We Are Accepted

We often don’t accept ourselves fully; we are not conscious of our connection to God, Who loves us all equally and sees us as divine children who are loved, oh, so loved by Him. He doesn’t expect us to make drastic changes to be accepted by him, and it is only our rejection of others that then turns back on ourselves with rejection also.

This dynamic, an egoic dynamic, has to end. God will work with us to alter the things that we find difficult in ourselves to accept. He is always near, certain of our rightness, our acceptability. It is our own shortsighted propensity that gives us a problem. And when we pray that our insecurities about ourselves fall away, they will.

We are as God created us. We are–still! This is what A Course in Miracles says, and repeatedly. Ask today to let us see ourselves in a new light, a light of forgiveness, a light of exceedingly good value.

Jesus: “You Are a Joy to Me”

“Let nothing disturb your heart.  Let nothing have you believe that anything within you is wrong.  You are a joy to me.”  Choose Only Love bk.2, 21:I

We have so much trouble accepting ourselves.  Accepting ourselves just as we are.  Always trying to improve, we get ourselves all tangled up for the trying.

But we are OK as we are.  We must let nothing disturb our heart.  If Jesus tells us, here, that we are a joy to him, then why can we not accept ourselves, just as we are?

Our ego is to blame.  And even if we have abandoned our ego, we have patterns of the ego that linger and disturb our peace.  The ego was always telling us we weren’t good enough, that if we only tried harder, we would find ourselves in a better position, sure of ourselves, sure of our value as human beings.

This idea from the ego is a mirage.  Just as an individual lost in a desert, seeing water ahead, aims to reach that water and then finds nothing there.  We have always held out to ourselves that we could be better than we are.  Of course, in some sense, this idea is true, but it is not the bottom line.  God accepts and loves us just as we are.  He wants us to be sane, though, and the insanity is what has made us dissatisfied with ourselves.  When we allow the insanity to fall away, we will know that God’s love is for the genuine Self who we are.  And we will be much more accepting of the truth that we are alright just as we are.

Keep in mind that Jesus says we are a joy to him.  He has the most sanity of anyone, and so I am inclined to believe that he sees something that we do not.

Ask to be accepting of our foibles as remnants of insanity that just need to fall away.  Accept our Self, know that all is well, and we are loved—just as we are.  We need to take this truth unto ourselves, and, yes, love ourselves, too.  We can’t love others well until we love ourselves, too. 

We need to realize that our lives will smooth out when we engulf ourselves with the Love that only God can give.  And He is giving this Love constantly.

How This Day Might I Extend the Good, the Holy, the Beautiful?

“A creator, abiding in enlightenment, knows that all events are neutral, so neutral that they have no effect, except for those who choose to be caught up in illusions. The creator, awakened, merely creates out of devotion to the mystery of That which has created him or her. The mind of an enlightened creator does not arise in the morning and say, ‘How can I survive yet another day in this world?’ In the morning, when an enlightened creator arises, the question is:

“How this day might I extend the treasure of the good, the holy, and beautiful?

“How can I, right where I am, experience these treasures even within the space and volume of this body?

“How can I look lovingly upon what my physical eyes show me, so that I discern or extract the good, the holy, and the beautiful, and therefore, give them to myself?” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 10, Page 126)

A hallmark of The Way of Mastery is the phrase, “the good, the holy, and the beautiful.” These are indeed beautiful words, something we would all wish to emulate.

Often, though, we may wake up on a given day in a funk, deploring our lives, thinking of our crises for the day, fearful of what that day will bring. We know that this is no way to live, but we do it anyway. We really don’t know how to avoid thinking such negativity. Is there a way out?

There is. It is the oft-spoken maxim in Eastern circles, “Be willing to have it so.” This is what Jesus calls in WOM “allowance.”

“Acceptance” is a close synonym. If we don’t resist negativity, it loses its punching power. What we resist grows stronger; the force field increases. But when we surrender to God in allowing whatever might transpire, to transpire, we are paradoxically freed.

Of course, we don’t lie down in the dust and accept the bad as the “way things are.” We accept only while in the flow that God gives us. And the “flow” keeps us safe. It is another way of stating “mindfulness.”

Focus on the good, the holy, and the beautiful. Seek to expand those things, and all will be well with our day. Even if the days has things that go awry, we will know that we are in the flow with God.

And that makes all the difference.

