Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty

“Nothing, not even the ego, has been able to keep you from expressing the beauty and truth of who you are. You came into the world of form incapable of not expressing the beauty and truth of who you are. That you are is an expression of beauty and truth. You express the beauty and truth of who you are by being alive. It has only been your inability to accept this that has caused your grief and pretensions. In a certain sense, your ability to express the beauty and truth of who you are has been taught out of you by learning practices that sought for sameness, and saw not your differences as the gifts they are.” (ACOL, D:Day9.27)

John Keats, a Nineteenth Century poet, expressed an idea that Jesus is here expressing also. Keats said, in the well-known “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Not many people could explicate that poem as beautifully as Jesus has in this quotation for today. We are often obvious of the beauty that surrounds us, but even our desire for physical beauty is a reflection of our God-given love of beauty. And here Jesus says that being who we are is an expression of both beauty and truth. And being who we are is the theme with which A Course of Love ends, the take-away for all of us.

Jesus also expresses a desire that we recognize the diversity that we all have. We often thought, previously, that we had to be “alike” or the “same” to fit in. Our society is just coming to the realization that differences are to be celebrated, and we find in that celebration a champion no less than Jesus.

Many literary critics have sought to understand what John Keats was trying to say, but very few of them would ever recognize that “being who we are” is likely the best interpretation that could be made. Beauty and truth enfold us, and we don’t have to be egocentric to recognize value in this; indeed, if we are egocentric, we will miss the point. Being who we are is to celebrate our diversity, our differences, but know that there is a divine nature undergirding all of us. We have many gifts from God, and we abide with them when we are aware that they exist. We don’t take credit for our diversity; we celebrate it, and we celebrate most of all the myriad ways that our truth and beauty can be expressed.

Dear God,

Thank You for giving to me an understanding of what beauty and truth really mean, here, in Jesus’s words. Our attempts to be beautiful physically can even be seen as a reflection of divine longings. Let me live with Your words and Jesus’s interpretation today. May I see the beauty and truth of the words themselves.

Thank You for another beautiful day in our beautiful world. Help me to look at the positive, even as the news may bring reasons to shake my head at the difficulty of this world. Be with me, point out the positive, and give me Your blessings today, as always.

Amen.

Let Memories Pave the Way to a Beautiful Future

“As was already stated, the first opportunities for you to learn the art of thought will be provided through what we have called the re-experiencing of memory. These are opportunities to re-experience the lessons your life has brought you.” (ACOL, T1:4.21)

This directive is fun to do. Who does not like to re-experience our life through memories? Of course, later on Jesus will caution against interpreting what we are reviewing. This interpretation is what we are used to doing, and it won’t get us where we want to go, which is to respond to our past with love and patience, sure that when we relive, we are safe.

We do learn through our lives. In the Dialogues, the third and last book in A Course of Love, Jesus encourages us to avoid study of the old masters, the learned wisdom of those whom we have deemed wiser than we are. In its place, he counsels observation of our lives, observation of the world and all that is in it, observation that will take us somewhere. And this observation is what we are now doing with our memories. We are trying to see what we can learn from what has gone before.

My own personal recommendation is that one lie across a bed when re-experiencing memories. This puts the body at rest. It is how I got up-to-date with my life when I was quite young, a child. We can’t retrieve memories well if we are uptight; the subconscious won’t come to our bidding. But the subconscious is what we are retrieving now. And when we have successfully retrieved the subconscious, we go on to the Unconscious, the God/Self deep within. And the union with our depths is what this re-experiencing of memories is really all about. It will lead to this further blessing of union with our depths.

Our life is our best learning mechanism. Have we really ever doubted this? The best knowledge that we have ever read is meaningless unless we can find something with which to identify. And this identification is with what has occurred in our lives.

Be still today, in whatever place or position you deem wise. Let the mind (and heart) rest. And see if God Himself doesn’t speak to us from our depths.

Dear Father/Mother,

May I spend some time today in contemplation of my life history. I get so busy sometimes, and in the busyness I fail to reach to You.

I would not make that mistake again today. Be with me as I seek to find You in my depths. Be with me as I seek to learn from my past. And may I know that regardless of what has happened, I am safe now.

Amen.

Endow Truth with Spark of Beauty

“It is still up to you to choose to join with truth or with illusion. But remember that to choose one is to let the other go. Which one you choose you will endow with beauty and reality, because the choice depends on which you value more. The spark of beauty or the veil of ugliness, the real world or the world of guilt and fear, truth or illusion, freedom or slavery—it is all the same. For you can never choose except between God and the ego.” (ACIM, T-17.III.9)

This quotation from A Course in Miracles succinctly explains much about the nature of true reality. Jesus herein pens a variety of contrasting words, and we know that on the one side is true reality, and on the other, the abyss of nothingness. It is basically the difference between truth and illusion, and the truth is seen as the real, the real world, or reality, and illusion is seen as perception of an unreal world that is governed by fear. This unreal world is imagined in all its details by the ego. And the ego does not mean us well.

