Scissoring Our Dream Out of Unity

Leafing through A Course in Miracles the other day, I came across a copy of a poem paper-clipped to Lesson 184, The Name of God is my inheritance, entitled The Way by Albert Goldbarth. It is faded and yellowed, and I probably cut it out of The New Yorker some time ago.

THE WAY

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose

of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lame
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lame.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.

I find this poem to be a remarkable description of how we make up an illusory world.

The sky is random.

I am sitting on our deck on a warm, sunny day in August, and I casually glance about me, seeing the bird feeder, the chimes, the trees, and the sky. I am simply looking, randomly, defined as “occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern.” Yet, I automatically name things, cutting each thing out of the whole, selecting one thing at a time by symbolizing it with a name.

You live by symbols. You have made up names
for everything you see. Each one becomes
a separate entity, identified
by its own name. By this you carve it out
of unity.
W-p1.184.1:1-4

Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness.

And once again, this is wired into our brains. In an article in the newspaper today, Michael Shermer, an author who studies how the brain functions says this:

We are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots, and often they really are connected. We just assume all patterns are real. You can show people a random collection of anything and they will find a pattern.(The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 2, 2009, p. A9.)

What is humanly visible we consider real, and what is shapeless and endless we consider unreal. The poet, Albert Goldbarth, intuits that this is what we do, and unfortunately for us, it is almost all that we do.

It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—

This is the way reality is made
by partial vision, purposefully set
against the given truth. Its enemy
is wholeness. It conceives of little things
and looks upon them.
W-p1.184.4:1-3

and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lame
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.

Even the birth of a galaxy, however huge it seems, is small because it is unreal. Even the beautiful metaphors of devastating rose and fatal lame do not make it real. In the phrase, super-duper telescopes, I saw the word “dupe.” We are always being duped by what we see and name, our own projections, reminding me of this sentence from out of the past: Whether we are looking into a telescope, or into a microscope, we are always looking only at the back of our heads.”

“Dupe” becomes even stronger when its origins become clear. It comes from (tête) d'uppe, or “head of a bird thought to be especially stupid.” You gotta to love it. We are stupid birds believing our illusions.

Even our family members seem to be getting old and sick and dying because we see them as illusions, as subjects, not as the truth of what they are, children of God.

They are made of sights that are not seen, and sounds that are not heard. They make up a private world that cannot be shared. For they are meaningful only to their maker, and so they have no meaning at all. In this world their maker moves alone, for only he perceives them. W-13.V.1:6-9

Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lame.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
an infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal.

Once again, Goldbarth intuits that space and time are carved out of unity, and we cut by scissoring with language. This is seeing with the body’s eyes, partial vision, purposefully set against the given truth.

And yet, there is only one vision, seeing with the eyes of Christ, the other vision.

Yet does this other vision still remain
a natural direction for the mind
to channel its perception. It is hard
to teach the mind a thousand alien names,
and thousands more. Yet you believe this is
what learning means; its one essential goal
by which communication is achieved,
and concepts can be meaningfully shared.
W-p.1.184.5

When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.

It is with a sure hand that Goldbarth ends his poem by evoking William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Wordsworth knew, first hand, that we are of God, not of man. Here is a famous stanza from his poem, Intimations of Immortality.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
hath had elsewhere its setting,
and cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
but trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God, who is our home.
59-66

Wordsworth experienced resting in God, our true nature, even though he referred to the daffodils by “counting;” for him it was simply a convenient metaphor. Here is the last part of Wordsworth’s poem, I wandered lonely as a cloud.

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
in vacant or in pensive mood,
they flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude;
and then my heart with pleasure fills,
and dances with the daffodils.

He captures perfectly what it means to step back from seeing with the body’s eyes, and in the bliss of solitude experiences seeing with the inward eye, seeing with Christ vision.

It is not completely clear to me why Goldbarth entitled his poem, The Way. I will assume that he is resting in the unity and wholeness of his true identity, knowing that there is no world, other than the illusory one we make by seeing through only the body’s eyes. I trust I am on the right track because Goldbarth does use the phrase in this manner three times in his poem:

the way we would. . .

the way our language scissors

the way we gild and rubricate

If so, he recognizes that only by demonstrating exactly how we scissor our dream out of unity and wholeness is the way we come to experience another way of seeing.

Jesus said unto them,
Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Before Abraham was, I am.
John 8:58

And Jesus expresses it this way in today’s lesson, 224, God is my Father, and He loves His Son.

My true Identity is so secure,
so lofty, sinless, glorious and great,
wholly beneficent and free from guilt,
that Heaven looks to It to give it light.
It lights the world as well. It is the gift
my Father gave to me; the one as well
I give the world. There is no gift but This
that can be either given or received.
This is reality, and only This.
This is illusion's end. It is the truth.

My Name, O Father, still is known to You.
I have forgotten It, and do not know
where I am going, who I am, or what
it is I do. Remind me, Father, now,
for I am weary of the world I see.
Reveal what You would have me see instead.
W-p11.224

The way means to ask for help to be reminded of the truth of what I am, so that I can learn to see through my illusory world of time and space, and experience in its place the peace of God, seeing with the inward eye.

Jesus saith unto him:
I am the way, the truth and the life.
John 14:6