Giving & Receiving as One

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

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

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

Absolutely not.  We give and receive in tandem when we follow the dictates of ACOL.  We know that independence is not so very healthy, that the opposite of independence is not dependency, but a heartfelt joining of ourselves to other people.  We give them our love; they return our love.  The giving up of our solitary nature is actually a most joyful undertaking—when we realize that we were never meant to be isolated and alone.  We are meant to share with others, to live in a partnership with others.  Why else would the world have so many people?

We are meant to join and to share, giving up our prideful isolation in a choice to give and receive as one with other people sharing our world.  This choice will give us joy.  Can it be so wrong to choose what will make us happy, avoiding the false independent nature that has failed us so many times?

RELEASING ATTACK

by Celia Hales. Published in Miracles Magazine; Jon Mundy, publisher; Glenn Hovemann, editor.

—

I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. (ACIM, COA ed, W-23)

When anyone attacks you . . ., they are merely crying out in their own fear and insanity.  (WOM, Part 3, Lesson 31)

The time has passed when the forces of ego attacked the truth with all their ferocity.  (CHOL bk 7, 5:I)

No one who has studied A Course in Miracles can forget the first quotation above; it is a mantra.  The world in Workbook Lesson 23 (of 365) is a world in which attack rules because we have not traveled far back to God.  Our first step is to change our own attack.  When we drop attack, we find that the sword we have been pointing at our heart has a blunt end.

The next lesson is a reassurance about the attack that we still perceive from others.  The Way of Mastery says that what we are seeing from others is really coming from fear and insanity.  I have found that when I say internally, to myself, “This is just insanity,” my own insanity subsides; I don’t want to attack in return.

Finally we reach the place of Choose Only Love.  Our world has become calmer now, and attack has taken a much secondary place–if we see it in ourselves or others at all.  Attack has actually been a ploy of the ego, and when the ego and its egoic patterns have been sufficiently weakened and then dissipated, we are living in a new age, the time of Christ.  Now life will get better, a lot better.  We will find in most of our moments that we experience the happiness that God wishes for us.  Perhaps happiness has been a long time in coming, but come it does.  Life without an egoic propensity to attack–and be attacked–takes on a mellow, pleasant aspect that is the essence of God’s peace.  And where God’s peace reigns, happiness reigns.

We see this in the spirit of Christmas, which as I write is ending for another year.  Even egoic people drop their defenses once a year.  If we retain God’s spirit, we know the spirit of Christmas year-round.

And that is what leaving the ego behind does for us.

Let Our Heart Embrace with Love

“For it is the embrace with perfect self-honesty that returns the mind to sanity.  It is the refusal to be honest that creates the conflict and tension in the mind that is called insanity.  And insanity is a state in which the mind is not at peace, and Christ cannot enter therein.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 269)

A Course in Miracles also says that we are living in madness until our minds and healed, and we walk with God.  All of us, and this is an arresting truth.

It sometimes helps in an altercation with loved ones (which happens to all of us) that we silently say, “This is insanity.”  We can’t ask our loved ones to be closer to God than we are, and ACIM also says that the one who is more sane at the moment has the imperative to cool things down (a paraphrase).

We need, as this passage says, to embrace whatever is happening.  Not to turn away from it, which makes for unnecessary conflict.  Choose Only Love also reiterates that embracing what is happening is the way we escape from what is troubling us; to try to avoid it is to invite further pain.

If Christ cannot enter us when the mind is in conflict, A Course of Love says that we ought to turn to our heart for a solution.  Yes!  This channeled work holds the key.  

Let the heart rule, for the heart will choose embracing, with love, just all the time.

Let the heart do its work, and all will be well.

