26.02.06
0701 - We’re the Howkowee
Posted in the Branch at 7:13 pm by James 
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from Issue 007 — Jun 2002
One of my favourite television shows was an American sit-com called “F-Troop.” It had a kind of off the wall humour that appealed to me at the time, and I dare say still does. I remember, although the exact details are a bit fuzzy, one episode in particular where the Indian tribe that was featured in the series explained the origin of their tribe’s name. It seems they were travelling from one place to another when at one point they stopped and the chief of the tribe asked, “Where the heck are we?” Rather than being taken for a question, this was taken as a statement and from that time on the tribe was know as the “Howkowee.”
I think students of the Course reach a point in their practice and study when they too think they could easily be one of the Howkowee’s. What seemed at first like a simple and direct path seemingly all of a sudden is no longer so. Yet, the Course itself, says it is simple:
This is a very simple course. T-11.VIII.1.
(See also T-20.VII.1:3 and C-in.3:8)
Indeed when one first begins to study and practice it, it seems so. Or rather it seems easy, not simple. After one has been with it a while, it no longer seems so easy and it still doesn’t seem that simple. Let me assure you that it is very simple and it is, for quite some time, very hard. Perhaps it appears a bit incongruous to say that a spiritual discipline needing some 1500 pages is simple, yet it truly is. It doesn’t need 1500 pages to tell us what it is there to tell us. Jesus tells us in a couple of lines in the introduction.
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists. T-in.2:2-3
He tells us in just two words later on in the Workbook.
We say “God is,” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. W-pI.169.5:4
He even specifically tells us that salvation is simple, and that his course is simple.
How simple is salvation! T-31.I.1:1
Salvation is simple T-15.X.9:6
So why the 1500 pages? The reason here is simple too: we do not believe him.
We are what we are, or at least what we seem to be, because we prefer to believe something else. Jesus goes to great lengths to explain to us why we think this way, why we mistakenly prefer to believe in our story and not the Truth and it is this that takes 1500 pages.
But what is it that makes something purportedly so simple, seem so very hard and complicated? Where is the distortion? Where is the learning impediment? Well it is right in front of our faces, or to be a little clearer, behind our faces.
Let me be more direct. The thing that makes the Course so complicated, so seemingly difficult, is you. You are the thing that seems to get in the way, that can’t find the answer to this or that problem, that keeps missing out on their share of peace, that wants to retain the option of being a spoilt little brat and throw a temper tantrum. We try desperately hard to find someone or something else to blame, to hold responsible for our difficulty in “getting it.” Indeed, one of the hardest messages of the Course , from the ego’s perspective, is that there is no one else. So towards the end of the text, when he says:
The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself (T-27.VIII.10:1)
we still refuse to hear it. And if we do hear it we refuse to fathom the impact of what he is saying. “He can’t be talking about me,” you say. Well brother he is talking about you, the you that sabotages, that gets in the way, that thinks its doing the Course : in a nutshell, the you, you think you are.
In a fundamental sense, it is this same you that first picked up the Course and thought, “Ah this is for me”, and happily, in some cases desperately, devoured its pages and lessons as quickly as it could. It is the same you that marveled at its success, feeling good about the miracles that seemed to populate its life, that reveled in the feeling of being in a place where advice and wisdom could be dispensed to all and sundry, especially to those less fortunate ones around it. It is the same you that has at times wanted to throw the Course out the window or roll up into a little ball so that you could hide in the darkest room of the house because of the weight of your fear and loathing. And finally (because I could go on and on) it is the same you, who, at another time, wants to shout from the rooftops “Jesus is a fake and all this ‘I am as God created me’ is a crock of shit!” Yes this is the you that finds the Course difficult. This is the you the Course describes in those passages that talk about this world, this dream and the figures in this story. And most importantly this is the you that you are so vehemently but unconsciously defending lest it disappear.
By now you have probably twigged that this you that I am speaking about isn’t the real you, but a role or persona that you seem to have adopted. After all the real you is at home in God, asleep and dreaming of exile (see T-10.I.2). Yeah right! Lovely words that sound very pretty, but you, in all honesty, have no real idea what they actually mean.
