Let Our Heart Lead Us to Flow Along

“You will simply flow and be carried in a firm, accurate, sweet way by the swell formed by the force that arises from the union of truth and love, the union of your thoughts and feelings.”  Choose Only Love, bk. 7, 2:III.  Message from the Archangel Raphael.

When we commune with God, really commune with Him, we are not kept off track very long.  A flow develops that carries us through our days.  And this flow is supernatural, far beyond anything that we could sustain without divine help.

Pray for truth and love, especially if we feel off-track.  Our truth responds to reason and common sense, not madness.  Our love is the catalyst that allow truth to blossom.

If our heart feels dead, do not let this state of affairs remain.  Turn to God, in direct relationship, and ask for His healing, His reaching to us from our depths, to heal and bless.

God will not ignore our pleas.  He always responds, and if He seems not to do so, then we are thinking amiss.  Our mind may have fooled us, but our heart never will.  And it is with our heart that we sense God’s presence.  And then our thoughts fall in line.

A Closer Walk with God

“While your mind did not accept the truth of your identity or the reality of love without fear, it existed in a reality of fear and judgment, and bound heart and body to this reality.  Your heart has now heard the appeal of this Course and worked with your mind to bring about this acceptance of the truth, a truth your heart has always known but has been unable to free you to accept without the mind’s cooperation.”  (A Course of Love, T4:7.5)

This quotation explains the concept of wholeheartedness, that we need to join mind to heart, not letting either take the ascendancy alone.  In wholeheartedness, we give up fear, not with a whimper, but with a joyful shout.  We are free at last!  Fear and judgment go together, and both are anathema to reaching Christ-consciousness.  Our heart has always known truths that our mind rejected because of our intellectualism.  Basically, we didn’t want to be superstitious.  We feared that believing in God was intellectually suspect.

Our heart doesn’t have such misgivings.  Our heart knows that there is a Something—or Someone—More.  And when we listen to our hearts, we are happier.  Would you not take happiness, any day, over intellectual skepticism that locks us in despair?

Love / Safety / Trust

“Where you learned to hate, you will learn to love.  Where you learned to fear, you will learn safety.  Where you learned to distrust, you will learn trust.  And each learning experience will be a learning experience because it will touch your heart.”  (A Course of Love, C:24.1)

We are thinking about the heart in A Course of Love.  Of course, technically we are thinking about “wholeheartedness,” which is the union of mind and heart.  But we focus on the heart because we have so long neglected that vital center of our Self.  When we were caught by the ego, we listened to what our deluded and insane mind said.  And when we sought to relinquish the ego, we were changing our minds.  

But there is a step beyond that A Course of Love seeks to have us reach.  And this step is reached without words that the mind could understand, or rational understanding that is totally beyond the ego.  This is the realm of the heart, where words fail us and we are at home in God.  We “know” things without having to be told.  We “understand” things without a rational explanation.  Life just “is,” and we are finally and ultimately happy in the “isness” that will lead us to Christ-consciousness.  We don’t ask anymore because we have no need.  We know.  And this knowledge saves us.

Living in Unity

“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.

Express Ourselves!

“We have talked about the expression of feelings.  It is necessary.  For this, first we travel the path of the silence of the heart.  Then we allow being to express itself.  The manner in which this expression is realized will vary, given the vastness of what you are.  Embrace, sing, dance, cry, moan.  Express yourself!  – Choose Only Love, bk. V, 20:III

Jesus is here channeling the progression to Awakening, or enlightenment, also called Christ-consciousness or metanoia.  We are so diverse that never ought there to be any judgment about how our enlightenment unfolds.  Choose Only Love, in seven volumes, has as its purpose the healing of memory.  There is a progression to the healing of memory, for as The Way of Mastery also points out, all aspects of the mind must be brought to the light by coming up from the depths of the subconscious.

This may sound hard, but never forget that God is in charge.  And also we have help from other realms.  It is God’s will that we progress to our next stage of evolution, to Awakening, and for this our mind and heart work in conjunction.

Let our heart lead.  The message is in our feelings, and there is great depth as we touch God directly through our feelings.

He will do the rest.  God is also a “She,” and so we need to become accustomed to this terminology also.  God is also our Divine Mother.

Let Our Heart Embrace with Love

“For it is the embrace with perfect self-honesty that returns the mind to sanity.  It is the refusal to be honest that creates the conflict and tension in the mind that is called insanity.  And insanity is a state in which the mind is not at peace, and Christ cannot enter therein.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 269)

A Course in Miracles also says that we are living in madness until our minds and healed, and we walk with God.  All of us, and this is an arresting truth.

It sometimes helps in an altercation with loved ones (which happens to all of us) that we silently say, “This is insanity.”  We can’t ask our loved ones to be closer to God than we are, and ACIM also says that the one who is more sane at the moment has the imperative to cool things down (a paraphrase).

We need, as this passage says, to embrace whatever is happening.  Not to turn away from it, which makes for unnecessary conflict.  Choose Only Love also reiterates that embracing what is happening is the way we escape from what is troubling us; to try to avoid it is to invite further pain.

If Christ cannot enter us when the mind is in conflict, A Course of Love says that we ought to turn to our heart for a solution.  Yes!  This channeled work holds the key.  

Let the heart rule, for the heart will choose embracing, with love, just all the time.

Let the heart do its work, and all will be well.

Faith & Real Hope

Note: The book mentioned in this post, Choose Only Love, is available from Amazon in both print and e-book formats. It was received by Sebastian Blaksley in recent years.

“Despite understanding little of what is said, still you go forward with faith and real hope, because your heart knows.”  Choose Only Love, bk.2, 6:I

When we begin reading the seven volumes of Choose Only Love, we are still largely lost in confusion, despite the blessings of what is said.  Enough has not yet been said to clue us in completely.

But as we move forward in our faith and in hope for what we know is a good treatise, we discover more.  And our faith and hope are justified.

The caveat is that our heart knows, has known all along.  When we listen to our heart, we merge with the Divine, with God, for all of us know that He is Love, and in ourselves, the heart is the center of our love.

Be with us as we read further in Choose Only Love.  Let us pause frequently to absorb the love that emanates from its pages.  May God’s blessing be upon our reading.

Heart

Note: Today’s posting is an excerpt, with prompting quotation added, to my book, Being Who You Are: Pondering A Course of Love, 265 pages. The book is available on Amazon for $7.95 (print) and $5.99 (ebook). Five out of five stars for all reviews.

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“While your mind did not accept the truth of your identity or the reality of love without fear, it existed in a reality of fear and judgment, and bound heart and body to this reality.  Your heart has now heard the appeal of this Course and worked with your mind to bring about this acceptance of the truth, a truth your heart has always known but has been unable to free you to accept without the mind’s cooperation.”  (A Course of Love, T4:7.5)

This quotation explains the concept of wholeheartedness, that we need to join mind to heart, not letting either take the ascendancy alone.  In wholeheartedness, we give up fear, not with a whimper, but with a joyful shout.  We are free at last!  Fear and judgment go together, and both are anathema to reaching Christ-consciousness.  Our heart has always known truths that our mind rejected because of our intellectualism.  Basically, we didn’t want to be superstitious.  We feared that believing in God was intellectually suspect.

Our heart doesn’t have such misgivings.  Our heart knows that there is a Something—or Someone—More.  And when we listen to our hearts, we are happier.  Would you not take happiness, any day, over intellectual skepticism that locks us in despair?

Prayer of the Heart

Sometimes the unconscious guides us to a certain familiar pathway as a warning.  If I find myself gazing vacantly out a window and fantasizing about the future, the future that I see is best avoided.  But remember not to try too hard to predict the future; probabilities change.

                                –

Reality offers what I really want–the prayer of the heart. (A Course in Miracles, M-21.1:3-4)

Centering

Journal writing is an invaluable tool for the centering of one’s life and work.  Once I went for 19 months with only two entries. 

