MIRACLE
ESSAYS #1
Originally
published in THE SUN, August 1988. See end of article
for more
information about A
Course in Miracles.
Back to the Real World
by
D.
Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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“I
loose the world from all I thought it was.”
Workbook
Lesson 132, A
Course in Miracles
I
h a v e
lately been recalling a time in my life when everything in the world
felt unreal to me. The sensation took hold in my early teens, held
almost complete sway over my consciousness by age twenty, then
gradually declined over the following five years. The feeling was at
once so subtle and pervasive that it seemed impossible to discuss
with anyone; to do so would have meant questioning my own sanity
(which I was far more defensive about than I am today). So the
sensation that nothing was real became a secret, as private as it was
powerful.
I felt a numbing gap between the things in the world and my experience of them, between my relationships and my emotions, and especially between my private thoughts and my effects in the world. It was as if my daily awareness were a cataract, a clouded lens that could not be cleaned or replaced. Frequently I had the troubling thought, “I am not living my real life,” and would subsequently experience a palpable fear that I might spend the rest of my days in this state, while the opportunity for a real life – whatever that might be – slipped farther and farther away. Thoreau’s observation that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation” held great significance for me. I felt poised upon the brink of a career in desperation, and I so admired my father’ s stoic ways that I was likely to keep quiet about it forever.
From a psychological perspective, I can diagnose this period as a kind of adolescent shock, which may be inevitable along the road from childhood naiveté to adult autonomy. It’s the shock that results from our so-called “loss of innocence,” as the perception of our parents as perfect and all-powerful protectors diminishes and is replaced by a need to “make it” on our own. It is difficult to imagine this transition taking place without deep emotional crises and some scarring. It may in fact be the toughest transition anyone makes; plentiful evidence exists that many people never complete it entirely, translating resentments against their parents into seemingly insoluble and repetitive arguments with friends, lovers, spouses and, all too often, their own children.
Current psychotherapeutic treatment often consists of counselors’ helping clients come to terms with childhood and adolescent crises that have never ended, whose repercussions still shock them and distort their lives. Thus, maturity is arrested wherever pain lingers. “Adult children of alcoholics” is an apt label for the human condition that results from growing up caught in that particular web of woe. And anyone who cannot transcend the wounds of growing up remains, to some extent, an “adult child.”
I now believe – as do many therapists – that true adulthood arrives with the capacity to forgive. By forgiveness, however, I do not mean the willingness to excuse someone else’s obvious or assumed guilt for the sake of magnanimity or simply to “get past the past.” Mature forgiveness is primarily an act of surrender, that is, the willingness to relinquish our most cherished and defensive beliefs about reality itself. That forgiveness may include releasing others from blame – and the emotional catharsis that brings – but it spreads far beyond that, as it calls out one’s own ego-based definitions of how things and people really are.
For people unused to considering philosophical questions – and who consequently accept the version of reality passed on by society and advertised by its media – this forgiveness can be doubly difficult. It first requires accepting responsibility for one’s own perceptions and admitting that we do not all see the world the same way; a particular person’s view of the world at any moment is significantly colored by transitory emotions, recalcitrant prejudices, and deep complexes from personal traumas. For many, this realization would be a major philosophical achievement, requiring a degree of introspection that our society generally finds suspect. But the second step into real forgiveness – the willingness to surrender our most fundamental prejudices – is a great challenge indeed.
This level of forgiveness can be reached meditatively through the Course in Miracles lesson, “I loose the world from all I thought it was.” In my experience, this more sophisticated forgiveness brings an unexpected result: joyful glimpses of a world of innocence, which I thought had disappeared forever with childhood. “The real world is attained simply by the complete forgiveness of the old,” suggests the Course Text in Chapter 16 – “the world you see without forgiveness.”
Recalling
the Confidence of Innocence
The
state of childhood innocence, which I would further define as
consciousness
undivided by fear, was
poetically described by Wordsworth in “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality”:
There
was a time when meadow, grove and stream
The earth and every
common sight
Did seem to me
Appareled in celestial light
The
glory and the freshness of a dream.
My earliest memories come from such a world, where I ran through viney woods too fast to look where I was going, trusting that I could not be injured or get lost in natural surroundings that usually felt more comfortable than human company. My experience of the outdoors was instinctively shamanistic; I saw all things, stones as well as snakes, as beings with some kind of spiritual if unspoken intelligence, on equal footing with me. Only gradually did I become embarrassed about conversing with trees and animals – an embarrassment that no doubt increased in direct proportion to my desire to be “grown-up.”