Living Happily Ever After
This post is about healing our relationships with others, which can lead to both personal and interpersonal peace, as well as to love and joy. If you are new to this blog, some helpful background can be found in my first post, “All Minds are Joined,” as well as in two posts from about a year ago, “Living in an Illusory World,” and “On Needing a Lover who Won’t Drive you Crazy.”
When Matthias and I got married, one of his sisters arranged for each table at our wedding reception to have some blank album pages, colored pens, and other craft supplies. The guests were asked to have another guest take a photo of them at their table which would later be attached to the album page. They could then write a message, draw a picture, or otherwise decorate the page. Flipping through the album today, over 12 years later, I see all their happy faces and read their lovely words. One of our nieces, who was 8 years old at the time, wrote underneath the photo of her and her family, “To Cristina and Matthias, I hope your love goes on forever.” The page is decorated with cut-out hearts. We all understand this hope. Weddings and ceremonies of commitment represent it. Wishing enduring love for others on these occasions makes us joyful, even tearfully so.
There is a reason so many fairy tales of romance end with, ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ A great many of us long for sustained happiness through loving another person and being loved back. Long-time married or partnered people know that this simply-stated idea is a hard-won achievement. While not everyone wishes to have a life partnership with another person, the fact is that emotionally close relationships of any kind take work, whether they are with parents, siblings, children, extended family, or friends. All relationships, no matter their degree of closeness, have the potential for conflict or for peace in them, even relationships with acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, and bosses, not to mention people we have never met, like politicians, celebrities, and media influencers. Even so, it is often our closest relationships that require the hardest work any of us will ever do. While the people we are closest to may make us feel the most loved, they also have the greatest power to hurt us.
A major goal of A Course in Miracles is healing, especially our relationships with others. In the Course, “healing” simply means, “becoming aware of being whole.” We believe ourselves to be separate individuals in a world of other individuals, and yet in reality we are “a Oneness joined as One” (T-25.I.7:1). Although we are unaware of this state, at least most of the time, our reality is an experience of changeless love, peace, and joy. Each of our relationships in the world can be a microcosm for experiencing a glimmer of this Oneness, and thereby a glimmer of limitless love, peace, and joy. It is therefore through healing our belief in separateness that we can ‘live happily ever after,’ starting with whichever relationship we pick. Unlike any number of other approaches to better relationships that we could turn to, A Course in Miracles has no interest in teaching us how to get our needs met or how to be more assertive or how to set limits. While those types of skills might improve our experience of our various relationships, they will not heal them. To achieve that, we need a very different approach.
According to A Course in Miracles, the key to healing, and thereby ‘living happily ever after,’ is changing our mind-set about how relationships are supposed to work. Chapter 6 of the Course, called, “The Lessons of Love,” begins with the basic logic of anger that we take as self-evident:
³Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it. (T-6.in.1:3)
Even two-year-old children understand this. Snatch a toy away from a young child, and she or he will show you just how justified anger is. But if we want to ‘live happily ever after,’ we have to move beyond this familiar logic. A Course in Miracles does not mince words about the wrong-headedness of anger and attack, characterizing them as irrational and insane. In their stead, the Course teaches the logic of sanity and of peace:
⁶The way to undo an insane conclusion is to consider the sanity of the premises on which it rests. ⁷You cannot be attacked, attack has no justification, and you are responsible for what you believe. (T-6.in.1:6-7)
In other words, in our relationships, we are never justified in seeing ourselves as wronged by the other person, blaming them for their words or behavior, getting angry, yelling, criticizing, distancing ourselves, and otherwise being unkind, impatient, or harsh. On the contrary, whenever we feel wronged—or even under attack—by the other person, it is a cue that we are being presented with a choice. On the one hand, we can choose to be irrational and insane, perpetuating our upset and our sense of separateness from our loved one. On the other hand, we can choose to step back from the familiar ‘anger-is-justified’ mind-set and look at the person and the situation differently. Making this latter choice will allow us to experience real love and connection with our loved one.
The Teacher in our minds stands ready to help us to look beyond our belief in separateness to the Oneness that is our reality. To do this, we need to learn to look beyond the body, or more particularly, we need to reinterpret the body so that it no longer obscures the Oneness that we share with our loved one—and with everyone.
Remember that the Holy Spirit interprets the body only as a means of communication. ²Being the Communication Link between God and His separated Sons, the Holy Spirit interprets everything you have made in the light of what He is. ³The ego separates through the body. ⁴The Holy Spirit reaches through it to others. ⁵You do not perceive your brothers as the Holy Spirit does, because you do not regard bodies solely as a means of joining minds and uniting them with yours and mine. ⁶This interpretation of the body will change your mind entirely about its value. ⁷Of itself it has none. (T-8.VII.2:1-7)
Rather than strengthening the belief that we are separate from others, housed in different bodies, the Teacher of Peace in our minds helps us to bridge this seeming divide. We learn with our Teacher’s help that the body can be used as a means of communication, from one mind to another. The idea that “[m]inds are joined” (T-18.VI.3) was the subject of the first post in this blog. How we see others is how we see ourselves. When we attack our loved one in supposedly justified anger, we are only attacking ourselves because we are one in reality. By token measure, as we practice overlooking what the other person has said or done that seems unloving or hurtful, we heal the relationship and strengthen the understanding that we are joined as one in love and in peace. This is the power of the mind.
‘Living happily ever after’ is not a fairy tale, but to experience enduring happiness and peace in our relationships requires that we be willing to change our minds about the familiar logic of anger and that we practice seeing ourselves and others as the same. A Course in Miracles explains that by doing this, “the power of salvation” is given to all of us, and we collectively “escape from darkness into light”:
You and your brother are the same, as God Himself is One and not divided in His Will. ²And you must have one purpose, since He gave the same to both of you. ³His Will is brought together as you join in will, that you be made complete by offering completion to your brother. ⁴See not in him the sinfulness he sees, but give him honor that you may esteem yourself and him. ⁵To you and your brother is given the power of salvation, that escape from darkness into light be yours to share; that you may see as one what never has been separate, nor apart from all God’s Love as given equally. (T-25.II.11:1-5)
We can heal any relationship in our lives, even if we hardly know the person or have never actually met them. None of that matters to becoming aware of our Oneness because we are each completely responsible for what we think and feel. The same is true for someone we know or have known well who has been cruel to us. Even if that person is completely unremorseful, even if he or she justifies or justified his or her behavior towards us, we can heal the relationship. Healing happens in our own hearts and minds with the help of our Guide. We do not have to wait for the other person to “come around.” Of course, when we do have a loved one who is willing to join us in seeing one another as truly innocent, it can be especially wonderful. No matter the circumstances and particulars, when we heal a relationship, right here in this imperfect world that we believe we reside in, something truly miraculous happens:
Each miracle of joining is a mighty herald of eternity…Each herald of eternity sings of the end of sin and fear. Each speaks in time of what is far beyond it. Two voices raised together call to the hearts of everyone, to let them beat as one. And in that single heartbeat is the unity of love proclaimed and given welcome. (T-20.V.1-2)
A Course in Miracles is published by The Foundation for Inner Peace. All the books comprising the Course, along with the supplemental pamphlets, are now found online:
https://acim.org/acim/en
All quotations of A Course in Miracles in this blog post are drawn from this version of the Course.