It is instructive that the last entry before starting this dry period was entitled “New Centering.”  I had reached a plateau and was willing quietly to rest there for a while. 

–

Creative assessment of real desires can help bring them about. But too much introspection can become retreating, and this fuels neurosis.

–

On making good decisions: “I’m feeling reassured that I will know the right decision to make if I pay attention to my nocturnal dreams, keep a positive and happy outlook, and listen to my heart (i.e., the Holy Spirit dwelling within).  Psychic inclinations help, but I must check them out and not go overboard.”

–

When a song goes through my head, I pause to remember the lyrics.

It is a fruitful path to the Unconscious.  Like a dream, the lyrics frequently take me a step deeper in my psyche. 

Caught in Our Mind

“There are many in your world who would yet perceive spirituality as a way to get out of the place in which they find themselves, not understanding that they can be nowhere save than in their own mind.  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 20, Page 244)

We are caught in our mind. We can’t escape by any known means (though we can escape from our ego, if given enough motivation).

There are some frequent illusions in spiritual literature to trying to escape by moving house, going elsewhere in the world, or retreating to the quiet countryside. Most writers are making the point that these attempts to save ourselves simply don’t work, because we take our agitated mind with us.

The only way is to heal the mind, and that is not entirely up to our personal self. We need God’s help. And we may also know that Jesus’ healing touch is available to us as well.

When we open our heart, not our mind, to love, then miraculously our mind is healed as well. We don’t have to move to the countryside after all. We have the peace we have sought.

Loving from the Heart

“If you love some more than others, or if you love certain aspects of creation in a different way than you love others, then you do not understand what love is.”  Choose Only Love bk.4, 4:I

What does Choose Only Love mean by this statement about love? How can we wrap our minds and hearts around this idealistic statement?

Like A Course in Miracles, Choose Only Love can be read on different levels. When we seek love in the interpretation of CHOL, we are seeking the love of God, Who loves all equally for we are all treasured children in His eyes. The closer we come to loving the way that God loves, the more “on the beam” we are.

This statement about love does not mean that we don’t choose different expressions of love with different people in our world. We do. This statement about love is not about those different expressions. It is about the heart, our heart as well as the heart of all others. In the heart, we can love equally, and when we do we are touching God’s hemline.

In the Bosom of God

“Once you accept that you are one with life, one with God, and are together a unit just like a child in the womb, you can begin to live in the reality of the bosom of God.”  Choose Only Love bk.4, 2:II

This quotation from Choose Only Love, an inspired work by Sebastian Blaksley just out, emphasizes to me the meditative nature of this work. It is coming out in multiple volumes, and is a blessing recognized by those of us who read it.

When we imagine ourselves a child in the womb, we are thinking safety, and nothing says safety more conclusively than being held close to the bosom of God. We need to practice love as well as seek safety, of course, and the best way for me to react with love in my devotionals is to feel the warmth of love in my heart–for God, for others, even for myself. This “cocooning” by God does lead us to recognize that without love, we are truly lost. He does not will it, but our personal will might take over and lead us into narrow pathways of ill choice.

I have sometimes said that we need to “milk” the love, when we feel it (especially when we feel it keenly), and then we will be more likely to turn to our heart instead of intellectualizing everything.

Our heart, as A Course of Love also said, does then inform our mind, working in conjunction with our mind–and we are led in the pathway back to God.

To Mother the New into Existence

“The invasion is an intrusion of The New into the old, a force meant to quicken the passing of all that lingers of death in the living.  To end living death and welcome living life.  To end division and become one with what is being birthed.  To mother The New into existence.”  Mirari

Here Mirari, Mari’s new book, takes up where A Course of Love left off.  Still talking about The New, the new world that we will all create together, this new book goes a step farther.  It counsels that we do what we can to bring love into our world, big time, for there are still too many of us who are bringing negativity into this world.

We need to be sure that we don’t encourage negativity by our own actions.  We must stop feeding egos, and here I know Mari’s new book is preaching to the choir.  All of us who have discovered A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love know of the detrimental effect of egoic and egotistical thought.

Listen to our heart.  Mirari is also a heart-centered book, in this way like A Course of Love.

Listen to Our Heart

“Uncertainty will not now come to teach you lessons you have already learned but will only visit you as an echo from the past.  It is a habit, a pattern of the old thought system.  All you must do is not listen to it.  Its voice will not be gentle or full of love.  Its voice will hold the unmistakable edge of fear.”  (A Course of Love, T3:10.11)

When we refuse to surrender to divine love, we are racked with uncertainty about life and everything in it.  We are like wind socks, buffeted about by the breeze, a gentle breeze that we mistake for the direst emergency.  This uncertainty will fall away when we know enough to surrender to God.  What uncertainty still plagues will only be a “echo” (T3:10.11) from the fear-ridden state of illusory separation.  This echo will be fearful, and this fear is the way that we will recognize that it is a lamentable part of our past.  It cannot do anything to us now except to make us uneasy.  But it can and will do that, until we give up separation and its concomitant independence as a bad idea.

Don’t listen to uncertainty about anything in our lives.  Let guidance from within give us the certainty about what to say and do and even think.  The heart’s advice will stand us in good stead now.  Listen to that which calls to us.  Listen to our heart.

Divine Thought

“The mind was not created for the speculative exercise of thinking.  It was created to receive divine thought.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 10:III

Divine thought is our wisdom, our “inner wisdom,” received from God. When we are lost in speculation, we are likely to be processing thought in an analytical way; this won’t do at all. When we lighten up and let God speak to us, then we are onto something grand. His words solve problems at the moment of their arrival. His words give us comfort and peace. Our wisdom, which is divine thought, is giving us a better life.

A very important quotation, for it says that we have not been thinking well. When we open to divine thought, our heart joins the mind for true thought. We are much better off. And we know it immediately.

When we are caught up in our thinking, our speculative thinking, we are often in conflict. We are lost in our thinking. We need to clear our minds and let God speak to us.

Then the Divinity Who is ours takes over. And, once again, all is well.

Love Comes from Our True Heart

“Remember also that what is not love is nothing; therefore any feeling that is not love does not come from your true heart, just as any thought of fear does not come from your true mind.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 10:I

When we are living in a true mind and a true heart, we will adopt love in all our dealings–not only with our brothers and sisters but with ourselves. We will treat ourselves gently; we will turn aside from fear by knowing that we too are made of God’s Love. Love is the way in which He created us. Love is the way to walk in this world.

Being true to our nature is amazingly important. And here we discover that being true is being in love. With our brothers and sisters, with ourselves.

Love will descend upon us when we ask in all sincerity of thought and feeling, of mind and heart. When we ask God for His blessing, we are asking in His will, and He moves quickly to comfort us.

If disturbed in any way, go to God. If mixed up, tangled up, go to God. His healing power will set our psyche aright again. He may use other people in this endeavor, but the real healing comes from Him. Let Love do its work, and we will be blessed beyond description.

Our Memory Enters the Father’s House

[A]ll that you are in your humanity will be reunited seamlessly with the eternal reality of your holiness.  Your mind has already healed.  Already your heart has been restored to Heaven.  Today, on this day of Divine grace, your memory enters the Father’s house.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 9:II

In truth, we are all living in the Now, for time is an illusion that cannot circumvent eternity. This “present moment” thinking is reflected in the quotation for today. Past and future do not exist in the timeless Now. And this is why we can read in Choose Only Love that all of us have healed memories–today.

We learned from The Way of Mastery (also called The Christ-Mind Trilogy) that our subconscious mind must be healed to awake in Christ. As ideas from the subconscious flood our mind, and our heart responds, we are healed when we accept what is transpiring. We don’t have to “do” anything, but simply “be” in the eternity of Love that God bestows on us. This is what I think Choose Only Love is saying about our memories in the passage. As our memories are healed, we walk in the light of God’s great Love. We know, in a way that we did not know before, what we need to do for salvation. And Awakening is but a moment away.

