Land of Heaven

“Beloved, you have come to the land of Heaven.  Tell me:  what other purpose could the way of being have but to serve love?”  Choose Only Love, bk.7, 1:I.  Message from Jesus.

When we come to Book 7 of the series, Choose Only Love, it is certainly hoped that we have walked the whole way back to God. And if we have been able to take to heart what has been said in the preceding books, we will have found a lasting place in our hearts for God.

We are asked just to “be,” which is an effortless way to live. Our times of effortful living are past. We did ask for struggle, as have learned, but the struggle can come to an end when we give God first place in our lives and we seek to let Jesus into our lives more and more. He asks for this early in the series, when he promises us that he himself will solve our problems.

We are well attended. If we believe the promises that Choose Only Love gives us, we are well situated to begin a new life.

Let’s ask for this today–if the new life has only just begun. Walking back to God is not meant to be an endeavor that depletes us; it is meant to be a glorious pathway with ever more joy coming to our lives each day.

Bring Heaven to Earth

“Getting to Heaven is no longer an attraction.  Bringing  Heaven to this world is.  Bringing light to darkness is all that matters.  Constantly desiring to bring greater light to your darkness is the way in which you live,  moment by moment, desiring greater light, greater light, and greater light.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 268)

It seems a bit surprising that our time on Earth has shifted into a movement to bring Heaven to this Earth.  We can do this, first in our own lives, and then in the lives of others.

When we give up the ego as an unworkable idea, we are primed to live in love always, and love is what brings Heaven to Earth.  

When we truly and completely fill our minds and hearts with the love that we crave, we ARE bringing Heaven to Earth.

Start today.

Loving Our Brothers & Sisters in This World

“Heaven is the gift you owe your brother, the debt of gratitude you offer to the Son of God in thanks for what he is, and what his Father created him to be.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-19.IV.D.19)

A new idea, that we “owe” Heaven to our brother, because of what he is, because of what he means to us, because of the gratitude that we owe to him.  He is our way back to God.  We need never to forget this.  He is the means that A Course in Miracles is using to save us time on the road to Awakening.  When we forgive him for his mistakes, his errors, we are also forgiving ourselves, for there is no difference between him and us.  We are truly one in God.

God created our brother to be a Self, Christ within, and we need not to forget this.  When we are grateful to him, we find our way to express thanks for him being in our lives.  We know that without him, not only would we be lonely, but we would be lost in “sin,” actually mistakes.

When we see mirrored in another our own probably misdeeds, we know what we need to forgive not only in himself but in us.  We would be guilty of the same thing, if given half a chance.  All of us have fallen short.  But we are saved from judgment by refusing to judge him.  Our brother is the holy Son of God, the means of our Awakening.  We owe him only gratitude for what he has been, is being, and will be to us in the future.

Where We Dwell Eternally

“Though we have said it unto you many times, we ask you to truly take pause and to consider this one statement:  We come forth to join with you, not from a place above you or beyond you, but a place in which you already dwell eternally.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 261)

We are at home in Heaven, something we have trouble believing because bad things still happen to us.  When we decide that Heaven is what we want, and ALL that we want, we are on the way to eliminating the bad things.  Believe this.  Take it to heart.

This statement is coming from the lineage, the group of souls who are Jesus’ helpers in the endeavor to save this world.  Membership is open to us, too.  We just have to go God’s, and Jesus’, way.

Ask to be told more.  This will come to pass.  We are living in the Now in time, and, yes, in the Heaven of our awareness.  If we don’t fully understand, then ask to be enlightened about what we can reasonably believe.

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.

Planning Our Lives

From Celia’s Images in a Reflecting Pool; a Journal.

I think we plan our lives before we are born.  If so, given that I have always spent much time in thinking about what I should do next, I’m sure I planned carefully on the other side.  

I once had an intuition that my growing-up years went just as intended.  I wanted to emphasize working hard on academic pursuits and developing the impetus to achieve.  Now when I question the advisability of all that, surely some balancing act is taking place.

–

All of us enter life with a script that is filled with challenges and hurdles meant to build Character in the highest sense possible.  But, as Wordsworth says, we forget about this intention (“. . .Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy, . . . .”  Consequently, we attend alumni reunions with a bright smile, making conversation that lies about a successful life with rarely a cloud in the sky.  Instead, we should drop our masks and admit that life has been tough.  After all, we planned it that way—each and every one of us.

For All This We Give Up Nothing!

“The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the understanding of where Heaven is.  From this side, it seems to be outside and across the bridge.  Yet as you cross to join it, it will join with you and become one with you.  And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this you gave up nothing!  The joy of Heaven, which has no limit, is increased with each light that returns to take its rightful place within it.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-16.VI.11)

Today is a joyful day, for doesn’t this quotation remain a harbinger of good things to come?  Heaven joins with us as we cross the metaphorical bridge.  And Heaven is here and now, not on the Other Side solely.  Not that we will find only after death.  We can experience Heaven here and now, and what a blessing this promise is, coming as it does near the beginning of the Text of A Course in Miracles.

How will we recognize Heaven when we have reached it?  Does this question really need answering?  We may actually still experience bad things, but the suffering that we knew previously will depart from us.  Any pain that we might experience can be turned over to the Holy Spirit, and then we can know relief.  This is, after all, still this world, and to believe that we would only experience the good is naïve.  But we will know that the bad that we see is actually only illusion, that this bad is not real.  Unreality is a powerful defense mechanism, and we have hardy tools in our experience now.

We don’t have to sacrifice to reach Heaven on earth.  Sacrifice is never asked of anything.  In the philosophy of ACIM, Jesus himself did not sacrifice when he walked the earth 2,000 years ago.  The idea that he had to die on a cross to save us is not the point, ACIM tells us.  His resurrection is the point, and it is in this way that he saves us.

We don’t lack for anything that Jesus had and has.  He assures us that he walked the pathway before us, but only so that he could help us along the way.  He doesn’t have anything that we lack.  Only time separates our walk, and time does not really exist.

So:  We give up nothing!  And we need do nothing (an ACIM tenet).  When we have reached Awakening, we will reach it with one glad realization, that, for all this, we gave up nothing.  And we need do nothing.

We will have busy doings, but they are of our free choice.  Ask before you embark on anything today.  Ask if that thing is right for you.

We Are Blessed

“Beloved pure soul!  You who live for God!  Whoever joins this work becomes one with us, and because of that union miracles and spiritual events of incalculable greatness and bliss will occur.  Gates of Heaven not yet opened will do so.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:II

There is a thread running through the first six books (of seven) published in Choose Only Love, and that thread is that those who discover these books and take them to heart are particularly blessed by God. Of course, we already know of God’s blessings, for we would not have sought out CHOL unless we were prompted to do so. And this, in itself, is a great blessing.

Sebastian’s manner of channeling is surely unique in the history of channeling. The veil between him and the Other Side is very thin, almost non-existent, often. And through it all, he has remained his modest self, a representative of God’s mission on Earth, a representative of Jesus, Mary, and the angels.

We will know greater bliss as we walk through this world. That is the promise of this quotation. “Gates of Heaven not yet opened will do so.” And what will we see when these Gates are opened? We don’t know, but Sebastian has given us a glimpse. And that glimpse is profoundly moving.

Certainly when Gates open to Heaven we will bask in greater Love from God. Not that He has been negligent with us, but because we are more open than ever before. We are ready for revelation.

And we will have it.

Heaven on Earth

“My field is your field.  This is what I am helping you to see.  We are together now to save this world so that Heaven on Earth can come to be.”  Mirari

Mary is here speaking to Mari.  But Mary is also talking to all of us, especially women but not exclusively to women.  Our “field” is the one that we share, our field the Earth.  And we need to do what we can to make a new beginning.  All of us have handled badly the handiwork of our Earth.  We have made a hostile and aggressive place.  Now it is incumbent upon us to create a new world of peace and joy.

The subtitle of Mirari, “the way of the Marys,” does include the way of all women.  But I don’t want to leave men out.  We are all the body of Christ.  And it will take women and men working together to turn this world from the lamentable place it is now to a glorious new creation blessed by God.

We have not seen how Heaven can come to Earth.  If we don’t know (and we don’t), it is up to us just to ASK.  God does not keep secrets from us.  When we have been prepared, we will be ready to hear His new revelations.

We all have work to do in the field.  This world.  Our newly created world.

Be ready today to do our part.  Ask today that each step of the new world be revealed to us—each part that is ours to accomplish.

God’s Protective Arm around Us

“You have never failed to create and attract precisely those most beautiful lessons that have triggered for you what you most need to learn, what you most need to feel.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 15, Page 179)

This quotation lets us know, in beautiful language, that we are living in a protected universe.  We are creating the lessons that we need to learn.  Our mind is one with God’s, and He creates for us the opportunities that we need to have.  We are not alone in what we experience.  Our creations could not be so precise unless we are receiving help from a greater Power than just our personal self.

Let us be reassured today that, when we listen, we will be guided.  Our lessons under these conditions will be benign.  We will not hurt.  Our suffering is and has always been needless.  Now we know that we are creating the very circumstances that we need to progress back to God in the best and quickest way possible.

We are discovering what we most need to discover.  This is why I say that it is a “protected” universe. 

The end is certain.  We are going to be at home in God, and, if we stay true to His direction, this being “at home” will come quickly.  Not in death, but in life, for Heaven is an experience that awaits us as we live on Earth. 

Heaven on Earth.  Yes!  A true experience.

Happiness of Heaven

“Let the wisdom of Heaven be your faithful companion.”  COL bk.2, 20:III

Everyone who reads this quotation will read it differently.  I focus on the happiness of Heaven this morning.  I will use this quotation as my mantra today. 

