From Fear to Love

“Living without fear is only possible when you live in certainty.”  COL bk.2, 19:II

To live in certainty is to know that we are One in God, sure of His love, knowing that all will be well.  To live in certainty is to experience, first hand, invulnerability.  Experiencing invulnerability first comes in glimpses of Awakening, and then in Awakening itself (on a constant basis).

We want to live without fear, and the way to woo this experience is to open ourselves more and more, as time passes, to love.  Love always cancels out fear, and all of us do know some ways to invite love into our daily lives.  We become more congenial as we go about our days; we cease the anger and hostility; we become peaceful.

Yet we aren’t always successful in making this transition from fear to love, because it takes God’s help to make a permanent change in our outlook.  We don’t do very well when we try to effect permanent change without any divine help.

Let divine help into our lives today.  Don’t try to alter thoughts and behavior by purely secular means, for these will all eventually fail.  If we have the certainty of God’s help, we have a Power on our side that will create a permanent change from fear to love in our outlook.

Give God a try today.  He is always willing to help anew and afresh, regardless of how long we have neglected Him.

Invulnerable Children of God

“You have no justification whatever for perpetuating any image of yourself at all. You are not an image. Whatever is true of you is wholly benign. It is essential that you know this about yourself, but you cannot know it while you choose to interpret yourself as vulnerable enough to be hurt. This is a peculiar kind of arrogance, whose narcissistic component is perfectly obvious. It endows the perceiver with sufficient unreal strength to make you over, and then acknowledges the perceiver’s miscreation. There are times when this strange lack of real courtesy appears to be a form of humility. Actually, it is never more than simple spite.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-3.VIII.12:1-8)

We are actually continuing the theme of blame in this quotation. If we believe that another can hurt us, we are misperceiving, and in this misperception, thinking that a perpetrator means us harm that we can’t get over.

We are not that vulnerable. We are actually invulnerable to hurts from another. We ourselves only seem to hurt ourselves. And then we spitefully blame the one outside of ourselves.

We are also not an image, but a real, divine part of God Himself. When we imagine ourselves as something else, we truly do ourselves an injustice. We are invulnerable children of God Whom He loves deeply. This is the only image of ourselves that matters.

Glimpses of Christ-Consciousness Will Offer Invulnerability

“An attitude of invulnerability is necessary now. It is not arrogance or a means by which to flirt with risk and danger. It is simply your reality.” (ACOL, C:25.13)

We are invulnerable, though we have seemed to be anything but, so far in our experience on earth. Our reality is a reality of invulnerability, for when we are in our reality, nothing can harm us. Illusions no longer have any punching power. We do not cringe in the face of denunciations from the outside, for we know that we would be cringing in the face of illusion, and illusion can do nothing to us.

We do not test out God by getting in situations that put our physical form in harm’s way. This would be arrogance and a flirtation with risk and danger. We do not tempt God. We simply recognize that invulnerability means that no longer is struggle our way. Struggle is not the only way to growth, though it is the way that we have used heretofore in our illusory world. We grew mightily when pitted against forces greater than ourselves.

Give up this old way of reacting. We can grow easily and effortlessly, for we are not complete in all particulars when we have reached Christ-consciousness. God will still fill us out with new gifts. We will do more, not less. But we will do so from a place of repose. God seeks our rest, our relaxation, not our fervent pushing of the rock of Sisyphus up the mountain, only to have that rock fall to the foot of the mountain once again—with the process to be repeated. This is the way of the ego, which would have us seek and seek, never to find.

So ask God for invulnerability. He will respond. And in the invulnerability we will, once again, get a glimpse of the way that he would point out to us, over and over, until we get it right.

