Video from last year… the course was open to the public. This year it is offered through your spiritual center.
copyright (r) 2007 Lynn Woodland
“There is no answer.
There has never been an answer.
There never will be an answer.
That’s the answer.”
“The Pathless Path” by Gertrude Stein
As last week’s lesson touched upon, the void phase of life periodically asks us to release all that we think we know. “Not knowing” means letting go of the idea of a graspable Absolute Truth and cultivating the state of mind expressed by Socrates when he said, “I know that I know nothing.” As soon as we hold a truth to be The Truth, we automatically separate ourselves from all others who don’t share our truth, and a disempowering cycle of judgment, separateness, and fear begins.
One of the three volumes of spiritual philosophy comprising A Course in Miracles is a set of 365 lessons. The first lesson is “Nothing I see means anything.” The second is, “I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me.” The third is, “I do not understand anything I see.” These exercises in deprogramming are an essential step in opening to an expanded paradigm of truth. The more rigidly we hold on to our interpretations of life, the more we close off to the multitude of options and possibilities that are beyond our current ability to imagine.
In the absence of one ultimate truth that our human minds can fathom, there are countless perspectives of truth that serve us until we outgrow them. Each perspective frames a piece of the truth, but all of reality is too big to frame in an absolute way. We may have transcendental moments of experiencing “All That Is,” but as soon as we try to define what we experienced, we simply construct another frame. What we see through a frame will never be the whole picture, so from time to time we must drop our interpretations, experiment with different perspectives of truth, and even be willing to live in the ambiguity of uncertainty at times.
Embracing paradox—finding coherency in two diametrically opposed truths—is a theme that arises in these lessons again and again because it’s such an important aspect of wisdom and empowerment. Remember the physics paradox, described in this course’s introduction, of matter being at once particles and waves. Human beings are the same: one with All That Is, yet unique and individual at the same time. The element of paradox is ever-present as we increasingly open to spiritual reality. We can be the creator of our own experience at the same time that we deeply accept and surrender to what is. We can know ourselves to be powerful enough to affect every atom in the universe and simultaneously recognize our powerlessness to change the Divine Order of All That Is. We can know more as we recognize that we know nothing.
Whenever we feel stuck in life, we can be sure that we have become too attached to our particular interpretation of truth. No amount of problem-solving will help until we first shake our rigid way of perceiving.
My favorite story illustrating a paradigm shift bears repeating here. It’s from the beginning of Price Pritchett’s short booklet on personal effectiveness entitled you2, where he described watching a housefly bashing itself to death trying to get outside through a screen window. All of its limited housefly senses told it that straight ahead was the most direct route to freedom. It could see it, smell it, practically taste it, yet the more it tried, the more beaten and battered it became. If only the fly could have seen the bigger picture it would have been able to turn around in the opposite direction and fly easily through an open door.
This is how we often operate in life. We become fixated on whatever appears most obvious to our physical senses. We then fall into assumptions that this is not just the best but the only truth and judge those who don’t share it. Furthermore, we remain stuck in our own self-created prisons.
Any time we feel torn between two, and only two, choices, where something gained must be at the expense of the other side losing, we can be certain we’ve become trapped by our narrow-mindedness. There are always more options. We may need to relax the ego’s need to feel in control and be “right” in order to find them—perhaps turning away from everything we thought we knew for sure—but they’re there, as surely as the open door is right behind the housefly.
Exercise: Freeing Your Mind
The following exercise will help you free your mind from its rigid grooves to find the open doors lying just out of sight. This is a helpful one to do when you’re feeling stuck in some area and, in this instance, you would slant the questions to identify what you believe to be true in relation to this specific issue. You may approach the following questions in a general way or slant them to a particular area of life where you especially feel a need for fresh insight.
Step One
What are your most deeply cherished truths? Write down the first handful of thoughts that come to mind.
Step Two
Review what you’ve written and ask yourself, what “truths” would cause you to feel very defensive if challenged?
Step Three
These are exactly the perceptions that need shaking up. The truth that you feel most protective of is showing you where you’ve become the most rigid and closed. Ask yourself, “What might happen if this were not true at all? What am I afraid would happen if this were not true?”
