Whatever.

That was my 90’s-ish disenchanted response to my daily A Course in Miracles lesson yesterday. I’m just being honest here. So, yes, I am on day 249 of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) in what is a year long process. I do, incidentally, recommend it thus far. That said, I do a fair amount of translating the language from its Christian-based perspective to my own personal form of spirituality, which doesn’t follow any particular religion (never has). The old patriarchal Father-Son language just doesn’t work for me. In particular, please stop referring to humanity as “the Sonship.” Just stop, please. I’ve read the justifications for this that suggest that Jesus, who is being channeled, utilizes the masculine in an attempt to heal all of our negative connotations of masculinity and to heal separation by including all genders in his definition of the Sonship. It just doesn’t work for me as a woman, which is to say that I still don’t feel included. I can see how it might work to guide a man into a mindset of inclusion. And, yes, you can argue that this is my own perceptual problem, but I would counter-argue that the problem is that our language isn’t capable of correctly portraying the way it really is. I endorse telling it like it is- God is not gendered and neither are our souls. If our language can’t convey this, then let’s invent words that can. You can see that when ACIM triggers me, I easily move into a full on rant.

This bothered me so much when I first attempted ACIM many years ago, that I stopped very early on because I couldn’t get past it. But I am determined this time to not let the language get in my way, so I just translate as necessary the essence of the lesson into my own terms. That has worked for me. Overall, I agree with the gist and intent of ACIM and have found it a helpful daily reminder, or mental operation as the case may be, in the midst of an intense part of my journey. There are those days, though, that it pushes my buttons. Yesterday was such a day. The lesson that I reacted to was this:

“Whatever suffers is not part of me.”

Is it pushing your buttons too? Just curious. If your reaction is anything like mine, the pushback is something like this: “Wait the hell a minute… my suffering is my G-damn suffering!” Again, just being honest, if not slightly dramatic. My reaction wasn’t all that, but I did feel my chest tighten as I read it. What that told me is that this is a sticking point for me. It also means that it is something that I am ready to look at and in fact have been working on very intensely this year.

To say a little more about the pushback, there is a flip side to all of this and really that was what instantly came up for me. And to be fair, this particular lesson can’t be taken out of the context of the 247 days that proceeded it. But I think the wisdom that it is attempting to convey is a sticking point for most of us. Other wisdom traditions say something similar. In Buddhism it is stated like this: attachment is the root of suffering. Hinduism aligns with Buddhism in this regard and both include desire and wrong-thinking as primary causes of suffering. What each of these traditions is trying to say is that it is our belief that we are our relative, embodied selves- our ego- that is the cause of suffering. In short, to be alive is to be subject to suffering for the simple reason that in order to be alive in the first place we kind of have to believe that we are separate beings. That is the function of our ego, to maintain this illusion of separation. But this separation from our divine nature is painful, and frankly, unreal.

So here is the rub for me. I like being alive. I think it is pretty dang cool and miraculous. I also think that life is divine in nature. In fact, I believe that there is nothing but God. That is my spirituality in a nutshell. ACIM, incidentally, agrees with this view. So something in me has an adverse reaction every time something or someone suggests to me that I should somehow want to overcome this condition of being alive. I’ll take it, suffering and all, thank you very much. Not that I am adverse to the alternative, it’s just that I don’t think that one state is inherently better than the other. Both states- relative (embodied, manifest) and absolute (unembodied, unmanifest)- are equally divine to me. That means that the suffering part is, in its own way, a gift.

Stated slightly differently, I react to the suggestion that my ego is not divine in nature. Really? If there is nothing but God (again, my view, which I am not asking you to adopt), then my ego has to also be God. This is where I may ultimately remain at odds with ACIM even though our view and end game is essentially the same, which is to say that this difference is more about semantics. Now mind you, I fully recognize that the function of my ego is to keep me convinced that I am not God. I get that. It’s just that at this point in my life I recognize that even this weird, backward-ass function plays a divine role in my process of becoming.

Now I am certainly not saying that I think that these wisdom traditions have it wrong. I don’t. In fact, I think they are right to point out that our suffering is of our own doing, generated in our own minds, projected out into the world, and then reinforced as our limited perception of what is what. If that was a mouthful, it simply means that we are making it all up. Again, I acknowledge that this is a trigger for many people. I can only hold space for myself and for you to consider it. ACIM is a good way to make space for this sort of considering. Come to your own conclusions. For me, suffering is based in the ego via attachment and the underlying misunderstanding of who we really are. Where I might differ from these traditions is that I don’t necessarily deem this choice to be a mistake. To the contrary, I view it as a necessary part of our process of becoming, of living into our divine nature. To know and experience who we are, we have to first forget who we are and then play out who we are not. I have found in life that I have to exhaust my ideas about myself and about the world before I can overcome my small-mindedness.

