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.

Mission for God

“Go into the world announcing the good news.  You have a means to do it.  Enjoy the joy of sharing.  Be messengers of peace.  Take love to the world.”  Choose Only Love bk.2, 21:II

What better way could we spend a life than to follow the directions given in this quotation?  What is the good news?  Simply that we are beloved of God, the beloved of God.  He stands with us in every earthly dilemma, every quandary, every mystery.  He may not take away every mystery, but if we bear with him patiently, the dilemmas and quandaries lift.

How might we announce the good news?  We won’t seek to recruit others to our way of life, unless they express obvious interest in knowing how we live.  We will turn off others if they are not ready for a change, even a change for the better.  So announcing the good news, when and where, needs deep prayer.  We need to discern when and where to offer the message.  Our own way may not, ultimately, answer the needs of our brothers and sisters if they are in a different place from ourselves, mentally and emotionally.

So depend on guidance in this delicate matter of influencing others.  But when the time is right, and the person before us is right, we can enjoy the joy of sharing.  And they too will be enlivened.

Offering peace and love to the world is a less delicate matter than sharing the good news of what we have found in God.  Peace and love are always welcome.

Our Way Home Is by Sharing Ourselves

“My dear brothers and sisters, what you truly are cannot be improved upon. But because you are in a state of unremembering, you must relearn who you are. You can only relearn who you are by being who you are. You can only be who you are by sharing who you are.” (ACOL, C:31.17)

When we reach out to others, when we share ourselves, we get along better. And this is, perhaps surprisingly, the only way, Jesus says, that we can be who we are. That is because we are One with all, everyone, everything, and God Himself. So to deny this by trying to isolate ourselves is to go against nature, our nature, the original nature that God gave us in our creation.

We can test this out, especially when we are feeling extroverted. Initiate several contacts with others, either by phone or in person (phone or in person works better than email). When we are reaching out in this way, there is an easy camaraderie, and a lifting of spirits. We can then, however introverted we might be, draw back in and reflect on the good feeling that engulfs us. We will feel better for sharing ourselves, even if the matters discussed are mundane and in no obvious way bear on the spiritual.

This morning I was feeling isolated and sleepy. I made three phone calls to friends, and immediately I was enlivened. Was this not an example of what Jesus is saying in this passage for today? He knows that we are meant to share ourselves, and when we turn inward too much, we don’t share and we don’t feel good.

We want to remember who we are. When we do so, we remember that we are children of God, partners with all of our brothers and sisters. We are inhabitants of a beautiful world, bringers of good tidings to others, individuals blessed by our circumstances. We are innocent, according to A Course in Miracles, never having sinned (which would be unredeemable), but guilty only of having made mistakes, mistakes that can be corrected in the present.

Reach out to others today, even if we are extremely introverted. The day will take on a luminous quality, any sunshine outside the house will be magnified.

Jesus is right. We learn who we are by sharing who we are. There is no better way to function in this world. No clearer and quicker route to self-knowledge.

Dear Father/Mother,

I would continue on the path that I started this morning, a path of sharing. I would look around me, even at strangers, and give them a smile. I would reach out to my friends and family; I would join with others as I share something of myself. The day will go better. Indeed, the day will blossom into a genuine blessing, for I will be following divine will.

Thank you for the insight that Jesus offers in A Course of Love. The way opens up, and this day becomes a lesson in giving of myself to others. And what better way to live?

Amen.

Share with Our Brothers and Sisters

“Your belief in your brothers and sisters will not be total, however, without the reunion of mind and heart that produces the state of wholeheartedness. This state was not achieved at all times by all those who believed in me—and perfection is not asked of you. As can be clearly seen from the records left to you, the apostles did not, in fact, achieve this state during my lifetime, for they looked at me as different and looked to me for power. Only after my resurrection did the Holy Spirit come upon them and reveal their own power to them by uniting mind and heart with belief. They were then reunited with me as they were united with the Christ. You thus must learn to see yourself as you see your brothers and sisters, and place your belief not in differences but in sameness.” (ACOL, C:19.12)

We are like our brothers and sisters in more than not, despite our culture’s interest in diversity. We are both the same and different. And in the sameness we see common ground, a common ground that will cause us to “believe” in our brothers and sisters. We will believe in them when we have achieved wholeheartedness, not before.

Jesus says that his apostles did not achieve this state in his lifetime, but only afterwards, when the Holy Spirit came upon them. Then they became one with Jesus as the Christ, just as we can so become. There is no greater achievement, and it comes to us as The Accomplished, though not in an egoic sense at all.

We are accomplished when we have joined mind and heart to achieve wholeheartedness, and then we are one with others. We share with them, something unlike the time of learning, in which individuality seemed (but only seemed) to reign. When we share with our brothers and sisters, we are going home at last. Home to Christ-consciousness, home to Oneness with God.