“Be Willing to Have It So”

“Imagine, then, living in a state of being in which literally nothing was unacceptable to you because you knew that the Source of your true being was far beyond the limitations of anything created in space and time.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 7, Page 90)

Nothing may be “unacceptable,” but this sentence doesn’t mean that we won’t work to change things that seem troublesome. For life to be acceptable, we mean that we are “willing to have it so,” that nothing must change for us to live life fully. This is a great secret of life, something I once read in Joseph Campbell. Joseph had been advised by a guru not to struggle so in life. Surely struggle is not a pleasant way to be.

Our Source is God Himself, far beyond limitations in time and space. When we make our home in God, we will live in true acceptance of whatever we do find on the earth plane. It is only after we have “accepted” that we can make meaningful change for the better. To fight against “what is” is to make unnecessary adjustments in trying to live in this world.

We aren’t asked to fight against ordinary reality. We are not asked, ever, to fight against anything. Our way is to find that which is positive, good, and peaceful. When we reach for the peaceful, we accept, and when we reach for the positive, we make meaningful change without struggle.

“Be willing to have it so.” By our very acceptance of the ordinary moments in our day, we pave the way for a better future.

We touch God in such moments.

The Embrace

Time has ended and there is nothing you must do. Being replaces identity and you say, I am. I am, and there is nothing outside of me. Nothing outside of the embrace. (ACOL, C:20.9)

The embrace is a mystical Oneness with the All, the God-in-us and in our brothers and sisters—indeed, in everything living. There is a well-known passage in A Course of Love in which Jesus embraces us to give us comfort and emotional support. He lets us cry on his shoulder, for the journey has been long and hard, and we are weary and beaten down by the dust on the trail. He soothes all of that away in his strong, embracing arms. And we embrace him in return.

This is true acceptance. We have come to accept Jesus as our guide and partner in sustaining life that will be in the newly created world, a world that will arise with our effortless work as a result of revelation from God.

New Life Flows from Acceptance

“Active acceptance is what allows the great transformation from life as you have known it, to death of that old life, to rebirth of new life. By clinging to some of the old, you prevent its death and you prevent the rebirth of the new. You prevent the very life-giving resurrection you await. You prevent the elevation of the self of form.

“This does not have to be. You have wanted something to do to change your circumstances in this earthly reality. This is what you have to do. This is the action required. The active acceptance of abundance is the way to abundance. Active acceptance is a way of being in relationship with all that flows from unity. This you cannot learn but you can practice. Thus your practice begins.” (ACOL, D:Day3.60 – Day3.61)

Today Jesus moves beyond the example of acceptance that he has been discussing, the actual value of money to our lives on earth. Now he moves acceptance into the larger realm of all that we encounter, but he explains elsewhere that he is not asking us to “accept” conditions that we don’t like. He is open and willing for us to change those conditions to something that we can be more comfortable with. But first we just accept, just accept. How can something that sounds so simple be so difficult to put into practice?

Acceptance of what we encounter does not have to be difficult. We actually make it difficult by our resistance. In resistance, we are making the force field stronger. Defenses make what they would defend against, as A Course in Miracles tells us. So we are bidden to drop our resistance, drop our defenses, and just live in flow with what happens in our lives. This flow will lead to something better when we have made a simple decision to live in God’s universe as His children. We don’t fight God any longer. We know where our home really is, and this home is all that we actively seek We then find out that this home is here with us on earth, a heaven on earth. But first our attitudes have to change.

Attitudinal change is what acceptance is all about. We stop fighting what seems inevitable, even when we don’t want it, and then the miracle happens. What we have prayed to see changed, actually does change. We are living a new life in Christ. And this new life includes an elevated Self of form living in Christ-consciousness—when we are completely ready. God Himself reaches down and lifts us up, knowing that the new abilities and talents that will be ours in this new state of being are safe with us now. These new abilities and talents would not have been safe with an egoic consciousness, and so they have not been available to us. But now they are. And it is a blessed life indeed that we live.

If Christ-consciousness seems far off, know that we are not privy to the decision of timing. We don’t really know how close we are coming. But we wait in anticipation for what will transpire, certain that God’s timing is always perfect. And indeed it is.

Dear God,

Abundance is a mighty blessing for me today. I thank You for the indications that You give me that I am on the right pathway. I realize that I can still make mistakes, even gigantic ones, but my heart is with You, and You will correct any and all mistakes that would seek to entrap me.

Thank You for Jesus’s guidance. Sometimes he seems very near to me, to be guiding my typing. I hope that this is a true assessment. I would not want to be mistaken about something like that.