Allow our healed minds to be informed by our hearts today. When memories are healed, we will walk forward with happiness every day. Our lackluster lives will take on new responsibilities that were hidden to us when we had “good” and “bad” days, never knowing what was wrong or how to fix it.

Let the light of Divinity shine on us today. Let us live with gratitude for all that the miracle of healed memories have given us.

The Embrace

“To know who you are and not to express who you are with your full power is the result of fear.  To know the safety and love of the embrace is to know no cause for fear, and thus to come into your true power.  True power is the power of miracles.”  (A Course of Love, C:20.28)

Seeing that we don’t express who we really are out of fear, let us contemplate what we might do to turn this situation around. 

Jesus includes in A Course of Love a sensitively-written passage in which he takes us into his arms and embraces us.  The passage exudes warmth, peace, and safety.  Here is the most cogent part:

“This is a call to move now into my embrace and let yourself be comforted.  Let the tears fall and the weight of your shoulders rest upon mine.  Let me cradle your head against my breast as I stroke your hair and assure you that it will be all right.  Realize that this is the whole world, the universe, the all of all in whose embrace you literally exist.  Feel the gentleness and the love.  Drink in the safety and the rest.  Close your eyes and begin to see with an imagination that is beyond thought and words.”  (C:20.2)

This reassuring passage is emblematic of the tone of all A Course of Love, for ACOL looks to the heart, first of all, to entice us to give up the false values of the ego, the false identity to which we have clung for so long.

In letting this memorable passage fill our minds, we are led beyond the bounds of the fear-ridden ego.  We will know that we want something different from what we have had all of our lives.  We know that the enticement that Jesus represents is the true value of love, the way that we will come home to ourselves.

When we come home to ourselves, we will be fully powerful for the first time, and who among us does not want a right sort of power?  The egoic power that we have known previously has given us flights of joy, but evermore it has dashed our feet on stones, and prompted tears of grievous regret.  We can be finished with these tantalizing fits.  We can stop sensing electric joy that dissolves into abject misery.  Jesus is showing us the way out when he encourages us to be who we truly are.

When we don’t fear anything, in the embrace, we are primed to come into our real power.  We are primed to be who we really are, in love with the whole world.  And for this miracle, we need give up nothing!  Nothing at all, for what the ego has given us has truly been nothing.  The ego gives but to take away.  And, even the giving is time-bound to be of short duration.  The “gifts” of the ego don’t satisfy very long at all.  Then we are off to a new goal.  And, ultimately, what we have accumulated becomes ash and dust at our feet.  No joy in the “everything” at all, for the everything is not enough.  “Is this all there is?” becomes a legitimate question for the vast majority of us.  And that is because we are looking for love in all the wrong places.

The best place to look for love is within the miracle.  Both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love say a great deal about the power of miracles.  We aren’t to decide personally what miracles ought to be done, because we would be misguided if that were our attitude.  Jesus makes clear that he decides when and if a miracle is timely, because he is in charge of the Atonement.  But when we ask for something, such as love and the centrality of love in our life, we can be sure that Jesus is right there with us, cheering us along.  We can’t know how the miracle will happen, only that it will.  We are asking in God’s will for the relinquishment of fear and the shift to love in all our dealings.  Prayers such as these do not go unattended.

The power of miracles is said in A Course of Love to be the true power.  Would any of us want any other power?  We need and want to be reverent in our asking, supportive of whatever guidance we get.  We don’t need to launch into pipe dreams that become meaningless.  With the attraction of true power in our minds and hearts, we will know Love sooner rather than later.  And the fear that has hampered all our doings for many years will gradually fall away.

Join in Love

“Beloved friends, peace be unto you always, and always I am with you.  I come to you not alone, but with many who have delighted in creating a resonance with me, and I with them, for no other reason than that power expands exponentially when  minds join in love from a foundation of wholeness and not neediness.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 13, Page 168)

Jesus comes to us in The Way of Mastery by way of Jayem, who channeled “live,” and these three books of The Way of Mastery are the result.  Often in these books, Jesus stresses that he comes with others who join forces to help us all.  He calls his particular group, a very large group, simply “the lineage.”   Their work has been going on for a long, long time; their work is what led up to Jesus’ life 2000 years ago.

When we join with others, our power too is expanded, as Jesus says, “exponentially,” when we are joined in love.  We don’t join with others strictly out of our need, for we will soon come to know that we are whole beings residing in God.  We don’t have to look to others out of this neediness.  We join others because we come to love them.

Right after this passage, Jesus asserts that he and Mary, who are bonded together, do not join because they “need” each other.  He and Mary are joined in love and the result of a common purpose—to save us.  And we might also realize that there are many of us on earth who share that common purpose—though being finite and in physical bodies, we don’t know all that will be known in the cosmic realm.

Join with others of like mind (and heart—as A Course of Love says), if there is love as the overarching feeling.  When we let love lead the way, our ratio of mistakes to truth changes drastically.  We let go of many of our old ways, and walk into a new world being created even as we speak.

Heart of Our Humanity

The heart of your humanity is your greatest asset, not your downfall. Mirari

We grew up hearing about our sinful flesh, how it betrays us and keeps us from accepting God and doing His will.  But the “heart” of our humanity is an asset in this world.  When we listen to our heart, which is the same as listening to intuition, we seldom make mistakes about what we are “hearing.”   And our heart is part of our humanity, part of our form, our flesh.

Of, we can let our own desires overrule what we are hearing from our depths.  But we can’t fool ourselves for long, and that is the blessing.  We know when we are off course, and then if we acknowledge the mistake we are making, and trust ourselves to forgive ourselves for the lapse, we are well on the way back to God’s bosom.

Know that living in this world with our form is an asset, but only when we listen to the heart of our humanity.  This turn of phrase, “heart of your humanity,” is new in received writings.  We can emphasize “heart” or “humanity,” but I think the best way to read the phrase is to give equal weight to both words.

Remember that what we see as basic to our humanity is actually the great asset which Mary is pointing out.  We don’t need to downgrade our humanity, our physical forms.  They will be transformed in the New, and we will live with Spirit fully present as well.

I think one reason that Jesus and Mary have channeled these new writings of A Course of Love and Mirari is that too many of us just wanted to get this earthly life over with after we had read and assimilated A Course in Miracles.  Jesus’ downplaying of the physical in ACIM was counterproductive, and I think he came to realize that.  Who would want to save the world if we all want to just leave it?

Jesus and Mary need us here.  We have work to do.  Let’s let the “heart of humanity” inform our choices of what to do and what to say.

Devotion

Let us look at the real act that makes manifest: devotion. Heart and soul working together to fulfill destiny. “Knowing” where you are meant to be and what you are meant to be doing. Mirari.

Not all of us are ready for such certainty as Mary expresses in this quotation.  We may not yet understand where we are meant to be or what we are meant to be doing—much less “know” it with any certainty.

But Mary does not leave us hanging.  She tells us the secret to “knowing”—and it is devotion.  Listening to our heart and soul.  Listening to God in the silence that speaks to us.  We are never left bereft.  God beckons, “Come to Me,” and then He opens the floodgates of love that transform us.

We all have a destiny to fulfill.  Or we may have several different purposes over our lifetimes.  Purpose is everything.

Ask for our destiny today.  God does not keep secrets from us.  We will know all we need to know when His time to reveal arrives.  And for this time to be now, we only need devotion—and to ask Him for a knowing.

Peace in Our Soul

“[S]tay for a few moments in the silence of your heart as you experience the peace of your soul as you hear these words:  You are safe and sound.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 2:III

We all need to be sure that we are “safe and sound.”  Jesus knows us at least as well as we know ourselves, and many believe that much in Choose Only Love is channeled from him.