The way is clear; the way is sure. Let us not dally any longer today. Let us join with our brothers and sisters, for joining is required on this pathway. We are not meant to be alone, lonely, and independent. We are meant to be interdependent.

And in this change to interdependence we will see the real world, the one that has been waiting for our vision.

Prayer

Dear Father/Mother,

I need you today, as always, to provide for me a good day. I can get so tangled up in the early morning, and I would not stay that way. Help me to unravel the snares and pitfalls. Help me to relax totally in Your care.

Be with all of us today, as we seek anew to stay on the pathway Home. This Home is all around me, if I have vision to see.

Please grant me this vision today.

Amen.

Sharing Is Better than Splendid Isolation

“You must forgive God for creating a shared reality before you can understand it is the only one you would want to have. You have to forgive this reality for being different than you have always imagined it to be.” (ACOL, 6.1)

We often want things for ourselves alone. We don’t want to share.

This attitude probably came from childhood, when our parents tried to get us to share with our brothers and sisters. Children don’t like to share. Now that we are adults, we often feel the same way. We want mine!

Sharing is the way of God’s world. We are not independent creatures, set in isolation in this world. We are amid many, many other individuals, our brothers and sisters, with whom we share our experience here. We need each other. This is a sometimes disturbing truth about our lives. We don’t want to need others. We think (along the ego’s thought lines) that if we are autonomous, we will not need anybody else. We will stand on our own two feet, independently; this is, we think, for maturity is all about.

But we are wrong. And when we recognize that maturity doesn’t demand autonomous living, we will open our hearts, at first ever so little, to other people.

We will live better when we have opened our hearts. Indeed, the heart is the way that Jesus is reaching us in A Course of Love. The heart knows truths that the mind cannot fathom. And we know better how to live when we let the heart guide.

Try sharing just a bit of yourself today. If this seems too threatening, tell yourself that it is just an experiment. See if you don’t have a day that flows better.

Sharing works. Sharing with our brothers and sisters is the way that we are meant to walk in this world. We don’t lose anything by sharing; all gifts belong to all of us, but nothing is taken from any one.

God will bless you when you reach out to others, giving your gifts freely to others, even as you enjoy those gifts also. The way back home is walked two by two, holding our brother’s hand, holding Jesus’s hand. There is no better way to live maturely.

We have truly grown up when we recognize that keeping our gifts close to our chests does not help anybody, lest of all ourselves.

Heaven Dawns Here and Now in This World

“In Heaven reality is shared and not reflected. By sharing its reflection here, its truth becomes the only perception the Son of God accepts. And thus, remembrance of his Father dawns on him, and he can no longer be satisfied with anything but his own reality.” (ACIM, T-14.X.2)

When we remember God, we are likely to be in a sharing mood with others. We are not likely to be isolated and alone, in a self-centered way with ourselves and others as well. In Heaven, then, reality is shared. We don’t see reality “reflected,” which is an inferior way to experience reality.

And we can have Heaven here and now. This is being said. We have long thought that we had to wait for the afterlife, and maybe eons beyond the immediate afterlife, to reach Heaven. But here and now Heaven awaits us, when we are made ready by our persistence and our love for God and other people, as well as love for ourselves (which is necessary to love God and others).

When we remember God, we are living reality. We don’t have to be made acquainted with God, for He is in our memory. We once knew that, being a part of Him, we could never lose Him. Now we need to realize that this remembrance is always out there, waiting for us.

The ways of this world are obscure at best. The ways of Heaven are transparent to those who ask to see.

Sense the Vibes

“Imagine the air around you being visible and your form an invisible space within the visible surroundings. This is the reality of Christ-consciousness. Consciousness may seem to be embodied by form but the reverse is true and has always been true.” (ACOL, Dialogues, Day 12, 12.2)

The assertion in this quotation may seem very strange indeed. But there is a Oneness to reality that we often miss. The Self that we are exists out in the open; inside, we all too often miss the mark, especially if we haven’t yet opened to the inner Christ. Our little bodies don’t keep the Self apart from our environment. Intuitively we know this, for do we not sense “vibes” that are seemingly outside of us? Of course, we all do sense these vibes, though we may not, until later on, put much credence in them.

Now is the time to put credence in vibes. We will live much better, for these psychic attunements are evidence that we are opening to a larger reality.

So consciousness is outside of our physical bodies, our physical form. We are a solid mass of physicality in our bodies, but we exist in the ether. We are not isolated, encased in bodies. When we think about this a little, we will be reassured.
Despite what the ego used to tell us, we don’t really want to be so independent of each other. We know, somehow, somewhere, that we are mean to be in concert with one another. This sharing of being is what life is really all about, what life is about when it is truly lived.