If we don’t focus on the goodness, the joy, the peace, of Heaven, then we so easily get ourselves tangled up as we live in a tangled world.  But, as A Course in Miracles tells us, projection makes perception, and we can therefore choose what we focus upon, what we will see.   If we let Heaven speak to us, we will be blessed indeed.  It is “wisdom” that Heaven gives, and so this is no mindless faith, borne of ignorance.  We will know things in a way that we have not before.  When we choose the wisdom of Heaven as our daily companion, we won’t lapse into recriminations, ruing our lot in life.  We will be grateful for what we have, and by living in that gratitude, we open the doors to Heaven’s storehouse, and more blessings rain down upon us.

The wisdom of Heaven will stay with us, when we invite it: “faithful” companion.  May we revel in the thought that God walks with us through thick and thin, always here, always living through us.

We don’t need to fear that He will ever let us down.  If we focus on His blessings, then we are doing our part to invite more.

Let’s let the wisdom of Heaven be our faithful companion today and every day.

Knowing Heaven

“[I]f you knew the Heaven that awaits you here and now you would cry of happiness.”  COL bk.2, 16::II

Here we are considering a series of quotations attributed to Mary, mother of Jesus.  She constantly reminds us of joys that we could know, if we weren’t so obtuse.  We can even know Heaven, she says here, and she adds, we can know Heaven “here and now.”

What a glorious promise!  We would be happy beyond compare if our world were to open up into an experience of Heaven.  And this can come true, regardless of outer circumstances.  Of course, it takes some mental adjustment on our part.  We need to turn inward, not outward, because within is where the treasures are. 

We turn inward not in a self-centered way, but in a way that opens up God’s treasure house for our enjoyment.  We touch God when we clear our mind, open our heart, and listen to the gentle, quiet promptings from inside.  Then Heaven really does begin to appear outwardly, too, for we are projecting our vision from the inside, making for the perception of a better world.

A Course in Miracles tells us that projection makes perception.  And it is this truth that allows us to see how Mary’s promise can come true in our lives—even when things seem darkest.  We are not fooling ourselves when we see a better world.  We really do see a better world, for we are not adding our pain to that world. 

Our happiness is seeded from within.  And there too we find Heaven on earth.

We Have the Company of Heaven with Us

“You are never alone and have never been alone.  I refer not to the company of the world, which is transient, but to the company of Heaven, which is eternal.”  COL bk.2, 16:I

What a wonderful comment to read:  that we are never alone and have never been alone!  We may be isolated in our daily lives now, but we have the “company of Heaven.”  And this company is eternal.  Who is involved?

Angels, of course.  And entities we have known who have passed over to the Other Side.  Plus advanced souls who seek to help us from their greater knowledge.  And especially, in the company of angels, the particular beings assigned to us, our guardian angels.  And then there is God Himself Who listens in on our prayers with patience, knowing that there is nothing that we need, but realizing that we don’t know this. 

Our needs are answered at the point that these needs are recognized.  Of course, we can’t see this, and we often think ourselves in a worse place than we are.  But if we settle down, calm our overwrought mind and heart with praying to the One Who loves us beyond all imagining, we will succeed at being enveloped by peace.  And this peace, if we woo it, will stay with us indefinitely.

We are never alone.  This in itself is a great way to soothe a troubled breast. 

Yes, we have the company of Heaven.

Our Brother Is Our Way Home

We usually find in our chaotic world that it is through pain and suffering that we realize there must be a better way.  Our turning point does not have to be thus, because Jesus assures us that it is not necessary to learn through pain.  In our confusion, though, we have usually made the conditions that will, in fact, bring enough pain to us that we will cry out for relief, and in that crisis point, we will find out that guidance through the Holy Spirit is awaiting us.  The Holy Spirit is ready to show us another way, a better way.  Once we turn the corner, then, we are open to guidance from the Holy Spirit.  Frequently, though, we blame God for our plight.  A Course in Miracles proclaims that God could not give this specialness we craved, and so we retreated into feverish dreams.  We did this; the only blame is on our own heads.  And there is a way out. 

Our Brother as Our Savior

By turning to our brother and freely choosing to join with him, becoming as one, we see that we would not choose to be more special than he.  There is a lack of love when one perceives self to be either greater or lesser than another.  Love does not thrive on competition, only in Oneness–the harmony of equals who are saviors one to another.

 ACIM gives a hard but unequivocal statement of our deep need to see our brother sinless.  It says, uncompromisingly, “When peace is not with you entirely, and when you suffer pain of any kind, you have beheld some sin within your brother, and have rejoiced at what you thought was there.”  (T-24.IV.5:2) Here in a nutshell is our supreme need to be equals, one to another, in love. 

–from Out of the Maze, an e-book by the author of this blog.

Secret for Staying in This World, but Seeing It Differently

“Think you not that reason opposes love, for love gives reason its foundation. The foundation of your insane world is fear. The foundation of Heaven, your true home, is love. The same world based upon these different foundations could not help but look quite different.” (ACOL, C:14.9)

We don’t have to have blind faith in the precepts of A Course of Love. We are told, “love gives reason its foundation.” (ACOL, C:14.9) We are further told that the foundation of our insane world is fear. And the foundation of Heaven, our true home, is love. It is strongly implied that the way that we look at our world determines whether it is hell or Heaven. The way that we look. That is perception, and we know from A Course in Miracles that projection makes perception.

What we feel inwardly will determine what we see in the outer world. And if we are feeling fear, we will see an insane world that is violent and destructive. If we are feeling love, we will see Heaven.

Is this too simplistic? Is this even true? Can the same images that flow before our eyes seem fearful or loving, based on what we are projecting? Yes. For the fearful mind sees more reason to fear, and the loving mind sees with these things only lamentable things, but no cause for fear. The loving mind does not reject the outer world of insanity as not there; it sees that it is there, but it is only illusion, the illusion of insanity. And so it gives that outer, violent and destructive, world no credence.

“The same world based upon these different foundations could not help but look quite different.” (ACOL, C:14.9)

Yes! This is the secret for staying in this world, but seeing it differently. This is the secret of having peace in the midst of chaos. Choose fear or love, and all the world will change according to the emotion that is chosen.

A Quiet Heart

Fear is the act of disconnecting your cord from the only socket that can truly satisfy you, and running about trying to plug it in to somebody else’s or something else’s. I would ask you to consider this one question, as you look upon the whole of your experience: Has it ever worked? Can it ever work? (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 74)

The only “socket” that can ever satisfy is our attachment, in the center of our being, our heart, to God Himself. We have long known this, but we “forget,” and have to be told again. We must quiet our minds and hearts in order to sense God’s presence, in order to feel His warmth. If we are trapped in a drama of fear and judgment, we are cutting ourselves off from the power that is in that “socket.”

Because God is within, as well as without—in just everything and everybody—He is unable to get through to us when we are in dire conflict. This is why the peace that passeth understanding is so important. A quiet heart opens the way to get God’s knowledge flowing into our personal, or “little,” mind.

If we look outside ourselves for peace, we will never find it dependably. Sure, we may be able to distract ourselves for a time, but the problem will recur, and maybe it will recur with greater force than previously. We are free of fear and judgment when we declare them to be in our past.

God helps us make that determination. And to make that determination, we must look within. Trying to find an answer in the outer world is an incomplete answer. The truest Answer wells up from deep within our soul, and it takes us Home to God right away, seeing a little bit of Heaven here on earth.

Heaven Blesses Us with Peace

Having free will does not mean that you can elect to take the only curriculum that life is offering you in every moment. It means only that you do have the right to put it off yet another day. And each time you put it off, you slumber in your suffering. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 73)

We would “slumber” in our suffering if we put off confronting God with every fiber of our being. We need to be fearless as we approach living in this world. How might we effect this?

We look to living in the present, not putting off the eternal questions of Love, peace, joy, harmony. When we are rooted in the moment of the present, there is no fear. And fearlessness is the primary characteristic of mastery. When we make the decision to stop entertaining our own dark places, when we ask Heaven to bless us with peace, we are making a decision that will change the content of our days. We are coming Home to God. We will eventually be approaching mastery.

When the day goes badly, and our heart is pounding, our bodies jittery, what then?

This is fear personified. The best that we can do is to turn within, to the peace that is always present inside. Know that this peace is not far away, because God would comfort His children when we ask. We need simply to rest in the knowledge—
and it is knowledge, not perception—that outside of our jittery bodies is a truth that is currently eluding us. We allow God to act upon our confusion. We allow Him to grant us peace.

Enough times of simply turning away from fear will do the trick. Enough times of allowing God to touch us with His healing balm will promote the fearlessness that we all want.

If we are distraught today, know that there is a better way. Know that God is trying to get through our tangled emotions. Quieten down, in any of the ways that we have used previously—meditation, prayer, quiet reading, even distraction.

We will know God’s peace, because He wishes it for us. He wishes it for us just all the time.

Heaven

Why may it take us so long to extricate ourselves from this world of madness? That is a misleading question, because time is relative, and if our attitudes are right, we can experience even Heaven itself in the here and now. Jesus says that Heaven is not a condition, but the awareness of perfect oneness. (T-18.VI.1:5) Surely in our mystical moments we come close to experiencing this wonder, and there are few of us who do not have mystical moments from time to time, even if we don’t call these memorable times by that name and even if we do not recognize these memorable times for what they are.

Jesus also says that we must retrace our steps, in effect, a process that he likens to a ladder, where we retrace our steps into descent, and eventually the ladder is removed. (T-28.II.12:7) Our old ideas of Heaven being “up,” of somewhere out in the sky being Heaven, here comes into play in Jesus’s metaphor. We cannot truly enter the Heaven that is actually within until we have let go of all illusions; this may be a very long process, because we have gone deep into madness.

