Sunset on a leaning tree

It’s the middle of the evening and I’m running out of gas. Funny how those expressions come about and stick with you. Maybe there’ll be a generation talking about running out of gas long after electric cars. I hope so. It’s not the expression so much as it is what it conveys. It’s nice, once in a while, to write an easy turn of phrase that is so universal. You know someone reading it can tell just how you feel.

As much of a sunrise person as I am, I’ve not been as poised for sunset. Tonight, coming out the back door, there was something about the light and the way it shown on this one tall tree just inside the woods side of the yard. It was standing out like an actress surrounded by a chorus line that no one was looking at. The spotlight was on her alone. It made me feel as if I’d never seen her before…and how could I have missed her.

This particular tree is a leaner, tall and slender. I suppose it was last fall that we had the branches cut that seemed to make her lean toward sunrise. She’s still leaning and now so bare. In the light she made an arc. Henry and I saw a deer cross the road yesterday and the tree reminded me of her: young and slender. Our deer crossing was at about the same time of evening and the light graced her too.

Sunrise and sunset feel like graceful, quiet times, and I’m glad of them.

Focus and multi-tasking

I’m not a multi-tasker. It was nice to hear of a report recently that said that even though multi-tasking was thought previously to be good for the brain, this is no longer considered to be true. There you go, another one of those studies like the ones about food that, just when you’re getting used to everyone looking at you funny because you still eat butter, reverses its findings so that, if you were so inclined, you could say “I told you so.”

Being as I’m not a multi-tasker, multi-tasking times wear on me. This month, just as I was starting on the first home improvements in fifteen years, I was called for jury duty. I had to quick finish up with my taxes before that started last week. The jury duty has been great actually, but I can’t talk about it. And even if I could, I’d be stymied by the way my brain gets when it’s had multi-tasking thrust upon it.

The great thing about any creative endeavor is that it requires focus. That’s also its curse in a multi-tasking world. One thing I can say about the beauty of jury duty is that it’s focused: cell phones off, previous obligations canceled, attention required and also appreciated. Ah. No wonder I’ve been liking it.

I’m in one of my periods where it seems stupid to share when no one’s sharing back. I’ve finally signed on with a new website company who assures me that I haven’t had the kind of blog that gets noticed. Then I feel the whole blessing/curse thing again.

If you’ve noticed, I’m also taking a break from writing on the practices of A Course of Love. Maybe doing that writing even started the “why do it” feeling because, when you write with a somewhat more serious intention of sharing, you have more a yen for response. With a nice obscure little blog, you can mainly just write for the fun of it, when you take your break from other things, when you can respond to the yen to spend a few minutes with that creative side of yourself that you’ve been missing – just to get back in touch with “it” rather than with anyone else.

I maintain that writers write for themselves. Sharing is a side benefit. If sharing were the major intention, most of us would be hopelessly disappointed. Our creative sources call us out. They won’t be ignored. They invite us to spend time with ourselves and to express that time in words (or music, art, wood). Don’t ask me why. But, since I know we’re all creative types of one sort or another, I’m sure you understand.

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.

No Relationships are Special

I remember how, on first receiving these short forms of these major themes, I felt that each contained a bit of the other, and as if none of them said what I would have expected them to say. This is true in this very short discussion of leaving special relationships behind.

I like that it’s short and sweet and that again the major thrust is on being who we are:

“Dedication to the goal of being who you are may at first seem selfish, but it is “the most sincere form of relationship. Relationship based on anything other than who you are is but a mockery of relationship.”

Being honest now is a “call to truth.”

Keeping our focus on being who we are aids us in this practice. There's no need to analyze our relationships for evidence of specialness. Our examination remains with ourselves and with living from the truth.

This treatise on the nature of unity begins with a discussion of treasure. What is treasured, both within and without, leads to an exploration of callings. Callings, Jesus said, come in many forms. We can feel a call – as to be a musician, doctor or priest. That’s one kind of calling.

In relationship, some of these calls come as demands and sometimes we’re “called out” in relationship. At times we might need to “call out” those we are in relationship with. It’s not that we ignore the richness or the conflict found in relationship, but that, in a sense, we mind our own business (or our own hearts). In sticking with what we truly feel, by listening openly to what is shared with us, by the very “give and take” of relationship, we are aided in seeing things about ourselves that we might not want to see. In sharing honestly with others, we can aid them. Keeping our integrity, we can’t lose or rob another.

“Your loyalty must be totally to the truth of who you are and not continue to be split by special relationships. While your love relationships will provide a rich learning ground for you now, they must also now be separated from all that would continue to make them special.”

