The First Remembrance: Dying is something you do for you.
The Second Remembrance: You are the cause of your own death. This is always true, no matter where, or how, you die.
The Third Remembrance: You cannot die against your will.
The Fourth Remembrance: No path back Home is better than any other path.
The Fifth Remembrance: Death is never a tragedy. It is always a gift.
The Sixth Remembrance: You and God are one. There is no separation between you.
The Seventh Remembrance: Death does not exist.
The Eighth Remembrance: You cannot change Ultimate Reality, but you can change your experience of it.
The Ninth Remembrance: It is the desire of All That Is to Know Itself in Its Own Experience. This is the reason for all of Life.
The Tenth Remembrance: Life is eternal.
The Eleventh Remembrance: The timing and the circumstances of death are always perfect.
The Twelfth Remembrance: The death of every person always serves the agenda of every other person who is aware of it. That is why they are aware of it, Therefore, no death (and no life) is ever "wasted." No one ever dies "in vain."
The Thirteenth Remembrance: Birth and death are the same thing.
The Fourteenth Remembrance: You are continually in the act of creation, in life and in death.
The Fifteenth Remembrance: There is no such thing as the end of evolution.
The Sixteenth Remembrance: Death is reversible.
The Seventeenth Remembrance: In death you will be greeted by all of your loved ones – those who have died before you and those who will die after you.
The Eighteenth Remembrance: Free Choice is the act of pure creation, the signature of God, and your gift, your glory, and your power forever and ever.
sábado, 30 de junio de 2007
martes, 26 de junio de 2007
3,4,,,del 4
2.33 Creating anew is the precursor of the coming of the new world. Remember, only from a shared vision of what is can you begin to produce unity and relationship through unity and relationship. This is your purpose now, and this the curriculum to guide you to the fulfillment of your purpose.
chapter 3
Natural Vision
3.1 Observation is an extension of the embrace that in turn makes the embrace observable. The embrace is not an action so much as a state of being. Awareness of the embrace comes from the vision of which I have just begun to speak.
3.2 Observation and vision are closely linked but not the same. Observation has to do with the elevation of the personal self. Vision has to do with what cannot be elevated. Vision has to do with the divine pattern, the unity that binds all living things. Observation is the means of seeing this binding pattern in physical form.
3.3 The personal self is still in need of being elevated — elevated to its original nature — by its original nature or intent. The devotion of the observant will return you to your original purpose. The vision of Christ-consciousness will take you beyond it.
3.4 Original intent has everything to do with the nature of things for original intent is synonymous with cause. The original intent of this chosen experience was the expression of the Self of love in observable form. This original intent or cause formed the true nature of the personal self capable of being observed in relationship. 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.
3.5 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 began with fear and proceeded from this beginning continually reacting to 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.
3.6 For every being there is a natural state that is joyful, effortless, and full of love. For every being existing in time there is also an unnatural state of being. Both states of being — the natural and the unnatural — exist in relationship. While relationship is what has kept you forever unable to be separate and alone, relationship is also what has kept you forever unable to return to your natural state of being. The fear that was birthed along with the erroneously inherited idea that it was your nature to be separate and alone, made relationships fearful as well. Trust became something to be earned. Even the most loving parent, like unto your most loving image of God, having brought a child into a fearful world, became subject to the tests of time. Thus did the world become a world of effort with all things in it and beyond it, including God, weighed and balanced against the idea of fear.
3.7 Now, as we reverse this set of circumstances, and replace the world of fear with a world of love, there can be no more weighing of love against fear. God did not create fear and will not be judged by it. All judgment is the cause of fear and this effort to weigh love’s strength against fear’s veracity. While you chose to believe and live in a world the nature of which was fear, you could not know God. You could not know God because you judged God from within the nature of fear, believing fear to be your natural state.
3.8 As the natural state of love is returned to you, judgment falls away because vision will arise. With the onset of the vision of love, many of you will make one final judgment in which you find everything to be good and full of love. Once all has been judged with the vision of love, judgment is over naturally for it has served its purpose. This is the final judgment.
3.9 The vision that will arise in you now is not new. It is your natural vision, the vision of love. What is new is the elevation of the personal self that will be caused by the return of your natural state of love. This is where observation comes in.
3.10 Vision will allow you to see the nature of the world and all that exists within it truly. Observation will allow you to elevate the personal self to its rightful place within the nature of a world of love.
3.11 Vision is the natural means of knowing of all who were created in love. Observation is the natural means of sharing what is known in physical form.
3.12 The physical form is not the natural or original form of the created. Vision is the means by which the original nature of the created can once again be known. Observation is the means by which the original nature of the created can newly be seen in physical form. Once the original nature of the created becomes observable in physical form, physical form will surpass what it once was and become the new nature of the created. There is no reason why the original nature of your being cannot become a being the nature of which is form if you so choose it to be. There is a reason why the original nature of your being cannot exist in a form unnatural to love. A form whose nature is fear cannot house the creation of love.
3.13 Man has striven since the beginning of time to be done with the separated state of a being of form, and at the same time to hang on to life, not realizing that what exists in form does not have to be separate and alone; not realizing that what lives does not have to die. That the nature of form can change. That the nature of matter is one of change. That the nature, even of form, once returned to its natural state of love, is one of unity and everlasting life.
3.14 The idea of everlasting life in form has seemed a curse to some, a miracle to others. Death comes as destruction to some, as new life to others. Either way is but your choice. Your attachment to life has kept you alive in form. Your attachment to death has kept your form subject to the cycle of decay and rebirth. There is another alternative.
3.15 The promise of life everlasting was not an empty promise. It is a promise that has been fulfilled. It is you who have chosen the means. Now a new choice is before you.
chapter 4
the Inheritance of Everlasting Life
4.1 Everywhere within your world you see the pattern of life-everlasting. Where there is a pattern of life-everlasting, there is everlasting life. Means and end are one, cause and effect the same.
4.2 The pattern of life-everlasting is one of changing form. It is one that is revealed on Earth by birth and death, decay and renewal, seasons of growth and seasons of decline. This is the pattern of creation taken to extremes. Inherent within the extreme is the balance. Even in the biblical description of creation was a day of rest spoken of. Creation balanced with rest is the pattern that has been taken to extremes within your world. You think of birth as creation and death as rest. You do not realize that your nature, and the nature of your life, like that of all around you, is governed by seasons natural to the state of love, seasons of regeneration.
4.3 In your history, generations pass, through death, to allow for new generations to be born. As your planet has reached a state of growth known as over-population, this balance between old generations and new seems necessary and even crucial. One generation must pass to make room for the new.
4.4 Even before the planet reached the state of over-population, this idea was much in evidence. The passing of a parent was seen, particularly historically, as the time of the child of the parent coming into his or her inheritance or time of
fullness. The power and prestige, the earthly wealth of the parent, passed historically to the son.
4.5 This is one of the reasons that I came in the form of the “Son of God.” In the time in which I lived, the idea of inheritance was an even stronger idea, an idea with much more power than in current times. Inherent within the idea of inheritance was an idea of passing as well as an idea of continuity. What belonged to the father passed to the son and thereafter belonged to the son. What was of the father continued with the son.
4.6 What my life demonstrated was a capacity for inheritance not based upon death. My life, death, and resurrection revealed the power of inheritance, the power of the Father, as one of life-giving union. I called you then, and I call you now, to this inheritance.
4.7 This idea of inheritance is a natural idea arising from the nature of creation itself. It is an idea of continuity that is an idea consistent with that of creation. There is no discontinuity within creation. Like begets like. Life begets life. Thus is revealed the pattern of life-everlasting.
4.8 Changing form is part of the pattern of life-everlasting. The change in the form you now occupy, the change I have spoken of as that of elevation of the personal self, is a natural part of the pattern of life-everlasting. It is long over-due. It is long over-due because you have rejected rather than accepted your inheritance.
4.9 This is why this treatise is called A Treatise on the New. There has not been a time on Earth in which the inheritance of God the Father was accepted, save by me. This is why this time is spoken of as the time of fullness. It is the time during which you have within your awareness the ability to come into your time of fullness by accepting the inheritance of your Father. You have the awareness and thus the ability to accept the continuity of life-everlasting.
4.10 Lest this sound like the ranting of your science fiction, and cause you to turn deaf ears to the knowledge I would impart, let me assure you that immortality is not the change of which I speak. You are not mortal, and so a word that speaks of an opposite to what you are not and have never been is not the accurate word. I do not speak of bodies living forever instead of living for what you call a lifetime — be it a lifetime of twenty, or fifty, or ninety years. Life has continuously been prolonged without a substantial change in the nature of life. To think of living on and on as you have lived your life thus far would not appeal to many of you. Those aged and contemplating death might wish for prolonged life, but many of these same welcome death as the end to suffering and strife. To continue on endlessly with life as it has been would only relegate more and more to lives not worth living.
4.11 What is it then, of which I speak? If you still must look ahead and see death looming on the horizon, how can it be that I speak of life-everlasting? Am I but using new words to repeat what you have heard in various form from various religions and systems of belief for countless ages? Am I but calling you to a happy death and an after-life in heaven?
4.12 I am calling you to the new. I am calling you to transform. I am calling you to Christ-consciousness. I am calling you to everlasting consciousness even while you still abide in form. To be cognizant or aware of everlasting consciousness while you still abide in form is to be fully aware that you have life-everlasting.
4.13 Being fully aware that you have life-everlasting is totally different than having faith in an after-life. Faith is based upon the unknown. If the unknown were not unknown faith would not be necessary. Faith will become unnecessary, as life-everlasting becomes known to you.