We want to join with truth. All of us, reading this far, do. How do we do so? We cease to identify with the ego, and the easiest way to do this is to decide, categorically, that we will not reinforce that ego by contemplating egotistical goals. The “ego,” of course, is not exactly synonymous with “egotistical,” but there is a very, very close connection. It is impossible to identify with the ego and not do egotistical things, not think of egotistical goals. And we must put a stop to this in whatever way we can.

We want freedom, and as long as we are apart from God (in illusion), we will be living with an imprisoned will. God set the limits on our power to miscreate. He had to hold the universe(s) together, and he realized that pain, to which the ego always leads, would encourage us to choose again. As Helen and Bill, co-scribes of ACIM, decided, “There must be another way.” And A Course in Miracles outlined one other way, a way back to God. This in spite of the fact that Helen was a proclaimed atheist.

So let us decide for the function that God has given us—salvation, happiness. The two are one and the same. We do not seek happiness as we sought egoic goals, though. We rest in surrender to God and His way, knowing that His Will and ours are actually identical. We want what He wants for us, but we just don’t recognize this. At least not in the beginning of our “journey without distance” (from ACIM).

Beauty / Truth / Wisdom — God’s Gifts

1 – Day 20

“You have realized now your relationship with the unknown and ceased to fear it. You are, perhaps, even eager now, to move beyond the known to the unknown. . . .

“This is the first transition, the transition in which you really ‘get it’ that the unknown cannot be taught, laid out on a map, or shown to you by another. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 20)”

2 – Teaching?

We cannot teach another what is buried deep within our hearts. Only our Self can accurately guide us in this life.

3 – Mentors

Oh, we have tried other things. We have listened to mentors, we have read—in all ways we have sought to learn from the teachings of others. But in this time of Christ we need to stop reaching out to others for the riddle of our lives; we need to realize that deep within are the Answers. So we get quiet, and we listen.

4 – Meditations

Now, meditations written by others may still help. They serve to anchor us, though, still deeper within ourselves. These meditations only remind us of what we have forgotten. They do not point out the road on which we ought to travel. Or, if we try to make them point out that road, we use those meditations in the wrong way. If we follow a path that has been laid out by another, we go nowhere—for each individual has a unique path. This point is well made by Joseph Campbell and is related in a book entitled, “Companion to Joseph Campbell.” The book blends oral comments from Joseph in a seminar of some time at Esalen, with quotations from Joseph’s work. And Joseph says just this—if we follow the path that has been followed by another, we go nowhere. Joseph also says, tellingly, that if follow our bliss, doors will open that have been closed before, and doors that would be closed for anyone else. So listen to your Inner Wisdom (a phrase used by an enlightened friend of mine), dialogue with your Inner Wisdom, and you will come out all right—not alright, for ALL right.

5 – We Receive

“What has happened here is that words have been put on the feelings and remembrances that you have within your minds and hearts and have been sharing in this dialogue. The way of saying this perhaps is new, but the way of saying this is the expression of the human being receiving it. The way in which you are hearing and responding to these truths is perhaps new, but that way too is of the human being receiving it, in this case, you. (A Course of Love: Dialogues, p. 183)”

6 – Learning

We have long depended on learning, on our minds, to live as comfortably as possible in this world. Day Twenty clarifies that we cannot learn the truth that way, the unknown cannot be taught. We know intuitively, and have always known intuitively, the truth of our being, the unknowns for which we have sought externally for solutions.

7 – Transitions

The first transition ends when we realize that we are in a state of transition, the state of knowing that we cannot learn anything, that we have always held internally the truths of which we are becoming aware. The more we turn inward, the more we will know these truths. Our minds are not the way; our hearts are. Thus we are at the true end of learning.

8 – Level Ground

We are preparing here, at the halfway point of our Forty Days and Forty Nights, to return to level ground, to leave the mountain top. We will be different people when we have returned to level ground. We will know the beauty, truth, and wisdom of the one Self, the Self that we share with all our brothers and sisters.

9 – Truth

“The truth is the truth. It doesn’t change. It is the same for everyone.

“What, then, is the unknown? The reception and expression of truth.

