Unhealed Healers

           Last week’s article was about ego’s spiritual advancement. It says, “If truth continues to grow in one’s conscious awareness, the effect can be mitigation of the worst of ego, self-centeredness, selfishness, pride, arrogance, guilt, and fear. This shows up as ego accepting it is part of something larger, considering others, compassion for others, ceasing taking itself so seriously, laughing at itself, taking responsibility for itself, admitting its faults, willingly making amends when possible, and forgiving”. These are things deemed in the world to be maturity and what many see as self-actualization or realization. The words to be emphasized here are “the effects can be”.

Students often tell me about someone, perhaps a popular teacher of A Course in Miracles or another teaching, or a friend who is also on the path, or someone in a study group they attend, who they find to be a terrible person in many ways but who claims to be spiritually aware. Sometimes the student says the person cannot be spiritually aware and is deceiving them by claiming to be. Other times, the student has been truly helped by the other and they struggle with the contradiction between who the teacher is as a person and the teaching that helped them.

Often it is said in these pages, “No person is enlightened.” Truth—pure consciousness—shows up in the mind, one’s conscious awareness, not in ego or the person. Truth can poke through into conscious awareness anywhere; it doesn’t matter the attitudes or behavior of the person. This can be momentary or ongoing. This happens randomly and a purpose is given afterward by the mind to which it came. How much this affects or changes the person varies. These stories of contradiction are proof of this.

There is no greater example than Helen Schucman, who channeled the Course. People have been baffled by how she could channel the Course yet still be a hard person in many ways. Ken Wapnick called her a master teacher, yet she rejected the Course in many ways. Really, the master teacher was in her mind, it was not Dr. Schucman the person. Right here is that very contradiction, the split mind, divided between truth and not-truth, or ego, which is in every mind.

Now consider Bill Thetford, her helper, the first student of the Course, really the one for whom she channeled it. His life was very different. He put the Course into practice and continued to learn and grow. And so did his personal peace.

Immaturity is a form of self-deception. As such, it blocks an ongoing awareness of truth. Self-centeredness and selfishness occur when someone denies they are part of a greater whole. Pride and arrogance come from the sense that one is more than others, which isn’t true. One can know more than others in some areas or be more skilled in some ways, but not all, and in any case that doesn’t make one more than others, just more informed or more skilled. Feelings of unworthiness and shame, which are made by ego to block truth, lead to not taking responsibility for oneself, to not acknowledging mistakes and taking steps to correct them.

Maturity is hard because it means breaking down tough ego defenses. Honest spiritual practice leads to this. And the first step in honest spiritual practice is acknowledging something in you that is more than ego.

Spiritual bypass is a common way for ego to avoid facing itself. It will arrogantly assert that, having had a mystical or nonduality experience, or even having just heard about them, it doesn’t have to address its person’s problems.  Ego will say there is no such thing as a Holy Spirit. But as long as ego is in your mind there is also an experience that is called in Christianity and the Course, the Holy Spirit. In other traditions it is called other things, inner teacher, presence, Buddha, guiding angel, etc. It is the loving offset to ego that goes by many names.

The ego consciousness experience, the duality experience of being a person in a material world, is one of symbols. Ego is a symbol of denial of truth. The Holy Spirit is a symbol of truth. That is one expression of duality. In a nonduality experience, ego falls away. The inner teacher seems to, too, because the truth it represented is the new context, or new experience of existence, where there is only one truth. So, the inner teacher experience is not a contradiction of nonduality. It represents nonduality in the duality experience. Its presence in your mind mitigates the pain of the ego, or duality, experience. You can foster awareness of that presence, but that requires your willingness to follow it, because mitigating ego means breaking it down.

So, when you meet someone who has an awareness of truth but seems to be a terrible person, what you are seeing is a genuine awareness of truth that ego has not let change it. This is what the Course calls the “unhealed healer”, a teacher who does not practice what they preach. You can be sure that but for those moments when they let truth through, ego rules their mind, which is not a pleasant thing. No doubt, ego covers this over by using the awareness of truth for a false sense of its own importance. But that is not peace. 

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