A Course In Miracles
It Isn’t Easy

By Jon Mundy
 

The title of my article in the May/June 2005 issue of “Miracles” was, A Course in Miracles Made Simple. While the Course may be simple, it isn’t easy. Why isn’t it easy? It’s not because the Course is not simple. It’s because, “we” are not simple. As the Course expresses it, Complexity is of the ego, and is nothing more than the ego's attempt to obscure the obvious. (T-15. IV.6). The egoic mind is very complex and complicated. It has taken many thousands of years to get our minds into the convoluted condition where everything is upside down and backwards (the world appears to be real and heaven a fantasy). There have been wars and rumors of wars since the day Adam opened his eyes. The world is old and tired and needs a new way of seeing. The Course itself got started when Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford got tired of ego games and agreed that there had to be another way.

The world is very tired, because it is the idea of weariness.
T-5.II.10:1
Time winds on wearily, and the world is very tired now.
Time, with its illusions of change and death,
wears out the world and all things in it.
M – 1. 4 1:1-2

Coming to Stop
While out gardening one evening, I heard some neighbor boys arguing. One said, it’s your fault! The other said, It is not! It is your fault! Back and forth, back and forth, they went until a third older brother finally stepped in said. Stop it! Just stop it! I’m tired of this and it really doesn’t matter! Whatever they were fighting about truly didn’t matter and so it is with all the egos madness. Mystical experiences occur when we get to stop. A good look at death will do it. Bankruptcy might do it. The death of a loved one might do it. The loss of one’s health or the loss of one’s job might do it.

The time will come when your mind will suddenly come to a stop
like an old rat who finds himself in a cul-de-sac.
—Yun-man (Buddhist)

Thank God for cul-de-sacs.
Like most of us, I’ve run down a number of cul-de-sacs, relationships that did not work out well, in 1989 a near collision with, though not a venture into bankruptcy, and two encounters with death. My most recent cul-de-sac was cancer and the opportunity it gave me to take a good look at Friend Death.
The purpose of meditation is to slow down the mind, to at least get it into “neutral.” If you’re really lucky you may get to stop. You will then stop making up the world. Once we stop making up the world, the world will not have to conform to our projections and the universe can rest from our insistence on it’s perpetually rearranging itself according to our prescription. You also get a rest. And now comes the chance for clearer perception.
Although I don’t recommend it as a path to awakening, more folks come to mystical awakening through “crash and burn,” than meditation. The Course tries to awaken us gently. Look, it says, here are 365 exercises.

Do one a day and you’ll begin to see differently and feel better.
You can temporize and you are capable of enormous procrastination,
but you cannot depart entirely from your Creator,
Who set the limits on your ability to miscreate.
T-2.III.3:3

The ego is doomed as are all false systems. It has a built in implode. At some point it will, just like communism, simply collapse inward on itself. There is, fortunately, a limit to miscreation. Eventually, the whole thing comes a-tumbling down. Actually, it already has.

We but undertake a journey that is over – W. L 158 3:6

The Insane Train
The Course makes 37 references to the “thought reversal” and 47 references to the “undoing” of our illusory thinking which must occur before we can begin to see – not as we have been seeing – through the eyes of the ego but with the vision of Christ. The ego is like an out of control locomotive barreling down the track at an insane pace. What is needed first, is to put the brakes on so we can stop this “loco-motion” and then after we have stopped it, to begin the reversal. The exercises in the workbook focus first on enabling us to understand that we have been seeing things backwards before we can then begin to undo the process.

Fixing the World --
What Doesn’t Work
Many years ago, in dealing with the traditional church, I had to learn that as Buckminster Fuller said, You don’t change the old by resisting it. You change the old by making it obsolete through superior methodology. Fighting the church (the system) was (and is) a tremendous waste of time. Resisting it only made the church and me both unhappy. What was needed was to “transcend” the system -- not to try to fix it. This is why it is so important for Course students to hear - Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. Correction of our errors, (our mistaken perception) does not now and never has been concerned with “fixing” the world.
I’m not saying don’t give money to causes you believe in or volunteer to help with projects you feel are helpful. If your heart calls you do a thing – do it. True healing, however, comes through forgiveness and the way to heal the world is to heal the relationships we have with the person sitting across from us at the dinner table, the people we work with, our parents and children, our employer, employees, friends, post office workers, waitresses, sales clerks, ie. all the folks we deal with in the course of a day.

The Course isn’t easy because we’ve been hypnotized into believing in a world we called “reality,” which is not just very far from but “completely” removed from “reality.” We have, as my friend Dr. Sam Menahem says, got it all backwards. Certainly reality has little to do with the construction of hierarchical based, ego driven institutions.