4.14 This knowing will come from the return of true vision. True vision sees life-everlasting where perception but saw finite life and mortal bodies. Once vision and Christ-consciousness have returned to you, the means of life-everlasting will be understood as a choice. Because there was no relationship save that of intermediaries between the human and the divine, there was no choice but to end the separated state in order to return to unity through death. Once the return to unity has occurred in form, the decision to continue in form or to not continue in form will be yours.
4.15 Continuity is an attribute of relationship, not of matter. It is only in the relationship of matter to the divine that matter can become divine and thus eternal. If you can abide in unity while in human form, you will have no cause, save your own choice, to leave human form. To abide in unity is to abide in your natural state, a state of life-everlasting. To abide in a state of separation is to abide in an unnatural state from which you eventually will seek release.
4.16 Although this discussion is likely to cause many of you serious doubts about the truth and applicability of this course, this discussion is necessary to your awareness of Christ-consciousness. To believe that you are mortal is to believe that you must die to the personal self of form in order to be reborn as a true Self. This is an old way of thinking. Have we not worked throughout this Course to return your true identity to you now? The joining of heart and mind in relationship is the joining of the personal self with the true Self in the reality in which you exist now. Remember, the heart must abide in the reality where you think you are. Only through your mind’s acceptance of your new reality has the heart been freed to exist in the new reality that is the state of unity and relationship.
4.17 Can you not see the necessity of removing the idea that your true Self will be returned to you only through death? What purpose would this Course serve if it were just another preview of what to expect after you die? What difference would this make to your way of living or to the world in which you live?
4.18 What purpose will death serve when your true Self has joined with your physical form? You will see it simply as the transformation it has always been, the transformation from singular consciousness to Christ-consciousness. Form has been but a representation of singular consciousness. As form becomes a representation of Christ-consciousness it will take on the nature of Christ-consciousness of which my life was the example life. To sustain Christ-consciousness in form is creation of the new. My one example life could not sustain Christ-consciousness for those who came after me but could only be an example. What you are called to do is to, through your multitude, sustain Christ-consciousness, and create the union of the human and the divine as a new state of being. This union will take you beyond the goal of expressing your Self in form because this goal but reflected the desire for a temporary experience. The temporary experience has been elongated because of the appeal of the physical experience. What this treatise is saying to you is that if the physical experience appeals to you, and if you create the union of the human and the divine as a new state of being, this choice will be eternally yours. It will be a choice of your creation, a creation devoid of fear. It will be a new choice.
chapter 3
Natural Vision
3.1 Observation is an extension of the embrace that in turn makes the embrace observable. The embrace is not an action so much as a state of being. Awareness of the embrace comes from the vision of which I have just begun to speak.
3.2 Observation and vision are closely linked but not the same. Observation has to do with the elevation of the personal self. Vision has to do with what cannot be elevated. Vision has to do with the divine pattern, the unity that binds all living things. Observation is the means of seeing this binding pattern in physical form.
3.3 The personal self is still in need of being elevated — elevated to its original nature — by its original nature or intent. The devotion of the observant will return you to your original purpose. The vision of Christ-consciousness will take you beyond it.
3.4 Original intent has everything to do with the nature of things for original intent is synonymous with cause. The original intent of this chosen experience was the expression of the Self of love in observable form. This original intent or cause formed the true nature of the personal self capable of being observed in relationship. 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.
3.5 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 began with fear and proceeded from this beginning continually reacting to 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.
3.6 For every being there is a natural state that is joyful, effortless, and full of love. For every being existing in time there is also an unnatural state of being. Both states of being — the natural and the unnatural — exist in relationship. While relationship is what has kept you forever unable to be separate and alone, relationship is also what has kept you forever unable to return to your natural state of being. The fear that was birthed along with the erroneously inherited idea that it was your nature to be separate and alone, made relationships fearful as well. Trust became something to be earned. Even the most loving parent, like unto your most loving image of God, having brought a child into a fearful world, became subject to the tests of time. Thus did the world become a world of effort with all things in it and beyond it, including God, weighed and balanced against the idea of fear.
3.7 Now, as we reverse this set of circumstances, and replace the world of fear with a world of love, there can be no more weighing of love against fear. God did not create fear and will not be judged by it. All judgment is the cause of fear and this effort to weigh love’s strength against fear’s veracity. While you chose to believe and live in a world the nature of which was fear, you could not know God. You could not know God because you judged God from within the nature of fear, believing fear to be your natural state.
3.8 As the natural state of love is returned to you, judgment falls away because vision will arise. With the onset of the vision of love, many of you will make one final judgment in which you find everything to be good and full of love. Once all has been judged with the vision of love, judgment is over naturally for it has served its purpose. This is the final judgment.
3.9 The vision that will arise in you now is not new. It is your natural vision, the vision of love. What is new is the elevation of the personal self that will be caused by the return of your natural state of love. This is where observation comes in.
3.10 Vision will allow you to see the nature of the world and all that exists within it truly. Observation will allow you to elevate the personal self to its rightful place within the nature of a world of love.
3.11 Vision is the natural means of knowing of all who were created in love. Observation is the natural means of sharing what is known in physical form.
3.12 The physical form is not the natural or original form of the created. Vision is the means by which the original nature of the created can once again be known. Observation is the means by which the original nature of the created can newly be seen in physical form. Once the original nature of the created becomes observable in physical form, physical form will surpass what it once was and become the new nature of the created. There is no reason why the original nature of your being cannot become a being the nature of which is form if you so choose it to be. There is a reason why the original nature of your being cannot exist in a form unnatural to love. A form whose nature is fear cannot house the creation of love.
3.13 Man has striven since the beginning of time to be done with the separated state of a being of form, and at the same time to hang on to life, not realizing that what exists in form does not have to be separate and alone; not realizing that what lives does not have to die. That the nature of form can change. That the nature of matter is one of change. That the nature, even of form, once returned to its natural state of love, is one of unity and everlasting life.
3.14 The idea of everlasting life in form has seemed a curse to some, a miracle to others. Death comes as destruction to some, as new life to others. Either way is but your choice. Your attachment to life has kept you alive in form. Your attachment to death has kept your form subject to the cycle of decay and rebirth. There is another alternative.
3.15 The promise of life everlasting was not an empty promise. It is a promise that has been fulfilled. It is you who have chosen the means. Now a new choice is before you.
chapter 4
the Inheritance of Everlasting Life
4.1 Everywhere within your world you see the pattern of life-everlasting. Where there is a pattern of life-everlasting, there is everlasting life. Means and end are one, cause and effect the same.
4.2 The pattern of life-everlasting is one of changing form. It is one that is revealed on Earth by birth and death, decay and renewal, seasons of growth and seasons of decline. This is the pattern of creation taken to extremes. Inherent within the extreme is the balance. Even in the biblical description of creation was a day of rest spoken of. Creation balanced with rest is the pattern that has been taken to extremes within your world. You think of birth as creation and death as rest. You do not realize that your nature, and the nature of your life, like that of all around you, is governed by seasons natural to the state of love, seasons of regeneration.
4.3 In your history, generations pass, through death, to allow for new generations to be born. As your planet has reached a state of growth known as over-population, this balance between old generations and new seems necessary and even crucial. One generation must pass to make room for the new.
4.4 Even before the planet reached the state of over-population, this idea was much in evidence. The passing of a parent was seen, particularly historically, as the time of the child of the parent coming into his or her inheritance or time of
fullness. The power and prestige, the earthly wealth of the parent, passed historically to the son.
4.5 This is one of the reasons that I came in the form of the “Son of God.” In the time in which I lived, the idea of inheritance was an even stronger idea, an idea with much more power than in current times. Inherent within the idea of inheritance was an idea of passing as well as an idea of continuity. What belonged to the father passed to the son and thereafter belonged to the son. What was of the father continued with the son.
4.6 What my life demonstrated was a capacity for inheritance not based upon death. My life, death, and resurrection revealed the power of inheritance, the power of the Father, as one of life-giving union. I called you then, and I call you now, to this inheritance.
4.7 This idea of inheritance is a natural idea arising from the nature of creation itself. It is an idea of continuity that is an idea consistent with that of creation. There is no discontinuity within creation. Like begets like. Life begets life. Thus is revealed the pattern of life-everlasting.
4.8 Changing form is part of the pattern of life-everlasting. The change in the form you now occupy, the change I have spoken of as that of elevation of the personal self, is a natural part of the pattern of life-everlasting. It is long over-due. It is long over-due because you have rejected rather than accepted your inheritance.
4.9 This is why this treatise is called A Treatise on the New. There has not been a time on Earth in which the inheritance of God the Father was accepted, save by me. This is why this time is spoken of as the time of fullness. It is the time during which you have within your awareness the ability to come into your time of fullness by accepting the inheritance of your Father. You have the awareness and thus the ability to accept the continuity of life-everlasting.
4.10 Lest this sound like the ranting of your science fiction, and cause you to turn deaf ears to the knowledge I would impart, let me assure you that immortality is not the change of which I speak. You are not mortal, and so a word that speaks of an opposite to what you are not and have never been is not the accurate word. I do not speak of bodies living forever instead of living for what you call a lifetime — be it a lifetime of twenty, or fifty, or ninety years. Life has continuously been prolonged without a substantial change in the nature of life. To think of living on and on as you have lived your life thus far would not appeal to many of you. Those aged and contemplating death might wish for prolonged life, but many of these same welcome death as the end to suffering and strife. To continue on endlessly with life as it has been would only relegate more and more to lives not worth living.
4.11 What is it then, of which I speak? If you still must look ahead and see death looming on the horizon, how can it be that I speak of life-everlasting? Am I but using new words to repeat what you have heard in various form from various religions and systems of belief for countless ages? Am I but calling you to a happy death and an after-life in heaven?
