ACIM - Olga Sáenz

Creative Retreats… what will I intent to teach? (And therefore learn)

Creativity Retreats Retiros de Creatividad

This morning, I was reflecting on what I am truly teaching these people and the universe about creativity. I think that creativity is made from attention to the present moment and not judging anything you do; not judging allows for Real Communication to happen. It allows for Silence to teach Its message.

There are no words, patterns, colors, or shapes involved, as they mean nothing—just images. Yet Communication is everything. Honest creativity coming from real silence will guide you, inspire you, and make you smile. It is an eternal space of freedom.

Creativity is the ultimate freedom, a place where you can endlessly play and have fun. And that is about it.

Olga has nothing to add.

Allow yourself to elevate to a state devoid of personal purpose or direction, avoiding interference from the past and the mind chatter; hear the music, listen to the book, the rain, or the cars going by. Allow the endless process of surrendering to whatever emerges. Just focus your mind somewhere else. And let it happen.

Follow a trail, listen to the music, a guitar tune, a singing voice, and get into complex compositions to take your mind over. Allow painting to flow deeply into the paper; surrender to the colors, play with them. Take all solemnity out of it. You are not the painter; you are just a tool to be used by Life to teach endlessly about Beauty and Freedom. Let it Be. It is Love.

Then, should I say that I am here to teach people to go back to being children? It is incredibly presumptuous, isn’t it?

No, that is not it.

They are not going back; they are beginning a way to see Life for the first time at every glimpse. Be in the present moment not to miss the breathtaking show of here and now. The sounding guitar, the texture of rusted metal, the miracle of color wherever it is found. Here and Now. And let the body act as it does. Surrender. No judgment, no interpretation: Let it Be.

Open up to a different view coming out of your hands and perceptions. You are in your mind, and when you surrender, Life shows itself in an astounding celebration of joy.

Everything loves you.

Who am I to talk about A Course in Miracles?

Talking about A Course in Miracles always causes me some discomfort. I deeply resist the idea of convincing anyone that what I believe is the truth. However, in my life, writing and A Course in Miracles are two constants and I feel the need to unite the two in this ancient instrument we call “blog”.

Talk about A Course in Miracles — “The Therapist” 60×60 (Personal Collection)

Introduction to this blog: Talking a Course in Miracles.

Hello,

This is not a blog meant to be read. It’s meant to be written… In my universe, obviously. In that universe too, almost nobody “reads” anymore. However, if you’re reading this, it’s for a reason, right? Maybe.

Here it is. I welcome you and my infinite gratitude for opening you to see one more interpretation of A Course in Miracles. In its new edition.

Who am I to talk about A Course in Miracles?

No one really. Or so I think. what do I know!

My name is Olga Sáenz. I like to be called O.

O. is a reminder in a way. It reminds me that in my innermost reality I am a zero that can go anywhere on the dot; it reminds me that I am here to be useful and not to serve a thought that says I am an individual and separate being. And that furthermore, I am the center of all that I perceive.

I am a circle that always goes back to the same places, a spiral that does not know if it is going in or out. An infinite movement that believes that it is the landscape that moves. As a character, I can tell you a lot of stories about this identity. Useful stories that serve me to remember. Stories that can be tools or weapons for genocides. In a good way I don’t exist, not even as a dust particle thrown in a black hole. In a hundred years I won’t even be a memory.

My job is to light the beacon, to open the door, to belly flop and be the bridge. That’s what I think I really am. A zero, which can be useful, but which, by itself, has no value whatsoever.

The story I can tell you about the character does not exist except in fantasies that I call memories. I am a student in first grade, kindergarten, maybe nursery school. I know nothing. I never know anything. I don’t even know what I really KNOW, because I don’t remember it.

And from that awareness of absolute emptiness, I intend to comment on A Course in Miracles. And I start at once. I follow neither an order nor a pattern. I open the app, the book, the audiobook and whatever comes out I comment on it. Here I blindly follow the instructions of my Inner Voice (Yes, if you are a student of the CM you will know that it is Holy Spirit).

I will base these comments on the Complete Annotated Edition of A Course in Miracles (the purple book).

I have not yet managed to find the complete translation in Spanish. I don’t know if there is any translation yet (I wish!). However on the“Circle of Atonement” site I found this partial translation:

https://circleofa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/UCDM-traduccion-parcial-version-CA-del-Circle-of-Atonement.pdf

In it I found this introduction to this new edition of the Course, which I particularly love and on which I am going to base what I am writing here.