Step Four
Imagine that all you thought you knew for certain is not true. Don’t assume this means the opposite is true or that what you most fear is true. You don’t need to figure out the how or why of this. Simply play with it as an exercise in imagination. As you release your current interpretations, don’t immediately grasp for new ones. Simply let your mind open and allow yourself to be confused. This process is much like letting your eyes go out of focus so that you’re seeing the color, the form, and the big picture of the world around you, rather than the details. Imagine that, even in the midst of confusion and not knowing, you’re safe and at peace.
Step Five
Do some imagining, perhaps in writing, about what positive new options become possible if all that you thought was true isn’t. If nothing comes to you, then go back to Step Four and let yourself continue to live in the not knowing. As you do, give special attention to relaxing into this place of ambiguity. Cultivate a feeling of faith that positive, new, unimagined doors are opening. Let go and let your mind be boggled.
Out of this soft, fuzzy state, don’t be surprised to find new insight arising, options appearing where there seemed to be none, and a paradoxical sense of peace that comes as the security of knowing the answers gives way to a sure knowing of how little we know.
Knowing God
If we don’t resist the Void but instead go deeply enough into its apparent emptiness to find the hidden fullness, we can’t help but come in contact with something ineffable and mysterious. You may have had such an experience in the meditation last week. These experiences leave most of us wanting to define and explain them; to put a frame around them.
I think it’s the natural condition for the human mind to be frustratingly unable to ever fully know the Ultimate Truth but far too complex to ever stop wanting to. We desperately want to make God comprehensible, to put a recognizable face to the unknowable and create some small sense of order in an overwhelming universe.
In our striving for understanding, we’ve created countless paths to God in the form of religions and spiritual practices. I imagine each religious path being akin to a picture frame held up against the sky. The sky, of course, is too vast to frame, but the act of doing so brings a particular piece of sky into focus. For some this might show a patch of blue, while others view a dark starry night, rain and lightning, a rainbow, or flat, unbroken gray. We’re all seeing the truth even when these “truths” appear to be so contrasting. And as surely as the act of focusing in this way brings us closer to an aspect of God, it just as certainly blinds us to others.
So how can we reap the benefits of a spiritual path without succumbing to its limitations? Perhaps a start is to see it for what it is: one of many slants on the truth—packaged, framed, and filtered to make it more accessible to some and less so to others. What we see through the frames of our religious paths will never be the whole picture. So to pursue true knowing we must, from time to time, loosen our grip on even our most cherished beliefs.
This, of course, is a tall order. The very nature of focus that each path requires calls forth a heart-felt commitment, a personal investment in one’s own truth. Holding our spiritual philosophy lightly is as challenging as not taking ourselves too seriously; or not getting attached; or letting go of “ego,” to name a few glib clichés that are all easier said than done.
Ultimately, a true desire for knowing, as opposed to a craving for identity, again comes back to a willingness to embrace paradox—that recurring theme in both the path to enlightenment as well as in quantum science. Juggling mind-boggling contradictions, whether to comprehend the nature of matter, which changes completely when it’s small enough to be out of sight, or the nature of God (and is there a difference?), requires a paradigm shift in perspective, which can be impossibly difficult (as difficult as a fly bashing through a screen window) or astonishingly easy (as easy as turning around). Where we’re going next in this lesson involves relaxing the frame of our assumptions, teachings, and reactions to teachings, and our need for spiritual identity, to meet the mind-boggling paradox of God as if for the first time and to discover what God is to us in this moment.
Meeting God
We put an infinite number of faces and names to God: our Higher Self, Great Spirit, Goddess, the Holy Spirit, The Universal Source, energy, guardian angels, Gaia the earth spirit, Jesus, Buddha, and other spiritual masters of the world’s great religions are just a few. Certainly, the ineffable nature of Spirit is greater than any face we can put to it. However, there’s value in finding our own personal doorway into God. The inscription on a Chinese stone figure of Buddha, dated 746, puts it very succinctly: “The highest truth is without image. If there were no image at all, however, there would be no way for truth to be manifested.”
I know many devoutly spiritual people who take offense at the very word “God” because they believe the word means things that don’t fit their spiritual framework. But in all the ways the word “God” is used, can it ever be more than a hopelessly inadequate shorthand for something so big that only the shortest of words will do?
If you have a well-constructed concept of God and spirituality, whether it comes from what you’ve been taught, a reaction against what you’ve been taught, or what you’ve come to on your own, consider letting it go, if only for this week, to give yourself an opportunity to have a new experience of God.