We Can See Clearly Now

The Course calls the act of pardoning, or forgiving, one’s brother of what is just illusion anyway as the “power to release your savior.” (T-21.II.3:8) If we will entertain the idea that the Course is right, that the world is truly illusory and illusion made in madness, the step of pardon becomes very easy. It becomes, in madness, the only rational choice that one would make. We would not get angry if our brother were psychotic, though we might wish mightily that he were healed, especially if in his madness he is causing us pain. In effect, the Course declares that this characterization is exactly what is happening on a daily basis in our world. We are all, to one degree or another, steeped in a metaphysical madness.

On a deeper level, though, we have never left Heaven, and our real Self is very strong. We are indeed strong enough to let this world go, accepting correction because we see that we are wrong. (T-21.II.4:10) It is only the extent to which we live by guidance that we can see a more benign dream, the still illusory Real World granted our waking dream by the Holy Spirit. The dreams he gives, though still illusory, are happy, and by them we see our way clear.

Choose Heaven

We can choose Heaven at any time, but we must choose it with our brother. This idea is central to the Course: this particular pathway requires that we not walk alone. Moreover, the Course clearly says that we are not victims of the world, nor are we strangers within it. All of our fellow travelers are brothers on a common pathway. And we will choose together or not at all. If we choose not at all, we can never “make” Heaven in illusions; we can only stay in the hell and misery of this world.

The Course asserts that the time of our choosing of Heaven is in our hands. Until we use our power of choice to choose otherwise, we are left in this world, seemingly (to us) as victims, but, thankfully, this state of affairs need not remain with us.

Finding Heaven

We know that we have chosen Heaven when we feel peace. And we can make this choice at any instant. When we invite the Holy Spirit to join us, we are once again attuned with God.

A Course in Miracles says that we are all One. Indeed, this is the definition of Heaven: “. . .not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this oneness, and nothing else within.” (T-18.VI.1:5-6) If this be true, we are all part of each other and of God. We cannot attack a separate being, because no separate being exists. The most that we, or an illusion of Self, can attack is an illusion of another. And then conflict ensues, creating fear for ourselves. This is one of the dynamics of the ego, and sometimes it seems that the more we study such meaninglessness, the more powerful it becomes. That is because the very process of studying the ego affirms its importance and makes it real to ourselves.

We can make much, but what results is still only illusion, and can never be truly experienced as real, though we can imagine it to be real.

To live an illusion is madness, a madness that the remembrance of God can shine away. In quiet and in peace can we be led to accept God instead, and we thereby leave conflict, and the fear that it brings, far behind. In forgiveness of ourselves and others do we find that quiet and peace.

There is no other way.

God’s in His Heaven

There is an old saying that when one points a finger at another, there are three fingers pointing back at us. Make a fist, point the index finger, and immediately this saying can be seen as obviously true. The Course’s version of this old ego dynamic is “It is as certain you will fear what you attack as it is sure that you will love what you perceive as sinless.” (T-23.intro.2:4) Somehow we believe the old karmic truth, that if we attack, we will be attacked in return. But the glorious opposite is also true: See innocence and sinlessness, and these too will become our own.

Because all seeing is projection, in the view of the Course, we can understand that all projection makes perception. What we are seeing is a dream projected outward, and the world becomes cruel or kind based on our inner life. Even the worst of “sin” can be seen as unreal (being a dream), and as the Course counsels, we can say, “My brother, choose again.” (T-31.VIII.3:2)

All of us have had moments, perhaps fleeting, when God seemed in His Heaven, and all was right with our little world. These moments of peace can be expanded more and more to all our hours, waking and sleeping. All of our dreams can become benign. This happens when the truth that we are dreaming our world sinks in, helping us to see that what we wish is based either on turmoil or calm, the peace of God within. There is, therefore, really nothing to “forgive,” but we do need the exercise of forgiveness for ourselves (not God).

It is only as we forgive that we come to see that there is nothing to forgive. No one blames a loved one who acts in psychosis to perpetuate harm; we know that he is sick. Likewise are we insane, all together, even when not diagnosed as mentally ill. We all are trying to bring greater and greater areas of sanity to our deluded minds.

Everything Is Conspiring to Take Us Home to God

“Each gesture, each thought, the way that the body breathes, all of these things are going on constantly, and they are communicating or revealing the effect of what you have allowed to make a home in your mind.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 12)

Everything is conspiring to take us home in God. Our every gesture is either a conscious or subconscious, unrecognized, desire to heal the separation that is not real, but in which we have believed. This separation from God has taken us on a long journey that is ending.

If we allow our mind to open to Love, we will gesture differently, think differently, breathe differently. We will be in a flow that takes us through the day with an ease that we have not imagined possible.

If our thoughts and actions are anger-oriented, then we know what we have given a place in our mind. And A Course in Miracles says that anger is never warranted, not that we will never feel it, but that it is not necessary. While this doesn’t mean that push the anger down into the subconscious, or that we are passive-aggressive, it does mean that we need to go back to the beginning, before we felt anger. What prompted it? What exactly was going on?

We may find that we are stressed, or tired, lonely, or hungry. Our bodies may be betraying us, for though we imagine the body to be illusory, it does seem to have effects in this world. Physiology of the body does make a difference.

But the mind and heart can rise above. Turn over unpleasant thoughts, too-fast breathing (maybe), to a Higher Power. The Holy Spirit knows how to heal us, and by bringing up these concerns in the mind, we are healing these concerns. All from the subconscious has to eventually be brought up (something Jesus says elsewhere in WOM).

Let our greater understanding of exactly what is going on with us, eventually free us to love more fully.

We Dwell in Heaven Also

“The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate. The ratio of repression and dissociation of truth varies with the individual ego illusion, but dissociation is always involved, or you would not believe that you are here.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VIII.7:1-3)

There seem to be aspects of the Self of each of us that dwells in a realm separate and apart from this world. Here Jesus calls it out “other life.”

This assertion gives me great comfort. When I think of millions of years to heal the separation for all people, I feel very isolated and alone, apart from God (even though I know this is a misinterpretation). When I feel reassured that there is a part of me that is thriving in another place, Heaven (if you will), then I can settle down and be satisfied here in this world. I am unaware of this other place when I walk this earth, but the fact that Jesus says that I live there, too, gives me great comfort as well as reassurance.

All of us are in a similar place. Our main Self has never left Heaven. Only a part of our being dissociated into the little self that is our personality, the little self that rebelled against God, and started on the long trek away from Him, and, now, back to Him.

This is part of the theology of ACIM that is often not emphasized. But its central place in the comfort of God’s children is without doubt a teaching that demands recognition.

Kingdom of Heaven Is Within

It is difficult to understand what ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you’ means. The reason is because it is not understandable to the ego, which interprets it as if something outside is inside, which does not mean anything. The word ‘within’ does not belong. The Kingdom of Heaven is you. What else but you did the Creator create, ad what else but you is His Kingdom? This is the whole message of the Atonement, a message which in its totality transcends the sum of the parts (as we have said about the sonship before).” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.1:1-6)

“The Kingdom of Heaven is you.” Yes, we are the children of God, created out of “God-stuff,” and constituting His Kingdom. The Whole differentiated into parts so that experiencing could proceed forward. When the Godhead knows the All, experiencing is not really possible, because, knowing all, there is nothing left to be discovered. So we, His children, fall into ignorance in this world, experiencing all the time in part, sometimes intuiting the Whole, Who is God Himself/Herself.

This scenario takes care of our yearning to know more and more of God. We accept our finite mind, and we rest in the assurance that the Mind encompasses us, keeping us safe, getting us out of jams that we collect like fireflies. God as the Infinite knows how to extricate us from that which we made ill-advisedly. And so we would be wise to listen to the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self to know how to proceed in this sometimes confusing world.

We need to drop the ego. We have said this many times to ourselves, but perhaps we don’t know where to begin. Don’t resist the ego, for the ego becomes strong in strife. Just turn aside gently, avoiding that which calls to the egotistical and egoic in us.

This will be enough. Over time, the ego will simply wither away as a bad idea. The ego is, as Jesus defines it in A Course in Miracles, a false idea of what we are, a false persona. He does not use the term ego as Freud did, when Freud wanted us to form a strong ego as we matured so that we would be ready to meet life’s challenges. Jesus’ concept of the ego is this falsity, and we know that falsity is nothing that we need or want. When we embody the soul, we are embodying the whole of ourselves, what Freud was really trying to get at when he defined “ego.”

Our persona is informed by the Christ who is within. When we turn to this self, we are turning to what will work as we travel through this land.

Expect Heaven on Earth

“This little note is just included to tell you to expect this. Expect heaven on earth you were told. This is what it is. There will be no doubt, no indeci¬sion. Your path will be so clear to you it will be as if it is the only path in the world and you will wonder why you didn’t see it all along. Expect this. And it will be. So be it.” (ACOL, E.6)

Jesus is here heading toward the end of A Course of Love, and his words are reassuring. We are told to expect heaven on earth. And, in other words, we are told that our guidance will be sure. Most of the time we are told not to hold expectations, but Jesus’ advice is different. He encourages expectations, knowing that we affirm is very likely to come true. This is the law of attraction in action.

What will heaven on earth mean? This will differ from person to person, because everyone’s heaven is different. As concepts differ, so does the result. But most of us long for more calm and peace than this world has ever given us. And if this is what we want, we will receive it in our new “heaven on earth.” It might be useful to jot down those aspects of true reality that we value, for what we value becomes true. See what heaven on earth really means to us. If the words appear too mundane, then lift our sights to God Himself, and He will guides our pen as it writes on paper, or our fingers, as they type on a computer.

