Introduction: On Being Kind

Kindness created me kind.

Early in our relationship, Helen Schucman, scribe of A Course in Miracles, quoted to me lines from W.B. Yeats, arguably Ireland's finest poet: "Tread lightly on my dreams. They are dreams. Yet they are my dreams." (1) The meaning was clear: Our various attempts to find love, peace, and freedom from pain may indeed be forms of our illusory dreams of specialness, yet they are all we can do at the time. The fear of losing our individual selves is still too strong to offset the right-minded attraction to salvation, and in the perverse insanity of the ego we continue to choose its pain over the joy of God (W-pI.190).

Therefore, these maladaptive attempts deserve kindness instead of judgment. We are all in what the Course calls a "fear-weakened state" (T-2.IV.4:8), and Philo (or Plato, as some scholars think) taught: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." This "hard battle," ultimately, is no less than the ego's war against God, which leads to the terror of annihilation. This is why we are told that fear is the origin of all dreams (The Gifts of God, p.115; T-29.IV.2), both individual and collective.

Kindness is a recurring theme of our teaching at the Foundation, in workshops, classes, Lighthouse articles, and books. While it is not one of the ten characteristics of advanced teachers of God (M-4.I), kindness would clearly be one of the natural effects of climbing the ladder home that separation led us down (T-28.III.1:2). Our article explores this essential theme, which protects us from the imprisoning adherence to the metaphysical letter of the Course's "laws," neglecting the spirit of its kindness. In the end, if we do not respect the mind's power to choose to dream, we are denying its power to awaken through our dreams of kindness. After all, "Kindness created me kind" (W-pI.67.2:4).

In effect, Jesus tells us in A Course in Miracles that the best teaching is by example (T-5.IV.5:1), and throughout the many years of his communication with Helen, he exemplified this loving principle. It can be succinctly summarized with his statement to her in the early weeks of the scribing: "If you do my will, I will uphold it. If you do not, I will correct it." We will return to this below, but turn now to a discussion of Jesus' relationship with his scribe as being the consummate model of kindness.

Our Model for Kindness: Jesus' Respecting Helen's Ego

I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you made,
but I will not uphold it unless it is true.

Many students of A Course in Miracles are familiar with the Higher Shopping Service, which refers to Helen's calling on Jesus to help with her inveterate if not addictive shopping behavior. Examples abound, many of which I can personally attest to, of Helen's consulting with Jesus' free service before going after a clothing item she coveted and then "miraculously" finding it. I explain in my Absence from Felicity: The Story of Helen Schucman and Her Scribing of A Course in Miracles (notably Chapter 17) how Helen's experiences were really symbolic of her own right-minded decisions, projected into her life as Helen in relationship to Jesus. Nonetheless, Helen's experience was that the very person of Jesus was specifically responding to her specific needs.

Helen was no one's fool, and certainly knew the defensive nature of her shopping, as she was also aware of the symbolic meaning of Jesus. It was even more apparent to both of us during the years we were together, for we spent many long hours canvassing Manhattan stores in search of Helen's special objects, sometimes with Jesus, sometimes without him. Many of these hours were obvious defenses against, or distractions from our editing the manuscript of A Course in Miracles, being engaged in other Course related activities, or asking Jesus for help with her various fears, anxieties, and concerns. And yet, Helen never once felt that Jesus was judging her for this. In point of fact, to state this again, she experienced him as actually helping her in this defensive activity.

The Higher Shopping Service ended abruptly one lovely spring afternoon when, as we left the Medical Center, I asked Helen where she wanted to go. This meant the Lord & Taylor and B. Altman department stores, or the quasi-infinite number of shoe stores on Fifth Avenue, and then west of Fifth on 34th Street. To my surprise, Helen announced that "It" (her euphemism for Jesus' voice) said that she had no further need of this. And that was that. We never went shopping again, except for essentials. (2)

Some might look at Jesus' Service as his "enabling her," to use the current and well-worn phrase, but there is another way of understanding what is a most instructive teaching example. The way Jesus treated Helen reflected this quintessential spiritual principle: love is strong and truly itself when it allows the beloved to be weak by dint of her own decision to deny the mind's strength. The strength of love, as A Course in Miracles says of the Holy Spirit, does not demand, command, or seek control (T-5.II.7:1-4). In its intrinsic gentleness, love simply reminds the mind of the strength of Christ it both has and is, and waits patiently for the instant when God's Son will choose to correct his mistake, choose again, and remember he is a mind with the power to choose Heaven or hell. Thus it reinforces the decision-making mind's power to choose again, whenever it so desires, knowing that the outcome of truth is certain. This is the ultimate meaning of patience, which is one of the ten characteristics of God's teachers (M-4.VIII).

