Thoughts from a letter written today to Beverly McNeff, editor of “The Holy Encounter.” A magazine published by Miracle Distribution Center, “a nonprofit organization founded in 1978 to serve as a worldwide contact center for students of A Course in Miracles.”
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Since I last wrote February 5 with an essay entitled “Boo-Boo the Dog-Faced Boy. . . “ my thinking continued on with another essay, “Birthmarks”. More critique of the Course but within a scope that goes beyond. I’m writing now to call attention to one of my essay’s insights that questions the metaphysical foundation of the Course and “The Holy Encounter” too. The idea of forgiveness.
This letter was already in the works before I had a psychic dream just now, overnight. A significant marker in my progress toward Self-Awareness, mainly because of what it conveyed about forgiveness. A perspective that anyone helping others to understand and apply the lesson of the Course, as you are, could put to use. That is, if its teaching embraces its questioning.
Which I’m not aware that it does. Its being the mission of Mr. Wapnick’s foundation to tout the primacy of Dr. Freud and his theories and the mission of MDC’s magazine to issue bromides. Though my previous letter did acknowledge that questioning is among the talents that produce it.
Forgive me, but my role is questioner. And if I’m to carry out my mission with integrity nothing will be spared. I’ll question anything, and that includes Jesus. His ideas and his book, and the bureaucracies that sprout up, inevitably, to peddle ideas and books that attract a following. Attracting attention from a bureaucracy to my thoughts doesn’t interest me. Sharing an insight with a person with a talent for questioning does, if only because insights are gifts and gifts, to be received, are to be shared. Ostensibly through my website, but if anybody has been reading my posts the last six years I’m not aware of it. Except for my webmaster now and then, but only because he gets paid.
Forgiveness is better than retaliation. And it’s psychologically possible, though Jesus admits that if anyone actually does it, it would drop the curtain on the whole show. An admission that, yeah, you can do it! And you can win the Galactic PowerBall lottery too! For all practical purposes we’re performing a holding action until a better response to wrongdoing comes to mind. Which hadn’t come to mind because of the Course’s scope. Limited to what came after the Child (Son), in a state of self-unawareness, was manipulated into imagining itself (himself) projected into a ‘paradise’ of anything goes.
The motivation behind wrongdoing is manipulation which in turn is rooted in make-believe. Recognized in the Course as the “ego” and in popular culture as the “devil.” A talented mimic who can fool anyone with its regular-guy likeability. A Ronny Cornwall flim-flam artist, who will part you from your money, confess that he can’t make his obligation whole, and suggest, in the most innocuous way, that maybe letting him off is a viable option.
Viable for him why? Because forgiveness, being invention rather than fact, is part of the manipulation. An instrument of guilt rather than innocence that can render the forgiver its victim as well as its perpetrator. I let you fail your test of character by letting you keep my money. I fail my test of character by succumbing to guilt: the price I would pay by failing to forgive.
Is this the result that we want? Or Jesus too? An interaction (“encounter”) that leaves both parties in a state of guilt. The ‘devil’ for having trapped its victim. The victim for having collaborated in its own trapping. Undone by a moral necessity that results in more wrongdoing at the expense of character. The point of it all: for both parties to pass a test of character.
What would pass a test of character? Jesus took the argument as far as it would go within the scope of the Course. But when the scope is expanded to take in the Child’s (Son’s) Parents (Father), the landscape is flooded with ideas. With the perspectives that they naturally imply, because the structure of inquiry is no longer inverted. With Movement on the bottom being questioned and also divided from on top. It’s returned to its rightful state: Movement on top being questioned from the bottom. With no possibility of division. No possibility of Character being corrupted by being divided.
Within this phase of the Child’s experience with self-unawareness – the phase preceding it – the limits that define its situation have nothing to do with psychopathy. The state of mind that summons remedies that can do no good so long as they validate it. Whether from voodoo shamans meant to ward off evil spirits or the more sophisticated palliatives of religion meant to silence its questioning. All of it of one piece with manipulation including ‘forgiveness’. With make-believe.
