Love

Note: Ann’s poem is first; Celia’s post follows.

From Ann Glover O’Dell’s Midwifing the Soul:

The Word

The Word became flesh

            once upon a time       once before time        once in time

                                  each time        a child is born        a gift is given.

                                        And upon their shoulders rests the imprint of the One

                                                whose Word makes all flesh to become.

Flesh becomes Word       becomes Verb Word

            saying ‘Let there be’

                        and there is

                                    as night follows day and dawn follows darkness,

                                                dappling creation with new language.

Be becomes all Words–

            creating nouns and expletives,

                        pronouns and correlatives,

                                    assumes the burden of unanswered questions

                                                and declaratives yet undeclared.

Flesh becomes Active Verb–

            transforming the great I AM into nominative–

                        posturing as transitive

                                    whose unknown object

                                           completes the diagram

                                                forming a sphere.

---

From Celia’s Images in a Reflecting Pool

Many years ago I was in a frame of mind in which unlimited possibilities seemed open to me.  The salient aspect of this period of time was that I was living with an attitude filled with love.  In making decisions, invariably I would come to a fork in the road.  It seemed that I could choose either way ahead and—this the questionable part—that either would be equally “OK”—just different ways to work out my destiny. 

Maybe we really do live in a safe universe when we are at home in Love.

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

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Sometimes the unconscious guides us to a certain familiar pathway as a warning.  If I find myself gazing vacantly out a window and fantasizing about the future, the future that I see may eventually lead to difficulty, but it will always hold much joy. 

At Home in Love

Do we have “free will”?  I once read someone’s remark to the effect that we act as if we do when we cross the street, so why not assume that we do? 

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Many years ago I was in a frame of mind in which unlimited possibilities seemed open to me.  The salient aspect of this period of time was that I was living with an attitude filled with love.  In making decisions, invariably I would come to a fork in the road.  It seemed that I could choose either way ahead and—this the questionable part—that either would be equally “OK”—just different ways to work out my destiny. 

Maybe we really do live in a safe universe when we are at home in Love.

Loving Thing

A decision made upon facing possible illness:  “I’ve been my own worst enemy in fearing health conditions in the past, and it’s time to put faith into action and not aggravate the situation with meaningless fears.”

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Recognizing that a behavior is irrational is the first step toward changing it.

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On understanding the way the mind works:  “I’m realizing that my superego (as Freud would say) is very strong, even severe.  Maybe if I were more forgiving, my thoughts of what I ‘should’ do would be less punishing. The choice to do the loving thing is not at all coercive.”

God Is Not Fear, but Love

“When you seem to see some twisted form of the original error rising to frighten you, say only, ‘God is not fear, but Love,’ and it will disappear.  The truth will save you.  It has not left you, to go out into the mad world and so depart from you.  Inward is sanity; insanity is outside you.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-18.I.7)

We have long heard that we need to turn inward, but have we really understood what this means?  It means that we set aside time for God every day, maybe twice a day (as Jesus recommends in ACIM).  And in this we turn inward.

We can affirm the truth, which is Love, and turn aside from those things that frighten us.  Our affirmations will not seem strong enough when we are overwrought, and so we need to quiet ourselves before we can receive the blessing.  When we quiet ourselves, turning inward, we will know—with every fiber of our being—that God’s way is not in any way fearful.  That is the insanity of what we see outside ourselves.  When we turn inward, to God, we find only peace.

Don’t try to assimilate this idea when you are in the throes of anger.  Anger separates us from the truth that is within.  And, likewise, don’t choose to practice affirmations when you are in a panic.  Slow down and breathe.  God will find you when you give Him a moment.

Insanity is without, in the world.  And when we project from within, as long as the ego is in the ascendancy, we project insanity and our perception of the outer world is a thing of madness.

Don’t walk this way.  Turn inward, not only two times a day, but as often as you think of God.  “Pray without ceasing” is not an idle recommendation.  The reverent feeling will flow over your whole world of insanity, remove the insanity then, and you will sense Oneness with God.

Reading Choose Only Love

“Hear me, all!  Those who come to this work will be my beloved saints unknown to the world, but known forever in my love.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:III

This statement is a loving affirmation of our task in reading Choose Only Love. We would not be drawn to this work unless we had made contact, however limited, with God Himself. We need do only small things, unknown by the world, but valuable within our circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. When love is the motivator, God can take our small work and amplify it. He can do this best when our hearts are open to receive Him.

If Jesus, Mary, and the angels are loving us, we are blessed indeed. What more could we ask, than this, a part in forwarding the transformation that Jesus began 2,000 years ago?

Laws of Love

“This cooperation is natural when fear has been rejected.  You have long embraced fear and rejected love.  Now the reverse is true.  This reversal of truth has changed the nature of your universe and the laws by which it operates.  The laws of fear were laws of struggle, limits, danger, and competitiveness.  The laws of love are laws of peace, abundance, safety, and cooperation.  Your actions and the results of your actions in a universe of love will naturally be different from your actions and the results of your actions in a universe of fear.  You set the laws of the universe when you chose fear.  The laws of the universe of love are God-given.”  (A Course of Love, C:20.30 – 20.31)

We need love; it is our very nature.  We have lived for a long time in the “tiny, mad idea” (from A Course in Miracles) that gave us a universe of fear.  We were not at home there; we struggled mightily.  We listened to an egoic persona that did not mean us well, that tried to protect us by isolating us from each other in a cacophony of diverse sounds that spelled “fear” to us.  We never felt safe, because we never were safe.  Our “creations” had come back to haunt us.

But now all that can change.  Now we know better.  In a universe of love, we know peace abundance, safety, cooperation.  Our laws of struggle, limits danger, and competitiveness are not outdated.  What a joy to envision what awaits us in this new age!  We are safe because we are no longer “creating” with the ego; we are working within the laws of God, laws which complement our true reality.  We are homebound, safe in a universe where love reigns and where we have turned aside from the ego and its sad and forlorn dictates.