It was out of Jesus' respect for Helen's mind that he uttered the following to her, and of course to all of us:

I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you made, but I will not uphold it unless it is true (T-4.III.7:7; italics mine).

We can see how Jesus' love for Helen, and likewise for every Son of God, does not coerce or impose guilt, but rather its truth steps aside and frees up the space for our illusions to hold forth. Since we are too afraid to experience the truth that would indeed set us free from the ego and its specialness, to confront us directly with the ego's lies could easily engender a panic reaction that would hardly be conducive to attaining the peace of God, the goal of any spirituality. Early on in the text we read of this in a passage designed to help students of A Course in Miracles remember the kindness of the spiritual path. Without this kindness, Jesus' intellectual teachings would be meaningless. It is clear that Jesus is "allowing" us to use magical remedies, recognizing our fear of the mind's power to heal. Note especially the total absence of judgment, perhaps the most significant aspect of Jesus' course, in theory and in practice:

   All material means that you accept as remedies for bodily ills are restatements of magic principles. … It does not follow, however, that the use of such agents for corrective purposes is evil. Sometimes the illness has a sufficiently strong hold over the mind to render a person temporarily inaccessible to the Atonement. In this case it may be wise to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body [i.e., miracle and magic], in which something from the outside is temporarily given healing belief. This is because the last thing that can help the non-right-minded, or the sick, is an increase in fear. They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are prematurely exposed to a miracle, they may be precipitated into panic (T-2.IV.4:1,4-9; italics mine).

The point here is that the magic of our defenses is needed until the fear of love abates sufficiently to allow the light of truth to once again shine into the mind that has been cowering in the dark recesses of fear. Jesus, therefore, provides us with a powerful though gentle example of how we are to relate to people's magic thoughts and behavior: loving the person, honoring the mind's power to choose, and respecting the decision even when it is based on fear. The kindness of this compromise approach in the face of magic is the subject of our next section.

The Kindness of Magic

I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking.

In A Course in Miracles, magic refers to anything external that we employ to bring us pleasure or alleviate pain. Magic, therefore, ranges from our pursuit of the absolute necessities of physical life such as oxygen, water, and food, without which, of course, the body would perish, to our need for special relationships with people, substances, and material objects, without which our psychological bodies would perish. In this way, magic makes the body real in our experience, and its safety, happiness, and freedom from pain and death become our only concern.

Recognition of the role of magic is enhanced when we juxtapose it with the miracle. Simply stated, magic sees problems as external and seeks always to resolve them through externals. The miracle, on the other hand, reflects Christ's vision that sees all problems as projections of internal decisions ("The world you see is. … the outside picture of an inward condition" [T-21.in.1:2,5].), and therefore the miracle seeks always to find the internal solution of right-mindedness. And because it seeks it, the miracle will surely find it.

Yet, since one cannot live in the world as a body without practicing magic, the miracle begins its healing work by recognizing our involvement in the material world, and then gently bringing us back to the "inward condition" of the mind's decision-making activity. As we have observed before in these pages, this role of the miracle parallels Freud's famous statement from The Interpretation of Dreams: "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." Without the outer expression (or projection) of the mind's thought system, we would have no way of gaining access to the mind. The veil of forgetfulness (more like an iron curtain) that the ego dropped between our bodies and minds precludes our returning to the only power in the universe that can solve our problems and save us from the personal and collective hells in which we all find ourselves. This power is the mind's ability to choose.

Consequently, we cannot but make mistakes while we experience ourselves as being in the world of materiality. After all, coming here through birth itself was a mistake, seeking to hide from the mind in the body. Yet in the hands of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, these mistakes become the means of our learning to distinguish between truth and illusion, joy and pain, freedom and imprisonment:

   Such is the Holy Spirit's kind perception of specialness; His use of what you made, to heal instead of harm (T-25.VI.4:1).

Separation from our Source was the first and, in truth, the only mistake we ever made. All other mistakes have their source in that first one, and the ego has never left its origin. As the text teaches:

The tiny tick of time in which the first mistake was made, and all of them within that one mistake … (T-26.V.3:5).