Those Who Accept the Atonement Know Invulnerability

“Those who accept the Atonement are invulnerable. (T-14.III.10)”

Often we think that vulnerability is to be desired, that it makes us more loving people, more willing to share. But is there not fear in this? We don’t have to feel vulnerability to be loving. This quotation actually indicates just the opposite. We will, of course, be more loving to ourselves and others when we have accepted the Atonement for ourselves, and in this, Jesus says, we will be invulnerable. What a promise!

What does it mean to be invulnerable? It know that nothing can harm us. In the cosmology of ACIM, it says that we are living in an insane and illusory world in which the attacks of others do not harm us because they are not true. This sense of invulnerability will protect us from the slings and arrows that only seem to hurt us. In actuality, these slings and arrows do nothing.

Invulnerability as the Self of Form Manifesting Christ-consciousness

“This displacement of the original intent can be simply stated as the displacement of love with fear. It is as simple as that. (The Treatises of A Course of Love: ‘A Treatise on the New,’ 3.4)”

1 – Original Intent

The original intent was not to live in fear as a physical self. This came about because of our “tiny, mad idea” (from A Course in Miracles) that gave birth to the ego. And with the birth of the ego came the manifestation of fear. The original intent was to live as an elevated Self of form, in a physical body, to experience what that reality would be. We are trying again to get it right, all of us. We are trying to leave fear behind.

2 – Fear and Love

As discussed yesterday, the two emotions (according to both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love) are fear and love. For far too long, we have been ruled by fear in all its distressing disguises. Now it is time to turn to love in a serious, meaningful way. There is no other way that we can save our world. The time is crucial now to make the decision for love.

3 – On Earth

When we do make the decision for love, we will manifest the original intent of our sojourn on earth. In time, we will change into the elevated Self of form, a Self that is part of the Christ-consciousness of all of our brothers and sisters, one with ourselves. May this day come sooner rather than later.

4 – Fear

As strange as it seems, it is hard to give up fear, because our minds hold spasmodically to the old records that just go around and around in our minds and our actions. If we recognize that, when we feel fear, we are actually wanting to feel love, that we are actually expressing a call for love–then there is hope for ourselves.

5 – Call for Love / Expression of Love

A Course in Miracles indicates that all that happens is either an expression of love or a call for love. So fear is actually a negative that is a call for love. This is true for everyone, and when we can realize this and make it our own, we won’t be so quick to reduce attack for attack, anger for anger. We will know that, whether or ourselves or others, it is just that we have momentarily forgotten what we want, and we are expressing a need for help in the only convoluted way that we can. It is also said in ACIM that everything is a call for help that appears to be something negative. Surely we want to rush to our brother’s side with solace, when he just wants to be comforted, when he is in a bad place.

6 – Jesus

Turn to Jesus as our companion, and ask his help. He has promised to be there for us, though to believe this requires an act of faith that our reasoning minds cannot understand. There are spiritual laws in operation in our world of which we know nothing. That is how, I believe, Jesus can be everywhere and with everyone simultaneously. In the Workbook of A Course in Miracles, Jesus says to imagine that we are holding his hand, if this will help us; and, he assures us, this will be no idle fantasy.

7 – How Can Jesus Be Everywhere?

How can this be? How can Jesus be anywhere, and everywhere, at the same time? The only logical explanation that we know in our secular world is what Jane Roberts’s wrote in the Seth books: that one entity can be simultaneously in more than one place. So Jesus would be able to clone himself, so to speak, appearing wherever and whenever a person makes to him “one unequivocal call.”

8 – Jane Roberts’s Seth

In Seth’s books, this concept has its counterpart in the concept of “counterparts,” in which other parts of our Self live our lives simultaneously in various parts of the globe, with different birth and death dates. This means that the Self that we know here is actually part of a multidimensional Self, with reincarnations separate in time as well as place. The Now is still all there is, but time is spread out so that we can experience things.

9 – Safe

These “selves” still all only experience different versions of the two emotions of love and fear. And the fear is always of the ego. Hence, when we have reached Christ-consciousness, we will know a certain sense of invulnerability. We will recognize that we are perfectly safe, because we will have given up all grievances (tenet of the Workbook of A Course in Miracles).

