The university was closed for summer break, the professors too burned out after two years of teaching during the pandemic to even consider teaching summer school. Nonetheless, I trusted that the side door to the Hogwarts-lookalike structure that led directly up two flights to my imaginary professor’s office would remain mysteriously unlocked and, as always, it did!
I raced up the stairs and turned the knob on the door to his likewise ever-open office to find it sadly unoccupied, before my eyes even registered the sign hanging from the doorknob that read— “GONE FISHING.”
He was messing with me again. I laughed out loud as his amused smile materialized out of thin air in front of me.
And then that smile, in true Hogwarts style, began to move backwards toward the stairs I’d just ascended. I followed it back down, out the door and across the grassy quad, delirious bees buzzing over beds of lilies, and up the flagstone path. The squirrels darting around here possessed Ninja moves that bespoke of some sort of secret training program, perhaps in a boarding school conducted in one of the gigantic oak trees towering above me.
That gentle, phantom smile led me beyond spilling fountains, the white noise of a brook, its banks threaded with wildflowers, up seemingly endless stone stairs I had never seen before. Through a grove of ancient-looking trees, I followed, to where the hill leveled off and the woods parted. I found him sitting on a blanket in the grass at the edge of what appeared to be a cliff, hurried over, and sat down beside him as my ethereal smile guide faded back into the nothingness from which it sprang.
“Gone fishing?” I said.
He shrugged; eyes merry.
In the far distance, below, a whole seeming world was doing its chaotic thing, miniature cars navigating mazes formed by skyscrapers, exotic birds circling verdant, shrinking rainforest canopies. Families of polar bears precariously skated across rapidly melting and fracturing glaciers as smoke from forest fires around the world appeared to have converged in a dark cloud above the U.S. Supreme Court.
I don’t know how long I sat beside him, transfixed by the special effects below, almost forgetting why I’d come.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked, after a while. I pried my eyes away from the view, willed myself to focus on him instead, my teacher, my path, my only real purpose and function of learning to practice and experience a true healing and forgiveness not of this world.
It had been another one of those dream days, awakening to news updates about the latest mass shooting, racial injustice, desperate women scrambling to navigate their choices in a post-Roe vs. Wade nation, the latest January 6 Committee revelations, current body count in Ukraine. On the personal front, I appeared to have slipped into a kind of limbo, stalled between work venues and assignments, berating myself for not making better use of my unexpected downtime to get back to work on the great American short story collection or at least tackle the horror-movie now playing in 3-D in my refrigerator.
Outside my office window, a surprise attack had ensued. We fortunately had convinced the developer responsible for constructing our duplex to undertake the process of digging deep beneath the poorly laid cement patio to correct the slow-motion settling in progress in front of our home. Unfortunately, the workers had arrived unannounced that morning to commence a day involving machines that looked like the Tonka Toys of my youth on steroids, resulting in an auditory assault earplugs and headphones did little to mitigate.
I did my best to remind myself of A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 5, “I’m not upset for the reason I think,” in this case meaning that the drone of the Backhoe was not really responsible for my distraction, frustration, and impending migraine. As always, I must be making an unconscious choice as a decision-making mind outside the dream to use the situation as an excuse to perceive myself unfairly treated. The writer’s block, the distraction, the acute anxiety that arose whenever I wasn’t doing something Susan deemed worthwhile returned with a vengeance. Who was I if not my work, my writing, my parenting, my teaching?
The very question evoked waves of panic I naively thought I had conquered. Then, too, something I’d been working hard toward for a long time had finally seemed to pay off. While I should have been celebrating, I found myself, well—incredibly freaked! I’d gotten pretty good at practicing the Course in response to my reactions to almost routine calamities in my dream but my reaction to getting something I wanted showed me just how much I still believed in the ego thought system of one or the other, sacrifice and punishment. Being rewarded for something I had done in this world must come at a price, could only leave me vulnerable to more loss and disappointment down the road.
“But what can I do for you, really?” he asked again, cutting through the crap I habitually used to defend myself from his mind-healing ways and propelling me back to the real reason I had come and didn’t want to look at. The tug of what the A Course in Miracles calls “specialness,” that persistent, universal need to substitute a person, experience, substance, or thing for the real, all-inclusive love, support, and connection we believe we forfeited forever to indulge the fantasy of experiencing an individual self. Presenting itself in the seemingly most insurmountable form of all in my personal hierarchy of illusions, a change in the terms of an unspoken agreement made with a loved one I consider nearest and dearest of all, most necessary to affirming Susan’s illusory sense of self-worth and wellbeing. A proposed change of plans I did not consider in line with my desires and best interests.
I thought about the “grab bag of guilt,” our beloved earthly teacher Ken Wapnick talked about. A metaphor for a kind of Pandora’s box wherein we place the specific imaginary dream figures and forms we’ve invested with the power to hurt us or save us. The stories and characters we reach for when the fear of healing our split mind and awakening from the dream of a personal self temporarily overcomes the desire to heal and awaken. The ones we rely on to resuscitate the ego. Unleashing the fictions of unfair treatment or special favor we seek to reinforce when we’ve forgotten our only real purpose of making our lives a forgiveness classroom. Wherein we remember our shared need to join with the healed perspective of a different inner teacher, symbolized by the apparition sitting beside me, gently smiling, ever available to help lead us, Home.
It dawned on me that I’d been putting my needs first again, completely forgetting the universal suffering born of believing we have needs that can be met by someone or something outside us, the guilt that unconscious belief engenders in everyone who seems to walk this earth alone. I’d forgotten how needy my special relationship and everyone involved in the seeming situation must feel, too. The constant pressure to include and exclude, balance competing interests, they, too, struggled with, an inevitable result of the false belief that we really do exist at the expense of all-loving Oneness but it’s not our fault. It’s the fault of all those others in my dream who in the end, always fail to meet my needs while continually pressuring me to meet their unreasonable demands.
I looked down with my inner teacher beside me at the dreamscape below, suddenly relieved of the need to have things my way, no longer sure of which way that would even be. The little cars continued to zoom on toward nowhere, their drivers likely cursing the different villains they held responsible for the cost of gas. I watched the vast variety of birds greedily descending on dwindling habitat, the polar bears slipping and sliding as they struggled to feed their young, the smoldering cloud over the Supreme Court obscuring hope of clarity. When I looked westward, I could even see the teeny workers moving around a tiny backhoe in my front yard. They really did look like toys from up here. All of them.
“It’s so quiet,” I said, yawning, my previous train of judgmental thoughts thankfully derailed. “Even more boring than going fishing. actually.”
He threw back his head and laughed.
And then I found myself unexpectedly curling up on the blanket and drifting off into a truly restful nap, aware he was already in charge at my request. Something Susan would never do on her own in a million dream years.
“…Your little, senseless substitutions, touched with insanity and swirling lightly off on a mad course like feathers dancing insanely in the wind, have no substance. They fuse and merge and separate, in shifting and totally meaningless patterns that need not be judged at all. To judge them individually is pointless. Their tiny differences in form are no real differences at all. None of them matters. That they have in common and nothing else. Yet what else is necessary to make them all the same?
Let them all go, dancing in the wind, dipping and turning till they disappear from sight, far, far outside of you. And turn you to the stately calm within, where in holy stillness dwells the living God you never left, and Who never left you. The Holy Spirit takes you gently by the hand, and retraces with you your mad journey outside yourself, leading you gently back to the truth and safety within. He brings all your insane projections and the wild substitutions that you have placed outside you to the truth. Thus He reverses the course of insanity and restores you to reason.” (Text, paragraph 7, lines 6-12; paragraph 8, lines 1-5.)