Be certain that guidance is happening now, right now, and this will reassure us. After all, we don’t want to set our sights too low. Jesus seems to indicate that we have it all, that we will never be satisfied until we do (this was a tenet of A Course in Miracles also). Pray for the insight that all will be well. Pray for insight about what to wish for. We have so long been contented with little that it takes some doing to elevate into a newly created world.

I have long done “blue-skying” in my journal. And that is exactly what I am asking you to do now. Let the sky above be all that stops our ruminations. Let the sky above offer a ceiling to our desires. And then nothing will stop their ascent.

Dear God,

On this day, please don’t let me “settle” for less than the best. Keep my thoughts, the thoughts of my mind and heart, elevated to new heights. Let me follow the inklings that I get for an ever-better future.

Thank You for guidance of long duration. So often I ask for guidance, but now it appears that You want me to make more of my own decisions. Still, it is You I turn to, for You dwell within. And we act as You decide, being part of Your very Being. This concept takes some getting used to, but once my mind/heart have wrapped around it sublimity, there is no turning back.

Thank You for being You.

Amen.

Return to Paradise

“There is no story to project what comes next—no accomplished story. There is only scripture unfulfilled, the promise of inheritance or the threat of doom. Myth too stops short of fulfillment, of return to paradise.

“Yet this return to paradise, to your true Self and your true home, is written within you. It only needs to be lived to become real. You must accept me because I lived it and made it real for you. You must accept me because I am the part of you that can guide you beyond what I accomplished to the accomplishment of creation, and beyond creation to the story not yet written, the future not yet created. To the realization of paradise and of your true Self and true home, in a form that will take you beyond time to eternity. (ACOL, D:Day1.23 – 1.24)

We are marching into Paradise. This is the good news that Jesus, in this quotation, comes to tell us. And we won’t make it on our own. If we have read this far in A Course of Love, we are tacitly accepting Jesus as our guide back home, our guide to Paradise. This is the acceptance that he is after. This is what we are asked to do.

What will Paradise mean to us? Our very consciousness will be altered to a much more serene manifestation. We will be easy-going, mellow, peaceful, and, above all, loving. Our minds will slow down, and this is something that we will recognize. Jesus does not ask us to accept, on faith, that which he cannot prove to us. We will know when we have changed to manifest Christ-consciousness, or, as A Course in Miracles says, Awakening.

All of us have already had glimpses of this new state of mind and heart. Jesus says this in the latter sections of the Dialogues. Not one of us is completely in the dark. And, if we have followed the gentle pathway of A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, we won’t awaken with a scream of terror, as though a light had been turned on while we are dreaming. We will awaken to a serenity that seems unreal at first, a quietness that we have never known. A very peaceful Awakening.

So we can know now, from our glimpses, that Christ-consciousness, Awakening, is not anything to fear. We will not be hurled into reality. We will walk a gentle way back to God, because we have listened to Jesus’s words, and however indecisively, we have accepted him as our leader.

Dear God,

Give me energy to do Your bidding today. This beautiful day is another of Your gifts to us. I would not rue this day, regardless of what it brings, and this day has, thus far, brought me closer to You. I wait in patience for You to reach down and lift me up, to have a prolonged experience of Your Being.

I long for the assurance that You love me, and you give this assurance to me in abundance. Thank You for holding the hand of this sensitive soul.

Amen.

Our Inner Heaven Offers a Joy that Knows No Bounds

“The life of the physical self became a life of suffering and strife only because the physical or personal self forgot that it exists in relationship and believed itself to be separate and alone. In its fear, it made an ego-self which, because it sprang from fear, was not consistent with the laws of Love or of creation. Knowing it existed in a state inconsistent with that of the laws of God, it made of God a being to be feared, thus continuing, and being unable to find release from, the cycle of fear.” (ACOL, T3:12.9)

This quotation is part of the theology of A Course of Love. If we can believe this quotation, we will find an answer to much of our previous questioning. We will know why fear intervened in a paradise that the earth could have been. We will know why we exited, metaphorically, the Garden of Eden. And we will get an inkling of how to find our way to a new Garden, a House of Truth, and with this we will exit the house of illusion, the illusion that has covered our eyes with scales, preventing our vision of something new, different, and better.

Surely when we imagine ourselves all alone in the universe, fear is not far behind. When we destroy relationships that could be an oasis of peace, we suffer. And this suffering prompts fear to arise. We wonder how we could have gone so wrong. And how could God allow us to go so wrong? How could a loving and compassionate Father not rescue us from ourselves?

He does do so, not by intervening and destroying our freedom of will, but by consoling when times are tough. When we feel love for our Creator, we are reaching for the heavens, and in this reach, we find Who we are seeking. He is reaching back down to us as well, coming out from deep within each of us, transforming our psyche so that we will never have to fear fear again. God is not “other than” we are; we are a part of Him. This is a tenet of both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, and when we believe it, we stop looking heavenward for a Deity. We see that heaven is really within each of us, that the elevated Self of form, being formed now, will make us well people. Our fear will be gone, our love will be all-consuming and all-transforming.

Let Love show the way. When fear beckons, know that this is the house of illusion beckoning to us once again. But don’t enter that place. Know that the House of Truth, God’s Kingdom, is our legitimate home and our inheritance. Know that our understanding of God will grow as we reside longer in this House of Truth.

Fear aside, we welcome Love into our hearts and minds. Our way home is assured, finally.

Prayer

I know in my innermost mind and heart that heaven is within me. When I don’t reach inward often enough, I forget, and then the problems start. Help me to reach inward today. Help me to find You.

Heaven is a promise to us of improved conditions. And with this promise comes a joy that knows no bounds.

Thank You.

Amen.

Our Mellowness Alerts Us to the Joining of Heaven and Earth

“You will be tempted, nonetheless, to re-enter the house of illusion, if only to grasp the hands of those you love and gently tug them through its doors. You will be able to take note of the explosions happening within and will want to return to add your own to those going on inside, thinking that with the force of one more, maybe the walls will finally come tumbling down and those inside be held within illusion no more. This was the work of many who came before you but the time of such work, for you, is past. Many remain to shake the walls of illusion. Few stand beyond it to beckon to those within.” (ACOL, T3:9.5)

Here Jesus gives us our motive for living, a motive that for adherents of A Course of Love is somewhat different in scope than what we knew before we learned how to leave illusion. We have learned that leaving illusion and joining with the truth, with reality, is as simple as walking outside the doors of the house of illusion, for when we do this, we are automatically in the House of Truth. The House of Truth has not abandoned all of us who chose to live in illusion for a long while; it has always encompassed the illusory place that we heretofore called reality. Now we know better, for we are the ones who have left our egos behind. We either have experienced Christ-consciousness or have caught glimpses of it, for in peace and harmony, the two worlds of earth and heaven come very close to each other. We are close to knowing a mellowness that will signal the start of something very grand for us, and something very grand for this world as well. Our mellowness alerts us to the joining of heaven with earth.

If we choose to enter illusion again, we will flirt with the ego again, and life is much too important to let the ego ever try to rule again. People with egos are still abundant on this planet, and many of them are doing very good and important work. They are enmeshed in the treasures of art, music, and science that explosions of the Self have wrought. They are leading all within illusion to see the best of what there is to see in illusion. These individuals have their calling.

Our calling is different as we approach Christ-consciousness. This is not egoic nonsense, but an understanding that something fundamental has changed within our mind and heart. We did not effect this change, though we did remove the barriers to the awareness of love, and thereby invite love into our very being. The Christ-Self dominates the new people whom we are rapidly becoming. And many more will join us as revelatory thought takes dominion over our psyches.

We would do ourselves and others a disservice if we thought ourselves unfit for a higher purpose, if we believed that because others are caught in illusion, we ought to be as well. We are harbingers of better growth for our world ahead. We are harbingers of the new. And it is in humbly taking our place in this great commission that we find the purpose for which we were born.

Prayer

Thank You for the mellowness that I am feeling these days. I wish it for all I encounter. Mellowness is another word for inner peace, and long have I associated inner peace with A Course in Miracles. After all, the foundation that first published ACIM was the Foundation for Inner Peace.

I need to discover—and discover is the right word—how to sustain this mellowness, for in doing so my glimpses of Awakening will lengthen into something more. Sustaining Christ-consciousness is the next step in our plan of becoming something more than we were in egoic prison. Sustaining Christ-consciousness will allow all of us to create a new world, something that we don’t even have to plan, but can await as creativity wells up from within us. Something outside the dot of the self, as Jesus says, will engage us in discovery and acceptance of a new world.

I need to take to heart the revelations of A Course of Love. Our world needs all of us to discover a new way of being, a non-egoic way of accomplishment that will embrace all, all with the One Self whom we share.

Amen.

Return of Heaven

“What happens when this oneness is accomplished is that divine memories arise to replace perception. This is miracle-mindedness. The accomplishment of this state of being is the reason for which you are here. It is your return to your Self. It heralds the return of heaven through the second coming of Christ, the energy that will bridge the two worlds.” (ACOL, T1:6.9)

This passage compresses a number of ideas in just a few words, words that cry out for deeper understanding. We are seeking oneness with God, and we reach that oneness when we turn inward to the Self, for the Self is part of God. When we have released this Self, we are flooded with memories that Jesus calls “divine,” and we are, finally and forever, released to miracle-mindedness. This is when we practice prayer that is unwavering and a constant thing in our lives; this is when we practice the art of thought, thought that embraces miracles just all the time, even in our very daily life.

We are on earth for a purpose, and it is the return of our being to the Self, the end of perception as the ego has taught it to us, and the coming of miracles that give us a new way to live. Jesus tells us in A Course of Love that we are now in the age of Christ, and this age will bridge heaven and earth. We are certainly, therefore, here at a wondrous time. A time that the ages have longed to see. We will not fully appreciate our position now in this world until we have reached union with the Christ Self Who resides within each of us. This is the Christ-consciousness, the Awakening, that we all long to see, and see right away.

