Be Willing to Have It So

“You have a saying in your world, ‘It is what it is.’ That is the beginning of wisdom. You will discover that what is, is what you have chosen to make of it. Be, therefore, where you are now, and deliberately decide—deliberately decide—to accept wholly that what you are experiencing in this very moment has no cause whatsoever, except your choice to experience it. Rest assured, whatever the mind may try to say, if you did not wholly want to be right where you are, you would not be there. If you are in a body in the field of space and time, rest assured, you desired it, you chose it, and it is here.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 18)

We become what we have desired, and right now everyone reading this has a body in a physical world. This is the “create your own reality” maxim of the New Age thought. Now, we might not like what we have desired, but that is another question entirely. Our souls wanted this experience for us, not necessarily the personality or persona, the “I” of daily experience.

If we are suffering, we can open our minds and hearts to something better, but the caveat is that first we have to move into acceptance of what “is.” This just may be enough to move us through and beyond bad feelings, even bad experiences. It helps to look for the nugget of gold in the midst of the pain. This pain, after all, is part of our learning experience in the classroom that is this world, and this pain holds a blessing for us. Nobody, we must believe, escapes all pain in this world. Nobody.

The most well-adapted people on earth are the ones that let things be as they are. Another way to say this is “be willing to have it so.” This is abject acceptance, and the adoption of this attitude will take us far.

It is the first step on our way home.

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In Peace with the Divine

“Imagine then, being able to experience whatever arises without losing the sense of spaciousness, innocence and ease that you now experience in fleeting moments. For instance, know you the experience when things are going well, you are singing a happy tune, and life seems to be moving ahead? Imagine that same quality of trust, faith, and certainty of purpose, even when the buildings are crumbling around you and the bank account has gone dry. Imagine being able to look at those events with the same sense of innocence and wonder with which you would look into the eyes of your beloved.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 17)

Surely this time of no time, when we are just flowing along, has been glimpsed by all of us in moments of enlightenment. The problem is that these moments, for most of us, do not last. Yet they promise a future that will be unlike the past, they promise one long stretch of time spent awakened. The glimpses that we have all seen just prepare us for a taste of the time divine.

We need to empty ourselves of our preoccupations to invite a glimpse of something better. This creates the spaciousness that Jesus refers to; this creates the joy and the happy tune that we would sing always. When we open ourselves, in emptiness, we are inviting the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Mind, to fill us up to overflowing.

We will have our wish, sooner or later. When we meet the conditions set by God, He will act. He will reach down (metaphorically) for us, raising us up to a high level that we have not been able to appreciate earlier. We didn’t think we deserved this high level. But as beloved children of God, this is our birthright. This is what has been waiting for us since the “separation” took hold, the illusory separation in which all of us have found a home.

Look for our real home today. Invite Jesus to bend low to us, and lift us up. God will do the rest.

We have nothing to fear.

A Course of Love Free Online Conference

The Course online FREE conference is now available. If you registered and did not get a link in your email, please check your spam filter.

I do not know if registration is still open. But do try the link below if you are interested and have not registered. The conference runs for three days, Saturday through Monday.

Please click on this link to register:

https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference/

Love, Celia

Deep Enjoyment in This World

“You seek innocence and peace. You seek abundance prosperity and joy. But often, when you touch these things, it frightens you. Why? Because the Truth of the Kingdom requires openness, trust, expansiveness and spaciousness. It involves allowing, trusting, witnessing and letting things come and go. It involves learning to cultivate a deep enjoyment of whatever arises, seeing that all things are just modifications of consciousness itself, and then let them go when it is time to do so.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 16)

Could we enjoy all of our time on this earth, this world? That is what Jesus is asking us to do, but to reach this way of relating, we need to be open, trusting, expansive, spacious. Being “spacious,” a concept discussed at length in A Course of Love, means that we are actually empty inside, ready to receive. We aren’t bringing our own misguided thinking to the table.

When we allow what wants to come, we are living successfully. This involves the trust that A Course in Miracles says is the primary characteristic of teachers of God.
We do not need to be frightened of our very selves. We hesitate to open up sufficiently, out of fear, and this is an egoistic reaction that needs to be eliminated. Just turn aside from the fear, not resisting it, for the force field becomes more binding in resistance.

Our consciousness IS being modified. This certainty will take us smoothly over the rough spots, as our subconscious moves to the surface of the mind to be forgiven. Our forgiveness of our own past mistakes and foibles will prepare us for God’s true blessings, will prepare for the way we are really supposed to live in this world.

We need ask for nothing more.

Highest Joy, Peace, Bliss

“For although you are given complete free will to create as you choose, the soul begins to learn that what brings it the highest joy, the highest peace, and the highest bliss imaginable is that which flows from the Mind of God through the mind of the channel, the soul, and expresses itself in the field of experience. It is for this reason that the Father’s will is that you be happy. And your happiness is found in choosing to restore your perfect alignment with only the voice for God.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 14)

Do we not want the “highest joy, the highest peace, and the highest bliss”? Of course we do.

But we are not smart enough to know how to bring these blessings to ourselves. That is why the Holy Spirit’s promptings are so important. He knows how to bring these blessings to us. A short while honestly invoking His guidance will prove to our satisfaction that God’s will for us, and our own, are actually identical. The Holy Spirit is, of course, the Voice for God.

Sometimes we wonder if happiness is the best purpose in our living. We wonder if we ought to be about good works, that somehow God will like that better.
We naturally do good works (or what we hope are good works) when we are happy. A person who is caught up in conflict is not well-suited to reach out to others. All of our conflicted thinking is just tying us up in knots, and we don’t have enough love to give to others, enough sanity to try to assist them. All of our energy is caught up in our own selves.

This is why happiness is a lofty goal. We can be there for others as well as ourselves when we are in joy. But this is not the whole truth. God wants us happy because He loves us. Do we not want happiness for our own children?

He is no different, in this sense. He reaches out with the intermediary, the Holy Spirit, His own Voice, and He tells us how to proceed to the life we were meant to have while on this plane of earth, this world.

We are right where we want to be. Are we satisfied with this place? If not, ask some serious questions of the Voice for God, and see if the Answer satisfies.

It will.

Comfort in Creation

“Therefore, the pathway of awakening—The Way of the Heart—must start with the decision to embrace the Truth that is true always:
“I am a creator of all that I think and see and experience. I am free always. Nothing impinges upon me, but the thoughts I have chosen to hold within. Nothing imprisons me, but my own perception of imprisonment. Nothing limits me at any level or dimension of experience, save that which I have chosen.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 13 – 14)

This quotation elaborates on the thesis that we create our own reality (begun in this blog recently). This idea has the potential to be very, very comforting, but it also has the potential to scare us. How can we control what we think? And isn’t it thought that brings our reality to us, in the law of attraction?

We must remember that we have help, the help of the Spirit within, the Holy Spirit as a mediator between ourselves and God, or the Christ-Self, Who is merged with God deep within each of us. We are beset by both subconscious and conscious wishes, and that is why what we want does not always materialize into a belief that will draw the blessing to us. Our soul knows the whole pathway. We don’t. And we trip ourselves up with part-knowledge.

“I am the creator of all that I think and see and experience.” There is satisfaction in those words if we listen aright. We are not at the mercy of any outside force, nor of any person outside ourselves. We are in the driver’s seat. And we can create joyous moments through a contemplation of the Love that God pours out upon all of us.

We aren’t victims of anything or anybody. This alone ought to give us solace. If we are hurting, our souls know why—though we may not know why on this side of the veil of death. Yet knowing that there is an Answer we will know ultimately must give us a particular comfort.

BE STILL IN SPIRIT

by Celia Hales

Note: This column has been recently published in the November – December 2018 issue of Miracles magazine (Jon Mundy, publisher; Eileen Katzmann, editor).

“If you speak from your spirit, you have chosen to ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.I.3:3)

“When action is seen to be necessary, this is exactly when a time of stillness is needed.” (ACOL, C:25.23:1)

We want to speak from our spirit, and when we do, we will not be cast downward in depression, “dispiriting” ourselves. Yet in this time before the ego is relinquished, we oscillate between spirit and ego. As we spend more time with our spirit, we will be welcoming Awakening. Our goal. The place we want to be. And when we speak from our spirit, we will be blessing ourselves and our brothers and sisters as well.

Jesus says that the quotation that begins, “Be still,” are inspired words, coming from knowledge. This is definitely opposed to what we have become accustomed to coming from, which is speaking from the ego. When we speak from the ego, in this dispiriting, and depression happens, we are seeing the reason that the world can seem at times to be such a very demoralizing place.

We will also find that, like Jesus, we want knowledge, as opposed to perception. In knowledge, we have a certainty about what we discover, whereas perception is so variable. When we know a thing, we relax in that knowledge. It is the easiest way to live, for we are listening to the Holy Spirit. We usually have to get quiet to hear His promptings, and getting quiet is something that we often fail to do in our busy lives. We may devote a while to devotionals, but then we head off into our work lives, and there busyness characterizes the day. In welcoming the promptings of the Holy Spirit, we listen to our intuition, what I have found to be the primary tool of the Holy Spirit in His attempts to reach us.

We have our own spirit, one that indwells, from a personal standpoint, with the all-embracing Holy Spirit. As we progress on to A Course of Love, this spirit is known as the Christ-Self. One with God, Who also dwells within, our minds are teased out of all thought as we seek to understand what can be glimpsed only intuitively.
Ask today that intuitive knowledge might be ours. We want to discover how to live well, and we can’t do that in hectic lives unless we take this time out that I am recommending. Our depressed spirit can be the catalyst for us to slow down. Ask today that we speak from the spirit, and in this, bless all others.