We Were Never Meant to Be Isolated and Alone

“Others represent the accidents waiting to happen, love that is not returned, the withholding of things you deem important.  This fear that you feel in relation to others is as true of those you hold most dear to you as it is of those you would call strangers.  It is the very independence of others that makes your own independence seem so important to you.  Dependency is not consistent with your notions of a healthy self.  What, then is the alternative?

“The alternative is believing in giving and receiving as one.”  (A Course of Love, T2:7.2 – 7.3)

We are in unity with others, but we often don’t encourage this unity because of our fear of these same others—even our most significant others.  We think that being independent of needing other people will serve us best.  We think being close with others will lead to an unhealthy dependency.  But is this in line with A Course of Love?

Absolutely not.  We give and receive in tandem when we follow the dictates of ACOL.  We know that independence is not so very healthy, that the opposite of independence is not dependency, but a heartfelt joining of ourselves to other people.  We give them our love; they return our love.  The giving up of our solitary nature is actually a most joyful undertaking—when we realize that we were never meant to be isolated and alone.  We are meant to share with others, to live in a partnership with others.  Why else would the world have so many people? We are meant to join and to share, giving up our prideful isolation in a choice to give and receive as one with other people sharing our world.  This choice will give us joy.  Can it be so wrong to choose what will make us happy, avoiding the false independent nature that has failed us so many times?

Small Things with Great Love

“When it was said that ‘he who is holy in little ways is great,’ we sought not only to give a guide to behavior and discernment, but to convey the truth that it is not necessary to do great things, but small things with great love.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:III

Anything that we do out of love that is not harmful to another is a blessing, smiled upon by God. Our smallest action, our smallest thought, if motivated by the Love that God encourages in us, is a blessing. We live correctly when we live from love. Anything else is quite inferior.

Sometimes we think we are not making much of an impact. This is when we are still trapped by an egoic pattern that wants us to make a big splash.

But this type of thinking is flawed. There are billions of people in the world now, and if even a small percentage react in their lives from a place of love, we can effect a transformation. We need only to do “small things with great love.”

Loving Freely & Without Fear

“You who do not know how to trade your separated state for that of union have still done so when you have loved freely and without fear.  In this state your memory returns to you of who you are, and you are innocent and joyous and one with love itself. . . .Nothing but fear could take the memory of love from you, or replace so quickly the glory that is your nature with the specialness that is not.”  (A Course of Love, C:14.28)

Fear is of the ego, and fear is a game changer in the hope of reaching Christ-consciousness.  We cannot, in fact, reach enlightenment when we still entertain fear.  But, the rub, how to stop the fear that so often threatens to engulf us?

Prayer is one answer, in all likelihood the best answer that we could ever devise.  And it is not our idea, but an intuition and an experience that comes from God.  Our prayers put us in alignment with something greater than we are, and this Someone has the power to right our little world immediately.  We don’t have to suffer anxiety any longer; it just dissipates when we start to pray.

Meditation is similar, of course.  We go into a zone-type of thinking that eases our minds.  We don’t actively think at all; we focus on a sacred word or our breathing.  And the miraculous effect takes over.

Talking with a treasured friend is yet another solution to fear.  Others have known the same fear that we dread, though often we think that we are all alone because they haven’t told us about their anxieties, wanting to appear strong and solid to us.  This is a fallacy, of course, which we will come to see when we converse intimately.  All short of enlightenment are victims of the fear mongrels that rob us of peace of mind.

Think a bit of the practices that have given us peace of mind in the past.  Of course, like all things, this fear, too, shall pass.  But there are a myriad of practices which can speed fear along its way, never to return in quite the same way again.

Trust that guidance will lead us out of the darkness of our anxieties and our fears.  Trust that choosing to be unity one with another will be an almost magical solution to an intractable problem.

We Exist because of Our Relationship with Love. Love Is the Unity We Seek.

“You exist, quite simply, because of your relationship with love.  Love is the unity you seek.  In having chosen separation over unity, you but chose fear over love.  When you let go of fear and invite unity to return, you but send out an invitation to love and say you are welcome here.”  (A Course of Love, C:11.18) 

Being welcome is an attribute of friendship, and being “friends” with love is something that we all can do.  We need to realize that we are one (unity), and in this realization we are inclined to love more than fear.

Of course, we can’t always banish fear.  We are particularly prone to fear’s ravages early in the morning, when the whole day looms and we are apprehensive about what lies ahead.  At such times we need to make a determined effort to calm ourselves down.  Over time, we have developed some of these techniques:  writing in a journal, meditation, deep breathing, quiet conversation with your significant other (if time permits), petting a beloved animal.  All will make small increments to erode fear.  And, as time passes, fear will become more of a stranger in our lives.

We feel ourselves separate and alone when we face the day with apprehension.  We are leaving our comfy homes for a sometimes terrifying outside that seems to wish us no well.  These are the types of thoughts that replace love with fear.  And it need not be so.  The outside world is as much in need of our love as are our nearest and dearest.  Give a helping hand to those we meet outside our homes.  And then they will seem much less the bearers of bad tidings, or, at the last, uncertain tidings that give us cause for fear.  Love with a whole heart, knowing that we actually are safe when we set our minds to creating a beloved world.

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.

The New

“Without trust in one’s own knowing, no matter how oblique or unspeakable, there will not be this advent of The New.

“What you are asked to do is to build anticipation for it, not to explain it.”  Mirari

We don’t know when The New will really get underway. But we will know our part in the New when we turn inward. No other way will answer our questions. No other way will provide the assurance that we are walking toward God in this pathway toward The New.

