Jesus’ Questions

“What do I need to let go of?  How deep can my self-honesty go?

“How wide can my compassion for life spread?

“What actions am I actually taking in this world?

“What am I defending?  What am I afraid of?

“Am I willing to become so powerful a conduit for Christ that I take on responsibility for the atonement and tell Jeshua to move aside?”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 268)

Jesus shows a sense of humor when he channels, live, in The Way of Mastery.  Jesus’ sense of humor here is representative of occasions in the rest of the book.  Here, of course, Jesus is using his other name, the name he is said to have used 2,000 years ago, Jeshua.  He does need our hands and feet to save the world, but certainly he won’t be stepping aside.  And neither could we succeed in his work in the world if he did.

The questions are quite helpful to self-reflection.  Take them one at a time, and see what they show about us.  They will take us toward giant leaps in our progress toward Awakening.  I see that Jesus mentions compassion, which always comes before love when we are walking the pathway back to God.

When we let go of the things that we know are holding us back, there is no limit to how much we can help Jesus.

We Are the Light of the World

“Rejoice in this concrete, perfect means to enlighten the nations.  You, specifically you, are here as the light of the world.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 10:IV

This assertion, made by Jesus in a scribed work, Choose Only Love, is meant for each of us reading his words.  Think of the gift given to us, to be the light of the world!  And we can be this, rather than doing a prescribed set of actions.  Being is extolled above doing just all the time in Choose Only Love as well as A Course of Love (also scribed by Jesus).

The only way, the only way, that we can fulfill our purpose is to live in love–not as a sometime thing, but a constant.  When we don’t live in love, we lose ourselves in patterns of the egoic fear that is still with us, with us out of habit of mind–not heart.  The heart, our center of being, knows better.  And we feel with our heart, we ARE loving.

Ask what effortless thing we might do today as we live our being.  Service in the world is what we are about, even as so are the angels who attend us.  

With a determination to “be,” we will be happy.  Nothing can deter the living out of an era that has now arrived, the time of Christ.

He asks us just to remember, and in the remembering from an ancient past, we are healed.

God’s Plan

“An apparent death which led to eternal life happened long ago.  It happened when time was conceived, although only two thousand calendar years ago, was it seen by human consciousness.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 7:III

This assertion is being channeled by Jesus, who lived that two thousand calendar years ago and was the central figure in the drama that still captivates the world today.  There is a plan, and here we learn that the genesis of that plan occurred before time entered our universe.  It is possible that we don’t understand this, for many are the mysteries that surround the origin of the universe.  But Jesus also lives now outside of time, and we can respect his assertions as being true.

There is a plan for our lives, too.   We are not blindly following things in our lives that on the surface don’t make sense.  The plan culminates, eventually, when we are old, with the blessings that Joseph Campbell said were “very sweet.”  It is only as time passes that we are given the wherewithal to see the “why” of our lives.  And only when we have passed the test of true love.

God couldn’t let His universe exist as a place a place in which love was ambivalent.  Certainly the universe would have self-destructed.  Resting on love, all things eventually work out a plan that blesses us.  Love draws us, for our joy is so complete when we open to love that we want nothing else.

This is the plan that Jesus’ life embodied.  And it is fascinating that the plan evolved before time made its appearance.

There are more things in Heaven and on Earth than we have dreamed of.  Let us thank God that His plans always work out perfectly, even though with free will we might avoid love for a time.

Offer Lilies to Jesus–and to Our Brothers & Sisters

“I have great need for lilies, for the Son of God has not forgiven me.  And can I offer him forgiveness when he offers thorns to me?  For he who offers thorns to anyone is against me still, and who is whole without him?  Be you his friend for me, that I may be forgiven and you may look upon the Son of God as whole. But look you first upon the altar in your chosen home, and see what you have laid upon it to offer me.  If it be thorns whose points gleam sharply in a blood-red light, the body is your chosen home and it is separation that you offer me.  And yet the thorns are gone.  Look you still closer at them now, and you will see your altar is no longer what it was.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-20.II.4)

Here Jesus is speaking of the way in which we react to him.  How we respond to Jesus will testify to how we respond to other brothers, brothers in this world now.  We may think that we have nothing to forgive in Jesus, but do we also have nothing to forgive in other brothers?  The dynamic is the same.  If we can offer lilies to Jesus, we can offer lilies to all of our brothers.

There is a clear metaphor in this quotation of our inner altar, and Jesus tells us that our altar is not as it has been.  We have traveled far enough along toward salvation that we are no longer offering thorns to either Jesus or other brothers whom we encounter.  Our altar has been purified, our inner altar, where our inner Self reigns.  We are facing a different world than we did in the past, and it behooves us to show a different face to this different world.

Previously, just recently, we chose separation, and the thorns were sharp and gleamed sharply in blood-red light.  We are no longer offering separation, though, for from our pure altar we see a different world, and we react differently because our projection from within (making perception of the world) is different.

This day we choose once again.  We choose not to offer separation to any brother, including our brother Jesus.  We offer salvation by our forgiveness of the words and deeds that have come from our brother.  We do not take any attack personally.  We know that we are seeing an innocent brother who only seems like an enemy because he is lost in madness.  Today it is given us to remove a bit of that armor from him by accepting him totally, recognizing that inside him is a perfect altar where his Self resides.  He may be offering us thorns, of course, but we don’t reciprocate.  We offer lilies, and in this offering is all the world saved.

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.

Pure Love Manifested

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Instant

“You who are now the bringer of salvation have the function of bringing light to darkness.  The darkness in you has been brought to light.  Carry it back to darkness, from the holy instant to which you brought it.  We are made whole in our desire to make whole.  Let not time worry you, for all the fear that you and your brother experience is really past.  Time has been readjusted to help us do, together, what your separate pasts would hinder.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-18.III.7)

We are said to be bringers of salvation now, and we have barely begun reading the Text of A Course in Miracles.  This must give us hope; Jesus has a lot of confidence in us.

The holy instants which we have now will transform us; it is the light that has risen in us, the vision that we now know.  A holy instant is a particular moment in time, a moment in which we feel ineffable peace and pure joy, a moment for which we are encouraged not to prepare.  The holy instant is the Holy Spirit’s gift to us.  And the holy instant is a gift that we and our brother share.  In this, we become One again.  The transformation of our special relationship into a holy one has begun.

There is an interesting take on time in this quotation that bears some reflection.  Jesus can adjust time!  He says so!  We who are strict realists in regard to physical reality will find this assertion hard to accept.  The adjustment is not something that can be measured by physical machines, such as clocks.  But have we not ourselves observed many times that time sometimes seems to stand still, sometimes seems to speed ahead?  If Jesus is here talking about an actual physical occurrence, the clocks (the measuring devices) would themselves have been altered as well.  In the final analysis, we don’t know if Jesus refers to physical reality in this quotation, or to simply our perception of physical reality.  We know that our perception of the passing of time is subject to variation, and we have known this long before we started reading A Course in Miracles.

It is enough to know that time will be adjusted to allow us to experience the holy instant, which is a miracle.  Elsewhere Jesus also says that time is adjusted for us to perform miracles. 

The actual facts here are less relevant than the ethereal nature of the holy instant.  We are being taken out of ourselves to an experience of pure love, and we will return to ourselves with more of our consciousness transformed.  We are making progress.

