Baptism in the River Jordan

In the second book of Jed McKenna's enlightenment trilogy, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, the author visits a study group on the Bhagavadgita, and ends up making the point that studying the story is pointless unless and until you realize the story is about you, i.e. the reader. That's the only reason why it's relevant.
The same could be said for the Gospel, as in fact J.W.Kaiser, whose work I hope to translate completely into English, says in his 1950 translation and commentary of the Gospel according to Mark. He fully and completely proceeds from the viewpoint that the story that is being portrayed is nothing else but the pictorial expression accompanying the inner experiences of one who follows Jesus. In other words, the only way to read the story is to realize it is about you.

And the teaching never varies, though the imagery varies according to time and place, be it Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Jesus in Galilee, Socrates in the allegory of the cave, or many other 'stories' that tell us of the way through the narrow gate. Today, we have A Course in Miracles, which expresses Jesus' teachings in language for the twenty-first century. It is framed in very psychologically profound language, and deals in the same terms, that the outside world is nothing but the out-picturing of an inner condition. "Projection makes perception" is what the Course says. And in the traditional Jesus literature it is the notion that to everyone 'outside the Kingdom' it all comes in parables.

Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. But though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. Perception is a result and not a cause. And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no meaning, there is chaos. (ACIM:T-21.in.1)

The reversal, the turning point, is born only from surrendering the ego's point of view completely, and the Course is geared to making our path lighter by offering the incremental approach of forgiveness and the miracle, which puts us on the path towards accepting the atonement. The transition never seems that easy in practice, for the ego is heavily defended against allowing us to look at its mechanics, since it knows they can't stand the light of day, and we are fanatically convinced that our life depends on clinging to the ego, and therein lies the 'dark night of the soul.' The guarantee that we'll get through it lies in the fact that we've already made the choice by that time, but what resists is the ego, which cannot go with us on that journey, and keeps trying to convince us it will be the end of us. Therefore the process is not so much the killing of the ego as some traditions would have it; it merely becomes moot, literally, because it just does not make any sense.

In the Course, the first stage is the 'little willingness' which is the beginning of doubting the ego, and realizing it's not what it's cracked up to be - the arbiter of all reality. It is only the arbiter of its 'reality,' and beholden only to its perceived self-interest, which is an inferior substitute for the reality of what we really are. In fact the Course makes clear that as long as we offer our little willingness to the Holy Spirit, we will not go this journey alone:

Never approach the holy instant after you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is its function. Never attempt to overlook your guilt before you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is His function. Your part is only to offer Him a little willingness to let Him remove all fear and hatred, and to be forgiven. On your little faith, joined with His understanding, He will build your part in the Atonement and make sure that you fulfill it easily. And with Him, you will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith, and rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone. (ACIM:T-18.V.3)

In the New Testament there is the story of the baptism in the River Jordan, under John, whose Hebrew name, Yehochanan, means 'God gives blessings', or 'God gives graciously', and he is the symbol of what the Course calls the 'happy learner' and Jed McKenna describes as human adulthood - living in the growing awareness that everything we encounter is in fact a blessed learning opportunity on our way back home, and is always our very best learning opportunity by definition. In the acceptance thereof we've already let the ego go, for it would have us believe that it first has to judge everything that comes on our path in terms of benefits or detriment to our ego individuality. In our darkest hour it is good to remember, that all the mountains of seeming fear are nothing but the projections of the ego's resistance: we certainly can be stubborn.

It is this that makes the holy instant so easy and so natural. You make it difficult, because you insist there must be more that you need do. You find it difficult to accept the idea that you need give so little, to receive so much. And it is very hard for you to realize it is not personally insulting that your contribution and the Holy Spirit's are so extremely disproportionate. You are still convinced that your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and makes it what it is. Yet we have emphasized that you need understand nothing. Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing you cannot give right now. (ACIM:T-18.IV.7)

Eventually the path leads through the deepest pit of the ego, and becomes the full fledged baptism in the events of our life -- the 'River Jordan' -- to the point of suffocation, because the ego cannot go along on that journey in any way shape or form. It means letting go completely, in spite of all the seeming terror of the ego's deepest pit. In Margot Krikhaar's book Awakening in Love, she shares her process with the descent into the ego's pit in very simple and straightforward language in Chapter 7 of the second part of the book, titled "Learning to look at what never was allowed to be seen." She documents also her experience that we do not go through this alone.

