(Having a right-minded moment and thought I should post quickly between breaking news! :))
“How did June become October?” I asked, as he materialized through an early-morning haze on the campus path, man scarf I’d given him knotted at his throat, robes flowing, surrounded by autumnal hues blurry as a Renoir. I handed my imaginary inner professor the paper cup of coffee I’d brought him and warmed both my hands around my own. “Time for a chat?” I asked, and followed him back to his office in that building covered with dreadlocked strands of curling red and gold ivy, huddled ravens in our path arising in a bickering Halloween whoosh.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked, leaning back in his desk chair framed by that picturesque beveled window.
I shook my head because—really—we both knew that question was something of a joke given his frequently repeated assertion that we need do nothing here in this dream of impossible, personal exile from our abstract, undifferentiated, eternally loving Self and Source. Except, you know; forgive what never was. I’d been avoiding him for that very reason since my birthday toward the end of June–my mother still wasting away at that point in home hospice, our house languishing on the market while undergoing additional, life-disrupting interventions. Including a botched installation of new carpet courtesy of the company we’d hired and more messy upgrades to two bathrooms courtesy of my husband’s hands-on frustration with the whole stalled house-selling process.
A couple of weeks later my mother had died, I’d contracted another case of diverticulitis, and we’d made the grueling trip back for the funeral. I’d spent the next two months struggling to get my bearings and digestive health back through a new restrictive diet that in the last couple of weeks actually seemed to have reaped magical rewards. Nonetheless our house remained for sale, albeit at further reduced price; despite a couple of interested bites from potential buyers. Our hopes of downsizing to a smaller, less costly abode still in limbo as we entered yet another season of our discontent. And although I’d vowed to take it off the market by this time to avoid having to potentially move over the holidays. I’d been advised not to risk missing the possibility of the proverbial offer we’d been waiting for (much like Godot).
I sighed. “I just want things to go my way, for a change, is that too much to ask?” I began. “I know we’re not supposed to ask for help in form since there actually is no form but those nonetheless convincing forms in my dream appear to be a mess and it infuriates me that I—and many of those I love—find ourselves completely at the mercy of unknown, apparently powerful forms beyond my, their, our control. I know you say I’m not a body but a decision-making mind but that decision-making mind–from whatever distant planet she inhabits–just keeps generating one punishing decision of a dream scene after another and I’m just so tired of it!”
“You think it’s not OK to be tired?” he said, in his confounding way.
“I think it’s not OK to spend a couple days last week tweeting my daughter about the need to smack certain men in a certain political party including but not limited to a couple of U.S. senators,” I said. “To imagine playing a whack-a-mole game on the photographic image of one of the latter’s face.”
He smiled.
And I just wanted to smack him.
“I think it’s not OK that I had to purchase new snow tires I can’t afford this morning and have the ABS system in my car fixed last week even though I haven’t put thirty-thousand miles on my vehicle in the last five years and my neck is killing me again and I can’t get in with the chiropractor and I need to move forward with finding my next writing projects but I can’t commit to anything because I must also remain constantly available to ready the house and flee with my dog in case we get a request for a showing and at some point—Hallelujah!–an actual offer at which point I will need to drop everything, find us another house provided there’s still one on the market we can afford that would actually work for us and you know, deal with inspections and additional work and all sorts of borrowing and lending and closing fiascoes and then actually moving out and moving in and.”
“You’re just so tired,” he said.
I nodded. “Plus, this coffee’s already cold. I just really hate it when that happens.”
“God knows.”
“Ha!”
“OK, here’s the thing. I woke up in the middle of a dream last night in which I was standing within a mob of people chanting ‘lock him up!’ in reference to a certain Supreme Court judge nominee who, if confirmed, has the power to make decisions about my friends’ and daughter’s life! Who’d been scrambling to defend his innocence by protesting his guilt far too loudly and too much, to my way of thinking. And suddenly it reminded me of another angry mob leveling that same refrain at a woman I supported for president not that long ago and also the way in which that ego anthem plays out again and again in the score of my life. And I thought about how—no matter how it plays out–the woman professor’s quiet, dignified, horrifying report of victimization at the hands of the Supreme Court judge nominee can never really buy her the release and relief she deserves.
And then I must have slipped into yet another dream because I could see my brother when he was four or five on one side of the living room we grew up in, myself a year older, on the other, glaring at each other over the barricade of couch cushions we had constructed down the center of the room as formidable as the Berlin Wall.
And I must have been dreaming again because I saw them—the judge and the professor–transported from the TV screen last week to separate corners of that same house I grew up in on different sides of those couch cushions awaiting sentencing or redemption. And I wanted to go to her. And I wanted him to go to, well, I guess that would be hell,” I concluded, surprised to find that I was crying. Because either way she loses. I lose. We all of us–including her and OK; him—ultimately lose!