Amen.

Acceptance

“Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I hear your protests and the reasons that you feel must prevent you from the acceptance I call you to. Yet as you fully accept that your right to your inheritance, your right to be who you are, and your commitment to the Covenant of the New, are one and the same, these reasons will disappear. All the different reasons you would cite become what they are—one reason, the same reason—and you will see that what is one is neither the same nor different. You will see that there is one answer, an answer different for everyone and yet the same for everyone. That answer is acceptance of your Self. That answer is acceptance of the new you.” (ACOL, D:4.31)

Jesus uses the word “accept” and the word “acceptance” in much the same way that he used the word “forgiveness” in A Course in Miracles. He makes clear, though, that the two concepts, while similar in how they encourage us to react, are not the same concept. When we accept our Self, we realize for once that we are justified in the sight of God. We are OK. The egoic self might not have been OK, but the egoic self was always a mirage, an illusion, nothing real. Now we are embodying the Christ-Self, and this is our real and true Self. We will have no problems now when we accept that this Self is the only one that we would want.

When we commune with God, we are expressing our highest form of devotion, and in this endeavor, we are realizing that to accept our Self is to find our way back home. Not by our own steam, but in the capable hands of Jesus (who asks us, later on, to “accept” him). Jesus is our emissary from God, if you will. He has made the journey for all of us, and now he simply takes us by the hand and leads us to God Himself. When one separated self has made the journey, it is made for all, and Jesus indicates in A Course of Love that it is he who made that journey. And he made it for us.

Give Jesus a chance. Drop self-doubt (always a bad thing to hold onto), and talk to him. He is with us if we want him, and how many of us don’t need a comforting and loving presence to soothe us, to let us know that things are going to be alright, to guide us back to Love Itself.

We are embarking on what Jesus is calling the Covenant of the New. We are being who we are, for the first time in our lives. This is not a state of aloneness, though it can feel like that. It elicits a sharing with our brothers and sisters that lets us know that not only is Jesus with us, but so are they. In the newly created world that we embark upon, sharing with others is the way that we know God. Sharing, not isolated, separated selves. But one Self Whom we share with all. We are One, One with God, one with our brothers and sisters. Now that we have accepted a united heart and mind, we are also one with ourselves—the gesture that started this journey without distance, to a goal that has never changed.

Ask today what our part will be in the Covenant of the New. Just ask, with acceptance of who we are and who others are. Hold no grievances, choose to be loving. The way back is not hard. Jesus says that the way back is effortless and easy, not requiring that we “do” anything. And not requiring that we any longer learn anything. The full walk along our pathway cannot be learned in the way that we have learned in the past. Much of it is still mystery, but mystical insight smooths the way.

Prayer

Be with me today. Be with me every day. I need you. I need Your love. And I need my Self, the overarching identity that I have previously not known nor welcomed. I am finally ready to welcome that Self of mine today.

Make of me something bigger than what I am. Not in an egoic sense, for I am through with that little self that indulged in the ego. Make me able to be loving in the face even of rejection, for there is never any loss of love; loss of love is a myth that the Self can overcome.

Thank You for being with me through the night. I ask that You be with me through the day, now and every day.

Amen.

Be Willing to Have It So

“This cannot be done through learning, for as you have been told, learning was the means of the separated self’s return to unity. These lessons have been given. They can be reviewed and reviewed again. They can be used as continuing lessons until you feel that learning is fully accomplished. They can serve as reminders as you continue to become the Self you have learned that you are. But further learning is not what will complete the transfor¬mation of the personal self to the elevated Self. Learning will not sustain Christ-consciousness.

“So what is it that we will now do? If I do not teach, and you do not learn, what is our continuing means for completing this transformation? As you have been shown, this will not occur by means of preparation but by means of acceptance. This will not occur by means of trying but by means of surrender.” (ACOL, D:1.17 – 1.18)

Acceptance is another way of saying “allowance,” which is the term used in The Way of Mastery. Both acceptance and allowance are another way of saying, “Be willing to have it so.” This is a very great revelation, a revelation to all that has gone unknown and unused until now. Joseph Campbell once quoted a Buddhist master as saying that his secret was to “be willing to have it so.”

Does this mean that we stand passive? Not at all. We simply accept the next right thing that our Self unveils as our direction, what we are to create next in our experience.