What is choked off is the ego identity, and what is reborn is the recognition that 'thou art My Son, in whom I am well pleased'. Or, in the words of the Course, we will finally wake up fully to the knowledge that we are still 'as God created us', and there will no longer be a way back to the ego, for it was nothing but an illusion of separate individuality, and never the truth. In Jed McKenna's analysis of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, it is Ishmael, the observer self, which wakes up from this descent into hell, or in this case the shipwreck, to realize 'nothing happened.' Therefore also the question people have at times: "What guarantees that we won't make the same mistake all over again?" is moot. The answer of the Atonement is: "What mistake?"

Copyright, © 2011 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

The Caterpillar and the Buttefly; Awakening in Love

Wer nicht stirbt eh' er stirbt, der verdirbt wenn er stirbt. It was Angelus Silezius who said that, as I just found out courtesy of Annelies Ekeler. I had thought it was Jakob Boehme who said that, and if not he, that it was Meister Eckhart. Both were German mystics, but it so turned out it was Angelus Silezius, and he was born in 1624, which was also the year that Jakob Boehme died. Lao Tze said: What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.

What the Angelus Silesius saying means is that whoever does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies. The reason is simple enough, if our consciousness is still stuck in identification with the body, we think we perish when the body dies, but if we have woken up to the universal awareness which the Course calls Salvation, or accepting the Atonement, and which tradition calls Enlightenment, or Awakening, we have already overcome the fear of dying, and moreover will be clear we are not our body. Conversely, the process of awakening is often experienced as a death experience at first, because we die as who we (thought we) were, to wake up as who we are in truth. In that transition what dies is our identification with the body. The awakening means that we remember who we are in truth.

The Course addresses this issue of identifying with the body, with the crucifixion, in many ways, including here:

Learn, then, the happy habit of response to all temptation to perceive yourself as weak and miserable with these words:  

2 I am as God created me. 3 His Son can suffer nothing. 4 And I am His Son. (ACIM:T-31.VIII.5)

and  it makes clear the temptation really is the temptation of seeing our brothers, and therefore ourselves, as bodies, as individuals, separate and independent from God, as very perishable bodies, which denies that who we really are in truth is God's Son, one with him. In the New Testament account this is powerfully expressed in the baptism scene in the River Jordan, under John the Baptist, where Jesus sees the Heavens part, and hears the voice for God saying that he is "My Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." The Course will say that we remember in that moment of accepting the Atonement, that nothing really happened, that there was no separation. It is the moment of remembering of who we are in truth. And anyone who practices the Course has that recognition somewhere along the line, and while we may yet forget it plenty of times, there is no way back any longer, for it is no longer quite as deniable as it seemed to be before we consciously had such experience. And eventually the time comes to accept it once and for all.

Margot Krikhaar delivers a powerful description of this experience in her book, and in fact several times had the sense that it was like dying, but only in looking back could she now be of help to the next person by sharing her experiences. For while nobody can do it for you, as the experiences are completely unique to an individual, still we can be of help to one another once we live the butterfly, testifying to caterpillars of life after the chrysalis stage. So while we live like caterpillars, in our individual consciousness, all that seems ever so far fetched, but then we may be lucky enough to see a few glimpses along the way. Practicing forgiveness steadily is likely conducive to some moments of clarity, which then give us the strength to go on forgiving as we plow through the seemingly endless mess of the ego's Augias stables. In the end, the awakening then is the return to what was and is and always will be the truth of who we are:

1. Why wait for Heaven? 2 Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. 3 The light is in them now. 4 Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. 5 Light is not of the world, yet you who bear the light in you are alien here as well. 6 The light came with you from your native home, and stayed with you because it is your own. 7 It is the only thing you bring with you from Him Who is your Source. 8 It shines in you because it lights your home, and leads you back to where it came from and you are at home. (ACIM:W.pI.188.1)

Copyright, © 2011 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

"Awakening in Love" by Margot Krikhaar

I've started some preparatory work on the translation of the book Ontwaken in Liefde, by Margot Krikhaar - the English title of which will be Awakening in Love. It is a remarkable book by Dutch author Margot Krikhaar, about her journey with A Course in Miracle, told in fresh language, evidently born from first hand experience. Her presentation is so personal and completely disarming that it invites us in, and there is much the reader can identify with, but even if not, it invites to self examination about what happened in our own lives at similar stages.

