The Wondrous World

Yesterday I wrote about the wondrous world we are promised--or more accurately, that we have been given if we will only choose to see it. This morning, as I think back over the past twenty years, I realize that I am slowly recognizing it. While I'm still tied here more than I hope to be, I believe in miracles now. I see them materialize in everyday events. I am less driven by fear with the passing years, and it is liberating to let it go. I marvel at the way things "work themselves out." Solutions to problems appear--solutions far better than I imagined.

Last week, I blogged about a problem with an employee. When I followed the guidance of ACIM, and chose to ask a different question, a stunningly beautiful plan began to emerge for how our team needed to reorganize itself to make optimal use of each person's best skills and interests. The excitement at our workplace is beautiful--everyone so eager to make the changes. Everyone feeling more important and valuable. This is the nature of the miraculous life. For most of us, we are not placing our hands on people to heal them of terminal illnesses--the one demonstration our world seems to demand as evidence that miracles still happen. We do not "work miracles" at all. We simply ask for them and recognize them when they appear. They are often very small. What qualifies them as miracles is that we sense the role of the divine in them. A pain of the spirit is removed, and joy takes its place. Something occurs that required others to respond positively--and your worldly fear says they won't. But they do. It is the moment that you recognize the truth that, at some level, we are operating from the same mind.

And it's available every day in every painful or fearful circumstance. Miracles are not rare, unless you refuse to believe in them. And the more you recognize them, the more you believe. And the more you believe, the less fearful you are.

Miracles and fearlessness. The first peek at the wondrous world that is our birthright.

DeQuincey the Opium Eater

My dissertation research allows me to dig into some fascinating ideas about the afterlife, or spiritual realms. Recently, I've been reading the works of Thomas DeQuincey, a writer and thinker who made a name for himself in the early nineteenth century by describing his years of opium addiction in "Confessions of an Opium Eater." He describes dreams that began as wondrous explorations of palatial realms and expansive oceans--dreams that turned frightening with phantoms. In the philosophies DeQuincey developed in later life, he felt strongly that humanity has to reach certain levels of development and understanding before the things of science and spirituality can be communicated to make sense.

As I read one of his dream accounts this morning, it seemed tied to the ACIM reading I had done an hour earlier. ACIM tells us that there is a wondrous world--the true one--that cannot be seen until fear is gone. As long as we are in terror of losing our individuality, we cannot let ourselves remember where we came from. I found myself wondering if DeQuincey, in his opium-induced state, was beginning to glimpse what our minds are capable of--magnificent worlds--but as an undeveloped being, fear misshaped his mental creation. Does not ACIM tell us that the world we see here is an insane delusion--something we've created with our minds to block us from the true world?

Do we not abuse all sorts of "opiates" (food, TV, drugs, ambition, fear-based religion) seeking a luscious state of being (perhaps a state we remember at some level)? But we make sure that all our paths to the desired Nirvana end up with dreadful effects. This fear keeps us confined in smallness.

Are we, in our desire for Nirvana, willing to do what is really required?

Not opiates. Not death. They lead only back to here.

Are we willing to give up self? Are we willing to become inconsequential as individuals in order to remember that we are, collectively, a single being? Are we willing to undo that moment millenia ago, when some piece of God's Son decided to go it alone?

What wonders will we remember when we are willing?

Employees and Ego

If there was ever an environment fertile to ego, it's the the state of being a boss. What an object lesson it provides daily for anyone trying to live the principles of A Course in Miracles. How does ACIMBoss keep ego out of it when an employee "steps out of her place"? How do we distinguish the hierarchies of the business world from the "we are one" truth of ACIM?

ACIM requires forgiveness, full and unfettered. But the business realm holds a manager responsible for adhering to policies, protecting morale, getting the best out of team members. In this model, you are not a good boss if you let certain behaviors go undisciplined. That's easy to work through.

But what if the employee insults you to try to get what she wants? What if, in trying to get more of a raise, she hints that you might give greater shares to your favorites (I.e., the ones who actually work occasional overtime)? What if you have gone out of your way for a decade to give this employee privileges, and you want to knock her down a notch or two? This is where doing the work of a good boss and exercising ego can become very entangled.