It has heretofore been a mystery, a sort of paradox, about how we could create our own reality—if we were to follow God’s will for us, and His will has been set forth as the only way that works. But God is within us, and the Self is a part of Him, and when we listen to that Self, we are following the highest and best that we know to create. So the seeming paradox is not really a paradox at all, but the way that we are to proceed in our lives as people who have found the right path to follow.

We don’t learn anymore from external authorities; we turn inward, and there we dialogue with Whom we will, and, of course, most importantly, we follow the promptings of the Self formed out of grace. This is our Christhood, the ultimate that we have sought to find. And when we listen to the promptings of that Self, we will lead magical lives, lives filled with grace and adventure. We will not have magical thinking, though, as A Course in Miracles points out. This use of the term “magical” implies something that is of our former insanity, our madness, when we are living the egoic self that was born out of separation from God—a separation that was purely illusory, but in which we believed faithfully. My use of the term “magical lives” is meant to connote a freedom, and a willingness to be “like the wind” (from The Way of Mastery). We know not wither we will go, and others cannot always understand us, because we are living by different lights than the world respects. We travel by our own lights, and this makes all the difference.

So we march to the beat of a different drummer. We let Love, or God, or Self, lead the way. We follow nudges to turn right or left without fail (at least most of the time, for we are still fallible creations). We are at home in God in this new way of living, and unfailingly, our part in creating a new world will be revealed as we take each step forward.

Prayer

Guide me to listen to my Self today. Let me be through with the madness of the ego, once and for all. Help me not to be too direct, if this disturbs my brothers and sisters. But never let me fail to speak well for You. I would create my own reality by following the prompting of my Self, a part of You. I pray that I will not ever be misled in this new adventure.

Thank You for a good day. As I write this, the sun is shining, the day is balmy, even though it is wintertime. Thank You for the climate in which I currently dwell. Thank You for the varying seasons of the year. Thank You for this beautiful earth that we all occupy.

Be with me throughout the day. Help me to be grateful for those things that I have heretofore taken for granted. I would take nothing for granted today.

Amen.

In Radical Acceptance We Will Live Peaceful & Harmonious Lives

“Although I offer it not as a replacement, what you will find will come in the place of blame is an idea of acceptance of what is, an idea that is needed now.

“Acceptance of what is, is acceptance that whatever is happening in the present moment as a gift and a lesson. What comes as a lesson may not seem like a gift, but all lessons are gifts.” (ACOL, T3:10.5 – 10.6)

Previous to this passage, Jesus indicates that he will not give us a replacement for blame. He simply, directly, asks us to be done with it. And if we love enough, his solution will be enough. We will simply accept what is, and in this radical acceptance we will live peaceful and harmonious lives.

Of course, our minds long to place blame, for there are many and varied instances of chaos in our world. We aren’t encouraged by Jesus to turn a blind eye to the injustices that we see here, but we can work for change without finding a scapegoat, especially not by making God that scapegoat.

We will see that each thing that confronts us is a lesson and a gift. Even our pain and suffering, the very things that cry out for the placing of blame on a benevolent God Who granted us free will. Our lives are so constructed by ultimate reality that everything that we see, everything that shows up in our lives, is a way to bring us home. This is the reality in which we live, though we cannot, with our finite minds, comprehend the vastness of the lessons/gifts that we are given. Each of our days allows us to take a step closer to home. Backsliding is possible, of course, but far less likely to happen if we commune with our Christ-Self often and well.

So: All lessons are gifts, and sometimes the lessons can seem harsh, though this is not necessary. We truly are our own worst enemy, and when we don’t take life by the smooth handle, we force the lessons to become more harsh than they have to be.

We need to let our hearts lead, just what Jesus has been saying repeatedly in A Course of Love. Our love-filled heart will soften the rough edges of our lessons, and so those lessons will seem ever more like the gifts that they are.

Prayer

Sometimes I have to be passive, which is the same as Jesus saying in A Course of Love to practice non-resistance. This attitude is controversial, for do we not all want to be strong and independent? And this is exactly where I go wrong, for independence is not the way: Cooperation is. We are interdependent beings, able to live life on our own terms only when we reach out to others as well. Our brothers and sisters need us, and we need them. I don’t need to feel that I have to go it all alone.

Let me put these final notions of the ego behind me. I would share with others in a state that Jesus has pointed out in ACOL. This state is one that allows loving interactions at all times. I let my various displays of anger just fall away.

Be with me now as I seek to go Your way, pointed out by Jesus in ACOL. My heart warms as I read; may all who read know this all-embracing wholeheartedness.

Amen.