Jesus appeals to our heart, letting us know that when we turn there, we experience peace in our very soul.  Most of us fret too much when faced with the difficulties of our world and of our daily lives.  We need to turn somewhere, and this passage suggests that our soul needs us to turn to our heart.  This is a primary emphasis in A Course of Love as well.  We have lived in our deluded minds too long, entertaining an ego that did not mean us well.  But many of us are leaving madness behind as we choose to relinquish the ego at every point that it seeks to ensnare us.  And ALL of its points seek to ensnare us.

Link our soul to our heart today.  Our feelings will indicate to us when we have succeeded in this exercise.

God speaks in silence, and He often speaks to our heart because it is not caught up in remaining patterns of the ego.  See what our heart is trying to say to us today.  See what we need to discover.

God Knows Us

“To believe in a God incapable of experiencing that which comprises the vast range of human experience is to misunderstand.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 2:I

God does understand us, our strengths and our foibles.  As we are part of Him, He is living through us.  His strength informs our own.  And when we slip up, His greater knowledge is there to set everything aright again.

God therefore experiences right along with us.  But I believe that He, as the Infinite, knows the Whole, and our finite minds, even our finite hearts, cannot comprehend that Whole except by intuition, intuition as our pipeline to sensing God.  Our intuition is best experienced as a heartfelt understanding.  Our heart has not had the false value of an ego to lead it astray. 

Our mind, on the other hand, got distracted by the ego that we made up and believed in for so long.  Our highs and lows of egoic longings only served to distract us from real truth.  But now many of us are coming around.  We now know that deemphasizing egotistical and egoic values is the right way in which to live.  We do know better now.

God is not incapable of knowing what goes on with us.  He lives within each of us; He lives within the consciousness of all universe(s).  His Energy transforms us, when we give our assent to Its transforming of our emotions, our mind, our heart.

God does know.  He is a personal God Who answers personal prayers.  We hear Him in silence, but we hear Him surely.

Purpose

“In the depths of your heart is inscribed the purpose of your existence.  Knowledge of that purpose is what we call the wisdom of the heart, an essential part of yourself.  All carry it.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 7:III

May we all reach deep today, inside, listening to our heart, to discover the purpose for which we came to earth.  There is one overriding purpose, though I think there may be different aspects demonstrated over time. 

Help us to discern rightly.  Help us to align our thoughts, feelings, and actions with the will of God (which A Course in Miracles says is the same will that we possess).

If we listen to our heart, we will be well served.  Listening to our heart is the only way to live well.  And the heart functions in love, something we all need to do.

Living in Love

“[L]iving with fear was the reality of the contraction in which you lived.  Now we begin to live consciously without fear, joyfully recognizing that we are the resurrection and will live in love.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 2:III

The only two emotions, fear and love, are polar opposites to one another.  The degree to which we open to love is the degree to which the contraction of fear leaves us.  If we are feeling fear, ever, maybe we ought simply to stop, just stop, and ask ourselves in what way we are not being loving. 

This will make all the difference.  Love cancels out fear, always and forever.  It is true, however, that fear and anxieties may have such a toehold in us that we can’t, right away, focus on love.  First we need to relax.  Let the fear sweep over us, but do nothing about it.  It will come to a conclusion as we relax.  Open then to love and loving feelings.  Think of something or someone whom we truly love.  This shift in feeling will open the way to a tremendous surge, and in this surge, a surge of love, and Love (meaning God), we will be released enough to drop the fear from our mind and heart.

Experiment today, if you are in fear.  Let relaxation quell the emotion of anxiety, and then move serenely into the feeling of love.

Our day will brighten.  Our mind, through Christ, is very powerful: “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”  Let the heart rule the mind in this instance of turning to love.

The heart already knows how to do this.

Lovingly Accept

“Fear does not accomplish anything.  It never made a dent in your soul.   Thus when you eliminate the fear of your experience, and lovingly accept all that you are now and always—then you return to experiencing the purity of your virginal heart.”  COL bk.2, 19:II

Our “virginal” heart is one that lives in love, the way it was before we thought we separated from God, the “fall of man.”  Yes, our love is the panacea for all that ails us.  Knowing that we are loved by our Creator will go a long way toward accepting whatever our lot in life is.

Fear is a non-entity, in reality.  It does nothing except in our illusory experience.  As this quotation says, “It never made a dent in your soul.”  If we can just eliminate our “love” for fear, we will be well on our way to a satisfying existence.

Acceptance is writ large in the channeled writings we are receiving now.  We are also to “allow” what happens, without taking it to heart unless it is good.  Allowance sets us right with God.  We assent to the myriad of details that make up our life.  We say “yes” to life.  We change only those things that speak to us for change.  God would have us live a peaceful time in this world.  If we rail against what is happening in our life, we only cement it in place.  Just gently turn aside from what hurts. 

We want purity.  And we can have it, however undeserving our ego has made us feel.  Now we are walking ever closer to Christ-consciousness, where the ego falls away.

Let us be grateful to a good God Who saves us from ourselves, for we are the engineers of all that hurts.

Peaceful Mind & Loving Heart

“Fear is unconsciousness; once you begin to accept that fear is unconsciousness of your true self, you will inevitably take the next step, which is to become aware that unconsciousness is simply the denial of something that you feel or have felt in your heart, or what you think or have thought in your mind.”  COL bk.2, 19:II

We feel with our heart; we think with our mind.  And both are necessary to good living.  Fear turns us aside from good living.  Here, in Choose Only Love, we see fear described as “unconsciousness.”  Certainly we are not in our right mind and not feeling blessed in our heart when we fear.  And so many of us have fears that just won’t leave us alone.

A friend gave me a lovely prayer that is apropos to this situation: “May I have peace in my mind and love in my heart.”  She recommended this maxim as a mantra to help in drifting off to sleep.  But it can be used anything that fear rears its ugly head.  We can’t get over all our fears just by wishing them away, but over time, when we walk back to God, fears diminish and eventually fade from view.

When we are truly ready to relinquish fear, the right reading will find its way into our library.  And we will know the right prayers to pray, the right form of communion to invite with our God.  When we live in the moment, conscious and aware of our being in this world, we invite fear to leave us.

Ask today for a lessening of fear.  When love takes over, fear always scurries away.

Clear Mind and Warm Heart

“Brother, sister . . . let me tell you that you are ready to heal fully.”  COL bk.2, 9:IV

The context of this quotation is that we have let the ego go and that we are merging with our Christ-Self.  If we have taken steps to eliminate fear and judgment, the two forbidden aspects of our thoughts that keep us back, then we are ready to heal—and to heal fully.  Healing is what is happening when we reach Christ-consciousness.  And healing is what happens when we have let neuroses go.

What a blessing this statement really is!  If we can be neurosis-free, then our minds will have learned from our hearts, and we will be walking a flower-strewn pathway.

Much of this philosophy of this post comes from A Course of Love, a received writing that came around the turn of this century.  We need to let our hearts, which have never doubted God, have full ascendancy over our minds, which are characterized by The Way of Mastery, as being “very stupid servants.”  While we may not agree that our minds are stupid, we certainly can know that we haven’t ever doubted God so much in our hearts.  It is only our minds that have given us problems, intellectual problems, about a God we cannot see.

But we can intuit God, and that is what I am asking you to do today.  Listen to the heart.  Know that it does not lie.  And the heart does not need the proofs of God’s existence that the mind seems to throw up while we are in the throes of the ego.

Be ready to heal fully, clear mind and warm heart, and accept this promise of full healing as our birthright.

Sense the Love of Our Hearts

“Let yourself be carried away by love and you will feel safe.”  Choose Only Love:  Let Yourself Be Loved (COL bk.2, 13:IV)

Who among us does not want safety?  Who among us does not want to feel safe?