We must at first be satisfied with glimpses of the Awakening. We will know a peace that passeth understanding, we will sense love in a deeper way than we can remember previously, and we will feel a harmony with others that has often been missing heretofore. These glimpses, if all goes according to the usual way, will lengthen, so that our thought processes slow down as we experience peace and not drama. We are on the verge now, and nothing could be more fulfilling. The ultimate bestowal of Christ-consciousness comes, however, when the ego has finally been vanquished, when fear has gone away, when judgment does not mar our days. Then and only then does God, metaphorically, each down and lift us up to the Christ-consciousness that has been His Will all along.

Let us pray for union with the Self today. Let us realize that we are praying in God’s Will. He will act as soon as we are ready, and we can remove the barriers to this abundant life by paying attention to what transpires for us. We can choose to drop fear by praying it away, we can choose to drop judgment by loving it away. The possibilities are endless, once we have touched miracle-mindedness ever so slightly.

God’s way will heal us. Let us ask for that today.

Dear Father/Mother,

I ask for a good day of no fear and no judgment, as well as no attack, no anger, and no senseless planning to protect myself in the future. These are the prerequisites to Christ-consciousness, or Awakening, as outlined in both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love. I know the truth; help me to live it.

Thank You.

Amen.

The Heaven on Earth that We All Seek

“See you now why those who judge cannot enter heaven? Judgment proceeds from the belief in sin and the irreversibility of all errors. If you do not believe you can reverse or “turn back” to the state in which you existed before the original error, then you never shall.

“And yet all you need do is turn back. Being an observer of your body has prepared you for this. Step back now to the place that has been held for you. You have not lost “your place in line” because you wandered. It has been held for you by the most loving of brothers, a brother united with your own Self.” (ACOL, C:17.12 – 17.13)

This “most loving of brothers” is Jesus himself, who, many believed, channeled A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love. So our place has been held by one who is united with us in our Self, a Self we share with all others. We never have to feel alone and lonely again, for we have a universe of beings with whom we are One.

Judgment is forbidden us, because it keeps us from entering heaven. We need to return to what we were before the original error, or the detour into separation from God. And if we judge, we think that there is sin and that errors cannot be reversed. So we damn ourselves.

God would not have it so. His loving son has prepared the way for us, and prepares the way still. We do not understand how we share a Self with all sentient beings, but in ACOL we are told that we do. And there is much in ACOL that rings true to me, this assertion included.

Enter the fold again today. This fold will ensure that we turn aside from judgment, that we welcome the fact that our Self is One with all others, and that we know that Jesus is holding our place for us in the grand scheme of things.

What more would we ask? Ask that we take this knowledge unto ourselves today, that we still our doubts, and that we open our hearts just a crack. The mellowness that we will feel will assure us that we are onto something. Something grand. And Jesus himself will take our hand, leading us to the heaven on earth that we all would love to see.

Love the Self and Usher in the Return of Heaven

“If you cannot claim at least a small amount of love for your own Self, then neither can you claim your power, for they go hand-in-hand. There is no “common good” as you perceive of it, and you are not here to assure the continuance of society. The worries that would occupy you can be let go if you but work instead for the return of heaven and the return of your own Self.” (ACOL, C:16.26)

This quotation seems to be refutation of the social gospel that many find important to the practice of religion in the world today. Jesus says that there is no “common good,” and that we are not here to assure the continuance of society. But are these statements a refutation of the social gospel?

I think not, for Jesus also says that we need to work for the “return of heaven,” and what would this state be but a much preferred way of life in our world? He pairs this statement with the assertion that we need the return of our own Self—seeing a return of heaven, here, and the return of our Self, here, as equally important—perhaps. Even if these two are not seen as equally important, we can well recognize that we can’t very well have one without the other.

Elsewhere Jesus counsels against proselytizing. Our first task is to get our own house in order, for anything that emanates from a divided self is a self that is still caught by the ego. We need to love this Self of ours, this Self with a capital “S.” And this may be a new idea for us, for we have had trouble finding anything to love in the being that we are. When we love the Self, our insane worries will fall away. And this is a goal well worth striving for, though not struggling for. Striving is good; struggle is not only unnecessary, but also undesirable.

We want our own power, but in order to assume power, we must first love the Self. In our darkest hours, when we are the most dejected, we look dimly on the house that we have built. This “house” is the personal or little self, and it has nothing to do with the Christ Self who dwells within. The Christ Self will assert its authority when we get our personal baggage out of the way. And that means we turn aside from the ego, its longings and its demands. There is only love, borne of unity; and fear, born of the egoic self. And we know which one we truly want.

Jesus is here giving it to us straight: Remove the impediments to Love’s primacy. Assume our own power. And therein establish the love of the Self that will usher in a heaven on earth. This is the new to which we are called.

This is creating a new world, a call that we find within the pages of A Course of Love.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

Be with me today as I seek to love this Self that You have given me. Don’t let me drop into dismal thoughts, thinking that this command is something that I don’t have within my power. We can love our Self, and others, and God—and it is best that we engage in practices that will cause this love to blossom.

Thank You for this good day. The sun is shining, the temperature is temperate, tree limbs move gently in the breeze. There is nothing amiss in my world unless I choose to drop into depressing thoughts. And I would not do this. I would welcome a glimpse of enlightenment, if this is possible on this beautiful day. Be with me as I drop my worries, I drop all judgment and all fear, and I welcome You into my heart.

Amen.

Seeing God in Human Terms

“The child believes she has “stolen” the role of parent away from the parent without having become a parent. God has become the enemy to those who judge just as the parent of a defiant child becomes the enemy in the child’s perception.” (ACOL, C:16.16)

This is not the first time that Jesus has compared our relationship to God to our relationship to our parents. There is much with which we can compare, for we call God the “Father,” and we see ourselves as His children.

Here we are compared to a defiant child who has not yet become a parent. We think that when we rebel against God, we are taking something away from Him, and we think that He is angry with us. He then becomes the “enemy,” the one who is out to take back what we removed from Him. This is an analogy of what we think happened in the separation from God.

The other time in A Course of Love that we see ourselves being compared to the family circle is when separation is compared to the rebellion of an adolescent child. The adolescent seeks to create his own identity, separate from the parent, and so rebels, just as we did in the separation from God. This is an illusory separation from God, for nobody could actually do this and live, being, as we are, part of God Himself. And God “let go,” even though we were too immature to understand what we were doing. He knew that we were too eager to live any other way. So He let us go our own way, until we found that our way was not nearly as grand as His way, and we sought to return to Him.

The family circle can teach us much, even the dysfunctional family circle, for God and we have been a dysfunctional family. Not on His part, but on ours.

The way is clear. Return to the fold! Return to God. Then and only then will we find real satisfaction in life. Then and only then will we find our way home at last.

The memory of rebellion is still strong in us, and we often don’t see how we can “merit” God’s love again. But we have never actually been separate from Him, our rebellion accomplished nothing, and He has always loved us with a love that is far beyond our comprehension.

He and we actually made this decision for an illusory separation. It was a way that we could form a false identity that would prove to us that Love is the best choice. Until we made a false choice, we didn’t know what we had. Being in heaven without a contrast to Love left something to be desired. But now that we have experienced separation, we can know what Love in heaven really means. It means more than we could ever have imagined if we didn’t have to contrast of living without the consciousness of this Love.

Ask to sense Love today. The journey without distance has been completed. Let us rejoice in a new day, a new day of Love expressed toward our Creator.

Prayer

Dear Father/Mother,

I want to sense that I am One with You again. I want to really feel this. Help me to do so, for I know that I am asking in the will of both of us.

Help me to be grateful for the blessings that have rained down upon my head in my years on earth. I have not always been grateful, but have often taken these blessings for granted. That is because of a lack of contrast between having and not having. But I would ask for your miracle today, to sense the gratitude that I really know is due to You.

May this day go well. May I make a difference in someone else’s life. May salvation spread upon the earth become the greatest satisfaction that any of us know.

Amen.

Considering Heaven and Love

“It is but you who gave heaven the purpose of giving you something to look forward to, a reward for a life lived according to your own rules, a reward to be gained by some and not by others, a pinnacle of achievement that will prove your rightness and your success after you are gone. Love you give the same purpose, but bid it do the job of rewarding you here and now. It, like heaven, is your proof that you are good and worthy, special and to be rewarded for your specialness.” (ACOL, C:14.23)

We have viewed both heaven and love wrongly, in the past. We are coming to see that heaven is something to enjoy here and now, in this world even. The same with love. But not as a reward of a life well-lived. We are not looking for “reward” at all; this is an old way of thinking, an egoic way of thinking.

We don’t need rewards to assure us that we are living as we ought to live. We don’t need to place heaven in the afterlife, and we don’t need to see the love that we enjoy here and now as evidence that we are good people.

All of the quotation for today is a false understanding that we have had ourselves. Jesus would lead us beyond this falsity to something infinitely better—a heaven here and now, a love that is not merited but a gift of God.

Some of us got these ideas from our religion, religion which placed heaven beyond us, in the realm after death. And works were believed by many to allow one to merit the love of our fellow beings on this earth. So we came by these beliefs honestly. But now is the time to leave such beliefs behind.

Heaven can be here and now. Love can be here and now, unmerited. We don’t have to “do” to merit anything at all—heaven or love. We need simply to “be,” and this being is the greatest gift that we can offer to God, to our brothers and sisters, and to ourselves.

The way is clear now. Let us walk the pathway with confidence.