4.12 I am calling you to the new. I am calling you to transform. I am calling you to Christ-consciousness. I am calling you to everlasting consciousness even while you still abide in form. To be cognizant or aware of everlasting consciousness while you still abide in form is to be fully aware that you have life-everlasting.
4.13 Being fully aware that you have life-everlasting is totally different than having faith in an after-life. Faith is based upon the unknown. If the unknown were not unknown faith would not be necessary. Faith will become unnecessary, as life-everlasting becomes known to you.
4.14 This knowing will come from the return of true vision. True vision sees life-everlasting where perception but saw finite life and mortal bodies. Once vision and Christ-consciousness have returned to you, the means of life-everlasting will be understood as a choice. Because there was no relationship save that of intermediaries between the human and the divine, there was no choice but to end the separated state in order to return to unity through death. Once the return to unity has occurred in form, the decision to continue in form or to not continue in form will be yours.
4.15 Continuity is an attribute of relationship, not of matter. It is only in the relationship of matter to the divine that matter can become divine and thus eternal. If you can abide in unity while in human form, you will have no cause, save your own choice, to leave human form. To abide in unity is to abide in your natural state, a state of life-everlasting. To abide in a state of separation is to abide in an unnatural state from which you eventually will seek release.
4.16 Although this discussion is likely to cause many of you serious doubts about the truth and applicability of this course, this discussion is necessary to your awareness of Christ-consciousness. To believe that you are mortal is to believe that you must die to the personal self of form in order to be reborn as a true Self. This is an old way of thinking. Have we not worked throughout this Course to return your true identity to you now? The joining of heart and mind in relationship is the joining of the personal self with the true Self in the reality in which you exist now. Remember, the heart must abide in the reality where you think you are. Only through your mind’s acceptance of your new reality has the heart been freed to exist in the new reality that is the state of unity and relationship.
4.17 Can you not see the necessity of removing the idea that your true Self will be returned to you only through death? What purpose would this Course serve if it were just another preview of what to expect after you die? What difference would this make to your way of living or to the world in which you live?
4.18 What purpose will death serve when your true Self has joined with your physical form? You will see it simply as the transformation it has always been, the transformation from singular consciousness to Christ-consciousness. Form has been but a representation of singular consciousness. As form becomes a representation of Christ-consciousness it will take on the nature of Christ-consciousness of which my life was the example life. To sustain Christ-consciousness in form is creation of the new. My one example life could not sustain Christ-consciousness for those who came after me but could only be an example. What you are called to do is to, through your multitude, sustain Christ-consciousness, and create the union of the human and the divine as a new state of being. This union will take you beyond the goal of expressing your Self in form because this goal but reflected the desire for a temporary experience. The temporary experience has been elongated because of the appeal of the physical experience. What this treatise is saying to you is that if the physical experience appeals to you, and if you create the union of the human and the divine as a new state of being, this choice will be eternally yours. It will be a choice of your creation, a creation devoid of fear. It will be a new choice.
2 del 4
Outward seeking is turning inward. Inward or internal discoveries are turning outward. This is a reverse, a polar reversal, that is happening worldwide and externally as well as individually and internally. It is happening. It is not predictive. I have never been and will never be predictive, for I am Christ-consciousness. Christ-consciousness is awareness of what is. Only an awareness of what is, an awareness that does not conceive of such as what was and will be, can peacefully coexist with the unity that is here and now in truth.
2.2 Again let me repeat and reemphasize my statements: where once you turned outward in your seeking and saw within what you perceived without, now you turn inward and reflect what you discover within outward. What you discover within is in a way that what you perceive without is not.
2.3 I have always been a proponent of The Way of Christ-consciousness as The Way to Self and God.
2.4 There was no Way or path or process back to God and Self before me. It was the time of man wandering in the wilderness. I came as a representation or demonstration of The Way. This is why I have been called “The way, the truth and the life.” I came to show The Way to Christ-consciousness, which is The Way to God and Self. But I also came to provide an intermediary, for this is what was desired: a bridge between the human or forgotten self, and the divine or remembered Self. Jesus the man was the intermediary who ushered in the time of the Holy Spirit by calling the Holy Spirit to possess the
human or forgotten self with the spirit of the divine or remembered Self. Although God never abandoned the humans who seeded the Earth, the humans, in the state of the forgotten self, could not know God because of their fear. I revealed a God of Love and the Holy Spirit provided for indirect and less fearful means of communion or communication with God.
2.5 The people of the Earth and all that were created have always been the beloved of God because Love is the means of creation. The people of the Earth, and all that were created, were created through union and relationship. Creation through union and relationship is still The Way and The Way has come into the time of its fullness.
2.6 The production that so has so long occupied you will now serve you as you turn your productive and reproductive instincts to the production and reproduction of relationship and union.
2.7 But before we can proceed forward, I must return to and dispel any illusion you may have of superiority over those who came before. That those who came before did not become aware of their true nature does not mean that it did not exist. That there are others living among you in this time who will not become aware of their true nature does not mean that it does not exist within them. You are no more accomplished than anyone has been, or is, or will be. The truth of who you are is as accomplished as the truth of all of your brothers and sisters from the beginning of time until the end of time. Any text that tells you that you or those of your kind or time are more or better than any other is not speaking the truth. This is why we began with the chosen and will return again and again to the statement that all are chosen.
2.8 I belabor this point because you literally cannot proceed to full awareness while ideas such as more and better remain in you. This is not about evolution unless you wish to speak of evolution in terms of awareness. You must realize that if you were to see into the eyes and hearts of any human from any time with true vision, you would see the accomplished Self there. There can be no judgment carried forward with you and when you continue to believe in a process of evolution that has made you better than those who came before, you are carrying judgment. While you continue to believe that being chosen means that some are not chosen, you are carrying judgment. While you continue to believe that a final judgment will separate the good from the evil, you are carrying judgment.
2.9 I also belabor this point because those of you familiar with the Bible, upon hearing words such as the end of time or the fullness of time, think of the predictions of the Biblical end of time. I speak of this because it is in your awareness and because many false interpretations of this time as a time of judgment and of separating the chosen people from all others abound. All are chosen. All are chosen with love and without judgment.
2.10 The idea of separation is an idea that is not consistent with the idea of unity. If you proceed into this new time thinking that this new time will separate you from others, or cause you, as the chosen, to be separate, you will not become fully aware of the new time. Full awareness of the new is what this treatise seeks to accomplish and so it is necessary to belabor these false ideas that would keep you from this awareness. If you think you can observe in judgment you do not understand the definition of observation provided in A Treatise on the Personal Self.
2.11 Being first does not mean being better. That I was the first to demonstrate what you can be does not mean I am better than you. Just as in your sporting events, a “first” is applauded, and soon a new record replaces that record-setting first, just as someone had to be “first” to fly a plane or land on the moon, being first implies only that there will be a second and a third. That attention and respect is given to those who first achieve anything of any merit is but a way of calling all others to know what they can achieve. One may desire to best a sporting record and another to follow the first man into space and the one who desires to best a sporting record may feel no desire to follow the first man into space and vice versa, and yet, what one achieves but opens the door for others and this is known to you. Even those who did not desire to fly in a plane when this feat was first accomplished have since flown in planes.
2.12 Similarly, those who have achieved “first place” do so realizing that the elevated “place” they briefly hold is of a finite nature and that others will soon do the same and that those who follow in time will do so more easily, with less effort, and with even greater success. They may consider themselves “better than” for a moment in time, but those who do will be bitterly disappointed as their moment passes. Despite the necessity for a confidence that has led them to achieve their desired end, most who so achieve and become the first to set records, discover, or invent the new, are not aware of themselves as “better than” for their goal was not to be better than anyone but themselves. Surely many desire to be “the best” as a means to glorify the ego, but few of these succeed for the ego cannot be glorified.
2.13 Thus, you must examine your intention even now and remove from it all ideas that were of the old way. You would not be here if you were still interested in glorifying the ego. You also are not yet completely certain of your Self, and in your uncertainty, still subject to the patterns of thought of the old. Many of these patterns do not concern me for they will fall away of themselves as your awareness of the new grows. But these few on which I linger will prevent your awareness of the new from growing and so must be consciously left behind.
2.14 It is difficult for you, because of the patterns of the past, to believe that you are chosen to be the pioneers into a new time without believing that you are special. This is one of the many reasons we have worked to dispel your ideas of specialness. One of the best means for us to clarify the lack of specialness implied in the statement that all are chosen, is through your observation of yourself.
2.15 The ability to observe what the Self expresses was among the original reasons for this chosen experience. Observe now the expressions of the self you are and have been. Although you are different now than you were as a child, and different now than you were a few years ago, and different now than when you began your learning of this course, you are not other than who you have always been. Who you are now was there when you were a child, and there in all the years since then, and there before you began your learning of this course. 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.
2.16 How, then, could you possibly observe any others without knowing that the truth of who they are is present even though it might seem not to be? This is the power of the devotion of the observant that you are called to, the power of cause and its effect. This is the power you now have within you, the power to observe truth rather than illusion. This is the power to observe what is. This is Christ-consciousness.
2.17 I repeat, this is the power to observe what is. It is not about observing a potential for what could be if your brother or sister would just follow in the way that has been shown to you. It is about observing what is. The power to observe what is is what will keep you unified with your brothers and sisters rather than separating you from them. There is no power without this unity. You cannot see “others” as other than who they are and know your power. You must see as I see and see that all are chosen.
2.18 Only from this shared vision, this observation of what is can you begin to produce unity and relationship through unity and relationship.