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

May I hold Jesus’s hand throughout today, knowing that he will lead me along the path to love and away from fear. May I put my doubts aside and realize that there are spiritual laws in this world that we do not now dream of. Jesus’s presence is surely one of these laws.

I have fairly often asked for Jesus to come to me, and I have experienced a sense of peace at the asking and its aftermath. I have never had such a vision, but feelings count for much. Thank You. Thank You for Jesus’s dedication to salvation and to help all who ask. He is there for us; may we be there for him as we seek to bring salvation to all who are at all interested in what we have to say.

Thank you for helpfulness today.

Amen.

It Is Impossible to Be Wholly Helpful without Being Wholly Harmless. The Two Beliefs Must Coexist.

“God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful. This is impossible without being wholly harmless, because the two beliefs must coexist. The truly helpful are invulnerable, because they are not protecting their egos and so nothing can hurt them. (T71)”

1 – Helpful and Harmless

May we learn to be both helpful and harmless. This passage recommends that harmlessness is an attribute of those who are following its way of peace and love. We will not attack when in our right mind, though we sometimes slip up. We know that anger is unjustified, even though we may still feel it from time to time.

2 – Invulnerable to Pain

When we are bent on helping our brothers and sisters, we will not knowingly do them harm. Not only do they benefit, but so do we. This helpfulness renders us invulnerable to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to quote Shakespeare. What this means is that we are invulnerable to pain from our egoic selves. We are leaving our egos behind as we embark on the pathway set forth by A Course in Miracles.

3 – Goals

So: helpful and harmless. What goals these are! And how blessed we are when, even in our imperfection, we reach those goals in our daily lives.

4 – Existence vs. Being

“Existence as well as being rest on communication. Existence, however, is specific in how, what and with whom communication is judged to be worth undertaking. Being is completely without these distinctions. It is a state in which the mind is in communication with everything that is real. (T70)”

This passage is often overlooked in A Course in Miracles, but it is a comparison of existence (which is of the ego), and being (which is of God). Previously, many of us who study ACIM might have made decisions about which people were worth our time. But this is a false distinction. We need to be totally in communication with all that is real—and individuals, our brothers and sisters, are real. We feel love for them, and sometimes we feel hate. But never are we indecisive about feeling for others. We may not know what to feel, but feel we must. It is locked in our bones.

5 – God as Being

We need to understand our being, which is better than mere existence. Another name for God is Being, with a capital “B.” And we are part of God, but we do not capitalize our personal, or little, self. We need to be in communication with others, giving them our love, not our hate. And we will find a way when we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the Universal Inspiration.

6 – Sharing

“God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing real can be increased except by sharing. That is why God created you. (T70)”

Gerald Jampolsky, in Love Is Letting Go of Fear, put a great deal of emphasis upon the fact that the intangibles of God—the love, the harmony, the peace, the joy—are increased by sharing; other the other hand, material goods diminish when shared. And material goods, like everything in this world that we can see with our physical eyes, are illusion.

7 – Why God Created Us

Here we learn why God created us: to increase the real by sharing. He shared with us, and we are meant, ultimately, to be co-creators with Him. Let us hasten that day along today.

8 – Praising God

“The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept such praise, and no perception with which to judge it. (T70 – T71)”

I have often found this passage to be somewhat amusing. In our previous lives, before ACIM, we may have thought just that—that God wanted us to tell Him how wonderful he is, by praising Him. But this type of praise feeds the ego, and God knows not the ego. So we praise God, but not to appeal to an ego-less Being. We praise because we need to express gratitude for our own sakes.

9 – Lonely God

“The constant going out of His Love is blocked when His channels are closed, and He is lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him. (T71)”

This is an especially sweet passage, that God would be lonely if we do not commune with Him. Elsewhere we learn that He recognizes that we are asleep and need to be awakened. And He sends the Holy Spirit to show us the way.