“And in all situations, no matter what another is doing, your first response will be to enter into the quiet stillness within and merely ask the Holy Spirit: What would you have me say?” (WOM, Bk. 1, Lesson 3)

In the relaxed, peaceful frame of mind and heart in which we find ourselves, we will know that we will say what guidance prompts. And at this point Awakening, for us, is but a moment away.

Ask to see a glimpse of Awakening today. Ask to be safe and secure in God’s arms.

Trailers for Free Online Course of Love Conference on December 1 – 3

Here are a few trailers sent out by Glenn Hovemann, publisher of A Course of Love, in preparation for the free online conference, to be held December 1 – 3, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the receiving of A Course of Love with Mari Perron:

Heart Opening Like a Flower – https://youtu.be/xQtKqNjoNbg

A Celebration of Two Courses – https://youtu.be/XiLkI_J1cdk

Connecting Prayer and Divine Memory – https://youtu.be/ulSshtj8Z7M

Creativity – A Marriage of Human and Divine – https://youtu.be/zT2KOXfyU6Q

Go Quantum! Discovering the Beautiful Mystery of the Universe – https://youtu.be/t30z5tn1fds

To sign up now, go to the following:

https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference/

Can’t make it on those days? Everything will be available afterwards to suit your convenience. You can arrange for that now or later at https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference/

Note: This is a much-anticipated celebration by the Course of Love community. Hope that you can join us. Love, Celia

We Choose Our Experiences

“Just as you would go to a grocery store and choose what you will have for dinner and then go home and experience your creation so too do you choose each experience. When you choose a perception, you lodge it in the mind. Then it expresses itself through the body, through the environment that you create around yourself and through the friends that you would call into your awareness. Every aspect of the life you live is the symbol of what you have chosen to experience and, therefore, to convey throughout creation.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 13)

Jesus seems here, almost certainly, to be saying that we create our own reality. This is a maxim of the New Age movement, made popular by Jane Roberts’ Seth, about the time that A Course in Miracles was being scribed. We surround ourselves with what we want, though if we are in need, it isn’t our personalities or personas that has made the lack, but our souls. Our soul knows the full chart of our life plan. Our soul then conveys to the learning being, also called the Self, or the Christ-Self (from A Course of Love) what we need to know. We will never, on earth, find a reason for lack/suffering/pain that will satisfy us, we can rest easy that there is an Answer, but that we are simply not enlightened enough to comprehend this eternal question.

We create the environment around us. We project from within, and from this a perception of the world arises. Elsewhere The Way of Mastery (the Christ-Mind Trilogy) and A Course in Miracles say that this world is an illusion of a real world. Some readers of A Course of Love demur from this interpretation, seeing in the true reality beyond Awakening or Christ-consciousness, a hope that something more is going on, that the rocks, trees, oceans, are becoming real in a new way.

We do not have to bear this cross. We do not have to join in this controversy. I don’t think that this particular problem, a matter of metaphysics, matters to Jesus at all. I think it simply doesn’t matter to him that we have differing views. Certainly physical reality is real enough to us here in our time on earth. We can debate metaphysical ideas on the Other Side, where we will presumably know more than it is given us to know in this plane.

It is enough that we create our own reality. This will be hard enough for us to handle. Remember that one is meant to have compassion on suffering, not increase it by blame of the one suffering. While there are no true victims, we are simply not astute enough to avoid blaming the victim, unless we hold them in the same love-filled vision that Jesus would.

Use our imagination to create a better reality for us. Use our imagination to realize that Jesus is right by our side, holding our hand, as we walk through this world. His help will give us a warmth and peace that we have heretofore lacked.

Beloved of God

“Understand well, The Way of the Heart requires that you allow yourself to rest in the simplicity of this truth:
“I am pure Spirit, undefiled and unaffected by anything or anyone. I am given full power to choose and therefore, to create my experience as I would have it be.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 10 – 11)

We are, of course, both human and divine—but the Spirit rules, and that is what Jesus means in this quotation. Our essence is Spirit, energy, and the energy has only coalesced into a slower form that we call “matter.” It is still pure Energy, without form and spread out upon the cosmos in a way that we cannot discern. Our Spirit is like a hologram, where each Part is cognizant of the Whole, Who is God. We just don’t know it when we are encased in bodies. Intuition is our only link with the Divine.

Yet we retain power, and part of that power is the wherewithal to create what we will in our everyday life. Of course, there is a delay in what we create, for matter is slowed down energy, and since we are caught in time and space, it takes time and space to create something out of whole cloth.

We CAN create our own experience, though we are bade not to “blame the victim” if it seems that someone has created a bad situation. The personality did not do that creating; it was on the soul level, and the soul knows the essence of suffering in a way that we do not. We can never, in this world, understand the “way” of suffering. We can, though, turn our pain (inescapable for everyone) into something that blesses us.

Rest in the knowledge that by our thoughts and feelings, our focus, we create what is ahead for us in time.

This truth gives us great power. Let us use that power today.

SAVE THE DATES: Free Online Conference on A Course of Love, entitled, “Open Your Mind to the Wisdom of the Heart” – December 1 – 3

“So what we are attempting to do is to open the mind to the wisdom of the heart with these dialogues.
“As the mind opens and accepts the new, the art of thought will become your new means of thinking.
“What has been learned will become an ability to think wholeheartedly.” A Course of Love D: 8.9

The conference will include a series of PRE-RECORDED video, and LIVE interactive sessions using Zoom. To sign up now:

—> https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference/

Here are the links to discover more:

– Saturday, December 1 – https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference-day-1/

– Sunday, December 2 – https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference-day-2/

– Monday, December 3 – https://acourseoflove.org/online-conference-day-3/

Forty presentations in all!

For later viewing, you may purchase the entire conference at a modest fee.

Everything Is Conspiring to Take Us Home to God

“Each gesture, each thought, the way that the body breathes, all of these things are going on constantly, and they are communicating or revealing the effect of what you have allowed to make a home in your mind.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 12)

Everything is conspiring to take us home in God. Our every gesture is either a conscious or subconscious, unrecognized, desire to heal the separation that is not real, but in which we have believed. This separation from God has taken us on a long journey that is ending.

If we allow our mind to open to Love, we will gesture differently, think differently, breathe differently. We will be in a flow that takes us through the day with an ease that we have not imagined possible.

If our thoughts and actions are anger-oriented, then we know what we have given a place in our mind. And A Course in Miracles says that anger is never warranted, not that we will never feel it, but that it is not necessary. While this doesn’t mean that push the anger down into the subconscious, or that we are passive-aggressive, it does mean that we need to go back to the beginning, before we felt anger. What prompted it? What exactly was going on?

We may find that we are stressed, or tired, lonely, or hungry. Our bodies may be betraying us, for though we imagine the body to be illusory, it does seem to have effects in this world. Physiology of the body does make a difference.

But the mind and heart can rise above. Turn over unpleasant thoughts, too-fast breathing (maybe), to a Higher Power. The Holy Spirit knows how to heal us, and by bringing up these concerns in the mind, we are healing these concerns. All from the subconscious has to eventually be brought up (something Jesus says elsewhere in WOM).

Let our greater understanding of exactly what is going on with us, eventually free us to love more fully.

Comfort in the Eternal

“It will come to pass that you will know the perfect peace of empty-headedness, not-knowingness. You will know what it means to be relieved of time and to be comforted by what is eternal. Never once let yourself think that you are alone. It is nonsense for you to think that I am not with you. You have asked. I have responded. We are in communication. That is the way it is. And that is the way it will be until the end of all illusion.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 10)

I find Jesus’ reassurance about his closeness very comforting. He says in A Course in Miracles that he will come to us upon “a single unequivocal call.” Now, right now, he is extending this promise to an even greater presence, perhaps, because we have asked. The passage from ACIM seems to me to imply that we are in dire straits when we send out a single “unequivocal” call. But we don’t have to be in hot water to reach out to Jesus. He loves and welcomes us always.

When we don’t know something, in “empty-headedness, not-knowingness,” then we have opened up the “spacious self” (from A Course of Love) to receive. We are open, sure that we are in ignorance. And so there is a space to be filled with God’s knowledge. And Jesus is the conduit, here in The Christ Mind Trilogy (WOM).

Our comfort in the eternal will be profound, a feeling of depth that will offer us the solace that we sometimes seem to lack. The things of time all pass away, of course, and we sometimes make our selves afraid with the understanding that things will change, things that we love may leave us. And people may leave us. So we very much need the sense of the eternal.

And that is God and His Love.

Tend Our Gardens

“Be you therefore, a wise gardener. Cultivate a deep love and respect for yourself, for you are not here to ‘fix’ the world. You are not here to ‘fix’ your brother or sister. It is only love that heals. And until you have loved yourself wholly by having purified the mind of every erroneous thought you have ever held—until you have loved yourself—you do not, in truth, love anyone or anything. Save in those brief moments when you let your guard down and the Love of God shines forth through you so quickly you do not even know what happened! The wise gardener cultivates a state of consciousness in which the Love of God is unimpeded.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 8)

What a lovely passage! We must tend our gardens, a concept that is developed by Jesus in A Course of Love. And this tending prepares our heart to love. We are not here to solve problems for others; these brothers and sisters have their own pathway, being pointed out by the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self. When we love, we mesh with others, but we don’t try to “fix” them, as Jesus says. We just calmly do the best we can, to love, and love deeply.

