Changelessness
The one year anniversary of the Day Things Changed was on March 11th, 2021. A year ago that day, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared the COVID-19 pandemic in a media briefing. This event is not really a flashbulb memory for me, the kind of memory where you remember in vivid detail exactly where you were or who you were with. Instead, the memories from that day and the days that followed have a dreamy, surreal quality to them. Life transformed over the course of a week. A few days after the WHO announcement, I closed my psychotherapy practice to in person visits, and the next day, San Francisco and the surrounding counties issued “Shelter in Place” orders. This was the name given to “lock down” or “quarantine” in our area. Suddenly, in the San Francisco Bay Area alone, literally millions of people of all ages were at home, all day, every day, for weeks, and then months and then more months.
In those first weeks of the pandemic, I remember feeling not just physically and geographically ‘locked down,’ but also mentally and emotionally ‘locked down’ too. I remember rotating through periods of feeling fairly normal, then truly overwhelmed, then significantly slowed down, and then fairly normal again. I watched a lot of TV shows and some movies. For months watching these shows and movies, I had intense nostalgia for the “before,” when we didn’t have to wear masks or keep social distance. I remember thinking again and again, “Wow, none of these people had to worry about that.” Or watching germophobic Sheldon Cooper (played by Jim Parsons) on The Big Bang Theory freak out over someone sneezing near him or slather anti-bacterial gel all over his hands, I would think, “Hey, that’s really uncanny!” What helped me a lot during that time was starting this blog and practicing my forgiveness lessons. One early lesson was to forgive all those people I saw on my daily walks who were not wearing masks or who passed by me too closely. I learned to laugh at my reactions and gradually to forget to notice much of the time what others were or weren’t doing.
Eventually, life in long-term lock down became the new normal. I have found the sheer simplicity of life lived this way to be a silver lining of the pandemic, with almost no time spent getting to and from places and more time to just be. I have grown in appreciation for my life, the home I live in, the surrounding area, and the two golden boys (one human, one canine) who have been a major part of each and every day over this past year. But, of course, there are the direct costs of the pandemic to mention too. There has been the cost of not being able to see friends and family near and far and periods of not being able to even enjoy the outdoors, with parks and beaches closed to keep new infections down. There have also been many times when I have felt truly horrified, by the sheer loss of life, the loss of freedom, and by the absolutely global reach of the pandemic. At one level, I believe that the body only seems to die, because, in fact, everything that we perceive as happening is an illusion; on another level, or at least, at other times, my experience seems very real and I find the losses taking place all around the state, country, and world to be unspeakably tragic.
Things are on the cusp of change again with the roll out of COVID-19 vaccines around the world. I feel both excited and hopeful about this new chapter in our lives. I also expect that the coming changes will not be uniformly positive. Nothing is uniformly positive in the world. That’s just the way the world is set up. I can easily imagine—and even predict—some idealization and nostalgia about the way things were in 2020, both in myself and in others. With change on the horizon, the anniversary of the WHO declaration of the pandemic has led me to reflect on changelessness. My experience is that the weeks of March 2020 through March 2021 have borne a great deal of resemblance to each other. The philosopher in me (a very small and underused philosopher, I might add) knows that there are of course dozens, if not hundreds, of differences between any of these weeks. Yet there still seems validity to the impression of the sameness of these weeks compared to, say, the weeks of the year before. Given the similar mandates by so many governments to restrict the movement and activities of people and thereby limit the spread of COVID-19, I expect that a great many people have been having an experience like mine.
The sameness of the pandemic weeks does not come even close to the changelessness described in A Course in Miracles. This absolute changelessness is an attribute of Heaven, and Heaven, of course, is not something “out there” but a state of being which is accessed through the mind. One of the last chapters of A Course in Miracles describes this changelessness:
There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten; where no memory of sin and of illusion lingers still. There is a place in you which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard. There is a resting place so still no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to gladden God the Father and the Son… And where They are is Heaven and is peace. (T-29.V.1)
If we were to completely forget the world, sin (i.e., the belief in anything other than absolute oneness), and illusion, and if we were to be out of the stream of time, we would experience peace that is effectively indescribable. It would not be an experience of nothingness, because there would be gladness and a hymn to Heaven, neither of them in small measure, to say the least. It would also not be an experience of being alone, because we would be joined with God and with everyone (i.e., “the Son” in A Course in Miracles refers every living or conscious thing that ever has been and ever will be, material or immaterial, spread across the universe).
The idea of being at peace, deeply joyful, and united with God and all living things has a lot of appeal. Even so, I can experience a good deal of discomfort if I ponder changelessness for too long. Who or what would I be without change? Although life for me through much of the time between March 2020 and March 2021 was not at all bad, if I think too long about the relative sameness of so many of these weeks, I can begin to feel claustrophobic. Sometimes I just long for change. It’s not a peaceful experience. The lack of profound peace in pondering changelessness, whether it’s the experience of relative sameness of weeks compared to one another or the absolute changelessness of Heaven, is the dead give-away that the ego is “talking.” Feeling boredom, doubt, claustrophobia, or any other discomfort, means I am mistaken or deluded. That is not the experience of the changelessness of Heaven, which is completely positive and desirable. There is no value in forcing a stable state of wanting changelessness. There is, however, enormous value in simply observing this mixture of thoughts and feelings without judgment.
Through the enthusiasm of Sheldon and his friends on The Big Bang Theory, I got interested in another show this past year, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember when Buffy was airing in the late 90s and the excited gleam in the eyes of friends in graduate school who talked about the show. I was watching X Files at the time and I didn’t understand the thrall of the pretty blond teenage vampire slayer and her friends. Now with my high school and college days a dusty memory, I have become enthralled with the Buffyverse myself. One uncanny moment in the show is in Season 6. Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) has been brought back to life and she describes her experience of life after death to an unlikely friend, Spike (a vampire and former mortal enemy, played by James Marsters):
“I was happy. Wherever I was, I was happy, at peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was alright. I knew it. Time didn’t mean anything. Nothing had form but I was still me, you know? And I was warm and I was loved and I was finished. Complete. I don’t understand theology, or dimensions, or any of it really, but I think I was in heaven.”
How beautifully put. It sounds great! Here are some similar words from A Course in Miracles (taken from the explanation of Workbook Lesson 107, “Truth will correct all errors in my mind”):
Try to remember when there was a time—perhaps a minute, maybe even less—when nothing came to interrupt your peace; when you were certain you were loved and safe. Then try to picture what it would be like to have that moment be extended to the end of time and to eternity. Then let the sense of quiet that you felt be multiplied a hundred times, and then be multiplied another hundred more. And now you have a hint, not more than just the faintest intimation of the state your mind will rest in when the truth has come. (From paragraphs 2 and 3)
We can pause for however long feels right and imagine this experience, whether it is Buffy’s experience of “still being me” or a more undifferentiated state. Imagine feeling peaceful, safe, complete, and, of course, happy.
The Big Bang Theory is a television show created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady that aired September 2007 through May 2019 on CBS. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, made a cameo appearance on the last episode of the last season.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a television show created by Joss Whedon that originally aired March 1997 through May 2003, first on The WB and then on UPN.
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.