Wonder of This World

There are dimensions of experience awaiting you that are so much grander than the dimension of the body-mind!  But the way that you get to them is by bringing full awareness to what you are choosing to experience in each and every moment. (“The Way of Transformation,” WOM, Chapter 13, Page.167)

I don’t think that this quotation is describing dimensions of experience in the afterlife; I think this quotation is describing a greater dimension to experience right in this world we inhabit now.  The “body-mind” is circumvented, all too often.  Sometimes we have not given up the ego, and egoic tendencies and egoic patterns sabotage us at every turn.  Sometimes we have given up the ego, but we find that we still don’t know what to do with ourselves because we haven’t yet found Christ-consciousness.

Be gentle with ourselves.  We are not without limitations in this world.  But when we open to larger dimensions, intuitively, we are coming in to our own.  These intuitive responses are telling us how to live happily.  They are also solving problems for us, problems with solutions right with the problems.

If we focus on the wonder of this world, we will be taking the right path.  We are meant to be happy here, regardless of limitations, regardless of any suffering/pain.  We can rise above difficulties if we make the mental and heartfelt effort.  And there is very little struggle involved.  The Holy Spirit asks only for a “little willingness” (from A Course in Miracles).

Enjoy the wonder of nature.  Enjoy the wonder of our relationships, becoming holy rather than special.  Revel in the pleasures of this world, because this is not hedonism.  This is supreme good sense.  If we make the most of what we have now, then whatever comes in the future will be easier to take.

We will have discovered the secret to a good life.

You Are Your Experience

1 – Day 31

“While you have been immersed in one level of experience you have been either knower or known. This is why experience has seemed to exist apart from you. You say, ‘I had this experience’ or ‘I had that experience,’ as if you have ‘had’ contact and interaction with circumstances or events that are separate from the self. . . .The truth that you are the experience escapes you. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 31)”

2 – Embodying Our Experiences

We are the experiences of which we are apart. We embody them, much as we think that our spirit embodies the physical form that is our body. We do not “have” experiences; we are them, because they transform us. And the extent to which the transformation comes from within is the extent to which we are aligned with inner forces, with the inner Christ Self.

3 – Transformation

We want transformation. All of us do. And we can have it when we give up fear. That is the salient factor. And to give up fear we simply must find out how we are to love each other, and also to love ourselves, and also to love God. All of this is One. Love is the Answer, as all religions have taught. But how do we come to love?

4 – Love

We remove all barriers to the experience of love. And the primary barrier is our own sense of insecurity, brought on by the egoic emphasis given fear. We surround ourselves with a hard casing that will protect. This casing is our defense. And A Course in Miracles tells us that we make what we defend against. So defense is not the answer. We need to realize that we are safe, and that we live in a safe world. Now, bad things happen all the time. But when we are at home in God, we will feel the pain, but we will not be immobilized by it.

5 – Pain

Some individuals who experience the most pain nevertheless have the greatest faith in times of turmoil. They see value in the bad experiences.

6 – No Need to Learn through Pain

ACIM says that we do not have to learn through pain. And so we don’t have to “be” experiences that are full of suffering. We can choose again, choose over. And in the better choosing, our suffering will drop away. Pain may drop away also, though if it is still with us it will miraculously become bearable.

7 – Mountain Top

“What the mountain top experience is helping you to see is that you are the experience. The mountain top experience did not happen to you or happen separately from you. It has happened and is happening within you. You are the experience and the experiencer, the knower and the known. This joining is the point of the experience and the key to experiencing wholeness. (A Course of Love: Dialogues, p. 209)”

8 – Summary

Day Thirty One functions as a summary of the thirty days that have preceded it. Jesus uses repetition deliberately and often to make his point.

9 – Joining

On Day Thirty One, we realize that “joining” has been what this trek to the mountain top, with simultaneously the experience of level ground, is to mean to us. We are One with our brothers and sisters, just as we are one within ourselves. The relationship that we share with others dovetails into union, one with another. This union is a manifestation of God. God is our point of unity, and we are all one with God. God is the essence of everything that we can see and know, and, moreover, all that we cannot see and know, but which is a part of the All.

10 – Separate from God?

