A New Way of Remembering

“Perhaps you consider this review to be unnecessary.  However we repeat it here given the forgetful nature of your minds–a feature that won’t last much longer.  You are at the threshold of remembering fully the truth of what you are and of sustaining that memory in a continuous way.”  Choose Only Love, “Echoes of Holiness,” bk. 1, 15:III

Choose Only Love continues this thread of thought/feeling in Book IV, “Wisdom,” and so the quotation conveys important points.   We are becoming forgetful, for a time, as our memories are healed.  The healing of memory is the purpose of the seven books of Choose Only Love.

As our thoughts fill with new understanding, the old survival needs are reduced and then eliminated.  We know what is true for us by revelation from God, not our admittedly flawed thought processes.

We discover that as we progress toward Awakening, transformation, that our mind, informed by our heart, clears–and we “float” in assurance that God, in revelation, will bring to mind all that is important or necessary.

We have more help now.  And we are freer.  We no longer need to struggle in our remembering.  We can rest assured that God is in the background, prompting us about everything we need to know.

Remembering

On looking back in regret: “Watched a program on television about the sixties.  I don’t think I was very reflective politically and socially in that time of my life, and I certainly know that I lacked courage.  Will I look back and regret my blindness today?”

And later on, “I was so unreflective in the sixties.  I wonder if I will look back on my life one day and feel that I went through all of it in a daze?”

–

My college suitemate during my freshman year was a senior with wide-ranging interests in the arts and culture, but who majored in economics, passed the CPA, and went on to get a Ph.D. in her field.  I once asked Joanne about this seeming “split” in her interest, and she responded that she wanted to keep her avocation and vocation separate; she wanted something “like economics” to pay the bills. 

I realize in retrospect how much to heart I took this comment. 

Even in college I longed for and deliberately planned for a profession.  The fact that what I eventually became (a librarian) is different from my college dreams (first, journalist; then, English college professor)is not particularly important. What is important is that all of these vocations are a little tangential to my “real” interests, which are a cluster of spirituality, metaphysics, and psychology. Something within me feared “getting lost” in these less-tangible areas.  In my work life I touch the here-and-now, the practical problems of interaction in and contribution to the secular world.

My head may be in the clouds, but my feet are on the ground.  Of course, it is the clouds that show me how to live.

The Christ Self Comes into Its Own Again

“Your awareness of the Self that you are now was not present in the past, but you can truly now, with the devotion of the observant, see that the Self you are now was indeed present, and was the truth of who you were then as now. (The Treatises of A Course of Love: ‘A Treatise on the New,’ 2.15)”

1 – Secular Psychology

As I mentioned yesterday, even secular psychology says that our personalities don’t change a great deal over the course of our life. We may not actually like this; we might want to be very different from what we were when we were insecure teens. And certainly some of the superficial changes are obvious. We grow more self-confident; we are less reticent to speak our minds; we don’t feel that being popular is the most important thing in the world.

2 – Self

But A Course of Love is saying here that our Self (with a capital “S”) has always been with us, but we just did not know this. This Self is the Christ Self, the inner Self that the ego sought to override and to rule. This Self is the tie to God that had been missing when the ego was in the ascendancy. This tie to God, so long missing in the separation, is the reason that the Holy Spirit was created (according to A Course in Miracles).

3 – Guidance

Now we are seeing this Self again, and we are listening to its guidance. This is the time of Christ, and are well-received by our whole Self when we listen to what this Self says.

4 – Remembering

This passage indicates that we “remember,” that we have never really lost, the true Self that was covered over during the time of our separation from God. Our separation, given elsewhere in A Course of Love, was a plan in which we participated because we were eager to experience life, and God had no other way to deal with us but to let us go (much as a parent lets a teen who is rebellious find their way through a sometimes troubled world). But if we “remember,” we have not really lost that Self that existed prior to the separation. And we are now ready to remember, in the form of the “elevated Self of form” (an ACOL tenet).
What a joy to know that this new way of living has always been available to us, but that our culture covered it over with concepts of God and the Holy Spirit meant for another time and place. We are ready now to walk into the light. May we do so today.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

May I truly know, in the depth of my being, the Self that You have said I really am. May today know no attack nor anger. May my little self not intervene in the glory that I can feel when the Self is in ascendancy.

Thank You for these words of reassurance in the passage for today. I know that if You say that I have always been this Self, then my awareness of this Self will expand and develop.

May this day be good. May I listen carefully to my inner Self as I seek to follow the good guidance that only You can give.

Amen.