Don’t Try to “Possess” Love

“Because love cannot be contained because love is life in all its abundance, then we can easily understand that behind the desire to possess objects is the desire to possess love.”  Choose Only Love, bk.2,1:I

We ARE wanting love–with all our heart.  But the idea of possession is, I think, wrong.  When we possess, we want to keep it all to ourselves.  And love, by its very nature, is a sharing concept.  We reach to our brothers and sisters, and when we love them unconditionally we don’t want to hinder their growth by holding so tightly.  If need be, we love enough to let go.

Loving Freely & Without Fear

“You who do not know how to trade your separated state for that of union have still done so when you have loved freely and without fear.  In this state your memory returns to you of who you are, and you are innocent and joyous and one with love itself.  That this memory does not last, and these feelings seem unsustainable, is the result only of that which does discard and replace.  As we have said before, there are but two emotions.  One is love, the other fear.  Fear, through your own choice, replaces and discards love.  Fear is always strongest when you value something that you feel may be threatened.  Love threatens most your specialness.  Before your conscious mind has any awareness of what is happening, your memory of love, of innocence and of joy, threatens your specialness, your ego, your separated self who quickly rushes in with love’s replacement.  Nothing but fear could take the memory of love from you, or replace so quickly the glory that is your nature with the specialness that is not.”  (A Course of Love, C:14.28)

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

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

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

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

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

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

God’s Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring Heaven to Earth

“Getting to Heaven is no longer an attraction.  Bringing  Heaven to this world is.  Bringing light to darkness is all that matters.  Constantly desiring to bring greater light to your darkness is the way in which you live,  moment by moment, desiring greater light, greater light, and greater light.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Lesson 22, Page 268)

It seems a bit surprising that our time on Earth has shifted into a movement to bring Heaven to this Earth.  We can do this, first in our own lives, and then in the lives of others.

When we give up the ego as an unworkable idea, we are primed to live in love always, and love is what brings Heaven to Earth.  

When we truly and completely fill our minds and hearts with the love that we crave, we ARE bringing Heaven to Earth.

Start today.

Love Is Welcome

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

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

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

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

Love

“As Christ you are the light of the world.  You are illumined by the light of the Lamb.  You are already living a new era in creation.  You have completed your path to truth and are ready to accept the eternal revelation of love.”  Choose Only Love, bk.2, 6:I

This quotation is speaking to the true believer, the one who has walked far along the pathway back to God, and is ready simply to rest in love.  When we walk far, we know that the only reason for life on earth, the only purpose, is to discover how to love.  Sure, we want to grow also, because an angel bends over each blade of grass, saying “Grow, grow.”  And angels accompany us on our pathway of growth also.

But love is the main thing.  

When we love enough, everything else falls into place.  

Self Perfect in Love

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

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

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

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

Loving Our Brothers & Sisters in This World

“Heaven is the gift you owe your brother, the debt of gratitude you offer to the Son of God in thanks for what he is, and what his Father created him to be.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-19.IV.D.19)

A new idea, that we “owe” Heaven to our brother, because of what he is, because of what he means to us, because of the gratitude that we owe to him.  He is our way back to God.  We need never to forget this.  He is the means that A Course in Miracles is using to save us time on the road to Awakening.  When we forgive him for his mistakes, his errors, we are also forgiving ourselves, for there is no difference between him and us.  We are truly one in God.

God created our brother to be a Self, Christ within, and we need not to forget this.  When we are grateful to him, we find our way to express thanks for him being in our lives.  We know that without him, not only would we be lonely, but we would be lost in “sin,” actually mistakes.

When we see mirrored in another our own probably misdeeds, we know what we need to forgive not only in himself but in us.  We would be guilty of the same thing, if given half a chance.  All of us have fallen short.  But we are saved from judgment by refusing to judge him.  Our brother is the holy Son of God, the means of our Awakening.  We owe him only gratitude for what he has been, is being, and will be to us in the future.