CHAPTER 3: ACCEPTING ATONEMENT FOR ONE’S SELF

Pain Can be Avoided

“The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time. This may appear to contradict free will because of the inevitability of the final decision, but this is not so.
You can temporize and you are capable of enormous procrastination, but you cannot depart entirely from your Creator, Who set the limits on your ability to miscreate. An imprisoned will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. T-2.III.3)”

God had to set limits on our ability to miscreate, or His universe(s) would be in jeopardy. This does seem to limit free will, but who in his right mind would depart from reality to find refuge in illusions, especially illusions that give pain and suffering? We don’t know the right things to do; we make all kinds of trouble for ourselves in our illusory world. Would God let that type of insane situation continue forever for his beloved children?

God, in my estimation, intervenes because he realizes that his children are lost in insanity. We departed from Him (or thought we did), in a “tiny, mad idea” about which we forgot to laugh. (This is from A Course in Miracles.) This tiny, mad idea started the chain of circumstances in which we find ourselves now. And we are in a dire place indeed. The Holy Spirit, God’s Voice, will guide us back to sanity if we will only listen. That is all we have to do: follow the promptings that come to us with courage, sure that Someone is making the right decision for us.

Our will is imprisoned because we are not following life according to the plan that God set up when He created us. In departing from that plan, we have found only misery, and the Holy Spirit would undo all the tragedy for us. Our free will, followed by us, will come to the conclusion that there is another way to live, surely a better way than the way that we have lived in the past. And in using free will to choose again, we use free will rightly. God surely must smile.

We Are Wholeness / This We Accept

1 – Acceptance

“Acceptance is necessary because escape is not possible. Everything that is, is with us, which is why we are the accomplished as well as the void, the healed as well as the sick, the chaos and the peace. Thus we heal now by calling on wholeness, accepting the healed self’s ability to be chosen while not encountering resistance or any attempts at rejection of the sick or wounded self. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 14)”

2 – Spacious Self

This quotation aims at saying that the spacious Self encompasses all parts of the Self, especially including, we must learn, the parts of the self that we would like to disown. The little or personal self is fraught with error, even when we have advanced far along the pathway. We may find ourselves still getting angry, still attacking, still being defensive. If we don’t like these aspects of our personality, we don’t resist, for resistance would make the force field stronger. We simply turn aside from less-desirable personality traits, giving them no energy. This “no energy” is our way to reach toward perfection.

3 – Perfection

Remember, though, that Jesus indicates that we don’t have to be perfect to be Christ-conscious. Eventually, we will know a kind of perfection, because in the New Testament, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” And in A Course in Miracles, Jesus says that he stands at the end, the correct the mistakes that we ourselves cannot correct. If he stands at the end, we still have some mistakes now. But we can do our part, as well as seeing Jesus do his. We can turn aside from those traits that are negative, turning instead to the light that is within all of us.

4 – Light of the World

We are the “light of the world.” This is declared in the New Testament as well as in A Course in Miracles. Let us together bring that light to our brothers and sisters who are lost in a damaging world of illusions.

5 – Contrasts

We are the contrasts. This quotation makes this clear. We are the up and the down. Only when we accept that the “down” needs to be enfolded into the spacious Self do we find relief from our discomfort.

6 – Today

Let us do that today, now.

7 – Projection

“The spacious Self realizes that the outer world is a projection and most often a rejection rather than an extension of what is within. Thus, sickness is a rejection of feelings. All that causes fear is rejection of feelings. All that causes loneliness is rejection of feelings. All that causes violence is rejection of feelings. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 14)”

8 – Extend

We need to extend what is within. This Self of ours is within, and extension is how we create well. But just now we are still caught in illusions, and for this to be our world, we have been projecting from our minds. Our little minds, the personal self.

9 – Rejection

We have been rejecting our feelings, because we have known unhappiness. In any given day, most of us have times of feeling down. And we tend to reject the feelings rather than to experience them fully; we stuff them downward into our psyches. But we don’t find relief that way.

10 – Relief

The only way to have relief is to welcome ALL feelings—even the negative ones. Welcome them into the spacious Self (by which we mean the all-encompassing Christ Self Who is within all of us), and there, within, see these rejected feelings transformed into something much more positive. We will not be disappointed when we stop trying to overcome negative feelings by rejecting them. Just welcome. And then the low mood will pass.