The New refers to a new world being created by love. We seem far from that now, but God can act swiftly when the time is right. He needs our co-creation, though; he needs our hands and feet. If we don’t act in the world, based on the inner knowing that we feel, there is nobody else to do it. God Himself looks to us to create the good world that we all want.

If all of us long for a new world, we are setting the stage for that new world to emerge. We might see things happening before its full advent that are mightily disturbing to us. We may not speak of these things, for speech tends to create the things being spoken of.

Go within for the knowing that we need. This inner knowledge is true guidance, for God dwells within all of us. We are immanent with Him. And if we will listen, we will always know what to do to make things better.

Love

“I have called this session ‘the unknown saints.’ It might also have been called ‘the enlightened strangers.’  What I want to express is that many kinds of beings have attained enlightenment, that is, higher knowledge or the wisdom of love.  Their common denominator is that they have chosen love as the center and the reason for life.  They have chosen truth as their eternal companion no matter where they are or what they do.  They live consciously for God and in God, even though the totality of the effects of their choice are not completely known while they remain functioning on Earth.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:II

This quotation seems to refer both to this world (“while they remain functioning on Earth”) and a world beyond (“many kinds of beings”).  Certainly Choose Only Love offers guidance from angels, and these certainly are other kinds of beings.  But the enlightened strangers are ourselves, too–many people who have no outward show to themselves and would not be expecting to be called “saints.”

The bottom line is that we can discover what we need to know from our brothers and sisters on Earth, and we can discover what we need to know from channeled writings.  Moreover, our own communion with our depths will enlighten us in a way that nothing else can.  Be sure to reflect on what rises from the depths.  If harm would come to anyone, it is not a right choice.

Yes, love remains the center tenet of Choose Only Love as well as all other channeled writings of which I know anything.  Don’t let this be a hackneyed statement.  If love were something new to us, we would be enthralled by it even more than we are.  We are too used to the concept of love not to be jaded sometimes.  And this is a great pity.

Love is the cement of the universes.  If it were not for God’s Love, His cosmos would never have stood.  Love is the glue that sets our feet on solid ground.  Our heads may be in the clouds, but our feet are on terra firma.

This World Is Our Classroom

“Time is an illusion.  The things that pass by, the phenomena of space and time, are just shadows that you have interpreted in a certain way.  There is no gain; there is no loss.  There is nothing to fear.  The world can add nothing to you nor take anything away.  You are merely here in this temporary classroom with an opportunity to do what any master in any dimension can do, for you hold the same power I do—you hold the power to teach only Love.  And what you teach, you must necessarily and immediately learn.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 20, Page 248)

“Teach only love” is an edict of Jesus in his channeled writings.  A Course in Miracles says this; Choose Only Love says this. 

Now we need to say this to ourselves, caught as we are in a time dimension that is illusion.  What we teach, we learn.  A Course of Love says that we need to think in terms of discovering, once we have moved beyond “learning,” as such.  Discovery whets our minds and hearts for more, and then we are truly walking fast along the pathway back to God.

It is important to wrap our minds around the concept that there is no time.  It is hard to do.  But when we persevere, we will come to see the value of it.  Quantum theory says the same thing, and so our science is keeping pace.  When there is no time, we are living in eternity—where we will spend forever.  This is a powerful statement of what lies ahead for us.  It is a powerful statement that there is no death, just change into another “form,” possibly spirit alone.

If we let ourselves be overwhelmed by Love, we will grow in grace with God as our Mentor.  Let’s let God have His way with us today.  As always, let Him guide.  Especially let Him guide today, when we are discovering what Love can do.

Returning Us to Our True Nature

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

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

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

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

Loving Thoughts

“I once suggested to you that you remember only your loving thoughts.  But the trick to that is that you must first become aware of them.  So many become trapped in the depression, anxiety and insanity of the mind because they put all of their energy into perceiving what is amiss and no energy into perceiving their success as Christ.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 20, Page 247)

Focusing on what is amiss is focusing on the negative, and I think God would make positive thinkers out of all of us. Here Jesus certainly clues us in to that. What we focus on expands and/or creates, and if we are constantly failing to love, we are missing out on the best thing out there.

God is Love, though many of us don’t understand how the Great Creator could be an emotion. Love is more than an emotion. It is the bedrock of creation. If God hadn’t recognized that Love needs to be in the ascendancy always, we would have destroyed ourselves long ago. Creation, the universes, don’t work if they aren’t founded on love. And when we lose our madness, this is one of the first things we will recognize.

We have been living in madness as long as we formed an ego that tried to leave out our divinity, our Oneness with God. It didn’t work. And nobody knows it better than us, lost in depression, anxiety, insanity–and knowing somehow deep within that there is a Higher Power Who will save us from ourselves.

Turn to God today–however we conceive of Him. He holds the Answer to every perplexity with which we have ever been confronted.

Awareness of Love

“The only obstacle to enlightenment, to supreme knowledge, is fear. . .

“But fear overrides your awareness of love.  Fear makes you lose sight of love.  Therefore, I say with certainty that although you may do many things to reach God, if you are unwilling to put aside fear, none of what you may spiritually ‘do’ will help you, but rather it will bolster your ego.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:II

Fear is not stronger than love, though. Negativity, which fear represents, is never stronger than positivity, which love represents. To believe that fear is impossible to overcome is to believe that there exists Someone or Something stronger than God. And we don’t believe this. The “devil,” or “Satan,” which might be said to be in a struggle with God, is simply illusion. In our understanding, the ego is the nearest thing that we have ever come to a devil.

With the law of attraction operating, we know that what we focus upon comes to be, in some form or other. And if we focus on praying for fear to disappear, we are focusing on negativity, which never works. Instead, make the simple shift to focusing on love in all our dealings. Ask to have our love increased. Ask to love ourselves, our brothers and sisters, nature (even), and God. Ask to have love so overwhelm us that we have no room for fear.

