Living in Love

As of this date on your calendar, there have only been a handful of beings who have truly lived life upon this lane, a very small handful. There are many of us that would just absolutely be thrilled if you would join the club!

I will let you in on a little secret: Until you do, you do not get to graduate. You will never leave this plane, filled with conflict and suffering, as it seems to be, until you have lived the experience of walking this Earth wholly as the thought of Love in form, with no other allegiances, but to Love. You will never leave this plane. You will never take up your cross and follow me. You will spin around again and again and again, only to be confronted by the same need to decide wholly for Love. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 79 – 80)

Jesus is here telling it like it is. We don’t “get to graduate” until we know how to live. We will stay on this plane, this earth, going around and around, often in misery and suffering, if we don’t learn to live in Love. On this plane forgiveness is all. Forgiveness will show us how to love. Only forgiveness.

Nobody else has done it to us. We have done it to ourselves, for we are manifesting our illusions, illusions that keep us tied to an existence that is not worthy of us.

Life is meant to be full of great joy, great blessings. Our only reason for being here is salvation, making the choice for Love.

Decide that real life is what we want. Decide today. Real life means that we remove the blocks to the awareness of Love, and a prime way to do that is to forgive.

We will “graduate” when our purpose here has been fulfilled. That may be a long way off, but if we live in Love here, we can enjoy heaven on earth. Truly. Completely.

There is no better way to live a life.

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Let Love Live through Us

The Truth is very simple. It is not complex at all. Get out of the way, and let Love live through you. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 6, Page 77)

How do we get out of the way, and let Love, let God, live through us? This takes a humble mind and heart. A sense of surrender, knowing that when we cast our cares on Him, He will keep us safe. If we let fear intrude, we have let the patterns of the ego intrude—even if the ego, proper, has been vanquished from our being.

We need just to rest in the assurance that all that we need for daily living will come to us, a gift of God. It does now mean, of course, that we do nothing.

Believing this would be a belief in magic, and a testing of God. But every busy doing on which we are sent will seem easy. Effortlessness will reign. And we will be happy.

This is how life is meant to be lived. This is how we live the Truth. The Truth will dawn suddenly upon the prepared heart. And the heart is prepared when we turn our affairs over to a Higher Power, turn our affairs over to God. He wants to show us how to work, how to live. The effortlessness by which all things come to us is simple indeed, not complex.

We are making the decision to let go and let God.

And this makes all the difference.

Now We Know What Love Is

No matter how deep you go into the depth of God, and no matter how deep you achieve an awareness and consciousness of union with God, what God is remains forever beyond your growing capacity to understand God. It is like an ocean of infinite depth. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 64 – 65)

We will never, if we visit a thousand worlds, know God completely. His Godhead is the All, and we can know, intuitively, only facets of His personality. He shares with us, but the sharing is not a sharing of equals. We are creations of the Creator. It is true that we are a part of Him, in that he differentiated His essence to form entities without number, an infinite number. The magnitude invites humility in us. Knowing that we are God, but we are not all that God is, can give us a realistic estimate of ourselves.

We are growing in understanding. Not so long ago, most men and women of faith believed that God stood apart from His handiwork, that we (and the earth) were His handiwork, and that the distance between ourselves and our God was so great as to be unreachable. Now we know that we can have a direct knowledge of God, and this knowledge is known to us because in the age of Christ we are not so afraid of Him. His magnitude, when we were sinners caught by the ego (read “Devil”) was beyond us. We needed a Comforter to bridge the distance, and that Comforter was the Holy Spirit. Now we know that this, a holy spirit, is a part of us, and we no longer quake in our boots at the thought of approaching His majesty as just our humble selves. We know what love is, and we sense that we are loved just as we are, mistakes and all. It is awe-inspiring. And humbling at the same time.

Let God talk to you today. He is in the silence of our meditations. He will comfort our aching minds with wisdom of our hearts.

Let the heart tell us this today.

Love Is the Elixir

Rest assured, whenever you believe you have not succeeded or not completed some decision fueled by desire, it is because you were simply not wholly committed—or you decided to change your mind. And when you change your mind, you literally change what you experience in the world or the solar system in which your self spins. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 56)

Our mind does control what we experience. If we are not firmly in the driver’s seat, for God makes a difference, we have some power in our creations. If we are constantly changing our minds about what we want to experience, we will go through oscillations that seem never-ending. We will also have conflict, as one idea rubs against another.

There is a better way. We need to let desire be informed by the Holy Spirit or the Christ Mind, and if we do this, we will have a way of living that will emerge as our heart’s desire. Conflict aside, we will be well-equipped to deal with the many disturbances in our world, this world of illusory separation from God. Our way forward will be magical in a good sense, not in the lamentable way of viewing magical thoughts that A Course in Miracles describes.

Our desires fuel what we bring into our little corner of the world. And when we allow God to act in us as He would will, we know that His will and ours are inseparable. We know that we never really wanted anything but His presence in our convoluted lives. When we feel His Love, we are transported beyond ourselves, into something that offers us our dreams.

Love is the elixir. Let Love fuel the choice of our desires, and keep our will firmly rooted in the Holy Spirit or Christ Mind. God’s choices then give us a value to everyday experience that has heretofore been lacking.

And suffering is no more, for, as illusion, it retreats into mists before the sun.

Love or a Call for Love

What a depressing idea is the ego! This false idea believes that guilt can never be escaped, that sin will forever hold us bound. We find misery on the one side, misery of the ego; we join, on the other side, the Holy Spirit. Which will we choose? The Course’s particular understanding of the world must be addressed in this context.

Traditional Christian belief holds that sin is real, but that through the grace of God we can be led to forgive any evil, however black. But this part of belief has always been a particular stumbling block, because the effects of sin (pain, suffering) are first made real (by belief) and then a superhuman effort must be made to forgive.
The Course’s cosmology is different. Believing that this world is an illusory one based on madness, it does not make something real before one is asked to forgive. One forgives because everything that happens is either an expression of love or a call for love. One does not dwell on the mistake (“sin”), but quickly overlooks it, thereby not making it “real” in one’s consciousness.

A call for love begs answering, and if one in madness has done wrong, both the realization that one actually needs love, and the realization that one is mad, inspire the other to rush to her side with help and love.

Call for Love

We do not have to “decide” whether or not this or that “sin” is “worthy” of forgiveness; we know all reprehensible deeds are done from a mind slant of insanity, and done as well in a world of illusions, so our forgiveness rests on solid foundation. Not only has our brother acted out of insanity, but he has also done nothing real, nothing that will have any effect except in the world of illusions, and, without effects, it is easily forgotten even as it is forgiven. He has called for love, in whatever misguided way he might do so. Because we are One, and his need is our own, we rush to his side with that love. And so we are both saved from the illusions of our presence in a mad world made by us to keep God out. We open our consciousness to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and we are on the pathway Home.

Awaken the Christ in Each Other

We must always try to remember that we awaken the Christ in each other. Just so long as we persist in holding grievances against our brother, that is how long our deliverance will be delayed. These grievances are a “shadow” that obscures the face of Christ and the memory of God. (T-26.IX.2:2) Remember that the passage of time is not a problem, for whether we have the shadow removed now, or a hundred or a thousand years from now, for Heaven itself there is no time. It is only our own suffering that we collapse into nothingness when time is foreshortened.

Love one’s brother, however deep may be the rancor. He is our way back. Jesus says, “The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love” (T-26.IX.6:1)

God Offers Comfort

The third law of chaos affirms that God must accept His Son’s belief about what he has become, and hate him for it. This illusion seems to be humility, saying, in effect, that we are miserable sinners in need of grace. But this is actually arrogance that would seek to circumvent the Creator. Now do we dare not turn to God for comfort, because He has become our enemy. Salvation, under this law, seems actually impossible. The ego cannot help in escape from this interpretation, but the Course was made that we might choose another way.

The fourth law of chaos is that you have what you have taken from another. By his loss, we win. This illusion says that there is a finite amount of treasure in the world, and if we gain treasure, we have it because we have taken it from our brother. In its most extreme form, this law says that we must destroy our brother to save ourselves. But Jesus affirms that we can only take away from ourselves. Instead of an “enemy” having our treasure, from whom we must wrest it, we are in firm control, and it is we who would deny ourselves. The enemy does not hold our inheritance away from us—it is we who have rejected it for the dubious “values” of the ego. There is a portion of this law that believes that we act unkindly because our brother has been unkind to us—forcing us into justified attack. But all of this illusion!

Finally, the last law of chaos is that there is a substitute for genuine love. This substitute is given us by the ego when we take back from our brother what we feel is rightfully ours. This is the ego’s secret gift. This secret gift has apparently been torn from us by our brother, and must be reclaimed if we are to have the ego’s notion of salvation. Our brother, by tearing this gift from us, has kept salvation from us. This is why enmity, one to another, can be seen as salvation.

When studied carefully and dispassionately, we can see clearly that these laws of chaos do not make sense. The illusions upon which they are based can be seen as illusions, and thus identifying the “laws” that illusions have, we are in a better position to seek further for the true laws—God’s laws—creating reality. Because these laws do not make sense, we are free to discard them for something better. Therein lies our true salvation. We have used our intellect to help us out, and while intellect is never enough (love and forgiveness, emotions of the heart, are required fundamentally), it is a start. And the lack of a satisfying worldview has kept many a skeptic in his darkness. I can imagine nagging Jesus for just such an elucidation of ultimate Truth that Course provides for us. “. . .seek, and ye shall find,” ((Luke 11:9 – KJV)and the world was finally ready in 1975 (the year A Course in Miracles was published) for this new way.