Next: Loss, Gain and Change

(Sharing from the beliefs/practices in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love. First on "No Relationships are Special.)

Giving, Receiving, and the discipline to express our true selves

The part of this belief that is about accepting needs has been challenging for me to put into practice in relationship. I may be pretty good at writing about my true feelings, but ask me to sit down with my husband and have an honest discussion about getting needs met, or to kindly but firmly express what I feel comfortable giving to other family members, and my mouth gets dry, clamps itself shut, and my cheeks flush as a heat rises in me. In not having the discipline to voice my needs, I am not being myself, and it is not even for reasons of censoring negativity or ceasing to judge. It’s about really needing practice at doing something I’ve avoided doing my whole life.

In this area, I’m happy to look at practice as being about developing skills and having the courage to practice them until I’m good at it; it becomes a little easier; or maybe even if it’s always hard. What I have found is that I no longer want to act in many of the ways that I do. I’m aware, painfully aware of this. Sometimes I feel as if an action is not good for me, sometimes that it’s not good for another, but after a while you’ve gotta’ see that both are the same thing. That’s a revelation and a relief. And I’ve begun to get a little better at seeing this since reminding myself of these beliefs/practices.

Our minds have a way of perpetuating our usual means of relating even after our hearts’ wisdom would have us leaving these ways behind. Mental patterns seem set in stone—imbedded in certain relationships like the air we jointly breathe, and so “in our faces” every day, day after day. This, too, is our opportunity to practice; to practice in life.

A call to practice is just that…it’s not a pronouncement that we’re failures or that we’re not coming from our hearts, or that we’re egoic. Our feelings can, at times, be precisely a confusion about what our hearts feel. As we reunite with our hearts, we can become so aware of our feelings that we’re like putty; getting shaped and at times sapped by every emotion that we meet.

Here is what Jesus has suggested as a means of practice:

“Bring the thoughts and feelings that arise to the place within your heart that has been prepared for them. Do not deny them. Bring them first to your Self, to the Self joined in unity at the place of your heart. From this place you learn to discriminate, to separate the false from the true…. With truth and illusion separated, you develop the discipline to express your true Self, as you are now. This is the only way the Self you are now has to grow and change. This is the only means the Self you are now has of giving and receiving as one. This is the only means available to you to replace the old pattern with the new.”

When we’re not honest, we get mad at other people half the time before realizing that we’re really mad at ourselves.

The very idea of practice being something we all need can take the sting from our unreadiness or initial less-than-successful attempts. We are “making known” not learning to play the piano or kick a ball.

As I’ve practiced extricating myself from my own pattern, some real shifts have occurred. I remember that I’m really doing everything that I do because of love…which ultimately is true…and then I can stop being so irritated that my husband leaves his socks on the floor or my daughter leaves her dishes lying around. When I pick them up, I feel more relaxed about it, and then the people around me are more considerate, and on and on.

Giving and receiving is not, I have found, saying: I do this for you/now you do that for me! No matter how much I’d like it to be, and to support these kinds of bartering feelings I’ve harbored, it’s simply not a wash.

Giving and receiving as one is deeper than that. It’s like drawing on that well of our truest feelings – the kindness and compassion that motivate us. When we trust that we’re acting from that place – not just for those we’re in relationship with – but for ourselves too, some of the things that bug the shit out of us will take care of themselves.

And yes, we’ll find the courage to talk about the others!

“Needs” are distinguished from “wants” by the simple idea that all needs are shared, and that this fact of life isn’t hidden to us. We’re aware of it. Our most basic human needs are shared. Not one human needs more water, air, food, love, freedom or dignity than another. Our needs are equal. Our essential equality is unquestioned.

This is where we begin to live out that certainty.

( Giving and Receiving as One, and the quote used here are from "A Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love.)

Giving, Receiving, and Being

(Part 4: Giving and Receiving as One and the practices/beliefs from The Treatises of A Course of Love, 2nd treatise: "A Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition")

One of the ways that accomplishment stands out as the “beginning” for me, is that it allows these other beliefs/practices to take root. What a reversal in itself – to have accomplishment come at the beginning.

Right away – at the onset of this Course of Love – we start to hear about our accomplishment. Let go of the ego, we are told. For sure let it go as our identity. We start hearing that we have a true identity. The ego is who we think we are. Our true identity is of God (by whatever name).