Cultivate our gardens today. Let the love of God shine in everything that we do, say, and even think.

The Father Heals the Subconscious Mind

“I give you this thought, and I would ask that you consider it well. What if the very life you are living, and each and every experience that is coming to you now since the moment you decided ‘I have got to awaken her,’ was being directly sent to you of your Father because your Father knows what is necessary to unravel within your consciousness to allow you to awaken? What if the very things you are resisting are the very stepping stones to your homecoming? What if you achieved a maturity along this pathway in which you were finally willing to let things be just as they are?” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 7)

“Sent” by the Father does mean that the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self is in control of everything that is being sent to us.

We don’t know what will heal us. But we need to bring up the layers of the subconscious mind that have been lost in egoistic thought for eons. These layers are just that—layers. So the different layers will come up, over time, differently. And the layers of the subconscious are different for everyone, so the schooling by a Higher Power is very precise, unique to each of us.

It is true that we can depart from this schooling. We can go off on tangents, forgetting what we are about, and what we are about is a return to God. We function best, though, when, in the flow, we listen to guidance.

The guidance takes us home in God. Let us listen and discover.

The Heart Is God’s Way of Speaking

“The Way of the Heart is not the way of the intellect. For indeed that aspect of the mind was never designed to be your master. It was designed to be the humble, and—if you will pardon the expression—very stupid servant of the awakened heart.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 5)

Jesus doesn’t use the word “stupid” very often, and when he does, we need to take especial heed. In A Course in Miracles, he says (complete edition) that the partially innocent are apt to be stupid at times. This is because the mind is leading us down directions we don’t need to take. We need to realize that the intellect that we have so exalted while stuck in the ego has not served us well. In heart-centered living, we feel a mellowness that does serve us well. And when we listen to what our heart is saying to us, we don’t ask “stupid” questions about reality; we just know.

The intellect is the part of the mind that is so stupid, so very stupid. I realize that we might not want to hear this, because many of us have prided ourselves on the intellect. We have gotten kudos from our culture for our highly developed intellect. We have had pride in it, a pride that the ego smiled upon.

No more. Let the heart speak today.

Listen to the heart, and discover what is really valuable.

First Step in Awakening

“The first step in awakening is to allow into the mind this axiom of truth:
“Nothing that you experience is caused by anything outside of you. You experience only the effects of your own choice.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 5)

We are in the driver’s seat, in that our projection is out-pictured as perception. This is all that we see in forming our world, reaching from deep within, often seeing what we want to see. Of course, this wanting is not on the level of the personality, but the soul, the inner Christ-Mind, Who is a learning being for a long time as this Self seeks to know God.

Much of the entire Way of Mastery is geared to one mission: to awaken as many people as possible, as soon as possible. So it makes sense that Jesus would explain what he is about right at the beginning of the first book, “The Way of the Heart.” If we follow Jesus’s instructions throughout The Way of Mastery (i.e., the Christ Mind Trilogy), we will be led to unwrap our subconscious mind, bring it up to the surface, and heal. This is what we are about. And everyone is blessed with a different subconscious, and so the way back to God differs for each of us.

Our own choice can be a choice for God in all things. This will immediately bless us with a harmony in our dealings with others that we have never known before. This harmony will be experienced in our minds and hearts as peace, the peace that passeth understanding.

Choose wisely. We must. We must try to get our world back on track.

Experience the Soul

“I speak from experience that separation is an illusion. When death occurs in your plane, in that very moment you still have the power to choose to recognize that something has changed, and to shift your attention to a different faculty that the body could never possibly contain. One in which you perceive and hear and communicate with that spark of divine light—the soul—that seems to have given up the idea of trying to keep a physical form animated. This is imperative. In fact, it is the very first step of The Way of the Heart.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 4)

We here get a glimpse of what it is like to die. The body is given up, and our souls emerge in full light of day. The soul, “spark of divine light,” will emerge at death if it has not already. I believe that the soul, in The Way of Mastery (The Christ Mind Trilogy), is part of the all-embracing Self, and the same as our personal self, here, called the Christ-Mind, in of A Course of Love. Jesus uses different words over the years, but his meanings remain stable.

We are not actually separate from God (and never have been). He emerges from deep within all individuations of Himself, what we and our brothers and sisters really are. My comprehension is that this differentiation of “God-stuff” was necessary that God might experience. He differentiated His Self into parts, and we are part of those parts, His creation. Totality, or the All, is not experiential. “All” and “nothing” often, ultimately, are experienced in much the same way. But there is an “All,” and we are participating, as an individuated entity, in that All, Who is God. He lives through us. And our soul, when freed from the depths of our entity, knows this.

We shift energy when we die. That is all that happens. We can experience the soul here on earth, too.

And it is that which we would do today.

Jesus: “What You Experience You Have Directly and Deliberately Called to Yourself”

“In each and every moment, you cannot be a victim of what you see, and nothing is outside of you. What you experience you have directly and deliberately called to yourself. If you hold the thought, ‘I do not like what I have called to myself,’ that is perfectly fine. For you have called to yourself the experience of being in judgment of yourself. Merely look with the wonder of a child and see what it feels like and ask yourself, ‘Is this an energy I wish to continue in or would I choose something else?’” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 3)

Jesus echoes A Course in Miracles here when he says, “nothing is outside of you.” This is the idea that we are projecting our illusion, that the mind projects outwardly, and then we perceive. The fact that we are perceiving illusion is germane. How can we be a victim when we are making what we see?

This is a hard point to grasp, but the idea that we live in illusion is central to ACIM, and also central to The Way of Mastery (The Christ Mind Trilogy). Readers of A Course of Love have a divergence of opinion about whether or not the world is ever actually “real.” I really don’t think it matters to Jesus whether or not we think this world is an illusion; thoughts about metaphysics are controversies that may simply divide us from one another. As in the quotation for today, we are encouraged not to sit in judgment of ourselves nor anybody else.

We don’t call judgment to ourselves, and in turning aside from this judgment, we live a better life. We are tolerant. And we continue with energy that builds up ourselves and others.

“What you experience you have directly and deliberately called to yourself.” This is the law of attraction spelled out in an opening page of this first book in WOM (Christ Mind Trilogy), “The Way of the Heart.” It says nothing less but that we are doing this unto ourselves. And A Course in Miracles says the same. (Jayem was instructed by Jesus not to read ACIM before or during his channeling, and so there is no chance that he was merely echoing things that he had read.)

Look with wonder today to the world in which we find ourselves. Even though the world is projection, we can see, in what we see, a harbinger of better things to come.

Speaking with Jesus

“Beloved friends, I come to where you choose to be. And if you would choose to open that place within the heart and within the mind in which you can communicate with me directly, I will meet you there as well.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 2)

In The Way of Mastery (The Christ Mind Trilogy), Jesus, right at the beginning, encourages us to have a personal contact with him. This is how he channels to Jayem, a human being who allows his body to be used for channeling that is “live.”

We are unlikely to have Jesus ask us to step aside and speak as Jayem does. Our way is likely different from Jayem’s. But the direct relationship is still here and possible.
Perhaps we will write what Jesus prompts. Perhaps we will hear interior words (a “locution”) in our minds and hearts. It does not matter. The connection has been made, however it is made.

I myself felt Jesus’s presence for several months in my early morning writing. I started a dialogue with Jesus, with my speaking, and then his. But eventually I heard interior words one night while falling asleep. “You are trying to draw me in.” It seemed a rejoinder that I did not welcome. And beginning the next morning, the words that I had imagined from Jesus just dried up.

Jesus does not foster dependence. And that is what was happening with me. He says in A Course of Love that his ultimate goal is to set us back upon ourselves, upon the Christ-Self who will emerge from our depths. This is the link with God Himself/Herself.

In A Course in Miracles, after a few opening chapters, he set Helen and Bill (and therefore us) back on the Holy Spirit, for the past century was still the time of the Holy Spirit.

Trust Jesus in his dealings with us. He knows what he is about.

JAYEM COMMENTS ON CHANNELING

Note: Yesterday on this blog I concluded a consideration of the first four chapters of the annotated and complete edition of A Course in Miracles, the edition published by the Circle of Atonement. These first four chapters were the most changed from earlier editions of ACIM.

Today I begin a lengthy consideration of The Way of the Heart, the first part of The Way of Mastery (The Christ Mind Trilogy). Today’s posting is an introduction which features Jayem, who channeled the work.

Your comments are welcomed. – Celia

—

“My body is vibrating, pulsating. Finally, I am able to speak, or, I might say, stammer.

“ ‘Wh-What happened? There was this light, and then. . .’

“Silence. A long silence. No one has moved. Then, one by one, each rises. A few come to me and touch my leg, or my hand. But say nothing. In due time, everyone has left. I am still sitting in the chair, vibrating, pulsating in energy, with Kendra looking at me. That is when I notice the shining remains of tears on her cheeks. She speaks softly.

“ ‘He, He spoke. To each of us. One by one. Everything. Our lives. Lessons. Next steps, if we are willing. Things no one could know. His own life. I. . .I mean, no one said anything. We just listened. And it was palpable. You could cut it with a knife.’

“ ‘What?’ I manage to say.

“ ‘The, well, the presence, the, the love.’” (excerpt from The Jeshua Letters)
—
The year was 1987. The first time that Jayem channeled to a group of people, the first time, his friends.

