A Course in Miracles Explained

Life is Dukka. - The First Noble Truth

The first of the four truths the Buddha described is called duhkha (doo-ka). Duhkha is not easily translated into English, so I’ve explained it here, I will leave it untranslated.

Duhkha is often translated as “suffering”. But this only gets at part of what the word means, because pleasure is also a form of duhkha.

Duhkha actually comes from a Sanskrit word that refers to a wheel out of kilter. If we think of this wheel as one that performs some important function, such as a potter’s wheel, then the out-of-true wheel creates constant hardship for us every time we try to make a clay vessel.

In the Buddha’s time the accompanying image may have been of a cart with a out-of-true wheel being pulled along. You can imagine how uncomfortable it must feel to ride in such a vehicle. The repeated wobble, rise, and drop starts out as annoying, then becomes steadily more distracting and disturbing. Maybe there’s a little pleasure in it for the rider at first – a little bounce, perhaps – but after a while it becomes more and more vexing.

The first truth of the buddha-dharma likens human life to this out-of-kilter wheel. Something basic and important isn’t right. It bothers us, makes us unhappy, time after time. With each turn of the wheel, each passing day, we experience pain.

Of course there are moments of pleasure. But no matter how hard we try to cultivate pleasure and keep it coming our way, eventually the pleasure recedes and the disturbance and our vexation return. Nothing we do can keep them entirely at bay.

pg. 26, Buddhism Plain and Simple, Steve Hagen

The parallel to dukka in A Course in Miracles is the underlying insane thought system of the ego. The world as we know it will always be ‘out-of-kilter’ because its fundamentals are based on murderous, vicious thought system of the ego. Like a building with a shoddy foundation, whatever we hold on dearly to in this world will ultimately come crashing down. In the dualistic world of the ego, only what is worth tearing down is worth building. It is only in Heaven that we can build anything that is of real value.

The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love’s absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone. W-pII.3 (What Is the World?), A Course in Miracles

A simple question yet remains, and needs an answer. Do you like what you have made?–a world of murder and attack, through which you thread your timid way through constant dangers, alone and frightened, hoping at most that death will wait a little longer before it overtakes you and you disappear. You made this up. It is a picture of what you think you are; of how you see yourself. A murderer is frightened, and those who kill fear death. All these are but the fearful thoughts of those who would adjust themselves to a world made fearful by their adjustments. And they look out in sorrow from what is sad within, and see the sadness there. T-20.III.4, A Course in Miracles

Here the deathless come to die, the all-encompassing to suffer loss, the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain and finally to die. T-29.VIII.6., A Course in Miracles

The world that we think we live in was borne of separation, and will always be characterized by separation. From the scream of a baby when it first enters the world, to the countless wars that have been fought throughout history; from the endless competition between people and societies, to our discontent with ourselves and with others – the illusion replays the same themes over and over again, only in different forms. The external world will give us some temporary pleasure or hope, only to have it taken away.

For many who approach Buddhism and A Course in Miracles, myself included, this is not so much of a pessimistic attitude than it is a penetrating observation of life. It is not a temporary view taken only when times are bad, or when we feel that we cannot cope with the vicissitudes of human life. It is an observation from our countless experiences, in this lifetime and many others, that there is something not quite right with what we call human existence. It is from this observation that our questioning starts, ‘Is there a better way?’

Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more firmly established, it becomes a turning point. T-2.III.3. A Course in Miracles

Our only hope out of the madness is to go beyond the world, into ourselves. Both A Course in Miracles and Buddhism make it clear that the real answers are to be found within.

The body – the perfect victim

The body is the ego’s idol; the belief in sin made flesh and then projected outward. This produces what seems to be a wall of flesh around the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant seems to be life; an instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water and set uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by, to offer his devotion to death’s idols and then pass on. And here he is more dead than living. Yet it is also here he makes his choice again between idolatry and love. Here it is given him to choose to spend this instant paying tribute to the body, or let himself be given freedom from it. Here he can accept the holy instant, offered him to replace the unholy one he chose before. And here can he learn relationships are his salvation, and not his doom. T-20.VI.11. A Course in Miracles

On leaving his sheltered palace life for the first time at the age of 29, Prince Siddhārtha encountered four sights that profoundly affected him: an old man, a sick man, a dead man and an ascetic. The young prince, accustomed to the perfect forms of dancing girls in his palace, was greatly troubled by the first three sights. He quickly realised that that old age, sickness and death was an absolute certainty, not just for the ordinary man on the street, but for all beings, including himself. It was only the last sight of the ascetic, who had dedicated his life to finding the cause of human suffering, which gave him hope and eventually prompted him to renounce his princely life in search of answers to this troubling question.