Kabbalist Marc Gafni and others, call our true identity our soul. In Soul Prints, Gafni says: “The human being is created Bezelem Elohim – in the divine image. What this means is that every human being is infinitely unique, dignified, and valuable. Our lives are about finding and living that uniqueness, affirming that dignity, and expressing and sharing our value in the world.” (xix)

It follows then, that continuing to think that what makes us feel human and unique is of the ego – whether these are uncomfortable feelings or distinct passions – isn’t going to jive with belief in our accomplishment, our uniqueness, or our needs. Belief in the ego (at least as ego is described in ACIM and ACOL) is like saying, “I’m not my true self…yet.”

Jesus says, also from the very beginning, that it is our true selves, not our egos to whom this Course is given. He says, in fact, that our egos can’t learn it.

And so…if our most vulnerable and human feelings are accorded to the ego, none of these beliefs or practices are going to sooth us, bring change, or propel us forward. Clinging to the ego breeds feelings of “not there yet.” “Not there yet” feelings keep us from being who we are.

“To proceed into each relationship as who you truly are, is to bring everlasting change to each and every relationship and thus to all.” 7.12

I watched a video of Earl Raj Purdy giving a class in A Course of Love yesterday. His style could be described as “all Earl” but it had shades of a rap artist and a Baptist preacher, an entertainer and a comedian. It was so lively. I felt, just briefly, as if Earl had what it takes and I don’t. But I was smiling even as I had the thought – so pleased was I that Earl was being “all Earl.” That’s what it’s all about. That’s what our many different expressions in the world are all about. That’s how – as each of us are uniquely who we are – we speak straight to the heart of anyone hearing our message.

Now Earl contributes his expression to getting out of the way and letting God speak through him, and I might attribute mine to getting out of my own way and then coming back. No matter how you say it, this is the journey most of us are on. We get out of the way of the ego and come back to our true selves (or the God within) – and there – we live, love, and express our Source in a way that only we can. It doesn’t really matter how we say it, think of it, or feel it, as long as we’re making that journey to being the unique expressions of love that we are.

As Earl read from ACOL Chapter 23: The Freedom of the Body, he read about our fear that when we lose our separated self, we’ll lose our individuality. He demonstrated that this is not so.

“To proceed into each relationship as who you truly are, is to bring everlasting change to each and every relationship and thus to all.” 7.12

Next: some observations from my own life about the challenge of needs

Giving, Receiving and Needs

Giving and Receiving as One (part 3)

A key in our cultivation of wholeheartedness is receptivity. Many of us are much more comfortable giving than receiving. Our tendency is to feel good about ourselves when we are able to give. But receiving? That is not always so comfortable. Receiving the help that meets a need can make us feel particularly uncomfortable – even weak or dependent. As strong as our desire is to have our needs met – our preference can still be not having any needs that can’t be meet through our own effort.

But this isn’t the way we were created.

According to Jesus, the overall plight about which we are mad and confused, and the major reason that we feel misled, is this way in which we were created. All our lives we seem to be assured that the ultimate maturity is either having no needs or being able to meet them ourselves. But our reality as humans doesn’t mesh with this goal. Human beings exist in relationship. For the first years of our lives, we need constant care. Even beyond those early years, we wither without love and care.

It is easier to accept that our being resides in relationship than that our relationships are necessary. Need has become a dirty word, associated with unhealthy dependency and lack.

The belief in giving and receiving as one can help us see need in healthier ways. And the practice can take us beyond the acceptance of needs to trust in needs being met.

“Real trust is not a trust that waits and hopes but a trust that acts from who you truly are. Real trust requires the discipline of being who you are in every circumstance and in every relationship. Real trust begins with your Self.” 7.16

The funny thing is that, in cultivating an identity for ourselves that is called “spiritual,” our tendency can be to become great deniers of needs, even those that are about expressing our true feelings. Our thoughts can tell us that some feelings aren’t worthy of our “true” self. A desire to hide all but our most attractive emotions can grow. If a thought is considered negative or bad, it is denied. From a desire not to judge, honest observations are withheld. This can lead to walking a tightrope of internal censorship. Suddenly we’re not being who we are at all!

Our thinking is full of unconscious patterns that can make us blind to the changes that begin to occur in us as we cultivate wholeheartedness. When our thoughts are joined with the feelings of our hearts, our intentions become more pure and there is less cause to suspect our motivations. We can call it like we see it. We must.

The discipline required in A Course of Love is the discipline to be who we are. Who we are can’t be denied in favor of who we will be. Being who we are “requires trust in self and honesty in relationships.” 7.19

Next I’ll share some personal observations.

(These sharings based on the beliefs/practices in “A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition,” the second treatise in The Treatises of A Course of Love.)