The channeling would happen many more times, beginning in 1994, recorded, and sent to many people all around.   These recorded words are now available in print, a 417-page The Way of Mastery, a book of words from Jeshua (Jesus) that Jayem prefers to call The Christ Mind Trilogy (and is now published separately as The Way of the Heart, The Way of Transformation, and The Way of Knowing). The channeling did not stop with this, though, but in various forms is ongoing, even today. Jayem comments that he is getting “long of tooth,” aging, but Jesus still comes to tell more, to help others, to clarify for Jayem what might lead to greater understanding or to help another.

The initial encounter happened one “normal” morning, when Jayem was scurrying around his apartment, trying to get ready to go to work. A normal morning, like any other. Except that this was anything but normal. Jayem “heard,” “Sit, and meditate.” The Voice was unmistakable. He obeyed. And from this humble beginning was to come a wealth of material, over the years, that assures us that Jesus is still very much involved with our world, still very much cares what we are doing with it.

Listen to what Jayem says happened next, on that fateful July 20, 1987:

“As a pinprick of golden light materialized in the room, it grew brighter and I began to feel inundated with a high vibration of pure Love, He appeared out of it. I recoiled when I recognized Him, and He hesitated, UNTIL I softened, and opened. Then, He moved toward me, ever closer, until that vibration and Light was all, His eyes were all I could see, and then He poured through me.”

Jayem was stunned, as we can well imagine anyone would be. He reports that his internal chatter quieted down as he moved through his usual routine over the next few days. But nothing would ever be the same again. Fear surfaced from time to time, as Jayem sometimes felt he was off the “deep end,” but he simply followed instructions to take notes. This instruction to take notes is, as we know, what had happened with Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles), and would later happen with Mari Perron (A Course of Love).

There developed for Jayem, though, direct channeling, in that his body was laid aside, rendering him oblivious to what was transpiring, while he channeled live. In other words, to be precise, Jesus took Jayem out of body, and then he (Jesus) entered it to teach directly. For those who want “proof” that it is actually Jesus, Jayem says that anyone who knows him (Jayem) knows “instantly” that there is a whole different level of vibration/mastery, use of language, etc., when Jesus is operating via his body-mind.

Direct channeling is different from what happened with Helen and Mari. They heard the impression of an interior voice, and they were conscious of their writing while receiving from Jesus. And the purposes are somewhat different. A Course in Miracles was given to dislodge the ego; A Course of Love was given to establish a new identity. For work with Jayem, Jesus said that he (Jesus) was creating a “PathWay” never done on earth before, to support anyone from the first inkling to awaken all the way into Christ Mind. In other words, Jesus is trying to take us all into Christ-consciousness.

Jayem describes Jesus in the following ways: patient; soft, yet a softness suffused with great strength; humorous; playful; capable; never wasting a moment; never “speaking just to speak”; unshakeable in full knowledge of the whole journey of Christing, meeting the student in the sphere they are in, and fully in charge. Jayem says that Jesus can “call you out” with skill and love when one is on the wrong track, leading one to simply reply “thank you.”

When I asked Jayem if there had been profound alterations in his life since the channeling began, he responded vibrantly in the following way:

“Yikes! ALL of it! Not one stone remains of anything before (one many levels); not one trace of how I saw things, thought, nor used time for ‘B.J’” (before Jeshua!). And it’s ongoing, a ceaseless unfolding/birthing; there is no finality in God’s creation, nor our capacity to surrender, attune, and flow IN it. I know what it means to live with ‘no plan of my own’ AND what it is to yet again struggle against the next steps and try to impose my own, knowing it will fail! Still some parts of me think that I can joust and negotiate, as if “I” have a life that is ‘mine’!”
We can see that Jayem is very human in his reactions to what has transformed his life—and ours, if we become students of the PathWay that Jesus is developing.

Jayem is very aware of the part that skepticism plays in the way we react to his claims about channeling Jesus. He suggests that we honor, relax, and just accept being skeptical, if that is our stance. He says to notice if the skepticism leads to quick conclusions or defenses as mind tries to close the door. Is fear dictating how one responds? He continues:

“IF it is true that God is Love, and that the Holy Spirit is available, and IF Jayem or The Way of Mastery have appeared in their lives, MAYBE it’s for a reason in His Plan.”
We might stay in wonder, curious, playful, open, something that will do no harm whatsoever.

“He will be there with you. What isn’t helpful for you, He will not lead you to.”

Jayem concludes:

“It is true. He does ‘stand at the door and knock.’ Spirituality is the deeply transformational process of opening that door, again and again, meeting our hidden fears, pet belies, etc., along the way, KNOWING he knows how to take us Home to the Kingdom.”

We need, therefore, to keep an open mind. If we believe that Jesus is still present in our world, our next step in believing is that he sees the need, still, to point out our best way, our best experiences. The Way of Mastery or The Christ Mind Trilogy thus does seek to move all of us to Christ-consciousness.
And when we keep an open and loving mind and hear to Jesus’ channeled messages, that is exactly where we will head.

Sooner rather than later.

Add Joy to the Kingdom

“God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful. This is impossible without being wholly harmless, because the two beliefs must coexist. The truly helpful are invulnerable, because they are not protecting their egos, so that nothing can hurt them. Their helpfulness is their praise of God, and He will return their praise of Him, because they are like Him and can rejoice together. God goes out to them and through them, and there is great joy throughout the Kingdom. Every mind that is changed adds to this joy with its own individual willingness to share in it.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.X.10:1-6)

We could well make “helpful and harmless” an affirmation, to good effect. This is the way that we want to be.
“Helpful” means that we reach out to our fellow man and woman, our brothers and sisters, with words and deeds that will offer solace. It is often solace, for this world seems cruel, and many are those who suffer in it.

“Harmless” means that we will not attack or respond in anger, regardless of the provocation. This can be a hard affirmation to live up to, but live up to it, we must. We cannot attack and expect to take our place in heaven, which on earth is known as the Awakening (enlightenment or Christ-consciousness). When we go easy, often keep a low profile, and ask if making waves is really appropriate, then we are more likely to be harmless. While we still need to be appropriately assertive, aggressiveness can get us into trouble. We do not want to be patsies for the wrong deeds of others, but we will find a lot less to complain about when our attack mode is silenced.

We want to add to the joy of the Kingdom, and we spectacularly do when we are both helpful and harmless. Anything less, and we are less than we are meant to be.

Ask the Holy Spirit how we might best fulfill these attitudes. He will have lots of ideas.

Reach Out & Touch God

“The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept such thanks and no perceptions with which to judge your offerings. But unless you take part in the creation, His joy is not complete because yours is incomplete. And this He does know. He knows it in His Own being and its experience of His Sons’ experience. The constant going out of His love is blocked when His channels are closed, and He is lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.X.8:1-7)

This quotation is a favorite of mine, for it acknowledges that the God we know may have very human emotions, though spiritualized and non-egoic. After all, it is even said in Genesis that God created us in His image. So why would the One Who created us not share some traits with us?

This may sound blasphemous, but it doesn’t to me. I like to think, even, of God as a new husband, keen on pleasing his new wife, eager to do things for her that make her happy. In this analogy (imperfect though it may be) God enjoys hearing our appreciation, wants our gratefulness, not because it is necessary for His joy, but because He knows that it is necessary for ours. If we aren’t grateful, we take this glorious life for granted, and we drop into the doldrums at the first instance of suffering/pain that comes our way.

Keep our minds and hearts elevated. That is the great secret of living life with a joyous spirit. If possible, make a list of those things that give happy moments, and so more of them. This is frequent advice in the self-help literature to increase one’s experience of happiness.

But elevating the mind and heart works. Even if circumstances surrounding us do not seem to warrant a positive outlook. Everything improves with positive emotions. Positive emotions are half the battle in any and all challenging situations.

We Are of One Mind with God

“Creation and communication are synonymous. God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and will. Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His creations naturally communicate with Him and communicate like Him. This communication is perfectly abstract, in that its quality is universal in application and not subject to any judgment, any exception, or any alteration. God created you by this and for this. The mind can distort its functions, but it cannot endow itself with those it was not given. That is why the mind cannot totally lose the ability to communicate, even though it may refuse to utilize it on behalf of being.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-X.5:1- 8)

We are created of “God-stuff.” This is the basic message of this passage. We are beings in communication with each other and with God. We never lose this ability to communicate, however deep into egoic darkness we have traveled.

We are meant to communicate. We were never meant to attempt independence from our brothers and sisters, nor independence from God. Moreover, we cannot be happy in such a scenario. Our mutual joining with others prepares us to live a full and glorious life. Isolation from others keeps us in defeat.

We can open to fuller communication by looking to others with love. When we look to others with fearful thoughts, we will always find reason to be threatened by these others. Then the dialogue breaks down. The fact that others may be on edge, frustrated, or otherwise unavailable to us, is not germane to our communication.

Communication, in love, can also be silent.

Gladden Ourselves–for Jesus Is with Us

“I offer far more than partial guidance, although you do not ask for more. The uneven quality of your skill in both asking and following my direction is due to the alternations you experience between ego- and miracle-oriented perception. This is a strain, but fortunately one which can be overcome along with the rest. There will never be a time when I do not will to try again. You might be gladdened by remembering that.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.IX.10:1-5)

Jesus is once again speaking just to Helen (and maybe Bill) in this reassurance that he offers continual guidance. But if we ask, he will do the same for us. In these early words, he has not yet solidified the Holy Spirit in A Course in Miracles. Soon he will ask that all of us turn immediately to the Holy Spirit when confronted with a dilemma. The Holy Spirit connects us to God, but not in a threatened way. At this point in our progress, we are still too fearful of God to approach Him directly.