Freedom from Imprisonment

“Become willing to be one who cultivates the ability to allow all things.  The mind that is free can do this.  The mind that is imprisoned cannot.  For the mind that is imprisoned is so because it insists that what it perceives should become different in itself, but that the perceiver need not change.  And that is the very essence of imprisonment.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 21, Page 253)

Our problems are frequently self-created. But when we seek answers from a counselor, we often think that everybody else has to change–rather than us! This insight from the psychologist and writer, Richard Carlson.

And this is exactly what Jesus is saying here, channeled by Jayem. But we need to “allow,” and this means being willing to have it so. It doesn’t mean we never will work for change in ourselves, other people, or the world, but it does mean that we are accepting in the face of things that don’t seem to want to be different. We don’t become tangled up in trying to effect change, when things often just seem to remain the same, oblivious to our influence.

In an unreal world, we project what we are viewing. It is a mass hallucination, an illusion. A Course in Miracles says famously, “There is no world!,” and though we don’t want to believe it, there it is.

We ought not to worry others with our insistence that they do our bidding. It is enough that we, the perceiver, make changes in ourselves that we see are needed. It always starts with ourselves. The world will change when enough people realize this. The tipping point will have been reached.

Joyous Praise

“What a joy it is to know that through expression we can know being!  How much joy there is in our hearts now that we recognize that the Creator speaks to us through creation.  Each cloud will speak to us of love.  Each gust of wind will sing melodies of love.  Every drop of water will show the purity of love.  The whispers of love will no longer be dim like moonlight, but like melodious songs that the mind and heart hear with gratitude.  As never before, everything we see will tell us of God.  You will recognize that love surrounds you everywhere, that you live, move, and exist in it.”  Choose Only Love, bk.7, 5:III

This quotation, from the last volume in the series–newly published–we see our love for God as a palpable thing. In effect, we are saying hosannas to God, thanking Him for the beauty of our world. Mary, in Mirari, has also commented on what a beautiful world we inhabit. Praising rising to God becomes easy when we live the being that this volume encourages us to inhabit.

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus tells us that our praise of God does not mean that we tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept such praise. But we ourselves need the discipline of gratitude. It warms our heart. Appreciation, or gratefulness, goes hand in hand with love.

This quotation lifted my spirits very high. When we feel close to God, we naturally want to say “thank You” to Him. And our day goes better as a result, for we are thinking positively, letting go of the many negatives in the world as we are living it today.

Self United

“The only replacement that can occur that will accomplish what you seek is the replacement of illusion with the truth, the replacement of fear with love, the replacement of your separated self with your real Self, the Self that rests in unity.”  (A Course of Love, C:9.24)

We see that A Course of Love makes parallels of illusion and truth, fear and love, and the separated self with the real Self, saying that a replacement of illusion, fear and the separated self needs to be made—with truth, love and the real Self.  This is salvation, this is the coming to know that we will find in fullness in Christ-consciousness.  Until then, we can see only rare glimpses, some longer than others, but still temporary.

This is the only accomplishment that we seek, and on some level it has already been accomplished, for Jesus says that we are The Accomplished.  But not in any egoic sense, of course.  We have walked the whole pathway, and now we find our way back to retrace our steps.

It doesn’t have to take long in the life of any individual, though the return may take a very long time for everyone on earth.  Make no mistake:  This is what we are about, the eventual return of everyone to full sanity, which means that we are in communion with our Creator and we have walked into the real Self through Awakening.

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.

Explanation of “The Lineage”

“So the distance from where you may yet perceive yourself to be and where you may perceive us to be is only the distance of a decision.  That decision waits upon your welcome.  No one can take from you the power to decide to own your identity as God’s child.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 20, Page 242)

Our decision will place us in the “lineage,” a concept that Jesus discusses elsewhere in The Way of Mastery. Jesus always welcomes others to the lineage, because this is the ancient group of entities who seek to effect salvation in our world. Members of the lineage planned the pathway by which Jesus entered this world. It is an ancient order, but not a closed one. Anyone who expresses the hope to save our world is welcome to join.

We are all children of God. We don’t have to be heavyhearted to experience this wonder. Jesus did not wear his Christhood heavily, and he would not have us do so either.

Keep in mind that we live in a dream world. The blood is only catsup. Reality is positive and good–only the fruits of a spirit which has merged with God once again.

Our decision for God, repeated daily in surrender, will show us the better world that we all seek. It is a matter of perception, and then knowledge. Nothing need be worn heavily in this better world. Choose lightheartedness, ask for help, and another way will be shown to us–just as it was for Helen and Bill in the channeling of A Course in Miracles.

Dreams

“You had a dream for you.  God had another.  Yours was a dream of separation; Hers a dream of eternal union with Her son.  Your dream was a nightmare; Hers the endless joy of truth.”  Choose Only Love bk.4, 3:I

Dreams are a fruitful way to look at our experience in this world as well as eternally.  We thought we wanted to experience separation from God, and we did, in disaster.  We did not really separate, for we are part of Him and cannot be separate, but we thought we separated, and in the thought the illusion became complete.

When we dream of union with Jesus, we are dreaming of our rightful place, with him, of Christhood.  He shares his Christhood with us, though he got there first and is still our leader in all that we do.

We want the “endless joy of truth.”  We know enough now to know that trying to live without God is a fruitless proposition, an endless mistake.  But living with Him is endless joy.

He made us for joy, and we are only satisfied when we are living joy—with Him.

Journey into Light

“The journey that we undertake together is the exchange of dark for light, of ignorance for understanding.  Nothing you understand is fearful.  It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and shrink away from it to further darkness.  And yet it is only the hidden that can terrify, not for what it is, but for its hiddenness.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-14.VI.1)

We need to walk into the sunshine, the light, with Jesus, holding his hand through everything that we encounter in life.  If we do this, we will not fear any longer.  Who could fear when he/she imagines that Jesus is holding one’s hand, and Jesus himself has said that this will be no “idle fantasy.”  So we need to keep a calm and peaceful mind to transverse this world well.  And if the imagination will help, so be it.

We are frightened when we walk in the dark, and it is only because it is dark that we are frightened.  A Course in Miracles has come as one way into the light, so that frightened children, such as we are, do not become vicious because we are afraid.  Decide, choose, today to leave fear behind.  When feeling anxiety, go within and offer a prayer that all might be well, that we walk in light and we hold Jesus’s hand.  The effect will be stunning and immediate.

We are in ignorance until we come to knowledge.  And the means to Awakening are being explained to us in A Course in Miracles.  This Awakening is another state of being, a new way of living that is overwhelmingly freeing.  We have been living in a perceptual nightmare, ruled by the ego, and we are tired of such living.  Let us allow God’s Voice, the Holy Spirit, to lead us out of this lamentable perception, the one that always ends in despair.  Let the Holy Spirit guide us to knowledge, and with knowledge comes a closer walk with God Himself, for we are no longer covering our eyes.  We will have true vision, which is not the same that the physical eyes see.  It is a vision that is possible because we no longer judge.  

Judging is one of the primary ways that we are denied Awakening now, not because the Holy Spirit is punitive, but because we literally cannot see rightly until we give up judgment.  We also must give up attack, and making plans against contingencies to come.  These three—attack, judging, making plans not endorsed by the Holy Spirit—if given up, will smooth the pathway to Awakening in a time frame so rapid that we cannot conceive of that tempo now.

