The Whole

Doing this writing on the Course’s practices is a grand experiment – or maybe a puny one. It’s just that I got done with “giving and receiving as one” and don’t think I spoke of it from the heart at all. Because what my heart knows about it wasn’t in there even obliquely.

Here’s what I mean and it goes to why I haven’t done this kind of writing before and why I’m questioning if I’m going to keep doing it now. When you take things apart, you miss the whole.

It was as if I “remembered” the whole today and then everything I’d written seemed so trite. True enough in a certain way, but not the whole.

I’ve said many times that there’s some way this Course comes to us as a whole. This is what has, for me, made it so fundamentally different. I’ve never gotten “stuck” in places, and I don’t know if I can explain what I mean but what I’ve written here gives me a chance to try, even if no one’s been listening all along (which may turn out to be a good thing).

Each time I’ve gone “back” to A Course of Love – doesn’t matter which book it is – I find something incredible. I’m awed.

A friend just wrote me about re-reading The Dialogues and he said – “I can’t understand why this isn’t a classic.” That’s how I feel when I go back. And being as I give talks once in a while and imagine that someday more people will be in awe and they’ll invite me to come and share with them – I wonder about all of this. These thoughts come, and they don’t come without an inner sense of excitement for how a day or a weekend could be spent on one particular thing: on “Dialogue” or “Freedom” or these beliefs/practices.

And then invariably I hit this wall of PARTS.

It seems if you pick things out and try to find the substantial in them, you’ve got less than the whole and it doesn’t work. You’ve missed the essence.

Case in point – these blogs on the belief/practices. This may just be me not being a scholar, or the way I came to these practices looking for something to help, or my lacks as a writer – but what I’ve written by focusing on this “part” of the whole…and doing 3-4-5- blog entries on Giving and Receiving as One, hasn't revealed the essence of it.

These chapters I'm writing on are, after all, in The Treatises, and the treatises aren’t the course or the dialogues. The Treatises – it is said right out somewhere – are practical. We are to have “gotten it” in A Course of Love, and then that inner knowing is followed up by these practical lessons. The Dialogues begin with a little more of that, like the confidence we’re sorely lacking, all the human stuff that gets in our way. But then they soar away/and twist back/and soar away again.

It is so confounding and so brilliant the way this Course begins at the end and ends at the beginning! Let’s just sweep you off into Never Never Land and then hand you back down into the jaws of life on the ground.

When we go “back” to A Course of Love after reading The Dialogues it’s like culture shock. When we’re into The Dialogues, just getting the hang of being on the mountain, we’re trust back to level ground. We’re upped and downed for nearly a thousand pages. Taken on a trip full of reversals and switchbacks and replacements, heights and depths, All and nothing.

We end in the land of “somewhere new” and we can’t quite go back, as I’ve tried to do, and pick out a few chapters, and stick with what’s in them.

Which leads me to what I wanted to say and that is that giving and receiving as one is so much bigger and broader than what I’ve said.

The essence of giving and receiving as one is the very act of intimacy, of being received, and of receiving. The ACT of holding your heart open for another and being open to be held. This is the embrace. Love to love inviolate. This is the deep mystery of our secret selves, perhaps our souls, meeting soul to soul.

Yes, there are practical aspects and I have needed to go back and touch them, to remember them. But that’s what I do. “I” touch “them.” When I’m not doing that, something vaster touches me.

The practical things aren’t what hold my heart. They’re not the things that moved me, touched me, let me feel received, or opened me to receive. “Helpful” isn’t holy. It’s not the miraculous.

Practices and beliefs may be needed at times, but they’re not the grand meltdown of the whole into one messy, murky, convoluted entity called me or you awash in the embrace of something glorious that lies far beyond the helpful.