I leave here below the foreword to this edition. And I’m about to write something about A Course in Miracles Annotated and Completed Edition.

Prologue to the partial Spanish edition

A Course in Miracles is a modern spiritual classic. Dictated to Dr. Helen Schucman by an inner voice between 1965 and 1972, A Course in Miracles has profoundly impacted the lives of millions of people around the world.

However, what many students do not know is that Helen’s original handwritten notes for the Course-which remained hidden for decades-contain approximately 45,000 words that are not included in the 1976 edition of the Course.

This Complete and Annotated Edition (C&A) of the Course is based on those notes, attempting to recover as many of the original words as possible and as much of the original wording as possible. It also contains extensive footnotes that clarify difficult passages and, in addition, contains an appendix of 33 cameo essays that reflect the guidance Helen Schucman and William Thetford received on how the Course should be applied in everyday situations.

We are very happy that the first part of this edition of the Course can now reach the Spanish-speaking world, which has a large number of students of this pioneering path. This project would not be possible without the dedication and tireless effort of our team of Spanish translation volunteers and their leaders, Carolina Alonso and Miguel Carrera. We are very grateful to all of them for their dedication and the care with which they have undertaken this project. We know it will be a valuable resource for generations of students of this spiritual masterpiece.

Blessings, Robert Perry

Why do I study A Course in Miracles? What is it about?

Why do I study A Course in Miracles? What is it about? A Course in Miracles is a book, a spiritual path, a point of view, a daily decision and a tool manual.
I have not always agreed with everything it proposes, however, over the years, the Course has given me more strength, faith and peace than anything else in this chaotic world.

Am I a monkey dreaming that I am God? Or a god, dreaming he is a monkey?

mono soñando que es dios, dios soñando que es mono

Monkey dreaming he is god, god dreaming he is a monkey? I don’t think we can ever know the answer, beyond the experience we perceive from one corner of consciousness or another.

monkey dreaming he's god, god dreaming he's a monkey — Stoned Ape – Private Collection.

I have the good fortune to live next to a tropical cloud forest in Monteverde, Costa Rica. And probably the capuchin monkeys in the area are my most constant visitors.

I love to see them, and from time to time, voluntarily or involuntarily, I have given them fruit. And then they come back and back.

I was watching them at length today. On the one hand, from the inevitable painter, and on the other, from the philosopher who seeks in her nervous and small gaze the answers to the only two important questions. “What am I, and what is God?”

Am I a monkey who dreams that I am God? Or a god, dreaming he is a monkey?

The issue here is that I pay too much homage to Sapiens, this definition in which we are half monkeys and half gods and with which we console all mysteries.

Sapiens is that right? Like a canteen in the middle of an intersection. I can choose the monkey, or I can choose the god. Perhaps that is the only prerogative of our tiny, powerful free will.

If I choose the monkey, I enter the persistent illusion of time.

If I play the god,…Oh! That is not a decision. Because “god” is, in the end, the fucking mystery of consciousness.

The only decision I make – more often than I would like to admit – is to forget about the All that I am in order to concentrate on the small expression of a monkey. The god is not perceptual. What analyzes this is the monkey, always looking for eternities where they have not been lost.

I say “god” like saying “papaya” or “feather” or “number two”. It is a term to define the mystery that I do not understand, but that is there, inevitable. I am aware. There is no way around this tough question. I exist and perceive.

The point is that I perceive even the thought that says I perceive.

The thing is, I don’t know if I ever think anything, or feel anything from the mystery of my consciousness.

I see this… Who? Who sees?

The body… The body sees. No, the body transmits the image. I perceive it… What the fuck is “I”?

Like a drunk-drinking unconsciousness, I perceive myself asking questions, searching for truths. (I only describe here how the consciousness moves). A la Amelie, I can’t help but imagine Ipathia, Plato, Jesus, and Buddha discovering this same truth: “I have no idea what I am. No idea.”

And I have no idea what I’m communicating with. No idea. I call him god. As if saying papaya. The name does not matter. I communicate with something, always. Inevitably. I perceive and communicate.

Do I perceive that I am communicating? I don’t know either.

The monkey dreams he is God, God dreams he is a monkey — Sloth – for sale

I cannot define true communication. It connects, it is an experience. Communication is also illusory.

Beyond communication there is something. There is everything. Beyond is the mystery. The “other” that exists and I don’t know what it is.

Do I feel reverence for that “other”? I do not know. The CM tells me that feeling it is obvious. But how can I revere what I don’t know what it is?

