Secret for Staying in This World, but Seeing It Differently

“Think you not that reason opposes love, for love gives reason its foundation. The foundation of your insane world is fear. The foundation of Heaven, your true home, is love. The same world based upon these different foundations could not help but look quite different.” (ACOL, C:14.9)

We don’t have to have blind faith in the precepts of A Course of Love. We are told, “love gives reason its foundation.” (ACOL, C:14.9) We are further told that the foundation of our insane world is fear. And the foundation of Heaven, our true home, is love. It is strongly implied that the way that we look at our world determines whether it is hell or Heaven. The way that we look. That is perception, and we know from A Course in Miracles that projection makes perception.

What we feel inwardly will determine what we see in the outer world. And if we are feeling fear, we will see an insane world that is violent and destructive. If we are feeling love, we will see Heaven.

Is this too simplistic? Is this even true? Can the same images that flow before our eyes seem fearful or loving, based on what we are projecting? Yes. For the fearful mind sees more reason to fear, and the loving mind sees with these things only lamentable things, but no cause for fear. The loving mind does not reject the outer world of insanity as not there; it sees that it is there, but it is only illusion, the illusion of insanity. And so it gives that outer, violent and destructive, world no credence.

“The same world based upon these different foundations could not help but look quite different.” (ACOL, C:14.9)

Yes! This is the secret for staying in this world, but seeing it differently. This is the secret of having peace in the midst of chaos. Choose fear or love, and all the world will change according to the emotion that is chosen.

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BATHED IN LIGHT

Note: This article was published in Miracles magazine for the July – August issue (Jon Mundy, publisher).

by Celia Hales

“. . . [A]nd who can say that he prefers darkness and maintain he wants to see?” (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-25.VI.2:5)

“You stand at the precipice with a view of the new world glittering with all the beauty of heaven set off at just a little distance in a golden light.” (A Course of Love, P:16)

“. . .[B]e bathed in the Light of Reality yet again, seeing that God is what I am. I am God. You are God. Only that One exists. Only the ‘I’ that we share as the One exists.” (“The Way of Knowing,” in The Way of Mastery, Chapter 33)

God is seen in Light not of this world. We must allow ourselves to be bathed in the Light of Reality (as The Way of Mastery says), lost in illusions of the ego no longer (as A Course of Love says). We will then be creating the new world that ACOL encourages. We will see no longer this world we now occupy, for our projections will be different, making our perceptions different, for do we not know that projection makes perception? The current world is often not a place of joy, but the Light will break, and we will see anew, when Awakening (Christ-consciousness) is the experience of all who live here.

We can compare the Light of Reality to the light of this world we now occupy. I have long wanted bright light, especially bright sunlight. Crisp fall days with low humidity give me a new outlook, a prelude to Awakening. I think my Inner Self recognizes that real seeing is only in the light, never in darkness. And in my deepest heart I want real vision. So do all of us.

A Course in Miracles says that when one looks on the world with forgiving eyes, one sees “nothing in the world to fear.” (T-25.VI.1:2) Is this not the new world we will be creating? If we forgive others, we will form the holy relationships that will allow us to see well for the first time, for it is through our relationships that we will be born anew, living in Light not of this world. It is only in looking to the Light within that we know the appropriate response in our relationships. The Light within leads to the light without.

We are only able to see clearly what is without when we have first looked within. Only at that point does our external world appear clear, we know how to proceed, and we walk fearlessly into the sunlight.

Love which Kept Us Safe – and Happy – and Bound to Those We Love

“The desire to protect is a desire that arises from distrust and is based totally on fear. If there were no fear, what would there be to protect? Thus, all of your love—the love that you imagine you keep within yourself, and the love that you imagine you receive and give—is tainted by your fear and cannot be real love. It is because you remember love as that which kept you safe, that which kept you happy, that which bound all those you love to you, that you attempt to use love here. This is a real memory of creation that you have distorted.” (ACOL, C:9.3)

We are not able to use love to protect us, although we often try. The desire to protect ourselves is a fear-based motivation, one that can’t be what it tries to do, keep us safe. We are already safe; we don’t need anything extra to make ourselves so.

We have, Jesus says, a memory of love from eons ago (as the world judges time). Love at the beginning, before the illusory separation, kept us happy and kept together all whom we loved. Somehow, dimly, we remember this true event, and we want some of that same feeling now. We try to find it in fear that comes from distrust. If we didn’t think we were in danger, why would we think at all about being “protected”? We would know that there is nothing that we need protection from, and we would be at peace. So this desire is wholly fear-based. We do love a disservice when we attempt to “use” it at all. Love cannot be used, just as we would be wise not to use each other for our own ends. We are safe, we have always been safe, and sooner or later we will all realize our safety is a God-given gift.

When love is tainted by fear, it is not real love. Unfortunately, most of our love in this world is tainted by fear, and thus we need another way to view love. We need to realize that it is part of the long-ago memory of Oneness with God. Only our attempt to separate from God, with the concomitant rise of the ego, has kept us from real love. Let us decide today that we will be done with all of this foolishness. Ask to experience real love, remove our mind from attempts to use this love to protect your physical body, and see if a better day doesn’t dawn.

Our Feelings in Truth Come from Love

“Your feelings in truth come from love, your response to them is what is guided by fear. Even feelings of destruction and violence come from love. You are not bad, and you have no feelings that can be labeled so. Yet you are misguided concerning what your feelings mean and how they would bring love to you and you to love.” (ACOL, C:5.11)

Jesus forms a startling assertion about love and fear, one that we wouldn’t expect. He says that all of our feelings come from love, in essence because we are not “bad” (C:5.11). ACIM says that we have the “innocence of God” (T-III.17:2), and so Jesus is here asserting to the same thought. How our feelings of destruction and violence can come from love may remain nebulous to us, but Jesus believes that we have just misunderstood ourselves. We have been misguided about how to bring love to ourselves. So we have made wrong choices in our love, choices that gave us destruction and violence.

Do we not often noticed that nobody who is embroiled in violence and destruction thinks that he/she is at fault about anything that is bad? History is replete with wars that were fought in the name of God, believing that one is doing God’s will in the antagonism. This is one way of looking at love gone astray. This is one way to realize that fear has done nothing, that it is only our misperceptions about love and how it ought to be expressed that have done us in.

Our feelings are not bad, Jesus says. We only need to channel those feelings in the right direction, seeing love where it really is, avoiding feelings of destruction and violence, pain and suffering. Then we will find love’s fruits to be our chosen just desserts. We will have taken another step on love’s pathway. Another step toward Awakening/Christ-consciousness.

The Christ in Us Is Wholly Human & Wholly Divine

“The Christ in you is wholly human and wholly divine. . . .It is this joining of the human and divine that ushers in love’s presence, as all that caused you fear and pain falls away and you recognize again what love is.” (ACOL, C:5.1)
We are indeed blessed now! When we recognize the Christ in us, we are recognizing a joining the human and the divine. And in this joining, we are told, love reigns, “joining. . .ushers in love’s presence.” (ACOL, C:5.1)

All that has caused fear and pain drops away, and we finally recognize what love really is. This is the celebration, when we recognize the Self within, the Self no longer a captive of the ego.

The Christ in us is wholly human and wholly divine, not omniscient, of course, because of our humanness. We are ready to experience true reality in the fullness of the Christ-consciousness (Awakening) that now engulfs us. We may as yet have captured only glimpses of this Christ-consciousness. But the purpose of A Course of Love is to lead us to understandings that will cause the impediments in our psyche to drop away. Jesus wants us to reach Christ-consciousness. A consolidation of awakened individuals is the best hope that we have for a world in disarray, lost in pain and suffering, lost in conflict of one brother and sister against another. But God, we might add, is the omniscient Presence that makes the decision of when we are ready. Thus, there is an indecisive quality about Christ-consciousness and its coming that we can’t predict. Only the omniscient God of us all knows when any one of us is truly ready.

There are things that we can do. Things we must do. We must give up judgments, one of the other. We must give up fear (a biggie). We must give up attack and planning that is not the direct result of guidance. A Course of Love highlights the giving up of judgment and fear; A Course in Miracles highlights the giving up of attack, judgment, and unguided planning. These directives are meant to remove impediments to the coming of Christ-consciousness, and we can all recognize how difficult these directives will be if we don’t have divine help.