Fortunately I am on vacation this week and am having time to cool down before I say what my ego wants to say. Every time the bile lifts in my belly, and I find myself having a very heated imaginary conversation with her, where I deflate her ego and make her afraid of me, I try to remember what ACIM says: I will make no decisions by myself today. It tells me that the presence of anger or fear is a sign that I am asking the wrong question. So what's the right question?

What made her say such a thing to me after a decade? What is she afraid of?

Then I start to cool down and think like an ACIMBoss should. This employee is me, and I am her. As her boss, I must hold her accountable for earning her raise. But her attack on me is irrelevant. It was her fear speaking, and her desire to manipulate my fears. An ACIMBoss must look beyond both to what was really going on. A long-term, do-the-minimum employee is threatened by the new go-above-and-beyond employee. Deep down, she knows I'm going to be fair with the raises, and that's what scares her.

But I will be fair with the raises. If she wants a greater share next year, she'll begin to emulate the employee she is jealous of, rather than trying to steal her merit raise by scaring me. But I will not punish her for wounding my ego. In fact, I plan to forgive her.

That's today's vacation project.

"Help is there, but awaiting his choice."

I usually remember to blog when a crisis has brought me low. It has been used as therapy, I suppose--for me, not for the occasional passerby who takes a look at "A Pilgrim's Spirit Log." I'm still not sure why I felt the impulse to do this, but perhaps it will be of use to someone eventually. Or someday, it will be a valuable exercise for me to read back through my perspectives at any given moment.

Today, I am in a peaceful, happy place--and I thought about the blog. What do you write when all is well? I decided to pick up my reading of ACIM, to see if anything sparked an idea. I have had a difficult time maintaining a regular habit of reading ACIM in recent weeks, due to a packed schedule and an ever-changing calendar. But I went to the last bookmark and began.

At T-25.III.6, I came across a couple of sentences that reminded me how different my perspective of God has become since my Southern Baptist days. Here's the passage:

"For he has come with Heaven's Help within him, ready to lead him out of darkness into light at any time. The time he chooses can be any time, for help is there, awaiting but his choice."

I once lived in fear of God's displeasure if I missed my "quiet time," as we called the time we were supposed to set aside morning and night for Bible reading and prayer. If I got out of the habit, I usually came back in crisis and begged God's forgiveness for my neglect, promised to do better, and within a day or two, was out of the habit again because it wasn't feeding me. It was perpetual guilt.

With ACIM I have come to see God as infinitely patient and absolutely loving. If I miss a few days or weeks or occasionally even months, of time with ACIM and the contemplation of God, I come back when I'm ready, and we pick back up where we left off. I rarely wallow in the guilt that once kept me in a perpetual cycle of starting over. I never come back thinking that, in doing it, I'm "turning over a new leaf" and giving up my pleasure for an ascetic life with God. So I want to come back to it--and I'm far more regular in my spiritual time now than I ever was back then. I am, because "quiet time" is now pure pleasure. I never leave feeling chastened and broken. I leave my ACIM reading feeling loved and loving--and absolutely safe.

Christians have accused ACIM of being the "feel-good" lies of Satan. I think, instead, that the creeds of many Christian churches have become the "feel-awful" lies of the ego.The fearful ogre I once bowed down to was a man-made construction. I was taught that "God is love." I finally believed it when ACIM started to make sense.

I Am Not Special, I Am Happy to Say

How upside-down from our most sacred human programming it is to say the words “I am not special.” And yet this is the message of ACIM for me today—and in it is peace and sweet relief.

My desire to please and be admired—cultivated from my earliest childhood—created in me the fear of discovery as an imperfect being. While I privately know and recognize my flaws, I live in hope that no one else will see them. Because when they do, I’m deflated, defensive, and fearful.

Yesterday, I sent an email that seemed appropriate to me, but I violated a policy I wasn’t aware of and got a kind-but-solid slap on the wrist from my boss this morning. He vouched for me with policy watchers, telling them that I had acted “naively,” but without intending to violate policy. And everything is fine now, except my ego. Naïve? You mean I’m not wiser than most? Not smarter than most? Not special? Why keep going then?

As so often happens, my reading from ACIM this morning had prepared me for what was coming. “Specialness versus Sinlessness,” it was called. (T-24. IV.1) It did not instantly cure me of my need to be special, of course. But it gave me the tool I needed to work through the punishment I wanted to heap upon myself for being that most dreadful of things: naïve.