“Birthmarks” theorizes about those limits. With help from Guidance that seeks our liberation from anything-goes make-believe that would fool us into believing that ‘freedom’ lies in the absence of Order. That anything-goes is a possibility, where wildness can jettison the limits of Definition and willfulness can assume authority beyond questioning. Absolute freedom and absolute power. The false and addictive ‘ideals’ of the animal side of human nature.
Where would the Course’s lesson stand if it were to venture farther back in its story of the Child? To the story of its Parents? The lesson would be that the great divide in the human-animal Psyche isn’t innocence vs. guilt, good vs. evil. It’s between human vs. animal. It’s the building of Character that’s impossible without self-questioning. Passing the test of Character being our reason for being here, in a hierarchical kingdom of ass-kissing corruption. By submitting ourselves to self-evaluation in a mirror that compels a an honest appraisal. The challenge I left with you at the end of my last letter: “Who are you?”
The lesson would be the building of Character that requires Understanding: that everything in the absence of one big picture / big answer under the jurisdiction of know-it-all arrogance – make-believe – is perspective. Is situation that necessarily comes with limits. And if we’re tempted to repeat the mistake of the Child, in being manipulated into a neverland of anything-goes no-limits, then we would be failing our test and prolonging our stay in training. Failing a test of Character.
Identifying with ‘animal’ rather than ‘human’ and therefore refusing to do an honest appraisal by looking into a mirror. Why? Because to do so confronts us with the truth of Self-Awareness. That it’s Definition, and Definition is limits. Make-believe cannot self-evaluate, cannot regard itself in a mirror of honest self-appraisal, because to be and do what make-believe is and does requires that it be unlimited. A mirror wouldn’t reveal who it is. It would reveal who it isn’t. Self-defining. Self-limiting.
When we apply the lesson from the Parents’ story to our everyday lives the result can’t be the operatics of ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’, ‘innocence’ vs. ‘guilt’. It’s the realization that an inverted structure of Creation in Reality is a suitable training ground for Character. Whose purpose is to supply Definition, the Conscience and constitution of Creation, with its operational function: Guidance. A function that requires competence earned and learned from our situation. In company with Guidance. With Jesus, himself at risk of error and in need of training. Every aspect of the Child throughout its hallucination in need of Movement forward toward its destination: Self-Awareness.
‘Animal’ heeds the call of the wild. ‘Human’ heeds the call from Self-Awareness. From our Parents in Reality. Not an unrelatable, monolithic ‘Father’ but Love bonded with Logic. Spontaneity with Order. Feminine with Masculine.
Should I apologize for questioning Jesus and the lesson of the Course? Not when he’s Guidance and Guidance is at my side. When we’re both mistake-prone, in need of training, and we’re getting it. In Relationship that’s Loving Friendship. Not by helpless victims seeking comfort and self-justification through the bromides of contrivance, but by Character questioning. You, myself, Jesus and the Course – everything. Until we get it right.
Have we gotten everything right? Has the Course gotten everything right? NO! But before the bureaucrat hits the mute button, check out “Birthmarks.” Tell me what your questioner thinks. The Person this is addressed to. In all honesty.
Interesting about LIMITS – something the world could use more of.
Another intriguing piece David!
Thank you, Doug. What makes it interesting for me is that it’s so easy to question the character of those who don’t respond to life’s passages with a moment of self-evaluation, when they can’t. I wouldn’t either if the role assigned to me in life’s classroom were to shed all limits in pursuit of absolutes. Absolute freedom and absolute power. The role of a cartoon character who must be at liberty to take on any appearance that its manipulator, the cartoonist, wills it to. The defining attribute of the undefinable. The cartoonist. ‘God’ and ‘creator’ of its domain: make-believe. Without limits.