God Did Not Banish Us from Heaven

“While you still view yourself as a body, you cannot help but think of God as a vengeful God whose final vengeance is your own death. While you still think of your self as a body, it is easier to accept that your banishment from paradise was God’s decision, not your own.” (ACOL, C:11.9)

Actually our detour into separation was a joint decision of God and Self, as we are told later on in A Course of Love. This is a necessary understanding, due to our coming to see that God and we are not separate at all, but One, with us being a part of Him. But we get into trouble when we see ourselves as our bodies, for then we project God, and we blame him for the plight in which we find ourselves. Separation didn’t have to mean what it has come to mean; the ego didn’t have to arise. To live in a body without an ego is just where we are heading with the elevated Self of form. And this incarnation in bodies might have been lived as a Self all along.

Instead, we got impatient. And so God “let go,” just as parents let overly ambitious teenagers go their own way in rebellion from them. We were not ready for the best that God could offer in form. And so a mistake occurred, a mistake that could not happen in reality, but that could happen in illusion. And so we projected illusion from our egos, and this world and universe were formed. Our own making did this. Not “creation,” but “making,” for we reserve the word “creation” for true reality.

So stop, today, seeing our bodies as ourselves. Our bodies are just projections. And that is part of the reason that they get sick so often. Our minds are sick, and they project a body that builds on the same sickness. If we would know healing, we must get beyond this misconception about our bodies being ourselves. We can make this transition, and it behooves us to make this transition quickly. God Himself does not want to see us suffer, though he knows the reason for it and does not Himself know the suffering that we do. An all-knowing being may, indeed, not see into the illusion at all. There is a difference of opinion among ACIM and ACOL students about this, for some believe that God does not see into the illusion. I differ on this point. Since God and Self are one, I think the Deity knows precisely what we are going through, and is moved by it. This does not have to be anthropomorphism. We are a part of God, and he lives the lives that we are living. We are His means of expression as well as His means of experience.

We can regain paradise. Home is there waiting for us. It takes only willingness, as A Course of Love makes plain.

Let us exhibit this little bit of willingness today. For it is just a “little bit.”

Find Heaven Here

“Your ‘other’ home is the home you feel as if you have left and the home you feel the desire to return to. Yet it is where you are, and you could not be anywhere else. Your home is here. You think this is incongruous with the truth as I’m revealing it, the truth that heaven is your home, but it is not. There is no here in the terms that you would think of it, the terms that set your reality in a location, on a planet, in a body. God is here and you belong to God.” (ACOL, C:8.17)

We sometimes wonder if we can have heaven on earth, as A Course of Love seems to tell us. We wonder mightily, for the world in which we live is troubled, difficult, and full of tragedies and problems. But there is a way that we can see anew; we can see a heaven on earth when our perceptions are cleansed. Projection makes perception, and when we realize this fully, we will have taken a giant step toward true knowledge that is not dependent on perception at all. Knowledge of the revelation that we get from God, and “God is here and you belong to God.”

When we assume the elevated Self of form, in Awakening or Christ-consciousness, we will know whereof Jesus speaks in this passage. We will occupy a physical form, but it will show us a heaven on earth. This is not my interpretation, but straight from the pages of A Course of Love. We don’t have to wait until the afterlife to experience heaven. When our perceptions are cleansed, we will experience that great blessing right here, right now.

While caught in the egoic mind, we often yearn for something better. But we can have that something better when we move in its direction. When we welcome the Christ Self from within, to come out, we know a better experience. We are no longer complaining about our days. We know a peace that overshadows the objective facts of our sometimes difficult lives. We rise above the difficulty; it is just that simple. God shows us a new way to interact with this world and a new way to live in this world. The new way is open to us, and we walk more smoothly along the pathway that God points out to us.

Walk a better way today. Stop the complaints; stop the agony. A simple change of mind is all that is needed. And this change of mind comes when we realize that God is with us. He is always with us. And He will lift our minds to a higher level, so that we don’t wallow in misery and unhappiness.

We Remember and Thereby Reclaim Heaven

“This remembering is not of former days spent upon this earth, but of remembering who you really are. It comes forth from the deepest part of you, from the center in which you are joined with Christ. It speaks of no experiences here, wears no faces, and bears no symbols. It is a memory of wholeness, of all to all.” (ACOL, C:8.4)

Being who we are is a prime emphasis in A Course of Love. And here is virtually the first mention of it in the first part, the Course proper. We do not need to brood on what has befallen us in the past; we need to move beyond such obsessions to a better day in the future.

And we can do so. Our way home is actually simply a remembering. We are not creating anew when we seek to reclaim what used to be ours, in our home in heaven. Heaven is not a place nor a condition, as A Course in Miracles tells us. It is the awareness of Oneness, nothing else outside this Oneness, nothing else within. We are sure of just one thing: We want God in all His fullness. And the inner Christ Self is that part of us who remembers Who God is.

The Oneness of which I spoke, above, is the memory of wholeness. We have so often been fragmented and discontented in our everyday lives. We have found ourselves depressed, angry, misunderstood (or so we thought); we have found any number of negative states of mind.

A Course of Love invites us to remember the real wholeness of the Self through listening to what our heart tells us. No more than this is required. No more than this is even recommended.

We cannot fail, for we have a savior who stands by our side, holding our hand along the journey without distance. Jesus is here for us, cloning himself, outside time and space, whenever we make one unequivocal call for him. He is our mainstay, the way that we continue without struggle on the pathway home to God.

Let us be grateful today, as we seek to be more contented, that we have such a companion to speed us along the way.

A World of Joy

“Remember now one lovely day, for each of you has had at least one that was a shining light in a world of darkness. A day in which the sun shone on your world and you felt part of everything. Every tree and every flower welcomed you. Every drop of water seemed to refresh your soul, every breeze to carry you to heaven. Every smile seemed meant for you, and your feet hardly seemed to touch the soft ground on which you walked. This is what awaits you as you join with what you see. This awaits you as you place no judgment on the world, and in so doing join with everything and extend your holiness across a world of grief, causing it to become a world of joy.” (C:5:32)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wish such a day often, even everyday? Is such a blessing possible? Probable?

I think that it is, but I do think that it is rare in our world. I have read of people who never met a person they didn’t like, people who feel happy every day. But I would be the first to tell you that this is not I. Oh, I hope for better days, and I do have many good days—but constant and unremitting joy has not been my lot in life.

I doubt that it has been yours either. But we can move ever close to such a blessed state by doing certain things daily.

It is well to start the day right, as A Course in Miracles points out. And, of course, Jesus also tells us in ACIM that the day can be begun again if it starts out less than the best. How to start the day right?

We need a time of quietness. And not all of us can squeeze this in first thing in the morning. It means getting up earlier, before our family rouses It means that we give a part of each day to God, right off the bat. And we are the better for it.

I do not always do this, but when I have, the rewards have been great. I go out on our sun/screen porch, where the early sounds of the morning, and my reading and prayer, grant me peace. Having this peace first thing in the morning is the best way to ensure that the day will unfold well. If the day turns frantic, we can then go within, in memory, for that moment when everything seemed right with the world—when God was in His heaven, and we were visiting Him, so to speak.

If you can’t carve out the first part of the day to spend with God, spend time with Him as soon as possible as the day unfolds. We will never regret these moments of quiet. We will flourish in a world that seems at time to have gone mad. As it has.

Return in memory to happy times. Recall a pristine day, as the passage for today encourages us. And remember that prayer is God’s way to talk to us. Prayer is sometimes silence, for God is heard in silence.

The world today does not live by these rules. And they are my rules, my interpretation, based on A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love. When you have time, develop your own rules.

You will live far happier days. And you will the God Whom you may have forgotten somewhere along the way.

Experience a Little Heaven on Earth

“The lucky ones among you have made a place resembling home within your world. It is where you keep love locked away behind closed doors. It is where you return after your forays into the world that you have made and upon entering believe you leave the world’s madness outside your door. Here you feel safe and gather those you love around you.” (ACOL, C:4.21)

We all identify with this passage. We know what it is like to come into our home, our safe haven, after a day of disappointment in the outer world. Our homes do reflect the Home that we are really after, the Home of heaven. If we are lucky, as Jesus says.
Some of us do have discord in our personal homes on earth. And so we have no place that we can hide.

Most of us have love in some form that we can recognize. Some form of love that meets our deepest needs, even though we are not always sure that our loved ones understand the real person behind our mask. We have lived this mask so many years that we know not how to share the real person, and so we feel lost and alone in our inner personal self.

There is an antidote, and that is to let the inner Self out to play. This Self does not wear a mask, and so we will need just to trust that this Self will be well-received. Because it is a Self of love, we can bet everything we own on its good reception. Others long for love, and when we are living the Self, we give love without demanding anything in return. We are living the best that we can. And when we aren’t demanding, others almost magically return the love that we are offering. Giving and receiving are One in truth. And we learn this, easily and for all time, when we live the inner Christ Self.

Imagine, when you come in from the harsh, cruel world that you are entering a little haven that is a precursor of heaven itself. Drop the discord, if there has been any. Just offer our genuine love to those in the world who mean the most to us.

We will be surprised by how our inner havens will change for the better. And living well, in our personal homes, will prepare us to tackle the outer world with less rancor. Our outer doings in this world will change for the better as well.

We can create a little heaven on earth in this way. Our havens presage Heaven itself. And we don’t have to wait for the afterlife to so experience what is right there waiting for us in this world.

Listen to the Heart in Every Instance

“When you think of acting out of love, your thoughts of love are based on sentiment and must be challenged. Love is not being nice when you are feeling surly. Love is not doing good deeds of charity and service. Love is not throwing logic to the wind and acting in foolish ways that pass as gaiety but cannot masquerade as joy.” (ACOL, C:4.12)

If we are “acting,” we are indeed acting. Just playing a part in the masquerade that passes for true living in this world. We don’t choose to act in illusion any longer. We choose really to live in love.

