Читать книгу Hineni: My Walk Into Beautiful Life - S. Joshua Mendel - Страница 15

The major gift I gained from the first Unity Church I attended was my introduction to A Course in Miracles ("the Course"). The Course has proven to be a watershed—the watershed?—of my spiritual life. It seems to me that whatever technologies I explored going forward were informed, sifted, and measured by the Knowledge I hold from the Course. Writing this document has shown me how much it has affected me as I look back. Here is its own summary:

"This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary… it aims at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence which is your natural inheritance... the opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing has no opposite.

This course can be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. This is the peace of God."²⁴

The rest of the Text is merely theme and variation on these concepts.

The Course is a channeled work. The author is Jesus. The Text is not an easy read, either in content or style. It is written in iambic pentameter²⁵; if you don't get the rhythm, a sentence can sound like gibberish. The Course's channel²⁶ used to say in jest that the Course was probably meant for five, maybe six people at the most. If so, it appears that I was the latecomer to the sextet!

It seems to me that in terms of natural gifts and my path to date, I was perfectly attuned to resonate with the Course. I am a mystic. Judaism had taught me to appreciate study and good works. Yoga had allowed me to quiet my mind and to focus my attention. Counseling had shown me how the ego could and had tripped me up. Unity Church had introduced me to Jesus and forced me to develop a relationship with him, however rudimentary or confused at the time; to put his example into in my life. And all this training had taught me to be comfortable with cognitive dissonance!²⁷ I myself had done some pretty dissonant things by then, so the upset factor on that score was nil. So this woman "channeled a spirit she called Jesus". That was as close to the truth of the Course's birth as I could manage at the time. I resisted for some time the fact that Jesus is the author; even though that is quite clear from the Text. (I am so good at denial!)

Any qualms I had about the Course were soothed when I read it. From the very first time I read the Course, I knew I was reading The Real Thing. I felt immediate kinship with the content. Something inside me said: "YES!" It is not uncommon for me to be moved to tears when I read the Course.

I clearly recall my first lesson. It was February 1991. The group was reading the Workbook for Students, Lesson Two: "I have given everything I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) all the meaning it has for me." I did not have a book when we started, so I read along with someone else. You can bet I bought the book that day!

Another mystery in my life…The Workbook has 365 lessons. Although certainly not required, my guess is that most individuals would start the Workbook on January 1^st, so the class would have been on a much later lesson. I might have been lost that early on in my introduction to the Course.

I remember looking up and out the window. It was one of those very cold days when it was sunny, yet gentle wisps of snow were falling. Winter is my favorite season and I appreciate scenes like this. And at that moment, I suddenly "got" that it was I who endowed the pleasure to this view. I remember that someone had complained about the cold before we started. He might not have liked the scene so much!

* * * *

I read the Workbook with this study group and I began reading the Text at home. But on my own, I screeched to a stop when I started reading words like "atonement"—they pushed my "Jesus died for your sins" button. Once I left Unity Church, I was on my own with the Course and being stuck, I did not read it much. Fortuitously, my friend Leila knew of a study group, not part of any church, which met at participants' homes. I say "fortuitous", but it is more than a bit miraculous. Leila does not study the Course. This was also an obedient and courageous step on my part. I knew none of these people heretofore.

I think that this group of six met bi-monthly, for about two years. I won't spend many words describing the group. I think the biggest lesson I gained from that group was how someone looking from the outside would say it disintegrated. One person dropped out because her husband did not read the Course and he was upset with her time commitment. A second woman told us: "The Course isn't giving me enough of a jolt." She moved on to crystals and other New Age "stuff". A third woman just could not get the rhythm of the Text. She would often read a sentence and exasperated, say: "What the fuck does that mean!" My friend Nadine or I would re-read the sentence with the correct iambs (is that the right use of the word?) and she would go "Oh….!" At some point, this woman found the Text too much of a hassle and just stopped coming. I can't remember why the other man in the group stopped participating.

This experience solidified for me concepts related elsewhere in this book:

•Everyone wants to "be spiritual", but few are willing to do the work it requires.

•Many people take on a technology for misguided reasons. They are doomed to be frustrated.

•Some people are made and/or prepared to resonate with some technologies, while others make no sense to them or leave them cold.

•If you lack natural gifts, there is only so far any educational experience can take you; and

•There are a lot of spiritual junkies out there!

