Not No
The instinct is almost reflexive. Something unwanted surfaces - a sharp criticism, a wave of anxiety, a flare of anger - and we immediately want it gone. Reject it. Suppress it. Spiritualize our way around it.
Many bring this same impulse to their practice. Treat the ego as the adversary. Wage a quiet campaign against “negative” thoughts. Try, with varying degrees of determination, to starve the separate self into submission.
But that’s not what A Course in Miracles and other non-dualistic thought systems are pointing toward.
The Course opens with one of its most luminous declarations: its purpose is simply to remove what obscures love’s presence. Not manufacture love. Not earn it. Not win it through disciplined self-improvement. Love’s presence is already here, already whole, already ours. An unconditional peace so complete it defies description.
What obscures it? One persistent, mistaken thought: the powerful pull toward a separate “me.” The impulse to selfhood. The sense that there’s a particular someone navigating this life, someone with grievances and partiality and a very pressing agenda.
This impulse isn’t evil. It’s merely a thought. And as a thought, it yields to something far simpler than conquest: examination.
Not intellectual analysis. Not argument or reason. Something sublimely still. We bring each expression of the obscuring darkness - each flash of irritation, each knot of worry, each whisper of shame - into the unhurried light of loving presence. We look at it gently, without agenda, without the slightest intention of changing anything.
And it dissolves. Not because we defeated it, but because darkness, in the end, can’t persist in the light of “holy perception”.
This is the whole of the practice. Not saying no to what obscures. But saying not no to what was always there.
Join me in Thursday’s class where we’ll explore this gentle but radical reorientation and discover the peace that’s been quietly waiting beneath. I look forward to seeing you then.