Silence

“Silence can be cultivated in a number of ways.  Initially, it will look like something you do through the body—to breathe deeply and rhythmically, to sit next to an ocean, to sit beneath a tree and become absorbed in the wind.  Or to merely practice the ancient art of remaining silent without speaking as you go through your daily events.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 263)

We all need silence, but we live in a noisy world. We all talk a lot, too. Cultivating silence in our daily rounds may be easier than practicing meditation consistently, and being silent as we contemplate is, to my mind/heart, a recommended substitute.

When we are silent, we can listen to our innermost world; we can go within. There is richness there. As we know, God dwells within all Creation. And He will speak to us when we get quiet enough to hear. I don’t mean something audible, but a knowing that gives us guidance for our next step.

Just quieten down, outwardly and inwardly. After a hectic holiday season, perhaps we all could use some silence.

Be Fully Ourselves to Avoid Pain/Suffering

Note:  After today’s post, I’m going to take a break from posting for a little while.  Thank you for your views.  Love, Celia

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“All pain comes from not being fully yourself.  Whenever you suffer, you suffer because somehow you are not being fully you.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 4:II

This is a novel idea, that not being ourselves can cause suffering/pain.  If this is true, we have some control over suffering and pain.  If we sense these things, we can simply ask in what way we are not being true to ourselves.  Not being fully ourselves is not being true to ourselves.

Perhaps we aren’t certain how to be fully ourselves.  This is a common problem, but a problem easily solved if only we remember to go within for our Answers.  Going within solves so much that has troubled us.  It is the way we reach God.  It is the way that we go home for a while, even while in the midst of this sometimes troubling world.

Pain is not the same as suffering.  In this world, we will sometimes have pain, but we can avoid the emotional context that leads to suffering, because suffering nearly always has an emotional component.  Jesus seems to be saying here that if we are fully ourselves, we won’t even have pain.  This is an ideal situation, and not all of us can reach to Jesus’ ideal.  But we can try.

Go within, in prayer, in contemplation—especially when something is troubling us.  If we nip the trouble in the bud by having as a goal being true to ourselves, then we will eclipse much that has been a problem in the past.

Remember that God sustains us.  When we turn to Him, we are much more likely to be successful in our desire to eliminate pain/suffering from what we experience, because it is not He Who brings bad things to us.  True, He allows it, but these mysteries of pain and suffering are not anything that we can fully understand with finite minds.  We need to practice acquiescence, as God does.  Then and only then, in our acceptance, will we have taken the first step toward getting rid of the things in our lives that we don’t want—principally, pain/suffering.

Contemplate Gently Today

“Let us now consider “thinking” to be the active and often unwelcome voice “in your head,” the voice of background chatter. And let us consider your “thoughts” to be the more meditative version of your “thinking,” often even resulting in a conclusion to your thinking, a summary of the finer points, as what might come to you in a reflective moment at the end of the day. Again we will see the idea of thoughts “coming to you” at such times. This is not the “thinking” of a conflicted and struggling mind, but the “thoughts” of a mind at rest.” (ACOL, D:12.10)

This quotation is a snippet in a longer discussion of the art of thought, and how we need to deemphasize (even eliminate) the “thinking” aspect of what our minds do, for we are often analyzing, not listening to inspiration. “Thoughts,” as in the lengthy chapter in A Course of Love entitled, “The Art of Thought,” is meant to mean a number of things: miracle-mindedness, miracle-readiness, miracles (just for themselves), and prayer (constant). Our thought processes as we head into Christ-consciousness are about to slow down drastically, so much so that it is harbinger of having made the great transformation of Awakening, enlightenment.

Jesus uses the words “thinking” and “thought” a little differently than the dictionary definitions, of course, but his reasoning is impeccable. We will let the matters of our concern rest lightly on our minds and hearts as we proceed along the path of transformation. We won’t stop the flow of lightly-held thought, but we stop plugging it up and analyzing stray thinking. We dam up our thought processes, and we are even tempting the ego back into our minds when we screw up our foreheads and “think.”