The pursuit of specialness is the pursuit of misery, ACIM says in essence. It was this desire that separated us from God and each other. We are not special because we are not separate. We are not special because we are perfection—all of us as one. Perfection is our natural state and will never be something that distinguishes one human from another.

I processed these thoughts today, every time the self-recrimination tried to creep back in. And each time, my tense body relaxed, and my load lightened. I’ve been through episodes like this before and sometimes wallowed in depression for days and weeks before it lifted. I used to seek someone else to blame. Or I’d think of starting over somewhere else, where no one had yet discovered my flaws.This exercise has been enlightening, because it shows me how persistent and subtly powerful the ego can be in its determination to keep us small—while making us pursue bigness.

Funny, it’s a relief to say, “I am not special.” It permits us to live and love and work without attachment to results or fear of failure. It permits us to just be. So I’ll keep repeating it until I’ve crumbled the programming of an American Idol world. I am not special. I am not special.... Already my spirits are lifting….

Perspective After Rest

The whirlwind of responsibilities that had me whining in previous posts finally sucked me into 14-hour days until I finally dropped out for a rest last Wednesday. I stopped looking at emails, refused to think about work, and slept as long as my body wanted to sleep. And then I started to remember who I am.

It's easy to become proud of how many people want your help--and to develop a misguided sense of honorable martyrdom as you put aside your own needs day after day. But when I rested, when I finally had time to pick up ACIM and really savor the words again, I realized that my martyrdom was self-centered, destructive, and ultimately was robbing the world of the best I can give it.

Tomorrow I go back to work, but I go back with a resolution to work reasonable hours and to leave my work at the office. At home, I need to work on a dissertation (a pleasure, if I give myself time to do it) and I need to enjoy my husband and friends. I need to eat properly, stretch, enjoy ACIM, and sleep plenty.

ACIM never asked me to pour myself out. It never encouraged martyrdom and, in fact, tells me that God is not asking us to sacrifice. It tells me a miraculous life is the most natural thing I can have in this man-made world. It's time to claim it. It's the best service I can offer my fellow men.

Hereafter Afterthoughts

Today, my husband and I went to see the new Clint Eastwood film, "Hereafter." With my dissertation work focusing on afterlife beliefs, I have been waiting anxiously for its release, and I wasn't disappointed. It raised so many of the themes that I have been pondering these last several years.

It depicted our deep ambivalence about the subject of death and what comes after it. Some of us refuse to consider that there is anything after death. Others accept religious creed without question. Some actively seek answers by ancient tools like seers and mirror gazing and others by new tools like infrared photography. Some ponder it and some give it little thought. And some seek to exploit those who, in their pain and fear, seek proof of an afterlife or contact with a dead loved one.

My early life in Christian orthodoxy gave me a very basic framework: There was heaven for the Christians and hell for everyone else. Of course, many who believed themselves to be Christians were not, according to Southern Baptist doctine. And it was our duty under God to persuade them of the horrors that awaited all those who had not had the proper "experience of salvation," as evidenced by a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I went through the proper rituals at age 7, so I never felt the fear of hell personally. I had no consciousness of how this worldview looked to those raised differently. And it never occurred to me that we might be wrong. We were programmed to speak with adamant certainty. "I don't just believe, I know!" was a common retort to anyone who seemed dismissive of our religion. And then there was the arrogant phrase I later came to abhor: "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it." There were no gray areas.

When I went through my change of heart in my late twenties and beyond, the first thing I had to come to terms with was the not knowing. I had to trust that God would honor my sincere search for understanding, even if it brought me to no absolute creed. I even contemplated the possibility that there was nothing beyond this.

Then my father died. The day I stood by his casket was the last day I considered the possibility that life ends at death. I fully recognized that I was choosing this view and not receiving unquestionable knowledge. But there was something more to it. My father was pure love to me--warm and safe and wonderful. In facing his death, I had to ask myself whether that precious energy could really be turned off like an electric light. Could such love really be just circuitry? It didn't make sense to me--and I'm coming to trust my inner questioning.