Yet that one mistake is buried in time and seemingly forever inaccessible to correction, at least in that form. We read in the manual for teachers:

   Time really, then, goes backward to an instant so ancient that it is beyond all memory, and past even the possibility of remembering. Yet because it is an instant that is relived again and again and still again, it seems to be now (M-2.4:1-2).

Because our mistakes are experienced in what we think of as the present, we need to correct them in the forms in which we believe they have occurred. Therefore, we also read:

   Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love (T-26.V.13:1).

In other words, the structure of the mind is vertical and not horizontal, the dimension of the illusion of linear time, and so mistakes we appear to be making now are but shadowy fragments of the mind's ancient and current decision to be separated from perfect Oneness and Love. Again, even though we cannot remember the ontological separation, it is of no matter for we relive the same mistake each and every time we see another as separate from ourselves, having an interest that is not our own. And because it is the same, correcting the specific attack thought that seems to be occurring in our material world corrects the single instant of the "sin" that we committed as one Son.

And what was it exactly that happened in that single instant when the time of terror took the place of love? Surely it was not the time of terror itself, for how could the impossible have truly happened? Again, we need to consult the manual:

In time this [the separation] happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all (M-2.2:7-8).

What occurred was our reaction to the seeming separation, not the magical thought of separation itself. Confronted by the impossibility of the "Oneness joined as One" (T-25. I.7:1) being divided and fragmented, we took the tiny, mad idea seriously and remembered not to laugh at it (T-27. VIII.6:2). Our understanding that illusions simply do not occur in reality means that the mistake could never have been what could never have happened, but rather was our taking this insane dream seriously. It was that one moment of insanity that gave birth to the ego, as it did the material world that appeared to rise as fact within the instant of madness (T-27.VIII.6:3).

All this, of course, was mere magic, since it was only illusion that was born (recall that magicians in our world are sometimes referred to as illusionists). Speaking of the instant when the illusion of separation came into existence, followed by the illusion of a temporal/spatial universe, Jesus offers us this pregnant passage from the workbook:

   Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic (W-pI.158.4:1).

Illusory though it may be, the ego's magic nonetheless seduces us with the promise, as it does in the Faust legends where it appears as Mephistopheles, of the fulfillment of our heart's desires. These ultimately coalesce into the single desire of eternal existence as an individual and special self, autonomous and free. However, A Course in Miracles would have us wonder: what if we had remembered to laugh at this ontological magic thought of separation, wherein we dreamed that we had indeed achieved what we wanted, independence from the undifferentiated unity of the Godhead? If we had chosen sanity instead of this madness, the Holy Spirit's kind and gentle response in place of the ego's severely terrifying one, then nothing would have happened and the dream, with its concomitant thoughts of sin, guilt, and fear, would have been over in the instant they seemed to have occurred. They could have had no effect on the undifferentiated unity that is the reality of the Godhead, which embraces the Creator, the created, and the creations of the created:

This world was over long ago. The thoughts that made it are no longer in the mind that thought of them and loved them for a little while. … All the effects of guilt are here no more. For guilt is over (T-28.I.1:6-7;2:1-2).

The clear implication of these facts, and this goes to the very heart of Jesus' teachings in A Course in Miracles, is that the problem never was the tiny, mad idea, which still remains nonexistent. It is only and always how we responded to the nonexistent (because it is insane) thought of separation. It is our seriousness in the face of magic thoughts and actions (one and the same) that needs correction, not the thought or behavior that is mere illusion. This is the meaning of still another significant passage from the manual:

   Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appears as facts (M-17.4:1-2).

The implications here are vast, for the above means that we are never—never!—upset for the reasons we think (W-pI.5); i.e., it is not the seemingly external relationships, situations, or events (the facts) in our lives that cause us pain (or pleasure for that matter), but only the way that our minds choose to look at them (the interpretation). This must be true if the key principle of the course is true: ideas leave not their source. If the idea of separation has never left its source in the mind, through projection, then there can be no world outside the mind that is dreaming it, let alone having an effect on us.

