“You simply want to rest and have whatever transformation is to come to you to come. If you could indeed give in to this desire fully, it would speed the transformation along quite nicely. So please, listen to your weariness and to your heart’s desire to rest. Listen to the call to peace and let yourself recline in the embrace of love, feeling the warm earth beneath you and the heat of the sun above you. (A Course of Love: Dialogues, pp. 120-121)”
Affirmation: “May I listen to the call for peace and recline in the embrace of love.”
Reflections:
Unity is defined on Day Five as being fully who you are and expressing fully who you are. It is not a matter either of effort or of learning. Jesus says repeatedly that the time of learning is over. The time of learning was in trying to satisfy the ego that one had accomplished. Unity is something quite different, as defined by Jesus in A Course of Love.
Likewise, as in the passage quoted above, the time of effort is over. We are to rest and to relax as our point of access to unity becomes clear to us. Jesus notes that there are various ways that access can be experienced: via part or all of the head, the heart, the hands, or even arising from the earth and felt throughout the body. A point of access will no longer be needed once we have sustained the elevated Self of form, rather than just tried to maintain it.
This summary will likely not be fully satisfying to you, because Jesus’s words are dense with meaning. Know that we are only on Day Five, and 35 more days of explanation will follow. In the meantime, rest assured that unity–being who we are and expressing fully who we are–is Jesus’s intention in the 40 days and nights on the mountain top.
Prayer:
Dear Father/Mother,
I long to peace today, for rest in You. I have sought salvation through my learning so earnestly, and I would now rest in Your promise that the time of effort is over. I do wish to express fully who I am, being reassured that I am sanctified.
Thank You for Jesus’s reassuring words in this Day Five of the mountain top experience. He ever has looked to You for his knowledge, and may I rest in surety that what I read today is knowledge and not simply perception.
Amen.
ACIM Workbook Lesson for Day 98:
I will accept my part in God’s plan for salvation.
Mari Perron
/ April 8, 2010Today, a friend sent me the same quote that you reflect on here. I don’t know if she did so because she’d just read your blog, or if it came up spontaneously from the email I’d sent her.
I was telling her about how I feel as if I’m getting a cold but am hoping it is the change in the weather. And I was telling her I’ve been planning a getaway for this weekend but that I’m feeling so tired I’d rather stay home…if I could rest.
So it was a natural that this quote might come to her in response to what I’d written. Then another friend, recently retired, wrote about how busy he’s been since retirement and how when there are many matters that fill him up it’s hard to rest.
This idea of rest come to weariness is prevalent in the message of A Course of Love. As I’ve embraced solitude over the years it was clear to me that I didn’t want any temporary escape. I wanted to find that rest right within my life — not feel as if I needed to go somewhere to get it.
Now, here I am, thinking I need to “go.” It just makes me aware that there are times when it is difficult to find the quiet orientation of rest within daily life — harder sometimes to “turn off” the commotion and the matters that always seem to need our attention. But doing that (in whatever way we can) really is the foundation of unity. I yearn to “get away” when I feel as if I’m too full — have one of those “I can’t think straight” feelings. Yet it’s really not that I need to think at all…only that I need to get back to myself, my center.
This is a lovely reminder of that, and I guess I’d just say that when you’re feeling the weariness, this Course makes you more aware of your need to take care of yourself, to find yourself again, because that weariness almost always arises from some form of “being away from” your self.
celiaelaine
/ April 9, 2010Dear Mari,
We long for rest and peace, and especially in the upcoming day, Day Six, Jesus promises this to us. Your comment also calls to mind the well-known and often-quoted passage from the first volume of “A Course of Love,” which Jesus invites us into his embrace (a very, very beautiful passage). I think that our society and our work requires much busyness of us. In retirement I have found more of the rest that I wanted and did not have for a career of many years. But, even in this, I have to say “no” to the many people in my various organizations and groups that would have me to sign on for things that would make be more busy than I wish to be.
I like from “A Course in Miracles” the fact that Jesus says that we are meant to be “perfectly calm and quiet all the time.” He continues, that this is what time is for–to reach this conclusion. I did have a work friend, who had not read “A Course in Miracles,” question this. She was not ready to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time, because she liked the excitement of many extroverted activities. I did not try to dissuade her, as I am more the introvert, and she, the extrovert.
The Bible says that the meek will inherit the earth. I wonder if one part of meekness is this quietness that we are reaching for. I feel blessed to have found both “A Course in Miracles” and “A Course of Love.” I feel that those of us who are reading these volumes are on the forefront of what this world will head toward next.
Thank you for your part, your scribing, that will help to lead us there.
Most fondly, Celia
Joe
/ April 9, 2010“Listen to the call to peace and let yourself recline in the embrace of love, feeling the warm earth beneath you and the heat of the sun above you.”
I am struck here by the juxtapositon of a spirtual state (peace) with the experience of the body (feeling the warm earth and the heat of the sun).
ACOL for me (especially in The Dialogues) connects me with the “both, and” as opposed to “either, or” nature of our experience here. It is not that this is either a spiritual experience or a physical experience. It is both/and.
celiaelaine
/ April 9, 2010Dear Joe,
You make what is to me a new point–a spiritual experience as well as a physical. Is this what the elevated Self of form constitutes? What do you think? I believe that you have been through the 40 days and nights many times, and you are qualified to give a good opinion.
Many thanks for letting us hear from you.
May I post your comments on the the “Miracle Cafe”? I am posting each day’s writing, as well as Mari’s comments (with her permission). I would like to include your comments as well. There are up to 2,000 page hits within that web site a day.
Most cordially, Celia
Joe
/ April 9, 2010Thank you Celia,
Yes, feel free to post my comments on the “Miracle Cafe.” I am not familiar with that site, though. Do you have a link?
I find it difficult sometimes to translate my “wholehearted” experiences with ACOL and The Dialogues into what I still experience as the very “heady” or “intellectual” real of the written word. But hopefully as we go on, I will find a way.
Thanks for this forum in which to practice!
celiaelaine
/ April 10, 2010Dear Joe,
I hope that others too will read this post and visit this link to the “Miracle Cafe”:
http://www.themiraclecafe.com/
Have a good day.
Most cordially, Celia