Reading ACIM, ACOL, WOM

Note:  This is a response I penned yesterday to a new reader of my blog.  The idea of listening to one’s heart about this matter came sometime ago from Glenn Hovemann, Take Heart Publications, publisher of A Course of Love.

Thank you for writing to me.  I appreciate that you enjoy the posts on my miracles blog.

I think you must listen to your heart in trying to discern which book to read first, and then the order of all the reading.   

If you recognize that the Holy Spirit gives you guidance (as described in ACIM), then listen to what you have come to recognize as His promptings.  If you recognize the inner Christ-Self (as described in ACOL), then listen to this deepest essence of yourself.  If you simply realize that you have intuitive feelings, then listen to those.  You will know.  Prayer helps.

ACIM seeks to dislodge the ego, and ACOL is said within its pages to be a “continuation” of ACIM, meant to establish a new identity.  But ACOL can stand on its own, separately, if that is your prompting.  WOM may be the most approachable.  You can read the Manual of ACIM first, if the Text or Workbook seem too daunting.  All seek to bring us to Awakening, Christ-consciousness, enlightenment, the next step in our spiritual evolution.  ACIM is my happiness book, ACOL warms my heart, and WOM gives me hope and comfort on my journey.  That is my personal take on them.

You have a treat ahead of you!  We are meant to enjoy our delving into spiritual matters, and I encourage you to read in an easy, reflective, meditative manner, whatever book first that you are the most drawn to.  Whatever you choose will then be right for you.  It would be wrong for anybody else to try to choose for you.  I have just tried to give you something to think about as you mull over your options.

Thank you again for writing to me.

Love to you, Celia

A Bridge – New Publication from Take Heart Publications

This is a message from Glenn Hovemann, publisher, Take Heart Publications, about a new booklet that will describe the connection between A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love. The booklet is called A Bridge, and can be purchased from amazon in both print and e-book format. It is excellent, my recommendation (from Celia):

Here are straight answers to questions from students of A Course in Miracles about A Course of Love.

• What’s different about the message of ACOL?
• Do both ACIM and ACOL see the world as an illusion?
• How can ACOL help me in my life?
• What could ACOL offer that I haven’t already gotten from ACIM?

Many long-time students of ACIM have wholeheartedly embraced ACOL without diminishing in the slightest their love for ACIM. Others have been hesitant about “another Course.” This little book was written by students of both Courses. It’s offered as a bridge of love.

This booklet is NOT couched as a “debate” or intended to foster that kind of energy. It is for people who are interested in these questions and who are open to listening. As it says in the Introduction:

This work is presented as a series of questions and answers, and the author of each response to each question has been indicated. Our intent is to avoid the suggestion there is any one form of answering these questions that is exclusively correct, and to avoid the solidification of answers into dogmas or ideals. Some of our contributors are more verbose than others. Some have different vantages. We view this as all of a piece, as we are each unique expressions of the fullness of God. Words remain but symbols. The truth is what lives and breathes and dances in our own hearts. It is the living reality of Love we would remember, and to which we would each return.

A COURSE OF LOVE: AN OVERVIEW – NEW FROM TAKE HEART PUBLICATIONS

Celia Hales (writer of this blog) has just published a little 48 – page book entitled A Course of Love: An Overview, with Take Heart Publications, the publisher of A Course of Love, Glenn Hovemann, publisher.

Please visit the A Course of Love website for ordering information. It is available as a paperback and an e-book for $3.95. (Scroll downward on the ACOL web site after viewing the new images.)

Here is an excerpt from the preface of the booklet on my introduction to Mari:

The year was 2004, three years after Mari Perron had published the first part of f A Course of Love (also known by its acronym, ACOL) with New World Library. Like Mari, I was living in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. And, like Mari, I was a seeker.

