When We Love

“Most of the abilities you now possess are only shadows of your real strengths. Your spirit knows, loves, and creates. These are its unequivocal functions. All of your present functions are equivocal, or open to question or doubt. This arises because you can no longer be certain how you will use them. You are therefore incapable of knowledge, because you can perceive lovelessly. And you cannot create surely, because perception deceives and illusions are not sure.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-3.VI.1:1-8)

We are heading into ever-greater realms, but now we live uncertainly, not yet Christ-conscious, not yet Awakened. We head into greater realms when we love totally and completely, no uncertainty, no doubt.

Until we assume Awakening status, we will be unreliable in our world. Others cannot depend on a being who sometimes loves, sometimes hates. We need to drop the ambivalence of our feelings for other people, drop the negative and assume the positive always. And that positive is always a greater love. We create our own reality, and it is only love that creates a reality with which we can be happy for eons in the future.

We have been weaving illusions in an erratic fashion. When we love, we create a true reality, and we are blessed by our creation. God steadies our hand as we create; His insight informs our own. We create surely, lovingly, and we walk into the sunlight with Jesus.

Advertisements

God Just Loves

“God is not a stranger to His Own Sons, and His Sons are not strangers to each other. Knowledge preceded both perception and time, and will also ultimately replace (or correct for) them. This is the real meaning of the biblical account of God as ‘Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ It also explains the quotation ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ Perception can and must be stabilized, but knowledge is stable. Fear God and keep His commandments is a real scribal error. It should read, ‘Know God and accept His certainty.’ This error is why the commandments are almost all negative, in contrast to my statement: ‘Thou shalt love.’” (ACIM, COA ed., T-3.V.11:3-10)

No, we are not meant to be afraid of God, if by fear, we mean apprehension. We are meant to know God, and as time passes, we will come ever more into this bliss. Jesus here contrasts his own new revelations, as recorded in the New Testament, with the harsh portrayal of God in the Old Testament. Jesus proclaimed a God of love, the Old Testament, a foreboding Figure—hence the negative tenor of the Ten Commandments.

The God of the Old Testament was all egoic, a projection of the scribes who were lost in egoism. Good and bad, right and wrong—all was slated through the eyes of a God Who could be very fierce, denunciatory toward His children. Jesus, with kind eyes, encouraged little children to approach him, and he loved with a deep and abiding love. The difference could not be more striking.

When we love as Jesus encouraged, we come to know, as opposed to perceive. And this knowledge is of a God Who wishes His offspring well. It is of a God Who lives through us, for we are part of Him. This is the new revelation in Jesus’s channeled writing, so new on the scene of our world. This is the view, of Gods in miniature that we are. God, in living through us, is constantly leading us to discover that His way is benign. We know this, when we listen to our heart. We know that our Maker, living through us, is wishing us well, loving us, for his creation will hold together only when the laws of love are obeyed.

The laws of love are open to us. We advance when we love; we fall back when we are caught in negativity. The only way that the universes could survive is if they were predicated on love for the discrete parts, one part feeling and expressing love for another. Anything else would self-destruct.

Walk along in peace borne of love for our fellow men and women, our brothers and sisters. The advantages will unfold before us, with nothing to trip our foot upon as we walk.

Love without Attack

“If you attack another’s error, you will hurt yourself. You do not recognize him when you attack. Attack is always made on a stranger. You are making him a stranger by misperceiving him, so that you cannot know him. It is because you have made him into a stranger that you are afraid of him. What is he to you? He is your brother. What else do you need to know? But do know that. This is not a matter of perception but a fact. Perceive him c
correctly, so that you can know him. The prayer for the miracle is:

“Jesus, help me see my brother [name] as he really is, and thus release both him and me.

“Anytime there is anything unloving that crosses your mind, you should immediately recognize that you do not want to hurt your brother.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-3.V.10:1-14)

Love our brother. And, of course, this includes our sister as well. If an unloving thought or feeling is in our mind or heart, we need to reconsider and choose again. There is so much that will be solved aright if we keep love in our mind and heart. When we love, we leave fear behind, no longer afraid of what our brother might say or do to us. We know that God Himself is protecting us from harm. And so there is nothing true that our brother can do to harm us. We remain in control always.

The world is harmless. It is our projection only. From our mind outward. And when the mind is healed, the projections will all be good. This is what we need. This is where we are headed.

Let the heart rule the mind, for the heart loves deeply and well. And then all of our thoughts about, and our actions toward, our brother will be true and good.