If we are feeling irritated, or, as Jesus says, “surly,” then what do we do then? Do we give vent to the emotion that we are feeling?

Surely not. But we can’t suppress it, either. So what do we do?

The best and surest antidote is to pray the bad feeling out of our system. God will answer us when we are lost in the egoic tenor of bad feelings. Of irritability. Of surliness. He knows our limitations, and these bad emotions are a hangover from our days of letting the ego rule us. If we were to ignore the sane solution of praying to get our emotions straightened out, we would be living a lie. Being “nice” is a solution that won’t work, for almost anybody with whom we come in contact will see our negativity below the façade of a sweet face.

If we do charitable deeds, they must come from the heart. Trying to merit heaven won’t work, either. We can’t do anything to merit heaven, for it is beyond the concepts of good and bad. Heaven is there, waiting for us, when we have tried all the pathways to peace, and we have found all but one untenable. The one that works in the genuine emotion of choosing love in every situation without smoothing over negative emotions with niceness. God will help. Without Him, there would be no hope at all.

We are insufficient to save ourselves. Perhaps we have always known this, but the ego has hidden this fact from our minds. But our hearts know this truth, and our hearts also know the way Home.

Listen to the heart in every instance. God will speak through our hearts. Turning one’s mind over to the influence of the heart is the way to make good things happen. The heart is the best thing that we have going for ourselves.

Heaven Dawns Here and Now in This World

“In Heaven reality is shared and not reflected. By sharing its reflection here, its truth becomes the only perception the Son of God accepts. And thus, remembrance of his Father dawns on him, and he can no longer be satisfied with anything but his own reality.” (ACIM, T-14.X.2)

When we remember God, we are likely to be in a sharing mood with others. We are not likely to be isolated and alone, in a self-centered way with ourselves and others as well. In Heaven, then, reality is shared. We don’t see reality “reflected,” which is an inferior way to experience reality.

And we can have Heaven here and now. This is being said. We have long thought that we had to wait for the afterlife, and maybe eons beyond the immediate afterlife, to reach Heaven. But here and now Heaven awaits us, when we are made ready by our persistence and our love for God and other people, as well as love for ourselves (which is necessary to love God and others).

When we remember God, we are living reality. We don’t have to be made acquainted with God, for He is in our memory. We once knew that, being a part of Him, we could never lose Him. Now we need to realize that this remembrance is always out there, waiting for us.

The ways of this world are obscure at best. The ways of Heaven are transparent to those who ask to see.

Does Illusion Fall Away in ACIM’s Real World?

“The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you out of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation, because it is the recognition that reality is only what is true.” (ACIM, T-11.VII.4)

Perhaps reality, being “only what is true,” is not illusion at all, is no longer the dream in which we perceive the world. A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love do not develop this idea very much at all; it is left to tantalize us with its innuendo. Certainly the eternal in our experience, the intangibles of love, harmony, peace, joy, happiness, are not illusion, and it may be these intangibles that Jesus is discussing. Honest people have differed on what he is saying, dedicated students/teachers, all, of A Course in Miracles.

We are teased out of thought when we wonder if seeing the real world, which ACIM notes happens only briefly, is not an illusion. We are caught up in Awakening by God Himself, and through this action do we know peace for the first time. Whether or not the images that appear before our eyes are perception or knowledge is not made clear to me in ACIM. Maybe I am too dense, but I still have questions.

How could the illusion of our eyes, in this outside world, suddenly, with the advent of the real world, true reality, be “real”? This is one question for us to puzzle over, because none of us has a definitive answer. This much is certain: the intangibles are eternal, and therefore true—but the eyes don’t see these intangibles.

—

“This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel you need a course which, in the end, teaches that only reality is true. But do you believe it? When you perceive the real world, you will recognize that you did not believe it. Yet the swiftness with which your new and only real perception will be translated into knowledge will leave you but an instant to realize that this alone is true. For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its destruction, but its translation into Heaven. The reinterpretation of the world is the transfer of all perception to knowledge.” (ACIM, T-11.VIII.1)

Will Heaven be a physical manifestation of truth? And will Heaven be here and now?

This quotation certainly seems to say “yes” to both questions. But A Course in Miracles can be obscure, and I seek to say nothing that is controversial, because controversy is divisive in that it separates us from each other in the study of ACIM.

We can ask to see this real world sooner rather than later. And we can do what we can to remove the blocks to love’s awareness.

This much we can do.

And it will be no mystery why we are healed.

—

“Reserve not one idea aside from truth, or you establish orders of reality that must imprison you. There is no order in reality, because everything there is true.” (ACIM, T-17.I.5)

This defines “true reality,” if we have ever needed a definition.

—

“How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they contradict reality. They go against what must be true. The opposition comes from them, and not reality. Reality opposes nothing. What merely is needs no defense, and offers none. Only illusions need defense because of weakness.” (ACIM, T-22.V.1)

This quotation explains why we need be defensive about nothing. Defense weakens us, making what we would defend against. This is an axiom of A Course in Miracles.

We can get ourselves so caught up in illusion, and so defensive, that we let the ego run wild in our psyches again.

We do not need this. Nobody needs this. The ego, so apparent to others, will keep us weak for eons—if we let it. Now is the time to turn aside gently from the ego, take heed no longer, and know truth for the first time.

—

“Where once you recognized only illusion and called it reality, the mind joined in union will now, more and more, recognize only truth and experience only the truly real.” (ACOL, 1.10)

This brings back the quandary with which I became this posting. Will we experience only the “truly real”? Does this go beyond simply intangible emotions (love, peace, etc.)?

Certainly it seems to say this. And what a great promise this is, if this should be true! We don’t have to fear being lost in illusions any longer. Our dreams are over, maybe in physical manifestation as well.

Ask deep within for the answer to this quandary. I suspect that honest people will vary on their interpretations, but that is no reason for us to be divided one from the other. We do realize that the intangibles are not dreams. And joy, peace, love, harmony, happiness, will beckon us forward every step of the way, paving the way for Heaven on earth.

Choose the Joy of Heaven Every Day

“You can label joy heaven and pain hell and seek the middle ground for your reality thinking there are more than these two choices. A life of little joy and little pain is seen as a successful life, for a life of joy is seen as nothing more than a daydream, a life of pain a nightmare.” (ACOL, 2.7)

This quotation is only a partial quotation, but the entire passage indicates that Jesus here is not advocating a middle ground. We don’t want to be halfway between heaven and hell. We want to be entirely in heaven, and this is not something that has to wait for the afterlife, the Other Side.

We can know joy here, joy to a substantial extent that blesses us with each and every day. We may not always have positive things happen to us, but although we may know some pain, we don’t have to see this escalate into suffering. Our attitude is everything. We can see the joy in the midst of any adverse life circumstances that come our way. We don’t have to choose the middle way of little joy and little pain.

There is some magical thinking going on in our minds when we select the middle way. We think that if we don’t reach too high, the gods won’t strike us down. But we don’t believe in plural gods. And God Himself doesn’t punish, though we probably were brought up to believe that He punished us if we did “bad” things.

Get this egoic thinking out of the way. Choose joy today. Pray for a more positive outlook for whatever circumstances surround you in your life.

The way to see life as heaven is mapped out for us in A Course of Love. We need look no farther for the newest revelations in our spiritual lives.

The Detour into Fear

“The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, with no effect at all. The miracle, without a function in Heaven, is needful here. Aspects of reality can still be seen, and they will replace aspects of unreality. Aspects of reality can be seen in everything and everywhere. Yet only God can gather them together, by crowning them as one with the final gift of eternity.” (ACIM, T-13.VIII.3)

Our presumed separation from God has caused us all the grief. We could have taken physical form without this fall from grace, but we somehow made a tiny, mad mistake and forgot to laugh at the idea (from A Course in Miracles). We have not really separated, of course, because we are a part of God and cannot do so and live—and we live eternally. But we can imagine that we have separated from Him, and in the delusion come all the ill of humanity.

—

“Thus, the son’s participation in the idea of separation seemed to bring about a completely reshaped life, a destiny different than that which had already been written. Yet this participation could not but proceed from the original idea and could not proceed in reality but only in the external aspect of life that preceded it. The idea of separation changed nothing in reality, but became a drama acted out upon a stage so real that it seemed to be reality.” (ACOL, 12.22)

We are, like Shakespeare said, characters in a dream, writing and carrying out a drama in which we star. There is nothing wrong with play-acting, but we have hurt ourselves in the process of following illusions. We don’t realize that we are in a make-believe situation; we take it all so seriously. And that is part of our problem. We are in a “drama acted out upon a stage so real that it seemed to be reality.”

Let’s try to be cognizant of the drama so that we will be in a preparatory state to awakening from this insane play.

—

“To know what you now know, and remain aware only of the reality of the separated self, would not sustain Christ-consciousness in form.” (ACOL, Dialogues, 3.16)
We need to reach beyond just the separated state, for awareness of a mistake is not sufficient to get us out of that mistake. We need to reach out to God, immanent in ourselves as the inner Christ Self. We also need to see Christ in others, for we are not separate from them anymore than we are separate internally.

—

“This created the separate and the unloved in your perception, and your perception created an unreal reality of the separate and unloved, often referred to as hell or hell on earth.” (ACOL, Dialogues, Day 16, 16.15)

Are we really living in a hell on earth? In some respects we are.

But we can walk out of this hell by following guidance of the Holy Spirit (ACIM) or the Christ Self (ACOL). Our days will be brighter. We will be happier. And we will come, eventually, to know separation no longer. For it has always and alone been illusion. Our own delusion about reality.