Much suffering takes place in an exclusive form in the world – in our bodies. Our aches and pains, the endless diseases and genetic imperfections the body is prone to, the endless needs of the body, all seek illustrate the fragility and ephemeral nature of human life. It is this fragility that the ego is heavily invested in – our attention is always occupied by the needs of the body: food, water, air, sex. In its constant upkeep, its endless dependence on things outside of itself, our attention is fixated on the illusion – exactly what the ego wants.

In the brief time allotted it [the body] to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure, and avoid the things that would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys are different and can be told apart. T-27.VIII.1.

We constantly try to differentiate ourselves from others by means of our bodies – going to the gym, going on diets, piercing and tattooing it, dressing it up in ‘nice’ clothes, all in the unconscious agenda of the ego to be a separate entity.

It puts things on itself that it has bought with little metal discs or paper strips the world proclaims as valuable and real. It works to get them, doing senseless things, and tosses them away for senseless things it does not need and does not even want. T-27.VIII.2.

Above all, the body seeks to disconnect us from the totality, limiting us in the fictitious world of time-space. All that we know is limited by our five senses. We are so far down the rungs of the ladder that we can no longer see ourselves as Christ.

T-8.VIII.6. Sickness is a way of demonstrating that you can be hurt. It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external guidance. The ego uses this as its best argument for your need for its guidance. It dictates endless prescriptions for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. The Holy Spirit, perfectly aware of the same situation, does not bother to analyze it at all. If data are meaningless there is no point in analyzing them.

Karma

In the Buddhist framework – individuated consciousness (an illusory phenomenon itself) undergoes numerous physical incarnations due to Karma – one’s actions and deeds in past lifetimes. But what exactly is Karma?

Karma is a Sanskrit word from the root “Kri” to do or to make and simply means “action.” It operates in the universe as the continuous chain reaction of cause and effect. It is not only confined to causation in the physical sense but also it has moral implications. “A good cause, a good effect; a bad cause a bad effect” is a common saying. In this sense karma is a moral law.

Now human beings are constantly giving off physical and spiritual forces in all directions. In physics we learn that no energy is ever lost; only that it changes form. This is the common law of conservation of energy. Similarly, spiritual and mental action is never lost. It is transformed. Thus Karma is the law of the conservation of moral energy.

By actions, thoughts, and words, man is releasing spiritual energy to the universe and he is in turn affected by influences coming in his direction. Man is therefore the sender and receiver of all these influences. The entire circumstances surrounding him is his karma.

With each action-influence he sends out and at the same time, receives, he is changing. This changing personality and the world he lives in, constitute the totality of his karma.

Karma should not be confused with fate. Fate is the notion that man’s life is preplanned for him by some external power, and he has no control over his destiny. Karma on the other hand, can be changed. Because man is a conscious being he can be aware of his karma and thus strive to change the course of events. In the Dhammapada we find the following words, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought, it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts.”

What we are, then, is entirely dependent on what we think. Therefore, the nobility of man’s character is dependent on his “good” thoughts, actions, and words. At the same time, if he embraces degrading thoughts, those thoughts invariably influence him into negative words and actions.

On Reincarnation, Takashi Tsuji

While most people know karma as a law of cause and effect according to one’s actions (ie. Galatians 6:7 ‘A man reaps what he sows’), we see from the above excerpt that karma can also mean a unique set of circumstances – physical, mental, emotional and experiential – for the individual. Both concepts are of course, highly interrelated.
While ACIM does not use the word ‘karma’, it certainly illustrates the concept in its own Christian language.

The first meaning of karma, of cause and effect, could be likened to a meaningless ‘law of the ego’ and a law of duality within the illusion. Imagine a pendulum swinging from one side to another. While karma might describe the movement of the pendulum, the driver of the pendulum is rarely questioned. This inertia, this invisible force which causes it to swing is our unconscious guilt. At the core of it, this unconscious guilt stems from our belief that we have separated from God (which we haven’t). Karma is the way in which our unconscious guilt recycles itself and seems to play out across and within lifetimes. It is unconscious guilt that causes us to perceive ourselves as bodies and as separate selves – indeed, it is unconscious guilt that causes us to think we are in the world at all!

When we start to look at our unconscious guilt, when we start dealing with it via forgiveness, we take away some of the force behind all of the manic swinging from one end to the other. When we have neutralised all of the force, we become completely still, immune to the effects of the world.