We do have divine help. We need only ask. The part of ourselves, the inner part, that is God, will respond. Angels will also come to our aid, for we are not all alone in the universe. Those of us who are in close contact with the Other Side will also come to recognize other entities that move to help us, though Jesus does not point this truth out, in so many words. Jesus has said that he is always with us, always guiding us by the hand. He is our rock, our salvation to a higher world in this world.

We do not have to die to enjoy the benefits of a higher presence directing our efforts.

How Could We Not Have Been Fearful with Doubt as Powerful as This?

“All fear ends when proof of your existence is established. All fear is based on your inability to recognize love and thus who you are and who God is. How could you not have been fearful with doubt as powerful as this? How can you not rejoice when doubt is gone and love fills all the space that doubt once occupied?” (ACOL, C:4.5)

We have often doubted God, and not just in our youth, when many of us became agnostics and atheists because the chronology of Genesis did not jive with evolution. We have doubted that there could be a Higher Power Who could hear our prayers. We wanted to be intellectually honest, but we didn’t listen to our hearts. Our hearts knew all along that we weren’t alone in a fearsome universe.

A Course of Love questions, “How could you not have been fearful with doubt as powerful as this?” (C:4.5). This lack of love that we felt when we were being intellectually “honest” is a reason to feel fear. What better reason could there be?

Now that most of believe in the Other Side, that channeling is possible and also probable, we are in a different place. Our doubts have subsided, but we still are living the remnants of too much fear. Fear has become a habit for us. And this has to change if we are to live full lives in a new world that we are seeking to create.

When we put away our doubt, we will make substantial progress. Just give the heart a chance to speak to you. You will not be disappointed. This may be the first indication that the Christ Self is coming into its own, in us, in all of us.

Love Is Not Something We Do; It Is What We Are

“You feel you are capable of loving acts of heroic proportions and fearful actions of horrific consequence, acts of bravery and acts of cowardice, acts of passion you call love and acts of passion you call violence. You feel unable to control the most extreme of these actions that arise from these extremes of feeling. Both ‘ends’ of feelings are considered dangerous and a middle ground is sought. It is said that one can love too much and too little but never enough. Love is not something you do. It is what you are. To continue to identify love incorrectly is to continue to be unable to identify your Self. (ACOL, C:2.6)

We know from the title of this book that being who we are is very important in A Course of Love. And what and who we are, are love. We sometimes see this love as passion, and that is not wrong, just incomplete. We have sometimes engaged in extreme forms of behavior due to our passion, and we have sometimes been fear-prone when we have been doing so. Pure love is not drama; we make a mistake in believing that it is. We think that if we love in an all-embracing way, we will be embroiled in a drama that will take us outside of ourselves.

Love is not something that we do. Instead, it something that we are. We won’t succeed in identifying our Self if we continue to think in terms of doing rather than being. And identifying our Self is what A Course in Love is all about. We are trying to establish a new identity, and the new identity is the source of our being one with God. We have left the illusory separation behind, and we are at one with God, no longer afraid of Him. We don’t have to fear a traumatic experience in those times that we approach God. Like A Course in Miracles says, we will instead have a beatific experience.

Sexual Behavior that Is Not of Love, Is of Fear

“There is only one distinction that need be made: what comes of love and what comes of fear. All expressions of love are of maximal benefit to everyone. While you may, for a while yet, not see that all that are not expressions of love are expressions of fear, I assure you this is the case. Thus any behavior, including sexual behavior that is not of love, is of fear. All that comes of fear is nothing. What this means is that cause and effect are not influenced by what comes of fear.” (T3:19.8)

So love is everything and fear is nothing. If behavior is not of love, Jesus says that this behavior is based in fear. He specifically mentions sexual behavior, and we know that much of our sexual lives have heretofore been more or less a “secret” from God. Not really, but we like to think so. Jesus brings this secrecy out into the open, letting us know that we are not getting away with anything. Our fearful sexual behavior, that is, our sexual behavior that is not love-centered, is actually nothing. It doesn’t amount to anything in any substantial way. It is just a lesser way to spend time.

We are encouraged to let our actions and our behaviors come out of love always. Then we will have no reason to regret. We will be home free in sexual behavior, in particular.

Love Is the Name We Give to Much We Fear

“Love is the name you give to much you fear. You think that it is possible to choose it as a means to buy your safety and security. You thus have defined love as a reaction to fear. This is why you can understand love as fear’s opposite. This is true enough. But because you have not properly recognized fear as nothing, you have not properly recognized love as everything. It is because of the attributes you have given fear that love has been given attributes. Only separate things have attributes and qualities that seem to complement or oppose. Love has no attributes, which is why it cannot be taught.” (ACOL, C:2.4)

We have confused love and fear, and in A Course of Love, we are told that love is everything, fear nothing. Love and fear are the two emotions, and love is fear’s opposite in every way. But understanding these points is not enough, for we have called “love” much that we actually fear.

This is most important to note in regard to special relationships, a topic of great interest in A Course in Miracles also. We actually find fear in our special relationships, the particular others that we seem to love better than other people in the world. These special relationships we fear to lose, for they seem to be everything to us. And this is where the fear is seen most strongly. Only when we have transformed the special into what Jesus calls “holy relationships” do we see our mistakes in making “special” anything in a relationship.

In A Course of Love, Jesus indicates that the time has come to give up our special relationships. They have never brought us anything that we truly wanted. They were flawed, borne of fear in a fear-ridden world. Holy relationships, though, are filled with true love. We know that regardless of how much a person might reject us, we will keep on loving. And love all we encounter, though not in physical or sexual terms, obviously. There is a place for discernment, still, in our relationships.

Lack = Fear

“All feelings of lack are synonymous with feelings of fear. Where there is fear, love is hidden. Love is rejected when a choice for fear is made. You cannot be without love, but you can reject love. When you reject love, it is hidden from you, because receiving completes giving. Each of your brothers and sisters are love inviolate. What each gives is incomplete until it is received.” (ACOL, C:25.5)

Loving each other, and giving and receiving as part of the same continuum, are mandatory in this world we hope to inhabit. If we are feeling in any way lacking in something that we need, we are in a fearful state that is best left behind. We have everything that we need, for our needs are met at the point that need is first recognized. The universe does provide; the only missing part might be that we don’t recognize that our needs are provided for. This would be a recognition of lack, and lack means that fear has the upper hand. Not something that we want; we don’t want to go there.

We are meant to share with each other in relationship one to the other. This naturally means that nobody will experience lack, for the giving and receiving that we do ensures that our needs are met.

Our brothers and sisters embody love. When this is all that we see in them, we will have walked a long way on the pathway back to God. We don’t need to see weaknesses and a sense of misplaced trust. These are egoic structures in others that are actually illusory.

All of us are strong in the Christ Self. And it is this strength that we draw on when we relinquish fear in favor of love.

Love or Lack of Love

“The heart of the body is the altar at which all your offerings to God are made. All offerings are love or lack of love. Lack of love is nothing. Thus, all offerings made from a place other than love are nothing. All offerings made from a place of fear or guilt are nothing.” (ACOL, C:1.2)

Our relationship to God undergoes a change when we read A Course of Love. He is no longer seen as Someone to Whom we pray for blessings, someone outside of ourselves Who hears our prayers. This type of supplication doesn’t work when we realize that God is within, that we are part of God. Our heart within the body is where our prayers properly reside. This is totally within ACOL’s emphasis on the heart as the center of our new being, the Self. If we are fearful or feeling guilty when we approach God in this way, we are sacrificing our best interests, for we need to approach our inner heart, the God within, in a spirit of love.

Love and fear, the same two emotions that we are considering, become pivotal here. If we approach God with fear, we don’t receive the whole blessing, for we are caught in our ego-mind. The Christ Self does not know fear, for this Self knows only love. And when we are in our right minds, joining mind and heart to form what ACOL calls “wholeheartedness,” we are living in love.

That is the only way to be, the only way to be who we are.