The title is very evocative of the basic message of the Course, that once the obstacles to Love's presence are forgiven all, what the ego imagines will be the destruction of it, ends up being a non event, the loss of what never was and an awakening in Love - enlightenment or resurrection are other words for it - because the only thing left is love, if nothing else because love is an absence, and impossibility, of conflict. After all, in oneness, there is nothing to disagree with, and all our fuss was just a silly mistake.

And, while I was working on translating the beginning of the book, I read a recent entry in her online diary, here: Margot Krikhaar Diary 8/29/2011 (in Dutch). In this entry she relates a probably last visit with her now 14 year old son, last because she is dying of cancer, and saying her goodbyes. In her usual frank style she shares how she still had difficulty dealing with what had clearly been a dysfunctional relationship in her life, because she was never able to really connect with this child, who was more his father's son than hers from very early on. She also shares about her experience of the presence of Jesus as she is looking at all of those issues for the last time, and forgiving them - by literally looking at them with him and then letting them go. And finally she shares how, much later, back home she has an experience of great relief that her mother role was lifted from her, completing yet another forgiveness opportunity in her life.

In parallel, I was reminded again of Prospero's speech in the Tempest:

Prospero:

 Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

 As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

 Are melted into air, into thin air:

 And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

 The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,

 The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

 And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

 As dreams are made on; and our little life

 Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

It is another classical reflection of this letting go, and the experience of the disappearance of the universe, as it is called in the title of Gary Renard's book.

Or, to mention yet another parallel from literature, one might think of Herman Melville's Moby Dick,  which is brilliantly interpreted by Jed McKenna, in his book Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, as being the account of Melville's own spiritual awakening - after all Ishmael, who is the writer of the story in the observer seat, survives the ordeal of the ego's hero of this particular nightmare, Ahab, and merely observes the events, realizing in the end that nothing happened.

It brings to mind the Course's definition of the miracle:

1. A miracle is a correction. 2 It does not create, nor really change at all. 3 It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false. 4 It undoes error, but does not attempt to go beyond perception, nor exceed the function of forgiveness. 5 Thus it stays within time's limits. 6 Yet it paves the way for the return of timelessness and love's awakening, for fear must slip away under the gentle remedy it brings. (ACIM:W-pII.13.1)

At this point we might remind ourselves that the Course has set out with the observation that the meaning of love is beyond what can be taught, our job is merely to remove the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence (Introduction), after that, the rest will speak for itself. In this context we can see how the mind who dreamt up all the characters in the play, and all of the stage settings and the story, finally let's them go - and the Course's forgiveness process is merely a shortcut that can help some people to speed up this process, of letting go of all the roles of our false self.
To look at it yet another way, here we may understand the often misconstrued Jesus quote, about the poor chances of a rich man entering the Kingdom. Since he always speaks in parables, what he means is that as long as we take the dream roles in the world seriously, by investing them with meaning, we are holding on to nothing, and it is this that makes us rich by investing in this world, which then prevents us from following him to the Kingdom.
It is the Course's forgiveness process which allows us to forgive first the characters in the dream, and increasingly more and more ourselves for our dream roles, until with Prospero we can let it all go. The process culminates in what the Course terms 'accepting the atonement,' being the full realization that nothing ever happened, and that God's reality (and our own, since we are his son) remained utterly unaffected, and with that we re-awaken in love.

5. The cause of pain is separation, not the body, which is only its effect. 2 Yet separation is but empty space, enclosing nothing, doing nothing, and as unsubstantial as the empty place between the ripples that a ship has made in passing by. 3 And covered just as fast, as water rushes in to close the gap, and as the waves in joining cover it. 4 Where is the gap between the waves when they have joined, and covered up the space which seemed to keep them separate for a little while? 5 Where are the grounds for sickness when the minds have joined to close the little gap between them, where the seeds of sickness seemed to grow? (ACIM:T-28.III:5)

Copyright, © 2011 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.