Yesterday I read something that touched me: The skeptic reads all the books and still doubts everything. The religious person reads only one book and does not question anything.

It makes me laugh, because I can put myself in both perspectives, and both are right.

If I think of the Course (that “only” book that came to answer almost all my real questions), the experience of the Course – which is not in itself a pyrotechnic moment – is a permanent solution, a true “washing of sins”, incomprehensible and ineffable.

The permanent result of the forgiveness that defines A Course in Miracles makes it somehow impossible to doubt it. The ineffable experience that you are at Peace with something with which at some point you had a dramatic and violent war? That one? I can neither deny it nor doubt it. I live it, permanently.

First of all, whether “The Other” exists or not, whether we are a biochemical phenomenon separated from everything (even writing it sounds SO primitive to me), whether we are, at last, a monkey dreaming that he is god, the experience of living is present. Incomprehensibly.

And it doesn’t matter in the slightest, who dreams up this pod because Pink Floyd, in their Pulse concert in 1994, is absolutely awesome. 🙂

Thank you for reading me.

Silence, the ultimate frontier.

Speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking ~Pierre Macherey.

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I am not a religious person. My mother would take me to the movies instead of mass. And I was very happy about it.

However, since an early age, I have been struggling with the same common thing that has had entire civilizations on their knees: The human silence within. A realm that lives there, innocent, impartial, unexplained. So subtle and transcending humans have created huge systems to explain it, humongous external buildings and art that promise us to take us there, into the Supreme Silence. Sometimes successfully, sometimes they merely take us to \”Our Version of…\” as drugs do sometimes. And even sex.

We don\’t even know we crave silence. Silence these days have a strong relation with boredom, and even worse, a cemetery, death.

However, the Supreme Silence, when we find it, either in awe, in love, or in meditation, far from being a grave, gives us an unexplainable sensation of deep understanding, of unfathomable company. Hard to define the undefinable.

And this fantastic quote that I found yesterday in the most unexpected place, gave me a hint about my resistance to the “sacred wording” in ACIM and the word itself: God.

Speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking ~Pierre Macherey.

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It is all about meanings. Isn’t it?

We give “God” such a heavy meaning that it crashes us even with three miserable letters. Four in Spanish. Actually, in most languages in the World, divinity is described in a short word. Especially in the monotheistic religions. You can see the whole collection here: https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/god

It is all about the meaning. Of course.

I have given all the meaning to those three letters put together in that order.

This small word has put emperors and geniuses to their knees. All throughout space and time.

If their egos were put to the test, how can mine not be crushed under millennia of conditions and laws around it? How can we, in our temporary small identities and time-encased bodies not be threatened by the one thing we can’t avoid ever?: Silence.

Silence makes everything possible in the mind. Makes the perception of time, not to crush all under one sole moment: If music didn\’t have silence, it would be one big mess. It is in Silence where we find our Real mirror and not our projections. In Silence, we find focus, attention, relaxation, rest.

From where I stand, being a student of ACIM for decades already, it addresses a mystery that religions put outside making the infinite fit into human codes and small thoughts.

We have given that Mystery a meaning. A meaning so strong that it has created reactions of all sorts, the most common looking out, either to explain it, or to deny it.

Probably both reactions are the same: utter fear.

Utter fear to what we cannot explain, define or understand. Utter fear to what we are afraid we truly are.

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In the East, they knew it a long time ago. In the West, science for the first time made an experiment and could finally see an important character in the play of perception… “OMG! There is a perceiver!”.

The idea of the perceiver, the unknown observer is the ultimate frontier. The one that is there to set us free. The last door to the ignored but ever-present Silence within.

The one that doesn’t follow the rules. Any rules.

The unperceivable perceiver.

That which perceives the perceiver but is itself unperceivable

The one we are behind all our names, labels, and masks, without time, age, or gender.

Serious meditation knows it. Anyone who enjoys solitude knows it.

There is something about it. There is a beautiful sensation in the Presence. A belonging sensation that doesn’t react to the “outdoors”. Not even a perception, it is so subtle I could only call it an experience of it.

If we get the word \”god\” out of perception and look at the Silence within. If we get the letters “G. O. and D.” out of all meaning and shape.

Blow the meanings, all the meanings. And just stay there. In the Content we are. Shapeless, ageless, timeless, spaceless.

We are not identities, we are not “beings”. We are the shapeless experience of life itself.

We are Silence.

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Thank you for reading.