Being

“My son, your brother, spoke to you of an in-between time, of the twin circles of one way passing and a new way coming into being.”  Mirari

Here Mary is speaking of A Course of Love, received by Mari several years ago. That book indicated that we are passing from a time of “doing” to a time of “being,” that there is a time for both, but that we are seeing a transitional time now. Jesus’ way was seen as “doing,” and Mary’s way is seen as “being.” Soon all of us will see the advantage of “being” as a way of life.

This does not mean that we will not continue to achieve in this life. But it does mean that our emphasis will be different. God doesn’t ask extravagant and busy doings of us; He celebrates our being with Him and with others in Love, Love that He champions.

Real World

“Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself: ‘The real world is not like this.  It has no buildings and there are no streets where people walk alone and separate.  There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need.  It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it.  There is no day that brightens and grows dim.  There is no loss.  Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever.”  (A Course in Miracles, T-13.VII.1)

A particularly picturesque scene might come to mind when reading this description.  We can imagine that the Vision that is of God doesn’t include the mundane details of a city street.  When we are joined with others in a loving sense, we aren’t aware of places in our world where we might walk in separate bodies, alone and lonely.  When we love, really love with the Vision of God, we are never alone and lonely. 

Jesus takes a negative view of our materialism, and this attitude comes out more precisely in this quotation than in any other place in A Course in Miracles.  He talks about buying an “endless list of things” that we do not need.  Why do we buy things we don’t need?  Basically, we are trying to find in material things the solace that we haven’t found in spirituality.  And we haven’t found solace in spirituality because we haven’t sought deeply enough within ourselves, where God is.

The fact of no darkness in the real world may seem to be that Jesus is talking about the Other Side, and it is surely unclear if this is indeed what he means.  But later on, in ACIM, he discusses the “real world,” and he indicates that we will inhabit this real world fleetingly before God Himself will reach down and lift us up into Awakening. 

So I think that Jesus is engaging in metaphor here of the real world that is full of intangibles that don’t impinge on materialism at all.  We want peace, joy, harmony, rest—all things that we can have and that we will have when we have walked the pathway that Jesus is pointing out.  These intangibles are the way that we get around the need, the incessant need, to find solace in physical objects.

The intangibles will never disappoint, and they are here for the asking.

Live in the Now

“As you look upon yourself and judge what you do honestly, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless.  Yet consider this:  You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity.  You have ‘sinned’ in the past, but there is no past.  Always has no direction.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-13.I.3)

This is Jesus’s explanation of how everything happening is outside time, is always in the “now.”  In time, we see sequences of things going on, past to present to future.  But everything is actually simultaneous, for time is part of the illusion in which we find ourselves.

We have “sinned,” which is put in quotation marks, because a tenet of A Course in Miracles is actually that there is no sin, that we have simply made mistakes, correctable mistakes.  The idea of sin is represented as having an attracting quality, something irresistible that we want to keep repeating.  Mistakes don’t feel the same to us; we want to make amends, to correct what we have done wrong, to seek forgiveness if necessary.

Time proceeds from past to present to future, but when we concentrate on the moment we are in right now, we are truly living.  And this “now” moment is often seen as a precursor to Awakening.  When we learn to live more and more of our moments without reference to time, we are coming closer to the ideal to which Jesus is leading us:  Awakening.

We have done things wrong in the past; we have made mistakes.  And we will want to seek forgiveness, from ourselves as well as others, for those mistakes.  We do not have to beg forgiveness of God, according to A Course in Miracles, for God has never condemned us; He has simply seen us as his innocent children.  But the primary thrust of ACIM is the matter of forgiveness, and we would do well to consider the primacy of forgiveness early on in our journey without distance.

Make amends.  Seek to right wrongs.  And then know that the forgiveness that you seek for yourself, you must also offer to others.  This is the way of A Course in Miracles.  This is our way home.  We must learn to see the innocence of our brothers as they confront us.  Everyone is truly doing the best that he can, given his degree of understanding.  And we are all mad in this world to one extent or another.  We should not, therefore, underestimate the extent of our brother’s insanity. 

The Good, the Holy, the Beautiful

“Therefore, the extension of the good, the holy, and the beautiful needs to become your sole purpose—as it has become ours.  For only when the mind is used for this purpose alone can there be the perfect remembrance of the Kingdom.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 19, Page 229)

Yes, these are beautiful words from Jesus. He did not remind us to “love,” for when we intend to express the good, the holy, and the beautiful, there is no way to do so unless we are loving as well.

We are meant to “remember,” because we are revisiting the past (A Course in Miracles tells us), and in that revisiting we shape that past into something more in tune with God. When we remember, we have remembrance of the Kingdom of God. And this remembrance can only bring us peace, joy, and security in a life well-lived.

It helps to have our purpose spelled out so clearly. Choose Only Love uses the same terms to indicate our purpose, and so there is evidence that Jesus is remembering what he has told us–and remembering exactly.

The good, the beautiful, the holy. A high expectation for us, but eminently doable when we stay close to God.

Fully Experiencing the Will of God

“To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can be fully known, because it is the only function that can be fully experienced.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-8.III.2)

This statement is the statement of a man of God.  Jesus gets his joy from fulfilling what he understands to be God’s will.  And he asks nothing less but that we do the same.

It is not hard, this following of God.  The guidance comes through precisely all the time.  The only question is whether or not we will turn into that guidance.  The best way to live is to tune in.  Then our days and nights develop a substantial flow, one event into the next, with ease and grace.  We fret less; we worry not at all.

These are our best days, the days that we follow guidance and in so doing develop a flow.  Ask that today be such a day for you.  If you are intent on following what you perceive to be the will of God, you will not be disappointed in the extraordinary day that will be afforded you.

Jesus is on the verge of introducing us in A Course in Miracles to the Holy Spirit.  Up to now, he has focused on asking us to imagine what he, Jesus, might say to us, and then following his guidance unfailingly.  He will not leave us now, though, if we are willing to keep doubts at bay, and consider that he is serious when he says that he will come to us in response to “one unequivocal call.”  He also says that we can imagine that we hold hands with him, and he says that this will be “no idle fantasy.”

But now Jesus is introducing us to the Holy Spirit, an introduction that may be unnecessary to some of us.  The Holy Spirit is, in A Course in Miracles, our Guide to right action.  He is also called the Universal Inspiration, and references to Him in ACIM are always capitalized. 

We need to have good days, like pearls on a string, blessed days.  And here we have the key:  follow guidance.  We will not be led astray.

To Decide that Love Is All We Want

“Do you recognize that you have already been every where and every when in the illusion of separation?  Would you be willing, right now, in the quiet privacy of your own heart and mind, to use the power of awareness given unto you to decide to be Love?”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 18, Page 227)

I don’t know if Jesus is using hyperbole when he says “every where” and “every when.” Certainly there are places that our friends and family have been in thought and feeling that we have not. Just knowing that our small circle has had experiences that we have not would lead to the conclusion that Jesus is exaggerating.

Of course, it is quite possible that Jesus is invoking the truth that all of us are One, and all of that One have experienced everything. In this scenario, we are in no way separate from any of our brothers and sisters, all children of God who actually are part of each other.

But one thing is certain: We have tried every avenue that we know to experience separation. And maybe “knowing” each avenue is what Jesus means.