So from an outside perspective, the group disintegrated. Or did it? It was now just Nadine and me. No, that was not true: it was Nadine, me, and Jesus. Just as the Course's channel, her scribe, and Jesus created the Course, Nadine, I, and Jesus created a Trinity to learn it.

For at least the next seven years, Nadine and I would meet weekly to read the Text, then the Workbook, then the Manual for Teachers, then a pamphlet and when that was complete, we would start all over again. My guess is we went through the Course's "canon" four times over. Here is the miracle for me in this experience: all Nadine and I did was read to each other. We would click into the sound of our voices and we entered a Trinity. As I said, the Course is not an easy read, yet it was rare that one of us would stop to ask the meaning of what one of us had read. If anything, an interruption was usually an expression of gratitude for the power and beauty of the words—or why one or both of us needed to Hear that message, that night! At some point, invariably not more than an hour (although we never planned this before nor timed ourselves), one of us would say: "I can't hear anymore. It just sounds like gibberish to me." I want to say that very often, both of us reached the same point at the same time. It's just that one of us "called the game".

Did Jesus appear to us in our meetings? Of course not! Jesus was with us in the sense of: "For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst…" (Matthew 18) In Course terms, my "brother" and I asked to learn the Course. We were willing to leave our egos behind to join with the Christ mind, the mind we share with all and Everything. Jesus, not as the Christ but as the prime Western example of that mind, joined with us in that effort, to make our learning possible. (Sorry if I can't explain this any better—it's a miracle. If I could be perfect at explaining this, it would not be a miracle. It's a paradox, see?)

I fear that if I go much further, I will write a book on the Course and bore you—and myself. I never find those books as powerful or true as the original! So here is my attempt to summarize what I have learned as a now 20+ year student:

•It took a while for me to truly grasp, but I realized that the God for which I had been searching all those years was no God at all. The Course is nontheistic.

•While this is still a mind bender, I accept this on some level: I and this entire world I see are a miscreation from a thought that happened in an instant: the thought that anything could be separate from Everything. That thought should have been laughed at the moment it was conceived, but it was taken seriously. And I am now part of this massive delusion, re-thinking that error moment-to-moment and acting as if it was real—creating and suffering the consequences.

To the extent I can let go of my hold on a separate me and a separate world, I can let go and let God. . . enter into Grace.

•The Course gives me a way—I believe the truthful way—to view the battle in my mind. One part of my mind hungers for Grace (my "right mind"); the other fears Grace and fights to maintain control. (Ego—ever heard that term before?) And then there is this third part in me that can and does tap into Grace. In my terms, The Voice; in Course terms, the Holy Spirit or Jesus as the once-earthly and best example.

•The Course is clear and inflexible on this point; I cannot have a split mind. Either I am receiving, thinking, and acting from my right mind or from ego. I am responsible for what I see and how I interpret it. I am responsible for my interactions with others and even for drawing to me the things that happen in "my" world.

•I am not left totally alone in this mind battle. If I let go to The Voice (in Course terms, "the Holy Instant"), then I can move into my right mind.

The Course has given this ex-Jewish boy a way to accept "the Jesus story" and Christological terms, in practical ways I can use in my life. Forgiveness, for one big example! Throughout the Text, Jesus says: "They (the Gospel authors, Paul) got me wrong! Here is what I really said; here is what it truly means!" Or: "Here is why I really did that!" For me, the most important statement Jesus makes in the Text is: "I was willing to take a radical step in terms of the Earth (dying on the crucifix) to prove that nothing could happen to my true nature. I took the ultimate journey—to prove you do not need to repeat it!"

The Course gives me tools I can use to stop my ego madness. When I do, and to the extent I do, miracles are possible. And I have done plenty! But the Course goes even farther; it keeps me from becoming a different kind of spiritual junkie; one addicted to miracles. The Course says miracles are temporary demonstrations of the truth. They only point to Grace; they are not Grace. To get too involved with miracles is just another way to lose my way.