Heaven Looks to Our True Identity to Give Light

“My true Identity is so secure, so lofty, sinless, glorious and great, wholly beneficent and free from guilt, that Heaven looks to It to give it light. It lights the world as well. It is the gift my Father gave to me; the one as well I give the world. There is no gift but this that can be either given or received. This is reality, and only this. This is illusion’s end. It is the truth.” (ACIM, W-224)

This quotation equates our true identity with what is true reality. And the quotation praises our true identity. We are blessed! God has blessed us, and we are actually a light in this world. We are seeing, with true identity, the end of illusion in our world.
Of course, not until or after Awakening, do we cease to see the end of illusion. But this quotation does categorically say that when we recognize our true identity, we have reached illusion’s end. And so we wonder what is ahead. Nobody can tell us this; it is something that must be experienced to be believed. It is a change in consciousness that fulfills our total being, our true reality, our true identity as Sons (and Daughters) of God. We are at last home free, Heaven on earth is at hand, and we are, of course, at peace for the first time ever.

Our true identity is a return to the innocence that we have always had but could not see as long as we were lost in illusions. We are “free of guilt,” as the quotation says, and we finally know this through and through. We have no reason to doubt God’s goodness. Of course, we have never had any good reason, but as long as we were lost in illusions, we felt guilty and we projected that blame on God, Whom we feared. Now we can leave all this foolishness behind. God is good, He has always been good, and now we can affirm this from the bottom of our hearts.

WHAT IS TRUE REALITY? DEFINITIONS, WHAT REALITY IS NOT, CHARACTERISTICS OF REALITY

Introduction
Part 1: Definitions
Part 2: What Reality Is Not
Part 3: Characteristics of Reality
Summing Up

This series on true reality is in three parts; within each part are quotations from both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love.
The two works are a continuum, channeled, many of us believe, by Jesus. This was the information channeled to Mari Perron:

“Where the original Course in Miracles was a course in thought reversal and mind training, a course to point out the insanity of the identity crisis and dislodge the ego’s hold, this [A Course of Love] is a course to establish your identity and to end the reign of the ego.” (ACOL, C:P.8)

In this blog, Miracles Each Day, the post entitled, “Nothing Real Can Be Threatened. Nothing Unreal Exists,” has been viewed many times—almost a record number of times over any other post in this blog. (The review of Jon Mundy’s Living A Course in Miracles is the only post viewed more often.)

This series on the real and the unreal, true reality, seeks to answer the questions that many of us have as we move closer to Awakening or Christ-consciousness.

How will reality change for us? What might we do to facilitate a change for the better?

Your comments are welcomed.

Part 1: Definitions

Heaven Is the Natural State of Sons & Daughters of God

“Heaven is the natural state of all the Sons of God as He created them. Such is their reality forever.” (ACIM, Introduction, What It Says)

We are told this wonderful thing in the introduction to A Course in Miracles, in the part that Jesus channeled. Heaven is our natural state, once we assumed the mantle of being “Sons” (and “Daughters”) of God! A glorious thought indeed this is, and it will make us want all the sooner to throw off the little, or personal, self, and to step into our identity at Sons and Daughters of God.

We will be Awakened when we have this characterization. In the meantime, we are separated, personal selves that are seeking a return to the God that we never, in actuality, left. The separation is an illusion, but for us it seems abject reality, and we must work with our beliefs. We need to make the “journey without distance” (from ACIM) back to God. And let us begin today.

It is our reality, the one to which we are returning, true reality. We can make small steps everyday, and larger ones on some days. We need to realize that we won’t make the decision of when we are right with God, when we are ready for Awakening. God alone makes this decision. It is up to us, though, to remove the blocks to the awareness of love’s meaning. And of this we can do much.

Ask and the way will be shown. Even today.

Effortless and Joyful and Effective, by Ivor Sowton

Jesus in A Course of Love (ACOL) leads us into an increasingly huge vision of who we are in truth and what the future can be like for us. Here’s from the Dialogues of ACOL (Ch. 13):
Join with your brothers and sisters in Christ and sharing becomes effortless and joyful and effective.

Effortless, joyful, and effective! So much is implicit here.

There is harmony, to start with! I mean look at the international news, so full of various forms of misery humanity is imposing upon itself so willfully through wars and sanctions and threats and provocation; there seems no harmony even available to some of these situations–seemingly hardwired vindictiveness runs rampant.

Disharmony also plagues our personal lives, for who doesn’t have right at this moment at least a few relationships which are fraught with some kind of painful negativity? These are our special relationships. If they stay the way they are now we’re stuck! So, big picture or little picture disharmony would both be the continued but completely unnecessary repetition of the old, when we could be in the new, says Jesus. All this disharmony is likened to self-imposed illness, poverty, dissing others:

This is precisely why you must choose not to keep the life of discomfort caused by perceived illness, the life of scarcity caused by perceived lack, the lack of stature caused by perceived disrespect. It is only by your choice that you will keep such things and only by your choice that these things will leave you. (T 3: 14.7)

So we really could be both seeing and creating much more harmony, even within an historical context of “some have been and will continue to be resistant.” These new possibilities will be joyful and effective, too, at least for us in our experience here; that is, in conflicted situations, we would be part of the solution and no longer part of the problem. This would spark that same Spirit in others, so that increasing numbers of us really lighten up with a capital L! Via la difference!

The mechanism of the new is often spoken of as true joining with others, who then become part of us. To me this huge identity shift has to be respected as so revolutionary that its unfoldment has to be in charge of Jesus himself, or God, or your Guru–you know what I mean? This is because we all start with a lot of ego identification, meaning that we experience separation right now in varying degrees, and cannot wrench ourselves out of that state, but need Someone beckoning to us from a much greater state, often referred to by Jesus as the House of Truth.

When we are truly settled in the House of Truth we are joined with others in unity and relationship, and there is only harmony. Effortless, joyful and effective! Even now, in many ways we are called to act from this new consciousness, which is actually not new but had been just temporarily forgotten. Our greater identity antedated the ego separation, and, being eternal, is just waiting our remembrance. By envisioning it more and more we become it more and more:

You who have followed me beyond the walls of illusion are now called to begin the act of revealing and creating anew the life of heaven on earth. (T-3: 9.6)

Accept Atonement and Find Healing

“Partial Atonement is a meaningless idea, just as special areas of hell in Heaven are inconceivable. Accept Atonement and you are healed. Atonement is the Word of God. Accept His Word and what remains to make sickness possible? Accept His Word and every miracle has been accomplished. (M-22.1)”

“Accept Atonement and you are healed.” A glorious statement, but do we really believe it?

This healing is, of course, healing of the mind, for the body is an outgrowth of the mind and is illusory (as are its sicknesses). We cannot choose this healing just a little bit, a partial Atonement, for this makes no sense, and it is sense that we are after now.

We are in Heaven now, but we often don’t recognize this, and so we make hell for ourselves. But this hell is illusory, along with this world that gave such an idea birth.

If we accept God at His Word, we will know that our healing is immediate, not a matter of time at all. We are well, we have rescued minds, and we are now following God’s way. What more could we really ask?

A Part of Heaven Is Laid in Our Relationships

“Before a holy relationship there is no sin. The form of error is no longer seen, and reason, joined with love, looks quietly on all confusion, observing merely, ‘This was a mistake.’ And then the same Atonement you accepted in your relationship corrects the error, and lays a part of Heaven in its place. How blessed are you who let this gift be given!” (T-22.VI.5)

We can easily accept Atonement when we accept it through our special relationships turned holy. A holy relationship, we are told, is a means of saving time. And when we turn to our brother, overlooking his mistakes as just mistakes (not sins), then we see Heaven itself in our relationship. We have walked further toward the grace that is always held out to us.

We have been confused when we fail to overlook mistakes in our brother. Of course, overlooking is hard when we believe ourselves to have really been attacked, and to have suffered from this attack. But to think in such a way is to compound the error, the mistake.

Our brother had only attacked us because his mind is lost in illusion, and we ourselves are attached to that illusion as well. Our real Self has not been harmed in any way. We are intact. And being intact, we can show our brother an innocent face, a face that has not been hurt, and in the showing of this unhurt face, our brother will receive (as do we) a part of Heaven itself.

CHAPTER 3: ACCEPTING ATONEMENT FOR ONE’S SELF

Pain Can be Avoided

“The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time. This may appear to contradict free will because of the inevitability of the final decision, but this is not so.
You can temporize and you are capable of enormous procrastination, but you cannot depart entirely from your Creator, Who set the limits on your ability to miscreate. An imprisoned will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. T-2.III.3)”

God had to set limits on our ability to miscreate, or His universe(s) would be in jeopardy. This does seem to limit free will, but who in his right mind would depart from reality to find refuge in illusions, especially illusions that give pain and suffering? We don’t know the right things to do; we make all kinds of trouble for ourselves in our illusory world. Would God let that type of insane situation continue forever for his beloved children?

God, in my estimation, intervenes because he realizes that his children are lost in insanity. We departed from Him (or thought we did), in a “tiny, mad idea” about which we forgot to laugh. (This is from A Course in Miracles.) This tiny, mad idea started the chain of circumstances in which we find ourselves now. And we are in a dire place indeed. The Holy Spirit, God’s Voice, will guide us back to sanity if we will only listen. That is all we have to do: follow the promptings that come to us with courage, sure that Someone is making the right decision for us.

Our will is imprisoned because we are not following life according to the plan that God set up when He created us. In departing from that plan, we have found only misery, and the Holy Spirit would undo all the tragedy for us. Our free will, followed by us, will come to the conclusion that there is another way to live, surely a better way than the way that we have lived in the past. And in using free will to choose again, we use free will rightly. God surely must smile.