The attempt to formalize religion is so obviously an ego attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable
that it hardly requires elaboration here.
P. 2. II. 2:3

Domestication
As the song from the movie South Pacific says it, You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve go to be carefully taught. We’ve all been very carefully taught to hate and fear by our parents, who were taught by their parents – ad infinitum. (Our parents were not trying to do anything bad. They were just doing what they had been taught.) Being angry at our parents, or the church or the school would be a misperception and a waste of time. We are taught by the whole of society, by television, by advertising, by newspapers, magazines and the internet – by the world.

If you’ve read Don Miguel Ruiz’s wonderful little book The Four Agreements, you know that the first chapter is not about one of the four agreements, it’s about domestication. Ruiz says we are all very highly domesticated. When we domesticate, we adapt to, acclimate ourselves to or settle into a particular life style or pattern. We are soon so hypnotized by the media and so conditioned to the ego’s pattern of thinking that the outside world seems to be reality while we miss any vision of the Kingdom of Heaven within.

If you want to know what reality is, go out into the desert someplace, sit down, shut-up and wait and after awhile you’ll have a better idea of what reality is – not because you have taken in any more information – we are already suffering from information overload. You will have a better idea of what reality is because Jesus in both the gospels and in A Course in Miracles says, The Kingdom of Heaven is inside you. (T-4.III 1:1-3 & T-29.V.2) He doesn’t mean it’s in our bodies but in the mind which has forever been connected with God. We are taught that what is valuable and real is that which is external, that having money matters a great deal, that prestige and honor are important.

When you let your mind be drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminences as valued by the world, you ask for sorrow, not for happiness.
W. L. 133, 2:2

There is truly no thing of this world that can satisfy us. The only satisfaction there is comes in knowing that the love of God can fill our hearts. This is the only real satisfaction. Only love brings fulfillment, contentment, and lasting peace. Everything else is so much fluff. It will all pass away. Only love is eternal and true. The things we buy, eminences as valued by the world, or our own bodily concerns are all “distractions from”, rather than “ the experience of” reality.

Why isn’t the Course easy?

If you saw the movie “What the Bleep?” you know that part of the conversation in the movie is about addictions. Addictions (habits) keep us asleep. The Course says that Routines as such can be dangerous. (M-16. 2:5). The way most of us begin the day is routine. We brush our teeth before we shower or we shower before we brush our teeth. Such simple routines enable us to get things done in an orderly fashion and you can argue that one’s morning practice is not very dangerous. It is suggestive however, of the great need we have to do things by rote. On Sunday in church we follow an order of worship.

When the whole of life becomes routine, it’s like walking around within a dream.
-- Dr. Baba Jon Mundane

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men;

and so with the paths, which the mind travels.
How worn and dusty then, must be the highways of the world.

How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.
-- Henry David Thoreau in Walden

Giving up the ways of the world is like giving up an addiction we don’t even know we have. We thus walk about with the persistent suspicion that something is amiss. We are so addicted to our own projection that in order to see anything we first have to drop projections. We have to drop judgment and seeing how we’ve been doing it for so long and there is so much reinforcement, it isn’t easy.

One day in a restaurant I could not help overhearing a group of folks at another table engaged in what might be call “mutual reinforcement of prejudice.” Each one had a better more horrendous story to tell than their neighbor about how bad and how stupid other people are, about how times are changing and kids are worse than ever. We have been projecting so much for so long; we are so filled with judgment that giving up judgment seems impossible.

The Course isn’t easy because we are easily addicted to our emotions, our anger, our hurts and pains, our attack thoughts and grievances. We think they are real and we hold on to them for dear death (not life). All the while they keep us blind. This is why only forgiveness (which requires a reversal in thinking) can really set us free.

If you have ever given up an addiction like smoking, food, alcohol or some other drug you may know how difficult it was in the beginning to be willing to change things. It may have taken a “crash and burn,” a life threatening illness, or an intervention on the behalf of friends before you would even consider it.

The Course isn’t easy because giving up our old friend “good old ego” looks like too high a price to pay for peace.

We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course.
It is the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy; the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which He gives you everything;

the very little on which salvation rests;

the tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to resurrection.
And being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood.

Rejected yes, but not ambiguous.
And if you choose against it now it will not be because it is obscure,

but rather that this little cost seemed, in your judgment, to be too much to pay for peace.
T-21.II.1:1-5

The Course isn’t easy because giving up the ego is like giving up an addiction we don’t even know we have. First we must learn that our addiction “truly” does not help us. It keeps us asleep. It helps us dream. We can awaken at any time.

The good news is that if you succeed in giving up an addiction, after a time you may look back at the addiction and wonder why you were so hooked on, so devoted to, something so silly. Yet what do you lose when you lose an illusion? All that was required to give up this addiction is a little willingness, a little effort – to simply be willing to let what is true, be true.
Peace,