How We Look upon Our Brother is How We Look upon Ourselves

“To look upon the fear of God does need some preparation.  Only the sane can look on stark insanity and raving madness with pity and compassion, but not with fear.  For only if they share in it does it seem fearful, and you do share in it until you look upon your brother with perfect faith and love and tenderness.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-19.IV.D.11)

Here we are encouraged to look upon our brother with forgiveness wrought of faith, love, tenderness.  He deserves no less, and neither do we, for how we look upon our brother is how we look upon ourselves.  There is no difference.

We see God as we see ourselves, and we are lost in insanity, and therefore we fear God, for somehow we think that He too is lost in insanity.  It is not true.  But we have to recognize that we need to be sane to see God clearly.  And we are heading in that direction, toward sanity.

We have long been insane, lost in madness.  It does not have to be so, it does not have to remain so.  We can step away from madness just as much as have wallowed in it for eons.  Now is our time.  Now is the time to turn away from insanity.  Then we will finally see God clearly as the God of Love that He truly is.

When we look on our brother with compassion, we also look upon ourselves with compassion.  Nothing else is right for either of us.  But as long as we are lost in egoic fear, the way will seem long and, indeed, impossible.

It is not impossible.  Just let a little love into our lives, and we quickly see that this other way, the better way, is what we have been looking for all of our lives.

Seek the love tomorrow, the compassion, the sanity.

We will be richly rewarded.

Holy Love

“The delights of our holy love will be given to all.  Thus, those who are most called to love can enjoy our beauty, and join our song of praise and gratitude.

“To give ourselves entirely will be the hallmark of our expression, serving love, the joyful fruit of our union.  By virtue of this, the world will have a new light.  Those who seek comfort will find it.  Those who long for truth will receive it.  Those who grope for love will stop looking, for because of our divine union, they will recognize that love is what they are, and that their being goes wherever they go.”

“The time of truth has come.”  Choose Only Love, bk.7, Prelude.

In the Prelude to the last book in the series, we are ushered into a new era, a new era that all of us reading will experience.  

We would not have gotten this far in Choose Only Love unless we were taking to heart its bounteous message.

Take our places in the great endeavor we are embarking upon–a new world on Earth.  We will succeed, for we have the Love backing us all the way.  The positive will win out in the end.  Negativism defeats itself, if not immediately, eventually.

Displacement of Love with Fear

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

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

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

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

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

And the transformation will be arresting.

Love Overcomes the Ego

“When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat of fear comes over it, remember it is always for one reason; the ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-19.IV.C.11)

This quotation helps us to understand the dynamics of the ego.  The ego is a part of our belief about ourselves that will not rest until we are miserable, though it pretends to offer us the good.  It does not offer us the good.

Particularly poignant as a expression of fear, this quotation assures us that the terror that we sometimes feel is ego-generated.  Love would never treat us like this, and love never does.  We are “in our egos” when we quail in fear against this unnamed something that fills us with cold shaking.  The ego thinks that this something out there is a sign of “sin and death,” and so it encourages us to be fearful.

If, even for a moment, we bypass the bitter dregs of death, the stubborn and witchy attempts to handle this unnamed fear, we will be OK.  But the only real choice is love, a manifestation of love by forgiveness.  Give the angry deed over to the Holy Spirit and His judgment; He alone can handle what has aroused such strong negative emotions.

The ego thrills, and the ego dashes to the ground.  There are always oscillations, and there will always be.  It the way in which we come to see that the ego is not the way that we want to go.  The ego is constantly being undone.  And well that it is.

Love only satisfies; love only cools the overwrought emotions.  Dwell with God in the form of the Holy Spirit, and so the brittle and rigid emotions will subside.  God knows us best, of course, and the Holy Spirit will guide us out of even this abyss.

The Time of the Truth of Love

“The delights of our holy love will be given to all.  Thus, those who are most called to love can enjoy our beauty, and join our song of praise and gratitude.

“To give ourselves entirely will be the hallmark of our expression, serving love, the joyful fruit of our union.  By virtue of this, the world will have a new light.  Those who seek comfort will find it.  Those who long for truth will receive it.  Those who grope for love will stop looking, for because of our divine union, they will recognize that love is what they are, and that their being goes wherever they go.”