These are the same questions.  And the Answer is the one that we have heard all of our lives:  just to love.  Let us be “carried away” by love.

The Way of Mastery, another received work, this one from Jesus, says that if we were told that scientists had discovered something new in the universe, never before known, and if it were called some exotic name, we would be more likely to listen than when we say that that this something new is love.  It is new because love has never been tried on a large scale.  We have loved in our families, perhaps, though this love has often been conditional and therefore imperfect.  We have loved our significant others, though often we have special relationships that do not become holy, and therefore fail us in the long run.  We have loved our friends, but often this too is fickle.  Whatever are we to do?

For love to work for us, we must sense love in our hearts.  This is the only way.  When we are enthralled by love in our hearts, we will know, finally, that we are safe in this earth.  Even in this earth that is fraught with dangers.

Safety is not always a physical thing.  But it can always be a “feeling” thing. 

Our hearts know the Answer, the Answer to one of our greatest needs—to know that we are safe in the arms of God.

Introducing Choose Only Love

Note:  I am now going to include, from time to time, passages and my reflections from the new series, Choose Only Love.  The work is being received by Sebastian Blaksley, who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The book is presented as a contribution by angels, archangels, Jesus, and Mary.

This is to be a seven-volume series, two volumes of which have now been published.  The publisher is Take Heart Publications.  Available on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com in print and e-book.

Reading the passages slowly and meditatively, part of a devotional, seems to me to be best.

–Love, Celia

—

Little by Little, Let Love Fill Our Being

“Calm your minds.  Calm your hearts.  Close your eyes for a moment.  Stay with me, your Heavenly Mother.  Together let us repose in peace, united in the stillness of Christ.  Give me your imagination, your memory, your will, your all.  Leave everything aside.  Feel how your heart widens when receiving the love of God.  Little by little, let love fill your being and overflow completely, extending to all creation.”  Choose Only Love:  Let Yourself Be Loved (COL bk.2, 7:IV)

We have in this section of Choose Only Love a contribution from Mary, mother of Jesus.  This passage, like all from her, are soothing in the extreme.  We see the influence of A Course of Love, in that we are encouraged to calm both mind and heart, a dual reminder of the emphasis placed on both mind and heart (“wholeheartedness”) in ACOL. 

Love is at the center of this passage, something that we will see throughout this Volume 2, fittingly entitled, “Let Yourself Be Loved.”  I feel reassured here, for the onus is not placed on us as a command:  to love.  We do not extend Love until we have been assured that we are loved by God.  If we try to move from an unstable core, the ego, we will quickly find that nothing we do will have enough love in it.  It is true that giving and receiving are one, but we love because “He first loved us,” as the Bible says.

Little by little, we read, we fill our being to overflowing with love.  When we have done this, drawing from the celestial realm, we will know a peace and happiness that has eluded us until now.

Mind = Servant of the Awakened Heart

“Those roots of fear must be dissolved at a level that is deeper than the conscious thinking mind can reach.  The mind was never designed to be your master, but to become aligned as a servant of the awakened heart, just like the flower blooms and sends forth its scent for all to see from the depth of the soil that is unseen, but has been well prepared.  So that the only roots that gather nourishment from the soil are the roots of that which speaks of Life and beauty, not that which speaks of fear and unworthiness.”  (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 12, Page 144)

We want the roots of our mind to be well-protected, nourishing new growth in our mind that will serve Love well.  The garden is an apt metaphor for this process.  Our subconscious mind has become polluted by weeds, and it behooves us to do something about this.

Jesus also speaks of Life and beauty, because these blessings will descend when we are truly loving and have cleansed our mind of pollutants.  What are the pollutants?  Hatred, attack, anger, discontent—all of these, plus many others that are hostile to the mind.  These hostile attitudes need to go, and go they will when we turn to love.  And Love with a capital “L,” Who is God Himself.

When we have been anxious and in fear for a long time, it may seem daunting to cleanse our mind of such pollutants.  If we ever want to reach Christ-consciousness, though cleansing the mind of fear and judgment is necessary.  And enlightenment or Christ-consciousness or Awakening—all meaning the same—is the goal of The Way of Mastery.  Jesus wants a genuine Awakening for all people everywhere, something that has never been done before.  But he is trying, and trying mightily, to get through to us, in channeled writings in addition to speaking to our hearts about what we really need to do.

Jesus has companions who work with him; he calls it the “lineage.”  These are entities who have long walked with God, loving and doing good in the world.  Many have now “graduated” from this plane, and return only to help us who are still caught in this world.

Ask today what might be done to rid the mind of weeds that have become an infestation.

Ask today to be shown how to love.

Quiet Mind

“I know that this sounds simplistic for you, but the way is easy and without effort.  Complexity is born of the world, and not from the Mind of God.  Therefore, continue well in that practice, and allow it to be the foundation from which the soil is prepared—the roots of fear are loosened—even in ways that you cannot comprehend with the thinking mind.  For the roots of fear are not merely ideas.  They are the effects of ideas.  They have been allowed to penetrate deep into the unconscious.”  (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 12, Page 143)

The Way of Mastery speaks often of how polluted our unconscious mind has become.  Our unconscious mind cries how for healing, and healing is on its way as soon as we make a nod in that direction.

We don’t have to “do” anything.  Doing will make for a busy mind, which is the reverse of what we seek.  The enlightened mind is quiet, thoughts slow down.  If we are to be comfortable with this new state of affairs, we need to begin somewhere.  We need to prepare the garden of our mind to welcome quietness.  In fact, A Course in Miracles says that a perfectly calm and quiet mind is where we are all heading.  Perhaps we don’t want that now, but that is because too much busyness has clouded our minds from what is the real good.

A friend once questioned “perfectly calm and quiet.”  She was quite a busy person, in work and in personal life.  She was so used to rushing around that we thought boredom would be her lot in life if she slowed down.

A quiet mind does take some getting used to.  But its advantages are many, and as we open to this healing, we will wonder why we used to run hither and yon all day long.  We will think that this rushing is an insane way to live.  And indeed it is.

Give calm and quiet a chance.  Let go of the stress that rushing about engenders.  Be willing to know that there is a better way to live.

Passionately Embrace Love

“The Way of the Heart has been designed to bypass the cognitive or thinking mind, and to strike at the roots of fear that abide in the depth of the mind in a place that is, by and large, unconscious.  All that we do seeks to dissolve that root from the depth of your being.”  (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 12, Page 142)

Our minds get us into trouble.  Our intellect, that intellect that we have often prized, is a handicap as we seek God.  Our intellect depends upon perception, which is an illusory way of viewing the outer world.  It is our heart that will save us, a concept that A Course of Love makes clear.

Uproot fear, reach for the root of it, and then be done with it.  Turn aside firmly, and passionately embrace love.  Love is the realm of the heart.  All that is not love is fear in some form.  And we need to find a way to remove ourselves from the fear.

Our thinking mind has often done us in, though we were taught to be proud of what we “knew” when we were going to school.  This was not true knowledge, which comes unbidden, intuitively.  What we had in school was a perception of ideas, and perception is fraught with illusion.

We need to let the unconscious rise to the surface, and to do this, we need quiet.  We need to spend time in our quiet corner each and every day.  If this is meditation, so be it.  The silence of quiet will heal.  And if the mind is busy, the unconscious won’t rise to the surface, where those thoughts can be healed.

Be patient, for we have many, many years of pushing down into the unconscious those things that disturbed us.  Fears, all.  Be assured that we will have help as we do our quiet part of releasing fears in the unconscious.  Don’t let the rising up be a disturbance.  The rising up is necessary for healing to take place.