Previously in our lives we knew only separation, and this includes a perceived (but inaccurate) sense that we were separate from God. Now we recognize how wrongheaded this thinking was. We were thinking only, thinking with our minds. Now our spirits have joined with our minds in wholeheartedness and with the realization that we are ready for the next step in spiritual evolution. Jesus will not disappoint us. He, as our companion, will lead us to discover what awaits in the final days of our mountain top experience.

11 – Knower and Knowee

“All experience is a product of knower and knowee. It is the One Self knowing itself as one individuated Self. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 31)”

12 – Repetition

This is a repetition of earlier statements made by Jesus. His repetition is deliberate, as he knows that repetition works. This quotation emphasizes that God individuated Himself in order to experience Himself, forming parts of the Whole as a way of experiencing. The One Self is God Himself, differentiated into the myriad parts of the universe(s).

13 – Hologram

And we are a hologram. We have the Whole deep within ourselves, for God is within. But we are the one individuated Self, for we do not yet have the union that is God. We are the relationship, but not the union In time we will also become the union. That is what the oft-repeated words in A Course of Love, “unity and relationship,” really mean.

14 – Individuated Self

“For the individuated Self to experience separately from God is to negate the purpose of the experience of the Self which is God. To negate is to deny what is. The denial of what is is the source of separation. The acceptance of what is is the source of union and the ability to experience in wholeness. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 31)”

15 – Turn Within

Do we want to experience as God does? Then we turn within, allowing the union between God and ourselves to happen. The final days of the 40 days and 40 nights emphasize how this transformation is possible. It becomes possible when we know Christ-consciousness, and not a moment beforehand—though we may catch glimpses of Awakening.

16 – What “Is”

How do we accept what “is”? We no longer wish for anything to be other than what it is. We can ask for a miracle, we can practice visualization and affirmations, we can invoke the law of attraction—but in the final analysis, this is not what we are about. All things are added to us when we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (from the New Testament). So we don’t waste our time trying to make our creature comforts more desirable to ourselves. They will fall in line as soon as our thinking is about God. There is no other way toward enlightenment. We accept what is. Pure and simple. We are willing to have it so, as Eastern religion encourages us. And then we have reached the pinnacle. We know, as we experience in wholeness.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

Help me to know–not to perceive, but to know–what it means to be One with You. My little mind is so inadequate to comprehend such a great truth. Help me to understand today.

God is within. I have long known that. And God is within the All. God is the All-in-One. May I know what it is to experience your personal caring, in the midst of the great universe of which I, along with my brothers and sisters, are a part.

Amen.

Finding Inner Vision

1 – Day 27

“You have been asked to let go of uncertainty, not certainty. You have been assured of a certainty you never before believed you were capable of. This certainty is beginning to form within you but will not come into its fullness except through experience. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 27)”

2 – Guidance

We will reach certainty about what we say and do only when we have consistently followed guidance. This can be hard to do, especially when we are having a bad day, when we are overwrought, or when we are being stubborn. We may rebel against the intuitive nudges that come to us. And rebelling is never a good idea.

3 – Uncertainty

We need to let go of uncertainty. We need to walk surely and easily in this world. And we will when we let the Holy Spirit (as A Course in Miracles says) or the Christ Self, within (as A Course of Love says) take precedence in our lives. If we believe that the Holy Spirit is our best guidance, we have not yet moved into the time of Christ. And this is OK. Many enlightened people still depend on the Holy Spirit.

4 – Holy Spirit

There is an implication in ACOL that the world’s people will have to “grow out of” the time of the Holy Spirit. We who were born in the time of the Holy Spirit will, in the natural course, leave this world. And then all people in the Twentieth-First Century will have been born in the time of Christ. This may or may not make any difference to us, but it will make a huge difference in the way that the world works. We need to contemplate moving into the time of Christ, asking our inner guidance if we are ready for this.

5 – Certainty

To reach certainty is to be consistently following guidance. Of course, I believe that the Holy Spirit knows on any given day whether or not we will be rebellious. And He tailors His guidance appropriately. We can’t fool Him, though we can fool ourselves.

6 – External Life

“Experiencing life without the insight of spirit was to experience external life. . . .Most of you have had well-examined external lives. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 27)”

7 – Well-Examined

All of us lived for years, probably, without benefit of the Holy Spirit, or the inner spirit. We didn’t know any other way to live. But we analyzed our lives quite a bit, especially when we embarked on the spiritual pathway. That leads to the “well-examined external lives” that Jesus speaks of here.