So what is Jesus to doing in these 1500 pages if the message of the course is so simple? Why do we need so much extra padding? It isn’t because we’re stupid. Indeed he tells us quite the opposite. Let me quote a telling paragraph from the final chapter of the Text.
No one who understands what you have learned, how carefully you learned it, and the pains to which you went to practice and repeat the lessons endlessly, in every form you could conceive of them, could ever doubt the power of your learning skill. There is no greater power in the world. The world was made by it, and even now depends on nothing else. The lessons you have taught yourself have been so overlearned and fixed they rise like heavy curtains to obscure the simple and the obvious. Say not you cannot learn them. For your power to learn is strong enough to teach you that your will is not your own, your thoughts do not belong to you, and even you are someone else. T-31.I.3.
And this “someone else” is the you, you think your are. And it is this “someone else” we so stubbornly cling to, so stubbornly prefer to believe in rather than accept the Truth. This is why Jesus spends so many pages and so much time explaining to us who we are, and more importantly who we are not and how we can recognise this stranger who we mistake for our self. We do not want to actually hear what Jesus says to us because to do so will cost us more than we can possibly conceive—the world as we ‘know’ it. While we see the world as more valuable than the truth of whom we are, we will continue to deny that truth. We will continue to place more value on the world while we continue to believe we are body and not spirit. (See T-12.VI.1) We feel some cost exists but we aren’t aware of the nature of this cost. And it’s this unknowing, the apparent magnitude of which gets larger and larger as we progress with the Course that seems to hold us back. We still believe the sacrifice will be too great because we still believe in sacrifice. We still believe that we are a figure in the dream.
I was going to say that we still believe that this Son of God is as guilty as hell. But then I remembered that there are some that don’t believe this. On the contrary they seem to believe that they are indeed a holy child of God and it is just these others that are guilty! The underlying mechanism is the same, only the conscious expression is different. But then it is consciousness that arose after the first split. And that is the crux of the issue. The Split. The belief in, and desire to, be separate. The defense of a sense of self. The wanting to do it ‘my way’: the tragedy of preferring to be right rather than be happy. This defense of self can express itself in many ways with students of the Course, from avoidance of reading the text, to a seeming fanaticism in reading it over and over trying to extract that last gem of wisdom. From not doing the lessons in the workbook, perhaps stopping because you don’t like what it tells you, to getting so high on a lesson you repeat it over and over again with out moving on. Or repeating the whole workbook over and over year in and year out until you get it right. Let me put some of your minds to rest right now. You’ll never get the Workbook right. It isn’t that sort of Workbook, and remember you are not the one who thinks they are doing the lessons anyway!
Now we are returning to where we began this discussion, you. You are the problem and you are the answer. The difficulty you experience in trying to do the Course is because you continue to try and do it rather than just do it! You are not asked to do anything complicated, yet you persist in doing nothing but making complication. You are simply asked to turn to the Light whenever you feel the presence of darkness. Nothing more and nothing less. Turn to the Light, ask for help, ask to see it differently, however you want to describe it, do it, but do only that. Do not try to second-guess, do not try to predict how things will unfold, do not try to play games, do not even try to do the right thing. The whole message of the Course is that you (that is the you you think you are) don’t know. Give up now as your own teacher.
This belief in separation goes by a name: we call it the ego. It is the interpretation of this thing that we’re calling the ego that we identify with. And just as it was born of a splitting, so too do we happily allow it to continue to split, breaking off those parts of our psyche found wanting, those parts judged unworthy and blameful. We are all familiar with this dynamic. What we fail to understand is that it is taking place in the very being we mistake ourselves to be. We have drawn an inviolate border around ourselves where, outside of this border, we think we can understand the dynamics the Course describes. Within the border though, well that’s different, that’s the real me. Wrong! Within this border is no different from without. Something we really don’t want to hear. You see it is this border we seem to have drawn around ourselves that allows us to seemingly accept what the Course is teaching us—as long as we only apply it outside the border. What is this border? This border is only a construction, a fence; the ego has placed around itself. Sound familiar?