2.19 This is why it has long been stated that you are not called to evangelize or convince anyone of the merits of this course of study. This is just a course of study. Those whom you would seek to evangelize or convince are as holy as your Self. This holiness need only be observed. When you think in terms of evangelizing or convincing, you think in terms of future outcome rather than in terms of what already is. This type of thinking will not serve the new or allow you full awareness of the new.
2.20 Can you remember this, blessed sons and daughters of the most high? Your brothers and sisters are as holy as your Self. Holiness is the natural harmony of all that was created as it was created.
2.21 Now I tell you something else and hope you will remember it and bid it true. Each day is a creation and holy too. Not one day is meant to be lived in a struggle with what it brings. The power to observe what is relates to everything that exists with you, including the days that make up your life in time and space. Observing what is unites you with the present in that it unites you with what is rather than with what you perceive to be.
2.22 Observation of what is is a natural effect of the cause of a heart and mind joined in unity. This first joining in unity, the joining of heart and mind, joins the physical and the spiritual world in a relationship of which you can be more and more steadily aware. It is a new relationship. Unity always existed. Oneness always existed. God always existed. But you separated yourself from direct awareness of your relationship with unity, with oneness and with God, just as you separated yourself from relationship with the wholeness of the pattern of creation. You have believed in God and perhaps in some concept of unity or oneness, but you have also denied even the possibility of experiencing your own direct relationship with God, or the possibility that your life is a direct experience of the pattern of unity or oneness that is creation.
2.23 Think of this denial now, for it is still evident in the pattern of your thinking. We have spoken of this within the text of A Course of Love as your inability to realize the relationship that exists with the unseen and even the seen. You have moved through life believing you have relationships with family and friends and coworkers, occasionally acknowledging brief relationships that develop with acquaintances or strangers, connections that feel real with like-minded associates for brief periods of time, but still essentially seeing yourself moving through life alone with few sustaining connections save for special relationships, and with little purpose implied in the brief encounters you have with others. You have watched the news and developments in parts of the world far away from you and at times are aware of ecological and sociological connections, or of other occurrences that are likely to have an impact on your life or on your part of the world. But unless you believe in the ability of what happens to have an effect on you, you do not consider yourself to have a relationship with the occurrence.
2.24 With your new understanding of observance must come a new understanding of relationship and the ability of the devotion of the observant to affect relationship.
2.25 Yet we have strayed here from the overriding idea of what I have revealed to you. A new relationship now exists between the physical and spiritual. It is not an indirect relationship but a direct relationship. It exists and you are becoming aware of its existence. You will increasingly be unable to deny it and you will not want to. As you allow awareness of this relationship to grow in you, you will learn the lessons that are being spoken of within this treatise.
2.26 This new relationship is the only state in which observation of what is can occur. The separated state was nothing more than the disjoining of heart and mind, a state in which mind attempted to know without the relationship of the heart and so merely perceived its own creations rather than the creations birthed in unity.
2.27 Let this idea gestate a moment within you and reveal to you the truth of which it speaks. The separated state of the mind created its own separate world. Cause and effect are one. The perceived state of separation created the perceived state of a separate world. The real state of union, returned to you through the joining of mind and heart, will now reveal to you the truth of what was created and allow you to create anew.
2.28 This state of union is what differentiated me from my brothers and sisters at the time of my life on earth. Because my state of consciousness, a state of consciousness we are calling Christ-consciousness, allowed me to exist in union and relationship with all, I could see my brothers and sisters “in Christ” or in their true nature. I saw them in union and relationship, where they saw themselves in separation. This ability to see in union and relationship is the shared vision to which you are called.
2.29 You have lived with the vision of the separated self for so long that you cannot imagine what shared vision will mean, and do not recognize it when you experience it. This is why you can still think of observance of what is as a game of make believe and feel that you will have to trick yourself into believing that you see love where there is cause for fear. You must remember that you are now called to see without judgment. To see without judgment is to see truly. You need not look for good or bad, but only need be steadily aware that you can only see in one of two ways — with love or fear.
2.30 You expect yourself to still see with the eyes of separation rather than with the shared vision of which I speak. You expect to see bodies and events moving through your days as you have in the past. And yet your vision has already changed, although you are not aware of the extent of this change. Realize now that you have come to recognize unity. You no longer see each person and event as separate, with no relation to the whole. You are beginning to see the connections that exist and this is the beginning.
2.31 Examine what you may have felt the onset of true vision would mean. Have you considered this question? Have you expected to see in the same way but more lovingly? Have you thought you might begin to recognize those who, like you, are joined with me in Christ-consciousness? Have you suspected that you might see in ways literally different? That you might see auras or halos, signs and clues previously unseen? Have you included other senses in your idea of “sight”? Have you thought your instincts will be sharpened and that you will know with an inner knowing that will aid the sight of your eyes?
2.32 All of these things are possible. But true vision is seeing relationship and union. It is the opposite of seeing with the eyes and the attitude of separation. It is seeing with an expectation first and foremost of revelation. It is believing that you exist in relationship and union with all and that each encounter is one of union and relationship and purpose…purpose that will be revealed to you because you exist in union with the Source and Cause of revelation.
Seeing with the vision of Christ-consciousness is already upon you. You are in the process of learning what it means. This treatise is here to help you do so. Learning to see anew is the precursor of learning to create anew. Creating
2.2 Again let me repeat and reemphasize my statements: where once you turned outward in your seeking and saw within what you perceived without, now you turn inward and reflect what you discover within outward. What you discover within is in a way that what you perceive without is not.
2.3 I have always been a proponent of The Way of Christ-consciousness as The Way to Self and God.
2.4 There was no Way or path or process back to God and Self before me. It was the time of man wandering in the wilderness. I came as a representation or demonstration of The Way. This is why I have been called “The way, the truth and the life.” I came to show The Way to Christ-consciousness, which is The Way to God and Self. But I also came to provide an intermediary, for this is what was desired: a bridge between the human or forgotten self, and the divine or remembered Self. Jesus the man was the intermediary who ushered in the time of the Holy Spirit by calling the Holy Spirit to possess the
human or forgotten self with the spirit of the divine or remembered Self. Although God never abandoned the humans who seeded the Earth, the humans, in the state of the forgotten self, could not know God because of their fear. I revealed a God of Love and the Holy Spirit provided for indirect and less fearful means of communion or communication with God.
2.5 The people of the Earth and all that were created have always been the beloved of God because Love is the means of creation. The people of the Earth, and all that were created, were created through union and relationship. Creation through union and relationship is still The Way and The Way has come into the time of its fullness.
2.6 The production that so has so long occupied you will now serve you as you turn your productive and reproductive instincts to the production and reproduction of relationship and union.
2.7 But before we can proceed forward, I must return to and dispel any illusion you may have of superiority over those who came before. That those who came before did not become aware of their true nature does not mean that it did not exist. That there are others living among you in this time who will not become aware of their true nature does not mean that it does not exist within them. You are no more accomplished than anyone has been, or is, or will be. The truth of who you are is as accomplished as the truth of all of your brothers and sisters from the beginning of time until the end of time. Any text that tells you that you or those of your kind or time are more or better than any other is not speaking the truth. This is why we began with the chosen and will return again and again to the statement that all are chosen.
2.8 I belabor this point because you literally cannot proceed to full awareness while ideas such as more and better remain in you. This is not about evolution unless you wish to speak of evolution in terms of awareness. You must realize that if you were to see into the eyes and hearts of any human from any time with true vision, you would see the accomplished Self there. There can be no judgment carried forward with you and when you continue to believe in a process of evolution that has made you better than those who came before, you are carrying judgment. While you continue to believe that being chosen means that some are not chosen, you are carrying judgment. While you continue to believe that a final judgment will separate the good from the evil, you are carrying judgment.
2.9 I also belabor this point because those of you familiar with the Bible, upon hearing words such as the end of time or the fullness of time, think of the predictions of the Biblical end of time. I speak of this because it is in your awareness and because many false interpretations of this time as a time of judgment and of separating the chosen people from all others abound. All are chosen. All are chosen with love and without judgment.
2.10 The idea of separation is an idea that is not consistent with the idea of unity. If you proceed into this new time thinking that this new time will separate you from others, or cause you, as the chosen, to be separate, you will not become fully aware of the new time. Full awareness of the new is what this treatise seeks to accomplish and so it is necessary to belabor these false ideas that would keep you from this awareness. If you think you can observe in judgment you do not understand the definition of observation provided in A Treatise on the Personal Self.
2.11 Being first does not mean being better. That I was the first to demonstrate what you can be does not mean I am better than you. Just as in your sporting events, a “first” is applauded, and soon a new record replaces that record-setting first, just as someone had to be “first” to fly a plane or land on the moon, being first implies only that there will be a second and a third. That attention and respect is given to those who first achieve anything of any merit is but a way of calling all others to know what they can achieve. One may desire to best a sporting record and another to follow the first man into space and the one who desires to best a sporting record may feel no desire to follow the first man into space and vice versa, and yet, what one achieves but opens the door for others and this is known to you. Even those who did not desire to fly in a plane when this feat was first accomplished have since flown in planes.
2.12 Similarly, those who have achieved “first place” do so realizing that the elevated “place” they briefly hold is of a finite nature and that others will soon do the same and that those who follow in time will do so more easily, with less effort, and with even greater success. They may consider themselves “better than” for a moment in time, but those who do will be bitterly disappointed as their moment passes. Despite the necessity for a confidence that has led them to achieve their desired end, most who so achieve and become the first to set records, discover, or invent the new, are not aware of themselves as “better than” for their goal was not to be better than anyone but themselves. Surely many desire to be “the best” as a means to glorify the ego, but few of these succeed for the ego cannot be glorified.