And so, how can we be upset by what is not there? Indeed, who would be there to even become upset? There is no world, only the mind's belief that there is. Once again, the world is only magic, pure and simple: an illusion that is the projection of an illusory thought, delusional thinking that has led to hallucinatory perceptions—a maladaptive solution to a nonexistent problem. If we are upset by the world's magic, in ourselves or in others, it can only be because we have chosen to make the magic thought of separation real. What else could it be? To attribute our upset or peace to anything else is simply an ego ploy to keep us separated, to establish that we are right and God is wrong. The beginning of Lesson 70 makes this fundamental ego dynamic crystal clear:

… nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. … nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace or upset you in any way (W-pI.70.2:1-2).

Assuming that we accept the validity of this idea, and in one sense we would not be students of A Course in Miracles if we did not, we need to ask why we continue to negate this metaphysical truth by allowing ourselves to become upset by magical thoughts and behavior that but serve to make the illusion of separation real. The answer lies in our cherishing the effects of such practice. Continuing the previously quoted passage, we read:

Why would you cling to it [guilt] in memory if you did not desire its effects? (T-28.I.2:4).

The effects of guilt, the effects of our magical thinking —and becoming upset at another's magic is in itself magic—are the reinforcers of our identity as individual, special selves. The personal self can exist only in the dualistic universe that arose from having taken the tiny, mad idea of separation seriously. And it is this error we repeat and reinforce whenever we see another's magical (read: insane) thought, feeling, word, or deed as deserving our rapt attention and weighty response.

Our motivation is echoed in the following passage from the aforementioned section in the manual, "How Should God's Teachers Deal with Magic Thoughts?":

How to deal with magic … becomes a major lesson for the teacher of God to master … . If a magic thought arouses anger [or judgment] in any form, God's teacher can be sure that he is strengthening his own belief in sin and has condemned himself (M-17.1:4,6).

By seeing sin in another we protect the projection of our own belief in sin, thereby using magic to strengthen faith in the ontological magical thought of having separated from our Creator and Source. That is why we make another's magical insanity real in our perception, justifying our response in kind. There is always method to the ego's madness, and the purpose of our insane responses is nothing less than proving God wrong and our separated selves right. Paraphrasing the line from the workbook, we can say: "If there is magic, there is no miracle and therefore no God" (W-pI.190.3:4).

Jesus offers another example of a kind and loving demonstration of his teaching in what is now Chapter 2 of the text. It originally came as a discussion between Jesus and Helen, who went to her teacher with some external fears. His was a two-pronged answer. Jesus clearly respected Helen's decision to be fearful, at the same time reminding her of the true problem: her mind's decision to be separate from him:

   The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate (T-2.VI.4:1-4).

After stating the simplicity of the problem and therefore the answer, for which we are solely responsible, Jesus proceeded to explain what was in back of his previous statement:

If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law of cause [decision to be separate] and effect [fear]; the most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course (T-2.VII.1:4-6).

In this way, Jesus reminds his scribe and all his students, that the purpose of A Course in Miracles is to return attention to the decision-making mind that is the single source of our perceived problems, and the only means of correcting them. This is the role of the miracle, as we have already seen, for it corrects the belief in the reality of magic, including the need for it. It is also the basis for our kindness toward others, enabling us to focus only on our reactions to what we perceive without judging them. The miracle's kindness leads us to exemplify the Holy Spirit's judgment: someone expresses love or calls for it (T-12.I.8-10; T-14.X.7:1). Either way, our response would be loving: sharing love with the person, or answering the call for love with love.

Thus, our focus shifts from the various forms of magic to our reactions, and this is nothing less than the shift from judgment to kindness, respecting people's fear as being their call for the love they do not believe they deserve because they betrayed it.

Our Being a Model for Kindness: Respecting Our and Others' Ego

Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence.

Once we are able to share perception with the Holy Spirit, His eyes become our own. With such vision, love becomes the only thought in our minds, and it is then impossible to believe that another's thoughts, feelings, or actions can have any effect on us. This frees us to have the love within our right minds, no longer impeded by the wrong mind's guilt and projections, hate and judgment, extend through us to embrace all those we are with or even think about. In this embrace, which is the essence of forgiveness, our brothers who had chosen wrongly are able to be gently corrected through Christ's vision. The following passage from the manual clearly articulates how this vision is manifest in the perceptual world in the face of the ego's magical use of sickness. This parallels the Holy Spirit's judgment of two categories: expressions of love or calls for it:

   The body's eyes will continue to see differences. But the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them … . [it] will put them all in one category; they are unreal … . only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two, but one is real (M-8.6:1-2,4-6).