Two Choices

“The choice that lies before you now concerns what it is you would come to know. The question asked throughout this Course is if you are willing to make the choice to come to know your Self and God now. This is the same as being asked if you are willing to be the chosen of God. This is the same question that has been asked throughout the existence of time. Some have chosen to come to know themselves and God directly. Others have chosen to come to know themselves and God indirectly. These are the only two choices, the choices between truth and illusion, fear and love, unity and separation, now and later. What you must understand is that all choices will lead to knowledge of Self and God, as no choices are offered that are not such. All are chosen and so it could not be otherwise. But at the same time, it must be seen that your choice matters in time, even if all will make the same choice eventually.” (ACOL, T4:1.11)

We choose between love and fear always. And in the coming to know of our true Self, the inner Christ Self, we are choosing love. Many have made this choice throughout time, some directly to know God and some, directly, through the Holy Spirit. We are led to approach God through the Holy Spirit when we are too fearful to approach God more directly. This choice evolves at the conclusion of A Course in Miracles, the conclusion of the Workbook, as well as in A Course of Love. Love wins out, finally, and we no longer fear God. We are not traumatized by Him. We can go to Him, be heard, and come away with the softness of love experienced.

We are always choosing between truth and illusion, love and fear. Love is always the way of truth; fear is always the way of illusion. There are no other choices.

We who have been caught in illusion for eons do not really comprehend, in the beginning, what is being asked of us. We are being asked to turn aside from illusion in all its guises. And with this choice to turn aside from illusion, we know truth in the form of love always. We cannot, on our own, turn aside from illusions. In A Course in Miracles, our guidance—which we always need to follow—was seen as coming from the Holy Spirit. Now, Jesus says, we have left the time of the Holy Spirit, and we are in the time of Christ, and so our guidance will be perceived in a new and different way. The all-encompassing Christ Self, which engulfs all of us, is the means that we now are encouraged to address. We are encouraged to listen to this inner Christ Self, to follow the guidance that comes from within. It is important to realize that we may not actually feel much difference in where our guidance comes from. And that is not too important. We know when we are following guidance, just as we know when we are turning aside from it.

And happiness comes with the choice to follow guidance. In doing so, we are choosing truth in our daily lives. And we are choosing love.

To Separate or to Remain Whole

“You have been told there are but two emotions, love and fear. What this is really saying is that there are but two ways to respond to what you feel—with love or with fear. If you respond with fear you expel, project, and separate. If you respond with love you remain whole.” (ACOL, D:Day16.10)

What is the difference in reacting between these two emotions?

Fear is always separating, removing us farther from the sense of God’s Presence within us. Love allows us to be whole, at one with God, with others, and with ourselves.

When we are caught in the egoic fear that has engulfed us for so long, we project a fearful world. We project that which we believe to be true about our world. But this projection is all coming from within a fearful self-concept, and so this projection is really a nothing, dressed up in clothes that make it seem something important and right. But it is never right, and most of us are tired of the same old world of fear. We need a new attitude, a new projection, a projection of love. And this we can have, when we follow the guidance of Jesus in these examples of channeling.

So let us decide, once and for all, that we will respond to what we see with love. This decision changes everything for us. Not only do we forgive, but we see with the eyes of love. And our little world changes accordingly, for (as A Course in Miracles makes clear) projection makes perception.

Only Two Emotions

“You label love a feeling, and one of many. Yet you have been told there are but two from which you choose: love and fear. Because you have chosen fear so many times and labeled it so many things you no longer recognize it as fear. The same is true of love.” (ACOL, C:2.3)

We have been pretty mixed up. We have, all too often, confused fear with love, labeling them both two of many other feelings. But we learn from Jesus that there are only two emotions—love and fear—and that all other emotions are variants of these two.

This simplifies life for us. But how do we move away from fear, toward love?
We need help, and it is help that Jesus is giving us. We have confused fear and love, often making choices that gave us fear when we were seeking to experience love.

This dynamic is especially true in special relationships, those relationships in our lives in which certain other people are emblazoned, by our ego, with qualities that seem to set these people apart from all others. This is especially the case with romantic relationships, which nearly always start out as special. We think that he or she is the best thing that we have ever encountered, and we want to appropriate these good qualities to ourselves. We complete in the presence of the other. We feel joyous. And we feel a sense of grandeur that is perhaps as yet unparalleled in our experience in this world.

But such thoughts are actually a grandiosity. And these feelings do not last. Our special person is found to have feet of clay, and we fall away disillusioned—sometimes almost immediately, sometimes years later. And then we often turn away, for we feel that we have somehow been misled. We misconceived what was before. He/she was not “special” at all.

But that other really was special. The problem is that we didn’t realize that we needed to turn the special into the holy, something that Jesus counsels us about. Ultimately, he tells us that none of us is special, or, conversely, all of us are—for we are no different one from the other. (Only in time do we differ, and time does not really exist; we live in eternity only.) We need to make an end, as A Course of Love counsels, to the whole idea of special relationships. They will never bring us what we want. And in turning from the special to the holy, we will finally know genuine love for the first time.

The special relationship fosters fear, for we sense that we “need” this other person for our completion. And we fear, rightly, that he/she may not always be there for us.

Relationships are the primary way that we confuse fear and love. A particularly poignant way that actually holds great promise for us. But only when we take away the fearful aspects of our relationship to another. And it is hard indeed to do that, when we are new to Jesus’s channeled teachings.

A Course of Love counsels us that we must indeed give up special relationships, but also that we will not really lose anything—for special relationships are nothing, being borne of fear. We will transform these relationships with particular others into a holy experience, and then we will know true love for what it is.

We have not heretofore recognized that fear is predominant in many of our relationships. We have had our eyes blinded. But now we can come to know. We recognize that feeling uncertain in relationships fosters fear only, not love. And we want love, the real thing.

And we can have love.

Tension of Opposites

“As a separate being, you have been in a relationship with fear. This relationship with fear is all that has provided the ‘I’ of the separated self. But because you exist as an extension of love, you have always held within you the Christ, who is the relationship with love. This is why individuation has become the conflict between, or the tension of, opposites. Because you have relationship with both fear and love.” (D:Day40.22)

We need to have the fear fall away, but we are doomed from that prospect as long as the ego rules and separation from God rules. We are heading into a new dimension of our personhood, a Christ-consciousness that will mean that we occupy a physical form in this world, but our minds and hearts are elsewhere, in a new consciousness that means that we live very much in the present. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

For eons we have been in a relationship with fear, because we were governed by a false view of self that has come to be known as the “ego.” This relationship with fear meant that any pain was very likely to turn into suffering, and more pain, and disaster, even. To rescue us from this dismal situation, Jesus has channeled both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, the former to dislodge the ego, and the latter to establish a new identity. To establish a new peace.

We have never really snuffed out the Christ within. This is our true Self, the entity that is one with God, Who also dwells within. But our relationship with this false part of ourselves called the ego has meant that we couldn’t sense the Christ, and we couldn’t live well, and all in all we have been in a bad way. This is because we have been attached to fear rather than to love. And now is the time to remedy that.

Love and fear do not mix very well. Love is harmonious and kind, as we know, but love is not just an emotion. It is truly what we are, what we are meant to be. Fear, on the other hand, is the great pollutant of what we are. Because we bought into fear through the self ruled by the ego, we have never really stood a chance to be happy.

The ego gives but to take away. We have had flights of fragile joy, but egoic joy is never the real thing. And just as soon as we experienced one of these joyous flights, we were hurled downward, face on the ground, to a devastating sense of doom. It is clear that we can never enjoy peace of a lasting nature when this is the reality in which we live.

Is this not the way that we have experienced reality? But this is not genuine reality. Jesus is telling us now, in ACIM and ACOL, how to so live that we are in peace and happiness continually. If we heed his words, we will live in what is true reality. And we will have a calm peace that remains undisturbed by outward events in our physical and emotional world. We will truly have learned how to live.

And we will be who we truly are.

The Embrace

“To know who you are and not to express who you are with your full power is the result of fear. To know the safety and love of the embrace is to know no cause for fear, and thus to come into your true power. True power is the power of miracles.” (ACOL, C:20.28)

Seeing that we don’t express who we really are out of fear, let us contemplate what we might do to turn this situation around.

Jesus includes in A Course of Love a sensitively-written passage in which he takes us into his arms and embraces us. The passage exudes warmth, peace, and safety.
Here is the most cogent part:

“This is a call to move now into my embrace and let yourself be comforted. Let the tears fall and the weight of your shoulders rest upon mine. Let me cradle your head against my breast as I stroke your hair and assure you that it will be all right. Realize that this is the whole world, the universe, the all of all in whose embrace you literally exist. Feel the gentleness and the love. Drink in the safety and the rest. Close your eyes and begin to see with an imagination that is beyond thought and words.” (C:20.2)

This reassuring passage is emblematic of the tone of all A Course of Love, for ACOL looks to the heart, first of all, to entice us to give up the false values of the ego, the false identity to which we have clung for so long.