We are not perfect, and so there will come times when we are overwrought. But these times do not occur when we are experiencing a satori, a glimpse of Awakening. Those who have awakened do not focus on fear, and so their experience is quite different. In attempting to move toward enlightenment, we are encouraged to focus on what we want, not to insert a negative of what we do “not” want.

Ask to be overwhelmed by love today–God’s Love. This is one of the most powerful prayers that we can offer to the cosmos, and God listens.

Only Love Is Real

“You will know that you are totally free when you no longer feel any obstruction to whatever is arising in the field of your experience.  Why?  Because you will simply see it as another opportunity to say:

“Holy Spirit, what would you have me say?  What would you have me do?  What would it be like in this moment for me to simply realize that only Love is real?  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 20, Page 245)

“No longer feeling any obstruction” is “being willing to have it so.” Deepak Chopra says that this is the final stage of coming to know God, his Stage 7 as described in his book on knowing God.

The second paragraph, above, is a repetition, from Jesus, of words first given in A Course in Miracles. Jayem was channeling accurately from Jesus, because Jesus himself had asked him not to read ACIM prior to their own channeling of The Way of Mastery. Jesus does not forget what he has said. And Jesus would have us turn to the Holy Spirit (or the Christ-Self) as much as we can remember to do so.

“Only Love is real.” Yes! Everything else passes away, but Love remains. This is love from God, not from our brothers and sisters, but love from our brothers and sisters may seem to pass (even though love is eternal and never truly ends).

Ask God to join in a partnership today. Ask Him anything, and see what words come to mind or develop in written form. These words may very well be divine revelation, ready for the taking by just anyone at all. We don’t even have to be very advanced spiritually to hear God talking to us.

Choosing Only Love

“Choosing only love is that for which you have come to this universe.  Nothing else.  Showing the way for others to make this choice consciously is the highest form of sharing because it is the way to share God.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:II

This quotation explains powerfully why the title for this series was chosen: Choose only love is why we are here in this universe.

This statement implies that there are other realms in the cosmos where we have lived before, although we know that time is an illusion and so all time is actually simultaneous. Time on earth is spread out so that we can experience it. There would be no other way.

We need to make the choice for love consciously. A Way of Mastery, also channeled by Jesus, lets us know that we need to draw up from the subconscious all that is there that can hinder our progress back to God in any way. When we have healed the subconscious, we are ready for Awakening–but not before. And then we do make the choice for love consciously, for the information in the subconscious has been brought to light.

All of this takes time. But remember that time is an illusion, and so we can skip over large chunks of time with Jesus as our leader. A Course in Miracles says this (though in slightly different words with the same meaning).

We need to share love with others, and then we are on the right path. Nothing else will do. Nothing else is good enough.

Caught in Our Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Love Banishes Chaos

“You would make no attempt to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not understand what anything means.  You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego, all would be chaos.  Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-15.V.1)

Judging will keep us from Awakening.  And without an ego, we would know immediately that judging is falsity and false thinking.  We don’t know the past, present, and future in all dimensions, and if we don’t know this, we can’t judge rightly.  This is why judging is accurately left to the Holy Spirit, Whose prescience tells Him past, present, and future in all dimensions.  Yet we clutch judging to our bosoms, being afraid to let it go.  We have been taught, wrongly, by this world that we grow in understanding as we mature, and that judgments, therefore, will grow in accuracy as we get older.  This is a fallacy, as Jesus so rightly points out.  We are always judging from the standpoint of the ego, which cannot know anything.

The Holy Spirit makes only one judgment:  God’s Son is innocent.  He does not have an ego with which to judge, and He knows the fallacy of holding anything at all against a precious child of God.

We think that we will be lost in chaos if we don’t judge.  We think that if we don’t defend ourselves, by judging, against predicaments that may arise, then we, poor defenseless selves that we are, will be fodder for any stronger person to devour.  We think that judging is the way that we protect ourselves.  But Jesus says elsewhere that defenses make what they would defend against.  We are thus lost by the act of defending from supposed detractors.  This is why we think that all will be chaos if we don’t judge.  It is a defensive maneuver.

But it is defensive maneuver that will not work.  And so why not open one’s self to the love that lies beneath this supposed chaos?  Without judging, all will be love.  And our defensiveness, which does not work anyway, won’t be needed.  We are protected as Sons of God, protected by our Guide and Teacher, the Holy Spirit.  God Himself, of Whom we are a part, knows that our entity, lost in Him, will abide forever, in safety and truth.

And this is all the assurance that we need.

Love’s Gifts

“Loss of love comes from only one source.  Call it fear or call it separation but it is still the same.  For in your separated state you ask that love make you special to someone else, and that one special to you.  You think this is what love is for, and so you make of it something it is not and only call it love.”  (A Course of Love, C:14.22)

Within the separation, the illusory separation from God that hasn’t actually happened, it is impossible for us to be contented aside from special relationships.  And, of course, these do not content us long, for we ask both too much and too little of them.  Special relationships are fraught with fear.  We fear being alone again, that this special one will love less (or leave), or that we (even though together still) do not love equally.

These concepts are all meaningless to a holy relationship, which seeks never to take, but always to give—though we know that giving and receiving are one in love.  We will be contented when we give up the idea of having special relationships.  Not that these relationships will be snatched away from us—no, never—but that we will never be happy on a continual basis until we have transformed our loves into holy loves.

Fear then will slip away.  We know that if we lose one form of love, another will take its place.  While we do not try to substitute loves for one another, we do recognize that it is our internal love that is most important.  And this means that all Selves are One, all loves are One.  Fear has no basis for gaining a foothold when ideas such as this are given sway in a life.

