantic and business partners--the alliances the ego thought system invented to reinforce and protect a rift from our source that never happened--“special relationships.” They are projected symbols of the buried guilt in our one mind over that seeming attack on our singular source. On the level of form in which we operate, however--the world that seems so solid and menacing--they are bargains we make with others to get our (largely unspoken) needs met. If you will meet my need to feel recognized, accepted, celebrated, revered, I will reciprocate. But no amount of recognition, acceptance, celebration, or reverence can permanently fill the gaping hole we carry in our mind. The haunting emptiness we experience as a result of the false belief that we have forfeited the one, whole, eternal, non-specific love we are.

The ego uses our special relationships to relieve our repressed guilt and prove its mantra of “seek but do not find.” Like our own bodies our closest relationships provide only fleeting pleasure. In them we unconsciously reenact the attack-defense cycle at the core of the ego thought system. We believe we attacked God by our choice to separate, and now must defend ourselves from his retribution. We do that by projecting the buried guilt in our mind onto others in a pathetic effort to prove our own innocence. We believe that those we include in our orbit—our kin, our next door neighbors, those who share and validate our political affiliations, our preferences and values over those of the outsiders—protect and support us. They shore us up in tough times and help us deal with the toll time takes on our bodies and belongings. But nothing can ultimately protect and support us in a world specifically designed to prove that the “sin” of independence actually occurred and deserves the final punishment of death all humans face.

It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to keep us from ever returning to the part of our mind that decided to side with the ego in the first place but can just as easily choose again for the part of our mind that remembers what we are. There is only one possible relationship--our relationship with the memory of truth/love in our one mind. Geared toward a prevailing Western culture A Course in Miracles uses the term Holy Spirit or Jesus to represent that memory but it is merely a symbol for a mind healed of the original belief in a fractured love. The unique forgiveness practice the Course offers galvanizes our relationships to heal that fissure. Learning to overlook our mistaken perception of reenacted separate interests in our special relationships allows us to begin to experience the one, eternal love we have buried in our one, eternal mind. When we choose to stop listening to the ego’s 24-hour soap opera of sin, guilt, and fear, we can (metaphorically) hear clearly the call of the love we never left. Restored to our right mind, we then come from a loving, gentle, accepting, unconditional place in our interactions with others without any effort to fix behavior.

The beauty of A Course in Miracles is the radical forgiveness practice it offers us to get back to our right mind, the ingenious way it teaches us to use our illusions to undo them. The first step requires us to observe how much we want to control and attack others. Everyone does this and there’s no need to beat ourselves up about it. It’s crazy to judge ourselves for doing what the ego designed bodies to do. Instead we must observe our denied impulses to attack and the unhappiness they cause us with our inner teacher to be motivated to accept a better way. We must learn to bring ourselves up to speed by admitting we know nothing and turning instead to the part of our mind that retains the knowledge of everything.

A Course in Miracles is not teaching us to be more loving. Trying to fix an illusion does not work. The Course instead teaches us to allow the undoing of a thought system based on a lie that keeps us from experiencing the love we already are. It teaches us to allow the removal of the blocks the ego mind has placed to keep the awareness of that love from resurfacing in our mind. It teaches us to catch ourselves in the act of holding our special relationships responsible for our peace, to recognize the problem and its solution is not rooted in a place “out there” but in our one mind, and to ask our inner teacher to see things differently. When we choose in this way to remember the love we are we experience complete, eternal, unalterable peace, and begin to reflect it more in our relationships.

It only takes one mind to heal. I am married to a man who has no interest in A Course in Miracles. He would sooner eat glass than crack open that big blue book. We are extremely different personalities and so have naturally experienced conflict. I have been practicing the Course for five years and while we still have completely different personalities, our relationship appears to be much more peaceful. I say appears because the Course does not focus on changing behavior, only on changing our mind. By committing to practicing forgiveness every time a conflict arises in my relationship with my husband and teenage daughter, I am beginning to experience elongated moments of perfect peace.

There are now times in mid disagreement when I completely forget my investment in my argument and he seems to do the same thing, as if we can no longer remember the script we wrote to keep us at odds. Only common interests prevail. When he is upset, I have begun to truly recognize it as my upset, the upset we all share over the impossible belief that we destroyed love. The compassion I am developing for him is my compassion for myself. The fear of love I witness in him is my own. Practicing forgiveness, remembering there is only one mind on ego and turning my error over to our inner teacher for gentle correction, the guilt in my mind lifts and I am greatly relieved of its exhausting burden. I am enormously grateful to my husband and my daughter for the healing of my mind.

Practicing forgiveness in my marriage and with my daughter has given my life new meaning—in truth, the only meaning it could ever have. I now recognize that lasting happiness is not of this world, but there is a love beyond that can never fail me. I awaken to that love by practicing forgiveness, taking my projections back to my mind and choosing again. The Course gives us the tools to do that.

It hurts to begin to look at how much we want to hold someone or something out there responsible for our lack of peace. But we don’t have to (and in truth, cannot) do it alone. We must call on the inner teacher in our mind. If it helps to imagine Jesus taking your hand, do it; he will grasp it. If it helps to hear his voice, he will speak to you. He will meet us where we think we are until our fear lessens enough to recognize that the hand and the voice are in truth our husbands’ and daughters’ and parents’ and bosses;’ our brothers’ and sisters,’ lovers’ and enemies.’ Our special relationships save us when we remember to practice forgiveness. We return to our one and only true home and freedom together. I find my innocence at last in you.