It is time to stop the nonsense of thinking that we can survive separate from God. He is in us, through and through, and He would commune with us often, indeed constantly. His Force of Love is the best thing we have going for us. He created us to need Love, to need His presence, for He is the All, and our part of that All is living through us constantly, forever.

It is time to go Home. It is time to drop confusion, turn from our hates and fears, and offer Love to ourselves, others, and God Himself.

There is no better way. This is what we need. This is what, in our heart of hearts, we want.

Evolution of Humanity

“But there, in love outside of time, did time and eternity first meld into a potential for the evolution of humanity and the elevation of the self of form.”  Mirari

Here Mary is talking of the incarnation of the Christ as Jesus, her son.  The incarnation was planned in a realm far outside of the time and space in which the Earth is caught.  The Way of Mastery indicates that the planning originally began eons before the actual fact of the coming of Jesus 2,000 years ago.

Jesus masterminded a giant leap for humankind, an evolutionary leap that we are only just now, 2,000 years later, coming to actualize.  A Course of Love talks a great deal of the “elevated Self of form,” and this is the “body” we will occupy when we have awakened.  This Awakening is heralded also in A Course in Miracles and Choose Only Love.  It will be a comprehensive change, an alteration in the way we live life.  And our lives will be so much improved.  We can all hope that the actual fact of the elevated Self of form will come quickly.

A Course in Miracles says that the separation took millions of years to come about, and it may take that long, or longer, for all to make the decision to return to God.  The pathway is long.  But we don’t have to become demoralized by ACIM’s assertion.  Tiny steps make a difference, for us and for the world.

Let’s get quiet, heal the subconscious one bit at a time—as The Way of Mastery recommends.  This book, which many believe was also from Jesus, asks that we take a look at each subconscious fear, to release it.  And this is a worthy endeavor, leading to Awakening.

Mary’s words are comforting, believing as many do that they are genuinely from her.  Her love for Jesus surpasses our own, for she is on a par with him, and his love is beyond measure.

See what quiet moments can do for us today.  See if we can make progress on our evolutionary journey.

Real Love

“The desire to protect is a desire that arises from distrust and is based totally on fear.  If there were no fear, what would there be to protect?  Thus, all of your love—the love that you imagine you keep within yourself, and the love that you imagine you receive and give—is tainted by your fear and cannot be real love.  It is because you remember love as that which kept you safe, that which kept you happy, that which bound all those you love to you, that you attempt to use love here.  This is a real memory of creation that you have distorted.”  (A Course of Love, C:9.3)

We are not able to use love to protect us, although we often try.  The desire to protect ourselves is a fear-based motivation, one that can’t be what it tries to do, keep us safe.  We are already safe; we don’t need anything extra to make ourselves so.

We have, Jesus says, a memory of love from eons ago (as the world judges time).  Love at the beginning, before the illusory separation, kept us happy and kept together all whom we loved.  Somehow, dimly, we remember this true event, and we want some of that same feeling now.  We try to find it in fear that comes from distrust.  If we didn’t think we were in danger, why would we think at all about being “protected”?  We would know that there is nothing that we need protection from, and we would be at peace.  So this desire is wholly fear-based.  We do love a disservice when we attempt to “use” it at all.  Love cannot be used, just as we would be wise not to use each other for our own ends.  We are safe, we have always been safe, and sooner or later we will all realize our safety is a God-given gift.

When love is tainted by fear, it is not real love.  Unfortunately, most of our love in this world is tainted by fear, and thus we need another way to view love.  We need to realize that it is part of the long-ago memory of Oneness with God.  Only our attempt to separate from God, with the concomitant rise of the ego, has kept us from real love.  Let us decide today that we will be done with all of this foolishness.  Ask to experience real love, remove our mind from attempts to use this love to protect the physical body, and see if a better day doesn’t dawn.

Feelings Come from Love

“Your feelings in truth come from love, your response to them is what is guided by fear.  Even feelings of destruction and violence come from love.  You are not bad, and you have no feelings that can be labeled so.  Yet you are misguided concerning what your feelings mean and how they would bring love to you and you to love.”  (A Course of Love, C:5.11)

Jesus forms a startling assertion about love and fear, one that we wouldn’t expect.  He says that all of our feelings come from love, in essence because we are not “bad” (C:5.11).  A Course in Miracles says that we have the “innocence of God” (T-III.17:2), and so Jesus is here asserting to the same thought.  How our feelings of destruction and violence can come from love may remain nebulous to us, but Jesus believes that we have just misunderstood ourselves.  We have been misguided about how to bring love to ourselves.  So we have made wrong choices in our love, choices that gave us destruction and violence.

Do we not often noticed that nobody who is embroiled in violence and destruction thinks that he/she is at fault about anything that is bad?  History is replete with wars that were fought in the name of God, believing that one is doing God’s will in the antagonism.  This is one way of looking at love gone astray.  This is one way to realize that fear has done nothing, that it is only our misperceptions about love and how it ought to be expressed that have done us in.

Our feelings are not bad, Jesus says.  We only need to channel those feelings in the right direction, seeing love where it really is, avoiding feelings of destruction and violence, pain and suffering.  Then we will find love’s fruits to be our chosen just desserts.  We will have taken another step on love’s pathway.  Another step toward Awakening/Christ-consciousness.

There Are No Idle Thoughts

“There are no idle thoughts.  All thinking produces form at some level.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-2.VI.9)

There is a very serious warning in the quotation for this evening.  Our minds do wander, and when the mind wanders it produces what we erroneously think are “idle” thoughts.  This is not so, as Jesus says to us here. 

We cannot understand what he is saying, but we can get an intimation by thinking of our nighttime dreams.  Form seems very real in nighttime dreams, but when we awaken in the morning, the dreams frequently vanish from our minds, and we accord those dreams no reality at all.  The form is real, though, and perhaps this type of form is what Jesus is seeing.

Jesus has told us that we live in a dream, even in waking reality.  We are living illusions.  And we think that we live in a solid world, a world of form.  We touch, we knock on hard surfaces, and we get resistance.  But our bodies are just as much an illusion as the table that we rap upon. 

Perhaps form in our idle thoughts is like unto this.  Such secular writers as Jane Roberts, in the books channeled by an entity named “Seth,” have said the same.  Our thoughts blossom out in all directions, according to Seth.  And form is not far behind, though we cannot see that happen.

So doesn’t it behoove us to rid ourselves of what we have been calling “idle” thoughts?  Wouldn’t it be better to think along better lines?  Wouldn’t it be better to fill our minds with thoughts that we imagine are like unto those that we imagine God “thinks”?  Certainly the encouragement that we give fantasies can be seen as a false way to spend our time.  Fantasies are not true, but we indulge in them.  We even fall into fantasy when we are contemplating or meditating.  Our minds stay so busy.

Rein in your thoughts today.  Don’t let them get ahead of yourself.  The best thing that we can do is to think as God would think.  Ask Him what He thinks, and see if your imagination doesn’t give you an Answer.

Joining Jesus in Christhood

“The Christ in you is wholly human and wholly divine. . . .It is this joining of the human and divine that ushers in love’s presence, as all that caused you fear and pain falls away and you recognize again what love is.”  (A Course of Love, C:5.1)

We are indeed blessed now!  When we recognize the Christ in us, we are recognizing a joining the human and the divine.  And in this joining, we are told, love reigns, “joining. . .ushers in love’s presence.”  (C:5.1) All that has caused fear and pain drops away, and we finally recognize what love really is.  This is the celebration, when we recognize the Self within, the Self no longer a captive of the ego. 

