A vacation is not always the best time to make decisions about puzzling problems. At least twice during 1984 I made that attempt, only to find when I returned to my normal routine that my decisions did not make sense.
Written upon reflection, two years subsequently, “It is easy to plan when very rested, as I was during that Christmas. But the unreality of my thinking gives me pause for thought.”
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When I awaken with a certain idea, I wonder if my subconscious has served up a message.
“When you have opened the floodgates of your consciousness, allowing everything you experience, whatever it may be, to be embraced, then you will live as what you are: the holy abode of Christ.” COL bk.2, 19:II
Embracing our experiences is, as Choose Only Love says, necessary to our continued march toward God. Others have said just to dismiss negativity, but perhaps the better Answer, as COL says, is to integrate the negativity; overcome the fear with love.
This is scary business—but it works! There is absolutely nothing that the power of Love cannot overcome. If we dismiss our thoughts of negative outcomes, the negative things may very well just go underground in our subconscious, just waiting there to make us uneasy and then to rear their ugly heads again. If we transmute (i.e., change the form) of our thoughts, they will never arise to hurt us again. We will be free of the bad thoughts, and we will, we know, have overcome them with the much better value of Love.
There is nothing that can’t be righted this way. As COL says elsewhere, when a worry arises, sit down, relax, take a deep breath, connect with our desire for something better, and then the Answer will arrive.
There is nothing that can’t be integrated toward the positive. Pushing down the negative thought by trying to put it out of mind only saves it for another rainy day.
We want to be the “holy abode of Christ.” Letting Love overwhelm us and our problems is the way to achieve this wonderful outcome.
“By loving everything that arises within you, you eliminate fear of yourself. By eliminating fear of yourself, you eliminate fear of your experience. By removing it [fear] from your innermost self, nothing and no one can make it arise again.” COL bk.2, 19:II
Many of us studied “positive thinking” for many years. But one thing that bothers me now is that we reject our negativism, and this takes effort. This quotation would have us embrace anything and everything that arises in our consciousness. We won’t have to judge ourselves so harshly for a stray thought that is not positive enough. We will simply love it away.
If we love everything that arises in us, we won’t be afraid of our mind anymore. Many of us have thought of our mind, especially our egoic mind, as the enemy. And that may be true. But rejection does not work, because what we resist becomes stronger. We need simply to turn aside from thoughts that we don’t want. Entertain something else, in the present moment.
If we are in a low mood, our thoughts will be negative. At such times Richard Carlson counsels us simply to relax and invite a graceful response. He says that if we don’t relax, we will be afraid of our own thoughts. And this is exactly what today’s quotation warns against.
There is no reason to be afraid of what arises from the depths of our mind to be healed. This rising from the depths is how we are prepared for Awakening, enlightenment, Christ-consciousness. We must see, with God’s help, that the subconscious is cleansed from the bottom up. This idea, from The Way of Mastery, makes perfect sense to those of us who have followed Freud.
Be gentle with ourselves today. Let fear fall away in the only way possible, by embracing love.
“Here is a simple exercise. Take just a moment and within your consciousness, drop this simple pebble:
“I am not what I have perceived myself to be. I am unlimited, pure Spirit and nothing is unavailable to me. Therefore, in this moment, I choose to open access to other dimensions of experience so that I might call this moment to me in a different way.” (“The Way of Transformation,” WOM, Chapter 13, Page 155)
We seem to be more psychic than we know: This is what Jesus is saying in this quotation for today. If “nothing is unavailable to me,” then we can know those things that have been shrouded in mystery—just by asking to see with the eyes of our Spirit.
On the other hand, if we think we can’t discern new things, we will be caught by our past. Jesus would not have it so for us.
In The Way of Mastery, Jesus often speaks of dropping pebbles of thought into our consciousness. These pebbles then circle outward, and the thoughts are thereby expanded. The image is a comforting one.
