Pure Love Manifested

“Blessed soul, beauty of eternal life!  Here we are, united in a time and place that has merged into the eternal.  Together we are the light of the world.  United we are the sun of life.  From our relationship of pure love, a new reality has been born, a reality pure and holy.  We are one mind, one heart, one holy being.  In our unity we are as we have always been–the immutability of being, expressing itself forever in glory.”  Choose Only Love, bk.7, 1:I.  Message from Jesus.

Jesus’ words are comforting.  He is reassuring us that we have never left the arms of God–and of himself.  He blesses us with his words.

If we have ever felt “not enough”–and all of us have–then we need feel insufficiency no longer.  In the midst of this quotation, we find that our saving grace is in our unity one with another and with God.

We have not changed–not in reality.  We took a detour that we now regret, though because everything is actually perfect, we know that God also, with us, made the decision for separation.  It was first our choice as free beings of free will, but He “let go” because we were so eager to experience all that could be experienced.  

Now we come home, never to leave again.  We are wrapped up in a cocoon of love, and lest we forget, we have God’s promptings to keep us in the know.

There Is Nothing Outside You

“There is nothing outside you.  That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is the realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-18.VI.1)

This passage puzzled me for a long time.  I think it is a statement of a holographic universe:  Each part contains the whole.  So we are a part of the All, the One, that is God—and therefore there is nothing outside of us.  We and our brother—all of our brothers—are One.  Everything is alive with energy, the stuff of the universe.  

We return to Heaven when we realize that we never really left at all.  What leaving we did was all a mirage, an illusion, something that never happened in actuality at all.  The separation never occurred!  The separation could not have occurred because we are a part of God, and so we can be “separate” from him only in illusion, not reality at all.

These ruminations reflect the theology of A Course in Miracles.  We will read further on, and then we will see the theology becoming all of one cloth.  There is no strain.  We will wake up to find ourselves at home in Heaven, the Oneness that we never really left at all.

Recapturing What We Lost in the Fall of Man

“In unity, all that you desired was participated in fully by a mind and heart combined in wholeheartedness.  You knew your Self to be the creator, and loved all that you created.  You did not desire and fear something at the same time, and your desires did not change from moment to moment.”  (A Course of Love, C:18.14)

We are now living eons past the time of “first” unity.  This first experience of unity cannot really be recaptured as a sense impression now, but it can be recaptured as we move farther along the pathway back to God.  We lived eons ago in wholeheartedness, knowing ourselves as a creator, a co-creator (if you will), of God Himself.  But because of something that couldn’t really happen, but did (the “tiny mad idea” that A Course in Miracles discusses), we fell from grace into an adolescent rebellion.  We weren’t patient enough to come into the fullness of our Being, our Self.  So we coalesced around a false persona, driven by an ego that we made ourselves, and we fell into deep despair as a result.

We can return to the unity that we have forgotten.  It takes patience and abundant willingness to capture what we have lost, but the recapture is God’s intention for us, and so he is right there helping us every step along the way.

Don’t get depressed that the way seems too long and tortuous.  It may be long, but the way is not tortuous at all.  Not with all the help that we are being given.  Our way back is assured—indeed, has always been assured, from the beginning.  God’s will only takes time in the working out, and time does not really exist, for we live in eternity.

Returning Us to Our True Nature

“You may not feel that you have ever intended to live in fear.  But the displacement of the original intent was so complete that each life has begun with fear and proceeded from this beginning continually reacting fear.  While the original intent remained within you and caused you to attempt to express a Self of love despite your fear, fear has thwarted your every effort and caused the very effort that has continued the cycle of fear.  To have to try to be who you are and to express who you are is the result of the displacement of the nature of love with the nature of fear.  What we now are about is reversing this displacement and returning you to your true nature.”  (A Course of Love, T4:3.5)

We had an “original intent” eons ago, and that was to live in love—not fear.  But fear intervened, and nothing has ever been right since.  This is the crucial, central feature of our lives.  We have displaced love with fear, and then we have lived in this egoic state of fear.  There ought to be a better way.

And there is.  We can learn, and not necessarily by traditional means of study, to displace fear and the egoic self with the Self of love.  This change will make all the difference.  And A Course of Love is showing us how to effect this change.  It is true (as A Course in Miracles says also) that God makes the final decision of when we are ripe for Christ-consciousness or Awakening.  Then he metaphorically reaches down to us and lifts us up.

Yet there are things we can do to remove blocks to the awareness of love.  This in itself will ease our way, and give us a happy experience.  We need to get the idea of suspiciousness out of our minds; we need trust above all else.  And trust we can have; just a decision to have it is enough to bring it to us.  This does not mean that we will be gullible.  We have our own good sense, and this is sense of the real Self, not the ego.  When we place our faith in the inner Christ Self, we are far more likely to be right than to be wrong in our evaluations of others.  Note that this does not mean “judgment” of others, for judging keeps us from attaining enlightenment.  We need to simply rest in the assurance that if we are encouraged to avoid a particularly situation (or person), we will know how and where to do so.  That is all.

Our Essence

“You are God Itself.  Now, that is the first time that we have been quite so bold.  It is the first time that we have described you as that which is God.  This can only mean that what you are in your essence, in your essential being, is God Himself.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 16, Page 188)

What this quotation is saying is that the All, everything, is composed of “God-stuff.”  There is no energy that exists except the essence of God, and He created children from that Essence that are differentiated out of His very being.  We are those children.

There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that we are finite and lack full knowledge.  We could not live if we knew it all, because our mind would act like a computer drive that has had too much data stored in it (an analogy from A Course of Love).  We have also “fallen,” in that we made an ego that has separated us from God—or so we thought.  We could not actually separate from Him, for we are part of Him, part of His essence.

When we return to God, to know it, we will be in a position to partake more of His very essence.  Our benefits will be great, for love and loving will be the way we live.  Love is God, as we know.  But God is not an emotion, and so by this statement we mean something grander than the emotion of love.  We draw sustenance from Love (something that remains a mystery), for when we forgive completely, we know that we are safe in His arms (we know this from A Course in Miracles, which stresses forgiveness as our great need).

And when we have walked the whole way back to God, we will then know that there is really nothing to forgive.  The dream is over, the reality is in full sway now.

Love is the way we walk in peace.