The Course declares that we think we do not believe in these laws. When articulated bluntly, their insanity becomes evident. But do we believe in these laws on an unconscious level? It is only their plain statement that allows us to reject them. Normally the actual intent is well-hidden. If, when raised to the light of day, we do reject the laws of chaos, then Jesus has done us a great service. It becomes clear that these laws govern chaos (illusion), never reality. A crucial three sentences explain: “There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion.” (T-23.II.19:1-3)

Love

The way of Mary is not a place or state of non-interaction however. This is not the state or place of the monks, nuns, or the contemplatives of old. It is not solitary nor isolated, nor confined to a specific community. It is a way of existence in which relationship is paramount. It is not listening to a calling to “do” but a calling to “become.” (ACOL, D:Day19.9)

All of us will eventually move into a calling to “become.” Mary’s way. But we are not there yet. In all likelihood there will be a period of merger for both doing and being, with doing predominant in many people for a while. The more that we can accept our ultimate best choice, though, the more we will realize that “becoming” prepares us best for the future. A future in a new world that we are creating every day.

The way of Mary does not mean isolation as it did for many of the contemplatives of old. We reach out into the community, showering love wherever we go, and we thrive in this new way of being. We are not withdrawn unto ourselves at all; we take our meditative moments, and then we shower them on our friends and family, our significant others. We have learned, discovered, in meditation, what works.

We have discovered how to love.

Living as Who You Are

The ultimate accomplishment is living as who you are within the world. But in what kind of world? This is the catch that causes feelings of purposelessness in those who are content to live as who they are within the world. Until they realize the power of reflection, they wonder why they, unlike their brothers and sisters called to ‘do,’ do not have a specific part to play in establishing the world in which all are able to be content with who they are. (ACOL, D:Day19.5)

As forerunners of the way that all of us will be later on, those living in the way of Mary, of being rather than doing, will influence all of us for the better. Jesus discusses the “power of reflection,” (D:Day19.5) which is a mighty power when under the sway of being. Those of the way of Mary will influence all of us to move faster toward the time when we live in a new world. If we are called to “doing,” the individuals who are called to Mary will have the solace that they need to carry out their tasks. Mary’s way is at that point in a supportive role, though that role will not long remain just supportive.

Mary’s way is the way we will all embody later on, once the new world has been created. We will relax in this new world, content that the weariness of the old egoic way is no longer—for almost everybody. Of course, there is work still to be done, and Mary’s adherents will effect that work in the most blessed way for the new time and place. Being who we are, we will transform the whole into something much better. And Love will have made this difference.

Love

Love is not being nice when you are feeling surly. Love is not doing good deeds of charity and service. (ACOL, C:4.11)

Here we see that our preconceptions about love have been all wrong. Jesus gets right to the point: Playing nice when we are in a bad mood, “feeling surly,” fools nobody—not our brothers and sisters, not ourselves, not God. And most of all not Jesus. And our good deeds are like the “works” that St. Paul said were not sufficient for salvation; he said “not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:9, KJV)

And now Jesus is saying the same thing to us in channeled writing of the turn of the Twenty-First Century. We must be onto something important.

A Carpet of Ease

“But more than this, each time that you judge anything or anyone, you have literally elicited guilt within yourself. Because there is a place within you, yet still, that knows the perfect purity of your brother and sister, and sees quite clearly that all things within the human realm are either the extension of love or a cry for help and healing.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 3, Page 25)

All things are either love’s extension, an expression of love—or a cry for love. All things. When we fully realize this, our life will get a lot better. We have found various goals in life, but the only meaningful goal is the talent to extend love. That is all that counts.

We judge often when we don’t even realize what we are doing. We imagine that another is judgmental of us, and in that “realization” we are actually projecting, for it is we who have judged and found wanting.

If we realized the extent to which projection damns us, we would withdraw our projections and rest in God’s grace. When we imagine that another has wronged us, we are failing to see their innocence in God’s eyes. If we realize that others do the best they can, given their state of mind and heart, given their understanding, then we can know that “reality” is not the harsh master of our lives that we think. This “reality” is not reality, in fact, at all. We are living in an illusion in which it seems that others have harmed us, but in innocence we forgive them, and then we are set into a true reality of peace, joy, harmony, and grace.

Extension of love will give us all that we could ever want or desire. Extension of love will offer us a carpet of ease on which to walk. Extension of love is our saving grace.

Always and forever.

Tend Our Gardens

“Be you therefore, a wise gardener. Cultivate a deep love and respect for yourself, for you are not here to ‘fix’ the world. You are not here to ‘fix’ your brother or sister. It is only love that heals. And until you have loved yourself wholly by having purified the mind of every erroneous thought you have ever held—until you have loved yourself—you do not, in truth, love anyone or anything. Save in those brief moments when you let your guard down and the Love of God shines forth through you so quickly you do not even know what happened! The wise gardener cultivates a state of consciousness in which the Love of God is unimpeded.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 8)

What a lovely passage! We must tend our gardens, a concept that is developed by Jesus in A Course of Love. And this tending prepares our heart to love. We are not here to solve problems for others; these brothers and sisters have their own pathway, being pointed out by the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self. When we love, we mesh with others, but we don’t try to “fix” them, as Jesus says. We just calmly do the best we can, to love, and love deeply.

Cultivate our gardens today. Let the love of God shine in everything that we do, say, and even think.

Gladden Ourselves–for Jesus Is with Us

“I offer far more than partial guidance, although you do not ask for more. The uneven quality of your skill in both asking and following my direction is due to the alternations you experience between ego- and miracle-oriented perception. This is a strain, but fortunately one which can be overcome along with the rest. There will never be a time when I do not will to try again. You might be gladdened by remembering that.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.IX.10:1-5)

Jesus is once again speaking just to Helen (and maybe Bill) in this reassurance that he offers continual guidance. But if we ask, he will do the same for us. In these early words, he has not yet solidified the Holy Spirit in A Course in Miracles. Soon he will ask that all of us turn immediately to the Holy Spirit when confronted with a dilemma. The Holy Spirit connects us to God, but not in a threatened way. At this point in our progress, we are still too fearful of God to approach Him directly.

Jesus points out the strain that we under. He seems particularly aware of this strain, as we seek to mediate between hell and heaven, the ego and love. Heaven and love are the only things that we truly can want, once we have let the magnitude of our mistakes sink in. Our attempt to create unlike God, something that is actually “making” rather than “creating,” has produced all of the chaos in which we live. We need to get beyond this. We need to recognize that our attempt to create something beyond God has just failed miserably. There IS nothing beyond Him except illusion.

Jesus constantly looks for reasons that we might gladden ourselves, for he knows that we are usually morose when caught in the vines of the ego. We need just to kick those vines away from ourselves, away from our feet (as Pat Rodeway’s Emmanuel says), and be on about our business. Jesus will untangle any egoic vines that won’t automatically disengage from our toes.

Love Deeply Today

“All things work together for good. There are no exceptions, except in the ego’s judgment. The ego resents everything it does not control. Control is a central factor in what the ego permits into consciousness, and one to which it devotes its maximum vigilance. This is not the way a balanced mind holds together. Its control is unconscious.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.VII.1:1-5)

Jesus is quoting the biblical passage, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” But in his quote, he makes no provisos: ALL things work together for good. He continues, “There are no exceptions.”

This biblical verse gave me much comfort when I was in my teens, just after hearing a sermon on the topic. Now it can do the same for us at any age. We want a balanced mind, and if we keep in mind that all works together for good, we will stop much discouragement in its tracks.

A balanced mind is controlled only by its unconscious; no effort at getting and retaining control on a conscious level is needed at all.

Does this tell us how easy salvation really is? Here we listen to the Holy Spirit (or the Christ-Self), and we do what guidance has prompted. Our mind then soon becomes clear in every predicament, with the next step, and then the next, and the next, pointed out to us in certain fashion.

Pray for a balanced mind today. Our mind is very precious to God, and we have let it be taken over by an insanity, the ego that arose because we didn’t know how else to counter fear. If we love deeply, love enough, fear will leave us.

Love deeply today.

Einstein: “Is the Universe Friendly?”

“Again I tell you that when you are afraid, be still and know that God is real and you are His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. Do not let your ego dispute this, because the ego cannot know what is as far beyond its reach as you are. God is not the author of fear. You are. You have willed, therefore, to create unlike Him, and have made fear for yourself.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.II.18:1-5)

Yes, we made fear. What other emotion were possible when we thought that we were a teeny point in the universe, cut off from all the rest? Would that not be reason enough to be afraid?

Know that this mirage is just that—an illusion made of nothing. When we know that we are merged with the cosmos, melted together in love, we will know that we are not and have never been alone, solitary creatures that had to make it on our own. We have a Guide, the Holy Spirit, Who will metaphorically take us by the hand and lead us back from whence we came. He will take us into heaven, when the time is ripe. And God Himself will transform us, when we are ready, by something called the “Awakening.” When this transformation happens, we will know that whether the time for us on earth is short or long, we are accepted and beloved children of God who can know bliss anywhere. Because God is everywhere.

Drop the ego, and when we do this, we will know far more than beforehand. We will know that fear is easily avoided in a universe that is cooperative, with all beings sharing in the glorious Light of the Creator. We live in a friendly universe, what Einstein queried: “Do we live in a friendly universe?”.

This query is one of the most important, if not the most important, queries we could ever have.

When we can certainly answer in the affirmative, our worries are behind us.

Jesus: “I Have Made Every Effort to Teach You Entirely without Fear”

“The role of a teacher, properly conceived, is one of leading himself and others out of the desert. The value of this role can hardly be underestimated, if only because it was one to which I very gladly dedicated my own life. I have repeatedly asked my pupils to follow me. This means that, to be effective teachers, they must interpret teaching as I do. I have made every effort to teach you entirely without fear. If you do not listen, you will be unable to avoid the very obvious error of perceiving teaching as a threat.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-3.IX.6:1-6)

When we perceive teaching as a threat, we are living in fear. This is the exact opposite of what Jesus hopes for us, the exact opposite of what he intends. His words, when considered rightly, envelop us in a sense of love. We do not have to “accept” him for this to be true, but we do need to open our mind and open our heart, at least ever so slightly. When we live in harmony with love, we appreciate the truth in teaching, and we can become good teachers ourselves. No other way, no way other than love, can do this for us.