My teacher pushed the box of tissues across the desk to me and we sat there like that while I completely lost it.
I thought about the section of A Course in Miracles’ text we were considering this week in my Tuesday night class: “The Treachery of Specialness.” (Text Chapter 24, II.) Elaborating on the ego dynamics covertly at work in our minds once we believed the “tiny, mad idea” of separation from our one Self and Source had real, treacherous affects and sought to replace our sense of devastating loss with a “special” personal self bound to proving its relative innocence versus another’s greater guilt. All to bolster the lie that we really do exist at God’s expense but it’s not our fault.
“You can defend your specialness, but never will you hear the voice for God beside it. They speak a different language and they fall on different ears. To every special one a different message, and one with different meaning, is the truth. Yet how can truth be different to each one? The special messages the special hear convince them they are different and apart; each in his special sins and “safe’ from love, which does not see his specialness at all. Christ’s vision is their enemy, for it sees not what they would look upon, and it would show them that the specialness they think they see is an illusion.” (Paragraph 5)
My daughter’s haunting question on the phone last week arose again: “How can it be that what we saw and heard was completely unseen by part of the population in this country, and what they saw and heard was completely unseen by us?” I can’t say I liked the answer I had found in the big, blue book. But I was finally at least willing to entertain the possibility it might be true. A possibility that somehow made the morning’s chilling fog a little less dense. For this unplugged moment, anyway.
I blew my nose. “Has it always been like this?” I asked.
He shook his head, still smiling. “Define always,” he said.
He had a point. He always does.
“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “My refusal to question my unconscious choice to believe in the crime of separating from the Love we will always share will always lead to suffering. When I choose to identify with the ego thought system of one or the other I will always feel unfairly treated, justified in glaring over that self-erected barrier with indignation at the audacity of that ‘other’ child so hell-bent on ruining my life. The way out of my suffering will always mean questioning the validity of the defensive dream I’m attributing it to, and reminding myself that I could be aligned with you, no matter what I seem to be going through. Thereby aware of our same need to find our way home to our undifferentiated, innocent union and forgiving our allegiance to differences that keep us all in frightened exile, retelling and reinforcing our tormented and tormenting stories.”
He just continued to smile.
“Do you happen to have a microwave for this coffee?” I asked.
NOTE: A Course in Miracles uses the character of an unconditionally loving Jesus as a symbol of the unconditionally loving presence still shining in every fragment of our one mind. A presence that never took the “tiny, mad idea” of separation from our eternally loving Source and Self (within whom we remain one) seriously. Who continues to experience and teach only the truth of our invulnerable, shared innocence and worthiness of God (and each other’s) love. Despite our seemingly unique, guilty dreams of separation, separate interests, and punishment deserved and realized.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Sorry it’s been such a long time—it’s been a distracting dream! 🙂
The Interviews page on my forays website has been revised to make it easier to find and access interviews with Ken Wapnick and others including Gloria Wapnick, and FACIM staff teachers. These interviews provide a wealth of practical information about learning to live a truly forgiving life, as well as some history of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles.
Schedule individual MENTORING sessions with Susan Dugan here: Although A Course in Miracles is clearly a self-study program and the one relationship we are truly cultivating is with our eternally sane and loving right mind, mentoring can help remind Course students having trouble applying its unique forgiveness in the classroom of their lives that the problem and the solution never lie in the difficult relationship, situation, behavior, health issue, etc., but in the decision-making mind. In every circumstance, without exception, we can choose to experience inner peace and kindness toward all, unaffected by the seemingly random strife of a world designed to prove otherwise. By choosing to look at our lives as a classroom in which we bring all our painful illusions to the inner teacher of forgiveness who knows only our shared innocence beyond all its deceptive disguises, we learn to identify and transcend the ego’s resistance, hold others and even ourselves harmless, and gently allow our split mind to heal.
Susan’s mentoring sessions provide valuable support in our forgiveness practice from a Course student and teacher deeply committed to awakening through learning and living true forgiveness. While keenly aware of our resistance to Jesus’ loving message from first-hand experience, she remains faithful to opening her heart to the Course’s universal answer for all frightened hearts and to sharing her ongoing learning and growing trust with kindred faithful, but sometimes frightened and confused, fellow students. Sessions are conducted via traditional phone or Skype (your choice). Please contact me to find out if mentoring is right for you before submitting a payment. (No one is ever turned away for lack of ability to pay!)
You’ll find a couple of new audios and a couple of new videos on my Audio and Video pages!