Quiet Places of the Heart

“Even as the thoughts of the world stream through your brain-mind, even as the sensory data are received through the cellular structures of the nervous system of the body, you can relinquish these things, and act only from that depth of perfect wisdom, perfect safety and perfect peace. Let this be a time of ‘thanksgiving.’ Will it be that time in which you truly give thanks for the grace that sets you free? Will you honor that grace by descending of the stairway to the quiet places of the heart in each of your days?” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 11, Page 139)

When we have a busy mind, we are kept from the depths of our being, losing touch with our soul. But we can dip deeply into our mind, and still act from “perfect wisdom, perfect safety and perfect peace.” This better view comes when we relinquish the busyness, and just sink into quietness. This quietness will give us both happiness and calm, because it is the best thing that we have going for us.

Jesus seems here to be asking us to meditate. And certainly spiritual teachers everywhere and of every time have counseled meditation. The happiness and calm that we know after a little while of meditation is palpable. We are much more prone to love, in the greatest sense possible. When we are stressed, love goes out the window.

We thus need to descend the stairway to the quiet place of the heart in each of our days.

It will make all the difference.

Jesus: “Father, One that Has Birthed Me, Why Am I? Where Am I? Who Am I?”

“I began to learn to ask of that Source, that mystery, ‘Father, One that has birthed me, why am I? Where am I? Who am I?’ My desire increasingly became to know the truth that could set all mankind free. I discovered that unless that freedom became fully manifest in me, it made no sense to talk about it with others. So I sought out the greatest of minds, the best of teachers. And yes, I was blessed by a family structure already dedicated to understanding the mysteries of what they knew as God. They led me to many such teachers.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 10, Page 121)

Here, in The Way of Mastery, Jesus is talking about his experiences while a young man on earth. He sought to understand what he did not understand. He sought direction. But he turned inward also, as other passages around this one make clear. He knew that there was ultimately only inward divine help, that others could not map out a way for him.

So it is for all of us. We turn to our heart, and then we come to know what has eluded us until now. God speaks through the heart more often than any other way, though he can speak through teachers, companions, significant others. Divine revelation knows no timetable, and we must be patient, on earth, for the unfolding of that which we do not yet know.

An unhealed healer cannot help others very much; that way is limited. Jesus wanted his own freedom made manifest, before he sought to have a ministry. He sought to set all humankind free. And he succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams.

Jesus is our leader in The Way of Mastery, A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love. He is reaching many who don’t talk about it in their everyday life. But he is succeeding in turning around the world that was heading in the wrong directions. His “celestial speedup” (as called by A Course in Miracles) is working.

And we can be very, very glad that it is.

Expand Our Heart to the Fullest

“The only difference has been that I learned to train myself, hour by hour, to drop only unlimited pebbles, that send out vibrations of unconditional acceptance and Love, forgiveness, unconditional and unbridled vision and revelation, while you have selected to do that only a few times.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 8, Page 103)

The metaphor here is of pebbles being dropped into a pool that is our very being. If we drop unconditional acceptance, of ourselves and others; Love; forgiveness, etc., then we will walk a green earth. If we are stingy with our “pebbles” being dropped in our pool, we will know dissatisfaction and all the ills that this world can visit upon us.

Our vision will show us the way; it is revelation from God. Make a decision today to expand our heart to the fullest, to drop unlimited pebbles into our pool. Jesus has shown the way, and he would have us do so, also. If we train ourselves to experience with our heart, we will be well on the way to a new heaven and new earth.

Our heart does not need proof of God’s existence. Our heart just knows. And we will know when we listen to what our heart tells us. We will know unconditional acceptance, Love, forgiveness, and all the rest mentioned in this quotation.

We will be walking straight back to the heart of God. Let’s walk a smooth pathway, sure of our steps, focused on our aim.

God Lives In & Through Us

“You will learn what it means to trust what is birthed in the heart. And you will arise and you will go forth without fear. . . . And the whole while you will know that of yourself you do nothing, but the Father, through you, can do anything.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 7, Page 87 – 88)

Our Father, God Himself, is living through us, for we are inseparably linked; we are a part of Him. And it is He Who does the works. When we try to accomplish things, we often fail. God does not fail. If we ask with truth in our minds and hearts, being willing to hear what the Holy Spirit tells us, our propensity to make mistakes will diminish. We will be on the beam, for we are finally listening to guidance. The Holy Spirit does not make mistakes, and so why on earth would we fail to follow advice like His.

Our heart will tell us what the guidance is. The heart, as the center of each of us, feels rather than thinks. We know that our minds can lead us wrong, but the heart, when listening rightly to the Holy Spirit, never leads us wrong. Even things when seem wrong at the time will eventually be recognized as right all along.

Creativity surges through us when we are aligned with God. And God can do just anything.

We best live our lives when we acknowledge our dependence on God, our complete dependence on His guidance as present in and through our Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

Listen today. Notice that our mistakes fall away.

Invite the Warmth of God’s Closeness

The holy relationship has been accomplished by the joining of the mind and heart in unity. (ACOL, T3:15.10)

The first and most important relationship is with the Self–the inner Christ-Self–and God Himself (called the Self in Its largest dimensions). When this relationship is formed anew and aright, it changes everything. Our heart and mind are melded into one, and this one is the same One with Whom we are merged in the Godhead Himself/Herself. With this joining of heart and mind, we are primed to have all good things to come to us. We are, at last, on the right track, “separate” from God no longer, even in illusion. And we are not in illusion any longer, but the supreme reality, true reality, a reality that does not fade with each passing day.

When mind and heart are joined, I feel a warmth that is not of this world. I once was accosted at night by a stranger who did not mean me well. Just before he touched me, I felt a Warmth that gave me a tremendous sense of safety and God-given care. And this sense carried me through the experience without any trauma. I ran and I screamed, and he fled. My voice and God’s grace had saved me. In that moment, with the warm feeling, I was in unity of mind and heart with that warmth, though this was years before A Course of Love was channeled. I only knew that God had been very, very close to me in that moment.

How do we invite the melding of heart and mind? We get quiet, we invite warmth, we invite God. If we open ourselves to God’s grace, He will descend upon us, prompting us to join mind and heart into a Unity that will solve all problems, release all neuroses, give us a new lease on life.

Be quiet today, just for a moment. A moment is all that it takes to allow God to speak to us in the Unity in which He abides.

Listen to Our Heart

Deny not the role of feeling in this dimension, for feeling is everything! (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 78)

Jesus indicates that we have been thinking too much, that feeling is the manner of reaching God, our feeling self is all that it takes. When we are trying to remove the barriers to Love, it is through our feelings that we will discover whether or not we have been successful. Only our feelings can tell us that.

This is something we can know well. If we sense, through feelings, that we are making headway in removing the blocks to the awareness of love (as this is stated in A Course of Love), then we will be able to make adjustments if the feeling doesn’t “feel” right. We will know that we are not making headway.

That is all that is necessary. Get in touch with our heart. Our heart is where the feelings reside. And our mind will never be smart enough to understand these things. Our intellect won’t do it for us.

Listen to our heart as we seek to determine if we are removing barriers to love.

Just listen to our heart.

Heartfelt Joy in “Being”

The answer lies in the simple statement of as within, so without. By living as who you are in the world, you create change in the world. You create change in the world through relationship. All live and create in relationship. Those called to the way of Mary, however, are called to the creation and anchoring of the new relationship in the new world. Their relationship of union, upon which their contentment is based, is the birthplace, the womb of the new. Their expression is expression of this union. (ACOL, D:Day19.6)

We want to live as who we are. “Being who you are” is the ultimate message of A Course of Love. But it is the real Self, the Christ-Self, who comes to us totally and completely when we have reached Christ-consciousness. Until that time, we do catch glimpses, and these glimpses are sweet.

If we are called to the way of Mary, we will focus on “being” rather than “doing” in this world. Many of us, in this new era of Christ, will be a blend of being and doing. A blend of Mary and Jesus, for Jesus was the “doing” aspect of life in this world. The example life. We too can be example lives, though those called to this way of living are few.