Jesus points out the strain that we under. He seems particularly aware of this strain, as we seek to mediate between hell and heaven, the ego and love. Heaven and love are the only things that we truly can want, once we have let the magnitude of our mistakes sink in. Our attempt to create unlike God, something that is actually “making” rather than “creating,” has produced all of the chaos in which we live. We need to get beyond this. We need to recognize that our attempt to create something beyond God has just failed miserably. There IS nothing beyond Him except illusion.

Jesus constantly looks for reasons that we might gladden ourselves, for he knows that we are usually morose when caught in the vines of the ego. We need just to kick those vines away from ourselves, away from our feet (as Pat Rodeway’s Emmanuel says), and be on about our business. Jesus will untangle any egoic vines that won’t automatically disengage from our toes.

Don’t “Evaluate” Jesus’ Messages

“You should be confident that any guidance which comes from me will not jeopardize anyone. If you can continue not to evaluate my messages and merely follow them, they will lead to good for everyone. Since this is the same area of difficulty which may be causing you trouble with meditation, practice in this is essential.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.IX.5:1-3)

We still tend to “evaluate,” which is another term for judgment. And judgment will not get us where we want to go. In fact, it will delay Awakening big time. We simply won’t be able to awaken until we have given up attack as well as judgment.
God wants gentle individuals, and the judgmental mind is anything but gentle. Notice the difference in ourselves when we judge, and we are tolerant. Tolerance, which is a weaker form of love, will set us back on the right pathway. Judgment will cause our feet to stumble over rocks. We will discover that the only way to move forward without incident is to move forward in tolerance as well as love.

If we are tuned into intuition, we will hear the messages from the Beyond. Sometimes this is Jesus. (In Helen’s case, it nearly always was Jesus, for he stayed very close to her in emotional support. Scribing was very threatening to her. Her co-scribe Bill was also very supportive.) Jesus does not jeopardize anybody at all when he gives us advice. He will be careful, though, not to make us dependent on him. He will step back if he thinks this dependence is happening.

Don’t judge. Ask how to accomplish this in our life. It is not hard.

In fact, ceasing to judge is one of the easiest things we will ever accomplish. When we get help.

Humble Asking Always Gets an Answer

“If you ask me for guidance, you have signified your willingness to give over your own control, at least to some extent. Your frequent failure to ask at all indicates that at such times you are not willing to go even that far. Failure to ask for guidance is a sign of fear. But when you at least ask, you are acting on a cooperative thought, even though it may not lack ambivalence. You are therefore entitled to a specific answer, but unless you follow it without judging it, you will become defensive about the next steps you will take.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.IX.4:1-5)

Jesus is available to us for guidance. As our elder brother, his advice is sounder than our own. It would be wise to ask.
Later on in A Course in Miracles, Jesus does not so much ask us to turn to him as to turn to the Holy Spirit. He knows that we ask of the ego, or we ask of Higher Guidance—whatever we do. While we may not be aware of these mental gyrations, they are nevertheless much a part of ourselves. We don’t make decisions just in our own superficial mind. Guidance is very real, but guidance of the ego is always wrongheaded and disastrous.

We will get specific answers, and these specific answers may very well come as the next quiet thought in our minds. Practical advice is always given. The Holy Spirit can be very practical, giving advice for the most mundane matters. The only criteria is that these matters are important to us. Humble asking always gets an answer. The solution is always found with the problem, as soon as the problem is articulated, even silently.

If we think we have decided what we want to do, and then ask, we have turned the tables on the Holy Spirit. We may not like what we hear, for the initial decision has, in all likelihood, be made in conjunction with the ego. ACIM says that the ego always answers first.

We don’t have to listen to the ego. It certainly would be wise not to do so, but simply to turn the matter over to spirit. The answer comes quickly.

Misery with the Ego / Joy with the Spirit

“I am conditioning you to associate misery with the ego and joy with your spirit. You have conditioned yourself the other way around. But a far greater reward will break through any conditioning if that reward is repeatedly offered when the old habit is broken. You are still free to choose. But can you really want the rewards of the ego in the presence of the rewards of God?” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.23:1-5)

The ego has never brought real joy; at best, we have had flights of fancy that were high enough in tone that we felt an exhilaration. Then, invariably, we were dashed downward to a sense of depression—mild or severe. These dramas were endless, and so unnecessary now that our knowing has expanded.

Jesus speaks of conditioning in this complete edition of A Course in Miracles, from the Circle of Atonement. The use of the word “conditioning” would make eminent sense to Helen and Bill. And we have enough general knowledge of psychology from everyday life to comprehend as well. What does Jesus mean by this conditioning?

We thought that the dramatic highs that the ego gave us were all that we could expect on earth. We were mistaken. A joyous spirit offers far more. This joy does not become inverted, to dash us downward into depression. This joy extends, more and more, as we are receptive to it.

This joy is often calm, and in the mild manner of it, we may not recognize what we have. Calm is sometimes a factor in depression, and we may even think that, when we are calm, we are depressed. We have much to discover. We are meant, according to A Course in Miracles, to remain “perfectly calm and quiet.” This new demeanor may not even seem desirable. We will see its value as we do quieten ourselves down and invite the Holy Spirit to inform our minds. We will see value when we let ourselves see value.

“Joy with the spirit”! Yes! Our new lives will mean much to us when we have given joy a welcome in our hearts. The ego will fall away, and, if we are careful and do nothing to reinforce it, the ego will never rear its ugly head again. It is not the same ego that Freud championed, a persona that we needed to live adult life. In Jesus’ use of the term ego, he means a false persona.

Let us ask for joy with the spirit today—and every day!

Guidance

“A giant step forward in your case would be to insist on a collaborative venture. This does not go against the true spirit of meditation at all. It is inherent in it. Meditation is a collaborative venture with God. It cannot be undertaken successfully by those who disengage themselves from the Sonship, because they are disengaging themselves from me. God will come to you only as you will give Him to your brothers. Learn first of them, and you will be ready to hear God as you hear them. That is because the function of love is one.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.21:1-8)

Do we really believe that we can hear God? We hear him in silence, not in words. Our intuitive sense carries the day. It is true that from brothers and sisters on the Other Side, we can hear what are called “locutions,” words impressed on our mind when we are quiet and receptive. We do not necessarily hear anything audible at all, but the impression of a locution does seem very powerful, when it comes. God’s silence, also, speaks volumes. We can know what God is wanting of us, and that may be only an expression of Love. He does not always expect us to work for Him; the pleasure of His company is all that He sometimes asks us to receive.

In meditation, specifically insight meditation, the focus is not only a specific mantra, but on phrases that filter through the mind. Our mind speaks to us, and sometimes this impression seems a little beyond us, as though a Higher Power were speaking to us. Feelings work, too. And feelings are primarily how the Holy Spirit speaks to us. When we are on the right beam, we comprehend that we are, and nobody else can tell us we are wrong. We do need to test out our discernment, though, as anything that might be harmful to another is definitely not coming from the Holy Spirit.

Jesus wants us to engage with him. He is able, as spirit, to live anywhere and everywhere. His consciousness can engage with myriads of human beings are one time. If this seems farfetched, let us simply listen to his words. I think that they will allow for no other interpretation.

A short period of meditation, or, at best, two such periods, will calm us and take us to the Heaven that exists in our minds. We may not stay there, but the visit is so very therapeutic.

Gratitude to Our Brother

“I have told you several times that I am in charge of the whole Atonement. This is only because I completed my part in it as a man and can now complete it through others. My chosen receiving and sending channels cannot fail, because I will lend them my strength as long as theirs is wanting. I will go with you to the Holy One, and through my perception He can bridge the little gap. Your gratitude to your brother is the only gift I want. I will bring it to God for you, knowing that to know your brother is to know God.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.15:1-6)

It is unclear who Jesus means by “your brother.” It is conceivable that he means himself, that he would like to have our gratitude, but I feel that this interpretation is probably off the mark. Jesus does refer to himself elsewhere as our “elder brother,” but all individuals are brothers (and sisters), and it is to our fellow man and women that it is likely Jesus refers. Knowing our brother (and sister) does lead one to God, for holy relationship is the means that A Course in Miracles uses to take us home. We do realize that in the sixties and seventies, when Jesus was channeling, the masculine term included the feminine as well.

We are chosen receiving and sending channels, for long ago we learned in Sunday school that we are the hands and feet of Jesus. If we do his bidding, we are taking our part in the Atonement, the miracle that will take all of us home to God, though, we are told, this final healing may take as long as the separation did to happen, which was millions of years (and maybe even longer). The time can be foreshortened if all of us pull together. After all, we are all in this together.

Jesus stands ready to help us, though he does not foster dependence in an unhealthy way. In our lives, we have to make our own decisions, with our own guidance being led by the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self. Jesus as an individual does not force his opinion upon us. We might sometimes want him to do so, but this is faulty thinking.

To know our brother is to know God. This is a startling assertion. Our brother’s essence is of God, for God is living through him. And the operative word is “know,” not “perceive.” Our knowledge is true understanding.

Jesus Trusts Us!

“My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but it will not always be that way. Your mission is very simple: You have been chosen to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego. I repeat that I do not choose God’s channels wrongly. The Holy One shares my trust and always approves my Atonement decisions, because my will is never out of accord with His.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.14:1-4)

Jesus trusts us! He sees us as a channel for good in this world, a channel for Atonement that is seconded by the Holy Spirit. Such reassurance that we are all on the right path. We all do want to be finished with the ego, and as long as we are careful not to reinforce the ego by egotistical/egoic thoughts and actions, we are hope personified. Jesus’ hope is for a new world, a world where the dreams are happy, brought to us by the Holy Spirit.