“The time of truth has come.”  Choose Only Love, bk.7, Prelude.

I worry about people who have heard that love is the Answer so many times that they are numbed by it.  But love IS the Answer, and until we relinquish our egoic tendencies and welcome unconditional trust and love into our live, we will never know consistent peace.

This means to give up attack in any form.  Doing so makes a giant leap into the arms of God, and His Voice, the Holy Spirit.  When we are agitated and inclined to argue, we are indeed lost to God.  He can’t get through to us when we are agitated.  Pray today for a surcease of agitation, and give a welcome to the peace that supplants it.

We are into the time of the Second Coming of Christ.  Nowhere in Jesus’ recent channeled writings are we told that this might be a physical incarnation.  But we ARE told that we ourselves are part of this Second Coming.  Jesus shares his Christhood with us.  

And when we respond rightly, in love, we respond with one accord to be better future.

Love in the Quiet Garden

“Love, too, would set a feast before you, on a table covered with a spotless cloth, set in a quiet garden where no sound but singing and a softly joyous whispering is ever heard.  This is a feast that honors your holy relationship, and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored guest.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-19.IV.A.16)

Lovely passage, melodic in its choice of words.  This quotation is meant to lighten our attitude toward the holy relationship.  The holy relationship, unlike the special, is a place of calm and quiet (note the “quiet garden”).  The special relationship has flights of joy, but these are always followed by times of dashed hopes; we climb upward, only to dash our feet on a stone on the ground.

Note of these vicissitudes are present in the calm and peaceful, and joyous always, holy relationship.  This is a relationship that is permeated, through and through, with love.  We don’t have to strain toward some sort of unnatural high; we are cocooned in an ocean of love that knows no bounds.

And, once we have achieved the holy relationship, we would never go back to the unholy, or special, again.  As we make one relationship holy, we would want to make all of our relationships with brothers holy.

And we can.  Just put our minds to it.  It is not hard.  Forgiveness is key, as always.

Pure Love Manifested

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

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

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

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

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

A New Response

“While God is nothing but the Source of Love, you have, in your doubt, made of God the source of fear.  Pause a moment here and let the enormity of this confusion sink in, for this is the reversal in thinking that will pave the way for all the rest.  Because of this confusion you have responded to Creation with fear.  Is it no wonder a new response is asked of you?”  (A Course of Love, T1:4.26)

We fear many things, but we don’t often realize that what we fear most is actually God.  Or our concepts of God, which are misguided and inaccurate.  He is Love—as we know—but still we forget, even when we pray daily.  We think that maybe He doesn’t have our best interests at heart, our best interests as we view them.  We think that what we want for ourselves would be better.  And when we realize that God is in the depths of our spirit, then we can realize how very confused we have become.

God means us well.  Our Depths mean us well.  We don’t have to fear God at all.  It is not He Who punishes us, if indeed we are punished at all.  (And the ego does punish, though we are trying to get away from this concept, this deluded concept.)  Once we are able to fully believe that God is “for us,” then our love for Him can blossom, and our egoic fears will soon drop away.

Purpose

“I and my Father are one.  Only Love is real, and Love, alone, heals.  My commitment is to the reality of Love.  Therefore, Father, bring each moment to me that I might learn anew to love, and allow that Love to transform a temporary illusion into that which extends the good, the holy, and the beautiful.

“Herein lies your purpose.  Herein lies your function, and herein—and only here—is Life.”  (“The Way of Transformation,” The Way of Mastery, Chapter 18, Page 217)

What is our purpose in life?  I think it is to discover how to live, and when we get really close to God, we discover that living Love is the only way to proceed.  Everything else makes no sense at all.

God’s universes could not survive if such was not built on Love.  And if it weren’t for our sometimes dim awareness that Love is the Answer, we would long ago have destroyed ourselves. 