Perhaps most important, my study of The Course has given me a concept of Jesus that truly resonates with me. Far from being some lordly, unapproachable spirit on the right hand of God, Jesus is in me; a loving brother and a guide. To understand my relationship with Jesus today, I offer my realization from the trip I took in the Grand Canyon (Aug/Sept 2010):

Over those seven days, we travelled 200 miles on the Colorado River, negotiating over 200 hundred rapids. Actually, I didn't negotiate one of them: Irv, our boat guide, did that for us. He knew whether to gun the raft into the rapids, cut the engine and let us float (once backwards!), or any other number of strategies. On hikes that were often up hundreds of feet, on rock cliffs, and usually in full sun, Irv was the guide who showed us how to traverse them safely.

Irv soon picked me out as the least intrepid of the group. His oft-repeated phrase to me was: "Now Josh, there's just a few "skanky" spots on this one…" When we got to that skanky spot, Irv's encouragement allowed me to swallow my fear (OK—terror!) to do things like hugging and shimmying around a rock that left only a foot (or less!) path behind my back, or to get down on all fours and squirm under the rock wall. (A misstep would be a 200+ foot drop!) It was Irv who found the sand bar to stop for lunch and the place to put away for the night. He made all our meals and cleaned up afterwards. He even carted out our… well, you know; the stuff that comes out later after you eat.

It didn't take long for me to realize that in that world, Irv was Jesus. I learned that if I trusted his experience and guidance, I could do things that normally I would be too frightened to attempt and I could do them safely, having an amazing experience as a result.

As stated earlier, Judaism felt incomplete to me. I need a Guide to take me safely over those rapids; someone to encourage me to take those hikes to that Power greater than me. . . as well as an example to show me how to let me float away. Jesus is that example and that guide. I believe he is The Voice I hear in my mind.

I had the good fortune, and I mean this in both senses of the word, to twice attend classes with Ken Wapnick at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, in Temecula, California. Ken was central to the effort in bringing the Course to the world after it was channeled. Seeing him at work and even being in his presence, I perceived that he lived what the Course taught.

Being in class with Ken was a unique experience. It didn't matter what the title of the class was; that was just the starting point. Depending upon the comments and questions of the students and the connections Ken might make in his head (just his head?), the class moved back and forth through the Course's canon. A very ordered person, this would normally bother me. But something inside told me that it really didn't matter; that we were learning what we collectively needed to learn. Or to state it a different way: Ken and we came together and asked to learn, so Jesus was the teacher.

OK, some hero worship here. It felt to me that when I saw Ken, I was seeing Jesus in the flesh. When his eyes locked on me, I felt that he was looking at me and only me with total love. Ken showed infinite patience answering questions. It seems to me he modeled "the silent smile of Jesus": the smile of one who saw challenges, frustrations, and pain in the so-called real world, yet knew nothing was happening; that all of this was a dream. I remember one class where a long-time student basically let fly his frustration with the Course, Jesus, and even Ken as the teacher. (I recognized his voice from DVDs I purchased of past lectures.) Ken did not stop the rant nor did he show emotion. I could feel the total love Ken had for this man. Ken just said to the man he loved him right where he was, and that when this man was ready to let go of his ego and his fears over union with God, the love he deserved would come to him. Wow!

Theism dies hard. I was a student for at least five years when I first met Ken. On our first meeting, Ken asked me what my favorite Workbook lesson was. I was especially attracted to Lesson 194 in the Workbook: "I place my life in the hands of God." After hearing my answer, with my hand still in his, he said to me with what I heard as The Voice: "Come on, all of this is metaphorical. God doesn't have any hands! The goal of the lesson is to let go of the ego's attachment to the past and the obsession over the future, to join with God." I heard The Voice follow in my mind: "Finally you get it… it's the first day of school!"

From that point on, I began to comprehend the Course in a totally new way. . . I trust the way it was intended!

* * * *

Despite its seeming inflexibility, the Course offers me the freedom to choose—even if I pay for it when I don't choose rightly. Jesus is very upfront in stating that this is not the only curriculum to Grace. If this Course fails to assist me in my Search there are other ways. Jesus is quite clear that you needn't accept him in order to work the Course or to reach Grace, because he is not the only teacher. The Text is not some Bible. In fact, one of the most powerful quotes in the Text goes: "Leave this book behind, leave everything you know and come to me with open arms."

Despite how central the Course is to my growth in Grace, I can and do compartmentalize it. I don't act all or most of the time as if I ever read a word of it! My first thought is not the one Jesus would approve. . . if he judged. To my salvation, I know that my first thought will rarely be the right-minded one.

And now I have the ability to pause; to Listen and re-act rather than react.