11 – Others

“It is by holding all feelings of others within the spacious Self, by not forgetting that the one and the many are the same, by willfully remembering that the feelings of the many can be ‘held’ and not projected into the world as sickness, violence, and so on, that acceptance occurs. It is in accepting all feelings as the feelings of the many that the feelings of ‘others’ are accepted as one’s own and held within the spaciousness of the One Self, the whole Self. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 14)”

12 – Turn to Others

We turn to others with this quotation. We need to accept their feelings as well as our own. All others, all brothers and sisters, are part of us, part of the All, the One. So we communicate telepathically all the time, particularly, perhaps, when we are unaware of such communication. We need to accept the negative feelings of others as well as the negative feelings of ourselves. When we accept, we are much more likely to transform. We will transform, in fact. We will not add our discomfort to the discomfort of our brothers and sisters, thereby projecting violence, sickness, and the like upon the world.

13 – Feelings

We accept others’ feelings as though they were our own. We are One, remember. So in a very real sense, we don’t see any feelings that are not our own. But we can rise above dishonest, reprehensible feelings by absorbing them into our spacious Self, our inner Christ Self. And they and we will be made much the better for it.

14 – All

“What the spacious Self holds within is the relationship of all to all. Relationship is the invisible reality only expressed through form. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 14)”

15 – Form

We see others as occupying form. This is the way that we see our brothers and sisters who are in this world with us. This is relationship in our world. We need the others’ bodies to be able to communicate in this world. And communicate we must.

16 – ACIM

In A Course in Miracles, we are told that Jesus needs our voice, our hands, our feet, to spread salvation. He needs the form that we occupy, for that is how we experience this world. That is how others experience us.

17 – Relationship

Relationship is actually invisible, because our spacious Self is invisible. It is the invisible force field that surrounds our natural bodies. We think that our bodies encompass ourselves, but it is actually the reverse; we are invisible forms that occupy forms that we can see. And we become the elevated Self of form, because we live in this world. It is the way in which we will survive once we reach Christ-consciousness.

18 – Acceptance

“Your acceptance of these words is a form of acceptance of the unknown and as such a means of coming to know. These words are only one means, which is why this is called a dialogue. Realize now that this is but one voice of the many. You have entered into the dialogue with the many as well as the one. This dialogue is going on all around you. Have you been listening to but one voice? Or have you begun to hear the one voice in the many? (A Course of Love: Dialogues, p. 161)”

19 – Healing

Healing is found in the acceptance of the spacious Self–the Self that we share with all others in unity and in relationship one to another. Earlier we have been tempted many times to reject feelings, and we have thereby been led many times into sickness. Now we are called upon to accept all of our feelings. Our feelings are not unique to each of us individually, but are part of the whole which we all share. Others feel as we do. This concept in itself is comforting, because we are tempted to think that nobody else in our world has ever felt quite as we do when we are feeling down.

20 – Hold Within

We are asked to hold within our feelings in the spacious Self, the Self we share with all others. We are not as likely to feel wounded when we know that others are a part of ourselves. We will not understand all things, but we will hold within not only our spaciousness but also the invisibility of that which we do not comprehend. We do not reject these unknowns; we hold them in our spaciousness. We are accepting of the unexplainable.
Our spacious Self will be a healed Self. We reach out to others, and we accept them in this dialogue. We are not alone on the mountaintop! We accept that others are with us on the same ascension. We then sustain one voice, the many expressing the unity in relationship that we have all needed for eons.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

May I recognize that in my Self are the others that surround me. I am never alone. My spacious Self includes all.

May I be forgiving of all of those others. May they be healed along with me, as we realize that we are all One.

May this day go well. I am seeking sudden change, so that my withered ego doesn’t have time to adapt to change. May I see that sudden change today. May I enjoy the day, enjoy all others whom I meet. The time for change will be as right as the Answer. Help me to know this internally, in my deepest Self.

Amen.

Love Will Transform Normal, Ordinary, Life into Extraordinary Life

1 – Transformation

“Love will transform normal, ordinary, life into extraordinary life. Loving exactly who you are and where you are in every moment is what will cause the transformation that will end your desire to remove yourself from life. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day Eight)”

2 – Jesus

Jesus had earlier, in these 40 days and 40 nights, talked of the need that some of us feel to remove ourselves from life while we metaphorically travel to the mountain top with him. He says that such removal is absolutely unnecessary, and is actually undesired (by him) and undesirable. If we love right where we are, we will have no need to feel that we want to separate from normal, ordinary life. We will be more than satisfied in the present, with Jesus leading the way to the mountain top.