Sure, we make mistakes—many mistakes.  But there is a resolution when we seek forgiveness of ourselves and move forward undeterred.  God, according to A Course in Miracles, does not need to forgive us because He has never condemned.  He condemns no one.  He simply spreads Love, always and forever.

God does give us free will, and so He lets us do as we will for a long time.  He knows with foresight that eventually we will tire of our games and turn to Him.  He knows that Love will draw us to His side—eventually.  It is the one Force in this world that ultimately will not be resisted.

It is this turning to Him that saves us from agony.  And when we love, in this world, however imperfectly, we are on the right track.

Gates of Heaven

“Beloved pure soul!  You who live for God!  Whoever joins this work becomes one with us, and because of that union miracles and spiritual events of incalculable greatness and bliss will occur.  Gates of Heaven not yet opened will do so.”  Choose Only Love bk. 6, 1:II

A wonderful promise from Choose Only Love, received by Sebastian Blaksley from the celestial.  We are often given encouragement in these seven books in the series, published by Take Heart Publications and available on Amazon.

If we choose to take to heart these promises, our lives will smooth out and we will enjoy greater happiness.

Sometimes we think wanting to be happy is a selfish thing.  But no!  Actually it is the gift of God to us.  We just have to follow His message of Love.

Love / Safety / Trust

“Where you learned to hate, you will learn to love.  Where you learned to fear, you will learn safety.  Where you learned to distrust, you will learn trust.  And each learning experience will be a learning experience because it will touch your heart.”  (A Course of Love, C:24.1)

We are thinking about the heart in A Course of Love.  Of course, technically we are thinking about “wholeheartedness,” which is the union of mind and heart.  But we focus on the heart because we have so long neglected that vital center of our Self.  When we were caught by the ego, we listened to what our deluded and insane mind said.  And when we sought to relinquish the ego, we were changing our minds.  But there is a step beyond that A Course of Love seeks to have us reach.  And this step is reached without words that the mind could understand, or rational understanding that is totally beyond the ego.  This is the realm of the heart, where words fail us and we are at home in God.  We “know” things without having to be told.  We “understand” things without a rational explanation.  Life just “is,” and we are finally and ultimately happy in the “isness” that will lead us to Christ-consciousness.  We don’t ask anymore because we have no need.  We know.  And this knowledge saves us.

Love

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

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

The Word

The Word became flesh

            once upon a time       once before time        once in time

                                  each time        a child is born        a gift is given.

                                        And upon their shoulders rests the imprint of the One

                                                whose Word makes all flesh to become.

Flesh becomes Word       becomes Verb Word

            saying ‘Let there be’

                        and there is

                                    as night follows day and dawn follows darkness,

                                                dappling creation with new language.

Be becomes all Words–

            creating nouns and expletives,

                        pronouns and correlatives,

                                    assumes the burden of unanswered questions

                                                and declaratives yet undeclared.

Flesh becomes Active Verb–

            transforming the great I AM into nominative–

                        posturing as transitive

                                    whose unknown object

                                           completes the diagram

                                                forming a sphere.

---

From Celia’s Images in a Reflecting Pool

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

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

–

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

–

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

At Home in Love

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

–

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

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

Loving Thing

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

–

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

–

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

God Is Not Fear, but Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Choose Only Love

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

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

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

Laws of Love

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

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

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

We Were Never Meant to Be Isolated and Alone

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

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

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

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

Small Things with Great Love

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

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

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

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

Loving Freely & Without Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self United

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

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

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

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

The New

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love

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

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

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

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

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

This World Is Our Classroom

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

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

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

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

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

Returning Us to Our True Nature

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

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

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

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

Loving Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Awareness of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only Love Is Real

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Only Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caught in Our Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Love Banishes Chaos

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

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

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

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

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

And this is all the assurance that we need.

Love’s Gifts

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

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

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

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

Loving from the Heart

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

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

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

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

Mistake that Could Not Happen but Did

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Greater Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Idle Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Return to Relationship

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

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