2.13 Thus, you must examine your intention even now and remove from it all ideas that were of the old way. You would not be here if you were still interested in glorifying the ego. You also are not yet completely certain of your Self, and in your uncertainty, still subject to the patterns of thought of the old. Many of these patterns do not concern me for they will fall away of themselves as your awareness of the new grows. But these few on which I linger will prevent your awareness of the new from growing and so must be consciously left behind.
2.14 It is difficult for you, because of the patterns of the past, to believe that you are chosen to be the pioneers into a new time without believing that you are special. This is one of the many reasons we have worked to dispel your ideas of specialness. One of the best means for us to clarify the lack of specialness implied in the statement that all are chosen, is through your observation of yourself.
2.15 The ability to observe what the Self expresses was among the original reasons for this chosen experience. Observe now the expressions of the self you are and have been. Although you are different now than you were as a child, and different now than you were a few years ago, and different now than when you began your learning of this course, you are not other than who you have always been. Who you are now was there when you were a child, and there in all the years since then, and there before you began your learning of this course. 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.
2.16 How, then, could you possibly observe any others without knowing that the truth of who they are is present even though it might seem not to be? This is the power of the devotion of the observant that you are called to, the power of cause and its effect. This is the power you now have within you, the power to observe truth rather than illusion. This is the power to observe what is. This is Christ-consciousness.
2.17 I repeat, this is the power to observe what is. It is not about observing a potential for what could be if your brother or sister would just follow in the way that has been shown to you. It is about observing what is. The power to observe what is is what will keep you unified with your brothers and sisters rather than separating you from them. There is no power without this unity. You cannot see “others” as other than who they are and know your power. You must see as I see and see that all are chosen.
2.18 Only from this shared vision, this observation of what is can you begin to produce unity and relationship through unity and relationship.
2.19 This is why it has long been stated that you are not called to evangelize or convince anyone of the merits of this course of study. This is just a course of study. Those whom you would seek to evangelize or convince are as holy as your Self. This holiness need only be observed. When you think in terms of evangelizing or convincing, you think in terms of future outcome rather than in terms of what already is. This type of thinking will not serve the new or allow you full awareness of the new.
2.20 Can you remember this, blessed sons and daughters of the most high? Your brothers and sisters are as holy as your Self. Holiness is the natural harmony of all that was created as it was created.
2.21 Now I tell you something else and hope you will remember it and bid it true. Each day is a creation and holy too. Not one day is meant to be lived in a struggle with what it brings. The power to observe what is relates to everything that exists with you, including the days that make up your life in time and space. Observing what is unites you with the present in that it unites you with what is rather than with what you perceive to be.
2.22 Observation of what is is a natural effect of the cause of a heart and mind joined in unity. This first joining in unity, the joining of heart and mind, joins the physical and the spiritual world in a relationship of which you can be more and more steadily aware. It is a new relationship. Unity always existed. Oneness always existed. God always existed. But you separated yourself from direct awareness of your relationship with unity, with oneness and with God, just as you separated yourself from relationship with the wholeness of the pattern of creation. You have believed in God and perhaps in some concept of unity or oneness, but you have also denied even the possibility of experiencing your own direct relationship with God, or the possibility that your life is a direct experience of the pattern of unity or oneness that is creation.
2.23 Think of this denial now, for it is still evident in the pattern of your thinking. We have spoken of this within the text of A Course of Love as your inability to realize the relationship that exists with the unseen and even the seen. You have moved through life believing you have relationships with family and friends and coworkers, occasionally acknowledging brief relationships that develop with acquaintances or strangers, connections that feel real with like-minded associates for brief periods of time, but still essentially seeing yourself moving through life alone with few sustaining connections save for special relationships, and with little purpose implied in the brief encounters you have with others. You have watched the news and developments in parts of the world far away from you and at times are aware of ecological and sociological connections, or of other occurrences that are likely to have an impact on your life or on your part of the world. But unless you believe in the ability of what happens to have an effect on you, you do not consider yourself to have a relationship with the occurrence.
2.24 With your new understanding of observance must come a new understanding of relationship and the ability of the devotion of the observant to affect relationship.
2.25 Yet we have strayed here from the overriding idea of what I have revealed to you. A new relationship now exists between the physical and spiritual. It is not an indirect relationship but a direct relationship. It exists and you are becoming aware of its existence. You will increasingly be unable to deny it and you will not want to. As you allow awareness of this relationship to grow in you, you will learn the lessons that are being spoken of within this treatise.
2.26 This new relationship is the only state in which observation of what is can occur. The separated state was nothing more than the disjoining of heart and mind, a state in which mind attempted to know without the relationship of the heart and so merely perceived its own creations rather than the creations birthed in unity.
2.27 Let this idea gestate a moment within you and reveal to you the truth of which it speaks. The separated state of the mind created its own separate world. Cause and effect are one. The perceived state of separation created the perceived state of a separate world. The real state of union, returned to you through the joining of mind and heart, will now reveal to you the truth of what was created and allow you to create anew.
2.28 This state of union is what differentiated me from my brothers and sisters at the time of my life on earth. Because my state of consciousness, a state of consciousness we are calling Christ-consciousness, allowed me to exist in union and relationship with all, I could see my brothers and sisters “in Christ” or in their true nature. I saw them in union and relationship, where they saw themselves in separation. This ability to see in union and relationship is the shared vision to which you are called.
2.29 You have lived with the vision of the separated self for so long that you cannot imagine what shared vision will mean, and do not recognize it when you experience it. This is why you can still think of observance of what is as a game of make believe and feel that you will have to trick yourself into believing that you see love where there is cause for fear. You must remember that you are now called to see without judgment. To see without judgment is to see truly. You need not look for good or bad, but only need be steadily aware that you can only see in one of two ways — with love or fear.
2.30 You expect yourself to still see with the eyes of separation rather than with the shared vision of which I speak. You expect to see bodies and events moving through your days as you have in the past. And yet your vision has already changed, although you are not aware of the extent of this change. Realize now that you have come to recognize unity. You no longer see each person and event as separate, with no relation to the whole. You are beginning to see the connections that exist and this is the beginning.
2.31 Examine what you may have felt the onset of true vision would mean. Have you considered this question? Have you expected to see in the same way but more lovingly? Have you thought you might begin to recognize those who, like you, are joined with me in Christ-consciousness? Have you suspected that you might see in ways literally different? That you might see auras or halos, signs and clues previously unseen? Have you included other senses in your idea of “sight”? Have you thought your instincts will be sharpened and that you will know with an inner knowing that will aid the sight of your eyes?
2.32 All of these things are possible. But true vision is seeing relationship and union. It is the opposite of seeing with the eyes and the attitude of separation. It is seeing with an expectation first and foremost of revelation. It is believing that you exist in relationship and union with all and that each encounter is one of union and relationship and purpose…purpose that will be revealed to you because you exist in union with the Source and Cause of revelation.
Seeing with the vision of Christ-consciousness is already upon you. You are in the process of learning what it means. This treatise is here to help you do so. Learning to see anew is the precursor of learning to create anew. Creating
lunes, 25 de junio de 2007
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forward
A year or so after the Course of Love series was complete, “Learning in the Time of Christ” was provided as an aid to those questioning how to work with the material of this Course. It has been edited here to serve as an introduction to the Treatises. The full text is available from the Course of Love website: www.acourseoflove.com.
The Treatises bring the same situation you encountered in receiving the Course of Love, but you will now encounter these situations in life. You are no longer only a reader. Your experience of this Course has extended beyond reading and beyond the classroom situation. Now a time may come when studying truly seems to be in order. The guidance provided by your reading may seem to come and go and your desire to rely on what you have “learned” will grow. You may desire to backtrack, review, or begin to highlight passages to return to again and again. New questions may arise and a desire for feedback or discussion grow stronger. This may also be precisely the time when you are so caught up in experience and learning “in life” that return to a group or classroom situation feels next to impossible.
Now you are experiencing life in a new way and will be attempting to reinforce what you already know and have already accepted. The “language” is returned to as a helpful friend would be turned to for judgment-free advice. What those who begin to experience life in a new way begin to discover are the patterns of thoughts and behavior that are most deeply entrenched. You feel in need of assistance!
You may need to become more flexible, meet in groups less frequently, and favor more casual and spontaneous encounters. Yet what is being gained through experience is still in need of being shared. This sharing can offer a rich and rewarding opportunity for differences to be revealed and for the welcome realization that differences do not make separate.
The forward motion is one away from learning and toward acceptance of what is. While differences may be highlighted in this time, what will be revealed through sharing is that while experiences may differ greatly and seem to be offering diverse “learning” situations, you, and those with whom you share, will actually be coming to many very similar new insights and truths.
The impatience of the earlier level may seem to have increased as your experiences will be moving you along at your own pace. Comparisons may arise and some may feel they are not advancing as quickly as others, while those moving quickly may feel in need of time to catch their breath!
Inclinations may be strong during this time, to “figure things out.” Problem solving is discouraged. Trust is encouraged. Question: “How might I be able to look at a situation in a new way?” Remembering the gentleness of the Art of Thought over the relentless stridency of the thinking mind is helpful. Obsessive thinking is always ruthless, judgmental, and wearing on you.
The entrenched patterns of the past are difficult to dislodge even when they have been recognized. “Watch the parade go by” as what has gone unhealed is brought forward for acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go. With the letting go of each old pattern or situation that seems fraught with peril, a cloud of despair will lift, a little more of darkness recede, and a little more light be available to show the way.