We are still making our way tentatively out of fear. There will be missteps, of course, but the way is still upward, toward love, away from fear. We are blessed by the channeled writings of Jesus. When we reflect on how we accept these teachings, we will realize that his love for us has been palpable. The love has drawn us in. And there is no better way to set our foot on the pathway back to God than to realize that a loving brother is leading us by the hand.

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.

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.

More on Miracles

“The miracles you are told not to perform have not lost their value. They are still expressions of your own state of grace. But the action aspect of the miracle should be Christ-controlled, because of His complete awareness of the whole plan.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-1.45.3:1-3)

When we sense love for another, that awareness of love may lead us to want to express love right away. An expression of love is the definition given to miracles. But we don’t always make the best decisions about performing miracles. We may feel love, but maybe right now is not a propitious time to express that love. So we must ask. Always ask; we will be answered by guidance, often in the form of a deep awareness or an intuition.

This quotation talks about “Christ” control, and by this Jesus may be meaning something more than just himself. He may be meaning the Christ soul that inhabits all of us, deep inside. A Course of Love says more about the inner Christ-Self. It is a manifestation of God Himself/Herself, found within each of us. It becomes our way to know when we have moved beyond the Holy Spirit as intermediary, and we wish to contact God directly.

When we know by guidance, we are tapping into knowledge of the whole plan. And knowing the whole plan is vitally important. It is the way that we stay in harmony with all of God’s creation, this world and worlds beyond. At its simplest, it is cooperation rather than competition, and it assures us that we are on the beam. It never asks us to stand independently, for the desire for psychic autonomy is left over from our ego. Our ego would like us to strive mightily to be independent, but independence is not the way. Interdependence is. We are with others on this plane for a reason; we are meant to join with our brothers and sisters to create a viable world, shorn of misdirected impulses of those who turn from God.

So: Ask what miracles we are to perform. Let love be expressed where it will do the most good, succeed better than at any other time or place. An expression of love is always good, but this may sometimes need to be an internal matter, not moving into the external realm outside one’s mind and heart.

An Endless Quest for Love’s Expression Is Eternity Itself

“What will there be to strive for? What quest will replace this quest for being? The quest for love’s expression—the quest to see, experience, and share, as many of love’s expressions as the world needs to be returned, along with you, to its own Self.

“Does this seem like a long and harrowing road? An endless quest? An endless quest for love’s expression is eternity itself.

“Be happy that there is no end in sight to this road you travel now. It is simply the road of what is endlessly creating like unto itself.

“You now know how to respond to love, for you are love, being. So be it.” (ACOL, E.27 – E.30)

So here is what we are about: an expression of love for all eternity. We need to be sure that we listen to these beautiful words in the quotation from A Course of Love, for love is a much-maligned word that promises more than we realize. It promises us everything, and everything is what A Course in Miracles says that we really want. We won’t ever be satisfied with separating a small segment of reality, and saying that we will be satisfied with that; we won’t be. And everything is ours, that is the beauty of it.

If we have wondered the purpose of our being, our very existence, then here we have the answer: an expression of love carried out through all eternity. If we think we don’t know how to do that, then we need to look within, where all expressions of love emanate. We will discover what it is we have been missing in our own little expressions of love. For the first time, looking within, we will see what Love really is all about.

Love is not just an emotion, but an attribute of universal consciousness. Our consciousness with God, Whom we all know to be Love through and through. We get ourselves tangled up when we imagine that all love is, is a feeling. Love is much more than that. As an attribute of consciousness, Love gave us our very Self. And the inner Christ-Self, now a knowing being, knows what it is to love. Let out of our depths, the Christ-Self wanders about a world, seeing with new eyes, our new eyes.

If we drop into low emotions, then let us rise up from that mire to new heights, knowing that all, all that we really have to do is love. This is not a mindless love, and certainly it is not a special love. On the contrary, it is a holy love felt with all our mind and heart, in wholeheartedness (as A Course of Love says).

Feel this holy love today. Don’t let anything hold us back from expressing the best that we have in us, and that, of course, is Love.

Dear God,

As we face a new year with new beginnings, let us leave not out Love that You show to us. You are showing us how to love with every right thought/action that we take. And we are discovering with a master, Jesus himself, who has channeled works such as ACIM and ACOL for our benefit. Be with us as we seek to keep an uplifted affect in this new year. There is no reason to be down about the state of the world, for we, as newly enlightened beings, have the power to effect real change, even unto creating a new world.

Thank You for warming me with Your Presence. May I be thankful that You are always living through me, expressing love as I will best allow.

Amen.

We Are Pure Love

“You have returned to your true nature. Perhaps you will remember that within A Course of Love you were once asked to “Imagine the ocean or the cheetah, the sun or the moon or God Himself, attempting to learn what they are. They are the same as you. All exist within you. You are the universe itself.” (ACOL, E.4)

We are love personified. The only problem is that we just don’t realize it, and we make all kinds of problems for ourselves by being less than we are. It is such a pity!

But there is a way back to what we once were, and lost our way a little while. A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love give us the way. We turn away from the ego, regardless of what it still tries to tell us, and we form a new and more stable identity, a Christ-Self Who has been waiting for us to recognize Itself. We need to take ourselves in hand and realize the wonder of it all. Pure love: That is what we are!

If we don’t recognize this, we are still lost in dreams, still in illusion rather than true reality. And we ought to do what we can to move into true reality, and the sooner, the better.

Dear God,

The wonder of love is a blessing indeed. Thank You! And this love is what I am, what all of us are. May we relax in Your care and realize that coming home to You is easy. We just don’t fight the inevitable any longer, and coming home to You is the inevitable. We haven’t been happy in separation; it is time to try something new.

Help us to form this new identity of solid love that You have planned for us. Let the wonder of Your Being enfold us today. And maybe I do my part to make it so.

Amen.

See Love Afresh

“I did not make you in my image. I created you in love because it is the nature of a being of love to extend. Realize that it is only when being is added to love—only when love is in relationship with being—that love is given its nature. Realize that it is only when love is in relationship with being that it attains this quality that we are calling extension.” (ACOL, D:Day40.4)

Jesus is talking about a mystical creation here, that he, joined with God in all fullness, “created” us in love. He has in mind and heart an understanding of being that is true and good, and far better than what you and I made in egotic misdeeds. Jesus’ understanding of us is of beings who live in extension from God Himself/Herself, being part of His/Her Being.

Thus we differ from the image that is Jesus. In other words, his persona/personality is uniquely his, as ours is our own as well. We all are unique, distinct entities who share the personhood of the Deity. We thus have a God Who lives through us. His Being limitless, and ours is restricted, but we can intuit what He knows simply by asking. Often we will receive an Answer, and we will know the Source of the Answer because it will always ring true. Our inner Self, one with God, will know that what we are “hearing” is true.

Ask for more understanding, a better knowledge of what is what. None of us is meant to live in befuddlement. Ask, and we truly will receive. God does not keep secrets from His beloved children.

Love has been so talked about by every religion and every religious leader that to talk about it more falls a little flat. When we open our minds and hearts to what exactly is being said, we will comprehend with a knowing that makes the idea of love fresh. With the idea of a fresh love, we are finally getting the message, said so long ago and so often throughout the years.

Dear God,

I ask to have a fresh understanding of love today. I don’t want a hackneyed understanding, something that will seem too old to be meaningful. I ask to see with fresh eyes, non-physical vision. Only then will I truly see what I am asking to see.

Thank You for Your patience with me. It must get very wearing to see Your children so constantly going astray. I am attributing human qualities to You, and this helps me to understand how I would feel. In your limitless Being, You see All, and this gives you total patience with our foibles.

Amen.

Love “Enough”

“What must occur now must occur between you and me. Your willing¬ness is all that is required.

“Let me tell you what has occurred in the past so that you know not to respond to love in the same way again.

“Who I have been to you is who you have been to yourself. Remember the idea of projection. This is what projection does. It projects outward. It is different from extension in that extension is like a projection that remains at one with its source. Projection separates.” (ACOL, D:Day39.15 – Day39.17)

We are being asked to compare what we have thought about Jesus in the past with what we think about him now. He doesn’t want us to build too much on our Christian tradition, for he has repeatedly said that he is equal to us, that we are The Accomplished. Of course, we may not believe this, or, at the least, we don’t understand it.

But say it he has. And it merits our careful consideration.

If we have read this far in A Course of Love, we know that Jesus is asking us to form a personal relationship with him, a belief that will entail a suspension of disbelief—for we must realize that, as spirit, he can focus his consciousness anywhere and everywhere at once.

It is hard to suspect disbelief this much. Let just a crack in. It might be true.

We know that Jesus asked us earlier to request a miracle. We might or might not have taken him up on his request, not for a specific miracle (he says this), but for the miracle-mindedness that is our birthright. The “art of thought” is how he describes what he is after for us. We need, in other words, to live in a state of readiness for miracles all the time, to live in a state of believing that the numinous pervades our lives and our world. Is this really so hard to believe, when we believe that all of us are a part of God Himself/Herself?

We are seeking to have extension in our lives, not projection. So our previous ideas of Jesus’s presence may have been wrong or misguided. Now we know that we have projected our beliefs onto him. Now he would have us love him in a more mature and more accurate image. If we extend what we know of love to him, we will be on the right track. Love, as always, is the great panacea.