10 – Internal Dialogue

We would be far better off if we carried on an internal dialogue with God all through our days. He will speak to us, and we do not have to fear that our sanity will be jeopardized. Indeed, our sanity will be restored instead. For we have been mad, quite insane, with an ego that has driven us to madness. Let us be done with this foolishness. Learn what joys await on a day dedicated to communion with God. We do not have to jeopardize anything in our busy lives. But the better parts of ourselves will be augmented.

Prayer:

Dear Father,

May I not lose my temper. May I remain helpful and harmless to my brothers and sisters. May I communicate with God today on an ongoing basis. May I forget not.

It God is lonely when He realizes that our channels of communication are closed, may we act today to open them up to Him. What better way to experiment with reality?

When I have remained helpful and harmless, then I am invulnerable to hurts as well. This is a great desire of mine. Thank you for helping me to be both helpful and harmless.

Amen.

Adopt an Attitude of Invulnerability

“While you believe fate works against you, you are not in concert with the universe.  These attitudes confirm a continuing belief in your separated and vulnerable state.  During the time of tenderness, you will learn, through the practice of devotion, to identify and reject all such attitudes and to adopt an attitude of invulnerability.  (A Course of Love, 25.12)”

Affirmation:  “Fate works with me.”

Reflections:

1 – Time of Tenderness

If tenderness at first is our experience, with attendant vulnerability, we will move along in time to a new state of mind and heart, one of invulnerability.  This is a welcome change, and it is not a front, and it is not harsh.  Invulnerability of the right kind means that we are totally protected in our lives by God Himself.

2 – Our Devotion

To whom is our devotion directed?  To none other than God Himself.  When we practice visualization and affirmations, along with our prayers (communion with God), then we are indeed in a favored position.  The problems and difficulties of our lives will fall away.  We may not forever be free of struggles, but the very struggles that might previously have floored us, will seem much lighter and will affect us adversely in a much lessened way.  We will know, in our bones, that God is there for us.  As a part of God, we will come to recognize that our communion is with our innermost Self/Christ.  And we will act out of that Self/Christ, not from the personal self.  The personal self is always a limited version of the much larger Self that we really are.  And the personal self is too informed by that part of the ego that has not withered away.

3 – Invulnerability

So:  Let us welcome invulnerability, knowing that there is nothing artificial about it.  It is not a defense that will crumble.  It is God Himself, holding us to His bosom.  We are blessed indeed, and our lives will smooth out in ways that now we can only contemplate dimly.  Our contemplation will become more vivid as we walk along.  As our attitudes change, and we attract that which we wish to have–blessings–we will indeed seem to the unknowing to be leading charmed lives.  But our lives will be no more charmed for ourselves than for anyone else who is ready to give up the ego and walk into God’s outstretched arms.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

As I move from the time of tenderness, with its increased sense of vulnerability, may I adopt the attitude of invulnerability.  That is where You are pointing, and I would do well to recognize it.  Fate does not work against me, and You protect me when my mind miscreates.  May my attention go to that which I truly want, thereby working in concert
with the law of attraction.

I cannot look to You to save me from my own mental processes all the time.  You are a loving Father/Mother, and You do not wish harm to come to me.  Jesus waffles a bit about how protective You will be if my mind drops into dissatisfaction and negativity.  I am responsible for what I think, for all thinking creates form on some level.  May this remain a dream state that does not impede the dream reality in which I live.

Help me to have a good day.  I know what to do, and it is up to me to do it.  You have taught me well.  Help me to be a good student.  Thank You for Your many blessings in this sometimes difficult world in which we find ourselves.

Amen.

Helpful and Harmless

“God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful.  This is impossible without being wholly harmless, because the two beliefs must coexist.  The truly helpful are invulnerable, because they are not protecting their egos and so nothing can hurt them.  (T71)”

Affirmation:  “The truly helpful are invulnerable.”