The Christ in us is wholly human and wholly divine, not omniscient, of course, because of our humanness.  We are ready to experience true reality in the fullness of the Christ-consciousness (Awakening) that now engulfs us.  We may as yet have captured only glimpses of this Christ-consciousness.  But the purpose of A Course of Love is to lead us to understandings that will cause the impediments in our psyche to drop away.  Jesus wants us to reach Christ-consciousness.  A consolidation of awakened individuals is the best hope that we have for a world in disarray, lost in pain and suffering, lost in conflict of one brother and sister against another.  But God, we might add, is the omniscient Presence that makes the decision of when we are ready.  Thus, there is an indecisive quality about Christ-consciousness and its coming that we can’t predict.  Only the omniscient God of us all knows when any one of us is truly ready.

There are things that we can do.  Things we must do.  We must give up judgments, one of the other.  We must give up fear (a biggie).  We must give up attack and planning that is not the direct result of guidance.  A Course of Love highlights the giving up of judgment and fear; A Course in Miracles highlights the giving up of attack, judgment, and unguided planning. These directives are meant to remove impediments to the coming of Christ-consciousness, and we can all recognize how difficult these directives will be if we don’t have divine help.

We do have divine help.  We need only ask.  The part of ourselves, the inner part, that is God, will respond.  Angels will also come to our aid, for we are not all alone in the universe.    Those of us who are in close contact with the Other Side will also come to recognize other entities that move to help us, though Jesus does not point this truth out, in so many words.  Jesus has said that he is always with us, always guiding us by the hand.  He is our rock, our salvation to a higher world in this world.  We do not have to die to enjoy the benefits of a higher presence directing our efforts.

Perfect Love

“Know first that this is fear.

Fear arises from lack of love.

The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.

Perfect love is the Atonement.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-2.VI.7)

Perfect love is the “undoing” of what has been an albatross around our necks for eons.  We are moving toward Awakening, and as we take steps there, and we will fear less as we love more.  This is the best way, the only way to welcome God into our lives.  We must ask for help if we find our propensity to love, weak.  And if we find ourselves in fearful states of mind all too often.  These two characteristics—fearful, anxious feelings and a lack of love while experiencing those feelings—are easily overcome when we go to God.  If tangled up or mixed up, go to God.  He will take you into His arms and comfort and heal you.

Can we get perfect love by willing it?  No.  That is why this favorite quotation is so puzzling for so many of us.  We want perfect love, because we so dislike the fearful feelings that we experience.  This desire is the practical motivation.  But perfect love is held out to us by God Himself, and we are led to that eventuality when we open ourselves to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  Jesus was the essence of the Atonement, his gift to us. 

The Atonement as gifted us by Jesus, as seen by A Course in Miracles, is not a sacrificial gift. Jesus would have us see the wholly benign lesson of the crucifixion, and then look beyond that to the resurrection.  The resurrection is seen as the promise of eternal life to all of us.  And whether or not we can accept that the resurrection really happened, Jesus still welcomes us.  He does not need intellectual assent.  He only needs the heartfelt response, the response from our inner being where we do not need intellectual proof.

Ask God today to allow the experience of perfect love to come to you.  It will come first in fleeting glimpses, but then, as time passes and we remain true to God, the times of perfect love extend.  We know perfect love, and the fears and anxieties of daily life drop from our experience.

The Embrace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guidance

“Only your mind can produce fear.  It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants, producing inevitable strain because wanting and doing are discordant.  This can be corrected only by accepting a unified goal.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-2.VI.6)

We know that we experience fear, but we may not have blamed our own conflicted minds.  We may have tried to sense that something outside of ourselves is causing our anguish.

It is not so.  The conflict is all internal.  We want to do something, but we think that we ought to do something else.  This produces the strain.  It can often be a counterpoint to following guidance.  We often want to do things that are not in our best interests, and guidance will show us something different when confronted by such a confused state of mind.  We listen to our “ought’s,” if we are smart, and in the ought’s we learn what guidance is really saying.  At this point in reading A Course in Miracles, we can assume that Jesus’s wishes and our guidance are identical.

How can he know so much?  We cannot answer this question.  But he does not lead us astray in ACIM.  He knows fully what we are about in this world.  His entity is far above our limited, finite minds.

We need a unified goal, and this we get when we realize that God’s will and our own, real, will, are actually identical.  Later on, when we are considering the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will learn that He chooses for us.  We don’t know rightly what to say or to do, but He does.  And when we get into the flow of following Him, we experience a flow to our days that assures us that all is well.  With this flow, we learn anew that Jesus, as well as the Holy Spirit, both know what is best for us.  Our lives go better when we are in the flow of following such guidance. 

We can do no better.  When we follow guidance consistently, our experience will prove to us that doing so is expedient.  At first we may balk, but we come to know that a unified goal, seen in flow, is what changes what we want and what we ought to do into the same.

Ask! The Only Thing to Do if Uncertain

“Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine.  If you are sure that it I, there will be no fear.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-2.VI.4)

Of course!  Here Jesus is speaking before he has introduced us sufficiently to the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  He wants us to imagine asking him if any given action is in accord with wishes that he would have.  Is the action loving?  Is it kind?  Is it free of attack?  Questions such as these will put us on the right track.

By what right does Jesus ask us to consider his wishes in regard to any action we take?  He is in charge of the Sonship, and he is attuned to the miracle-mindedness and the revelation-readiness of all of us.  He is our leader, our teacher, our guide.  And so it is not foreign to consider his wishes when we want to make good decisions.

What a lovely way to rid ourselves of fear!  We need only be sure that our choices are in accord with what Jesus would want.  Can we be assured of ridding ourselves of fear if we do this?  Jesus says so, and his word is enough for me, for I believe that he did indeed channel A Course in Miracles.  And I do believe that he is in charge of the Sonship.  So my course is clear:  I will ask, internally, what I think Jesus would do, and I will take this guidance as my own.

Many people in traditional Christian faith have recommended that individuals ask, “What would Jesus do?,” when confronted with any dilemma.  The words of A Course in Miracles here suggest something very similar.  It is words like this that puts ACIM in direct lineage from the Bible.

Never fear that Jesus will give us something more to worry about, if we get the indication that what we are about to do is out of line with what Jesus would wish.   He is a gentle teacher, and he always means us well.  He will not to anything to raise our anxiety level, and therefore our fear (and our worry). 

So ask when confronted with dilemmas.  Imagine what Jesus would say.  And we will be well-guided.  Depend on it.

Quiet Soul

“Quiet your soul now and close your eyes.  Leave everything aside.  Open your heart and in the serenity of the self.  Receive the grace of being aware of the Christ that you are and have always been.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 9:II

When we sense that we are Christ—we ourselves as well as Jesus—we don’t have any worries.  We know that the power that was in him is in us as well.

And we know that God would have us happy in His world, despite appearances of difficulties worldwide.

These difficulties are a harbinger of a turning from the past to something better, amazingly better.  We are living in perilous times, but we don’t have to obsess about this. 

We can still live peacefully, with a quiet soul.