A Course in Miracles suggests that we are still caught by illusion, for dreams are not real. But the “happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings” can be enjoyed without guilt. We can stay a while on this beautiful earth, loving our fellow men and women, doing God’s work, and all will be well. No harsh judgment will assail us. We do create our own reality, and we discover how to do that when we listen to the Holy Spirit (as described in ACIM) or the Christ-Self (as described in A Course of Love).

Guidance is very, very important, for we cannot find our way back to God unaided. We are too lost in insanity. But a glimpse of sanity comes to us more and more as time passes. And ultimately, those glimpses will, in Awakening, merge into a dream that offers good days continuously. We can have a Heaven on earth. We just have to follow the rules, and guidance will elucidate those rules for us.

A Choice Bringing Peace and Joy

“You have very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me instead of to your ego for guidance. The results will convince you increasingly that your choice in turning to me is the only sane one you can make. No one who has learned from experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs much conditioning.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.10:1-3)

In the beginning chapters of A Course in Miracles, where we are now, Jesus counsels turning to him; he has not yet focused on turning to the Holy Spirit in ACIM, and it is not until much later, in A Course of Love, that he will counsel that the time of the Holy Spirit is past, and that in this time of Christ, we ought to turn to our inner Christ-Self, the mind that is one with God, found deep within us.

If we turn to Jesus, we will turn away from the ego, the ego as defined as a false persona (not in the Freudian sense of a persona that we need to develop to live well). And turning to Jesus will give both peace and joy, two aspects of what we want with all our heart. Turning to the ego is the choice for insanity, and insane thinking, because it is so convoluted, is the choice for chaos and disaster. We know this way well; we have lived it for eons. Now is the time for something better; now we are ready to leave all this chaos behind.
When Jesus senses that we are becoming too dependent upon him, he will withdraw, letting us make our own decisions, but decisions made without the ego in ascendancy. When we make our own decisions, we will look inward, where both the Holy Spirit and the Christ-Self dwell.

We can still have the peace and joy, for guidance from within does guide us truly. Our days of being insane, mad, are drawing to a close. We know better now; we know to let inner guidance wipe our minds clean of conflict.

Gently we come to know what to do. When we have faith that this is so, we certainly do discover that it IS so.

Reaching God

“When I told you to concentrate on the phrase ‘Here I am, Lord,’ I did not mean ‘in this world’ by ‘here.’ I wanted you to think of yourself as a distinct consciousness, capable of direct communication with the Creator of that consciousness. You must begin to think of yourself as a very powerful receiving and sending channel.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.8:1-3)

Jesus is first talking to Helen, but, as usual, we can appropriate his words to ourselves. We can communicate, as a “very powerful receiving and sending channel,” with God Himself. If this is too threatening to us, then the Holy Spirit will mediate. This is the whole purpose of the Holy Spirit, of course, to draw us back to God when we are in fear that would prevent a direct channel to the Almighty.

A Course of Love, sequel and continuation of A Course in Miracles, postulates a more direct route to God. In this age of Christ, it postulates, we are capable of direct communication with God, no longer so fearful of Him that we need the Holy Spirit as mediator. The age of the Holy Spirit, ACOL says, has now passed. We are to derive our guidance from the Christ-Self who dwells within each of us. This Christ-Self, still a learning being until morphing into discovery through observation and an informing by the heart, is capable of accurate choices. This Christ-Self is being healed, through and through, all layers of the subconscious. And when this healing is complete, we will know Awakening/Christ-consciousness/enlightenment.

God dwells within and without, though we project the world from the Mind. I believe this world does not really exist, because the Mind is all, and the Mind is, at base, Spirit. This non-dualistic world view gives a way to understand that God is everywhere at one time. We are “God-stuff,” and out of his individuations/differentiations of His Being, we develop as His children.

God then knows us as His own. Finiteness does serve a purpose, to experience, because knowing the Whole, as God does in His Godhead, would make experiential effects not separate from Cause, and thus unknowable. (This interpretation is based in part on Neale Donald Walsch’s “conversations” with God, and is not found in ACIM/ACOL.)

We Dwell in Heaven Also

“The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate. The ratio of repression and dissociation of truth varies with the individual ego illusion, but dissociation is always involved, or you would not believe that you are here.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.7:1-3)

There seem to be aspects of the Self of each of us that dwells in a realm separate and apart from this world. Here Jesus calls it out “other life.”

This assertion gives me great comfort. When I think of millions of years to heal the separation for all people, I feel very isolated and alone, apart from God (even though I know this is a misinterpretation). When I feel reassured that there is a part of me that is thriving in another place, Heaven (if you will), then I can settle down and be satisfied here in this world. I am unaware of this other place when I walk this earth, but the fact that Jesus says that I live there, too, gives me great comfort as well as reassurance.

All of us are in a similar place. Our main Self has never left Heaven. Only a part of our being dissociated into the little self that is our personality, the little self that rebelled against God, and started on the long trek away from Him, and, now, back to Him.

This is part of the theology of ACIM that is often not emphasized. But its central place in the comfort of God’s children is without doubt a teaching that demands recognition.

Eternity Will Free Us

“Eternalness is the one function that the ego has tried to develop but has systematically failed to achieve. It may surprise you to learn that had the ego willing it to do so, it could have made the eternal because, as a product of the mind, it is endowed with the power of its own maker. But the decision to do this, rather than the ability to do it, is what the ego cannot tolerate. This is because the decision, from which the ability would naturally develop, would necessarily involve true perception, a state of clarity which the ego, fearful of being judged truly, must avoid.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VII.11:1-4)

This quotation is filled with dense meaning. The ego would not want true perception, because then it would be judged truly, and then it would be rejected summarily. So, caught by the ego, our mind alters perception in a thousand, and more, crazy ways. Seeing unclearly, we wander hinter and hon, in uncertainty, lost in a maze.

Do we really want this maze to continue? We do want the eternal, and the ego can’t give us this. The eternal assures that we will forever be here, in the now, the present—not lost in past and future meanderings. The eternal and time are actually not compatible, and when we come to know more of the eternal, we will realize that time itself is, in our world, only for convenience. We can, though, partake of the eternal in the Now. The eternal is on a vertical line, with time being on a horizontal. Only at one point, the Now, do they intersect.

Decide to stop walking the maze now, today. Giving up the temporal for the permanent is another way of seeing eternity.

Eternity will free us, for the cause and effect of suffering/pain, born of fear, will be no more. Ask to have eternity shown to us now, in our complete and total awareness of the present.

Ask for a Balanced Mind

“It would be very intelligent of you to set yourself the goal of really studying for this course. There can be no doubt of the wisdom of this decision, for any student who wants to pass it. But, knowing your individual weaknesses as a learner and being a teacher with some experience, I must remind you that learning and wanting to learn are inseparable. All learners learn best when they believe what they are trying to learn is of value to them. But values in this world are hierarchical, and not everything you may want to learn has lasting value. Indeed, many of the things you want to learn are chosen because their value will not last. The ego thinks it is an advantage not to commit itself to anything that is eternal, because the eternal must come from God.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VII.10:1-7)

The ego is afraid of God, that is the insanity of it. Our mind, taken over by the ego, believes that it will be punished for imagining itself separate from its Maker, Whom it knows to be all-powerful.

If we can open our mind ever so slightly, and realize, even if we don’t feel it, that God is not vindictive, then we will have a reason to trust Him. If we can just entertain the possibility, indeed the certainty, that we have let our mind go insane, and that now we are attempting to retrieve sanity, then we will have motivation to learn A Course in Miracles. Motivation is all that it takes. Jesus can work with a reluctant learner, but he can do nothing for one who refuses the innate inclination to listen to reason. He doesn’t go against our free well. We can refuse to listen, refuse to learn—but who would when suffering and pain, in our egoic state of mind, have been so devastating.

The suffering and pain were inevitable, and these are no cause to blame God. Suffering/pain are a cause-and-effect relationship. Given our strange thinking, we need a Power from beyond us to set all things aright. Without that, the deleterious effects continue. And surely we don’t want that.

Ask for a balanced mind. This mind will welcome guidance. This mind, as prompted by the heart, will take us, finally, back Home.

Love Deeply Today

“All things work together for good. There are no exceptions, except in the ego’s judgment. The ego resents everything it does not control. Control is a central factor in what the ego permits into consciousness, and one to which it devotes its maximum vigilance. This is not the way a balanced mind holds together. Its control is unconscious.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VII.1:1-5)

Jesus is quoting the biblical passage, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” But in his quote, he makes no provisos: ALL things work together for good. He continues, “There are no exceptions.”

This biblical verse gave me much comfort when I was in my teens, just after hearing a sermon on the topic. Now it can do the same for us at any age. We want a balanced mind, and if we keep in mind that all works together for good, we will stop much discouragement in its tracks.

A balanced mind is controlled only by its unconscious; no effort at getting and retaining control on a conscious level is needed at all.

Does this tell us how easy salvation really is? Here we listen to the Holy Spirit (or the Christ-Self), and we do what guidance has prompted. Our mind then soon becomes clear in every predicament, with the next step, and then the next, and the next, pointed out to us in certain fashion.

Pray for a balanced mind today. Our mind is very precious to God, and we have let it be taken over by an insanity, the ego that arose because we didn’t know how else to counter fear. If we love deeply, love enough, fear will leave us.