In letting this memorable passage fill our minds, we are led beyond the bounds of the fear-ridden ego. We will know that we want something different from what we have had all of our lives. We know that the enticement that Jesus represents is the true value of love, the way that we will come home to ourselves.

When we come home to ourselves, we will be fully powerful for the first time, and who among us does not want a right sort of power? The egoic power that we have known previously has given us flights of joy, but evermore it has dashed our feet on stones, and prompted tears of grievous regret. We can be finished with these tantalizing fits. We can stop sensing electric joy that dissolves into abject misery. Jesus is showing us the way out when he encourages us to be who we truly are.

When we don’t fear anything, in the embrace, we are primed to come into our real power. We are primed to be who we really are, in love with the whole world. And for this miracle, we need give up nothing! Nothing at all, for what the ego has given us has truly been nothing. The ego gives but to take away. And, even the giving is time-bound to be of short duration. The “gifts” of the ego don’t satisfy very long at all. Then we are off to a new goal. And, ultimately, what we have accumulated becomes ash and dust at our feet. No joy in the “everything” at all, for the everything is not enough. “Is this all there is?” becomes a legitimate question for the vast majority of us. And that is because we are looking for love in all the wrong places.

The best place to look for love is within the miracle. Both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love say a great deal about the power of miracles. We aren’t to decide personally what miracles ought to be done, because we would be misguided if that were our attitude. Jesus makes clear that he decides when and if a miracle is timely, because he is in charge of the Atonement. But when we ask for something, such as love and the centrality of love in our life, we can be sure that Jesus is right there with us, cheering us along. We can’t know how the miracle will happen, only that it will. We are asking in God’s will for the relinquishment of fear and the shift to love in all our dealings. Prayers such as these do not go unattended.

The power of miracles is said in A Course of Love to be the true power. Would any of us want any other power? We need and want to be reverent in our asking, supportive of whatever guidance we get. We don’t need to launch into pipe dreams that become meaningless. With the attraction of true power in our minds and hearts, we will know Love sooner rather than later. And the fear that has hampered all our doings for many years will gradually fall away.

A Course in Miracles Sets the Stage

“The further teachings of the original Course were designed to turn fear into love. When you think you can go only so far and no further in your acceptance of the teachings of the course and the truth of your Self as God created you, you are abdicating love to fear.” (ACOL, P11)

Many come to A Course of Love from A Course in Miracles. And Jesus has made clear that A Course of Love is a continuation of A Course in Miracles. Here we find the continuity that Jesus wanted. Here he expresses this continuity in terms of love and fear.

We are told, in no uncertain terms, that when we feel that we cannot fully accept A Course in Miracles (and, by implication, A Course of Love), we are “abdicating love to fear.” (ACOL, P11) We think we don’t know how to live a life fully in love; we don’t dare let go of fear.

What is this but the ego talking to us? It is nothing but: It is pure ego.
We have such a problem in letting go of the fear-ridden ego in favor of the heart-felt place of our love. We think, wrongly, that the ego has protected us from unnamed disasters—when it is actually just the reverse. We are abject cowards in the fact of the loud voice of the ego that we hear shouting to us to be careful.

We think that if we don’t heed these shrieking sounds, we will be lost. But it is actually the reverse. We will be lost in a hell of our making by refusing to listen to the still small voice that whispers of Love.

So let us take a look at what we are really meant to be, the person that Jesus sees in us. The person who chooses love over fear, consistently.

Choose Love – Not Fear

Note: I am going to move to a consideration of love and fear as presented by A Course of Love, with some inclusion of A Course in Miracles. I will return to The Way of Mastery later on. – Celia

—

“All feelings you label joyous or compassionate are of love. All feelings you label painful or angry are of fear. This is all there is. This is the world you make. Love or fear is your reality by your choice. A choice for love creates love. A choice for fear creates fear. What choice do you think has been made to create the world you call your home?” (ACOL, C:1.180)

So we are off on an adventure, a decision to shed fear for the much better value of love. The question in the quotation begs itself, for we know that previously all of us, encrusted with an ego that is destructive and violent, have chosen fear as our guide to walking through this world. We don’t have to make this choice anymore. There is another way, outlined in A Course of Love, scribed by Mari Perron, just as Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford chose another way that way culminated in A Course in Miracles.

We want our reality to be love, whether or not we are thinking about this all the time. We often make decisions that are steeped in fear, thinking that we are making a choice for love. Our special relationships are the most obvious example of this dynamic. We find a “special” someone, we fall “in love,” we think that we cannot live without this lovely thing—for the person has become a “thing” to us. We want to possess the other individual for ourselves, but we are fearful about losing this precious object. What do we do now? How do we find a way out of fearing and loving, seemingly at the same time?

This is the dilemma of our world. And , in taking a look, directly, at love and fear, we will be directed to a new and different, never way tried by ourselves before. It is a fabulous journey without distance to a goal that has been ours for eons.

We just didn’t know it before.

Conflict

“Many of you believe you are on a spiritual path. You will know if that is true by your willingness to feel and experience wholly exactly what is in front of you, moment to moment. So if you have a conflict with another and you sit in your chair and decide to pray or meditate in order to change the feeling state within yourself, and you arise later and say, ‘There, I’m feeling much better now,’ but the issue has not been solved with another, nothing has changed.

“Go, therefore, to the other. Open your heart, share, and resolve. If you have offended another, ask them their forgiveness. If you have judged another, admit it. Ask for their forgiveness. It is only in such a way that you can truly heal the place of conflict within.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 80)

When we have a misunderstanding with one of our brothers and sisters, we probably don’t want to hear Jesus tell us that we ought to resolve the issue by going to that person and clearing up the conflict. But this is biblical advice also. We need to find within ourselves the wherewithal to confront, in Love, and thereby turn the experience into Love for both of us. There is no other way for full resolution. There is no other way that our meditation and prayers can truly sink into our minds and hearts.

Jesus and the Holy Spirit often ask us to do something that seems unwise to us. We are afraid of how we will be received. We are going to be embarrassed. But Jesus says in A Course in Miracles that this perception comes from a shabby self-image, and we would be done with that.

If there is somebody you feel that you have wronged, meditate and pray to know how to approach that person. Being in our closet with prayer can help tell us what to say, how to act. Prayer and meditation can determine our resolve.

Only if approaching the other is now impossible do we seek redress in our thoughts, our deep thoughts. Psychically the other will know our intentions, will know that we are seeking forgiveness on another level.

Don’t confuse ourselves about this. There may be times that we say the confrontation, the reconciliation, is impossible, when actually it is very possible indeed.

Discern the difference.

Living in Love

As of this date on your calendar, there have only been a handful of beings who have truly lived life upon this lane, a very small handful. There are many of us that would just absolutely be thrilled if you would join the club!

I will let you in on a little secret: Until you do, you do not get to graduate. You will never leave this plane, filled with conflict and suffering, as it seems to be, until you have lived the experience of walking this Earth wholly as the thought of Love in form, with no other allegiances, but to Love. You will never leave this plane. You will never take up your cross and follow me. You will spin around again and again and again, only to be confronted by the same need to decide wholly for Love. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 79 – 80)

Jesus is here telling it like it is. We don’t “get to graduate” until we know how to live. We will stay on this plane, this earth, going around and around, often in misery and suffering, if we don’t learn to live in Love. On this plane forgiveness is all. Forgiveness will show us how to love. Only forgiveness.

Nobody else has done it to us. We have done it to ourselves, for we are manifesting our illusions, illusions that keep us tied to an existence that is not worthy of us.

Life is meant to be full of great joy, great blessings. Our only reason for being here is salvation, making the choice for Love.

Decide that real life is what we want. Decide today. Real life means that we remove the blocks to the awareness of Love, and a prime way to do that is to forgive.

We will “graduate” when our purpose here has been fulfilled. That may be a long way off, but if we live in Love here, we can enjoy heaven on earth. Truly. Completely.

There is no better way to live a life.

Forgive and Be Free

Until you fully decide to come into life as the presence of Christ, as the presence of Love, and to own each moment of your experience as wholly self-created, for no other reason than that you have chosen it from the perfect and infinite freedom of your unlimited being, life has not yet begun. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 79)

Have we truly been living? Or have we merely been existing? This is not an unimportant point. We have been creating our reality, and we haven’t known how to do that very well. We have often seen ourselves as victims of others, as victims of our experience in life.