Being is more open to us, because we are heading into a world where being will be the watchword. The way of Mary will emerge in all its glory. While we may still “do,” (for nobody can live here and not do), our heartfelt joy will be found in the being. We will anchor new relationships in this world. We will keep the home fires burning.

Sexist categories will break down, for men and women both will focus on being rather than constantly seek to do in the world. The way looks bright to us, and indeed it is. Our hearts more often tilt toward the fact of being, and however warm and fuzzy, mellow, we can be, the better.

Life doesn’t get any better than this.

The Heart Is God’s Way of Speaking

“The Way of the Heart is not the way of the intellect. For indeed that aspect of the mind was never designed to be your master. It was designed to be the humble, and—if you will pardon the expression—very stupid servant of the awakened heart.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 5)

Jesus doesn’t use the word “stupid” very often, and when he does, we need to take especial heed. In A Course in Miracles, he says (complete edition) that the partially innocent are apt to be stupid at times. This is because the mind is leading us down directions we don’t need to take. We need to realize that the intellect that we have so exalted while stuck in the ego has not served us well. In heart-centered living, we feel a mellowness that does serve us well. And when we listen to what our heart is saying to us, we don’t ask “stupid” questions about reality; we just know.

The intellect is the part of the mind that is so stupid, so very stupid. I realize that we might not want to hear this, because many of us have prided ourselves on the intellect. We have gotten kudos from our culture for our highly developed intellect. We have had pride in it, a pride that the ego smiled upon.

No more. Let the heart speak today.

Listen to the heart, and discover what is really valuable.

Ask for a Balanced Mind

“It would be very intelligent of you to set yourself the goal of really studying for this course. There can be no doubt of the wisdom of this decision, for any student who wants to pass it. But, knowing your individual weaknesses as a learner and being a teacher with some experience, I must remind you that learning and wanting to learn are inseparable. All learners learn best when they believe what they are trying to learn is of value to them. But values in this world are hierarchical, and not everything you may want to learn has lasting value. Indeed, many of the things you want to learn are chosen because their value will not last. The ego thinks it is an advantage not to commit itself to anything that is eternal, because the eternal must come from God.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VII.10:1-7)

The ego is afraid of God, that is the insanity of it. Our mind, taken over by the ego, believes that it will be punished for imagining itself separate from its Maker, Whom it knows to be all-powerful.

If we can open our mind ever so slightly, and realize, even if we don’t feel it, that God is not vindictive, then we will have a reason to trust Him. If we can just entertain the possibility, indeed the certainty, that we have let our mind go insane, and that now we are attempting to retrieve sanity, then we will have motivation to learn A Course in Miracles. Motivation is all that it takes. Jesus can work with a reluctant learner, but he can do nothing for one who refuses the innate inclination to listen to reason. He doesn’t go against our free well. We can refuse to listen, refuse to learn—but who would when suffering and pain, in our egoic state of mind, have been so devastating.

The suffering and pain were inevitable, and these are no cause to blame God. Suffering/pain are a cause-and-effect relationship. Given our strange thinking, we need a Power from beyond us to set all things aright. Without that, the deleterious effects continue. And surely we don’t want that.

Ask for a balanced mind. This mind will welcome guidance. This mind, as prompted by the heart, will take us, finally, back Home.

Our Heart Knows

“In its characteristic upside-down way, the ego has taken the impulses from the superconscious and perceived them as if they arise in the unconscious. The ego judges what is to be accepted, and the impulses from the superconscious are essentially unacceptable to it, because they clearly point to the nonexistence of the ego itself. When this occurs, the ego experiences threat, and not only censors but also reinterprets the data. However, as Freud very correctly pointed out, what you do not perceive you still know, and it can retain a very active life beyond your awareness.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.3:1-4)

The quotation for today alludes to the concept of the mind to which Jesus subscribes. The superconscious is “above” us, devoid of the ego, and is actually a bridge to God, the Holy Spirit, the Christ-Self. Freud, misunderstanding, called this part of the mind, the “superego.” As this quotation points out, the ego actually has nothing to do with it.

The conscious is our normal waking awareness.

The unconscious sinks below thought, but is still (unlike what Jung thought in his “collective unconscious”) unique to us. Jung thought that underneath, we all think the same, and in some sense this is akin to an awareness of our Creator, God Himself—a Source found, according to Jesus, in the superconscious.

We don’t have to fully grasp these differences in consciousness to make use of them. Helen and Bill, co-scribes of A Course in Miracles and psychologists, would have been very attuned to this portion of ACIM. Jesus would be talking right up their alley.

We do still know what is in our mind, even when we are not conscious of it, and then it causes a subtle (or not so subtle) uneasiness. It can affect our actions, something that we all know. When we are driven by schemas that draw upon childhood conditioning, we are very lost in the mind.

The solution, according to A Course of Love (what many believe to be a continuation of ACIM), is to draw upon the heart. The heart by-passes the confusion of the mind, because the heart doesn’t demand proof of what it knows.

The heart just knows.

Open Our Heart to Parents & Friends

“Your parents probably did misperceive you in many ways, but their ability to perceive may have been quite warped, and their misperception stood in the way of their own knowledge. There is no reason why it should stand in the way of yours. It is still true that you believe they did something to you. This belief is extremely dangerous to your perception and wholly destructive of your knowledge. This is not only true of your attitudes toward your parents, but also of your misuse of your friends. You still think that you must respond to their errors as if they were true. By reacting self-destructively, you are giving them approval for their misperceptions.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-3.VIII.13:1-7)

Here we find that our attitude toward our parents and our friends is pivotal for a good future for our minds. When we believe that parents and friends “did” something to us, we are giving our power away, dangerous to perception, wholly destructive of knowledge.

We still don’t believe that we ourselves, and others, are innocent creatures, children of God, who made mistakes that actually, in reality, never occurred. We are living in illusion! How often do we have to reiterate this to ourselves?

When we believe that illusions are true, we bind ourselves to the past, and we make a future like the past, a deplorable future. Let’s wash ourselves clean, now, of these misperceptions. Let’s ask God to tell us how we can all be innocent. Step out in faith, and His Voice will answer.

We don’t need to stay in self-destructive thinking. Let the heart lead, for its way is Love, and its understanding is true. We can and will come to understand what innocence is all about when we open the heart to our parents and our friends. We have closed down when we misconstrued them, and this makes a mockery of innocence.

Way Out of Fear

“Whenever you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you have allowed your mind to miscreate; that is, you have not allowed me to guide it. It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of misthought can result in real healing. When you are fearful, you have willed wrongly. This is why you feel you are responsible for it. You must change your mind, not your behavior, and this is a matter of will. You do not need guidance except at the mind level. Correction belongs only at the level where causation is possible. The term does not really mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-2.IX.4:1-8)

Jesus knows that we have not given up fear, that we still have misthought, and we feel the results, in pain often. He emphasizes that a change of mind is far more important, and pivotal, than a change in behavior. A change in behavior will happen when we have changed our mind, then and only then.

He wants us to correct our thinking, and then we will see an improvement in our behavior. It seems that he is not so much concerned with the outcome of misthought as he is with the problem of the mind itself. He wants us to think aright.

A Course of Love, channeled later, emphasizes that we change our mind when we listen to our heart—a heart that has always known what to think, say, and do. Our heart does not need any teaching, but our mind, so long egoic, has still patterns of the ego lingering. And so we need a sounder basis for making decisions, and that sounder basis is our heart.

Everyone knows what the heart means without a tedious telling. Our heart will inform our mind, which will inform our behavior. Then we will really be healed.