Reflections:

1 – We Can Learn to Be Helpful and Harmless

May we learn to be both helpful and harmless.  This passage recommends that harmlessness is an attribute of those who are following its way of peace and love.  We will not attack when in our right mind, though we sometimes slip up.  We know that anger is unjustified, even though we may still feel it from time to time.

2 – Conflict

When we are unnaturally tired, it is my interpretation that we are struggling with some conflict that Jesus would willingly take from us.  Ask the Holy Spirit how He would have us react.  If we are struggling to “do something” for a brother or sister, and it just doesn’t feel right (though it would be a loving act), perhaps now is not the right time.  Perhaps we need to reassess and ask how we might really help.  Sometimes doing nothing at all, at the present moment, is the right response, the harmless response.

3 – Invulnerability for Us

When we are bent on helping our brothers and sisters, we will not knowingly do them harm.  Not only do they benefit, but so do we.  This helpfulness renders us invulnerable to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to quote Shakespeare.  What this means is that we are invulnerable to pain from our egoic selves.  We are leaving our egos behind as we embark on the pathway set forth by A Course in Miracles.

4 – Laudable Goals

So:  helpful and harmless.  What goals these are!  And how blessed we are when, even in our imperfection, we reach those goals in our daily lives.

Prayer:

Dear Father,

May I not lose my temper.  May I remain helpful and harmless to my brothers and sisters.  

When I have remained helpful and harmless, then I am invulnerable to hurts as well.  This is a great desire of mine.  Thank you for helping me to be both helpful and harmless.

Amen.  

Invulnerable Mind

“The mind that serves spirit is invulnerable.  (T11)”

Affirmation:  “May my mind serve spirit today.”

Reflections:

1 – Do You Feel Vulnerable?

Many of us feel vulnerable.  But there is a way out.  When we dedicate our minds to the service of spirit, we will know ourselves to be invulnerable.  This is one of the few places in A Course in Miracles that “spirit” is not capitalized and therefore meant to be the Holy Spirit.  I interpret this to mean that to focus on “spirit” (not capitalized) would inject controversy into our study.  By the same token, the word “soul” is not brought up in any significant way in ACIM; there are too many theological overtones to the word “soul,” and Jesus says that theology can delay.  We need the universal experience that ACIM seeks to bring about.  We do not need to let theology delay, for a universal theology is impossible.  (These are paraphrases from ACIM.)

2 – Invulnerability

What a grand experience this is, even when seen only in snatches.  We will recognize invulnerability only at certain junctures, when we are especially open to love.  When we pray that our minds will serve spirit only, we are well on our way.

3 – A Great Gift

The recognition of invulnerability is a great gift.  We can walk unafraid throughout our world, certain that we are protected.  We may find pain, but we will not know suffering in that pain.  And Jesus has promised in A Course in Miracles that we do not have to learn through pain.  This is an open mind, serving spirit, that lets us walk freely through the sometimes conflict-ridden world that we know.

4 – The Holy Spirit

When I say “spirit,” I am not specifically writing of the Holy Spirit, but it is through Him that we live best.  Our minds cannot comprehend Who the Holy Spirit really is, but we can pray that we will understand from a mystical standpoint.  We can “know” things, beyond the shadow of a doubt, internally–things that we would not ever be able to verbalize.  So part of our prayers today could well me an entreaty to have us come to comprehend something more of Who we mean by the Holy Spirit.  And, in the meantime, we can speculate that it is He that will tell us, being, as He is, our Guide.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

I would be invulnerable, because I would let my mind be totally subject to Your peace.  When I am not stressed, I do not get angry–another way of saying that my ego is not in control.

I would try to invite the Christ-consciousness by being sure that I am following the guidance that You give to me.  I would sustain a better way to live.

Thank You.

Amen.