This attitude is not accurate. We have been making the decisions that brought our experiences in life to us. We have been doing the manifesting. Just because we didn’t know how to do this very well is no reason to blame anybody else, to blame others. It has all been our fault.

Now Jesus is showing us the way to manifest, to truly own each self-created moment. He is teaching us how to live. We will not truly live until we know what we are about. Until we stop blaming others for our plight in life.

We are the instigators, the manifesting entities. We need to look with fresh eyes upon our experiences, knowing that in forgiveness of others lies our reward. They have not done anything, for they have acted in innocence, in illusion. True reality has not been affected. The harmony, joy, peace, mellowness are still here for us to dwell in. But to get to that height of passion, we need to recognize that our brothers and sisters have done nothing to us, in reality; they have just been pawns in a larger game.

Forgive our experiences and the people who seemed to perpetrate them. Forgive and thereby be free.

Listen to Our Heart

Deny not the role of feeling in this dimension, for feeling is everything! (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 78)

Jesus indicates that we have been thinking too much, that feeling is the manner of reaching God, our feeling self is all that it takes. When we are trying to remove the barriers to Love, it is through our feelings that we will discover whether or not we have been successful. Only our feelings can tell us that.

This is something we can know well. If we sense, through feelings, that we are making headway in removing the blocks to the awareness of love (as this is stated in A Course of Love), then we will be able to make adjustments if the feeling doesn’t “feel” right. We will know that we are not making headway.

That is all that is necessary. Get in touch with our heart. Our heart is where the feelings reside. And our mind will never be smart enough to understand these things. Our intellect won’t do it for us.

Listen to our heart as we seek to determine if we are removing barriers to love.

Just listen to our heart.

Freedom

. . .[W]hen you look upon another person or another situation or another thing and realize that nothing in this world has the power to hurt you and nothing in this world has the power to take anything from you, you are free. . . The seeker is no more and only Christ walks this Earth. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 78)

What would it take for our Self, as the Christ Self, to walk this earth? We do have to release barriers, within ourselves, to Love. We have to let Love pass through us. Our experience of energy, through the chakras, changes. We realize in such moments that nothing in the world can hurt us, for we are enthralled by God. He is calling the shots. He is in charge.

We are free when we extend the Love that He has first given to us. We would not know how to love if we had not first experienced it from God Himself. “Because He first loved us,” which is a quotation from the New Testament. We can do all things now, because we are ready for living as created beings created to love. We are free to experience the world in a new way. Jesus even says that we have transcended birth and death, and that we seek no more.

Seeking is a constant thing for us, until we recognize that Love is all that we want. When we surrender to the Love in our heart, we are surrendering to God. A necessary step that will make everything that follows palatable. Our lives will smooth out.

We will be at home.

Let Love Live through Us

The Truth is very simple. It is not complex at all. Get out of the way, and let Love live through you. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 77)

How do we get out of the way, and let Love, let God, live through us? This takes a humble mind and heart. A sense of surrender, knowing that when we cast our cares on Him, He will keep us safe. If we let fear intrude, we have let the patterns of the ego intrude—even if the ego, proper, has been vanquished from our being.

We need just to rest in the assurance that all that we need for daily living will come to us, a gift of God. It does now mean, of course, that we do nothing.

Believing this would be a belief in magic, and a testing of God. But every busy doing on which we are sent will seem easy. Effortlessness will reign. And we will be happy.

This is how life is meant to be lived. This is how we live the Truth. The Truth will dawn suddenly upon the prepared heart. And the heart is prepared when we turn our affairs over to a Higher Power, turn our affairs over to God. He wants to show us how to work, how to live. The effortlessness by which all things come to us is simple indeed, not complex.

We are making the decision to let go and let God.

And this makes all the difference.

Parting in Relationships

If a twinge of sadness arises because you recognize that two bodies in space are now going to go to separate parts of the planet, as that twinge arises, you will recognize it as the effect of a mistaken perception. You will move within, to the place in which all minds are joined. You will remember that your fulfillment does not rest in gaining love from another, but in giving Love to everyone. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 77)

Parting from significant others is painful. But there is a way that we accept whatever comes. There is a way that we can wish these significant others godspeed, and send them along their way. How might that be?

We need to know that we don’t gain love from others. We gain love from deep within ourselves, where God dwells. This is truly all we need to know, but perhaps we don’t understand what it means. Our fulfillment comes from giving love, for we have first received it from God Himself. If the person or persons to whom we give our love changes, we need to realize that the change happened for a reason. Often it is because our vibration changed. We were no longer on the same wavelength as the significant other.

Knowing this takes acceptance. We don’t easily give up the ones we have loved. But sometimes life asks this of us, and when we acquiesce, we listen to God’s guidance, and we are satisfied. We know that there is a larger plan at work.

Ask to see that larger plan today. Shrouded in mystery, we often have to turn to our faith to be reassured. But glimpses of reasons will come to us, for God does not keep secrets from His children. It is only our finiteness that prevents, sometimes, the whole truth from dawning on our minds.

Love

All you need is Love. Love fulfills all things. Love heals all things. Love transforms all things. Therefore, remember well: You, and only you, can become the cause of your fulfillment, your peace, and your completion of time. This requires that you do nothing save remember to establish the connection with your Creator. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 75)

We can wander around, willy- nilly, feeling unfulfilled, or we can remember to reconnect with our Creator, with God, often during the day. I know from experience that attempts to “feel good” by positive thinking won’t do it. The connection with God is the only thing—the only thing—that ensures a good day. When we fail to spend time with God, we fail ourselves. Only when we have received an infusion of Love from our Source, often, will we feel good constantly. Love is the only way.
“Love fulfills all things.”

Yes! This quotation from Jesus says it all.

All too often we think that this is the same old answer that we have heard, and we dismiss it. This is a grave mistake! Why seek to reinvent the wheel, when Jesus has walked the journey before us. The fact that he reconnected with God is the assurance that we can and will do so also. But time wears on wearily, and the world is sad and sometimes frightful.

When we surrender to the Love that is found in our hearts, the world takes on a new aspect. We no longer fear what we will encounter on any given day. We are at peace. And we feel fulfilled in our daily walk.

Let Love lead the way today. Let Love lead the way everyday.

Bliss

When you have experienced in relationship with anyone or anything a moment of bliss, a moment of a peace that forever passes all understanding, a moment of fulfillment so sweet and so sublime that no word could touch it, much less express it, what you have experienced is on the flow of the Love of God through you. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 75)

God is living through us, and so when we experience this bliss, of the Love of God flowing through us, He is actually acting, in Love. This is the way that we are meant to live, conscious of Love, conscious of God. The external has not caused this bliss; it is all internal. So we don’t have to think that we “need” the person who seems to be the instigator of our sense of Love. God is our sense of Love. The external person has just been the catalyst.

This sense of Love streaming through us will not only be bliss, it will be an example of the peace that passeth understanding. And we will feel fulfilled in that moment of bliss and peace. Our dissatisfactions with life will seem far away and very insignificant. We are at home in God in such moments.

These moments won’t last, at least not at the same sublime feeling. We have momentarily stepped out of our illusion and out of our dramas. But when we return to what we think of as everyday life, we will remember what we experienced. We will want this experience again. And we can have it. This has been a glimpse of Christ-consciousness, of enlightenment, of Awakening, and our road ahead will be easier—for we know what is possible.

We may not always live at such heights of bliss, but knowing what is possible will act as hope for us.

A Quiet Heart

Fear is the act of disconnecting your cord from the only socket that can truly satisfy you, and running about trying to plug it in to somebody else’s or something else’s. I would ask you to consider this one question, as you look upon the whole of your experience: Has it ever worked? Can it ever work? (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 74)

The only “socket” that can ever satisfy is our attachment, in the center of our being, our heart, to God Himself. We have long known this, but we “forget,” and have to be told again. We must quiet our minds and hearts in order to sense God’s presence, in order to feel His warmth. If we are trapped in a drama of fear and judgment, we are cutting ourselves off from the power that is in that “socket.”

Because God is within, as well as without—in just everything and everybody—He is unable to get through to us when we are in dire conflict. This is why the peace that passeth understanding is so important. A quiet heart opens the way to get God’s knowledge flowing into our personal, or “little,” mind.

If we look outside ourselves for peace, we will never find it dependably. Sure, we may be able to distract ourselves for a time, but the problem will recur, and maybe it will recur with greater force than previously. We are free of fear and judgment when we declare them to be in our past.