Loving from the Heart

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

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

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

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

Mistake that Could Not Happen but Did

“The displacement of the original intent, while it did not change the original cause, formed a false nature for the personal self.  This displacement of the original intent can be simply stated as the displacement of love with fear.  It is as simple as that.  Yet the way in which each of you have interpreted this displacement has come to seem quite complex.”  (A Course of Love, T4:3.4)

We think that we live complex lives, and, indeed, the ego has reveled in that thought.  But the only thing that happened, the detour into fear, was a shift from love to fear.  We may this transition as quite young children.  And we are led down a path toward living in fear that has always been hard to reverse.

Now we have a way, and it is simple in the extreme.  We simply learn to listen to what our heart is telling us.  Our heart always opts for the love that is hidden away deep within it.  Our heart always knows how to guide us.  In this time of Christ, the heart is our beacon, for the Christ-Self is within, like the heart.  Of course, we don’t mean the physical heart.  “Heart,” as used in A Course of Love, is a metaphor for the deepest feeling part of ourselves.  We feel rather than think, and in that shift, a shift in consciousness comes slower or later.

We can hope for sooner, for those of us reading these words long for Christ-consciousness (if we have not already reached this).  We long to live serene and awakened lives, sure of ourselves, sure of our brothers and sisters, and sure of God.

When we occupied physical bodies, we made a mistake, a mistake that could not happen but did.  We opted for separation from God by feeling a tiny bit of fear that grew into an almost all-encompassing fear.  This situation does not have to go on.  We can retreat from fear into our real essence of love.  At any time.  And the transformation will be arresting.

To Attack Anything in Creation Is Never Necessary. It Never Was.

“As you begin to allow the memory of this truth to dawn, answer this question:  Do you despise or attack any brother or sister who accompanies you for a short time on the journey you make towards your heart?

“To attack anything in creation is never necessary.  It never was.”  Choose Only Love bk.4, 3:II

We have feet of clay, being human, and to say that we need hold anyone at all in creation in a less than loving light is not beneficial to our growth as spiritual beings returning to God. We need instead to practice the love that has been preached by every spiritual tradition in existence.

If we are thinking negatively about anyone at all (and all of us has someone in that category), then we need to ask God for help in cleansing our minds. Our hearts already know that truth of what love can do, but our minds are still at least partially deluded. Even awakened people are not perfect in this change to a wholly loving perspective.

Bless us today as we open our hearts to all in creation, barring none. And especially open our hearts to You, dear God, the hope of our life.

A Greater Wisdom

“How can what continues to give in to fear know love?  All your reasons for fear-based living have been discounted one by one.  And yet you dare not try to live without it.  Why?  Because of the thoughts of the ego-mind.  The ego-mind is concerned only with its own survival but it has you convinced it is your survival that depends on it.  How can you be convinced to live as if the truth were otherwise?  For only if you begin to live as if the truth were otherwise can you see that it truly is otherwise, or based on a wisdom other than what has come before.”  (A Course of Love, T1:3.5)

We tremble in fear when we make short forays in to trying to live without fear.  Fear seems a given, something that will protect us.

We are misinformed.  Fear is not necessary for our continued survival in this sometimes harsh world.  The reason that we think that fear is needed is the lingering influence of the ego-mind, the insane part of us that continues to dwell just below the surface of our good sense.

The ego is gone from us when we have assimilated the truths of A Course of Love.  We may not realize this, we may still struggle.  But the ego only has a residue of false thinking that continues to infiltrate our moments of reflection.  We have always thought with the ego-mind, and so to hear Jesus say in ACOL that we are done with the ego is immediately enough to raise doubts in our minds.  How can we be done with the ego?  We see its influence constantly.

We need to let go.  We need to trust what Jesus is telling us.  If he says that the ego is no more for us, then let the mind rest in that knowledge—for it is knowledge, not perception.  Just rest.  And the truth of the elimination of the ego will dawn on a calmer mind in ourselves.

A greater wisdom is available to us, and we ought to take advantage of that greater wisdom forthwith.  Let the smudge of ego on our minds be lightened by our prayer consideration that perhaps the ego is just a mirage, seeming to be ahead of us on our pathway, but actually not representing anything but illusion.

No Idle Thoughts

“This is why the very pathway of awakening, regardless of the form it takes, is always a retraining of the mind.  It is a decision to choose to discipline the mind in each moment, to teach only Love, to hold only loving thoughts, and to recognize that there is no such thing as an idle thought, since each thought or perception held in the mind immediately generates your experience.  That experience is like a pebble dropped into a pond that send a reverberation, a vibration, throughout the field of your being.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 20, Page 239)

A Course in Miracles also tells us that there are no idle thoughts.  We often think that if we don’t say anything bad, we are home free.  But thoughts have repercussions, and if our thoughts are “bad,” we need to ask for help to right them.

We can’t just will love, but when we get quiet and go within, we will find God’s Love, and He prompts us to love those surrounding us.  He teaches us how to love, but we have to become still from time to time, in contemplation and prayer, for his guidance to “take.”

Every thought counts.  But this is not counsel to fear our thoughts.  It is counsel to let God’s Love overwhelm us in our daily round.  When we open our heart to Him, He teaches us what we can learn no other way.

We discover how to live, and that living is done in overwhelming love for ourselves, our fellow human beings, and our God.

Return to Relationship

“In seeing the self as separate you have known fear and have been forced to reconcile fear with love.  Now, in coming back to relationship and union with me you have realized that you are not separate and now have striven against the ‘opposing’ force of separation.  With the acceptance of the Christ in you, you are returned to relationship and need no longer strive against the ‘opposing’ force of separation, for you no longer know it.”  (A Course of Love, D:Day40.8)

As we turn from separation, we turn from fear to love.  We may even strive actively to turn from fear to love.  We have realized that we aren’t separate (as we could never be, for we are part of God), and we have striven to get past these ideas of the ego with every force of our personality.  When we accept the Christ in us, we understand that we have returned to a relationship that has long eluded us, and now we no longer need to strive against separation.  We know intimately that we are joined with the Christ Self; we know intimately that we are “separate” no longer.