It was then that I began to have a real interest in questions of life after death. I began to pray that God would open to me a window to the afterlife, so I could study it without having to die first.Christianity had made it seem such a dull fate--bowing and singing praise songs to God for all eternity. But with the greater spiritual freedom of my questioning years, I could ask what kind of God would be so egotistical? And why would we desire that heaven?

I found myself far more interested in the near-death experiences I read about. Oh, I am fully aware of the skeptical interpretations--and healthy skepticism is warranted. But it all cannot be explained by the shutting down of the brain, and we so-called scholars embarrass ourselves in our determination to prevent matters of spirit from having a place in our research and study--our tendency to dismiss as naive those who see a larger possibility.

We especially embarrass ourselves by refusing to acknowledge centuries of experience simply because the machine does not yet exist to prove the unseen. A healthy skepticism says, "I'm open to the possibility," and studies.

I had a healthy skepticism about ghost stories. I found them much fun and intriguing and undoubtedly most are worth no more than a moment's fun. I enjoyed the rise of the ghosthunters on television, but I could not believe until I had my own experiences to draw upon. That was when that "window to the afterlife" I had prayed for began to open.

About eight years ago, I started my current job, which placed me into a wonderful old house that had been swallowed over the past century by a large university campus. From the beginning, I heard footsteps coming into my office at times when I was the only one in the building. But the staff assured me that the house wasn't haunted, and I tried not to be spooked by the noises.

Several years ago, I hired a graduate student who began to have experiences in the building. She saw a shadow person in her doorway now and then, but told no one, and she also heard footsteps walking through my office door--when the door was closed and the building empty. Another student had walked through an icy cold spot in the hallway, which is not airconditioned, on a summer's day in Alabama. Another employee was hearing a rustling in a storage room behind her office, but never told anyone. In fact, student employees over the years had heard things--singing and conversations--but had never said so. They had graduated and moved on with their secrets.

But two years ago, a retired school teacher was doing some volunteer work for us and saw an apparition. Eight times in four hours, she saw an African American woman in a floor-length dress, with a headscarf, standing in a doorway, looking at the floor. For the first time, we all started to share our stories.

Only two of us were willing to investigate what was going on, and for the next year, we spent many night and weekend hours in the house with digital recorders. We recorded doors slamming, footsteps, etc., at first. Then, voices humming and whistling. And eventually voices talking--sometimes in answer to our questions. While we can only speculate what these voices mean or what they prove, we know they are there and cannot be explained by exterior noise, radio waves, or the other standard skeptical dismissals. We have reason to believe that some ghost stories are based on more than hysteria

We also both had to face what it could do to an academic career to openly acknowledge that we believe in ghosts (for we have no better name for these voices at this point). Some of our academic peers have been interested and even wanted to spend time in the place. Some politely change the subject. And some have been sneeringly condescending--one saying with a tone of deep disappointment, "Donna, please tell me you don't believe that." But I won't back down from what I've learned, because the sneering ones have no experience and no knowledge. I do.

For these reasons, I believe in a "hereafter," though I doubt it is much like the Southern Baptist heaven. And I doubt there is a hell at all, unless it is this life here--as A Course in Miracles suggests. I won't say I know there is an afterlife until I've actually been there. But I believe it--less and less because I want to and more and more because the evidence leans that way.

My study of ACIM and my experiences with my haunted workplace have led me to believe that the death of the body does not carry us immediately to full and eternal understanding. It does not render us pure, complete, and all knowing. There is more to be done. The afterlife, therefore, is not equivalent to heaven. ACIM says that the final resting place is the blissful return to a memory of who we were created to be--who we've always been. It is the death of our illusions of individuality and materiality. We will remember--we have no choice about that. How rapidly we remember is our choice and can be substantially shortened by our decisions now.

I never wanted to speed the return to heaven when it was the God of my childhood waiting there--ready to be adored and bowed down to for all eternity as he cast my "lost" friends and family into eternal torment. Only as ACIM has pulled back the filters and shown me what seems a much truer vision of God have I lost all fear of death. I have no desire to hurry it, but I'll welcome it when it comes.

I'll welcome the opportunity to take my studies to the next level. For now, I just hope to see as many of my fellow travelers as possible set free from the cages of religious and scholarly canon. Because we are, in essence, one being, I will only be fully free when we all are. And we all will be.