God helps us make that determination. And to make that determination, we must look within. Trying to find an answer in the outer world is an incomplete answer. The truest Answer wells up from deep within our soul, and it takes us Home to God right away, seeing a little bit of Heaven here on earth.

Heaven Blesses Us with Peace

Having free will does not mean that you can elect to take the only curriculum that life is offering you in every moment. It means only that you do have the right to put it off yet another day. And each time you put it off, you slumber in your suffering. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 73)

We would “slumber” in our suffering if we put off confronting God with every fiber of our being. We need to be fearless as we approach living in this world. How might we effect this?

We look to living in the present, not putting off the eternal questions of Love, peace, joy, harmony. When we are rooted in the moment of the present, there is no fear. And fearlessness is the primary characteristic of mastery. When we make the decision to stop entertaining our own dark places, when we ask Heaven to bless us with peace, we are making a decision that will change the content of our days. We are coming Home to God. We will eventually be approaching mastery.

When the day goes badly, and our heart is pounding, our bodies jittery, what then?

This is fear personified. The best that we can do is to turn within, to the peace that is always present inside. Know that this peace is not far away, because God would comfort His children when we ask. We need simply to rest in the knowledge—
and it is knowledge, not perception—that outside of our jittery bodies is a truth that is currently eluding us. We allow God to act upon our confusion. We allow Him to grant us peace.

Enough times of simply turning away from fear will do the trick. Enough times of allowing God to touch us with His healing balm will promote the fearlessness that we all want.

If we are distraught today, know that there is a better way. Know that God is trying to get through our tangled emotions. Quieten down, in any of the ways that we have used previously—meditation, prayer, quiet reading, even distraction.

We will know God’s peace, because He wishes it for us. He wishes it for us just all the time.

Finding God

When you choose to surrender, to give up the game, to give up the dream of trying to resist the Truth that is true about you always, you will become a mere channel, a mere conduit. You will become no more a seeker, for you will have decided to have found. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 72)

We do not want to remain seekers forever; we want to find. When we open ourselves to the God within, we put ourselves in a place where we can declare that we have found. And this is very sweet indeed. Much of our reading has been seeking behavior. We have wandered in and out of treatises, ancient advice, channeled writing. This has not been wrong; we had to find something that would speak to our hearts. But if we don’t want to remain seekers forever, never to find, we must start listening to our own hearts, sans the advice.

God speaks to each of us, just all the time. His way is clear, when we get out subconscious fears and judgments set aside.

Set aside fear and judgment today. Let God know that we are serious about listening to Him. Not that we will never read again, but that we will bring our own insight to the table. Then our reading can really speak to us.

Resting in God

At times, within your hearts, there is a longing to follow me. If you would but heed that longing, if you would make that longing primary at all times, your own desire will bring you wholly to where I am. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 71)

We are all—every one of us—residing in the Mind of God. Our longing to follow Jesus to where he is, is a laudable desire, but the way we think of it is a little misdirected. He is in that Mind of God also! Of course, we imagine that he has moved a little bit beyond us, and indeed he has. But our locus of operation, where our lives originate, in the Mind of God, is exactly the same.

So we have not moved an inch when we have come to where Jesus is, and he indicates elsewhere that we will laugh when we realize this. Jesus’ sense of humor is palpable. And he uses it to good effect in The Way of Mastery.

We don’t have to go anywhere to experience God. We are everywhere and in every way surrounded by Him, for He lives through us. We are part of Him. And He experiences right along with us.

Trust in the Mind of God to give us the grace to know that all is well. Jesus tells us not to be afraid about anything at all. If our trust seems weak, then we need to expand our love, and the trust will follow.

Friend in Jesus

There is no one who shall receive these words who has not already looked upon me and seen the face of Christ within. And likewise, I look upon you and call you ‘friend.’” (“The Way of the Heart, WOM, Lesson 6, Page 70)

Jesus is coming close to us today, in these words that will comfort our heart, in the quotation for today. He knows that we have need of him. He would not allow us to lean on him forever, for he will finally resign from being our teacher. But until our guidance is sure, he will allow us to ask him for what would work best.
Jesus does not want our love for him to breed dependence. He wants us to depend only upon our God, personal relationship to the Almighty that all of us have when we reach down deeper, within. We have the will to reach God when we are not afraid of Him. And, as Jesus, we call God a “Friend.”

Know that Jesus comes upon a single unequivocal call. He promises this in A Course in Miracles. If the need seems dire, call today. And be sure to say a silent “thank you” when he blesses us, graces us, with his presence.

Friendship is a two-way street. Be sure that we are good friends to Jesus, too.

Don’t let him try to forge the relationship out of whole cloth.

A Gentle Voice

“Peace then, be with you always. Let peace pervade your being at all times. Know that you are safe in the Love of God that arises from that great Source of mystery and would move through you with every breath you breathe and every word you speak, until you hear only that impetus of guidance that wells up from the depth of your being as a gentle voice that you trust completely. And you will know the freedom that you seek.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 69)

We are always needing guidance, and especially when we think that we are on the right pathway. We fool ourselves, and we think that we can do it ourselves now.

This is never true. We always need the guidance of the Holy Spirit, or the Christ Self. We are never so smart that we can forge our own way through the thicket that surrounds us. For in this world, there are many temptations, many erroneous ideas that will ensnare us.

Ask today. Just ask.

And the Way will unfold for us, bounteously.

Bliss Calls to Us

Surrender is the cultivation of the recognition that your happiness can be found only in the submission of your will to the will of God. For your will has been in conflict and struggle and limitation. God’s will is that you live without conflict, in peace, joy, fulfillment and happiness. It is called bliss. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 68)

Why is surrender necessary? I have long known that it is, but the why has not been clear. Now I think it is. Only in surrender to God do we start living in constructive ways. Our little, personal, finite minds have not known where to turn when we try to take things in our own hands. We flounder, we make many mistakes, we aren’t happy.

Our will and the will of God are actually identical, for we want what we make us happy and allow us to make a contribution in this difficult world in which we live. We want to see others happy as well, and we would like to do something to effect that. Salvation is our business, our only true business. And when we turn to God, in abject surrender, He takes us by the hand and leads us out of our quandaries.

We live in a freer fashion, for our non-surrendered will has been imprisoned. God could not let His universes self-destruct, and our power is such that perhaps this could happen if He allowed it.

Surrender repeatedly, for this is necessary. We walk away from time to time, read things that confuse us, fail to follow guidance that comes to us unbidden, and even bidden.

Our way home to God includes surrender to His will and way. There is no other way to make the changes in our lives that need to be made.

No other way at all.

Nothing Is Happening by Accident

. . .[N]othing is happening by accident. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 68)

We can experience God when we allow Him to dwell, observed, in our very bodies. Of course, he (and we) are not truly bodies. But in this world of form, we experience that, and it is all good. Allowance opens the door to God’s action in our lives. It is the best thing that we have going for ourselves.

Elsewhere in the Way of Mastery, Jesus says that allowance is one of the keys to good living. It gives us salvation, the ultimate salvation of Awakening (Christ-consciousness). Allowing things to influence us is a matter of some faith, at least in the beginning, before we believe concretely that there is Another World, a place beyond us to which we go at death. Then we do not have to have faith, because we “know.” Jung said the same thing a few years before his death.

When we know of God’s reality, then our allowance for Him has taken hold.

Then we are living lives of growing joy and abundance.

Let us allow God to have His way with us. Let us let Him take the controls.

Following the Spirit

From my “ponder” series. . .

I don’t know when I encountered the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It must have been a quiet experience. I do know that when I was working as a media coordinator in the public schools in North Carolina, I went about my duties in the library with one ear tuned to what I was feeling. The Holy Spirit talked to me through my feelings. Sometimes it seemed that I was even prompting to turn left or right at a given time, not sure what I would see when I turned.

It was all a bit unnerving. My preacher had previously told me that Holy Spirit doesn’t tell you whether to turn left or right at a stop light, but my experience was different. To me, guidance spoke in particular ways in my everyday life.
Things went along well when I tuned in. The “feelings” were somewhat different from what I would term “intuition.” Intuition can be a “knowing,” and the nudges I got were not a knowing, because I didn’t understand what would transpire when I made a move in the direction prompted.

My Unconscious mind, where I think the Holy Spirit resides, must have been very close to the surface during that early period of learning how to listen. And the listening continued for long years, culminating now in a sense of knowing. I don’t get those indications of whether to turn right or left.