Let’s truly live life today, sharing and in concert with one another.

Sharing Purely in Salvation

“The Atonement must be understood as a pure act of sharing. (T-5.IV.2)”

How did Jesus, in the Atonement which he fulfilled, share with us? He shared an example of someone who overcame death. Never does he say in what form he arose. He leaves that a mystery, for our faith to decipher in whatever way we choose. But he does say in A Course in Miracles that his part in the Atonement was fulfilled by the resurrection, not the crucifixion—and this is a departure from the doctrine of traditional Christianity.

Likewise, the Holy Spirit shares with us; we share with others. So the line of giving is complete, and giving and receiving, as we have previously learned in A Course in Miracles, is the same.

Jesus set the example; indeed, he says elsewhere (A Course of Love) that his is the example life. He reached out to all of humanity with his great gift of teaching and, most of all, his God-granted right to resurrection, a gift that would let us know that eternity is ours.
Few of us have ever known “pure” acts. But when we listen to guidance, we will understand that what the Holy Spirit shares with us, we will want to extend to others in a pure act of sharing.
And Jesus says that he is with us also, when we ask. He says to imagine that he holds our hand, and that this will be no “idle fantasy.”

Some aspects of traditional Christianity are not interpreted differently by A Course in Miracles, and the Trinity is certainly portrayed similarly. The plan of salvation includes our openness to God, and His to us; our relationship to the Holy Spirit, our Teacher and Guide; and our brotherhood with Jesus, who says he has nothing that we cannot also have. Let us take these reassuring words and walk with them in our everyday life.

Share the Atonement when So Prompted

“My part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and give it away. (T-5.IV.6)”

Jesus says repeatedly in A Course in Miracles that he is in charge of the Atonement, that his resurrection was the event that started the Atonement principle (not the crucifixion). He does not express any understanding for the skeptics among us about how his resurrection might have been a true happening. He never downplays his resurrection also. He simply assumes that, somehow, in some way, the resurrection happened, and it started the whole movement of Christianity that transpired from then on.

How do we “give away” the Atonement? We share. We don’t share indiscriminately, because we are not called to proselytize. We are told, in one vivid point, that sometimes a smile may be all that another person is ready to accept. Salvation has come for that moment.

Thus we accept the Atonement for ourselves; that is “joining” it. Then we give it away in whatever manner the Holy Spirit prompts. And when we are on the beam, we may give it away without even being aware of a special prompting. We will just act in line with Jesus’s plan, his plan of Atonement or correction to the ways of the world.

All that Is Real Is Shared

“[O]nly with your understanding that all that is real is shared does the ego lose its power. The ego was made from the belief in separation and all that followed from it. Thus your true identity must be re-created from the belief in unity that is inherent in the acceptance that you are a being who exists in relationship. Separation is all that opposes relationship, and the ego is all that opposes your true identity. (Treatises of A Course of Love: Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition, 11.7)”

Affirmation: “I will share today, that the ego might die.”

Reflections:

1 – ACIM

These ideas in the passage for today are logical extensions of much in A Course in Miracles. We share with others in relationship, and this creates a unity, for all of us are actually One, with ourselves, with our brothers and sisters, and with God. When we are ready to be in relationship as our foremost endeavor, we are truly ready to give up the ego. In secular terms, this means that we choose cooperation, which is a benign concept, over competition, which is often egoic in nature.

2 – Protective Defense

We try to choose separation from others when we are being particularly protective of ourselves, trying to save ourselves from hurt. This in itself is not bad, but the ramifications are, for to separate from others is to be all alone with the ego. Only the ego wants this separation, and with the separation comes strife, and the ego is strong in strife (from ACIM).

3 – Personal Experience

I was quite retiring and shy as a teenager. And some of this carried over throughout my college years. Finally, finding reference librarianship did much to bring me out of my shell–but discovering A Course in Miracles did even more. We do not need to fear others, to turn inward in a withdrawn way. We do not have to fear others at all, for they have no power over us that we do not give them. We choose what happens to us on some level, though this choosing is not conscious, and we have to be careful that we don’t blame the victim when something bad ensues. The Self/Christ makes these decisions, and that world view is much bigger than anything that the personal self can see.

4 – True Identity

So the ego is all that opposes our true identity. Of course! What more could it be? And when we turn aside from egoic thinking, listening to our heart, we will find our way home. The “journey without distance” (from the Text of ACIM) is completed sooner rather than later. Do not, however, lament if the way still seems long. Brighter days are here as we learn to give up the ego in every way that we perceive. And the knowledge that comes to us from God will ensure that our walk is smooth and our way is well-marked.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

May I walk a calm way today. I have been overpressing lately, trying to do too much, being on the go all the time. This is no way to live a life. Help me to regroup and to lead a more placid existence.