Dear God,

I would seek to love more deeply today. You know that I have a question in my heart for which I request a quick Answer, from You. Perhaps you are telling me that if I love enough, I will get along very well indeed. That is my hope.

Guide me to love enough, although Jesus says in A Course of Love that we often think that one can love too much or too little, but never enough. But I would think differently today. I would love with my whole heart—enough!

Thank You for guiding my thoughts this day.

Amen.

Only the Loving Gesture Really Works

“You keep striving for differentiation in a way that simply will not work—through separation! And what’s more, you keep striving for differentiation while wanting to continue a certain reliance. Your differentiation from the being of God can only come through the relationship and unity that you would deny in your quest for separation! This would be like demanding to be a body and not a mind! Your reliance on God can only come through the relationship and unity that you would deny in your quest for separation! This would be like demanding that the mind send the body the signals it needs while proclaiming their separation.” (ACOL, D:Day37.8)

Woe unto to us who continue to choose separation from God! Sometimes we think that if we follow God’s Will (really our true will as well) we will be coerced into doing things that we don’t want to do. At such times, we don’t trust God to have our best interests at heart. Old ideas of a punitive god die hard. And that is just what we have in our minds—a punitive god who demands sacrifice at the cost of our good living.

Many of us have had faulty images of God in the past. The time is now upon us to love a God Who is more mature and more accepting of us than we have ever imagined. His desires for humankind are benign, not directive except to let us know that only the loving gesture really works. We do exert our free will, sometimes disastrously, and He doesn’t step in to call a halt, even to horrific things. And we blame Him for this. Instead, we ought to blame ourselves, and our society and culture, for failing each other. When we blame God for not intervening, we ask Him to sacrifice the truth of His creation. Free will is among His greatest gifts, and to intervene in our violent deeds is to ask Him to meddle in a creation that He would set free.

Violence is not of God. Evil is not of God. He knows that regardless of the forms that we use, we are either expressing love or calling for love. Regardless of the form that we use. Without exception.

Ask to be more loving today to those in our circles, our brothers and sisters near and far. It is only when we reach the tipping point in our societies and cultures with more of us choosing the expression of love than not, then and only then will we truly be saved from ourselves.

Dear God,

Guide me today to express only love in my dealings with other people. This may mean that I need to call a halt to a quick retort, remain silent when I want to speak, or (contrariwise), speak up when I would prefer to remain silent. You know what I can best do. You know me through and through. Take charge of me as You live through me. Don’t let a divided self seek to stand.

Thank You for guiding my thoughts today, for it is from my thoughts, the thoughts of my heart, that I will discover how best to be a friend to all.

Amen.

There Is Nothing Worth Doing except Loving

“Unity is oneness of being. Relationship is different expressions of oneness of being.

“Being a creator must begin with full realization of oneness of being, which is unity, because without this full realization the potential exists for conditions other than love to exist. It should not take much consideration to know that to create from anything but love could have disastrous effects. This has been seen time and time again as you have “created” in separation.” (ACOL, D:Day35.13 – Day35.14)

We have made a mess of things in our world. We have not let Love take the lead.

Now we have another chance, for we know (like The Way of Mastery says, another channeled work believed to be channeled by Jesus) that there is nothing else worth doing than loving. Of course, even in our secular world, we recognize “tough love,” and so nobody, lest of all Jesus, is recommending that we become victims of hostile individuals. Yet just moving into a situation with the intention of doing the loving thing will break down barriers of defensive postures. We can make a difference in Love. The problem is that we have never really tried Love, though all religious leaders have advocated it.

When we are united with God, He gives us ideas about what to say, do, think. It is when we think that we are unjustified in His sight that we turn on ourselves and seek to find out what we would do if truly apart from Him. But we are not apart from Him, never have been. Let His gentle whispers of the next step move us in a new and different direction. Let Love inform all of our decisions.

We have created differently from what Love would say. This is the bottom rung of our ladder of mis-thought, a ladder that rises to a metaphorical Tower of Babel. Let us give up such nonsense forthwith. We garble our words when we don’t communicate in love.

We need to be joined in harmony, and Love is the only harmony that truly and decisively works.

All the time.

Dear God,

I would be gentle and harmonious today, and let the experiences of today inform my tomorrows. I would sometimes take the role of follower in my interactions, not saying the harsh thing, not asserting my authority. Love speaks this way sometimes. Does it really matter if we are always right? Isn’t happiness the better choice? And doesn’t our own choice for happiness make for a better world, in our circle of friends and family, and even in the larger world.

Thank You for giving me the blessing of Your Presence, the sense of closeness that on which I have come to rely. Thank You for my intuitive sense of what I think is the next right action.

Amen.

Loving in a New State of Being

“This is what we move toward as we practice participating in two levels of experience simultaneously. We practice experiencing the constant and the variable as one. We practice experiencing the constant and the variable together. We practice in order to move toward an experience of variability within wholeness rather than within separation. It can be done.

“Life, your humanity, is the variability. Spirit, your oneness, is the constant. Life is oneness extended into separation and variability through experience. The elevated Self of form will be the expression of new life lived within the constant of wholeness but continuing to experience the variability of separation. This is what you practice as you gather on the mountain top while remaining on level ground.” (ACOL, D:Day27.14 – 27.15)

What will life be like, on earth, in form, but knowing the Oneness of Christ-consciousness and therefore being the elevated Self of form? We will be discrete beings, of course, but we will feel the unity of sharing with our brothers and sisters in a way that we have never heretofore experienced. In the egoic state of mind, we thought that we had to be competition with other people, and we did not often see them as the brothers and sisters whom they are.

Now, we know better. No longer in competition, we are in cooperation, for sharing is the hallmark of our new state of being, and sharing is cooperation. We love better, of course, more deeply and more people. Our horizons have widened. Before, we chose a certain few, an ever-varying certain few, to love. Now we know that special love is inferior, and we seek to expand our love to all with whom we come in contact.

This does not mean physical promiscuity, of course. This is not what is being described when we say “love.” Our love may, according to A Course of Love, include much physical expression with our nearest and dearest significant other, but love has a mystical component that elevates our experiences above simply the physical. We love deeply in Christ-consciousness, and we love well. We don’t employ guilt in our relationship any longer, for guilt undoes everything. Our dramatic highs and lows, so prevalent during egotism, have smoothed out in Christ-consciousness. Often we are perfectly calm and quiet.

We share, we experience deep love, and we grow together as we create a new world. Ever-expanding into a new life, we derive our stability from our relationship to God, the Self of Whom we are a part.

Dear God,

I look forward to the future, but first I live in the present, very, very deeply. I enjoy the others who cross my path. This way that You have pointed out to me, through Jesus, is good indeed.

Thank You for the insights. I would draw them close to my heart today.

Amen.

Love Visible & Livable

“Both the self and the relationship of self to all must become known in order for the paradise that has been re-found to be recreated for everyone. What else would life be for but to make the invisible paradise of love visible and livable for all?” (ACOL, D:Day18.12)

A paradise of love visible to all! So this is what life on earth is really meant to accomplish! Our walk along the pathway that I often mention is for a truly laudable goal. And we seek to make this goal that is ultimate salvation possible for all. This means, basically, that Christ-consciousness will be available, sooner than rather later, for everyone. We can remove blocks to the awareness of love, though it is definitely God who makes the decision of when enlightenment will come to each one of us.

The self and the relationship of self to all is the meaning of the fact that the inner Christ-Self joins with the larger Self Who is God in everyone and everything, a relationship to the All. God is known, actually, in relationship, whether it is an inner knowing and relationship to our depths, or an outer knowing, and relationship with our brothers and sisters. Relationship is actually how the Godhead knows Himself in all His majesty as well. An undifferentiated Self, homogenous, would not allowing the knowing that even He wants. So we have the creation of individual entities who make up the Whole. And God knows Himself by living through all entities.

These metaphysical concepts don’t need to hold us back. If they are helpful, that is good, but actually our faith can and might be built on something much simpler. An intuitive knowing of God. When we reach deeply within, we feel the sustenance of the Godhead, and the comfort that emanates from being at one with Him. This brings forth a warmth that is a love not of this world. And in the apprehension of this love we are saved.

Let God speak to us today. Let Him get His guidance in the forefront of our minds and hearts. There will be no turning back when we have really experienced God as a factor in our lives that makes sense of the whole.

Dear God,

You give me a safety like nothing else. When I turn to You in humility and in dependence, You speak to me in the depths of my feeling soul. This intuition then colors everything. And I am never afraid when I sense Your nearness.

Thank You for my many blessings today. Surprises abound that are good, just today. And it is in the living out of the life You have given me that I find value.

Amen.

Remove the Blocks to Love’s Awareness

“There have always been individuals who challenged the predominant patterns of learning because of the strength of their connection to Christ-consciousness. While no one has more access to Christ-consciousness than another, some exhibited more willingness to let that consciousness be their guiding force—that by which their being gained movement and expression. Those like Jesus, who fully expressed Christ-consciousness in form, did so as individuals, by not negating their being as they realized this connection. Many others with realization of Christ-consciousness as strong as that of the man, Jesus, did not express that realization but negated the individual in favor of the “spiritual.” (ACOL, D:Day17.5)

We are not to negate our individual self, our wants and needs, in trying to become something that we really can’t, anyway: “spiritual” in the sense, I think, that we become self-righteous. Self-righteousness is always a mistake; it is not a mistake any larger or grander than any other, or any harder to counter. Jesus will answer our needs, and if we have veered into the self-righteous, the false “spiritual,” then he will see that the mistake gets corrected. There is nothing to fear, now or ever.

There have always, we are told, been individuals who let Christ-consciousness become a guiding force, and this is apparently before Christ-consciousness took them over as their predominant frame of mind. Now we are living anew, and Christ-consciousness is available to more and more of us. Jesus hopes that we will sustain this new place in our psyche. Sustenance of Christ-consciousness in affected people is the great need of our world today.