Is something missing, or am I just following guidance another way?

Ask to Do the Best of Which We Are Capable

The Holy Spirit can gather millions of beings to come to you in many planes, because it knows you will not distort the Love of God by usurping God’s position and putting yourself upon the throne. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 66)

We need to give God His due. We are not living alone in this world; we have Him backing us up, living through us. And this is always true, though we make mistakes that are not of God’s origin in the narrowest sense. We are living as finite gods, and so we do make mistakes. Ask the ultimate Authority to heal us of these mistakes. Ask to live, in peace, in His world.

If we sense that many people are looking in on our world, perhaps this is not paranoid. We live in glass houses, and the unseen world can spy on us. This has always been going on, but it may disconcert us if we are just coming to realize it. But near this passage Jesus is telling us just that. He is telling us that we can be an example for untold “millions.” Let this not go to our head, but let us sense the responsibility of it all.

Ask to be a good example to the disembodied souls who look in on us. Ask to do the very best that we can in this false world, where illusions reign, and the world is not truly real. We can make it real, in our estimate of it. And it certainly does seem real when we knock on wood.

Ask to do the best of which we are capable.

We can do no more.

Mysteries

The world would teach you to be a doormat so that you fit in and do not ruffle anybody’s feathers. But as you become empowered, one way you will know that it is occurring is that some people will not like you. You will push their buttons just by walking into the room, for darkness abhors light. It is that simple. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 66)

If we find ourselves rejected by the world, or even by a few individuals in our world, let us rest easy. There is a bigger reason for this. It may, of course, be our fault, and we can ask to have this remedied by God. But it may be that we, by just who we are, are pushing others’ buttons. And that is not our fault.

What a revealing group of statements by Jesus! I had thought that if people didn’t like me, it was just bad karma. Something had happened in a past I could not remember that was affecting relationships today.

And this may be the case. This may be the case when we push others’ buttons. Their souls are remembering when maybe we did them wrong, and they turn from us as a reaction from further hurt.

We do the same. We may find ourselves unaccountably nervous around certain people, and we do or say things that hinders the good relationship. We may be remembering when that person was not good for us. And maybe that person is not good for us now.

There are mysteries in the world that surrounds us. Let us put the best face that we can on this world.

And then let it go.

Now We Know What Love Is

No matter how deep you go into the depth of God, and no matter how deep you achieve an awareness and consciousness of union with God, what God is remains forever beyond your growing capacity to understand God. It is like an ocean of infinite depth. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 64 – 65)

We will never, if we visit a thousand worlds, know God completely. His Godhead is the All, and we can know, intuitively, only facets of His personality. He shares with us, but the sharing is not a sharing of equals. We are creations of the Creator. It is true that we are a part of Him, in that he differentiated His essence to form entities without number, an infinite number. The magnitude invites humility in us. Knowing that we are God, but we are not all that God is, can give us a realistic estimate of ourselves.

We are growing in understanding. Not so long ago, most men and women of faith believed that God stood apart from His handiwork, that we (and the earth) were His handiwork, and that the distance between ourselves and our God was so great as to be unreachable. Now we know that we can have a direct knowledge of God, and this knowledge is known to us because in the age of Christ we are not so afraid of Him. His magnitude, when we were sinners caught by the ego (read “Devil”) was beyond us. We needed a Comforter to bridge the distance, and that Comforter was the Holy Spirit. Now we know that this, a holy spirit, is a part of us, and we no longer quake in our boots at the thought of approaching His majesty as just our humble selves. We know what love is, and we sense that we are loved just as we are, mistakes and all. It is awe-inspiring. And humbling at the same time.

Let God talk to you today. He is in the silence of our meditations. He will comfort our aching minds with wisdom of our hearts.

Let the heart tell us this today.

Let God Act in Gentleness in Our Very Souls

I and I alone am the source of what I experience and perceive. I am not a victim of the world I see. Everything I experience, I have called to myself, plain and simple—no excuses, no ifs, ands, or buts. That is the way it is.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 64)

We are one with Jesus, as we are one with all other beings in our world. We are responsible for this “pebble” (Jesus’ word) called “earth.” There is one Self only, and this Self is a manifestation of God, insane though we have been in manifesting Him. He is not insane, and so we could not fully experience God in our illusory separation from Him. But we have never been victims. We did just what we wanted. We thought it smart to develop a worldview that left God out, and in the doing of it, we suffered mightily. Our suffering was chosen by our souls to lead us back to knowledge that what we were about would never work.

God was not punitive. He just had to have universes that were based in Love in order to keep that Creation from self-destructing. We didn’t know this, for our finite minds could not contain the ramifications of this in our delusions. We projected the ego as the Devil, and we imagined a cosmic war going on. This has never been, but we didn’t have, in separation, a certain way of knowing the truth.

Now we do. We live in the time of Christ, and certain things that have been hidden until are now, now are out in the open. Our way back is seen as the smooth path that it is. We need fret, worry, suffer, be in pain, no more. Our Self, seen as individuated entities apart from each other, will gradually return to the fold, knowing that suffering is unnecessary. We will let God have His way with us, learning through rewards, a way that is vastly superior to pain.

Jesus says in A Course in Miracles that it is not necessary to learn through pain. Believe him, and watch the agonies of this world recede.

Let God act in gentleness in our very souls, and our way will be smoothed for all time.

It Is in God’s Hands

. . .[Y]ou suddenly realize you are not the maker and doer, that you can accept responsibility for anything and everything because through you all power under Heaven and Earth is made to flow, to manifest the Love of God. So, in short, it is in God’s hands, not yours. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 63)

We are not the doers, at least not in our personality. The Doer is God Himself, Who dwells deep within each of us as One. We are, of course, One, being part of the one Self Who is manifested in the world. That’s why harm to another actually harms the self, for there are not two, but one.

The world is meant to manifest God’s Love, and it is only in our desire to see if we could create something better than He that we wandered away into separation from Him. It was never so, but we were free to be lost in the illusion that it was the truth.

Now we know better. Our separation from God was only in dreams of illusion, dreams that have played out on the stage of this world, and perhaps others. We have never left God’s bosom, and when we allow His Love to encompass us again, we will be very close to enlightenment, a stage of life, coming to all of us, that will make manifest in our world the truth that Love is the All, the Everything. God, as we know, is Love, though to think of love as an emotion is to miss the point. Love is a fact, a reality, a truth, that permeates the whole, and now we know this in our inmost being.

The eons have passed in which we walked in a fog. Now time is fleeting, and we are all passing into the knowledge of God, past perception. Now we know what was only a shadow heretofore.

Now we know. What are we to do with this knowledge? That is the only question left to answer. Let intuition rise to the surface, and that secret, too, will be revealed.

Allow God’s Gentle Direction

You come to see that you cannot think a thought without disturbing the farthest of stars. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 63)

Our thoughts contain worlds, and influence worlds. We have not believed this truth, not because it is so unbelievable, but because we feared the ramifications. If we know this, ought not we to do something major with our lives? Ought we to realize that we can affect the very course of history?

We are not powerless, but very powerful. And as bits of foam on the tips of waves in the ocean which is God, we will grow in grace as we realize how powerful we really are. When we allow God’s direction to manifest in our lives, we will accomplish much that would have seemed impossible previously. Of course, we won’t know how strong our influence really is, and perhaps this is wise, for the ego might try to win back our allegiance by guile. The ego is very cunning, and its patterns are still a part of our mind. The farther away we can run from these patterns of the ego, the better off we will be. And the greater our influence really will turn out to be.

Ask for guidance, for we do not want to harm anybody with our thoughts and feelings. We don’t want to adversely affect anything, and if we allow God’s gentle direction, we will not cause ripples in the ocean that is our home in God. We will know His magnitude, and this magnitude will erase the cunning of the ego in its false majesty.

Subconscious Cleansed from the Bottom Up

. . .[Y]our life is no longer your own to dictate and control. But that rather, you have given it over the Source of your own beingness, to that depth of wisdom in the depth of the ocean that knows best how to bring about what is required to push up the dross from within your consciousness, so that you can release it.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 62)

We are becoming enlightened by a process by which the subconscious is cleansed from the bottom up. We don’t try to dictate how this will come about. Our part is simply to allow it to happen by not focusing on the wishes of the dying ego. Allowance is the way that Jeshua (Jesus) moved Jayem to enlightenment, as described in The Jeshua Letters. His own conscious willingness to let go in surrender was all that was needed, for his own subconscious had been largely cleansed by the time that Jesus approached him, perhaps through the Eastern wisdom that he had read voraciously for years.