Love deeply today.

Jesus’ Instructive Guidance

“If you will think over your life, you will see how carefully the preparations were made. I am in charge of the Second Coming, as I already told you, and my judgment, which is used only for its protection, cannot be wrong because it never attacks. Yours is so distorted that you believe that I was mistaken in choosing you. I assure you this is a mistake of your own ego. Do not mistake it for humility. Your ego is trying to convince you that it is real and I am not, because if I am real, I am no more real than you are. That knowledge, and I assure you that it is knowledge, means that Christ has come into your mind and healed it.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VI.15:1-7)

It is likely that Jesus was speaking to Helen here, asking her to think over her life and realize how prepared she was made for the task of scribing. There were many things that she needed to have in her mind, and her upbringing assured that this happened. In channeling, Jesus must draw on the words that are already in a scribe’s mind, being limited to using words that are already known. This doesn’t mean that the ideas are in the scribe’s mind, just the words, for nobody who has taken A Course in Miracles seriously, and knew Helen, thought that she could have made all this up. She had a fine mind, of course, but she did not have the genius of Jesus.

Jesus is on a par with us, in that both he and we are real. The ego disputes this, but we all know by now that the ego is insanity itself. Jesus has walked the whole pathway back to God, and now is guiding our footsteps. His work with channeling is just one aspect of the careful instructive guidance that he gives to us all.

Healing of the Mind

“The First Coming of Christ is just another name for the creation, because Christ is the Son of God. The Second Coming of Christ means nothing more than the end of the ego’s rule over part of the minds of men, and the healing of the mind. I was created like you in the First, and I am reminding you that I have called you to join with me in the Second.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VI.14:1-3)

Here Jesus is explaining the new reality, the fact that when he came 2,000 years ago, he was embodying the Christ, the Awakened Son of God. Now, he says the Second Coming is a healing of OUR minds, that we too will recognize that we too are Christ, Sons and Daughters of God. This, being a healing of our mind, is the end of the ego’s rule.

The only thing that needs to happen is that we rest in God’s love, let the barriers to love’s rule dissipate, and wait, patiently, for our Awakening—by God Himself. This means, obviously, that we take measured paces to relinquish the ego. We don’t do anything to reinforce it; we stay away from egoic notions, for they will only derail us.

Does Jesus come in the Second Coming? Is there a physical manifestation? He never says, in any of his channeled courses (A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love, The Way of Mastery Platform). It wouldn’t be wise for us to speculate about something that has been so divisive in our religions.

If he comes in physical manifestation, we will see great glories on earth. If not, perhaps he intends for us to manifest those great glories, in a new world that we will create. This latter point is made very plain in A Course of Love.

Gladden Ourselves

“Have you really considered how many opportunities you have to gladden yourself, and how many of them you have refused? There is no limit to the power of a Son of God, but he himself can limit the expression of his power as much as he wills. Your mind and mine can unite in shining your ego away, and releasing the strength and beauty of God into everything you think and will and do. Do not settle for anything less than this, and refuse to accept anything but this as your goal. Watch your mind carefully for any beliefs that hinder its accomplishment, and step away from them.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VI.11:1-5)

Certainly everybody has experienced times when, in retrospect, we might say that we have been our own worst enemy. This is, I believe, what is happening when we have refused opportunities to gladden ourselves. We seem to wallow in self-pity, never a very laudatory experience. When we are so absorbed by self-pity, it certainly makes it hard for anybody else to sympathize and to emphasize with us. Our own self-centeredness at such times makes inevitable the truth that the ego will be in the ascendancy.

Jesus will join his mind to ours, and the two of each of us can shine the ego away. His offer is a free offer, with no strings attached. And should not we make the tiny effort to accept his free offer? Only a “little willingness” is necessary, as Jesus says elsewhere in A Course in Miracles. The Holy Spirit will take our little willingness, and make it into something mighty. Jesus will cooperate with us as we seek to leave the remnants of the ego in the dust under our feet.

We need God’s strength to finally take tentative and hesitant steps toward accepting His great blessings for us, His blessings in a world that is slowly giving up the ego as a very bad idea.

When tempted to indulge in the misery of self-pity, let us lift our thoughts with an effort of the will, and let God’s grace show us a world that will gladden us.

Deprived of Nothing Except by Our Own Decisions

“When you are sad, know that this need not be. Depression is of the ego, and you are hiding little spots of hatred that are hurting you. Depression always arises ultimately from a sense of being deprived of something you want and do not have. Know you are deprived of nothing except by your own decisions, and then decide otherwise.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VI.5:1-4)

We have been given everything, by God, to make our way through life easily and peacefully. On the surface, this sounds like an outrageous claim, but Jesus does say that we are “deprived of nothing except by your own decisions.” This sounds very akin to Jesus’ way of speaking of the law of attraction, in which what we focus upon, actually comes to be.

The law of attraction has been hot news since Rhonda Byrne and her team made a film entitled The Secret, and this was followed, by her, by books (The Secret, The Power, The Magic, The Hero). It is a very controversial idea, but the law of attraction says that we have to watch our minds for the scraps of fear that abide there, for we will make very bad things for ourselves if we focus on the negative. In The Power, Rhonda made clear the central place of love, and this book has spiritual aspects that would lead all of us to see that Love in religion, and love in the law of attraction, is a universal concept with universal ramifications.

Depression does wrap our mind up in knots. We can do much to dismiss depressed thoughts when they arise in us, as the psychologist Richard Carlson has made clear, especially in the books, Shortcut through Therapy, You Can Feel Good Again, and Slowing Down to the Speed of Life. He doesn’t think that we are doomed by brain chemicals to lead a depressed life; we have some say in how we thrive.

Jesus, in the passage for today, seems to say much the same. We all need compassion, and those who are depressed perhaps need more compassion than most. If we are trapped by depression, let us reach out to our brothers and sisters, including the medical establishment and the community of psychologists and psychiatrists.

Let us ask what we would want to think that we can’t seem to think now.

And that will hold the key.

Joy & Emotional Peace

“When your mood tells you that you have willed wrongly, and this is so whenever you are not joyous, then know this need not be. In every case, you have thought wrongly about some brother that God create and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass. Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have thought, and what you have not thought that God would have you think. Search sincerely for what you have done and left undone accordingly. And then change your mind to think with God’s.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VI.3:1-5)

When we are not joyous, we have let something go wrong. This is true because our natural state of mind, when we are One with God, is joy. If we simply look at nature, we will know that God’s primary emotion is joy, though storms, earthquakes, and the like, can let us doubt this. The fierceness of nature is part of its charm, though when people die in natural “acts of God,” we wonder what kind of God we really have.

God does not mean us ill. I am absolutely certain of that. Our suffering cannot be understood on this plane of this world; our finite mind cannot see the whole. But God doesn’t make the decision to rain pestilence down upon our heads. His gestures are all loving.

And when we know that God is loving, we can rest in joy, for we are well-protected. If any harm comes to us, we can rail against fate (though this is a futile gesture). God wraps us up in His arms, and all is well.

Emotional peace is more important than physical ailments. If our minds and hearts are at peace, we are right where we need to be, resting in God.

Reframe the Psyche for Sanity

“Consider how much vigilance you have been willing to exert to protect your ego, and how little you have been willing to expend to protect your higher mind! Who but the insane would undertake to believe in what is not true and then protect this belief at the cost of truth?” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.17:3-4)

Perhaps, in reading A Course in Miracles, you have balked at accepting Jesus’ assertion that in our usual frame of mind, we have been mad, insane. This may be because we think that we don’t do the insane things that people who are certifiably mad have actually done. Of course, there is a difference, but I think we will see, when Awakening dawns, that our psyche has been skewed. The ego is easily recognized, then, as a form of insanity.

We have to use our imagination to project what life would really be like without the ego. We have to lay aside the definition of the ego that Freud gave, in that the ego was seen as necessary for an adult to function, that the ego would form the persona, and then we would live independent lives when grown. Jesus’ defines the ego differently, in that he sees it as a false concept, a concept to be overcome, and a concept not at all needed for responsible living as an adult. Our persona will thrive when we awaken and do not seek any longer to cling to our egoic ways. We will also realize that independent living is not the panacea we had thought, that we are meant to be interdependent, living in cooperation with our brothers and sisters.

Let the ego wither away by failing to reinforce the egotistical ideas that so call to us. Let humility lead the way. After all, Jesus said that the meek would inherit the earth. While he did not mean by “meek” any form of subservient behavior, we can, in the word, glimpse a little of what he meant many years ago when he walked the earth.

We want to follow the truth. And when the tenets of A Course in Miracles take hold, we will find ourselves triumphantly following that truth.

Relax in God’s Grace

“In your own unconscious, deeply repressed by the ego, is the declaration of your release: God has given you everything. This is the one fact which means that the ego does not exist, and which therefore makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego’s language, to have and to be are different, but they are identical to the spirit. It knows that you both have everything and are everything. Any distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of getting, which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That is why we made no distinction between having the Kingdom of God and being the Kingdom of God.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.16:1-6)

So: God has given us everything!! This declaration surely doesn’t mean right now, but intuitively it can mean just that. When we draw on ultimate meaning, we draw on what we both have and are, and this is the infinity of God Himself. Like a hologram, the Whole of everything is within us, though our finite mind cannot comprehend this universal blessing. Our ego cannot comprehend, period. And so it shivers in dread and fear. But we don’t have to do that; we can immerse ourselves in the love that God’s greatest blessing to us. And in this blessing, we know that we partake of His grandness.