Join with Love in Stillness

“Simply join with love in stillness and wait for the revelation of God’s plan.  Because God is infinite and inexhaustible, revelation of Her can happen in every moment and forever. ”  Choose Only Love bk.4, 3:I

When we don’t know what to do next, there is a solution, but it does take patience, and many of us have patience in short supply.

We need simply to rest in stillness, awaiting God’s response. God is here called the feminine, because God is without gender, and Choose Only Love is emphasizing the helpful aspects of the feminine gender.

God will respond to us when we are in a quandary. He doesn’t mean to keep secrets from us. He means us well. And will respond, always and forever.

Revelation can come to anyone at any time, but getting quiet within seems to be a prerequisite most of the time. If trying to come to a decision, we are not alone; we have Help.

Let God speak to us in our quandaries.

Love & the Call for Love

“The only judgment involved is the Holy Spirit’s one division into two categories; one of love, and the other the call for love.  You cannot safely make this division, for you are much too confused either to recognize love, or to believe that everything else is nothing but a call for love.”  (T-14.X.7)

This quotation states a fundamental truth of the teachings of A Course in Miracles:  that everything is either love, or a call for love.  This is how we are to view the words and actions of our brother as well, our significant other(s) who is walking this world with us.  He is either expressing his love for us, or he is calling for us to overlook his attack and to know that that attack is a call for love from us.  These are the only two choices.

We cannot make this division ourselves, not at this juncture.  Appeal to the Holy Spirit when confronted with attack; know that this need not be.  He will make the judgment that one’s brother is only calling for love.  We will be too overwrought to make that distinction.  But the One Who can will speak to us and calm us.  Then we will be in the best position to run to our brother’s side with the love that he needs so desperately.

Don’t run to your brother’s side if he is not yet receptive.  There will come a time when he will be receptive.  And, if you are listening to the Holy Spirit, you will know when that time is.  This is the time to act.  Not a moment later.  But be sure that you are discerning correctly.  Be sure that your own overwrought emotions have righted themselves.  Be sure that the Holy Spirit is saying, “Act NOW!”

Our Internal Love Is Most Important

“Loss of love comes from only one source.  Call it fear or call it separation but it is still the same.  For in your separated state you ask that love make you special to someone else, and that one special to you.  You think this is what love is for, and so you make of it something it is not and only call it love.”  (C:14.22)

“If you do not believe you can reverse or ‘turn back’ to the state in which you existed before the original error, then you never shall.”  (A Course of Love, C:17.12)

Within the separation, the illusory separation from God that hasn’t actually happened, it is impossible for us to be contented aside from special relationships.  And, of course, these do not content us long, for we ask both too much and too little of them.  Special relationships are fraught with fear.  We fear being alone again, that this special one will love less (or leave), or that we (even though together still) do not love equally.

These concepts are all meaningless to a holy relationship, which seeks never to take, but always to give—though we know that giving and receiving are one in love.  We will be contented when we give up the idea of having special relationships.  Not that these relationships will be snatched away from us—no, never—but that we will never be happy on a continual basis until we have transformed our loves into holy loves.

Fear then will slip away.  We know that if we lose one form of love, another will take its place.  While we do not try to substitute loves for one another, we do recognize that it is our internal love that is most important.  And this means that all Selves are One, all loves are One.  Fear has no basis for gaining a foothold when ideas such as this are given sway in a life.

Love and Fear

“The displacement of the original intent, while it did not change the original cause, formed a false nature for the personal self.  This displacement of the original intent can be simply stated as the displacement of love with fear.  It is as simple as that.  Yet the way in which each of you have interpreted this displacement has come to seem quite complex.”  (A Course of Love, T4:3.4)

We think that we live complex lives, and, indeed, the ego has reveled in that thought.  But the only thing that happened, the detour into fear, was a shift from love to fear.  We made this transition as quite young children.  And we are led down a path toward living in fear that has always been hard to reverse.

Now we have a way, and it is simple in the extreme.  We simply learn to listen to what our heart is telling us.  Our heart always opts for the love that is hidden away deep within it.  Our heart always knows how to guide us.  In this time of Christ, the heart is our beacon, for the Christ-Self is within, like the heart.  Of course, we don’t mean the physical heart.  “Heart,” as used in A Course of Love, is a metaphor for the deepest feeling part of ourselves.  We feel rather than think, and in that shift, a shift in consciousness comes sooner rather than later.

We can hope for sooner, for those of us reading these words long for Christ-consciousness (if we have not already reached this).  We long to live serene and awakened lives, sure of ourselves, sure of our brothers and sisters, and sure of God.

When we occupied physical bodies, we made a mistake, a mistake that could not happen but did.  We opted for separation from God by feeling a tiny bit of fear that grew into an almost all-encompassing fear.  This situation does not have to go on.  We can retreat from fear into our real essence of love.  At any time.  And the transformation will be arresting.

In the Bosom of God

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

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

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

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

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

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.

From Ego-Self to Christ-Self

“I repeat, and will do so again and again, that the ego-self is gone from you.  Whether you fully realize this or not matters not.  This A Course of Love has accomplished.  Now the choice is before you to do one of two things. . .to proceed toward love or fear.  If you proceed with fear you will assemble a new ego-self, an ego-self that perhaps will seem superior to the old, but which will nonetheless still be an ego-self.  If you proceed with love, you will come to know your Christ-Self.”  (A Course of Love, T3:4.8)

Yes, the ego-self is gone from us.  The first book of A Course of Love accomplished this, making us The Accomplished.  It is not ego that says this.  It is the unparalleled good sense.  Jesus says it.  Can we not believe it?