Retain Only What is Lovable

“Your own final judgment cannot be directed toward yourself, because you are not your own creation. You can apply it meaningfully and at any time, however, to everything you have ever made, and retain in your real memory only what is good. This is what your own right-mindedness cannot but dictate. The purpose of time is solely to ‘give you time’ to achieve this judgment. It is your own perfect judgment of what you have made. When everything that you retain is lovable, there is no reason for any fear to remain in you. This is your part in the Atonement.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-2.XIII.8:1-7)

We need to look at what we have made, and this making was of the ego. We “make” with the ego, but we “create” with our joining to God, our Self, the Christ-Self. When we look at what we have made, we discard, just turn aside, from what lacks value. We, in a sense, elevate the best to a creation, not a making. We thus judge, in our own way, what experiences and objects we have taken into our world. When what is left is simply lovable, we have fulfilled our mission.

When we retain only what is lovable, fear will leave us. Is this not motivation enough? To live a life without fear is what God wants for us, for we will have given up the ego, and with it our false life. We will be headed straight for home in God, the separation over, healed. Is this not what we want, now that we know better than we used to know?

This is our part in the Atonement, giving up the valueless for what truly has value in our life. It cannot be hard, for the Holy Spirit, if we let Him, will guide our every action of relinquishment. When we retain the lovable, I reiterate, we are safe and secure in the home where we belong.

Seek to Master Love, Not Fear

“We began this section with an attempt to correct the fundamental human error that fear can be mastered. The correction was that only love can be mastered. Even if you are ready for revelation, though, that does not mean that you have in any way mastered that form of communication. Mastery of love necessarily involves a much more complete confidence in the ability than you have as yet attained. Readiness, however, is at least an indication that you believe this is possible. This is only the beginning of confidence. In case this be misunderstood as a statement that an enormous amount of time will be necessary between readiness and mastery, I would again remind you that time and space are under my control.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-2.XII.10:1-7)

Yes, time and space are under Jesus’ control, and here he is trying to get us to do what seems impossible to us—to master love. We often attempt to do the reverse, master fear. We are in pain when we experience anxiety, and we just want to get rid of the feeling. But we are limited in what we can do until we turn our bodies and souls over to love. Then, when love is attained, and even mastered, our fears drop away. It is just that simple.

I have long been prone to anxieties; they have dogged my every step through this life. But when I am immersed in love, feeling love with every bone in my body, I notice that there is no trace of fear/anxieties. And this is what Jesus is talking about. We master fear by first mastering love.

Of course, we don’t stay in a cloud of love all the time. This world drags us back. But as often as we retreat from love, and then feel fear, we can try again, take another step in a better direction. We move forward and retreat throughout our lives. Only in Awakening are the vicissitudes altered. Then we have smoother sailing.

So: Seek to master love, not fear. The benefits are stupendous. The way opens to God Himself, for God is but Love.

How to Drop Fear

“No one as yet has fully recognized either the therapeutic value of fear or the only way in which it can truly be ended. When you miscreate, you are in pain. The cause and effect principle here is temporarily a real expeditor. Actually, Cause is a term properly belonging to God, and Effect, which should also be capitalized, is His Sonship. This entails a set of cause and effect relationships which are totally different from those which humanity introduced into the miscreation.

“The fundamental opponents in the real basic conflict are creation and miscreation. All fear is implicit in the second, just as all love is inherent in the first. Because of this difference, the basic conflict is one between love and fear.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-2.XI.9:1-5 and 10:1-3)

Jesus talks about love and fear in a new way in this passage, a way that explains that our own miscreations in this world have made our fear. When we get on the beam with him, we won’t be miscreating any longer. And so there is no reason for fear. What a glorious promise!

Our next step is to ask the omniscient Jesus how to create anew, how to drop the miscreations that have caused us such grief. If there is something particular in our life that is making us miserable, there is our opening. There is a miscreation, for nothing God has created, or which we have truly “created” (as opposed to “made”) can harm us.

We need help. We must not be too proud to ask for it. Jesus, our teacher, is ever near to guide and direct. And his way works.

Let love overshadow us today, let us create well, and then fear will drop from sight.

Love and Fear

“In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds along these lines:

“Perfect love casts out fear.

“If fear exists, then there is not perfect love.

“But

“Only perfect love really exists.

“Therefore, if there is fear, it produces a state which does not exist.

“Believe this and you will be free.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-1.50.2:3-8)

This quotation is a favorite part of A Course in Miracles for its students and teachers. Of course, saying that we love, and that we want to be free of fear, is easier than having it done for us. But it can be done for us, by the Holy Spirit. And by God, when He reaches down and lifts us up to Awakening.

In the meantime, for us lowly mortals, we know that we need to love more completely to get line for these great blessings. Any attack will move us farther away from our goal, and attack/anger are the result of fear. When we don’t have stress/fear, we may proceed in a harmonious way through our days.

But life is life, and things happen, prompting us to leave our good intentions for something that doesn’t work at all. Keep in mind that we think awry when we fear and stress, and that we are on the beam when we love. And the more completely we love, the better off we can be.