from The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation
of Joseph Campbell (Celestial Arts, 1990)
This article
has 4 parts. This is the last part
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and
the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The Bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus and the
Resurrection
Part 4: A Course in
Miracles
One of many
current
attempts to articulate this wisdom is the amazingly popular A Course
in Miracles. The Course is a three-volume set of books that was
"dictated" to an anonymous, and previously agnostic, psychology
professor at Columbia University. Her name was Helen Schucman. The
"speaker" in the books, most of the time, seems to be Jesus. The
message, however, is only occasionally like orthodox Christianity.
I came by the Course in a curious
(miraculous?)
way. I had been in New York City with my friend and one-time
collaborator Toby Marotta, talking with people in the publishing
business. We had been given the name of an editor at a Christian
Fundamentalist press. Since one of the manuscripts we were marketing
was Toby's Harvard dissertation analyzing the history of the
homosexual rights movement in America, we didn't think he would be of
much assistance to us, but as a courtesy to the person who had given
us his name we called him. Yes, he said, he'd like to meet us, if
only socially. We made a date to meet in Central Park.
He turned out to be a delightful man, not
at
all what I had been expecting from a Christian Fundamentalist. He
talked with us superficially about New York, about the publishing
business, about our lives. I talked a little about Buddhism and
comparative religion. He said something that caught me off guard. He
made an offhand remark about "those of us who have made the vow."
What had he meant by that? "Bodhisattva?" I said quizzically and
cryptically. If he didn't pick up on it, I'd know he had not meant
what I'd thought.
"Well, yes," he said. I hadn't expected to meet
a bodhisattva that day or to have him recognize that I too was
drawn
to that spirituality. Later, over drinks in one of the fancy hotels
that face the park on Fifty-ninth Street, he asked me if I had heard
of A Course in Miracles. I hadn't.
One day a month or two later, back home
in San
Francisco, I was feeling a bit glum, uncertain of the direction my
life was moving. All day I'd been singing under my breath a song by
The Moody Blues. Though I really couldn't understand all the lyrics,
the refrain seemed to catch what I was feeling: "I'm looking for
someone to change my life. I'm looking for a miracle in my life."
I came home in the afternoon to find a
package
waiting for me. Inside it were three books titled A Course in
Miracles. My bodhisattva friend had gotten them to me right on time.
The next day I began studying the Course,
which
the book--assuming a pattern of reincarnations--tells "is a required
course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not
mean you can establish the curriculum. It only means that you can
elect what you want to take at a given time."
The Course consists, in part, of
practicing a
365-day series of short meditations. The starting meditations center
on the experience of emptiness: "Nothing I see means anything"; "I
have given everything all the meaning that it has for me." A
mythology is gradually introduced which says that God, of whom each
of us is a "Son" like Jesus, wills happiness and health for each of
us. But because we "see only the past," living in memories that are
fraught with anxiety and dissatisfaction, we tend to create around
ourselves an illusion full of disease and ignorance. The Course
promises to teach us to work "miracles," which are natural
consequences of grace in our lives. "When they do not occur something
has gone wrong." And the Course warns that "miracles are habits, and
should be involuntary. They should not be under conscious control.
Consciously selected miracles can be misguided."
The secret to working miracles is
forgiveness.
And forgiveness consists in seeing that disease and suffering are
illusions that only seem to exist because of memories of the past.
The method of the Course is to forgive all that seems to have wronged
us, to rise above fear and desire, and to see that life is indeed
giving us all that we need, since clearly, God wills our good fortune
and what we have is exactly what we need and everything is working
out just the way it should.
That same wisdom,
expressed without the Christian mythology, appears in a concise and
wise little book that grew out of the psychedelic Age-of-Aquarius,
Summer-of-Love mysticism of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury culture.
This is Thaddeus Golas's The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. The
metaphysics is simple and as vague as the emptiness it alludes to
would require: "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations
with each other." We cannot know what kind of beings we are; we can
only know that we are in relationship with one another.
The spirituality is simple and phrased in
short
mantra-like epigrams: "No resistance." "Love it the way it is." "Love
as much as you can from wherever you are." "I wouldn't deny this
experience to the One Mind." The spiritual method of The Lazy Man's
Guide is to "raise the level of one's vibrations" by loving and
affirming life, remembering the epigrams as aids to lowering
resistance and generating love.
Perhaps the most effective spiritual
method of
all is to believe in life. We cannot fight it. We can only pay
attention, resisting as little as possible, investing it with meaning
and significance that allow us to say yes to our experience. For in
that experience and nowhere else can we find a God that is capable of
satisfying and supporting us.
The verification almost every belief
system
claims for its doctrine is that "it works." For believers in every
system--especially as new converts--begin to experience miracles,
find meaning and significance in their lives, discover joy and
delight. Coincidences abound; the universe seems full of the sweet
touch of God. For it is, after all, not the content of belief that
matters, but the fact of belief. True believers find that life
supports them because their faith, and their contact with the deep
stratum of consciousness from which faith arises, activates and
vivifies them.
We don't need miracles--though we may get
them--nor do we need intentionally to manipulate our destiny. We need
simply to accept our lives attentively, to be aware of being alive in
a benign universe. Then our lives can be seen to be full of
miracles.
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page
of this article
This article has 4 parts. This is the last part
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and
the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The Bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus and the
Resurrection
Part 4: A Course in
Miracles
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