Balancing in a New World

“Making the heart of Mother love, that natural duad to the Father love that has reigned, brings the rising of the feminine and the balancing, at long last, of the masculine.”  Mirari

This quotation concisely summarizes what Mirari is about.  Mary of Nazareth is writing primarily to women in Mirari, but here she uses an important word that might be overlooked in the call for female presence in this world.  The word is “balancing.”

Mary is not trying to exclude men.  She stresses the feminine so much because she is attempting to corral women into greater solidarity and greater activity in our world.  But she, of all people, with her close relationship to her soulmate, Jesus, knows that our world needs men and their contribution ever so much.  Men have dominated, sometimes harshly, for many long years, and her “balancing” is seeking to end this imbalance between the genders.

Ask what our task is to be.  Ask, whether we are men or women.  We need guidance in creating a new world—and we know that a new world was the call of Jesus in A Course of Love.  Mary echoes this desire in her manifesto, Mirari.  She is doing her part to join in the groundswell of change that Jesus is heralding.  She too is so heralding. Wait for God to speak to us, God to reveal our part.  Then act from the whispers in our mind and the calling of our heart.

Miracles & Revelation

“Revelation unites you directly with God.  Miracles unite you directly with your brother.  Neither emanates from consciousness, but both are experienced there.  Consciousness is the state that induces action, though it does not inspire it.  You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-1.II.1)

The first aspect of this quotation delineates revelation vs. miracles, and explains the difference in our unity with God, first, and then our unity with our brother.  God is responsible for revelation; we are not.  He communicates to us by revelation, including, sometimes, the experience of Awakening—Awakening that does not last.  He shows us the end, where we are headed.  And Jesus’s book, A Course in Miracles, gives us the means to get to that end of Awakening.  Revelation is not on the same level as miracles.  Under Jesus’s guidance, we perform miracles for our brother, and, in turn, our brother performs miracles for us.  They are, in that sense, reciprocal, unlike revelation.  Revelation always proceeds from God to us, never the other way around.

We are consciousness embodied.  We are alive in our minds, and we experience our projections from mind as perceptions of this world.  We experience revelation and miracles from this consciousness.  We are led to act in this world through what our consciousness says to do.  If we allow ourselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit, then our consciousness has a divine Master.  If we allow our consciousness to be guided by the ego, we have feet of clay.  There is no in between.

These ideas, above, are central to A Course in Miracles.  We have a learning task before us, for until we have the theological undergirding of the Course, we cannot master what it says.  Our mind will be trained as we do the Workbook lessons.  The more theoretical aspects of the Course are presented in this, the Text.  We likewise need to master that theory.  There is no other sure way of catching all the means that will lead us to the end of Awakening, the means to the end.

We must await revelation from God.  And we must await Jesus’s nod as to which miracles we are to perform for our brother.  We will get used to the fact that we are not in control anymore, as soon as we start on the road of relinquishing the ego.

Miracles Represent Freedom from Fear

“Miracles represent freedom from fear.  ‘Atoning’ means ‘undoing.’  The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-1.I.26)

Have you ever felt conflicted and agitated?  In turmoil.  Of course.  All of us experience such things on a regular basis.  And have you surrendered, turned it all over to God, and quickly felt a sure sense that all goes well?  This is a miracle.  This is our freedom from fear, from conflict, from agitation, from turmoil. 

We are undoing the flow of events as we have known them—or, more precisely, the Holy Spirit within us is undoing that flow of events for us.  And with this expansive change we give up fear.  We have no reason to fear when we are surrendered, completely and totally.  And the guidance that we will receive will be sure, for we ask with an open heart.

Ask for a quiet sleep tonight.  Let this miracle be shown you.  If sleeplessness comes instead, ask what you need to resolve with God tonight.  There is always a reason for sleeplessness.  The same for sleep.  The miracle is always right on the beam.  We don’t have to fear that God will not have His way with us when we have opened ourselves to Him.  Ask for the undoing of fear now.  This will be right in line with accepting the Atonement for ourselves.  And accepting Jesus’s contribution to the Sonship is essential.

Jesus’s contribution is not seen in A Course in Miracles as being the atoning nature of his shed blood.  This sacrificial nature is denied entirely.  We are, instead, to look to the resurrection and all that it promises us about eternal life.  If you have let the intellect intrude, and wonder, “How could this be?,” then suspend disbelief a bit and let your heart tell you what you need to know.  A miracle will replace disbelief.  Not that you will ever resolve intellectual doubt that easily, but a mystical understanding will encompass the whole for you.  You will know that Jesus’s Atonement for us is real.  Whether or not we intellectually grasp it.

Miracles are sure.  Miracles are certain.  And if they do not occur, then something has gone awry.  We have either turned to attack, turned to judgment, or turned to making plans against contingencies to come.  These three aspects of our “normal” experience are all that it takes to hide the miracle from us.  And when we turn aside from this trio, we will wonderingly see that all was not lost for us, just misplaced. 

Love

“The consciousness of Christ is your true consciousness.  It is a consciousness of pure love.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 9:II

“Pure love.”  If we might only realize what this means!  We have so misused the word “love” in our world that we often don’t take seriously the arresting spiritual meaning of this word.  When we have walked far along toward God, and had satori (fleeting glimpses of the Divine), these will eventually lengthen into Awakening, and it is the Awakening of the consciousness of Christ—a Christ Whom we all share.  Because Christ is now a plural concept, we can acknowledge that what Jesus had 2,000 years ago is available to us all.  It does not come to us all, but our own preparations can speed the time when we will all know Christ-consciousness.  And Christ-consciousness is the next leap in evolution.

Focus on love today.  Know that when things go awry, and we want to get back on track, the surest way to do this is to quieten down and go within.  The Answer to our dilemmas will be there.  And with a clear mind and a loving heart, we can walk a green earth again.

If on the verge of hot feelings with another, just pause; don’t say anything.  Know that the loving response is the only true response that protects the other and ourselves.  We don’t have to be “right” all the time; we can let God lead our friends and family in the best way that only He knows.  We can choose happiness, as A Course in Miracles says (“Would you rather be right or happy?”), and with this choice comes the return of love.

Spend some time today contemplating what love means to us. 

There is no better way to spend time.

Whispers from Jesus & Mary

“You can feel Us [Jesus and Mary], you can experience Our sensitive presence in your lives if you wish.  It only requires making enough silence outside and inside to hear and to feel the whisper of Our voice.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 9:I

So here we have it.  We have divine help available to us.  We just have to get quiet inside and outside.  This quotation from Mary indicates that we can hear their “whispers” to us if we cultivate silence.  The roar of outside noise will stifle our listening, will stifle us.  This we don’t want.

Why ask questions of Jesus and Mary rather than the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self?  They have known humanity, and their sentiments toward us are very sincere, coming from that knowing.  The Holy Spirit and the Christ-Self are emblematic of God Himself, and listening to guidance from God can never lead us wrong—if we are sure that what we are “hearing” is indeed God.  But it is sometimes reassuring to hear from someone who has been there before us—hence Jesus and Mary.

We need guidance, and there is no end to where it can come from in the cosmos.  We are not left bereft.  We have help.

Knowing this help is available can make all the difference in how we approach a day.

Prayer

“Prayer is the medium of miracles.  It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator.  Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-1.I.11)

We need prayer more than God needs it from us, though He is said to be lonely when the minds He created do not commune with Him.  Since God is within (All is within), then we are communing with our innermost depths when we pray.  We will not be disappointed.  If we turn to God whenever we feel tangled up or mixed up, we will find solace for our aching souls.

