This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on August 30, 2017.
“Just put on the God-damn glasses,” I said. “I mean, who do you think you are, anyway? Icarus? A two-year old? The President of the United States?”
My inner professor tossed back his head and laughed. “We’ve talked about this,” he said.
But I was just trying to protect him, for God’s sake, and let’s face it; in no mood for sanity. “Hey mister, it’s my dream,” I said. “So put on the freaking glasses and pass that pitcher of mimosas, please.”
“In your dreams,” he said, leaning back in his lounge and slipping on the fetching, hot-pink sunglasses I had given him a few years ago. Ever willing to humor me until I came to my senses, or, as he often put it: “wait with you in hell a while longer.” What an optimist. Even though he’d left me to my own devices all summer long, apparently oblivious to studies that prove learning loss occurs when students are not properly engaged in their curriculum, a fact that had circulated in my brain like a bad, stuck song all morning long before I’d magically found myself transported courtesy of my revived, long dormant right-minded imagination to this turquoise swimming pool, rivaling that of a set for the TV show Mad Men.
Although the August 2017 total solar eclipse had come and gone, along with all the meanings frenzied, hopeful heavenward gazers–from astronomy geeks to astrologists to historians, psychologists, and social scientists who perhaps preferred staring at the sky to another twitter update–had sought to pin on it, the overhead sun remained just as dangerous an object of projection upon which to fix one’s gaze (even on a cloudy day like this) as it had been during the moon’s upstart run on it. On a metaphorical level, its effects seemed to have stalled, casting the corner of the universe within which my seeming body appeared to orbit into a surreal, panoramic twilight from which it seemed as impossible to wrest oneself as from a town straight off the pages of a Stephen King novel.
Leaving me once more haunted by phantoms of the past, the nagging sense that everything good in my life remained behind me. Comparing its romanticized highlights unfavorably with what seemed a diminishing present and threatening future. While likewise comparing the self I still think I am to certain fellow dream figures who appeared to be reaping the benefits of years wisely invested in special relationships from human to financial. Harvesting gratitude and recognition for short-and long-term accomplishments while I continued to flounder aimlessly, no longer sure what I even was stripped of so many roles I once played, apparently no longer required.
Worse, I seemed once more to have tuned into the ego’s 24/7 fake news channel hell-bent on endlessly pointing out that not only had I ultimately failed all worldly endeavors but had managed to flunk this Course, too. Doomed to spin out my all too finite days seeking and never finding the meaning of it all let alone the antidote to the loneliness within from which all who choose to enter this fictitious world apart from God suffer, consciously or not.
It seemed an especially cruel paradox that I, having vowed to change the purpose of my life from rooting myself more deeply in that futile dream to awakening from it through true forgiveness, had managed to come far enough on the journey to make that loneliness super conscious, recognizing that every continually arising unkind thought had nothing to do with the person, situation, or political figure that seemed to have triggered it and everything to do with my continual choice for the ego as my internal news source. And yet seemingly unable to take the next step of choosing again for the inner teacher of peace, seated beside me now dutifully wearing his shades, perpetually unperturbed or deceived by the world’s mayhem disguised as admirable achievements or despicable assaults.
The question of why my teacher had finally chosen to show his face this last week in August after failing to respond to multiple urgent calls, texts, and emails weighed heavily on me now, a topic I found it harder to broach than I’d expected. In truth I’d been largely unsuccessful searching for him all year. My dream seeming of its own volition to stream ever darker, more twisted pilots involving my body and the bodies of those I love and, let’s face it, love to hate. Under nearly unrelenting siege as a result of other reckless, irresponsible, and sometimes downright malevolent “other” bodies with whom I was less personally familiar but no less intimately involved in hating back for their well and constantly documented hateful ways. I know. Hell, I didn’t even have time between internal attacks, defenses, rationales and spinning out new plots to chronicle these sorry scenes and try to make sense of them. Let alone surrender them to the part of my mind capable of transcending them with His God-Ray vision. Seeing beyond their diabolical something-ness to the silly nothingness from which they sprang.