We mentioned earlier that you meet people in this lifetime whom you’ve had dealings with before in other lifetimes, whether through special love or special hate. Of course that’s a linear perspective. It actually happened all at once as a hologram and then appears to act itself out in a linear manner. When you meet someone in this lifetime you’ve known before in other dream lifetimes, it’s because you’re orbiting each other. Just as planets orbit the sun, move away from each other in their orbits and then, after reaching their farthest point away, come back to their closest point again, people orbit each other in the hologram of time and space in a similar manner. Pg. 98, Your Immortal Reality, Gary Renard

Yet everyone who comes to this world did so with an unconscious knowledge of what was going to happen. They chose their fate, and they have the opportunities to learn their lessons from whatever occurs. You might think we’d be doing people a favor by helping them avoid their problems, and the truth is they’d just have to go through the same kinds of things all over again anyway, because the unconscious guilt would continue to play itself out until it’s forgiven. Even if it doesn’t always look that way to you, the best thing to do is learn how to forgive no matter what appears to happen. That’s the only real way out of this whole nightmare – and even if it doesn’t seem like a nightmare to some people, it always turns into one eventually. Pg. 375, The Disappearance of the Universe, Gary Renard

The second meaning of karma points to the fact that everyone, in every single moment in their lives, has a unique set of circumstances which surround us – our sex, age, ethnicity, families, friends, job, personality traits, neuroses, etc. All of this has been determined by our past – individual and collective – not just the way we were brought up, our choices in the crossroads of life at every particular junction, but also who our parents were, their circumstances, and who our parents’ parents were, their circumstances, ad infinitum.

In the A Course in Miracles context, all of this is a collection of mental concepts which seek to define and limit the shattered consciousness of the ‘tiny, mad idea’. Like the demon Mara, the Lord of Samsara, brandishing the wheel of life and death in front of the Buddha, the ego uses this elaborate soap opera to prop up the idea that we are separate identities, going through separate existences. It is only when we look at our Karma and deal with it in the right way, as the Buddha did, that we can begin to free ourselves. Through forgiveness, we can refuse to ‘buy into’ the story of the ego, and start to erase our karmic debt. It is through forgiveness that we can undo the Gordian knot we have tied ourselves up in.

The ego is a master illusionist, and one of the ways it diverts your attention, from the moment you’re born, is by giving you – and this calls for another drum roll, please – problems. These problems are usually right in front of you, and the answers to these problems have to be found out there in the world and utilized. It doesn’t matter if it’s your own survival that’s the problem, or something as seemingly lofty as attaining world peace. The problems and the answers are always somewhere out there in the world or the universe. Pg. 165, The Disappearance of the Universe

Reincarnation

Highly related to the concept of karma is the concept of reincarnation.

The law of Samsara holds that everything is in a birth and rebirth cycle. Buddha taught that people do not have individual souls. The existence of an individual self or ego is an illusion. There is no eternal substance of a person which goes through the rebirth cycle. What is it then that goes through the cycle if not the individual soul? What goes through the rebirth cycle is only a set of feelings, impressions, present moments, and the karma that is passed on.

Buddhism, Pat Zukeran

Here, it is important to point out that the Buddhist concept of reincarnation is not transmigration. Transmigration means that there is an eternal ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ or ‘self’ which moves from one body to another following death. The Buddhist view is that there is no eternal soul, there is only a ‘stream of consciousness’. What’s the difference, you ask? While this might seem subtle, it reflects an important distinction in the Buddhist paradigm of the world being an illusion. Also, it points to the fact that the ‘stream of consciousness’ is the cause of the body, and not the effect.

A problem can appear in many forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts. It serves no purpose to attempt to solve it in a special form. It will recur and then recur again and yet again, until it has been answered for all time and will not rise again in any form. And only then are you released from it. T-26.II.1.

The last quote is highly relevant to both the concepts of karma and reincarnation. A Course in Miracles is telling us that unless we choose a right-minded response to problems, we are fated to relive it again, only in another form. This process can happen both in a ‘micro’ scale (within the context of a single lifetime) and also in a ‘macro’ scale (within the context of multiple lifetimes). Ultimately, of course, there are no ‘scales’ to speak of – time being a holographic, non-linear concept, it all happens / has happened / will happen simultaneously. There are no real divisions between lifetimes – the entire process is a collective dream!

The basic cause for rebirth is the abiding of consciousness in ignorance (Pali: avijja, Sanskrit: avidya): when ignorance is uprooted, rebirth ceases. – Wikipedia

We see that the parallels between A Course in Miracles and Buddhism are uncanny:

• A Course in Miracles tells us that as long as we have unconscious guilt in our minds, we will always be ‘propelled’ / ‘projected’ back into the illusion as bodies.
• Buddhism tells us that as long as our consciousness ‘abides in ignorance’, we are fated to go through cycles of death and rebirth.