Wait until you have some quiet, uninterrupted time to relax and imagine before you begin the following meditation. You may want to have pen and paper or art materials close by to capture your impressions.
Meditation: Meeting God
Relax, take some deep breaths and let your attention turn inward…. Review in your mind all of your impressions of God and Spirit. Let go of your intellectual thoughts and concepts and instead see what images feel the most comforting and emotionally appealing to you. Let your imagination play with different images of the Divine to find what represents spirituality most purely and powerfully for you.
Let go of your ideas and stereotypes about God. See what feels right. Is Spirit best pictured for you in a male or female form? Does God take a human form, animal form, or pure energy? Put aside what you believe to be right and simply see what “God” brings the greatest comfort…. Does it feel external or within? Do you see Jesus, Buddha, or another well-known spiritual figure? Do you see an angel or being of light, an Earth Goddess, pure energy or light, a child being, an old wise figure, or something else altogether?
Let yourself be drawn to a representation rather than deciding upon one. The “right” one is the one that has the most positive emotional voltage to it, the one that gives you the biggest lift. Imagine that the unknowable magnitude of All That Is is coming to you in exactly the form that best serves your growth at this time….
When a vision or sense of God comes to you and feels right, take some time to simply be in the presence of your God. Allow it to heal you, guide you, and love you. Let it tell or show you why it has come to you in this form.
When you’re ready, take a couple of deep breaths and bring yourself back to a normal, waking state feeling alert and refreshed. Take time to write or create, if so inspired.
Exercise: Growing a Relationship with God
Imagine God came to you in the form it did because there’s something you can receive or learn from this God that you couldn’t from any other form. Spend this week opening to what this might be. Imagine this manifestation of God is with you as you go about your day and at night as you fall asleep, and let it be your first awareness as you wake up. You don’t need to “know” anything as you do this. Just be open.
The Dark God
For many of us, there lies beneath the surface of our well-constructed, chosen view of spiritual reality, a darker figure. I’m not talking about images of Satan and evil that may be part of our religious upbringing, but rather our fearful images of an all-powerful force that isn’t purely benevolent. Our early religious training may have taught that God is wrathful and unforgiving. Or, early in life, we may have looked upon the sadness and cruelty of the world and decided God is uncaring. Even the benign image of Santa has the frightening side of always knowing if children have been “naughty or nice” and rewarding wrong-doing with switches and coal. These learned images, along with elements of our parents—the gods of our childhood—and other early influences, all combine into, not our chosen idea of God, but our fear of God—fear that remains semi or completely unconscious and has tremendous power over us. It remains down below, steering the ship, leaving us frustrated that all our efforts in the opposite direction are making no headway. Once revealed, its power is significantly diffused.
I became aware of an aspect of my own dark God in the midst of one of my five-day intensives that had the theme, “Living in the Fullness of God.” As I helped a participant to recognize and transform her limiting image of God, I realized that I, myself, often joked about an “evil trickster god” who enjoys having a good laugh at my expense. While I said this out loud only in humor, deep down it wasn’t a joke. I really did carry this image of God with me. My understanding of spiritual law holds that the benevolent forces of spirit give us what we love and we demonstrate what we love by where we give attention. So “God” will show up as we envision it—in my case, from time to time, as an evil trickster god just watching for an opportunity to have a cruel joke!
As I acknowledged, for the first time, the power of this image, I was able to transform it. While keeping some of its basic character in tact—that of a bait-and-switch jokester—I turned it into a benevolent trickster god, who makes fun of my negative expectations by delivering something wonderful just when I’m preparing for the worst. The more I work with this figure, the more I create for myself a therapeutic double-bind: when things are going well I can give thanks to God; when things are going poorly, I’ve set up the subconscious expectation that I will be “tricked” into things going well again in spite of myself.
Transforming the Dark God
What form do you imagine the dark God of your fears takes? In the same way I did, see if you can find a way to transform this dark figure into a friend and helper. Keep as much of its character intact as you can but change it just enough so that it’s now on your side and working to your advantage.
Compare the image of God that came to you in the earlier exercise to your transformed dark God. How are they similar or different? If different, what does each have that the other doesn’t? If they blended into one, what would that One be?