Likewise, allowance is our way, too. If we try to remain in the driver’s seat, we will miss the point as well as miss enlightenment, Awakening, Christ-consciousness.

God must be allowed to have His way with us, and in this ultimate surrender, He blesses us with the knowledge of His love and His guidance. Our pathway will be as clear as our next step, for we see the pathway only step by step. But we have said “yes” to the whole route, and in so doing, we have fallen into Jesus’ arms. His embrace, as described in A Course of Love, heals. And it is this embrace that contains the whole universe(s).

Abundance

You have chosen what your experience will be and you have manifested it. There is nothing new about that. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 61)

We have always manifested, though the world has been slow to recognize this.

Manifestation, or the law of attraction, has gotten popular acclaim only in the work of Rhonda Byrne, author of the film and book, The Secret. She traces the roots of the law of attraction, also known as the law of love, back generations. Some earlier folks did not want the masses of people to realize how powerful their thoughts and feelings were, and only a few were knowledgeable. Now this has changed, a groundswell of change that is identified particularly in Jesus’ The Way of Mastery (The Christ Mind Trilogy), the third book, The Way of Knowing.

Now the truth of our thoughts and feelings and their manifestation is becoming common knowledge. We might think that we have discovered something magnificent, but we have been doing it all along, as Jesus tells us in this quotation. We have not been directive about it, though, and now many people are being directive. We miss the point if we dwell on the material, because material blessings are often wanted by our ego, and we are trying to let the ego pass away from us. Abundance is a vital part of God’s plan for us, and His abundance is best asked for by intangible blessings in the emotions of peace, joy, happiness, serenity, mellowness. If we have these intangible blessings, the material will normally take care of itself without our even having to ask.

Blessing from God

From my “ponder” series. . .

Does God play any role in the law of attraction other than seemingly being a genie in a bottle?

The law of attraction entered the mainstream just a little over ten years ago, primarily encouraged by Rhonda Byrne and The Secret (both book and film). The initial writing seemed to downplay any role that God might have in our lives. The focus was, quite a bit, on egoic thoughts and material possessions. To her credit, later writing by Rhonda in The Power and The Magic does make a return to traditional spiritual values of love and gratitude, respectively.

The law of attraction is often a secular way of receiving God’s blessings when we are too conflicted to hold a belief about a deity. But I think it is a blessing from God to keep us on the right track. I think God doesn’t ultimately care if we disbelieve (though He can help us more if we have belief in Him); he doesn’t have an ego to need the praise that traditional religion often asks us to make. So, using our minds, even though they are not spiritually attuned, will often get us what we want. This is the bottom line of the law of attraction.

Having a faith in God can bring us a much more fulfilling life, though. Just trying to think positively, and trying to feel good all the time, won’t do it for us—and it is these points that are often made about how to attract what we want.
What we want will fail us unless there is a deeper Mystery to ponder. Getting what we want is not the final answer because at some point we will be saying, “Is this all there is?”

A full surrender to a Higher Power (as we understand this Power) will ensure a better life. And this is classic spirituality.

Believe

The universe is always answering your questions. And when you ask unclear questions, you get unclear answers. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 60)

Jesus’ practical advice shines through today’s quotation. “And when you ask unclear questions, you get unclear answers.” Yes! We need to get clear in our minds (and hearts) what we really want, then ask, believing that our agreed-upon goal will manifest. Then we only need wait (and not wait long) for the manifestation to appear.

Believing is the crux of the matter. And when we don’t really believe, then we are trying to force something into our reality that is not in our contract for this lifetime. Our innermost Self knows that this way is not for us; we are only with a request. When we truly believe a thing, then we are on the beam of the pathway for our lifetime. We need do no more, for we will see it become ours.

What are we committed to in this lifetime? Spend a while contemplating this important question. Let it permeate the subconscious mind. Then, with a clear mind, revisit the question. If we have turned the decision of commitment over to our deepest mind, we will have a knowing that has eluded us until then.

Thought of Love in Form

You are here to remember that you are the thought of Love in form. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 59)

Allow God to live through us without restriction. He is doing so, of course, but our little or personal self can mess up the loveliest reality. Living in illusion, in the dream of a world that doesn’t really exist, we are trapped in matter that seems to hold us firm. But this way of viewing our lives is so defeatist. We are not trapped in anything when we let go and allow the Higher Power (think God) to have His way with us. Until that time, we make a thousand inroads into oblivion, lamenting our very existence on earth.

We are in form, and when we live with this form, we ultimately become the elevated Self of form (as A Course of Love says). We become this when we have allowed Christ-consciousness to spread throughout our holy minds. Our hearts will guide our minds to this better place. And the heart knows only Love. And Love is of God.

The way back is effortless. Sure, we don’t believe this now, but after Christ-consciousness has transported us to a new reality, we will believe it.

Allow God to make this difference in our lives today.

Love Is the Elixir

Rest assured, whenever you believe you have not succeeded or not completed some decision fueled by desire, it is because you were simply not wholly committed—or you decided to change your mind. And when you change your mind, you literally change what you experience in the world or the solar system in which your self spins. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 56)

Our mind does control what we experience. If we are not firmly in the driver’s seat, for God makes a difference, we have some power in our creations. If we are constantly changing our minds about what we want to experience, we will go through oscillations that seem never-ending. We will also have conflict, as one idea rubs against another.

There is a better way. We need to let desire be informed by the Holy Spirit or the Christ Mind, and if we do this, we will have a way of living that will emerge as our heart’s desire. Conflict aside, we will be well-equipped to deal with the many disturbances in our world, this world of illusory separation from God. Our way forward will be magical in a good sense, not in the lamentable way of viewing magical thoughts that A Course in Miracles describes.

Our desires fuel what we bring into our little corner of the world. And when we allow God to act in us as He would will, we know that His will and ours are inseparable. We know that we never really wanted anything but His presence in our convoluted lives. When we feel His Love, we are transported beyond ourselves, into something that offers us our dreams.

Love is the elixir. Let Love fuel the choice of our desires, and keep our will firmly rooted in the Holy Spirit or Christ Mind. God’s choices then give us a value to everyday experience that has heretofore been lacking.

And suffering is no more, for, as illusion, it retreats into mists before the sun.

Let God’s Glory Be Reflected in How We Live

Of myself, I do nothing. But my Father, through me, does all things. And it is very good. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 4, Page 55)

We too can step aside and let God’s direction flow into our lives. After all, we are composed of “God-stuff.” He is living through us, and when the separation has been healed, we will know it with a certainty that puts all confusion to rest. Our confusion will melt away, and we will be home, in God’s arms.

Our desires direct what we do. Ask those desires to be filled with God’s grace. We are immersed in Life when we feel our desires. Pray that our desires might be worthy of us—and worthy of God. A nearby statement says in WOM, “. . .[L]et the petals of the rose blossom within our holy being.”

We are not used to thinking of ourselves like this, in this exalted way. We are so used to denigrating ourselves, calling it humility. But true humility does not disenfranchise us. A false humility will mean that we have a poor self-image, and while self-images are actually a false concept (in that no image is needed), we ought to rise up to the best that we have in us.

God asks no less of us, that we let His glory be reflected in the glorious lives that we live.

Born of the Spirit

For as you take up your rightful place, you become a vehicle through which the voice for God will creatively touch the lives of countless persons that you may never ever meet physically.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 4, Page 55)

What an exalted notion Jesus has of us! We might cringe, thinking that we are being humble, but this is simply another evidence of our playing small. Jesus calls us to greatness, not greatest borne of the ego, but greatness borne of the spirit. We are children of God, created in His image, and when we give up our separation from God (for we have this in our power), we will grow all the way up to whatever glory we have in us.

We will attract others, whether they be many or few. Our persona will radiate a good will that is attracting. Nobody likes to interact with an ego, lest of all our brothers and sisters who are in our close circle. Egotism puts off everyone, though when we are lost in the ego, we don’t recognize how off-putting this way of being really is.

We do appreciate Jesus, and here he indicates near the passage for today that he knows this. He too appreciates us, and our best efforts, and will support us in every worthy endeavor.

Ask for Jesus’ help today. He won’t be long in coming to us, holding our hand, and walking along. Our best efforts will then be multiplied, with such a companion as he.