We get this solace because we are feeling love from God, and love is the great resolver of everything that has gone wrong or might go wrong.  This is not a trite expression of faith; it is the way that life is set up.  We may be blessed without communing with God, for He loves us still, but we will not feel so blessed as we will with complete and utter surrender to His way and will.

We ask Jesus what miracles we are to perform, once we have received this all-encompassing love from God Himself.  We don’t just think up good deeds for others, and then seek to do those good deeds.  Even the most altruistic impulse of ours could easily be the wrong thing to do, if we haven’t received guidance about that action.  Ask Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, what we are to do about any impulses for altruistic action that we have.  Is doing something a right thing?  Or would it be better to wait on His guidance?  We will get our answers when we stop long enough to surrender to a Higher Will, and to do the bidding that we receive.  We will not have to wait long; the Holy Spirit can speak to us, and will, when we ask from a tranquil and easy heart.

Why is it this way?  We do not know enough to make decisions on our own.  When we attempt to do so, we are attempting to develop our own judgments about a given issue or person.  And our judgment will be wrong, for we don’t see the whole picture—past, present, and future.  But there is One—the Holy Spirit—Who does see that whole picture.  His judgments are always true.  And He speaks from that loving judgment to all of us who ask for guidance.  We are set on our way through this meandering world by starting the day right by asking.  Always asking.  And we continue to ask as the day unfolds.  This way what we do and say, and even what we think, are miracles of expediency in our journey through life.  We walk surely, for we have a sure Guide.

Are We Really “Christ”?

“You are Christ.  Your life in physical human reality is the same one I traveled, although I was first conscious of my unity with God.  Does that matter?”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:III

We will at first resist this assertion by Jesus.  We will want to leave the “Christ” concept to him alone.  But in recent channeled writings, the term “Christ” is a plural word that includes all of us who have followed in the way back to God.  .When we are conscious of our unity with God, we have done all that we need to do to appropriate the word “Christ” to ourselves.  We don’t even have to have yet Awakened.

Jesus makes it easy for us.  He says here that he was first conscious of his unity with God, but “Does that matter?”  I think the flow of the sentences in this passage means, “Does it matter that Jesus was first in experiencing the fact of being Christ?”   Elsewhere Jesus asserts that we will do what he has done, though that does not include a crucifixion.  Jesus has paved the way for us.  He was the initial pioneer.  Now we need simply to follow in his footsteps, and our lives will smooth out, and we will eagerly embrace the concept that we too can say we are “Christ.”

Journey No Longer

How much time will be saved by an end to empty seeking?  You have already arrived and need no time to journey any longer.  How much time will be saved by an end to the maintenance required by special relationships?  When all relationships are holy, you have no need to maintain specialness.  (A Course of Love, T1:8.7)

Most of us have been seekers for a long time, maybe a long, long time.  Maybe all our lives, more or less.

This search can end now, when we are on the cusp of developing our special relationships into holy ones.  We won’t have to work so hard to maintain our holy relationships.  Our loved ones will just know that they are loved unconditionally.  And, especially, what we have been seeking in special relationships will fall away.

Our seeking has worn us out.  We went from our early religious training, probably to unbelief, and then returned to the fold of spirituality.  But still we sought for yet another piece of information that would be the end that would make us happy.  But nothing can make us happy, can create happiness for us, except ourselves.  We won’t find it in a book.

I sought happiness in special relationships as well as in books.  So my seeking in relationships and books was twofold, as is true for most of us.  It is very reassuring that we have done enough now.  We know enough.  A Course of Love has finished it off for us.  It is simply up to our Christ-Self, from deep within our being, to teach us more.

So now we are hearing that there needs to be an end to seeking.  Jesus, in channeling A Course of Love, declares its information to be an end point.  We have arrived!  He even says that we are The Accomplished.  While we have trouble believing that, we know that we have a peace inside that has eluded us up to this point.  This peace will elude us no more.  We will linger in contentment, sure that we are in the right place, and, now, in the right time.

Our holy relationships will save us; that is why we need seek no more.  Relationship was primary in A Course in Miracles also.  Our relationship to our brother (and sister) would take us home.  Now Jesus is emphasizing this truth yet again in ACOL.  If we love others enough, we will have won the prize, the Holy Grail, of salvation. 

And we will know not only peace, but happiness, as well.

Miracles

“There is no order of difficulty in miracles.  One is not ‘harder’ or ‘bigger’ than another.  They are all the same.  All expressions of love are maximal.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-1.I.1)

The first sentence in this quotation is of paramount importance to understanding A Course in Miracles.  Jesus, the one who channeled ACIM, knows that there is no order of difficulty in miracles.  We don’t, for we think that we can point to many things in our world that would be hard to change.  We need to open our minds ever so slightly, and consider that we are wrong.  Miracles light our way, will light our way.  As an expression of love, miracles transform us and our world.

What does it mean to be an “expression of love”?  Jesus expresses his love for all of us by checking on the miracle-readiness of all of our brothers, and sending those of us whom he selects to effect the miracles that he and he alone points out.  We do not select certain circumstances to effect miracles.  We don’t effect miracles at all, in fact, for miracles are of God and the Holy Spirit, and, on a more practical level, of Jesus.

Jesus is in charge of the Sonship.  And, as such, he dictates to us what our part in salvation really is.  We don’t have to guess about these matters.  When we open our minds to possibilities, the way to effect salvation—through miracles—will develop as well.  We need fear nothing.  We can’t but be in the right place at the right time.

So let us think a bit on miracles, and the miraculous nature of a deed that is done without range of difficulty.  Can we open our minds to this possibility?  Wouldn’t it be a wondrous truth—IF there were no range of difficulty in miracles.

Let us take Jesus at his word.  Ask him today if you are ready to effect any miracles, under his guidance, for your brother.  He will answer, for he holds our hand as we walk along the pathway toward home.

Traveling the Path of the Living Christ

“I traveled the path of the living Christ because that is what I am.  It is exactly the same path you travel.  Yours may not include portentous miracles.  You may not be famous.  You may not transform water into wine for humanity to begin to see a power not of this world.  You may not heal the sick, externally speaking.  None of that matters.  None of that is essential.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:III

I think Jesus is here giving us a context for believing that we can one day be equals of him.  Of course, those of us of faith don’t usually think in these terms.  Yet Jesus says things like this repeatedly in various received (channeled) works from the recent past.  We don’t have to perform the miracles that he did, though elsewhere he says that we will actually do more than he—certainly a startling assertion.

Jesus wants companions, not subservient individuals who idolize him.  He can be an ideal for us, of course, but that is not the same thing as idolatry.  He has pointed out the way, 2000 years ago, and he continues to be available to us in a mystical fashion that our finite minds and hearts cannot fathom.  Many of us believe that he indeed did channel A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love, and The Way of Mastery.  Now in Choose Only Love there are numerous portions coming from him as well.

Jesus doesn’t want us to assert things that we don’t quite believe.  Even if we doubt the practice of channeling or receiving from a discarnate being, we still can read the words and be inspired.  Much of what we read has a basis in traditional Christianity.  This provides continuity from Jesus that is tremendously reassuring.

