In Patience Possess Our Souls

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“Oh, Child of God, you have no need to try at all, no need to be burdened or to grow tired and weary. You who want to accomplish much good in the world realize that only you can be accomplished. You are here to awaken from your slumber. You are here not to awaken to the same world, a world that seems a little more sane than before but still governed by insanity, a world in which it seems possible to help a few others but certainly not all others, but to awaken to a new world. If all that you see changed within your world is a little less insanity than before, then you have not awakened but still are caught in the nightmare your ego has made. By choosing to reject yourself you have chosen to try to make sense of the nightmare rather than to awaken from it. This will never work.” (ACOL, C:P.14)

We need to forgive ourselves as well as others; this is what Jesus is saying when he notes that we tend to reject ourselves, to make sense of the nightmare in which we find ourselves. Until we forgive, we are sitting in judgment, and we know that judging complicates our minds and makes us feel uneasy, ill-at-ease, awkward, and afraid. No one can judge and hope to live well. So let’s give up the rejection of ourselves, the judging, the lack of forgiveness, as a bad way to interact with our very entity.

We can find a little way through this world just by living the holy dreams that the Holy Spirit sends; these are happy dreams. But if we are content just to dream dreams, we are making compromises with reality. We are only a little sane, and we need and want to wholly sane.

True sanity comes with Christ-consciousness, and Christ-consciousness usually comes in stages, in glimpses. We intuit the end long before we experience it. And the intuition leads to an Awakening that doesn’t have to be traumatic. We will led gently, as down a garden path. Indeed, we might think of our pathway toward ultimate salvation as a garden path.

Jesus calls us “the accomplished” in ACOL. What does this mean? It means that we have made progress—finally. But it is not a progress that the ego would anticipate. It is progress that we make in humility, but not in self-abasement. We give ourselves credit for how far we have walked in this garden of a world. We give ourselves credit for what the Christ Self has accomplished in us to integrate mind and heart into wholeheartedness.

We are easy with ourselves, content to know that we are doing what Jesus has encouraged. We don’t denigrate our progress, nor do we exalt ourselves in a final burst of egoic thinking. We just attend to our business in this world, and that is our Father’s business, just like Jesus in the synagogue at age 12.

Have patience. At the end of the third part of A Course of Love, the “Days” of the Dialogues, Jesus indicates that we may make the trip to the mountaintop many times, though this is not his wish for us. But we may go many times in our reading. This in itself is not bad. The time is already set, and there may be little that we can do to speed up that time of the coming of Christ-consciousness.

Above all, don’t get frustrated about our perceived slowness. Jesus would not have that. He is ever-patient with us, and we must be so with ourselves.