The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built, to separate parts of his Self from other parts. W.pII.5.1:1
No matter how many times we read that the body is nothing, is neutral and has no mind of its own, we continue to ignore it, deny it, pamper it or punish it. We give it a pivotal place of ascendance in our plan for salvation whereas we are specifically counseled not to. We are told we need do nothing. Remember, doing is done with bodies. The practice of the Course is not about doing anything with the body. Yet because our sense of self is so deeply entrenched in a “body-consciousness” we interpret all the passages we find in the Course that describe how one might act or behave as prescriptions on how we must act or behave!
The idea of simply being still and asking for help is not enough. And it’s not enough because it doesn’t involve who you really think you are, a body. Your version of asking for help, of necessity, must include a request for directions on what you must do. And doing, being of the ego world, is always with the body.
But wait a minute! “I am on a spiritual path and I can move past this seeming barrier,” you say. And the ego (that is, your underlying belief in separation) is quick to offer help. One way of compensating for this embodiment, it counsels, is to just deny your experience of being a body. To ignore caring for it, feeding it, looking after it when “its” sick and so on. After all it is nothing isn’t it? What you have forgotten is that to deny something one must first believe it to be true. It is a similar dynamic to making the error real. You see the problem as being of the body (and thus real) and then attempt to solve it by denying its (the body’s) reality. That’s the beauty of the ego’s method of helping you on your spiritual journey. By giving you very good theological reasons to justify your behaviour it masks the fact that it is really reinforcing your belief that it, and the body, is something real.
Your body is just like any other figure in the dream with one exception: you don’t see it as a figure in the dream, you see it as you. The figures that seem to populate our dream are all there to keep your attention “outside” of not only where you are in reality, but also where you think yourself to be “here” in the world. As we begin to accept that these figures are but split off fragments of a whole that seems to exist below our consciousness we turn our attention inside the one figure we think we are. Many sincere seekers think this is all that is really required, turn the attention inward, let go of the world. Yet when done in such a way they invariably find things aren’t really that different “inside.”
The same splitting off, stepping back and dissociation is taking place “inside” as well as “outside”. This splitting off and stepping back is an important primary dynamic in the ego’s arsenal of self-preservation. Yet a dynamic that can, when given to the Holy Spirit, be employed to subvert the very idea that gave it birth. You see, each time we step back we simply step in to another form of the ego. Whereas the ego would have us step back in order to condemn, the Holy Spirit would have us step back to realize we are “not that.” In this way stepping back becomes very important in the process of waking. The difference in the two approaches to stepping back is that for the ego it is an end in itself, for the Holy Spirit is only a step. A step, however, that needs repeating until the end of time.
This is where the interpretation of the Holy Spirit can show us another way. The whole point of the Holy Spirit’s stepping back process and the vigilance we are asked to have, is to demonstrate to us that we are not that which we have stepped back from. The ego is quite happy to assist us in this as long as we stop after a little while and settle on one of those selves we step back into. The ego doesn’t care if this is a defeated self, a guilty self, a righteous self, a wise self or foolish self. The ego is not proud. To the ego, a self is a self is a self. To the ego, a self is a little bit of separation. Paradoxically, by ceasing to step back you reinforce the idea of separation. Jesus meanwhile is asking us to keep stepping back. In fact he is asking us to never stop stepping back. To never be seduced or fooled by the self we step back into. To not believe that it is our true self.
We can never be conscious of our true self for consciousness was the first split after the separation and according to the Course the separation never happened. We are told that no concept could ever be held about the self that can be the truth. That is why practicing the Course is so simple. Just keep turning to the Light. Just keep asking for help. Whenever you begin to “work it out”, to “know this or that”, you are asked to remind yourself that no concept can ever stand for what you are (see T-31.V.15:1-2). In other words, nothing you think you are can be what you are in truth. Once you accept that you can’t know, once you can accept that you, that is the you you think you are, body and all, can’t do this on your own, once you accept that you really don’t know and it doesn’t matter… then you will see the simplicity of the Course .
James