“This is why you can ‘know’ while always coming to know. . . .The only thing there is to know is the One Self in its many expressions. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 20)”

10 – Paths

The “truth” that is same for everyone is not the same as the path that someone will take in life. We all take different paths, but if we are to stay on that pathway, we need the same truths that speak to all of our brothers and sisters. We need authoritative truth, not subjective. We need to hear from someone like Jesus—and here he is speaking to us as an equal, a companion on our trek to the mountain top with him, leading to Christ-consciousness.

11 – Surrender

Surrender is an important component of arriving at Christ-consciousness. It is not within us to know the place nor the time that God appoints. This is a paraphrase from the New Testament in regard to the coming of the Kingdom of God, Heaven on earth. And what will we have in Christ-consciousness but the Kingdom of God, Heaven on earth. Nothing. We are walking to fulfillment as a Christ Self, allowing that inner Self to blossom and become obvious to ourselves and all around us.

12 – Timing

It is not hard, but it does take surrender to God’s timing, for He makes the decision about when.

13 – Preparation

Are there things that we can do to prepare? Yes, or A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love would never have been channeled. The ultimate purpose of both is to see us awaken. Jesus says in ACIM that revelation may occasionally reveal the end to us, but to get there, the means are needed. And he continues, that the means are being carefully explained to us. That is A Course in Miracles, the means.

14 – Struggle

I think that it is likely that Jesus saw many of struggling, once we knew that the ego was a bad thing, meant to be eliminated for our lives. How do we replace it with something? And so I think that Jesus had unfinished business with us, he recognized this, and, accordingly, as the new century dawned, he channeled A Course of Love to Mari. Just as he had channeled A Course in Miracles to Helen. There are other books available, many others, believed by their scribes to be channeled by Jesus in this new age. I do not judge these books. We find truth, sometimes wherever we look. But my way to a culmination is A Course of Love, just as my way was (and is) A Course in Miracles. And, as Jesus says about ACIM, why choose some other way that has served others well when this one is intended for you (for me). Yes, we need to realize that there are many pathways to God, and there is a different course for every teacher of God (the latter a paraphrase from the Manual of ACIM).

15 – Beauty, Truth, and Wisdom

“In other words, all the truth and all the wisdom that is available but unknown to you, takes you to make it known. And if this is the only way that the beauty, truth, and wisdom of the One Self can be made known, then you are the source and the power of coming to know and making known. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 20)”

16 – Beautiful Passage

This is an especially beautiful passage (as are many passages of particular beauty in A Course of Love). We are a source of coming to know for ourselves; we do not first seek outside ourselves. We are deliberately told not to seek outside ourselves by A Course in Miracles.

17 – Seeking

But isn’t outside seeking what we have been doing so often? We don’t just look on others’ writings as meditative, inspirational reading; we seek in them the ultimate answers to the ultimate questions. And we will not find such there, for such can only be found within. We can prepare, we can learn—but now is a time of rest, a time of reflection, a time of ultimately coming to know from our inner Christ Self. We are prepared. We may (and we do) still have flaws of personality, but we are “all right.” We accept ourselves the way that we are, or we decide that we don’t like a given personality trait, and so we just quietly turn aside from it. (Note that we don’t resist, which would tie the trait to ourselves all the stronger.)

18 – Gifts

So: beauty, truth, wisdom. These are gifts of the Christ Self Who is within all. We can know these gifts today. We do not have to wait. Just ask. For what we ask is in strict accordance with the Will of God, and if we have a little faith, a tiny faith that He will answer, indeed He will answer. Just first ask, politely and with love.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

It seems to me that You are teaching me that I have always known intuitively what is just now becoming clear to me. How foolish I have been! I have put more faith in what others have told me than in what I knew internally.

I ask for Your guidance, and the will to follow that guidance, today. I will never have done all that I can do to prepare for Awakening if I refuse, out of stubbornness and recalcitrance, to follow your Way. The Way that You point out to me. Sometimes I do feel stubborn, but if I follow Your Way, as it is pointed out to me by guidance, as soon as I can relinquish resistance, all will have returned to the right track. Just follow as soon as I can. With willingness and abundant joy, for joy is the hallmark that I am in the flow of my day. My day has flow when I follow guidance, and I chafe against illusory binding when I resist Your Way. How foolish would I be today? I choose not to lead a foolish life, not to see that foolishness in my thoughts, words, and actions today. I do want flow, and the only way that I can have it is to surrender to Your guidance as I comprehend that guidance. It is not hard, when the day has started right. And if the day starts wrong, I can start again. The path is both gentle and kind. And especially loving, for it is Your Way, which is always and ever loving.

Perhaps I needed to learn from others. But now You are teaching me to rely on the inner Word that You have place in my heart. May I rest in the comfort of this concept.

Amen.