Remember that to reach the point of being Christ-conscious, one must remove blocks to love’s awareness. These blocks are mentioned at the very beginning of A Course in Miracles, which was the predecessor of A Course of Love. These blocks will keep us from our desires. They will keep us from welcoming God back into His place as central to our lives. We must not let this happen. We must fall in line with God’s directives and let Him place enlightenment foremost in our minds and hearts.

Jesus did it right in his lifetime. Now he is seeking to guide us to “do it right.” Let him.

Dear God,

I would listen to your words and possibly the words of Jesus: “Please take notes.” I immediately went to my laptop computer, opened this document, and started typing. I was conscious of a Higher Power at work in my work. Thank You.

Be with me to allow me access to a greater Mind and Heart. I would open my heart today to You, feel Your warmth (as always), and join in thanksgiving that You love me enough to guide me truly.

Amen.

Safely Embraced by Love

“You have no feelings that are bad. Fear is not a feeling but a response to a feeling. Emotions are responses. You have been told there are but two emotions, love and fear. What this is really saying is that there are but two ways to respond to what you feel—with love or with fear. If you respond with fear you expel, project, and separate. If you respond with love you remain whole. You realize that you have no feelings that are bad. You embrace sadness, grief, anger, and all else that you feel because these feelings are part of who you are in the present moment. When you remain in the present moment you remain within Christ-consciousness where all that is exists in harmony. To embrace is the opposite of to escape. (ACOL, D:Day16.10)

We are meant to embrace our emotions, for none of our emotions are “bad.” We respond to love or to fear, and what we respond to determines our experience in this world. We are attracting either love or fear in every moment. Let us make the decision that we will reach out only for love, that we will feel that it is ours in every instance, and that we are safe in the love that has been brought to us. This safety, or feeling of safety, is important. If we feel unsafe, we will naturally feel fear, and then more fearful thoughts will engulf us, for we have sent out a beam of thought that promotes fear.

If we are sad, we are not necessarily in fear. We are often subsumed, at such times, in love, for is it not well-known that much of the adolescent angst that engulfs our young people is based in their attraction to the love they find in their relationships? And when these relationships fail, as they often do, sadness is the result. But not necessarily fear. Fear and sadness do not compute to be the same.

We need to respond to what we feel with love, and then more loving thoughts will come to us, will multiply. We need to turn aside from fearful thoughts in order that they don’t multiply. Our way back to God depends on this. Our way back is not fearful, for the path to enlightenment in A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love is gentle. We are not hurled into reality. We walk ahead peacefully and easily.

When we love, we are walking in God’s way. And this can bring nothing but good to us.

Dear God,

I reach out to the cosmos with love today. I reach out to You with love today. Be with me to keep me on the beam of love, never veering into fearful thoughts. When I veer into fretful and fearful thoughts, I call more like thoughts to myself, and then life suddenly looks bad. I would not sabotage myself today.

Thank You for the dawning of a new day, a day fraught with promise. May You guide me, patiently, alon the pathway that You would have me walk.

Amen.

Holding All within the Heart of Love

“Thus holding the loveless self within the spacious Self of love is the answer to the question of evil and the final lifting of the last veils of fear.

“The same is true of all you would fear, such as the suffering self. A suffering self, held within the spacious Self, exists in harmony with the spacious Self. Attempts to eject the self of suffering from the spacious Self create disharmony. It is only by this holding within that the loveless self and the suffering self are rendered ineffective. It is only in this way that you realize that all exist within. It is only in this way that you become completely fearless and totally spacious, for fear is part of the density of form, being a lack of love.” (ACOL, D:Day13.6 – Day13.7)

Jesus here gives us an answer to suffering; we hold it with the self of love. When we hold the suffering self within the self of love, in the heart of love, the suffering self is rendered ineffective. Pain may continue to exist, but we never –never—have to escalate our pain into suffering. It takes great patience and much understanding to effect this ideal, but it is within the power of all of us. Pain may become severe, but most often it is the emotional component of “Why me?” that lands us squarely into suffering. There is no answer on this earth to the problem of “Why me?” Our limited mind and heart cannot fathom an answer that would make sense. But of one thing we can be certain: Any interpretation that we give to suffering that makes of God something less than loving is a false concept.

The loveless self, a self that includes ourselves part of the time, as well as our brothers and sisters, needs only to be encompassed by a holding within. Jesus calls this self within, the “spacious” Self. It is a Self who is big enough to encompass good and bad, right and wrong, and all things in between. This spacious Self is our real inner Christ-Self coming into all its glory. When we know that anything bad can be rendered ineffective by a “holding within,” then we have no reason to indulge in fruitless worry and abject fears anymore. The same for judgment, also forbidden by A Course of Love. We are big enough to embrace the whole of reality—true reality. And this true reality is always loving, and, indeed, Love itself. In true reality we are embraced by a warmth that is not of this world. And everything we face easily becomes easier to face and harmless in its outcome.

Dear God,

I would grow so large today that all of my worries, fears, judgments, would be subsumed in the glory that Jesus wishes for me. For all of us. This is my spacious Self, newly born on earth, as I move ever closer to an elevated Self. In my physical form, I can fear many things, but my elevated form fears nothing. And that, dear God, is where I am heading.

Thank You for being with me so closely these days. I sense Your warmth. You invite my larger Self to inform the ideas I have in my head. May my heart warm so much that Your warmth never leaves me.

Amen.

Our Love Is the Love of God

“The love that is found in the relationships of the one Self with the many is the love of God. There is no other love. God’s love is constantly being given, received, and felt in relationship. God’s love is your love. Your love is the love of God. God is love.

“Thus is explained the relationships and the forms emptied of love. Where there is no love there is no God present. Where there is no love there is a lack of godliness or what you have defined as evil. A complete lack of love creates formidable obstacles, or in other words, obstacles of solid form that contain no spaciousness. Solid form is actually a void, a substance devoid of spacious-ness, a form that is form only. These forms are still encompassed by the loving space of Christ-consciousness and thus are easily rendered ineffective.” (ACOL, D:Day13.4 – Day13.5)

We are completely surrounded and taken up with the love of God—when we allow it. If love is not present, Jesus explains in theology unique to A Course of Love that this solid form resulting needs to be taken up by the “loving space of Christ-consciousness” and thus “easily rendered ineffective.” This is how, in ACOL terms, evil is overcome with love.

We do not, therefore, have to retain our fears about the nature of evil. Love always overcomes the lack of love, or the evil that some individuals still insist on maintaining. If we are ourselves truly “right with the Lord,” we have nothing to fear from the machinations of those who don’t follow the way of Heaven. The way of God. No harm is ultimately done at all. This follows the injunctions of A Course in Miracles, in which all of us are seen as innocent. Our misdeeds have been done in illusion, and thus have no meaning apart from the illusion of reality in which we find ourselves.

True reality—the experience of love and its characteristics of harmony, peace, joy—comes to us when we have finally put aside our fear and judgment and let God Himself transform our being into a being of light, a Christ-conscious being who walks this earth with good will toward all. Even the most “evil” appearing individual still left on this earth. The Christ-conscious know that there is nothing that can be done that will harm his/her entity. Even the loss of life is not bad, for we simply move from our form into our ethereal form on the Other Side. Harming the body is harming the illusion of a body, in my opinion. So nothing has really been done to us at all.

Love does overcome all barriers to its complete and total experience by any one of us. Love is not said by Jesus to “conquer,” though, for we are not in a war. We are gently and peaceably led by the hand to a new reality, our true reality, in which Love (with a capital “L”) is all that we will experience. Nobody’s “evil” deeds can touch us here in this new reality.

Dear God,

Help me to be afraid of nobody. I would still protect myself by not walking down dark pathways at night. But I would not obsess about it. I would know that no hand can touch me that You have not allowed to touch. You know best, and one of the things that You know best is that fear and judgment are not a part of Your world.

Thank You for guiding me, ever so gently, to a peaceful, mellow day. A glimpse of a better world. Such has been my experience today. And I much appreciate the truth of what You have shown me today.

Amen.

We Invite Love

“The elevation of the self of form is nothing but the recognition of the One Self within the Self.

“The One Self exists within the many in order to know Its Self through sharing in union and relationship.

“All the benefits you might want to bring to the world are brought about in only one way: The way of sharing in union and relationship. It is only in relationship that the oneness of the self separates from oneness and so knows oneness. It is only through the means of separate relationships joining in union that the One Self is capable of being either the observer or the observed. This is as true of God as it is of the self of form. God is the oneness and the separation. Life is the relationship. God is what is. Life is the relationship of what is with Its Self.” (ACOL, D:Day11.3 – Day11.5)

If the Self has seemed to be a confusing concept to us, Jesus clears it up today. Reread the quotation. Let the words sink in.

God is the One, the All, but in order to know Himself, He had to differentiate into relationship. The Whole made up of the parts. He is the Self, divided into discrete parts, all of which, like a hologram, contain the whole.

When we become aware of the Self, we become aware of love, but Love with a capital “L.” We are inundated with Love. It forms the bedrock of our experience. This is when God is very real to us. Our Self, a part of God, reaches out to our brothers and sisters in relationship, and we have the best of what life, our life, can offer.

The quotation today gets into the theology of A Course of Love. It explains, much as does Neale Donald Walsch in his Conversations with God, how the One had to divide itself into relationships to discrete others to actually know anything. This is not understandable, I feel, to our finite minds. But when we read Jesus’s words, they have the ring of truth for us. They have the ring of truth for everyone.

So: Reach out in love today. Let God’s felt Presence overwhelm our heart, and with that will come a non-neurotic need to express the Love that we feel within.