If we continue to walk with fear. we are in danger, for we will be tempted to form a new ego-self.  Jesus says in fact that we will form a new ego-self, if fear intrudes on our peace.  We need to get rid of the fear, for our right minds depend on it.

On the other hand, if we proceed with love, we will come to know our Christ-Self, the inner essence that is our real Self. 

We need to make the distinction between fear and love to make the right choices upcoming.  We need to know that we are safe in this world, that nothing can harm us, that the blood that we see is merely catsup, and that illusions are not reasons to be frightened.  We need to see reality, and reality will launch us toward love.  We see reality when we trust, for, as A Course in Miracles affirms, trust is the bedrock of our new thought system, the thought system of love, of the Christ-Self.  We give up fear when we recognize how divisive a force it has been in clogging up our minds.  Our minds are precious indeed, but we have walked with an insane  mind.

Now we can walk with a sane mind by listening to our heart.  Our heart is our saving grace in this new reality in which we find ourselves.  Only our heart can save us now.  Let us proceed by listening to our heart, a part of our being that needs no proof of God.  In our inner essence, we just know that we are not all alone in the universe.  That we have an indwelling spirit that means us well.  And that that indwelling spirit is God Himself.

Love

“The rebellion against love is what gave rise to fear.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 11:II

We know that this quotation is true. Even today, when we start to feel fear, we can recognize that we are not feeling love–at least not enough love.

So the solution to us of an end to fear is to rev up our love–love for God, love for our brothers and sisters, even love for ourselves. Of course, the quotation harks back to a time before time, when we separated from God because we thought we could make a world we would like better than what He provided. And such a mess we got into.

The way back is to become overwhelmed with love. When we sense even the slightest bit of love, we can “milk” it for more. When we milk the tiny bit of love for all it is worth, we discover what God can do. He meets us more than halfway. He restores our soul to a calm place, a place where there is not fear and we sense only love.

Ask for such a blessing today.

To Mother the New into Existence

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

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

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

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

Love Moves Us

“When the mind is surrendered, you could say that body walks as an empty shell and is merely waiting to be informed by the Love of God.  When the Love of God does not inform you or ask you to move and take action, then simply rest and do nothing.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 19, Page 232)

A totally surrendered Self waits to hear the impression from God as to its next step. This is the ideal state of being. Not many of us reach it all the time, but when we do, we can recognize that this is the best way to live. We move like the wind, not sure of where we will alight next. We listen to how to place our step. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum, without input from the Almighty. And this Almighty, God Himself, moves us by the means of Love in our depths.

Listen to Our Heart

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

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

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

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.

Loss of Love the Greatest Fear

“And all of these, those who would admit to fear, and those who would not, would still believe that love exists despite fear’s claim upon it, and think that they are lucky to have found a love to shield them for a little while from all the other things they fear.  And yet the greatest fear of all is that of loss of love.  You who have given everything to be alone and separate fear most of all that which you have given everything to attain.  For what is loss of love but confirmation of your separate state?  What is loss of love but being left alone?”  (A Course of Love, C:14.21)

We thought that we wanted to be separate from God; this is part of the theology of traditional Christianity as well as A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love.  Separation would be that we would be independent, on our own, isolated.  Yet in the illusory actuality (for we could never actually separate from God, being part of Him) we have been the most afraid of being alone.  Try as hard as we can, we still cling, desperately, to the special love relationships that would save us from ourselves—or so we think.  So the living out of isolation has actually been the source of our greatest fears.

We fear being alone more than anything because somewhere in our deluded minds is the certainty that we are living amiss, and that a furious God will take revenge on us for denying Him.  This is as true for atheists as anyone else, for each of us of whatever persuasion has a religion in which we put our faith.  If this religion is ego-tainted, we will fear all the more, and what religion in our world is not ego-tainted?  It is only in giving up our false idols of isolation and separation that we come even close to finding our way safely through this world.

We find our way safely in this world by acknowledging what our heart tells us.  And this heart does not require “proof” of God’s existence.  It is rightly said that there are no atheists in foxholes (a somewhat outdated reference recalling the first world war).  When we get scared about our predicament, we do turn to what we hope will save us.  And A Course of Love proclaims that this is the saving grace for what we understand to be our heart.  It alone does not seek to have divine proof; it simply knows that we are not alone in all the universe.  We are not isolated and independent; we are meant to share our living with others.  And A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love call these relationships, the “holy” relationships. Most all of us have experienced loss of love in some form, with somebody.  Somebody let us down, we cry.  We think that if only this special someone had loved us for ourselves alone, we would be saved.  This makes of love a mockery.  And it places in our midst a scavenger that would devoir true love.  We do not have to pin our hopes on one someone (or several someones) who can save us.  We need only rest in the knowledge—and it is knowledge—that we are never meant to be alone, that divine love is there to protect and keep us safe.  And once we give up the attributes of specialness, our relationships one to another will indeed be holy.  We have to give up specialness in relationships, we are told.  But the relationships will not be snatched from us, to leave us cowering in the dust.  The special relationships turned holy will be a foretaste of Heaven, right here on earth.

World of Love

“Now, as we reverse this set of circumstances, and replace the world of fear with a world of love, there can be no more weighing of love against fear.  God did not create fear and will not be judged by it.  All judgment is the cause of fear and this effort to weigh love’s strength against fear’s veracity.  While you chose to believe and live in a world the nature of which was fear, you could not know God.  You could not know God because you judged God from within the nature of fear, believing it to be your natural state.”  (A Course of Love, T4:3.7)

We thought that it was protective to have fear in our arsenal of defenses.  But did it ever work very well?  We got anxious often, but did this really protect us?