To bring this down to earth a bit, I would say that it is by moving through our suffering that we arrive at joy. And joy is our true nature. Again, this is in alignment with these wisdom traditions. There is a meme going around that suggests that maturity comes with damage, not with age. If that were accurate, then we would all be as mature as all get out! There is plenty of damage to go around and nobody is immune from it. Although I do think it is generally true that people who have more evident damage are more likely to be in touch with their damage and are therefore more likely to attain maturity. This is to say that for me the sign of maturity is the degree to which we are able to step into and own our damage (aka, suffering). For me I distill this into a four step process:

1. Gain awareness of the root of my suffering.
2. Face the part of me that is suffering.
3. Do the (hard) work of nurturing that part of me that is suffering.
4. Carry my suffering to the surface and expose it to the light.

The process ranges from easy to extraordinarily difficult. Some suffering lingers at the surface, but the deepest suffering in us has been hiding out for a long time- perhaps since birth, or even before. Simply discovering that it is even there can be difficult. Those deepest, most primal wounds tend to be the most allusive and the most subversive in our process of becoming. I liken getting to them as digging a well into the depths of myself. Basically, follow steps 1-4 starting with whatever is showing up at the surface, then repeat, repeatedly. Eventually you’ll get down into the center of the suffering. To me it is the regular and conscientious implementation of some process like this that is the sign of maturity.

I knew that I was earning my wings when I got deep enough into myself to understand that step 3 is about me becoming the parent to my own inner 5 year old child. This parenting is no easier than the real deal. Same difficulties, actually. That kid has a mind (and a heart) of her own! Kids don’t grow up overnight (although it seems that way) and we don’t necessarily gain maturity with age. I might argue that maturity as I am defining it is fairly rare these days.

The point of it all, though, is what comes with step 4. To expose suffering to the light is to release it. To release it is to experience the joy that it was hiding all along. This is what these wisdom traditions would have us know. That we are not our suffering. What we are is joy. Now I suppose it is possible that we could come to this realization without all of the well digging. Just a snap of the fingers and be done with the suffering. Let’s just abide in the joy that we are already! I think- and I could be wrong- that to achieve the level of joy that the wisdom traditions point to (heaven on earth or enlightenment in the highest sense) would be difficult to achieve without doing the hard work of acknowledging, facing, nurturing and exposing our suffering. If it were as easy as a snap of the fingers, then I seriously doubt that Jesus would have whined to God about being forsaken, or that Buddha would have starved himself to near death in search of the truth.

But my point is that the work itself doesn’t have to be a life sentence. Mastery of a process like the one that I outlined is what I would call a state of full maturity, or elderhood. It isn’t that the suffering goes away- that is a condition of life as the wisdom traditions say. We need our pesky egos to maintain the illusion of relativity that is the foundation of life. Mastery of the process, to me, is to fall in love with every second of it. It is to embrace and be grateful for this extraordinary opportunity of Self-discovery. We can find joy in the process itself. We can find joy in our pain. To do that is to transcend it in a way that allows us to remain here, gratefully and gracefully, in this gift that is life. This is different than trying to escape being here in search of some absolute state where suffering does not exist. I have no desire to escape life. This is to say that I do not believe that the state with no such suffering (the absolute, unembodied, unmanifest) is any more divine or any more wonderful than the state with suffering (the relative, embodied, manifest). That’s just me. You can choose whatever you like.

Moving toward a non-conclusion now. Maybe you have noticed, but all of the above contains a paradox. On the one hand, life is suffering. On the other hand, life is joy. On the one hand, we are truly not our suffering. On the other hand, we need our suffering to figure that out. This is the both/and that is life. Life is a beautiful paradox, and to embrace this is perhaps half the battle in healing the attachment that causes our suffering. Don’t try to solve it. On this front, here is one of my favorite lessons from ACIM so far: “I leave creation free to be itself.”

Last but not least, my end game might just be to save life on this planet. Facing where we are on this front has been painful. The level of loss that we are all being confronted with is extraordinary. It is easy to focus my attention outwardly on all of the things that I might help heal through my vocational skills. Believe you me I have been hard at work on that front for years now. Yet what I will leave you with today is that I have come to realize that there is nothing more important than the work that I am doing to heal myself. It is not even the case that I have to heal myself before I can heal what is outside of myself. Healing myself is the actual work. Period. Yes, and hopefully, others will be inspired by my healing and in turn heal themselves. But to keep this beautiful experience called life around, we each will have to ultimately do our own work to heal the illusion of separation that lies within. That is the crux of the issue at the moment. Godspeed.