I’ve been having a series of thoughts I have decided to put in the blog. I have been getting in touch with how profoundly wonderful the Course’s view of reality is and have had a lot of thoughts around that and my own relationship with that.
I believe that we have a deep and powerful drive to affirm, to look out at something and maintain that it is positive, that it is good. This has two crucial benefits. First, to feel good toward something is, quite simply, to feel good, and we like that. Second, when you affirm, you become an affirmer, a force of positivity. You become a positive influence, which means that you yourself are to be affirmed. If all you do is negate, you sour on yourself, even if you think you have ample cause to negate. In sum, for the sake of our enjoyment of things and for the sake of our sense of self-worth, we want to affirm. Put more strongly, we want to love.
We generally pick a small collection of people and things that we are truly invested in affirming, in loving. But ultimately, this drive to affirm is not limited to that small collection. Ultimately, we want to be part of a larger community that can itself be affirmed. And in the final analysis, we want this community to be totality. We want it to be everything. We want reality itself to be something we can affirm, something we can love, fully, deeply, without reservation and with all our hearts. Only then, can we really love life and love ourselves.
I can look back in my life and see this need running all through it. When I was three, I fell in love with dinosaurs, because a reality that had dinosaurs was clearly a bigger, more exotic, cooler reality. It was a reality I could affirm more fully than this boring, mundane, dinosaur-deprived reality. In my teens, I got heavily into science fiction and fantasy, because the realities in those stories were also bigger and better, more interesting, more fantastic, more enjoyable.
Of course, notice how, in order to find a reality I could affirm, I needed to go outside the reality I saw around me. I had to go into the past, into the future, into outer space, or into fantasy. I think the longer we live in this world, the more ingrained in us is the basic sense that reality is against us. Even while we slap on the bumper stickers that say “Business is great, people are terrific, life is wonderful,” our actions tell a different story. Moment by moment, we are warding off an endless series of threats, from people, companies, the weather, the system, “acts of God,” even flora and fauna (I say, as I try to clap to death an infestation of fruit flies that has somehow established my computer as its home base). As time goes on, the feeling in us grows that reality harbors a fundamental indifference and hostility toward us. It is not a reality to be affirmed. Which is very depressing indeed.
All of this explains, I think, the basic appeal the Course has held for me. As time goes on with me and the Course, I am having the opposite experience to what I just described. The sense is growing in me that the reality it describes is the answer to my basic drive to affirm, to love. The reality described by the Course seems truly unsurpassable. You have a God Who is pure love, Who loves us to a degree that is humanly incomprehensible. This God created an infinite community of beautiful, radiant, perfect beings, living in loving harmony and unity with each other. In this reality, I am absolutely loved and safe. And in this reality, I can love, with everything in me, all my brothers and my Father. And because I love, because I affirm without qualification and without limit, I can affirm myself, completely. The reality described by the Course is the reality that answers the deepest longings of our hearts. It seems quite frankly too good to be true. Yet the sense is slowly growing in me that it is true, that the Course’s reality is reality.
Along with this is coming another realization, that in this picture, the only thing wrong is in me. My own ego is the lens that warps the entire picture. True, everyone else has an ego, and this makes the world a very messy place, but all of that wouldn’t obscure my basic affirmation of reality if it weren’t for my ego. This passage from the Text has been on my mind a lot over the last few months: “The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see. Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth [a reference to Jesus’ call “Lazarus, come forth!”] and waken from their dream of death” (T-24.III.7). This, to me, captures the basic worldview of the Course, that reality itself is “freedom and peace and joy” but that even while it surrounds us with loveliness, we are asleep in the tomb of our ego (to use the Lazarus image).
And that is the bitter pill that comes along with news of this wondrous reality. The pill is that I have to admit that the whole problem, the one thing that blocks my drive to affirm, is my ego. We just don’t want to do that. Heck, we don’t like admitting we are wrong about a tiny factual matter. Imagine admitting you have been wrong about everything.
To appreciate the depth of our resistance to this, we can note that in our usual way of thinking, the picture is precisely the reverse. In our view, while reality itself is hopelessly screwed up, we ourselves are sane. We have basically got it together. We have our head more or less screwed on right. If only the world could be more like us, things would be basically OK. Whatever we may profess intellectually, our motto is “I’m right, reality is wrong.” To expand it slightly: “I need to hold onto my sanity and keep my citadel intact, because reality is against me.”
I realize that what I have done is carry this basic attitude, so ingrained that it’s hardly been articulated, into my work with the Course. Thus, when it tells me, “Freedom and peace and joy stand beside you, calling you to come forth from your ego’s tomb,” I automatically funnel that through my basic view. As a result, it comes out sounding like just another way in which that fundamentally hostile reality is trying to get me to give up my sanity and bend to its will. Rather than its old method of crashing the gates of my citadel, now it is trying to sweet-talk its way in, so it can have its way with me once more.
I really think this is the basic challenge we face with the Course. We view with a deep-seated suspicion its claims that God/reality is good and that our ego is what needs to change. Somewhere deep inside, we take this as just another way for us to get cheated. For we “know” that things are basically sane inside. We know our head is basically screwed on right, and that reality is basically out to get us. Are we really going to let it get us again?
What I’ve been feeling over the last several months (though I’m sure it’s been going on for a long time) is that this view is slowly changing. If you can imagine a continuum with my basic orientation (read: ego) on one end, and God/reality on the other, then imagine what I think is called a slide control, a little knob you can slide from one end to the other, like you see on professional recording equipment. This slide control is labeled “my friend.” So the question is, where do I place this slide control? What do I see as my friend, as my happiness, as what’s on my side? I started out many years ago with the slide control all the way to the one end, the end of my basic orientation/ego. That was my friend. But I have been feeling it very slowly move toward the other end, so that I am increasingly seeing God/reality as my friend, and my ego as the problem, the thing to be escaped. I won’t go into details as this has been a very long post (during which I have dispatched about eight more fruit flies). But it means a gradual shift in all sorts of respects, towards people, towards the Course, towards my practice, and towards life in general. The Course’s reality is becoming a constant source of solace and buoyancy. It really is subtle. Unfortunately, it’s probably not noticeable except from the inside. But I do feel that slide control is moving, and I think that movement is, in the end, the whole journey.