This is the way back. As well as the best way to live.

Dear God,

I would sense Your Presence today, today and every day. When I sense Your love for me, I am opened up to love myself, and then I want to share this all-encompassing love with my brothers and sisters. Help me to do that. But never let me forget that I am never isolated, that You are always inside me, in my interior, healing and helping.

Thank You for leading me to a greater tomorrow. I sense it. I appreciate it.

Amen.

Love Is on the Horizon

“You are not separate now from who you will be when you reach comple¬tion! You are in and within the relationship of creation in which created and creator become one.” (ACOL, D:Day6.12)

So often we focus on what is amiss in our lives. And the focus itself makes us feel worse and limits our experience of the Christ in us. We are already possessed of the inner Christ-Self, and it is this Self who reaches deep within to God, for this Self is a part of Him. And it is this Christ-Self who gives us glimpses of Awakening, glimpses that feed our soul and let us know what is on the horizon, in just a little bit—sustainability of these thoughts and feelings, a sustenance of Christ-consciousness.

When we focus on what is amiss, we limit ourselves. Not only do we feel demoralized, but we limit the process by which we prepare for enlightenment. We actually need only remove the blocks to Love’s awareness, as Jesus has emphasized many times in A Course of Love, and in removing the blocks, we uncover what we are really seeking. What we are really seeking is an ongoing experience of Love, and by feeding our loving thoughts, and turning aside from what has been amiss, we enjoy the rich moments that Love can bring to us. We experience Love, and in this experience we have the grandest experience known to humankind. Jesus tells us in The Way of Mastery that he loves for he has discovered that it is the only thing WORTH doing. It is the same for us. Loving is the only thing that is worth doing.

We will know that Love is everything when we eschew thoughts of attack and being attacked. If we recognize that this type of behavior is just pure insanity, we will not be tempted to fail to forgive when confronted with someone who is simply in a bad mood, a mood that will be temporary, easily over, and soon forgotten—when we forgive. The attack that so accompanies the ego (and truly is its most significant characteristic) can be forgotten and forgiven when we realize that this is simply a passing manifestation of madness. And all of us—all of us who have not reached Christ-consciousness—are mad to a degree.

How do we remove the blocks to love’s awareness without obsessing about what is amiss? Well, we can’t entirely. But we need to look at the second part of that directive, “love’s awareness,” not overlooking that if we have to have obsessions, Love is what we ought to be concerned about. The awareness of love will take us far, farther and faster than we might have hoped.

We are no longer totally mad. We, all of us reading these words, have had glimpses of God’s bounty for us. And those glimpses will elongate and eventually become permanent fixtures for us. When we have understood that Love is only thing worth doing, the only thing worth having. Our solitary time spent with God and our inner Christ-Self will show us this.

Spend time alone today with God. Let Him speak to our very real needs.

Dear God,

Thank You for leading me to understand that focusing on what is amiss, to the exclusion of what is right (Love), will get me nowhere fast. May I focus on Your Love today. May I realize that removing blocks to love does not have to become an obsession with blocks. It can become a true understanding of what Love is all about.

Be with me to refocus my thoughts on the positive. Be with me as I seek Your counsel always.

Thank You.

Amen.

True Love Knows No Bounds

“You are in continual relationship with the air you breathe and in continual relation¬ship with unity. It is a constant exchange. When you are fully aware of this is when full access is attained. So we will continue our work now in releasing you from those things that would still block your full awareness.” (ACOL, D:Day5.26)

Our awareness of our true Self is the focus of Jesus’s words now. He says here, in this quotation for today, that we are in continual relationship with unity, and this unity would be a union with our true Self, a Self who is ultimately merged with God Himself. Maybe we don’t understand this yet, but Jesus does. Do we trust him to tell it like it is?

We will know more than glimpses of unity when we have sustained Christ-consciousness. Removing the blocks to this accomplishment (though not an accomplishment in egoic terms) is what we are about now.

How do we come to love more? And more deeply? We need to realize that our attack and anger, our fear and judgment, mar the picture. We need to discover that love is an all-encompassing attitude of mind and heart, one that takes u to be a better place than we have known heretofore. Love is not JUST an emotion; it is the very stuff of Life, the stuff of God. This Love is actually an energy, though we do not often recognize it as such. Opening the mind and heart to this reality will actually energize us to the fact of all-encompassing Love.

Be gentle with ourselves if we don’t fully comprehend Love’s benefits now. We don’t love because it is a good thing to do, of course. That is using the mind alone. When our heart gets involved, we love because there is nothing else worth doing, nothing else that we would choose to do. But we are drawn by this Love, not with our mind but with our heart. The pull of Love is overwhelming, and when we have loosened our hold on the things of this world, we will open to Love and let it bring us good tidings of great joy, joy that has previously been unfelt in our experience.

Dear God,

I loose the things of this world from their hold on me—and I do it today. I would sense the Love from You that is all-abiding. The grandeur that You have given my Self, my soul. This doesn’t bring up egoic longings, for all of us on the pathway of A Course of Love have reached beyond this now. I ask today to be overwhelmed by Your Presence and Your gift of Love.

Thank You.

Amen.

Invite Fervent Love

“You must realize that here is where fear must be totally replaced by love. If you fear to go where the portal of access will take you, you will not go. Thus your desire needs to be greater than your fear. Love needs to reign. Love of self and love of your brothers and sisters, love of the natural world, of the world of form that is, love of the idea of the new world that can be, all of these must come together and be victors over the reign of fear.” (ACOL, D:Day4.38)

God would not have chosen Love as the overwhelmingly best feeling in all universes if He hadn’t known that in no other way would His creation work. We are drawn by Love, drawn from the deepest depths of the ego and the most violently bad deeds we have ever done. Love speaks to us as nothing else can. Regardless of what we have embodied in the past, all of us have felt the mesmerizing effect of a genuine, overshadowing Love. It is this emotion that we need to woo now. It is this emotion that will save us from ourselves.

So sit or lie still for a while, and invite Love to come into our heart. The heart will reach out to the mind. And soon this powerful emotion of Love will transform even the worst day into something grand. We can discover how to love, even when we have been resistant all our lives. When we consider the alternatives, we know that Love with a capital “L” is all that we have really longed to have. And it is this Love that will take us home.

Dear God,

Enfold me in Your arms now, and forever. So melt my heart that I want nothing but the Love that You pour out upon me. May this fervent prayer reach Your heart today, and from heart to heart, I will know the depth of Love that You offer.

Amen.

Miracles = Expressions of Love

“Abundance is the natural state of unity and thus your natural state, just as certainty rather than uncertainty is your natural state, just as joy rather than sorrow is your natural state. What you are being asked to do here, is to open the self of form to the place of unity, thus allowing this divine flow of union into the elevated Self of form.” (ACOL, D:Day3.44)

What this quotation says is the way of the future: We open our bodies, with the elevated Self of form encapsulated, to the union that is union with God. Our mind has been transformed by the heart into a place of holiness, a Christ-conscious transformation that we will recognize when it happens to us. Our incessantly busy thinking will slow down, and our unconscious mind will become more available to us. We will seem to see a different world, a world suffused with love and abiding in an environment that has changed because we have changed. The interior changes first, for the external is a reflection of the inner. We must change on the inside before any of our social action agenda will be permanently changed for the better; to try to change the outer without a corresponding inner change is to invite disaster, not what we want at all.

We will know abundance; we will know certainty. Abundance does include our financial betterment, but what it really denotes is the security that God alone can give. No material gain, however great, will satisfy for long—for it could always be taken from us. Certainty is somewhat similar, in that the only lasting certainty is what we learn from our inner Christ-Self, the Self bonded with God.

What can we do to effect this change? Or is it totally out of our hands? We can do one thing and one thing only: Remove the barriers to the expression of love. Then we have the miracle. The complete and annotated edition of A Course of Love, just published by the Circle of Atonement (Robert Perry, editor), makes clear that miracles are expressions of love. Perhaps we were not certain of this before. But every time we fulfill a miracle that we have been asked to perform (listening to guidance), we chip away at the egoic patterns that have ruined us. We are making progress. But, importantly, we don’t decide which miracles we will perform, because consciously selected miracles can be misguided. Wait to get the nod from guidance. Then express love as fully and completely as we know how.

Dear God,

I would hold no resentments nor grievances, attack nor anger, today. To do so is to choose a pathway other than the one You so graciously point out to me. Show me the way to perform miracles that You choose. Help me to express the highest and best love that I have in me.

Thank You that I feel secure in Your abundance and certain Your love. I will be in a better position to work miracles when I am not insecure. Please make sure that my certainty enlarges to a stance of security in the face of Your great blessings to me.

Be with me today. Keep my attitude high.

Amen.

Love as the Wind at Our Back

“Love is the spirit of the wind that animates all form. Love is spirit, is God, is creation. Love is a description of the All of All because it is whole and rests in eternal completion and wholeness. Love is the state of unity, the only relationship through which the Self and God become known to you. Love, God, Creation, are all that remained in union, in eternal completion, when form came into being.” (ACOL, D:16.7)

What a full definition of Love! Reread the quotation for maximal enjoyment and understanding. When we are Love itself, we move like the wind, never knowing in advance where we will go or what we will do. Moving like the wind is an echo of words in another work channeled by Jesus, The Way of Mastery. Moving like the wind, like Love, is to be in the flow at all times. When we are kept in an attitude of readiness, we will receive guidance on an ongoing basis, and this guidance will be Love personified. We will be in sync with God.

