This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Sep. 19, 2014.
Jesus, I know it’s been a long time. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom and at least now know better than to try, I think I needed a break from our dialogue (OK, monologue, since I do all the talking, really), in which I all too often inch dangerously close to facing my real fear of being swallowed by the heart of God, and then find myself clowning around with you again before I can quite go there. Then, too, I suppose I had become somehow dependent on the imaginary you I conjured in our talks as a way of avoiding the abstract we beyond all words. Today, though, for reasons that gratefully elude “me,” I feel the need to fill you in on the little independent study (I know that sounds sketchy, but try and trust me on this) I’ve been conducting over the summer.
When last we talked, I believe I may have come to you on my knees, perhaps in tears? Offering symptoms I feared would somehow fell the physical being I still cling to before I could really learn to digest the good news I’ve been ruminating on for more than 10 years that I am not a guilty, mortal body at odds with every other. Despite terribly convincing evidence to the contrary. Just one frightened mind, at odds with its true Self. Confused about how the hell it got here, unable to remember where it came from, but nonetheless pleading to go home.
When last we talked, my hand in yours, aware only of your eyes alive in mine, it occurred to me in a familiar, welcome flash of completion that I didn’t need to know why I’d chosen these bodily problems, only that I had, and it scared me. Because a part of me believed it was safer to be scared than released. It occurred to me that the solution to my fears about these physical problems, the meaning of true healing, was no different from the solution to a problem in a troubled relationship wherein I learn to recognize the ego activated in another’s seeming meltdown as my own. In either case, I don’t need to know why I’ve chosen to support the sick belief in separation realized. Just that I have, and it scares me. And a part of me I don’t even remember likes to be scared. As Ken Wapnick often says, the problem is not what I’m dreaming. The problem is that I’m dreaming to stave off the awakened awareness that I am still one with God, scary or not.
When last we talked, I was just beginning to learn from the inside out that the practice of true healing and forgiveness are the same, providing the same remedy for the same fundamental problem showing up in yet another, equally, ultimately irrelevant, form. The former merely focuses on correcting the guilt projected on my own seeming body, or the body of a loved one I also identify with as my own, the latter on correcting the guilt experienced as another’s incoming attack.
Both strive to make the unreal body real, defending against the truth of our uninterrupted, abstract union in the mind. Milking the body’s physical or emotional pain for the nectar of specialness that, however much we guzzle, never comes close to replenishing the inner reservoir of ALL we believe we permanently drained. Both require remembering that perceiving myself (physically or emotionally) under siege is a choice I am making in my mind (outside this dream) right now to prove I exist at God’s expense but it’s not my fault, as Ken always says. I could see peace instead of this. I have done so before and I will do so again, as soon as my fear of you subsides.
When last we talked, I was up again during the night, hurting in so many specific-seeming ways, so very tempted to pin the cause on something or someone “out there.” Learning, nonetheless; that I could elect to stop scaring myself. I could locate the tender place within that was beginning to hear the call for love in others as my own and respond spontaneously to the same call that now seemed to emanate from “me.” I could treat myself like I am learning to treat other frightened children disguised as grownups with your patient, non-judgmental compassion, without internally joining with their belief in an external cause of their suffering. Without supporting our addiction to helplessness that refuses to recognize our only real power: our decision-making mind. Applying what I have learned under your tutelage every day in my classroom with my husband and daughter, friends and acquaintances, teachers, and students, to “me.”
Since last we talked, as my reactions to my physical and emotional symptoms continue to ebb and flow according to a choice I can’t remember making in a mind outside this dream I can’t remember I have, as I find myself awake in the rawest recesses of the night, taking it all seriously again, seemingly without you, I have somehow also remembered things are not what they seem. Eventually falling back into sleeping nightmares that abruptly morph into healing dreams. Discovering an entire colony of those dreaded, diabolical spiders I’ve mentioned before crawling on the foot of my bed, for example, waking within the dream, and flinging off the sheets and covers intending to capture and/or kill them, only to freeze as they turn into Monarch butterflies before my astonished eyes.
Or, swimming in a vast channel, a man and a woman standing above on a bridge pointing out a Great White Shark churning toward me through metallic-looking chop. Heading under the bridge to escape him even as the fin draws closer, his head bumps against me, and I jab outward at it with my elbow. Watching him circle away, only to return for me, as predators will. Bracing myself for certain death as he lunges out of the water and onto my suddenly mighty shoulder, magically able to sustain such weight, even immersed in water, as the creature transforms into a dolphin, fishing net entangled around his nose, crying, beseeching. Most recently, cornered by a giant serpent, slowly coiling and rising to strike. Even as a voice I somehow know as yours advises me to sit down and take the creature into my lap, as I would a frightened child. (Thank God, I had the sense to wake up before I could obey you on that one, but still.)
Since last we talked, in my waking dreams, too, you’ve been showing up in the most surprising places. Special relationships I’ve been practicing forgiveness in for years with mixed results (in terms of my recurring sense of victimization) and, quite honestly, often tried to avoid altogether so as not to shatter my spiritually tolerant facade, have suddenly appeared to shift from toxic to benign. Doors to hearts long sealed shut have suddenly swung wide open, forcing me to dig a little deeper within to find the roots of my enduring pain, a terrifying excavation of seemingly long-exiled, warring fragments, and yet.
Since last we talked, I seem, nonetheless, to have survived the ordeal of my own scrutiny. Despite scouring the sewers of my psyche intent on finding the unholy, past source of my enduring sense of hard-earned suffering and hidden, luxuriously justified hates, each scene revisited simply dissolved into the ether from which it sprang once my compassion for the dream figure I thought I was at the time, the dream figure I mistook them for, kicked in. Which must mean you were beside me all along during this little sabbatical, right? Sneaky, ever-smiling savior that you are. In stealth mode. Even as I elected to face my most formidable foes.
Jesus, since last we talked, I think I am learning, in spite of myself, as dreams come and go, kingdoms rise and fall, that there could never be a time, appearances aside, when you are not.
“To look within is but to find my will as God created it, and as it is. I fear to look within because I think I made another will that is not true, and made it real. Yet it has no effects. Within me is the Holiness of God. Within me is the memory of Him.” (A Course in Miracles workbook Part II, lesson 309, paragraph 1, lines 4-7)
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 Tuesday nights at RMMC.