Here you may meet individual assessment and self-doubt. You may wonder if you are missing something. You may feel as if you have not experienced unity or as if you are no closer to knowing yourself or God. You may feel as if this course of study that seemed to be working so well for a while, now is letting you down. You may wonder where and when the peace, ease, and abundance promised by this course will arrive. Stay grounded in the present and remember that you are no longer seeking. This time of engagement with life is just what is needed to integrate what has been learned. A return to the simple words that begin the Treatise on Unity would be appropriate: “A treasure that you do not as yet recognize is going to be recognized. Once recognized it will begin to be regarded as an ability. And finally, through experience it will become your identity.”
The achievements of the past, achievements that awarded credentials, certificates, and degrees, admiration, respect, and status, are now a thing of the past. What you may well be looking for is your reward for the investment you have made in this coursework. While you are looking for it to show up in an old way you will miss the new ways that are being revealed. The achievements of the past were not lasting and they are not what you would truly want now. The goal is reached in being who you are at last. It is present—not in the future. It is with you—not beyond you. The treasure is you.
A year or so after the Course of Love series was complete, “Learning in the Time of Christ” was provided as an aid to those questioning how to work with the material of this Course. It has been edited here to serve as an introduction to the Treatises. The full text is available from the Course of Love website: www.acourseoflove.com.
The Treatises bring the same situation you encountered in receiving the Course of Love, but you will now encounter these situations in life. You are no longer only a reader. Your experience of this Course has extended beyond reading and beyond the classroom situation. Now a time may come when studying truly seems to be in order. The guidance provided by your reading may seem to come and go and your desire to rely on what you have “learned” will grow. You may desire to backtrack, review, or begin to highlight passages to return to again and again. New questions may arise and a desire for feedback or discussion grow stronger. This may also be precisely the time when you are so caught up in experience and learning “in life” that return to a group or classroom situation feels next to impossible.
Now you are experiencing life in a new way and will be attempting to reinforce what you already know and have already accepted. The “language” is returned to as a helpful friend would be turned to for judgment-free advice. What those who begin to experience life in a new way begin to discover are the patterns of thoughts and behavior that are most deeply entrenched. You feel in need of assistance!
You may need to become more flexible, meet in groups less frequently, and favor more casual and spontaneous encounters. Yet what is being gained through experience is still in need of being shared. This sharing can offer a rich and rewarding opportunity for differences to be revealed and for the welcome realization that differences do not make separate.
The forward motion is one away from learning and toward acceptance of what is. While differences may be highlighted in this time, what will be revealed through sharing is that while experiences may differ greatly and seem to be offering diverse “learning” situations, you, and those with whom you share, will actually be coming to many very similar new insights and truths.
The impatience of the earlier level may seem to have increased as your experiences will be moving you along at your own pace. Comparisons may arise and some may feel they are not advancing as quickly as others, while those moving quickly may feel in need of time to catch their breath!
Inclinations may be strong during this time, to “figure things out.” Problem solving is discouraged. Trust is encouraged. Question: “How might I be able to look at a situation in a new way?” Remembering the gentleness of the Art of Thought over the relentless stridency of the thinking mind is helpful. Obsessive thinking is always ruthless, judgmental, and wearing on you.
The entrenched patterns of the past are difficult to dislodge even when they have been recognized. “Watch the parade go by” as what has gone unhealed is brought forward for acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go. With the letting go of each old pattern or situation that seems fraught with peril, a cloud of despair will lift, a little more of darkness recede, and a little more light be available to show the way.
Here you may meet individual assessment and self-doubt. You may wonder if you are missing something. You may feel as if you have not experienced unity or as if you are no closer to knowing yourself or God. You may feel as if this course of study that seemed to be working so well for a while, now is letting you down. You may wonder where and when the peace, ease, and abundance promised by this course will arrive. Stay grounded in the present and remember that you are no longer seeking. This time of engagement with life is just what is needed to integrate what has been learned. A return to the simple words that begin the Treatise on Unity would be appropriate: “A treasure that you do not as yet recognize is going to be recognized. Once recognized it will begin to be regarded as an ability. And finally, through experience it will become your identity.”
The achievements of the past, achievements that awarded credentials, certificates, and degrees, admiration, respect, and status, are now a thing of the past. What you may well be looking for is your reward for the investment you have made in this coursework. While you are looking for it to show up in an old way you will miss the new ways that are being revealed. The achievements of the past were not lasting and they are not what you would truly want now. The goal is reached in being who you are at last. It is present—not in the future. It is with you—not beyond you. The treasure is you.
9,10,,,,,del..1
The art of thought is not possible without a return to the virgin or unaltered self. The practice of the art of thought is what will complete the return begun through the course work in A Course of Love. This will bring about the union of the male and female, of conception and action, of inspiration and manifestation. This is what we have been speaking of when speaking of miracle-mindedness or miracle-readiness. This is wholeheartedness and is achieved through mindfulness.
9.2 Whether you be male or female matters not as you are in truth the union of each. The end of separation that brought about the resurrection, brought about this union, and the separation of male and female continues to exist only in form.
9.3 However, we are talking now, in a certain sense, of an elevation of form. While this is actually an elevation beyond form, it must begin in the reality where you think you are. In other words, it must begin with form. You cannot await some changed state but must create the changed state you await.
9.4 You are used to creating in outward ways. One of the few exceptions to this outward creation is the act of giving birth. But birth, like all outward manifestations, but reflects inner change. The growth of a new being within the womb of another is a visible manifestation of gestation, which is the prelude to resurrection. What was once part of the mother and father, what would have died without the joining that occurred within, becomes new life.
9.5 Now you are asked to carry new life not in the womb but in the united mind and heart.
9.6 Let us consider why birth has been the purview of women and why men have been incapable of giving birth. This is because, in your version of creation, there needed to be a giver and a receiver. You knew that giving and receiving makes one in truth. This is your recreation of this universal truth. You remembered that something does not come from nothing and that nothing is all that exists without relationship.
9.7 You have not remembered that the first union is of mind and heart. The first union is union with the Self. Union with the Self is resurrection or rebirth. All are capable of this life-giving union. All are capable of birthing the Self.
9.8 But what then of the necessary act of giving and receiving? In this birth of the Self, who is the giver and who is the receiver? In order for the Self to be birthed, giving and receiving must be one in truth. Yet it seems there must be one to give and one to receive. You have long waited to receive what you have thought could come only from some other. Your churches are but evidence of this as you seek from religion an intercessor, one to facilitate for you this receiving or communion. Only through the Christ within you does this giving and receiving become one in truth.
9.9 As I awaited my death I was given the gift of knowing what would come to be through my resurrection. This I tried to pass on in the simplest of terms. I tried to make it known that while I would die and resurrect into a new form, you would also. I made it known that this new form would exist within you, that you would become the Body of Christ, and that giving and receiving would be complete.
9.10 You are the Body of Christ.
9.11 What will it mean to bring about the union of the male and female, of conception and action, of inspiration and manifestation? It will mean union and a time of miracles. It will mean that you are the living Body of Christ.
9.12 In the broadest of terms, this is already happening. As the ego has become threatened and allowed the coming of guidance, males and females both have begun to work with the parts of themselves over which the ego has the least control. For males this has most often meant a turning away from the intellectual realm, which was ruled by the ego, to the realm of feelings. For females this has most often meant a turning away from the feeling realm where their egos held most sway, toward the intellectual. This instinctual turning toward an opposite has been made to serve you through the intercession of the Holy Spirit. In turning within rather than without to find what you need to free you from the ego’s reign, you have turned toward wholeness. In the same way that embracing both the male and female attributes within you causes a merging of both and a wholeness to be achieved, so too does a wholeness then come about with conception and action, inspiration and manifestation.
9.13 Lest you fight these ideas as stereotypical, I will give just a few brief examples. These I ask you to cull from your own recent experience. What has caused the ego to become more apparent to you as you have learned this course? Has it not seemed to lie dormant for periods of time and then to suddenly be called back to life through some event or situation? What was this event or situation? Did it not threaten your self-image? And did this threat occur at what you would call the feeling level or at the intellectual level? Were your feelings hurt or your pride? Your feelings called into question or your ideas? And what guise did the ego take as it rallied to your aid? Did it require you to retreat or advance? Did it stir emotions or attempt to still them?
9.14 These may be difficult questions to answer as your initial reaction and your response will likely have taken on different forms. You may for instance, have reacted by being hurt or angry. Your response may then have been either an emotional one or an intellectual one. The point here is that the one that is most comfortable and that is likely your first reaction, is cognizant with your old pattern, or the pattern of the ego. What breaks the ego’s hold will be the second reaction, or the turning away from the old.
9.15 One first reaction might be to puff oneself up with pride, bolster one’s position, think one’s way through, argue, manipulate, or chastise another so that you feel better in relationship to the other in the situation or event. Another’s first reaction might be one of self-pity, of making oneself or another feel guilty, or of experiencing a sense of diminished self-esteem or worthiness. The first will feel like an intellectual position. The second like a feeling position. Turning away from the intellectual position to one of feeling will most readily and quickly solve the first. The second will be most readily and quickly overcome by a turn toward reason or the intellect. The perceived attack will have entered where you have placed your highest value and are most vulnerable. In the past your response would have been to protect and use that which you have most valued. Now your response will have been changing. You will not see so much to value in what has called your ego into action and will turn away from it.