Of course, we can misjudge. We don’t need to think too highly of ourselves, lest we slip and stumble against a rock. We are finite creations of God, his children, but still limited—and limitless only to the extent that we are open to following the whispers that come from our Self, the inner Christ-Self merged with the Self of union (that which is just beyond us, but mystically joined with us). We need to realize that if we slip backward into egoic thinking, all of our progress will be lost, and we will misjudge routinely. The ego never told the truth about anything and anyone. A nothing it was, but a very potent nothing that, at this point in reading A Course of Love, we have left behind. Pray that none of us entertain the nonsense of the ego, and thereby set about forming a new ego. This would set back the banner of Christ by quite a lot. Each one of us is needed to change and/or create a new world. Jesus’s fervent wish that we remain true to his guidance in ACOL.

It is sometimes hard to imagine that God is Love, because we are accustomed to seeing love as an emotion. Our romantic hearts do often fall prey to love’s machinations. But this, in the early stages at least, is special love, not holy, and so partakes quite a little with God’s real intent for us. God and the All MUST be love, for what else would keep true Creation inviolate? God’s Kingdom would fall of its own weight if any truth functioned except love. That is why what we have been making is just illusion, and cannot touch God’s Kingdom, the House of Truth, at all. But we are moving away from these false ideas, and when we love fully and completely, with our whole being, we come very close to God. And it is He Who has been leading us to discovery all along our pathway home to Him.

Prayer

Thank You for this good day. Guide my fingers as I type. Guide my thoughts as I form the next sentence. The Self of union knows whereof I speak. The Self of union is the real Self whom we, all of us, share.

My debt to Jesus is great. I appreciate his willingness to take charge of the Sonship. So many in our world look to him as their leader. It behooves us to listen, and to listen well, for Jesus may be whispering in our ears—any of us.

Amen.

Envision All that Love Can Do for Us

“Realize that this is a call to love all of yourself. You who once could love spirit or mind, mind or body—because of the dualistic nature associated with them—now can love all of your Self, all of God, all of creation. You can respond to love with love.” (ACOL, D:7.10)

Why do we need to hear now to love all of ourselves? Because we have not been ready to do so in the past. Now we are rapidly evolving into a new embodiment, a new elevated Self of form, a form that is human and divine, a form that embodies Christ-consciousness.

This is good news indeed. But we do not yet understand it, because we haven’t walked the whole pathway back to God from the eons of separation from Him that we have known in illusion. But we know, even though it is cliché, that love is the answer. Jesus says elsewhere that if he had proclaimed something different, other than love, we might have listened more keenly. Many great leaders have proclaimed the need for love, and all too often we have not listened, or we have listened and not understood.

Now we can understand. And A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love lead the way (as well as other channeled works of Jesus, such as The Way of Mastery). ACOL proclaims the elevated Self of form, a Self in unity with mind, spirit, and body. A Self who belongs outside of our little identities on earth. A Self who is encompassing of all of us.

I long have realized that there was a part of me exterior to the life that I lived on earth. It was an intuitive knowing, said years ago to a good friend (who thought I was confused). Now that I have read ACOL, I know that I was right all along. And the sign of being right about this Self who is external, yet still One, with my little self on earth is reassuring in the extreme. It can be reassuring to all of us. It is evidence of life-everlasting, of life eternal. It is evidence that we are never alone with our finite minds on earth. We are surrounded by the greater Self; the dot of our body in the field of white—Everything else—is very real once we contemplate such things.

Ask to be shown all that love can do for us. Don’t let the cliché ruin it for us. We won’t be mistaken in this difficult world. We will see with new eyes, with vision, and the difficulties of the present will soon be put far behind us.

Prayer

I ask to love fully and completely today. Today and every day. I don’t see the way that this can happen, but I do trust that it can. I have never fully understood all that expressing love would hold out for me. But I ask to know today. And I ask this for all others whom I encounter as well.

Let us be calm in the midst of turmoil. If we see turmoil, there is something that we can do, in our little individual worlds, to quell it. It is up to us to do that little something. Help me to find that right little thing to do.

Amen.

Discover New Certainties that Are Based in Love

“For in this time of revelation, discovery is the new divine pattern that will replace the “thought” systems we have spoken of. To discover is simply to find out what you did not previously know.

“Creation of the new will be predicated on the discovery of what you did not previously know. This will not happen if you cling to “known” truths. Revelation cannot come to those who are so “certain” of what is that they cannot allow for the new to be revealed. Your certainty about what is is a false certainty, a learned certainty based on the fear that caused you to order the world according to a set of facts and rules.” (ACOL, D:6.14 – 6.15)

In the new world that we will be creating, there is no room for fear. We have reached certain certainties in the past that were based on fear; now we are being asked to discover new certainties that have a basis in love. And we are asked to respond to love; that is the difference that has heretofore been missing when we were told that love was the answer to everything. Giving and receiving are identical. And it is in the giving that we know our greatest happiness; this is the response that we are asked to give to everybody and everything thing.

This is all part of the theology of A Course of Love, and theology can seem confusing when the whole rationale for that theology is not given. Take nothing that I say unto yourself unless it find a place in your heart. I think Jesus would say the same about all of his words in ACOL as well. We are not being driven, kicking and screaming, into a new world. We are being led, gently and without coercion, into a better place, a true reality that is based on our response to love. Something is asked of us, and we will be given the great blessing when we have responded with a united mind and heart.

We are discovering now, at this point in the Dialogues of A Course of Love. We have left learning behind. This may seem confusing to some of us, but learning has been accomplished by those who have read this far in ACOL. The Christ-Self deep within us has learned (even though we sometimes find it hard to understand why a Christ-Self would need to learn anything). Now Jesus is using different terminology; we are discovering the world around us by observation, and then we will discover the world around us by being in-formed by that world. In the final analysis, though, it is not necessary to comprehend what all these terms mean in order to understand the gist of A Course of Love. We are prepared, and when we let our heart lead our mind, we are well-satisfied, calm and serene as we walk into each new day.

Prayer

Is fear necessary to be walked through? Or do we reach enlightenment purely by calm and serenity, tranquility and faith? Jesus’s channeled writings have contradictions around the purpose of fear, and I would wonder if any purpose of fear could ever be called good.

I ask for an Answer today to these wonderings. This seems to be a need, and I know that needs are answered at the point that they are recognized, thus ceasing to be needs at all. I would pray about this quandary. I would seek Your Answer. Thank You in advance for Your response, for I do have faith that an Answer will come, and will come soon.

Amen.

Accept Love that Is Our Birthright

“The two patterns, the internal and the external, were created together to exist in a complementary fashion. Both of these divine patterns are being newly recreated and we will talk much more of them and of the creative time we are now entering. Thus far, we are merely working together to create a pattern of acceptance to replace the pattern of learning.” (ACOL, D:4.13)

We are moving beyond learning from scholarly sources of the past. We are seeking simply to accept where we are and what we are about. This acceptance of all of our self will pave the way for the acceptance of unity beyond the self, called the Self, or Christ-Self, and the elevated Self of form, the time-bound self that lives in our bodies. We are moving into a new future, a new world, and the benefit to us will become apparent as we proceed.

Learning was a divine pattern, but the ego was not divine. The ego arose once we decided to try to make something that would be superior to what God had created, and because we chose separation, we also chose fear. Being alone and lonely, we had few options; we thought that God had forsaken us, but it was really ourselves that had walked away from God.

Now we are reversing this, having become clear that what we have made has not served us well. We have suffered; we have experienced pain; we have experienced loneliness—and these are just the personal aspects of what we have experienced. On a worldwide scale, the tragedy has been great. Our egos have gotten out of hand, and conflict has become a way of life. Evil has seemingly triumphed. Jesus would have us walk away from this scenario with a return to acceptance of the Love that is our birthright.

Acceptance has been likened to the forgiveness of A Course in Miracles, though they are not identical, and may even be seen as somewhat dissimilar. Acceptance allows us to live with who we are without trying to become an ideal self, a persona that is always out there, beckoning us onward. The ideal self is an idol, and we know that idols are not what we want. We want to accept ourselves as we are, with all of our seeming imperfections, because as the elevated Self we are all one in Love for each other. These imperfections are our differences, and we know from our secular life that diversity is a good thing.

Accept who we are! That is where we are headed. We can change if the character traits that we embody do not seem to be serving us well. Just ask. We will soon know that our identity is not something to be rued, but the embodiment of the Christ. Obviously, to accept this is to leave behind fear and judgment in favor of a greater Love than we have heretofore known. And it is this greater Love that will save us.

Prayer

I ask to accept my Self today, not turning away from it because it is not perfect. It is a great revelation that perfection is not asked of us. I know that I need to be cognizant of what needs to be changed in my persona, but this does not mean that I am unlovable. These changes will come naturally as I let go of fear and judgment, attack and anger. Yet even anger can be accepted as long as my expression of that anger undergoes a transformation. It is in the expression of Love that even anger is not derided.

Be with me today for a good day. I hope to make much progress toward an all-consuming Love today, building on this Love as the days spread out into the future. Help me to turn to You whenever I have a question of what to do or what to say.

Thank You for being You.

Amen.

Reflect the Love Found Within

“All systems have been based upon your desire to understand the world around you rather than the world within you. If you were to understand the world within, you would need no systems to understand or manage the world without.” (ACOL, D:2.19)

This quotation for today makes a point that Jesus has been dancing around for some time: Listen to the Self within, the Christ-Self who is a part of God Himself. The world within is well-constructed. The world without is only a reflection of that which is within. Projection makes perception (from A Course in Miracles).

When we were egoic in nature, separated from God (even though in illusion), we projected a world of chaos. When we listen to the Love that is at the center of our being, our heart’s love, we project a world that reflects true reality—harmonious, peaceful, serene. And this change in what we are listening to within makes all the difference. To listen to the ego was to invite a hostile and dangerous world; to listen to Love is to be on the right path, finally. Obviously, there is a world of difference.

We have been trying to learn a chaotic world, an impossible feat indeed. When we pay attention to the God within, we project a world much different, and true reality is never confusing. We are projecting true reality when we project Love., and the world changes accordingly.