Jesus tells us that he doesn’t think in the same way that we do; he doesn’t “think” at all. He doesn’t explain exactly what he means by this, but it is clear that he encourages us to live intuitively, and this is a way of living that discounts intellectual reasoning power. Our intellect so often deceives us! We think we are just so very smart, and such thinking is so of the ego that we recognize that we are thinking amiss.

Let thought rest lightly, as the miracles as expressions of love comes to us to be performed. Jesus will guide us as to what miracles to perform; we are always to ask. Our Self, the same Self who we share with Jesus and all our brothers and sisters, will respond with an answer. Our Self of union, in A Course of Love, is the way that we know what to think, say, and do. As noted earlier, we have moved beyond the Holy Spirit as an intermediary between God and ourselves, and we can get guidance directly from the Self who is a part of God, the Self who has dwelled deep within as long as we have existed as beings created by God.

So: Contemplate gently today. Let the mind rest, knowing that what we need to say and do will occur by means beyond ourselves. We don’t need to struggle with the events of our lives. Our insight, often felt as intuition, will tell us all that we need to know.

Prayer

Be with me today as I seek to give my mind a rest. Let my heart come to the forefront. Let my heart truly live, for its ways are informing my mind—and to great benefit for me. May my expressions of love to my significant others smooth their way today. May my expressions of love be a constant, daily thing.

Thank You for this good day. I rejoice in the day that You have created.

Amen.

For Inner Vision Close Your Eyes

“Close your eyes on all that you have become accustomed to seeing.  And you will see the light.

“In the light that comes only to eyes that no longer see, you will find the Christ who abides in you.  (A Course of Love, 3.5 – 3.6)”

Affirmation:  “Christ abides in me.”

Reflections:

1 – An Invitation to Meditation?

This passage seems almost an invitation to meditation, but it does stop short of recommending meditation.  Many people see in the concluding pages of the Workbook of A Course in Miracles a call to meditation.  And perhaps it is.  We ought not to invite controversy into our thinking.  We will just see what there are in both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love that we can take unto our hearts and live with in gladness.  Turn aside from anything that we seem unready yet to accept.  But read carefully, and contemplate in our hearts, and we will be well off indeed.

2 – Christ Abides in Us

Christ abides in us.  He/She is our Self, a Being deeper (or higher, depending on the concept that one has) within that guides us and comforts us.  Christ is in Jesus, of course, but in A Course of Love, Jesus makes clear that he has nothing that we cannot aspire to have.  And this is a great blessing.  Later on in the trilogy of A Course of Love, he will resign as our teacher, and become our true heart’s companion.  This is where we are heading in A Course of Love.

3 – Christ = Our Real Self

Christ is an all-encompassing term, meaning our real Self, a Self that we will later come to understand, in part, as our “elevated Self of form.”  Jesus has been stressing that the real world is not  seen with physical eyes, but with inner vision.  And there is no form that is truly real.  We do live in an illusion.  But in the illusion we experience form, and that is not a bad thing, nor a thing to be lamented.  God chose for us, as adolescents, to seem to depart from Him, because to hold on would be to deny free will.  Jesus compares this action to the action that parents take toward an unruly adolescent who would assert his/her freedom.  The parents let go, just as God Himself let go.  And only then did we realize how much we needed Him.

4 – See with Non-Physical Eyes

Return to God today.  See with non-physical eyes the vision that Jesus would have us see.  And all will be really well.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

I would forget the world for awhile today, reveling in the mysteries inside of me.  Thank You for reminding me that my physical vision, my physical eyes, do not see aright.  It takes inner vision to see the Self who I really am.  May that Self become ever more a part of my outer being today, so that I can let my light shine aright for You.

Be with us today as we walk together in this world of illusion.  May we quiet ourselves when such quiet seems warranted, and may we find in the quietness a holiness in ourselves that only You put there, and only You can lead us to see.

May I so let my light shine today that You can be seen by the others in my world.  And may I not let You down in any way.  May I not let my brothers and sisters down.  We all need to be good examples for each other, so when one of us slips, the other can catch his/her hand.

Amen.