9.16 What “was” is being thrown out and the first step in this is embracing what you heretofore have not embraced. You are pulling forth sides of yourself that were previously undervalued rather than looking for an other to provide what you lack. This is important and universal in its impact. It would seem to be about balance but is about wholeness. Male and female are labels laden with attributes. When the different attributes are merged, male and female will be no more and wholeness will reign.
chapter 10
Peace
10.1 Now let me address the issue of the peace you all have been experiencing as well as your reactions to this peace. It is so foreign to each of you that you can’t quite imagine that it is what you are supposed to be feeling. There is a core of peace at the center of yourself now and the issues that you choose to deal with will not affect that core of peace at all. While you may find this almost disturbing, you will not go to extremes to break this peace.
10.2 My peace is yours. You have asked for it and it has been given to you. To not have it, you will have to choose not to have it. This will be tempting on occasion. You will wonder at the lack of extremes in your feelings and want to bring them back. You will experience this loss of extremes as a lack. You will think something is wrong. You will feel this particularly when others around you experience extremes. A friend is experiencing feelings on an extreme level and this will seem to tell you that this friend is really alive. Whether it be joy or sorrow, it will seem real in a way that peace does not. It will seem so human that a wave of desire to be fully human will wash over you. You will think that this human who has caught your attention is fully engaged and fully experiencing the moment. You will think this is what you want. And I say again that it will not matter whether it be joy or sorrow for you are, or have been, attracted by both for the same reason, the reason of wanting to be fully engaged in the human experience.
10.3 Here is this experience you have created and how often have you been fully engaged in it? How often have you given yourself over to those highs and lows? You will be tempted to give yourself over once again in this most human of ways. You will cry and laugh for the poignancy of the human experience. This is the known that you will be tempted not to give up. If you can’t be moved from your peace by the greatest of these experiences, the most profound sorrow or the most all-encompassing joy, you will feel inhuman. You will think that this cannot be where you are meant to be, what you are meant to feel. You will wonder what is wrong with you.
10.4 This is temptation. The temptation of the human experience. This is what you continue to choose over the Peace of God. This is not a right or wrong choice but it is a choice. It is your free will to continue to make this choice.
10.5 You used your free will to choose the human experience. Now are you willing to use it to choose the Peace of God instead? Can you wholeheartedly choose peace? Can you choose peace long enough to become accustomed to joy without sorrow? If you cannot, you will continue to create hell as well as heaven and will continue the separation between the divine and the human. Is heaven worth enough to you to give up hell?
10.6 These extremes of the human experience have been learning devices. They have cracked open hearts and minds to the divine presence within. You have chosen them for just this reason. But you can now be an observer and look upon them as the learning choices of your brothers and sisters without choosing to return to learning in the same way again. You no longer need these experiences to alert you to the divine presence. Once you have learned to read you do not return to learning to read over and over again even while you may continue to read for a lifetime. You can continue to experience
life and still carry the Peace of God within you. As you live in peace you can be an example to your brothers and sisters, an example that says there is another way.
10.7 Are you being asked to give up extremes? Yes. You are being asked to give up all that would take peace from you. But as you have been told before, you will be giving up nothing. It will seem as if it is so for a while perhaps. You will continue to be attracted to those living at the extremes and there is no reason not to take joy in observing another’s happiness or to feel compassion at another’s suffering. But you need not partake and you cannot partake if you are going to carry the Peace of God within you.
10.8 This is what has been meant by the many references that have been made to God not seeing suffering. God exists with you in peace. When you feel peace, you feel the Peace of God. There is no other peace. There is no other God. Whether you believe it now or not, I assure you, within the Peace of God is all the joy of what you have known as the human experience and none of the sorrow.
10.9 Each of you will have an experience you look back upon, an experience of profound joy or grief that also became an experience of profound learning. You will think that you would not be who you are now without experiences such as this one. You will think that I cannot possibly be asking you to give up these types of experiences. But you have already had them! I ask you not to give them up. Only to make now a new choice.
10.10 It is your memory of these events that hold such sway over you that you would choose not the Peace of God. But look past what you have remembered to what was truly there. No moment of true learning ever arrived without the Peace of God for without the Peace of God no true learning is possible.
10.11 Let us separate experiences you might call peak experiences from experiences of extremes that served as learning devices. Peak experiences often follow occasions of happiness or trauma, but they do not happen within them. Peak experiences are what you can look forward to rather than back upon if you but choose the Peace of God.
10.12 The extremes that we are talking of leaving behind are extremes of reaction to a chosen lesson. What you are being asked to leave behind is the need for such lessons. If you have learned the curriculum, what further lessons are needed? What quiet knowing cannot come to you in peace? Why would you believe you can learn from the turmoil of extremes what you cannot learn in peace eternal?
10.13 This is what you have believed and why you have not chosen to accept your inheritance. Yet let the memory of the truth return to you now and you will see that peace is all you have sought learning to attain. If you do not pause now and accept that it is here, you will not know the Peace of God that is your own Self.
10.14 Peace, in whatever way you find it, in whatever expression it takes, no matter what words you use to describe it, is your answer to God and God’s answer to you. Peace is the inheritance I left you. Peace of body, mind, and heart. Peace is the realm of miracles, the condition of the wholehearted, the prerequisite to the art of thought, the description of heaven, the abode of Christ. Peace has come to you and you to Peace.
10.15 Now your final instruction is here. You who have found peace – live in peace. You who have been given the Peace of God – go in Peace. Spread peace throughout the land. Go out in peace and love and service to all. For in this going out you come home and bring with you all the brothers and sisters you have brought to peace. Go in peace to love and
serve with all your heart. Thus are we one heart, one mind, one unity. Thus are we one in a relationship of love and peace that is our eternal home. Welcome home my brothers and sisters in Christ. Welcome home.
9.2 Whether you be male or female matters not as you are in truth the union of each. The end of separation that brought about the resurrection, brought about this union, and the separation of male and female continues to exist only in form.
9.3 However, we are talking now, in a certain sense, of an elevation of form. While this is actually an elevation beyond form, it must begin in the reality where you think you are. In other words, it must begin with form. You cannot await some changed state but must create the changed state you await.
9.4 You are used to creating in outward ways. One of the few exceptions to this outward creation is the act of giving birth. But birth, like all outward manifestations, but reflects inner change. The growth of a new being within the womb of another is a visible manifestation of gestation, which is the prelude to resurrection. What was once part of the mother and father, what would have died without the joining that occurred within, becomes new life.
9.5 Now you are asked to carry new life not in the womb but in the united mind and heart.
9.6 Let us consider why birth has been the purview of women and why men have been incapable of giving birth. This is because, in your version of creation, there needed to be a giver and a receiver. You knew that giving and receiving makes one in truth. This is your recreation of this universal truth. You remembered that something does not come from nothing and that nothing is all that exists without relationship.
9.7 You have not remembered that the first union is of mind and heart. The first union is union with the Self. Union with the Self is resurrection or rebirth. All are capable of this life-giving union. All are capable of birthing the Self.
9.8 But what then of the necessary act of giving and receiving? In this birth of the Self, who is the giver and who is the receiver? In order for the Self to be birthed, giving and receiving must be one in truth. Yet it seems there must be one to give and one to receive. You have long waited to receive what you have thought could come only from some other. Your churches are but evidence of this as you seek from religion an intercessor, one to facilitate for you this receiving or communion. Only through the Christ within you does this giving and receiving become one in truth.
9.9 As I awaited my death I was given the gift of knowing what would come to be through my resurrection. This I tried to pass on in the simplest of terms. I tried to make it known that while I would die and resurrect into a new form, you would also. I made it known that this new form would exist within you, that you would become the Body of Christ, and that giving and receiving would be complete.
9.10 You are the Body of Christ.
9.11 What will it mean to bring about the union of the male and female, of conception and action, of inspiration and manifestation? It will mean union and a time of miracles. It will mean that you are the living Body of Christ.
9.12 In the broadest of terms, this is already happening. As the ego has become threatened and allowed the coming of guidance, males and females both have begun to work with the parts of themselves over which the ego has the least control. For males this has most often meant a turning away from the intellectual realm, which was ruled by the ego, to the realm of feelings. For females this has most often meant a turning away from the feeling realm where their egos held most sway, toward the intellectual. This instinctual turning toward an opposite has been made to serve you through the intercession of the Holy Spirit. In turning within rather than without to find what you need to free you from the ego’s reign, you have turned toward wholeness. In the same way that embracing both the male and female attributes within you causes a merging of both and a wholeness to be achieved, so too does a wholeness then come about with conception and action, inspiration and manifestation.
9.13 Lest you fight these ideas as stereotypical, I will give just a few brief examples. These I ask you to cull from your own recent experience. What has caused the ego to become more apparent to you as you have learned this course? Has it not seemed to lie dormant for periods of time and then to suddenly be called back to life through some event or situation? What was this event or situation? Did it not threaten your self-image? And did this threat occur at what you would call the feeling level or at the intellectual level? Were your feelings hurt or your pride? Your feelings called into question or your ideas? And what guise did the ego take as it rallied to your aid? Did it require you to retreat or advance? Did it stir emotions or attempt to still them?
9.14 These may be difficult questions to answer as your initial reaction and your response will likely have taken on different forms. You may for instance, have reacted by being hurt or angry. Your response may then have been either an emotional one or an intellectual one. The point here is that the one that is most comfortable and that is likely your first reaction, is cognizant with your old pattern, or the pattern of the ego. What breaks the ego’s hold will be the second reaction, or the turning away from the old.