Let us “open access to other dimensions of experience.” We can’t know exactly what will come up from our subconscious when we do open up. But what comes will heal us, be healing to us. And if we are to have transformation, glimpses of enlightenment that lengthen to the real thing, then we are encouraged to heal all layers of our mind.
This is our way home to God.
“You cannot take fear into Love. You cannot take judgment into forgiveness. You cannot take limitation into unlimitedness. These things must be released at the level in which they were first created.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 12, Page 146)
Jesus’ channeled writings (the principal of which are A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love, and The Way of Mastery) could not have been written in the manner given prior to Sigmund Freud. Freud developed the idea of a subconscious mind that the mind of conscious awareness knew not of. The fear, the judgment, and the limitation are lodged in this subconscious. In the quotation for today, Jesus says that these things “must be released at the level in which they were first created.” And this means the subconscious.
We didn’t set out to be fearful, to be judgmental, to be limited in our personalities. These things developed over time in a world that impinged upon us. We inherited much of this, but it is a dead-end street to blame our parents. They too were hoodwinked. People have simply not known any better because of the construct called the ego. This is the false persona that rose up when we decided that we wanted a make a world different from what God had created. We would try to do better than he. And in this ridiculous notion, we retreated into fear when we “separated” from Him. He let us go, knowing that with his gift of free will, He did not want to coerce us.
We cleanse the mind of fear, judgment, limitation by spending time communing with God in prayer, meditation, quiet times that nourish our soul. We learn again that we are not sufficient unto ourselves, that we need each other. We join others in relationships that promote the unity that we have to realize we need with God. We take a step back from the ego. We begin again.
We need to remove the blocks to the awareness of love. This may take time, but it does not, should not, be a struggle.
When we seek, we do find. And in the finding are all things made right again. One with God and with each other, we walk a flower-strewn path—even in this world.
“That book is the depth of your consciousness in which all things are already written. And that depth finds its source in your heart. You enter it through forgiveness, through the process of relinquishing the world—not hating the world, not despising the world, but simply relinquishing it. You allow your time to serve you in the process of relinquishing what does not serve you any longer, and what only disturbs your peace.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 10, Page 125)
“That book” is actually our minds and hearts, what dwells within and can free us of all impediments. We need to allow our subconscious to surface, and in the surfacing our mind will be healed. It is just that simple, but just that difficult.
When we contemplate, letting our minds go over the past, and we dedicate this time to God, we are on the right track. When we allow ourselves to feel forgiveness for that dramatic past, we are really on the right track.
Most of us have had drama in our past, and we will have drama again if we don’t forgive ourselves as well as others whom we have known. This drama needs to step aside so that the better value of peace can give our mind and heart some rest, some respite.
Ask for help in cleansing the subconscious. In numerous places The Way of Mastery tells us that this cleansing is a necessity for enlightenment.
Let’s get on with it.
. . .[Y]our life is no longer your own to dictate and control. But that rather, you have given it over the Source of your own beingness, to that depth of wisdom in the depth of the ocean that knows best how to bring about what is required to push up the dross from within your consciousness, so that you can release it.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 5, Page 62)
We are becoming enlightened by a process by which the subconscious is cleansed from the bottom up. We don’t try to dictate how this will come about. Our part is simply to allow it to happen by not focusing on the wishes of the dying ego. Allowance is the way that Jeshua (Jesus) moved Jayem to enlightenment, as described in The Jeshua Letters. His own conscious willingness to let go in surrender was all that was needed, for his own subconscious had been largely cleansed by the time that Jesus approached him, perhaps through the Eastern wisdom that he had read voraciously for years.
Likewise, allowance is our way, too. If we try to remain in the driver’s seat, we will miss the point as well as miss enlightenment, Awakening, Christ-consciousness.
God must be allowed to have His way with us, and in this ultimate surrender, He blesses us with the knowledge of His love and His guidance. Our pathway will be as clear as our next step, for we see the pathway only step by step. But we have said “yes” to the whole route, and in so doing, we have fallen into Jesus’ arms. His embrace, as described in A Course of Love, heals. And it is this embrace that contains the whole universe(s).