I would share with others, but not so as to make any others jealous of each other. Especially my significant other needs to know that I am there for him. May I make this clear today, clear to him in a way that is unmistakable.

I would choose to avoid egotistic doings today. May my choices reflect the truth that I try to follow Your guidance. Thank You for the guidance that You have already given me today.

Amen

A Receptive Heart

“You are coming home to the way of the heart.  What you gain by sharing with others is a situation in which you ‘learn’ in unity through the receptivity of the heart.  (Addendum to A Course of Love:  Learning in the Time of Christ)”

Affirmation:  “May I share with others today.”

Reflections:

1 – Heart

May my heart be receptive today.  May I share with others, to the extent that You would wish.  May I share accurately, and may my heart dictate the words that I write.  Only when the heart is engaged do we really come to realize that we are really alright the way that we are, that all is well with us, and that we can correct the faults of our personality simply by willing these faults to disappear.

2 – Unity

All of us are One.  This is what “unity” means.  And we are one not only with our brothers and sisters, but with God and His helpers, and with ourselves, our deepest Self.  May this assurance bring us comfort today.  May we realize that the oneness of our being means that we are never alone, and therefore we do not have to fear isolation.  We are not meant to be isolated, however introverted we may be.  Everyone needs some companionship, and it is in the assurance that we are One that we know that we are not alone.

3 – Observe

May our hearts be receptive today.  When our hearts are open, we can observe (the replacement for learning) in a way that we cannot otherwise.  May today be a good day, a receptive day, that lends us credence for a safe world in which all of us abide under God’s care.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

Thank You for the intuitive indications You have given me today.  They provide much solace, much comfort.  May I not depend on intuition to live my life totally, but may I know that the solution is always with the problem, and so the answer is there for me to find–immediately.

When I listen to my heart, I am the better off for it.  May I encourage others to have a good day, listening also to their hearts.

Amen.

The Reason for Unhappiness

“Yet you must understand that nothing that is not part of God is worthy of joining, nor can join with you.  What you have sought to join with is the reason for your unhappiness.  For you seek to join with what cannot be joined, and you seek separation from all that could be joined with you and all that would fill your dark and lonely places with the happiness you seek.  (A Course of Love, 12.4)”

Affirmation:  “I would join, metaphorically, with all today.”

Reflections:

1 – Joining, Not Separation

The passage for today is obscure, but it is likely that Jesus is referring to our belief in a separated state, and the idea that we can join with special others when we wish, and depart from those same special ones when we wish (from the Manual of A Course in Miracles).  But nothing separated can actually be joined.  We need to, at least tentatively and temporarily, share an idea of Oneness with all.  And then the joining is easy.

2 – Spending Time with God

Jesus is not speaking here of physical joining, though he does speak of this joining elsewhere.  He indicates that this physical means was meant to remind us of our desire to one, not to be separate.  We are meant to be in relationship one to another; we are never meant to spend lives of isolation.  I do not mean for this statement to be controversial.  There are introverts who prefer solitude to the company of others, and shy people sometimes choose solitude also.  There are many religious individuals in religious orders that spend a good bit of time in prayer and meditation, and for these activities they may be alone.  But God is always with us, and He wants our companionship.  The opening pages of the Text of ACIM says that God is lonely when the minds that He created do not commune with Him.  He knows that we have fallen asleep and must be awakened.  And He seeks to do just that.

2 – Joining in Onwness

So, we learn today that joining in Oneness is the intention of God for us.  We are in unity and relationship, a recurrent theme of A Course of Love.  The unity makes us One; the relationship makes us differentiate from one another so that companionship can occur.  We are actually talking with a part of ourselves when we speak to another!  And we would not wish for ourselves a bad day, and so let us be kind and loving, sparing of anger and attack, when we are with others.  Our brothers and sisters deserve this of us.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

May I never be guilty of choosing isolation from You.  And, except in special and particular times, I would not choose isolation from other people.  Be with me today as I seek to be sensitive to the interpersonal needs of other people, and to share my life with theirs, to the extent that we both desire.

I would thank You for leading me from too much introversion to a blend of being both introvert and extrovert.  I learned years ago that I get along better when I share my life with others, including the personal aspects that previously I kept between myself, my journal, and my God.

We do best when we join with others, not taking the idea of separation so seriously.  Separation, especially the independence that is so prized in our culture, is actually not always wise.  And separation, by itself, is never wise.  

May we seek and find You in the companionship that You would wish to have with us.  May I speak to You often today.

Amen.