We don’t need fear’s protection.  We don’t need protection at all.  We have no need for defense against anything.  We will be warned when we need to do anything to “protect” ourselves because we are in danger of some kind.  God does not leave us defenseless; He is our defense, if we ever need to have a defense in this world at all, and that is debatable. 

Defenses do what they would protect against. 

We thought that fear was a natural reaction, not realizing that it was, instead, evidence of living insanity.  We need to replace this world of fear we have made into a world of love, and only then can we relax in the grace that God gives us.  We need to make a definite decision to give up judgment, and this much we can do.  We can determine that we will not judge ourselves, others, or God, and we can stand by this as a promise.  The world will never again look as dismal.  We will have found means to emerge from a world of insanity.  We will walk into the light.

The Work of Love

“Here is the message that all humanity has been waiting for from time immemorial.  Souls will understand.  Hearts will rest in peace.  Memories will begin to remember the love of loves, and in that memory find the clear path to lead them, singing, back to the house of the Father.  Angels will join them from every corner of the world, and will also join you who are part of this work of love.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 10:IV

Just as every person is Christ, sharing in Jesus’ divinity, so is every work of love a part of the message that humanity has been waiting to hear. Choose Only Love is an important new revelation, but as good as it is, it does not stand alone. Whenever any of us seek to further the Kingdom of God, we are following in Jesus’ footsteps, and our work is similarly blessed.

The most significant aspect is that our work, the work of all of us, be centered always and forever, in love. We can’t fool ourselves about this. If we are embroiled in the ego, our listeners will know and be turned off. If, instead, we react from an open heart, we will be moving in love, and the response we get to what we try to do will be enhanced.

Ask for guidance in the work of love. And let us all join together to usher in a new Kingdom, a Kingdom in this world that will be now in a newly created world.

Surrender to Love

“Surrendering to love is what will finally make you able to free your mind, your heart, your memory, and your will from all restrictions.”  Choose Only Love bk.3, 10:IV

We need to have–and keep–a clear mind, heart, memory, will. Just this morning I was praying for my hangups just to recede and ultimately to disappear. And then I turn to my document from Choose Only Love, and immediately my eyes light on this quoted passage. It seems, in its own way, a miracle.

The Answer is even in this quotation. The Answer, as it so often is, is just surrendering to love. Yet we often tie ourselves in knots, trying a little bit of everything else. When we seek God’s kingdom, the entrance is gained by love. Nothing else. No other way.

I sometimes think that we hear this imperative to love in so many spiritual teachings that we are a little numb about it. Just how do we “surrender to love”? What is the way?

It is possible that the way is paved by simple trust in God. We must trust that God has our best interests at heart. If we don’t believe this, we will be too frightened to surrender to Him. Many of us have subconscious fears about the validity of God’s love for us. We think His will for us, and our will for ourselves, are at odds. The wills are the same, but if we are to adopt God’s choices for our lives, we will see blessings that our own personal wills can never attain.

Ask, just ask, how to surrender to Him. Surrender will come when we get very quiet. When we give up trying to navigate a difficult world all by ourselves.

When we give up, the light dawns.

The Seed of New Life

“This is the way the great ‘they’ of the physical world would have it be.  They live by removing themselves.  They desire for all to be so removed from the divine that they are comfortable with their own removal.  They preach the removal.  We will preach the invasion, the seed of new life, what can be neither run from nor removed.”  Mirari

I think it would be fair to say, along with Mari (who received Mirari), that Mary of Nazareth has a problem with our world.  She sees that we are on the wrong path, and she is eager and desirous to alter our direction by enlisting those people who are more gentle into her cause.

Surely we count ourselves among Mary’s faithful.  To follow her lead, we cannot remove ourselves from this world, nor would we want to.  We can offer new life to a dying world, if we will only step out on what we know.  We know a truth that is not of this world.  And it behooves us who follow both Jesus and Mary to do our best to lead in the direction of a new world.

We cannot, any of us, do this alone.  We need each other—men and women of faith—to step out on that faith and enact what we know to enact.  When we commune with our God, He will give us our marching orders.  He will guide and direct our steps along a pathway that—it is not too much to say—will save our world.

Elsewhere we learn that we are in the end times.  Of course, every generation since Jesus’ time has said the same thing.  And so I wonder if Mary has it right this time.  But I think one thing is certain:  We must act “as if” we are in the end times.  And that means we need to keep ourselves, and to enlist others, into a return to the way of our God. 

And this way is, and always has been, the way of Love.

Choose Love in Our World

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

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

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

“The same world based upon these different foundations could not help but look quite different.”  (C:14.9)  Yes!  This is the secret for staying in this world, but seeing it differently.  This is the secret of having peace in the midst of chaos.  Choose fear or love, and all the world will change according to the emotion that is chosen.

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.

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.

Only Love Heals

“Remember, then, that each loving thought restores you to your rightful place. Every fearful thought merely delays the moment of your release and the restoration of your perfect peace.  Remember that only Love can heal.  No technique has ever brought healing, though it can provide a temporary field in which the mind can choose to love.  Remember how perfectly simple it is.  It is not possible for you to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 18, Page 226)

We cannot be in the wrong place at the wrong time because God is here with us. His mercy keeps us safe, regardless of outer circumstances. His Love makes the difference in our experience.

When we deliberately start an argument, it is usually because we are in a low mood. We have temporarily lost sight of our goal–which is to be One with God at all times. When we realize what might be coming between God and us, we are back in alignment with Him. That alignment is always a choice for love, or His Love (spelled with a capital letter).

Know that we need only practice His Love consistently to have a marvelous life. Even if the world is in terrible turmoil, and even if we are experiencing that turmoil, we can walk a better path if we can stand firm that God is not betraying us. We humans make many mistakes, but God always stands ready to help in any emergency.

Re-surrender today, if life seems terrible. Re-surrender today, if we can’t see a way out. God needs only our cooperation to turn disaster into a reason to practice His way.