8 – Decisions

We have previously been experiencing external life, making decisions that would fall in line with what we were experiencing externally. Now the time is ripe to look within before making decisions. The inner life prompts much better, and we start having a rich internally-focused life. The life that we live will smooth out accordingly.

9 – Coming to Know

“Coming to know if not an aspect of the mind alone. It is not an aspect of the spirit alone. Coming to know is a quality of inner-sight, of wholehearted human experience combined with spiritual experience. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 27)”

10 – Inner-Sight

We want to know, of course—all of us. And we will really know only when we have inner-sight, experiencing the world while living with the spiritual understandings that we have come to have through experience. Here Jesus is talking about combining the mind and heart to be wholehearted in experience. This was a major emphasis of the first volume of A Course of Love.

11 – Internal and External

“To be able to hold onto, apprehend, and carry with you the ability to experience both levels of experience, the internal and the external, the form and the content, the human and the divine, is to elevate the self of form, or, in other words, to be what you have always been: Whole. (Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 27)”

12 – Elevated Self of form

A central theme in ACOL, the elevated Self of form is what Jesus wants for all of us, the elevated Self of form sustained. Many have had glimpses of this Awakening, but Jesus says in ACOL that nobody has sustained this. And he needs sustaining. We can reach the sustenance of Christ-consciousness if we refrain from judging and if we lose all fear (from the Treatise on the New). A tall order, but easy if we have the grace from God that calls these traits forth.

13 – Judging and Fear

Certainly returning judgment and fearful thoughts will both abort the Awakening experience. How do we live without judgment and in a relaxed state that eliminates fear and anxiety?

14 – What We Do

Just being aware of the pitfalls will make a huge difference. But grace is the Answer to completely foiling these negative states of mind and heart. God’s grace in our lives. And we cannot totally control this, even though we know that His Will for us is Christ-consciousness, a sustained, elevated Self of physical form in this world. Knowing that the natural state of human beings is Awakening helps a great deal. When Christ-consciousness comes, we are not doing anything special, but are merely moving into the realm that has always been there for us.

15 – Life

“Life, your humanity, is the variability. Spirit, your oneness, is the constant. Life is oneness extended into separation and variability through experience. The elevated Self of form will be the expression of new life lived within the constant of wholeness but continuing to experience the variability of separation. This is what you practice as you gather on the mountain top while remaining on level ground. (A Course of Love: Dialogues, p. 200)”

16 – Apprehension

The apprehension of which Day Twenty Seven speak is not an apprehension of fearfulness, but a comprehension, an apprehension, of life itself. We are asked to reach for life itself in all its variability. We seek for variability through wholeness. This is actually more familiar to us now than we realize, because in studying ACOL from the mountain top, while simultaneously remaining in our daily world, we have been experiencing two levels at once. This is the basic reason why we were asked to go to the mountain top while not removing ourselves from daily life.

17 – Wholeheartedness

We experienced external life for many years in out past without the benefit of spirit. Now we are beyond such evidence of limitedness. We are experiencing life through the spirit as well as the mind. We are experiencing the wholeheartedness that is the hallmark of A Course of Love.

18 – Whole

To experience the human and the divine simultaneously is to be what we have actually always been: Whole. This is leading to the sustaining of the elevated Self of form, a basic tenet of ACOL. We are heading toward an experience of variability within wholeness rather than within separation. The biggest revelations are ahead of us.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

I welcome the chance to experience both my humanity as well as my spirit. This is a new contribution of A Course of Love, and I find this concept enchanting.

May I learn in this period of 40 Days and 40 Nights all that the “mountain top” experience is meant to hold out to me. Be with me as I seek. Help me to learn through thoughts that I do not think, even as this trilogy that is A Course of Love has encouraged learning to cease, and observation and experience to continue as I walk further along my personal pathway..

Thank You for the many blessings that this day has brought to me. Help me to forgive myself for the mistakes that I have brought to this lovely day of Yours. I know that You don’t need to forgive, because You have never condemned. But I need to realize, once again, that I am very fallible, and that regardless of good intentions, I do sometimes stumble and fall—as I did earlier today. I would begin again, start the day over. And I know that Jesus would say that this is entirely possible, for he has pointed out the way for starting the day over in A Course in Miracles.

Thank You for these blessings of ACIM and ACOL. We need so much to learn what Jesus has been trying to get across to us. We need to heed his words, to walk into the sunlight with him.

Amen.