Some time had gone by since I had purchased and read the New World edition. But I found myself interested in having a conversation with Mari about A Course of Love, in part about the assertion I had read that Jesus had channeled this new work. We met over coffee. She was charming and articulate, but unassuming, just a “regular” person. We were deep in conversation for over an hour.

Mari’s daughter Mia came over to greet us. Mari lamented that A Course of Love had not “taken off” the way that she would have liked. Mia said something prophetic: She said that it took a while for A Course in Miracles to take off, and that it would just take some time for A Course of Love to become known as well.
As our conversation continued, Mari said, “I have been praying that someone would come to me to help me get the word out about A Course of Love.”
I was stunned. Mari thought that I was an answer to her prayer.

I thought she had the wrong person. I was A Course in Miracles enthusiast, and I thought that she needed a younger generation to come along and help her.

Now, twelve years later and seven years into writing a blog on both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, I think Mari might have been right all along. Right about a mission for me, right about Jesus as the one who channeled to her.

Now many others are drawn to ACOL, due largely to Glenn Hovemann’s Take Heart Publications and the new combined volume. Yes, Jesus’s professed “continuation” of A Course in Miracles has an ever-widening and increasingly enthusiastic audience.

To my mind Jesus had “unfinished business” with us after A Course in Miracles. A Course of Love answers many of the questions that we have had after reading A Course in Miracles. Now Jesus not only takes us by the hand and leads us beyond the ego, but he tells us how to establish a new identity—in this body but beyond this body, the “elevated Self of form.”

We are on the threshold of a newly created world. The Voice that Mari heard as “thoughts she did not ‘think,” (D:12.11) now made available to us in A Course of Love, counsels us to transform ourselves and our world.

—

Thank you for your interest.

–Celia

The Prodigal’s Return, by Ivor Sowton

A Course of Love (ACOL) is a transmission from Jesus to Mari Perron, the “first receiver” of this new course, scribed in three years around the turn of this century. She published the work in three volumes during the years since. It is now in one combined volume in a beautiful, newly released edition by Take Heart Publications, available on their website and in all the major bookstores, including Amazon/Kindle.

Mari will have a table at the upcoming A Course in Miracles (ACIM) Conference, A Present Love, April 17th-20th in New York City. Also at the table will be her Take Heart publishers, Glenn and Muffy Hovemann. I know some of you will be there; please come to their table!

Mari and Take Heart Publications have also set up a wonderful Facebook Group called “A Course of Love USA,” centered on her new audio recordings of ACOL. Currently the group is listening to and commenting on chapter 9 of ACOL, The Prodigal’s Return.

Here’s a quote from that wonderful chapter that jumped out at me:

“It is the relationship inherent in meeting another’s need that makes the meeting of the need a thing of lasting value. It is your willingness to say, “Brother, you are not alone” that is the benefit of such situations, not only to your brother but also to you. It is in saying, Sister, you are not alone” that spiritual hunger and thirst is met with the fullness of unity. It is in realizing that you are not alone that you realize your unity with me and begin to turn from fear toward love.” (9.27)

To speak honestly now about my own experience of life right now, I do indeed feel like the prodigal son in this chapter. That is, in my deepest feelings I am aware of a tremendous loneliness and isolation, which I no longer want. I feel that Jesus is personally offering me a way out.

That way out is to realize, first in my mind–since I seem so trapped there so much of the time!–that actually all other people ALSO tend to feel deeply alone and isolated, at least in their ego natures.

Then I can be willing to reach out to them; and then my heart starts to open to them, and the artificial barriers between us begin to dissolve at last.

The nitty gritty of this joining with my brothers and sisters seems to involve overlooking outward differences. For instance, my brother might be thinking he needs “X”, and I might be thinking I need “Y,” but if I can risk taking Jesus at his word here, I may be able to realize that what my brother and I both ACTUALLY need is to feel the Love of God–the embrace spoken of so beautifully in chapter 20. In realizing that we are one in that need, my brother and I have joined in Christ.

This, then, is the return of the Prodigal Son/Daughter, who is us.