This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on August 7, 2017.
The proverbial battlefield still smoldered above strewn, severed limbs as tangled as a Picasso painting, the sun a distant orb obscured by the bitter ash of betrayal. I lay writhing in pain in the middle of it all, apparently with just enough Hollywood strength left to wrest myself free from the bloodied, muddied carnage, grab a tattered, still mostly white cloth, and wave it in the air. The score rose in a final, Rococo crescendo as I staggered to my feet, coughing, the camera slowly panning out, house lights rising to reveal a lone robed and bearded figure seated out there in the viewing room, bringing his palms together in polite applause.
It took me a moment or two to fully grasp once more that it was only a movie I’d gotten lost in again, but another DVD excavated from my cavernous library of morality plays. This one, like all the others, designed in one way or another to prove Susan the victim of circumstances beyond her control. Beleaguered survivor in a field of devastation, the dubious story that I exist apart from uninterrupted wholeness but it’s not my fault, it’s theirs. You know, the ones who’d so cruelly thwarted me, the ones I’d made pay so dearly for it. Only the taste of victory was no longer even remotely sweet.
Consumed with horror, guilt, and downright shock that I had this much wrath still left in me after so many hours in the forgiveness classroom, I sighed, again disgusted with my little s self. This was getting really exhausting. As the credits rolled, I stumbled back out into the theatre still wagging that soiled white flag, dropped to the floor into devotional pose, and lay the emblem of my surrender at his sandaled feet.
“Hey,” I said, forehead still pressed against the carpet to the unmistakable tune of his gentle laughter.
I could hear him clearing his throat, the familiar sound of him trying to act serious, to meet me in the condition I think I’m in, so to speak, no small feat.
“Popcorn?” he said, brightly, tapping me on the shoulder and offering me a half-eaten bucket. Or was it half full?
I got up, dusted myself off, and slipped back into the chair beside him where I belonged.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“You always do.”
“Seriously?”
He smiled. “Eventually, at least,” he said.
He had a point, he always did. “‘You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy,’” I said, quoting from the first paragraph of The Happy Learner in A Course in Miracles Chapter 14. “‘The Holy Spirit cannot teach without this contrast for you believe that misery is happiness.’”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” he said.
“Ha! The thing is; I thought I passed that test a long time ago, right? Look it up in your records. I know misery when I feel it. I’ve tasted the real happiness of your way of seeing. I can tell the difference. I really do know that choosing you as my inner teacher brings peace and choosing that other smarmy bastard brings pain. But there still doesn’t always seem to be a choice, you know what I’m saying? I mean, Jesus, it happens so freaking quickly.”
“Go on,” he said.
But where to begin? In the past week, a series of (in retrospect really quite minor) dramas with a couple of other costars in seeming, rapid, mind-boggling succession appeared to have rocked my world to the point that I found myself once more in full fight-or-flight mode, completely rooted in the fox hole of a primal brain, unable to resist feeling justified in defending myself based on the overwhelming conviction that I was right and had every right to prove it.
Not even the déjà vu-like awareness that I had played this role with these same costars one too many times with the same tragic, guilt-nourishing results could stop me from rushing out onto the battlefield in an effort to establish my territory once and for all. Only this time, as soon as the explosion of anger dissipated, it immediately gave way to a guilt more seemingly bottomless than anything I had heretofore experienced (which is saying quite a lot!), without so much as a pause in between in which to savor a nanosecond of self-congratulatory triumph.
“So what you’re really saying is I must exhaust my belief in the possibility that identifying with, let alone defending, any personal interest however seemingly justified will bring me anything but excruciating pain? And that my only choice when I catch myself doing so is to forgive myself. Recognizing that although I have made some real progress in at least associating the cause of my suffering or happiness with my choice of inner teacher, my mind is still split. My decision-making mind is still terrified of returning to the seeming cause of the split, the belief that the “tiny, mad idea” of separation from seamless union with our one and only source had real effects. While still captivated by the possibility that the self I still see in the mirror has anything to win or lose from anyone or anything else seemingly ‘out there’ in the many movies of my own making. It’s like you say later in that same paragraph:
‘Have faith in nothing and you will find the “treasure” that you seek. … A little piece of glass, a speck of dust, a body or a war are one to you. For if you value one thing made of nothing, you have believed that nothing can be precious, and that you can learn how to make the untrue true.’
I’ve just been making a big to do about nothing again, is what you’re really saying. Not because I’m daft, just because I’m so afraid of giving up on finding love within the nothingness of my dream of exile, and looking for it where it can be found in you. I just need to stop beating myself up about the ultimate nothingness of still having an ego, and bring even my most shameful ego attacks to you to be unlearned together.”
He nodded.
“So the way to become a happy learner is to look with you at how much a part of me still doesn’t want to learn this Course, at least not in every circumstance, at least not with those that most push my buttons. To see the part of me that wants to be an unhappy learner and forgive it. To catch without judgment my mistaking the role I’m playing on the screen for reality again, and drag myself back to this seat to watch the movie I made with you.”
He just continued to smile.
“Well, I guess that’s a wrap, then,” I said. “I’m so glad we had this little talk.”
“Always a pleasure.”
I grabbed the popcorn. “I am so going to ace this Course!”
His brows shot up and down the way they do.
“Eventually, at least.”
He threw back his head and laughed.
I had to laugh, too.
“…Learn to be a happy learner. ⁴You will never learn how to make nothing everything. ⁵Yet see that this has been your goal, and recognize how foolish it has been. ⁶Be glad it is undone, for when you look at it in simple honesty, it is undone. ⁷I said before, “Be not content with nothing,” for you have believed that nothing could content you. ⁸It is not so.
6. If you would be a happy learner, you must give everything you have learned to the Holy Spirit, to be unlearned for you. ²And then begin to learn the joyous lessons that come quickly on the firm foundation that truth is true. …” (ACIM, T-14.II.5:3–6:2)
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.