Ask today how we might emulate Jesus.  Ask what our contribution might best be.  Set up a dialogue in a journal, with questions and answers, and see if there doesn’t seem to be a way out there for all of us to experience directly.  Ask to know what our mission is.

We will not be disappointed in what we “hear.”

Join in Love

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

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

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

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

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

Heart of Our Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God’s Plan

“You have not entered the physical plane after My incarnation by chance.  It is part of God’s plan.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:III

There are no accidents in life, no chance meetings, no happening that “just” happened to come about.  We are living at the right time for us, the time following Jesus’ incarnation. We are living a plan, a plan that we intuited from God, and then set up as our contract for our life.  We put bad things in our contracts as a way of growing, a growing to perfection.

We know from A Course in Miracles that it is not necessary to learn through pain.  Jesus said in ACIM that learning through rewards is more lasting.  Unfortunately, many of us are just learning this, discovering this.  And so we are caught in bad things happening to good people.

We can change on a dime.  We can soften the hard parts of our contract with life.  When we turn to God in our daily lives, He comforts and soothes us.  Always with us, living through us, He would not have us turn the pain in our contracts into suffering.

Make a decision today to live above the fray.  If we lighten up about life, life lightens up for us as well.  We are caught in a drama, in a series of dramas, but we don’t have to buy into the chaos.

Know that every prayer to God is heard. 

And with this knowledge, the fray will recede in our minds and hearts, hopefully never to return. We just must remember to do our part, a part we discover when we ask for guidance on a frequent basis.

Holy Spirit

“[T]he Spirit of God that lives in you, which is what Holy Spirit means, likewise encompasses the love beyond attributes that God is.”   Choose Only Love bk.4, 1:III

We haven’t had a good handle on Who the Holy Spirit really is, and today we discover–the Spirit of God. Though part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is nothing really separate, even as the Son (and Daughter) are not actually separate from God–for God lives in all, the All, everything.

The Way of Mastery refers to “a” holy spirit that overshadowed Jesus in his time on earth. Yes, a holy spirit really did overshadow him. And that Spirit was the Spirit of truth (though we can see that truth in reality is really Love).

We have moved into the time of Christ now, the time in which all of us following God’s pathway do indeed embody Christ. Christ is not limited to one entity, Jesus. Jesus welcomes us all into his mantle.

Ask that our truth today be informed by the love that truth really contains. We need each other, and we need each other in love.

Love

“Bringing human nature to its fullness in love is what has been the purpose of Our incarnation, just like yours.  There are no differences between you and Us.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:III

Jesus is here speaking of himself and Mary.  If we know that we have one purpose in this world, and that purpose is to live in the fullness of love, then life becomes very easy.  We do things that promote love, and we avoid things that do not.  How hard can this be?

One purpose means that life becomes simple.  Oh, how our insane ego has made life in this world so complicated!

But we are through with this madness—and through with it now!  Affirm to God that we will walk His way, and His way only.

And then life will become completely bearable, and easy and simple in the extreme.

Jesus’ Humanity

“I loved My humanity and I still love it.  The human nature that the Father gave Me is eternal.  I am fully man and fully God, always—likewise with Mary, Heavenly Mother of all men and women of all times.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:III

Jesus is giving us a reason not to turn against our humanity—because he hasn’t.  He is saying that he is fully human and fully divine, just as traditional Christianity says.

Is it too much to realize that we too have a divine nature, a human nature as well as a divine one?  Jesus has told us elsewhere that there is nothing he has that is unwelcome for us.  We are equals (though he has walked farther ahead than have we).  We are of the same nature.

Likewise, Jesus here brings in Mary, who is his soulmate.  We will find as we read further in Choose Only Love that God too has a feminine nature.  God is revealed as a God of both the masculine and the feminine.  His nurturing manner is an aspect of the feminine, often more so than in the masculine.

So our human natures will be eternal also.  Definitely we don’t want to denigrate the human by wishing for an otherworldly nature to the exclusion of the human. 

Our divinity will inform our humanness.  And then we will be fully whole.

Our Humanity Is Good

“To despise your humanity is an act of cruelty—so far from love that you could not believe such nonsense.  Not a fiber in your body is not holy; no aspect of your personality is not holy; nothing in you is imperfect.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:III

Certainly when we first read this quotation, our mind takes exception from what is said.  Who, on first reading, could agree, “nothing in you is imperfect”?  But Jesus is talking about our REAL Self, the Self with a capital “S.”  This Self reaches down into our personalities and purifies; our mind and heart, similarly, use our bodies in good ways when we recognize that the body too is holy.

If we reject our humanity, we are rejecting something that was created for our good.  Our human nature partakes of our spiritual essence; they are part and parcel of the same.  The new revelations assert that we don’t have sinful natures in the flesh, in our humanity.  The most that we have done is to make mistakes, and mistakes can and will be corrected, when we see the light. 

It is true that traditional Christianity often made us feel very guilty about our sinful flesh.  But we are seeing a new way of looking at humanity now.  We are seeing, in new revelations (A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love, The Way of Mastery, Choose Only Love, Mirari, etc.) that our very flesh is, as we have learned, made in the image of God.  There is nothing there that we need to denigrate.

We don’t denigrate our humanity unless we have bought into negative ideas.  Actually we do not believe that we are lowly and unworthy of God’s attention.  Only when we stoop down in the dust and find ourselves depressed about our very being do we decide that we have not a worthy bone in our body.

Listen to these wise words from Jesus.  And embrace our humanity, a humanity that can and will glorify God for His part in forming our natures.

We are worthy; that is not delusion.  It is the sanest good sense.

Jesus & Mary

“[T]hroughout the history of humanity I have manifested as a self separated into two realities, that of Jesus and Mary.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:II

Edgar Cayce, perhaps speaking metaphorically, said that Jesus and Mary started out as Adam and Eve.  We can’t know what this means, though we know that Adam and Eve represent the advent of human beings on earth.

Here Jesus is raising the feminine to new heights.  We have lived so long in a masculinely oriented world.  But the feminine has great value, and recently channeled writings—A Course of Love, Choose Only Love, Mirari—have said much about greater leadership, leadership of being as opposed to doing, coming from women.

We would all hope for a soulmate relationship such as Jesus enjoys with Mary.  Perhaps we all have such a relationship, if not here on earth, then waiting for us on the Other Side.

Let our minds play with the benefits that a feminine concept can give.  For one thing, feelings are often transcendent in a woman, feelings rather than the thinking of the mind. 

See what that idea can do for us today.

Power

“Believe me when I tell you that with every movement of your mind and heart, that is, of what you really are, you impact everything.  Nothing in you is without effect; nothing in you is futile.  You are eternal creators of your own experience.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 8:I

By “everything” in this quotation, I think Jesus means literally the universe as a whole, not just our own little part of it.  That is just how powerful we are.  That is just how much we need to be cognizant of what a difference we can make.

We know that we influence our circle of friends and family, and if we postulate that our influence reaches out farther, to this world, we can also postulate that our world impacts others—others about which we know nothing.  It behooves us to be careful with our days.  Reverent in our doings.  Peaceful in our approach to life.

What a difference it makes if we are really this powerful!  The slightest movement creates ripples that spread throughout the cosmos.  We are not powerless, but very powerful indeed.

Let us walk carefully through our world today, aware that what we say and do influences realms far greater than we know.

Peace in Our Soul

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

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

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

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

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