The mystical transformation that carries you from feeling yourself to be a disempowered little drop of foam on the edge of a wave to the sense of freedom and empowered living that flows from the Mind of God through you to express only beautiful creations filled with majesty, power and miracles is willingness. (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Lesson 4, Page 49)
Jesus compares us to waves rising from the ocean, with God being the ocean. We are no more separate from God than a wave is separate from the ocean. We are a part of God.
The willingness mentioned in this quotation is called just a “little” willingness in A Course in Miracles. When we give ourselves to God, He takes our bending to His will and grows it tremendously. We may have heretofore felt thwarted in some of our projects. If we give the details of our lives, even the practical details, over to a Higher Power, we will know a success unexpected in common hours. And we will know God.
It is through knowing God that we know what next step to take. When we have walked far along the way, knowing becomes a most intimate part of ourselves. We don’t have to stop and think. We just know what to say and do. We act in innocence in our world. If our initial impulse would hurt anyone, then we need to go within and recognize that our response is not, in fact, from God.
When we, children of God, act on His side, what we say and do is not harmful to anyone. It is permeated, through and through, with the innocence that is our very being.
“Each gesture, each thought, the way that the body breathes, all of these things are going on constantly, and they are communicating or revealing the effect of what you have allowed to make a home in your mind.” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 2, Page 12)
Everything is conspiring to take us home in God. Our every gesture is either a conscious or subconscious, unrecognized, desire to heal the separation that is not real, but in which we have believed. This separation from God has taken us on a long journey that is ending.
If we allow our mind to open to Love, we will gesture differently, think differently, breathe differently. We will be in a flow that takes us through the day with an ease that we have not imagined possible.
If our thoughts and actions are anger-oriented, then we know what we have given a place in our mind. And A Course in Miracles says that anger is never warranted, not that we will never feel it, but that it is not necessary. While this doesn’t mean that push the anger down into the subconscious, or that we are passive-aggressive, it does mean that we need to go back to the beginning, before we felt anger. What prompted it? What exactly was going on?
We may find that we are stressed, or tired, lonely, or hungry. Our bodies may be betraying us, for though we imagine the body to be illusory, it does seem to have effects in this world. Physiology of the body does make a difference.
But the mind and heart can rise above. Turn over unpleasant thoughts, too-fast breathing (maybe), to a Higher Power. The Holy Spirit knows how to heal us, and by bringing up these concerns in the mind, we are healing these concerns. All from the subconscious has to eventually be brought up (something Jesus says elsewhere in WOM).
Let our greater understanding of exactly what is going on with us, eventually free us to love more fully.
“I give you this thought, and I would ask that you consider it well. What if the very life you are living, and each and every experience that is coming to you now since the moment you decided ‘I have got to awaken her,’ was being directly sent to you of your Father because your Father knows what is necessary to unravel within your consciousness to allow you to awaken? What if the very things you are resisting are the very stepping stones to your homecoming? What if you achieved a maturity along this pathway in which you were finally willing to let things be just as they are?” (“The Way of the Heart,” WOM, Chapter 1, Page 7)
“Sent” by the Father does mean that the Holy Spirit or the Christ-Self is in control of everything that is being sent to us.
We don’t know what will heal us. But we need to bring up the layers of the subconscious mind that have been lost in egoistic thought for eons. These layers are just that—layers. So the different layers will come up, over time, differently. And the layers of the subconscious are different for everyone, so the schooling by a Higher Power is very precise, unique to each of us.
It is true that we can depart from this schooling. We can go off on tangents, forgetting what we are about, and what we are about is a return to God. We function best, though, when, in the flow, we listen to guidance.
The guidance takes us home in God. Let us listen and discover.