3 – Love

How do we know when we have transformed life by love? We do not really need to ask this question, for when we have actually made the transformation viable, we will be happier than we have ever been before. We will know that this was where we were heading. We will know ecstasy, at least sometimes (though prolonged ecstasy would be debilitating to our bodies).

4 – Love Deeply

How do we love that deeply? We pray to love more deeply; it is just that simple. The prayer to love more deeply is in the Will of God, and He will provide. When we are consumed by our love, we will feel a warmth and a gentle ease that will assure us of God’s Presence, here, now, right in ordinary life.

5 – Rushing About

What a blessing this is! We get in such a rush sometimes, barreling over ourselves to reach God—when He is within us, just waiting quietly for us to realize His Presence. When we rush through life, we miss so very much—and, most of all, we miss God. He can still reach us from within, but it is harder for us to feel Him.

6 – Hard?

We don’t need to make things hard for ourselves. We need only get quiet, calm down, relax, take the easy course—and life with God as a present Reality takes form. This is the Will of God, as well as His pleasure with us. This will bring us the love that we have heretofore felt only in fleeting moments that fell away all too soon.

7 – Acceptance Clarified

“But here is the point that needs clearing up. This is not about acceptance of what you do not like. Do you really think you are being called to accept ‘normal life?’ Called to accept those conditions that have made you feel unhappy? No! You are being called to an acceptance of new conditions! (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day Eight)”

8 – “Don’t Like”

We do not have to accept what we don’t like. This would be acquiescence in the face of negatives that we don’t want to accept. And we wouldn’t get the boon that we hoped to have by acceptance. We realize that we don’t like certain conditions; we just accept that we don’t like them. This “don’t like’ is in itself a form of acceptance. And it will take us farther along the pathway. Much farther than reluctant acceptance of that which we don’t like, simply because we think that this uneasy acceptance is required of us.

9 – New Conditions

The new conditions come as we ascend the mountain top with Jesus. These new conditions include a greater desire to be quiet and calm—not to make drama in our everyday lives. These new conditions are the joy of living, the day-to-day happiness, the relaxation and easy work that we do now. No work needs to be hard, when we are in the pattern of acceptance. We will enjoy what we do, however busy that might be. We are not meant to remove ourselves from life in some superficial desire to be lazy.

10 – Power

“All power to effect change comes from acceptance—not acceptance of the way things are, but acceptance of who you are in the present. Not through acceptance of the way you want to be but of the way you are now. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day Eight)”

11 – Accept Self

We need to accept ourselves, flaws and all. We have a certain perfection of being that is independent of the perfection that we are eventually called to. If we don’t like a certain trait, we just turn away from it, giving it no power because of resistance. What we resist, on the other hand, becomes stronger in the resistance.

12 – Perfect?

I believe that we are intended to become perfect in all respects, but we don’t have to be perfect to realize Awakening, or Christ-consciousness. Anger is such an example. Remember that Jesus showed anger with the activities of the moneychangers in the temple during his last week on earth. Would we believe that he didn’t have Christ-consciousness? Of course not. This is a very real example that allows us to accept ourselves as we are, even though we learned in A Course in Miracles that anger has no justification.

13 – Who We Are

We need, therefore, to accept who we are in the present. We need to cease our relentless seeking, always wanting something more by way of salvation. That something more will come to us when God is ready for us to have—and not a moment sooner. We cannot “achieve” enlightenment, or Awakening, though we can move in that direction by the early seeking that we do. At this point in A Course of Love, though, we need to do less seeking and more accepting. Jesus makes this point over and over. We can do something more, but will that really help us at this point?

14 – Intolerant of Illusions

“Remember that you have been told that your real Self will be intolerant only of illusions and that this intolerance will take the form of seeing only the truth rather than attempting to combat illusion. Thus when you see others gossiping, you are called to see only the truth of who they are—to see beyond the illusion, what would seem to be the ‘fact’ of their gossip—to the fear that feeds it, and beyond the fear to the love that will dispel it. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day Eight)”

15 – Gossip

Jesus uses gossip as an example in Day Eight. He says that we don’t like it, sometimes because we have been the brunt of gossip. We aren’t, however, to denounce the purveyor of gossip as a bad person; it is just a mistake, we feel, and then we turn aside from it without giving it power by resistance. These individuals who gossip are fearful in their lives, fearful because their ego has sway at that point. We can love in spite of the gossip, for we will nearly always find that the person who is conveying gossip about us has done something nice for us at some time. Jealousy, or a wish for the type of life that we have, is often a factor in gossip. And have not all of us been guilty of jealousy at some point, some time wanting what another has in life?