How does this vision work in practice? How does our healed perception translate to healing others and correcting their magical thinking? Recall the comment from Jesus to Helen that I cited earlier: if she did his will he would uphold it, and if she did not he would correct it. This cannot mean that we correct the magical behavior, since that would fall directly into the ego's trap of making the body real, focusing on the distraction rather than the problem in the mind. We are told in the text that the way out of suffering is to look at the problem as it is, and not the way we set it up (T-27.VII.2:2). This means that we do not look to the magical behavior but to the magical thought that led to the behavior. This is the belief that we could separate from love, project our guilt onto the body—ours or another's—and in doing so free our minds of their fear of punishment.

Consequently, it is the thought of separation from love that needs undoing. It does not need confrontational correction as there is nothing to correct. Instead, the magical mistake is corrected simply by demonstrating that our love has not been affected by the insane wish to attack it through specialness. Undoing, therefore, is done on the mind level, since that is the only level there is. In the presence of those who manifest symptoms of the mind's sickness of separation, we exemplify Christ's vision, calling our "sick" brothers to choose again:

   To them God's teachers come, to represent another choice which they had forgotten. … Very gently they call to their brothers to turn away from death: "Behold, you Son of God, what life can offer you. Would you choose sickness in place of this?" (M-5.III.2:1,11-12)

How simple then is our life here when we have chosen vision instead of judgment (T-20.V.4:7)! With nothing but love to extend, there is no guilt to project. The miracle comes easily to replace the ego's magic, and dreams of hate and spite gently give way to happy dreams of forgiveness. Herein we have at last remembered to laugh at the silliness of ever believing we could be apart from our Creator, or from any seemingly separated fragment of the Sonship whom He created one with Him (T-27.VIII.6:2). Our kind forgiveness to others makes us ready for the next step, our eyes softly awakening to the reality we never left, the home our Father has always held for us, as we now read:

   Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. And from this dream the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son. Dream of your brother's kindnesses instead of dwelling in your dreams on his mistakes. Select his thoughtfulness to dream about instead of counting up the hurts he gave (T-27.VII.15:1-4).

Awakening from Our Dreams

God willed he waken gently and with joy, and gave him means to waken without fear.

If forgiveness is the reflection of Heaven's love, then kindness, too, would be its reflection. It is the gentle way—for ourselves and for others—to take the journey from nightmares through the happy dreams of correction, to the ultimate awakening:

So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking. … God willed he waken gently and with joy, and gave him means to waken without fear (T-27.VII,13:4-5).

Kindness to others, therefore, is the way, par excellence, for negotiating the treacherous waters of the magical special love and hate relationships that constitute the ego's arsenal of defenses. We recognize that our brothers' dreams of loss, guilt, and judgment are only their classrooms of learning, detours to be sure, but then all life here is a detour on the journey that is truly without distance to our true Life. There is no hierarchy of detours in the sense that one is any better or worse than any other. Our evaluations of them depend only on the purpose they serve in the greater Atonement path. Thus our choice to judge or forgive them but represent our mind's decision to remain asleep or to awaken. Who except the insane would choose dreams of judgment and hate over the gentle dreams of kindness, when it is clear that we dream but for ourselves, each dream reflecting the choice between taking our place among the forgiving saviors of the world, or remaining in hell with all our brothers (T-31.VIII.1:5)?

And so, at last, we join our brother Jesus at the outer edge of dreams; standing on the lawns of Heaven with hands outstretched to our companions on the journey, welcoming each and every one—without exception—as they pass through the gate that leads beyond all dreams to eternal life. Our voice echoes the words Jesus once said to Helen, a prayer of prayers that reflects the journey's close and the end of dreaming:

How beautiful are you who stand beside me at the gate, and call with me that everyone may come and step aside from time. Put out your hand to touch eternity and disappear into its perfect rest. Here is the peace that God intended for the Son He loves. Enter with me and let its quietness cover the earth forever. It is done. Father, your Voice has called us home at last: Gone is the dream. Awake, My child, in love (The Gifts of God, pp. 122-23).

FOOTNOTES:
1. These lines were not remembered exactly by Helen. They are from Yeat's "Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," and the complete poem is as follows (italics mine): "Had I the heavens' embroider'd cloth, / Enwrought with golden and silver light, / The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half light, / I would spread the cloths under your feet: / But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
2. For the full story, the reader may consult my Absence from Felicity, page 427.