“In its characteristic upside-down way, the ego has taken the impulses from the superconscious and perceived them as if they arise in the unconscious. The ego judges what is to be accepted, and the impulses from the superconscious are essentially unacceptable to it, because they clearly point to the nonexistence of the ego itself. When this occurs, the ego experiences threat, and not only censors but also reinterprets the data. However, as Freud very correctly pointed out, what you do not perceive you still know, and it can retain a very active life beyond your awareness.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.3:1-4)
The quotation for today alludes to the concept of the mind to which Jesus subscribes. The superconscious is “above” us, devoid of the ego, and is actually a bridge to God, the Holy Spirit, the Christ-Self. Freud, misunderstanding, called this part of the mind, the “superego.” As this quotation points out, the ego actually has nothing to do with it.
The conscious is our normal waking awareness.
The unconscious sinks below thought, but is still (unlike what Jung thought in his “collective unconscious”) unique to us. Jung thought that underneath, we all think the same, and in some sense this is akin to an awareness of our Creator, God Himself—a Source found, according to Jesus, in the superconscious.
We don’t have to fully grasp these differences in consciousness to make use of them. Helen and Bill, co-scribes of A Course in Miracles and psychologists, would have been very attuned to this portion of ACIM. Jesus would be talking right up their alley.
We do still know what is in our mind, even when we are not conscious of it, and then it causes a subtle (or not so subtle) uneasiness. It can affect our actions, something that we all know. When we are driven by schemas that draw upon childhood conditioning, we are very lost in the mind.
The solution, according to A Course of Love (what many believe to be a continuation of ACIM), is to draw upon the heart. The heart by-passes the confusion of the mind, because the heart doesn’t demand proof of what it knows.
The heart just knows.
“The spacious Self realizes that the outer world is a projection and most often a rejection rather than an extension of what is within. Thus, sickness is a rejection of feelings. All that causes fear is rejection of feelings. All that causes loneliness is rejection of feelings. All that causes violence is rejection of feelings.
“What is ejected from the self becomes separate and in the separation willfully forgotten. The spacious Self no longer ejects or forgets because all feelings are accepted as those of the One Self.” (ACOL, D:Day14.2 – Day14.3)
Rejecting our feelings gets us in bad trouble, bad trouble indeed. Why do we reject feelings? Because they are uncomfortable, some of them. It is those uncomfortable feelings that we reject—feelings that lead to sickness, fear, loneliness.
We need to be gentler with ourselves. We need to embrace bad feelings as soon as they come up, just embrace and wrap our spacious Self around them. When we embrace, we love, don’t we? And it is love that is the healing Force.
Our outer world, in this quotation, is seen as a projection, and, as Jesus says, often a rejection rather than an extension of what we have found within. The part about the world being a projection is right along the same lines as words found in A Course in Miracles. But when we have looked on our outer projection of the world, and been displeased, we need to realize that we don’t like what we are seeing within. And actually becoming aware of what we don’t like within is a great blessing. By seeing it, we can open these interior parts to healing from God. The subconscious is thereby systematically healed, and this is what it takes to be ready for Christ-consciousness, Awakening, enlightenment.
We are getting beyond separating ourselves from what we don’t like from our interior. Our spacious Self accepts—exactly what Jesus has bade us do in recent quotations. This acceptance doesn’t mean that we are pleased with what we have found on the inside of ourselves. But this acceptance does mean that we don’t try to separate ourselves from it, thereby making a new ego.
We are no longer living in separation, and this new place that we occupy is holy. We are living in a shared unity with our Self and this a Self Whom we share with others. Our brothers and sisters. Let us offer them today the best that we have in us, as we seek to embrace, in us, all that we have previously rejected as uncomfortable feelings.
Dear God,
Let my interior rise to the surface, that it might be healed. This is a fervent prayer, the prayer I pray today. I would see my subconscious cleansed of all fearfulness and all judgment. This is not hard to see happen; it is hanging on to the uncomfortable feelings that is hard, very hard.
I will take care of the quantity in writing; You take care of the quality. A writer’s prayer, recited often by Julia Cameron. And recited today by me.
Amen.
MIRACLES EACH DAY 