Faith Is of the Heart

“Readers who have not moved away from their desire to learn something that will feed their minds or egos will seldom continue to this next level. The next level brings with it the same situation the reader encountered in receiving the Course, but the reader will now encounter these situations in life. The reader is no longer only a reader. Their experience of this Course has extended beyond reading and beyond the classroom situation. Now a time may come when studying truly seems to be in order. The guidance provided by their reading may seem to come and go and their desire to rely on what they have “learned” will grow. They may desire to backtrack, review, or begin to highlight passages to return to again and again. New questions may arise and a desire for feedback or discussion grow stronger. This may also be precisely the time when the reader is so caught up in experience and learning “in life” that return to a group or classroom situation feels next to impossible.” (ACOL, A.26)

As we read A Course of Love, going through different phases, we reach a point that out learning/discovery moves into the outside world. We learn/discover from what is happening in our lives. But this learning/discovery is helped along by what ACOL has taught. We are applying what we now know. We will be the better for it.

If we resist this change, we will be resisting the whole progress of ACOL in both our mind and heart. And we don’t want to do this. Allow our mind/heart to be moved along by the progress that we have made. Resist nothing. It doesn’t matter that we don’t learn/discover in the old ways any longer; what we have now is infinitely better—a choice for what the heart will teach the mind. Our wholeheartedness, mind and heart combined, is the result.

We will likely be tempted really to study ACOL, intently and repeatedly. This might not be wise, for it is a return to the mind shorn of the heart. Let the heart lead where it wants. Be assured that Jesus’s words have inculcated the heart, and now our heart is taking the lead—as Jesus recommends for all of ACOL.

Jesus may have realized that A Course in Miracles could trip us up by providing, as he did, a treatise that gave the mind lots to chew upon. The mind can and will get tangled up if we don’t return to the intuitive longings of the heart. And, fresh from the ego’s clutches, we will wander as in a desert if we don’t let our Christ-Self lead the way. The Christ-Self best leads the way not by evidence, but by faith, and faith is of the heart.

Be relaxed today. Listen to the warmth that the heart prompts. Be assured that this is the best way, heart-filled, miracle-minded impulses that enfold us in God’s grace.

Dear God,

I would feel Your warmth today. This mystical sense welcomes my mind, even as it reassures me of the truths of the heart.

Help me, always, to live a good and clean life, supported in this endeavor by the truths that have come to me unsought. Thank You for guiding me so precisely.

Amen.

Way of the Heart

“The way of the heart is the way of the Time of Christ. The time of the Holy Spirit has passed. The time of the intermediary is over. The greatest intermediary of all has been the mind. It has stood between you and your own inner knowing, caught in a dream of perception.” (ACOL, A.19)

If we listen to our heart, we will be alright. Jesus is saying that failing to listen to our heart has been the problem all along. The mind has dominated, seeking for proof of God, seeking to perceive accurately from an egoic perspective.

We know now that the mind is the servant of the heart. The mind just confuses things when it seeks to analyze. Analysis is the way of deep study, and when we move into ease, we give up intense study, of this Course, of life in general. The mind tried to learn, but it got things wrong. Now Jesus has turned to our heart to have us form a new identity, an identity shorn of the ego. And, if we are fortunate, we will get it right this time.

We don’t really want to “perceive” at all, for this is the way of the mind. We want to know, and this inner knowledge is the way of the heart. We don’t need an intermediary, the Holy Spirit, to keep us unafraid of God. We trust God. We can go directly to Him/Her, and when we do so, with our heart, we are gentle and peaceful. Our solace is sure. Our inner knowing is the Christ-Self, and this Self will take us on days that are filled with smooth sailing.

The time of Christ is new and different, a time of new beginnings in this long saga of life on earth. Our way is sure now, for we turn to the closest aspect of ourselves that we can envision: our heart. No longer seeking proofs, we rest in knowledge that is non-egoic. We know that all others are our equals, and so we see aright—for the first time in eons.

Dear God,

Thank You for the rest You have given me on this morning of a busy day. May I let my heart lead, sure in its convictions of the knowledge that You alone can give.

Thank You for taking me by the hand and leading me. I am not scared of You any longer. I come directly.

Amen.

Heartfelt Knowledge

“Let me be clear. The seeming lack of difficulty in this Course is where its difficulty lies. To give up difficulty for ease is more than some egos are willing to accept. To give up effort for receptivity is more than some can accept. Why? Because it is too difficult. It goes against all you have learned and the nature of the reality in which the mind has functioned. In turning to the heart we seek to bypass this difficulty as much as possible, but each will feel it to some degree, the precise degree to which they are capable of giving up reliance on what they but think has worked for them in the past.” (ACOL, A.18)

Many of us have a work ethic, work hard and succeed, not only in our jobs but in our family life as well. This is all very well, but it won’t get us to where we want to get in our spiritual life. Studying A Course of Love as though we were going to take a test on it, is the absolutely wrong way to go. If we relax in our reading/hearing of ACOL, we will let our inner Self discover in a way that the egoic mind never did.

Relaxing in reading a difficult and complicated text goes against the grain. But it is absolutely necessary. We will “succeed” in this endeavor to the extent that we let our Christ Self come out and play—yes, play—with the concepts. We have largely lost the will to play, unless it is a night on the town and involves alcohol. Our children know how to play, and we can see what play is all about by revisiting our own childhood. What did we like to do? How did we approach our first lessons in reading? It is not likely that we screwed our foreheads and concentrated with all our might. Instead, we responded with curiosity to the words on the page. The teacher was there to correct us if we read a word wrong. The Christ Self similarly corrects. We have nothing to worry about. Put some distance between ourselves and the concepts. Know that intense study won’t teach us more. A relaxed mind is not a little gift.

Here we come back to heartfelt knowledge. Let the softness of the heart teach. We will eventually give up traditional means of learning in approaching A Course of Love, with thought processes that will move beyond what we have previously encountered as “thinking.” We will let miracle-minded impulses show us the way. Always the way. And the way will be not only illuminating but also a love-filled experience.

Dear God,

I would let my heart lead when I reread A Course of Love. I won’t read with pencil in hand, ready to mark the most enlightening passages. I will let the knowledge on the page enfold me with its blessing. This takes reading with a soft heart.

Thank You for teaching me anew how to learn, how to discover. I am now at the discovery phase of taking in ACOL. And ACOL is blessing me. Thank You.

Amen.

Heart Knowledge of God Tells Us that He Exists

“God remains God who is one in being with all, and God also is given form, or is, in other words, differentiated. God is All in All. And God is also All in One and All in Many. God is still the Creator of All, but God is also now the Creator of One, the Creator of the experience of one life, or many lives, the experience and the experiencer of life. Through differen¬tiation, God is you as you are God. God retains oneness of being and also becomes a being in union and relationship—in short—a being in union and relationship with you.” (ACOL, D:Day36.17)

Here we have more explanation about Who and What God really is. He is living through us; it is just that simple. Perhaps the pains to which Jesus is going with his theology about God will soothe and comfort us. We are not alone; we have the greatest Power in the universe fueling our true Self.

How could we separate from God at all, ever? Of course, we couldn’t, but we could imagine that we did. And this fantasy, an illusion, is what has made all our trouble for ourselves. Now we are ready to make a new choice, an informed choice, to know that God is the All, the One, and the Differentiated in unity and relationship as well.

We cannot know God through our minds. He is too big for our finite minds. But we can intuitively, mystically, sense Him through our heart. If we open our heart to be big and expansive, and forgiving, of our brothers and sisters, we will have taken a giant step as A Course in Miracles tells us. But A Course of Love expanded on ACIM’s tenets, and it is ACOL that told us just simply to listen to our heart.

If we listen to our heart, we will know that we don’t have to “prove” God’s existence. We will just know that the Whole is good, joyous, and harmonious—a Whole that is friendly.

Dear God,

Einstein asked if the universe were friendly. And this morning I am asking the same thing. And getting an answer through my heart.

I wondered when I was quite young if the universe were friendly. At that time, I was a church-goer, but not yet a confirmed believer. I am now, and I thank You for effecting the change in me.

Amen.