Not that I felt like writing about the Course anyway. The essays within which I had long expressed Susan’s seeming stumbling journey home to the united Love we’re told we never really left (that once provided a lifeline to my teacher’s unwaveringly all-loving presence) reduced to a futile, mechanical exercise in identifying the problem as I see it, bringing it to my inner teacher to look at as it really is, changing my mind about its cause and solution, and repeating said process. Without so much as a holy instant above the smoking battleground within which to catch my breath and recapture a glimpse of our invulnerable, abstract innocence. Provided I even got that far before yet another seeming incident aka forgiveness “opportunity” arose, hurtling toward me at warp speed; plunging me more deeply into the cockpit of my defensiveness. But another asteroid delivered by a punishing universe in the ego’s gigantic, interactive video game. I know. God I was getting sick of myself.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“I’m guessing you do,” he agreed, smiling that confounding smile of his.
“It’s like you say in Text Chapter 18 IX., paragraph 3:
“From the world of bodies, made by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind that made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For you sent forth these messengers to bring this back to you. Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are no messages that speak of what lies underneath, for it is not the body that could speak of this. Its eyes perceive it not; its senses remain quite unaware of it; its tongue cannot relay its messages. Yet God can bring you there, if you are willing to follow the Holy Spirit through seeming terror, trusting Him not to abandon you and leave you there. For it is not His purpose to frighten you, but only yours. You are severely tempted to abandon Him at the outside ring of fear, but He would lead you safely through and far beyond.” (ACIM, T-18.IX.3:1-9)
I forgot again that the tests you give, unlike the ego’s, are never multiple choice,” I said. “Contingent on picking the best person, place, or thing in the world to substitute for the one Love I think I abandoned and now lack forever, or blaming the secretly circulating guilt over believing I pulled off that impossible divine homicide on some other lost-in-the-dream soul. Your tests are always and without exception true or false. None of these “maladaptive solutions to a nonexistent problem” (as Ken Wapnick so succinctly put it) mean anything because nothing outside my mind is true. Not the risks and not the benefits. Not the redemption and not the damnation. Not the crime and not the punishment (sorry Dostoyevsky) and or any of its big- or small-screen, 24/7 consequences. It’s false, not good or bad. Just false. With no power whatsoever to make me feel better or worse about myself.”
“‘Don’t look!’ the ego warns, ‘without my special glasses,’” I continued, “or you’ll be burnt toast. But what we’re always blinded to, what is always totally eclipsed when we’ve secretly donned the ego’s special glasses, is simply the brilliance of Truth within every mind that has never stopped shining, stories of brazen moons swooping in to grab the spotlight notwithstanding.”
“Well put!” he said. “Maybe those studies about learning loss over the summer aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
He had a point. He always does. “Besides,” I said. “You’ve been here all along, right. You’d never really leave me, no matter what I think or do, would you?”
“Absolutely not,” he agreed.
We sipped our mimosas. This day was turning out a lot better than I could ever have imagined—ha!
“Just one more question,” I said, after a while. “Where does that leave me, Susan? On the spectrum of true or false, I mean.”
“Spectrum?” he asked.
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s what I was afraid of!”
He smiled. “It’s almost September,” he said. “How about we just leave that lesson for another school year?”
“Cheers,” I said, lifting my mimosa and clinking my champagne flute against his. “See you in September.” I mean the blazing sun was out again—go figure—still all ‘lazy, hazy, crazy’–and that turquoise pool I’d dreamed up beckoned.
“The circle of fear lies just below the level the body sees, and seems to be the whole foundation on which the world is based. Here are all the illusions, all the twisted thoughts, all the insane attacks, the fury, the vengeance and betrayal that were made to keep the guilt in place, so that the world could rise from it and keep it hidden. Its shadow rises to the surface, enough to hold its most external manifestations in darkness, and to bring despair and loneliness to it and keep it joyless. Yet its intensity is veiled by its heavy coverings, and kept apart from what was made to keep it hidden. The body cannot see this, for the body arose from this for its protection, which depends on keeping it not seen. The body’s eyes will never look on it. Yet they will see what it dictates.” (ACIM, T-18.IX.4:1-7)
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches online via Zoom on Tuesday nights.