Be wise today: Project true reality by being loving. First love God, then the Self, then our brothers and sisters external to us. Though we are all One, we don’t see it that way very often. We see others as separate from us, and as long as this perception holds, we will need to extend love to the beings whom we think are different from us. When we realize that we are all the same, though diverse in personality, we will have made giant leaps to what reality, the real world, actually holds.

Decide to start the new year off right. Decide for God, and all will be set aright in our little worlds, that which surrounds each of us, but is actually One with the All—God Himself.

Prayer

I ask for the ultimate and final end of the ego in me, and I ask that no new ego form—making useless all of my attempts to find You and to find Your Love. Jesus says that we are beyond the ego now, but he also says that we can form a new ego, and such a pity that would be. Help me to walk the harmonious straight and narrow pathway that You point out to me.

May You take charge of the first thoughts that enter my mind in the morning. Those first thoughts make quite a difference, and I would have relaxed and easy thoughts, peaceful and happy. It is hard for some of us to get going in the morning, and our minds lapse into negativisms almost without our being aware of what is happening. I would alter that tendency, here and now.

Thank You for giving me a prayer to say this morning. Prayers work; prayers turn lives around. And I ask, in boldness, for a glimpse of Awakening this morning. The world cannot touch me when I am in the peace of a glimpse of Christ-consciousness.

Amen.

Let the Heart Lead

“You are now asked to do two things simultaneously: To accept the new and to deny the old. Acceptance is a willingness to receive. Obviously, when you consider this definition of acceptance, you will see that this is not the way of the old. Willingness to receive is quite contrary to the attitudes and actions with which you have led your life thus far. You were told within A Course of Love that willingness was all that was necessary for you to be able to take this Course into your heart and let it return you to your true iden¬tity. Those of you who found within this willingness an ability to receive and left behind your effort to “learn” this Course, began the work that is being continued here, the work of replacing the old patterns of learning with the new pattern of acceptance.” (ACOL, D:2.1)

“Acceptance” is a key concept of the third and final book of A Course of Love, the Dialogues. Acceptance is akin to the allowance that is described in The Way of Mastery, and it is akin to the forgiveness that is encouraged in A Course in Miracles. We are willing to allow life to go along as it will, not in passivity, but in simple acceptance of what is. This “what is” is the way that we live now. We can still change things, but we do so from consulting with our inner Self, being sure that what we do, and what we plan to do, will be in alignment with the best of creation.

Acceptance is a willingness to receive. It is true that to feel Love, or God, best, we give. But giving and receiving are one. And when we open to receive, it is made easier for us to give. We are attempting to leave behind the old, and to latch onto the new, to accept the new and to deny the old. What does this mean? It means everything to us now, for nevermore will we be living in a refusal to trust God. He would have us deny and accept, simultaneously. And so would Jesus. Jesus wants us to deny the old world that has been lost in egoism, and to start forming a newly created world. We don’t know what this will entail, but we hold ourselves in readiness, for we will know when the time to act is at hand—if we are listening to the inner Christ-Self.

Feeling the Presence of God within is the most fruitful thing that we can do at this point. Opening to God’s Love will dictate all of our present and future choices. It will make life worth living. It will give us a better life than we have ever been able to imagine. Harmony, peace, joy, serenity, compassion—all will descend upon us when we are ready. When we have accepted Christ-consciousness from our Father, God Himself.

Nobody, not even Jesus himself, knows exactly how this transformation occurs. He can give us pointers, but the pathway is different for everybody, for the subconscious differs in what needs to be healed. It is a matter of healing the subconscious that will lead to Christ-consciousness, and so time spent in prayer and meditation is time well spent. Accept that the way may still be long, but accept that it is in God’s own perfect timing that the miracle will occur. We will get over fear and judgment before the blessing arrives for us, and leaving behind these two bugaboos will mean much to our peace of mind.

Let the heart lead; let the heart inform the mind. And let the Christ-Self make the decisions, for these will be right on.

Prayer

May this time in the history of the world be a time of culmination, a working out of things that I have been led to expect for a long time. Help me to have equanimity in the midst of what may at times be chaos. May I walk a peaceful pathway. Guide me to know what to do and what not to do, anything at all that will retain peace in my mind and heart.

Be with my friends and my significant other today. And my family. I have been surrounded by love throughout my life, even when I didn’t realize this. Thank You for giving me the insight to know that Love is always and forevermore present and accounted for. Love solves any and all problems, and Love makes life worth living.

Amen.

I Now Dwell in the Light

“I am no longer the personal self who was separate and alone.

“I am my Christ Self.
I dwell in unity.
My identity is certain.
This is the truth.
“I am not less than I once was, but more.
Where once I was empty, I now am full.
Where once I dwelt in darkness
I now dwell in the light.
Where once I had forgotten
Now I remember who I Am.
“Now I go forth
To live as who I Am within the world
To make cause and effect as one, and
Union with the Source of love and all creation the reality.” (D:1.14)

This prayer says it all, doesn’t it? We are no longer the personal or “little” self that was lost in an illusory separation from God. We are full of the Christ Self, a certain identity that emerges from within, where God dwells. We are going out into the world, now in union with God and all creation; we are creating a new world.

There is much hope in Jesus’s prayer, here beginning the Dialogues, the last part of A Course of Love. He puts faith into his dealings with us, sure that we will follow in the way that he has pointed out. He himself is simply the Atonement, and we are heading not only toward acceptance of the Atonement, but into the embodiment of Christhood, Christ-consciousness lived day by day in a newly created world. When we give Love, we will know the joy that is hidden in this prayer. It is not so much that we receive Love, as that we give it, for it is in the giving that we are created anew. Life has been chugging along at an abyssal pace, but soon what we do and say will pick up speed. We will be living a true reality, no longer lost in illusion at all.

Jesus carries us through this prayer, bit by bit, in the Dialogues. And he concludes his message with 40 days and 40 nights on a mountaintop that has come to us while we are still situated in “real life.” We don’t separate ourselves from anything or anybody, but we live on two levels at once—the mundane, daily one, and the elevated one that will predict the elevated Self of form.

We have much to look forward to as we consider this final part of ACOL.

Prayer

Be with me today as I seek to live fully in Your grace. I would long for a genuine giving of Love to others and to You, but also to myself—for if I hate myself, it is impossible to love anybody else, You included. Let me have a good, genuine love for the Self, nevermore egoic. May I be reassured that the ego is dead in me (though my best instincts are that it is still looming within me, ready to strike). May I walk humbly with You. May you teach me how to turn aside from the ego at every turn.

Thank You for offering me a good day, a day of peace and happiness, gentle joy. I offer to you my Love, as deep from my heart as I can create it.

Be with me as this day unfolds, and help me to be of assistance to my brothers and sisters. And to You, for you do need my hands and feet.

Amen.

Our Natural State Is One of Pure Love

“In this time of Christ, this time of direct revelation and direct sharing, the probable future you imagine, envision, desire, will be what you create. This is the power of the devotion of the observant. A shared vision of unity and a return of all to the state natural to all is what I ask you to imagine, envision and desire.” (ACOL, T4:6.4)

We are in a new time now, the time of Christ. And Jesus is asking us here, in A Course of Love, to envision that all of us will return to our natural state, a state of love rather than fear, a state of Christ-consciousness. The ego was never a natural state for us, and that is why, regardless of what we did, we were in the process of eliminating it from our being, our psyche. The ego was constantly being undone, or who would choose fear if we knew how to avoid it? We choose to experience anxieties when we are afraid of what the present or future will hold, and this “being afraid” is the very fear that Jesus would eradicate. We experience what we, in the depth of our being, want to experience. We may sometimes choose fear out of ignorance and insanity, but there is a way out, and it is to turn to love, love of God, love of our very being, love of others.

We turn from fear when we choose forgiveness, recognizing that others have been acting in innocence borne of insanity as well. And forgiveness is the opposite of judgment. So when we forgive, we are setting aside that second bug-a-boo that Jesus would have us eliminate from our thoughts and evaluations. He would have us set judgment aside, and the best way to do that is to forgive. Everyone deserves forgiveness, for everyone has been doing the best that he/she knows to do, given the state of their knowledge of what’s right.

Why would we ever choose fear and judgment unless we didn’t know any better? Yes, patterns of past ignorance do still pervade our minds, and so what we think does make a difference here. Patterns of fearful thoughts may still assail us, and when this happens, we need to get quiet and go within, pray, spend time in communion with God. Quiet reading can also help. And often judgment comes when we are angry with someone, but have not acknowledged that anger. We sometimes think that a judgment can keep us from fear, if the words or actions of another have indeed seemed to cause fear in us, and we decide that rejecting that person, his words and actions, can save us. This is thinking that is somewhat amiss, because we never benefit very long from rejecting another. Rejection is the opposite of love, and God would have us love our brothers and sisters.

If we know that fears and judgments assail us at certain times, that doesn’t mean that the ego has returned, or that a new ego has formed. We have been in the habit of holding to fears and judgments, and even though we have now turned aside from both, the habit persists from deep within us, and so these patterns of the ego also need to be left behind. We are creating our reality, and when we ask for God’s help in creating better images, His help will be forthcoming. Patterns of the ego will be left behind; sometimes it just takes a little time, and this calls for patience on our part.

Prayer

Be with me today and every day. May I choose love, and in that choice may my fears and judgments simply drop away. I would choose love to eradicate fear, and I would choose forgiveness to eradicate judgment. All of this is within my power, especially now in the time of Christ.

May this day offer me a glimpse of enlightenment. I know that when I get very calm, I see such a glimpse, sometimes passing very quickly. Stay and dwell with me a while. I know that I ask for what You would will for me.

Amen.