A Course in Miracles’ stance on reincarnation, however, is slightly more nuanced. In the Manual for Teachers, Jesus answers this very question:

IS REINCARNATION SO?

(To avoid excessive length in this article, I have chosen excerpts.)

M-24.1. In the ultimate sense, reincarnation is impossible. There is no past or future, and the idea of birth into a body has no meaning either once or many times. Reincarnation cannot, then, be true in any real sense.

M-24.2. Reincarnation would not, under any circumstances, be the problem to be dealt with now. If it were responsible for some of the difficulties the individual faces now, his task would still be only to escape from them now. If he is laying the groundwork for a future life, he can still work out his salvation only now. To some, there may be comfort in the concept, and if it heartens them its value is self-evident. It is certain, however, that the way to salvation can be found by those who believe in reincarnation and by those who do not. The idea cannot, therefore, be regarded as essential to the curriculum.

M-24.3. For our purposes, it would not be helpful to take any definite stand on reincarnation.

M-24.5. Does this mean that the teacher of God should not believe in reincarnation himself, or discuss it with others who do? The answer is, certainly not! If he does believe in reincarnation, it would be a mistake for him to renounce the belief unless his internal Teacher so advised. And this is most unlikely. He might be advised that he is misusing the belief in some way that is detrimental to his pupil’s advance or his own. Reinterpretation would then be recommended, because it is necessary. All that must be recognized, however, is that birth was not the beginning, and death is not the end.

A Course in Miracles sees reincarnation as an illusory concept within the illusion, and does not ‘take any definite stand on reincarnation’ as such. After all, to give credence to the illusion at all would be to make it real. However, it is also clear from M-24.5. that this concept of reincarnation can be useful for some (such as myself), and Jesus has no problems with those who use it in a right-minded way.

Of all the supplementary literature available currently in the A Course in Miracles field, it is perhaps the work of Gary Renard which uses this concept the most. The conversations in DU and YIR are based on Gary meeting two ‘ascended masters’, one of which is his future self in his next (and final) lifetime, Pursah. Incidentally, Pursah / Gary, was also supposedly Didymus Judas Thomas, or Thomas the Apostle, one of Jesus’s disciples 2000 years ago.

The Incredulity of St Thomas by Caravaggio

As a side note – while this may sound incredulous to many, I personally have not found any single piece of evidence that disproves any of numerous things stated in his books. This being said, I am neither able to conclusively prove that he did go through all of those experiences, or that he is indeed a reincarnation of Thomas. I do know, however, that:

1. The message of Jesus as presented in his books is clear and coherent, unlike that of modern Christianity. Notably, authors such as Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen have examined the saying of the Gospels of Thomas as dictated by Pursah in YIR with the Nag Hammadi versions, and have found them to be incredibly consistent with a pre-Pauline Jesus. (ie. before Paul the Apostle / Saul of Tarsus, whose interpretation of Jesus’s message has been effectively adopted by modern-day Christianity)
2. I have met Gary twice and I can say that he neither strikes me as a mentally ill person nor a congenital liar. In fact, he comes across as quite the opposite.
3. I have found (amongst many others), that DU and YIR have been wonderful and extremely helpful teaching devices which satisfy my intellectual curiosity (about reincarnation for example), but always focusing on the main practice of ACIM, which is forgiveness.

Gary: Some people believe reincarnation leads to the evolvement of the soul. True?

Pursah: Think, Gary. Your soul is already perfect, or otherwise it wouldn’t be a soul; it would just be something you’re mistaking for a soul – like your mind, which people do mistake for the soul, or a projection of your mind, which includes bodily-shaped ghostly images that people think are souls. Evolution is something that appears to happen on the level of form, but it’s just a dream. Once your mind has learned all its forgiveness lessons, then it awakens to spirit or soul, and everything else is gone except Heaven. Most people think of their soul as being an individual thing because they can’t help but think of themselves as individuals. When that false belief is gone, then you know that there is really only one soul – which is our unlimited oneness as spirit.

Gary: Reincarnation is also just a dream?

Pursah: Yes, but as we’ve been trying to explain, since it’s something that appears to happen, we talk about it as though it does. When your dream lifetime is over, you see yourself as leaving the body and having other adventures, but you’re not really going anywhere. You’re just watching the mind’s projections, or as we’ve often call it for your benefit – a movie.

Pg. 328, The Disappearance of the Universe

We thus see that on the concepts of Karma and Reincarnation – although A Course in Miracles and Buddhism do not contradict, and certainly have a number of commonalities, distinctly different approaches are taken by both. How much of it is semantic and how much of it is actually theological is a question that can only be answered by the individual.

Next: A Course in Miracles & Buddhism – Part 3: The Middle Way

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