16 – Charmed Life

We particularly need to be aware that others will sometimes see us as “living a charmed life,” because our understanding has allowed our projection to make perceptions that are very good indeed. The world itself is an illusion, and our lives become better once we realize such things as this. We have had a guide in the Holy Spirit as we have created our lives, and thus we have made lives that work better than someone who has never learned these things. So live and let live, knowing that others are looking to us, also, for guidance. They, too, would like to live charmed lives.

17 – Anger

“If anger arises in you now, it does not mean that you will react in whatever way anger once called you to react and it does not mean that something is wrong with you or that you are not spiritual enough! It simply means that you are involved in a situation or relationship that has called forth that feeling. It is in the expression of that feeling that who you are is revealed, not in the feeling itself. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day Eight)”

18 – ACIM

Here we are talking of anger again; Jesus uses this example repeatedly in A Course of Love. It must be that anger is a hot spot for many of us, and perhaps Jesus knows how we have struggled with his words in A Course in Miracles. In ACIM he declares that anger and attack have no foundation in truth and are not justified. But Jesus would know that premature suppression of anger does what it would remove. We find ourselves engaging in behavior that is worse than it was before we had this instruction!

19 – Jesus’s Attitude toward Anger in ACOL

So Jesus takes, in A Course of Love, a more tolerant attitude toward anger. He does not, note, say that it is a good thing. He recommends that we be accepting of our anger as we are of everything else in our lives. We have that certain perfection even now.

20 – Don’t Suppress Anger

He would have us refuse to express anger, which we can do without suppressing it. We can refuse to express anger to our brother/sister, for how could expressing anger help him/her? He/she will feel betrayed, perhaps, for each is doing the best he/she can, given his/her understanding at the time.

21 – Acceptance

“Now, however, it is crucial that you come to acceptance of yourself–in the present, as you are–for only by doing so will you come to full acceptance of who you are and be able to allow the Self of unity to merge with the self of form, thus elevating the self of form. You will also, only in this way come to true expression of the elevated Self of Form. (A Course of Love: Dialogues, p. 136)”

22 – Accept the Present

The title for Day Eight, “Accept the Present,” is particularly apt. Virtually everything in the chapter explains this assertion in some way. We need to accept the present of being in normal life as we spend this time on the metaphorical mountain top. We do not need to separate ourselves from our brothers and sisters, for they are the only way to the love that will give us unity with them. We also do not need to separate ourselves from our normal living routines.

23 – Passivity?

We are not called, however, to accept what we do not like. We are not called to any passivity. We are called to total acceptance of our Self. Once we have accepted the Self, sometimes it will take some time for conditions to change, and sometimes conditions change immediately. This is one of our blessings. Change will not come without first having acceptance of our Self.

24 – Feelings

We should accept our own feelings. Distancing ourselves from our feelings is not only dishonest; it will prevent us from further movement forward. We are called to unity with our brothers and sisters through love. We cannot err when we follow our feelings–for these feelings have now been cleansed. If, however, we have not accepted all that Jesus holds out to us, we must be wary of feelings that take us away from the Self that we want to be, the Self of Christ-consciousness. Then and only then do we need to be wary of following our feelings. (This latter point is an interpretation, not a tenet of ACOL.)

25 – Thinking and Feeling

“Remove all thinking that says that you can err in following your feelings. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day Eight)”

26 – Harbinger

This statement is a harbinger of greater things to come in the 40 days and 40 nights. It is also a statement that intuition works best for us, even when we are tempted to ignore that intuition. We can have better lives when we follow our guidance, and that guidance frequently comes by way of feelings.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

Help me to accept myself as I am, knowing that You do. I chastise myself so often, and I think so often that I am not worthy. Jesus would have me to drop these thoughts and the actions that result from them. I am not perfect, but I must accept that You accept me as I am.

If there are things about myself that need to be changed, please give me the grace to change easily. I understand that I have made real progress, and that the elevated Self of form is something that I can attain. I am apt to forget this. Help me to remember this. And thank You for the blessing of the Christ-consciousness that You hold out to me.

Thank You for this good day. May the days ahead string, like pearls on a string, into a beautiful necklace of good feelings brought about by love of others as well as a settled good love for myself. Until I can love myself, I am hindered in loving others. I have not always recognized this truth, but thank You for showing it to me now. Be with me as I walk into the evening of this good day.

Amen.