We do not have lacks. Oh, we think we do. But the fulfillment of need is only a motion away, a creative motion in which we rest in what we have, in gratitude that it is enough. We may, it is true, lack for material things, but this need be only temporary, for God’s storehouses are full to overflowing with what He can and does give to us.

Our spiritual needs are met immediately at the point of asking, for these intangibles do not wait on time or place. Our emotional needs, sometimes the greatest of our needs, may be resolved with a heartfelt prayer asking for help. And in asking for help, we know that we are not truly experiencing lack, for the help arrives, and all is well.

If this seems “pie in the sky” thinking, just relax in God’s grace. Try not to let skepticism stop the good from coming to us. This is egoic thinking, and we have determined to leave the ego behind. If we fall into egoic thinking at the first sign of trouble, we are asking of the wrong source. Ask for God’s help, and we are asking aright.

We both have and are the Kingdom of God. Ask what this means, and rest in surety that the Holy Spirit will answer, in terms that we can understand.

Jesus: “I Will Come Gladly in Response to a Single Unequivocal Call”

“Watch your mind for the scraps of meanness, or you will be unable to ask me to do so. I can help you only as our Father created us. I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you have made. But I will neither love nor honor it unless it is true. Ask me truly, and I will come. Do not ask me truly, and I will wait. I will never forsake you, any more than God will. But I must wait as long as you will to forsake yourself. Because I wait in love and not in impatience, you will surely ask me truly. I will come gladly in response to a single unequivocal call.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.14:1-10)

This quotation gives the context for Jesus’ opt-quoted words, on this blog, that he will come upon hearing a “single unequivocal call.” This is one of the most reassuring sentences in all of A Course in Miracles, particularly if one has what has been called a “personal relationship” with Jesus.

In A Course of Love, the sequel, continuation, of A Course in Miracles, Jesus says that we don’t have to accept him for us to benefit from his words. But he can do so much more for us if we do “accept” him. This means that traditional Christianity does get many things right, and a personal relationship with Jesus as the optimal is one such right thing.

We have made many things in illusion, and Jesus does not uphold these things. But our true creations, he does respect and honor. We ourselves don’t even know what all these creations are. There are several references in ACIM to our “creations,” but no full explanation of what is meant. I think most basically the creations are our intangible, but real, emotions that cause us to extend love to others—in other words, our miracles as instigated by Jesus (for he says that he should prompt us when and where to perform a miracle).

Let Jesus come to us today. He is not limited in any way, we can believe, though we cannot know how this is possible. Our finite minds need to let go of trying to understand, and just accept Jesus’ promises.

Then we will really be on the right road back to God.

Ever Mindful of God’s Love Given & Received

“Let us ask the Father in my name to keep you mindful of His love for you and yours for Him. He has never failed to answer this request, because it asks only for what He has already willed. Those who call truly are always answered. If you become fearful at this, remember: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me’ because there are none. You still think there are.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.12:1-5)

Do we still imagine gods that are other than our Creator, God Himself/Herself? The ego certainly does, and by this I mean the endless desires that we have for many, many things in our life, often material things. These become gods in their own right. We don’t have to subscribe to a “devil” figure to imagine that we are being tempted to put other gods before our Maker. We do this automatically and incessantly when we cozy up to the ego.

The many things that we admire and love more than God are mirages in the desert. Jesus says elsewhere in this complete edition that the thing to do with a desert is to leave. Certainly that is what we have to do with the ego; we have to turn aside, ever so gently, so as not to be sucked into a quagmire. We need to turn aside and give our allegiance and love to the One Who truly deserves it.

Remember that God loves us. And, buried deep within us, is our response of love. We know that love makes the world go ‘round, and when we love God, we come to see that the universes as well thrive on love.
If we think that we don’t love God, think a bit about what or who we do love. If this is true love, and intangible, then we can find God in this source. Loving this known bit of God can turn us on to God Himself.

Sometimes it is easier to love something little than the big, all-encompassing Source of Love Himself.
This small, intangible, love will take us to God. We have trouble because God is ineffable, and we don’t know how to get a handle on Him. This is as it should be. Turn within, and see if we don’t sense Love from the Almighty.

His blessings will lead us to Him.

Ask for Our Inheritance

“The Bible has many references to the immeasurable gifts which are for you, but for which you must ask. This is not a condition as the ego sets conditions. It is the glorious condition of what you are. No force except your own will is strong enough or worthy enough to guide you. In this you are as free as God, and must remain so forever. You can never be found except in honor, and that is always voluntary.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.11:4-9)

This asking is not a greedy rapaciousness. This asking is for our rightful inheritance. God intends good things for His children, and we are His children.

When I was young, I did not want to be greedy. I once ate a large portion of a package of cookies, at one sitting, and my mother, once she became aware of what I had done, told me that I had been “greedy.”

This crushed me. A small incident from childhood that was instructive.

This unhealed incident from my childhood has sometimes kept me from asking God for what is actually my “due.” God is not limited, and His gifts are abundant. Unlike a box of cookies, if we ask Him for what we want, and get it, there will not be less available for everyone else.

The storehouses of Heaven are filled to overflowing. Let the damaged areas of our conditioning fall away if we have hesitated to come to God with our legitimate desires.

He wants to give, and give, and never cease giving. We have only to accept, with a full heart.

God Is Glorious

“Against this sense of temporary existence, the spirit offers the knowledge of permanent and unshakable being. No one who has experienced the revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again. How can its meager offering to you prevail against the glorious gift of God?” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.8:1-3)

This “sense of temporary existence” travels with the ego. We know, somehow, that the ego is not real, that it is an illusory form of existence that has entrapped us. When we listen to our spirit (and we may here think of the Holy Spirit), we know that there is a “permanent and unshakable being” in the midst of our very soul. And this revelation will calm us and give us a new lease on life. This knowledge of what is really permanent saves us. The obvious next step is to cease listening to our ego—just drop it, gently.

If we resist the ego, it will become stronger, for resistance signals strife, and the ego is strong in strife. How do we just turn aside?

First, we drop the ego in little ways. We become attuned to understanding when we are acting egotistically. Often this comes when we are insensitive to the needs and desires of our fellow men and women. We behave with a “me first” compulsion. While thinking of our own needs can be and is, often, necessary, this sense can be taken to extremes.

We can be living within the ego even when the impulse is not strictly egotistical. We can simply be self-centered, and this is an egoic state of mind. If we find that we are putting #1 first in every situation, we can think again.

We can always turn to the heart, as A Course of Love encourages, to bypass the willful thinking that gets us into such trouble. As we turn to the heart, a place that has always been devoid of the ego, we discover anew how to live.

The heart informs the mind, and then we realize that both egotistical and egoic trains of thoughts consume us no longer.

Our Heart Knows

“In its characteristic upside-down way, the ego has taken the impulses from the superconscious and perceived them as if they arise in the unconscious. The ego judges what is to be accepted, and the impulses from the superconscious are essentially unacceptable to it, because they clearly point to the nonexistence of the ego itself. When this occurs, the ego experiences threat, and not only censors but also reinterprets the data. However, as Freud very correctly pointed out, what you do not perceive you still know, and it can retain a very active life beyond your awareness.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.3:1-4)

The quotation for today alludes to the concept of the mind to which Jesus subscribes. The superconscious is “above” us, devoid of the ego, and is actually a bridge to God, the Holy Spirit, the Christ-Self. Freud, misunderstanding, called this part of the mind, the “superego.” As this quotation points out, the ego actually has nothing to do with it.

The conscious is our normal waking awareness.

The unconscious sinks below thought, but is still (unlike what Jung thought in his “collective unconscious”) unique to us. Jung thought that underneath, we all think the same, and in some sense this is akin to an awareness of our Creator, God Himself—a Source found, according to Jesus, in the superconscious.

We don’t have to fully grasp these differences in consciousness to make use of them. Helen and Bill, co-scribes of A Course in Miracles and psychologists, would have been very attuned to this portion of ACIM. Jesus would be talking right up their alley.

We do still know what is in our mind, even when we are not conscious of it, and then it causes a subtle (or not so subtle) uneasiness. It can affect our actions, something that we all know. When we are driven by schemas that draw upon childhood conditioning, we are very lost in the mind.

The solution, according to A Course of Love (what many believe to be a continuation of ACIM), is to draw upon the heart. The heart by-passes the confusion of the mind, because the heart doesn’t demand proof of what it knows.

The heart just knows.

Kingdom of God: United & Protected

“The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen.
“That was written in the form of a prayer because it is a good thing to use in moments of temptation. It is a declaration of independence. You will find it very helpful if you understand it fully.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.2:8-12)

This is a declaration of independence from the ego, not independence per se, for we have learned that independence is a goal that we can never win. We always ask advice of something/Something before we act—either the ego or the Holy Spirit/Christ-Self. Of course, we are not often conscious of this advice-seeking behavior; we think that we are autonomous.

The Kingdom of God is that with which we are One, and it is protected by the power of God Himself. We cannot ultimately fail. We will find our way home. It just might take a while.

This is not to be discouraging, but Jesus did say in A Course of Miracles that it might take “millions of years” for everyone to return home, for everyone to heal the separation from God. Even though this separation is actually impossible, because we are a part of God, it can certainly seem real enough to us, making return necessary. We have to heal our minds. We have to watch the subconscious contents make their way to the surface to be healed. All of this does mean that Awakening is not possible for all of us as immediately as we would like.

The Kingdom of God! Let us rejoice that we are actually numbered in its Whole.