9.15 One first reaction might be to puff oneself up with pride, bolster one’s position, think one’s way through, argue, manipulate, or chastise another so that you feel better in relationship to the other in the situation or event. Another’s first reaction might be one of self-pity, of making oneself or another feel guilty, or of experiencing a sense of diminished self-esteem or worthiness. The first will feel like an intellectual position. The second like a feeling position. Turning away from the intellectual position to one of feeling will most readily and quickly solve the first. The second will be most readily and quickly overcome by a turn toward reason or the intellect. The perceived attack will have entered where you have placed your highest value and are most vulnerable. In the past your response would have been to protect and use that which you have most valued. Now your response will have been changing. You will not see so much to value in what has called your ego into action and will turn away from it.
9.16 What “was” is being thrown out and the first step in this is embracing what you heretofore have not embraced. You are pulling forth sides of yourself that were previously undervalued rather than looking for an other to provide what you lack. This is important and universal in its impact. It would seem to be about balance but is about wholeness. Male and female are labels laden with attributes. When the different attributes are merged, male and female will be no more and wholeness will reign.
chapter 10
Peace
10.1 Now let me address the issue of the peace you all have been experiencing as well as your reactions to this peace. It is so foreign to each of you that you can’t quite imagine that it is what you are supposed to be feeling. There is a core of peace at the center of yourself now and the issues that you choose to deal with will not affect that core of peace at all. While you may find this almost disturbing, you will not go to extremes to break this peace.
10.2 My peace is yours. You have asked for it and it has been given to you. To not have it, you will have to choose not to have it. This will be tempting on occasion. You will wonder at the lack of extremes in your feelings and want to bring them back. You will experience this loss of extremes as a lack. You will think something is wrong. You will feel this particularly when others around you experience extremes. A friend is experiencing feelings on an extreme level and this will seem to tell you that this friend is really alive. Whether it be joy or sorrow, it will seem real in a way that peace does not. It will seem so human that a wave of desire to be fully human will wash over you. You will think that this human who has caught your attention is fully engaged and fully experiencing the moment. You will think this is what you want. And I say again that it will not matter whether it be joy or sorrow for you are, or have been, attracted by both for the same reason, the reason of wanting to be fully engaged in the human experience.
10.3 Here is this experience you have created and how often have you been fully engaged in it? How often have you given yourself over to those highs and lows? You will be tempted to give yourself over once again in this most human of ways. You will cry and laugh for the poignancy of the human experience. This is the known that you will be tempted not to give up. If you can’t be moved from your peace by the greatest of these experiences, the most profound sorrow or the most all-encompassing joy, you will feel inhuman. You will think that this cannot be where you are meant to be, what you are meant to feel. You will wonder what is wrong with you.
10.4 This is temptation. The temptation of the human experience. This is what you continue to choose over the Peace of God. This is not a right or wrong choice but it is a choice. It is your free will to continue to make this choice.
10.5 You used your free will to choose the human experience. Now are you willing to use it to choose the Peace of God instead? Can you wholeheartedly choose peace? Can you choose peace long enough to become accustomed to joy without sorrow? If you cannot, you will continue to create hell as well as heaven and will continue the separation between the divine and the human. Is heaven worth enough to you to give up hell?
10.6 These extremes of the human experience have been learning devices. They have cracked open hearts and minds to the divine presence within. You have chosen them for just this reason. But you can now be an observer and look upon them as the learning choices of your brothers and sisters without choosing to return to learning in the same way again. You no longer need these experiences to alert you to the divine presence. Once you have learned to read you do not return to learning to read over and over again even while you may continue to read for a lifetime. You can continue to experience
life and still carry the Peace of God within you. As you live in peace you can be an example to your brothers and sisters, an example that says there is another way.
10.7 Are you being asked to give up extremes? Yes. You are being asked to give up all that would take peace from you. But as you have been told before, you will be giving up nothing. It will seem as if it is so for a while perhaps. You will continue to be attracted to those living at the extremes and there is no reason not to take joy in observing another’s happiness or to feel compassion at another’s suffering. But you need not partake and you cannot partake if you are going to carry the Peace of God within you.
10.8 This is what has been meant by the many references that have been made to God not seeing suffering. God exists with you in peace. When you feel peace, you feel the Peace of God. There is no other peace. There is no other God. Whether you believe it now or not, I assure you, within the Peace of God is all the joy of what you have known as the human experience and none of the sorrow.
10.9 Each of you will have an experience you look back upon, an experience of profound joy or grief that also became an experience of profound learning. You will think that you would not be who you are now without experiences such as this one. You will think that I cannot possibly be asking you to give up these types of experiences. But you have already had them! I ask you not to give them up. Only to make now a new choice.
10.10 It is your memory of these events that hold such sway over you that you would choose not the Peace of God. But look past what you have remembered to what was truly there. No moment of true learning ever arrived without the Peace of God for without the Peace of God no true learning is possible.
10.11 Let us separate experiences you might call peak experiences from experiences of extremes that served as learning devices. Peak experiences often follow occasions of happiness or trauma, but they do not happen within them. Peak experiences are what you can look forward to rather than back upon if you but choose the Peace of God.
10.12 The extremes that we are talking of leaving behind are extremes of reaction to a chosen lesson. What you are being asked to leave behind is the need for such lessons. If you have learned the curriculum, what further lessons are needed? What quiet knowing cannot come to you in peace? Why would you believe you can learn from the turmoil of extremes what you cannot learn in peace eternal?
10.13 This is what you have believed and why you have not chosen to accept your inheritance. Yet let the memory of the truth return to you now and you will see that peace is all you have sought learning to attain. If you do not pause now and accept that it is here, you will not know the Peace of God that is your own Self.
10.14 Peace, in whatever way you find it, in whatever expression it takes, no matter what words you use to describe it, is your answer to God and God’s answer to you. Peace is the inheritance I left you. Peace of body, mind, and heart. Peace is the realm of miracles, the condition of the wholehearted, the prerequisite to the art of thought, the description of heaven, the abode of Christ. Peace has come to you and you to Peace.
10.15 Now your final instruction is here. You who have found peace – live in peace. You who have been given the Peace of God – go in Peace. Spread peace throughout the land. Go out in peace and love and service to all. For in this going out you come home and bring with you all the brothers and sisters you have brought to peace. Go in peace to love and
serve with all your heart. Thus are we one heart, one mind, one unity. Thus are we one in a relationship of love and peace that is our eternal home. Welcome home my brothers and sisters in Christ. Welcome home.
1,7,6,8,,,,del 1
4 A Course of Love has provided you with what you need to know, which is the function of all course work. This does not mean that you have acquired the ability to live what you have learned, only that you are ready to. The very word “remember,” as well as the concept of memory, implies mindfulness and the ability to reproduce or recall both what has been learned and what has been experienced. Reproducing and recollecting are acts of creation. They do not bring back a reality that once was but transform that reality into a present moment experience. It is in the present-moment experience memory provides that truth, rather than illusion, can now be experienced and learned from. It is in the present-moment experience that you will receive the blessing of being able to respond differently to love.
1.5 All that you have experienced in truth is love. All that illusion provided you with was nothing. Your first task as you remember and re-experience is that of separating illusion from the truth. This will require no effort for what you have learned in this Course has prepared you for this task. As each situation that re-enacts a previous learning experience arises, you will, if you trust your heart, be perfectly able to identify illusion from truth. This is a simple act of recognizing meaning. All that you believe you learned from illusion will have no meaning to you now and will allow you to give up any remnants of false learning you acquired. All that you learned in error from identifying love incorrectly will be relearned as love is properly identified.
1.6 Although I have just instructed you to trust in your heart, your reunited mind and heart will now be called to act in unison. That A Course of Love instructed you little in the mechanics of the mind was consistent with its theme and learning goals. The mechanics of the mind can, in truth, be left behind as we concentrate rather on the art of thought.
1.7 The mechanics of the mind were what engaged you in so many daily battles that you became almost too weary to continue. The mechanics of the mind were what were in need of being overcome in order for you to listen once again to the wisdom of your heart. The mechanics of your over-worked and over-stimulated mind were what you were asked to leave behind, as this act of leaving behind was the only means by which you could allow your mind to be restful enough for it to even contemplate union or the new learning required to facilitate your return to union. Your return to union is your return to love and it is accessed at the center or heart of your self. Your mind was in need of silencing in order for you to hear the wisdom of your heart and begin your return. Now, in order to complete your return, mind and heart must work as one.
1.8 You are a thinking being. This cannot be denied nor should it be. A course that left you with an erroneous impression that relying on feeling alone would complete your learning would in actuality leave your learning incomplete. Without this Treatise on the Art of Thought, too many of you would become muddled in your feelings and know not where to turn to explain the many riddles they would seem at times to represent.
1.9 A mind and heart joined in union abolishes the ego. The ego-mind was what was once in charge of all your thoughts. Since the ego is incapable of learning, the ego-mind had to be circumvented in order for true learning to take place. This is what A Course of Love accomplished. This learning was accomplished in you, making you The Accomplished. As The Accomplished, you now are able to access universal mind.
1.10 The joy that will come to you from the thoughts of a mind joined in union will be unparalleled in your experience here. “Ah,” you will say with a relief and joy that knows no bounds, “this is what it is to experience and know the truth.
This is what it is to create for this is what it is like to think as God thinks.” Where once you recognized only illusion, and called it reality, the mind joined in union will now, more and more, recognize only truth and experience only the truly real.
1.11 You can already imagine what an extensive change this will bring. As you are still experiencing change in time, without guidance, this change would be seen as quite difficult no matter how grand its outcome and even in spite of your recognition, at first in mere fleeting moments, that it is a change you would welcome.
1.12 Again your willingness is called upon. Be willing now to apply the art of thought to the experience of truth.
The thought system of the ego-mind is a learned system and this is why it can be unlearned. The thought system of the truth is always present, as the truth is always present, and can be neither learned nor unlearned. The truth will be revealed to you as soon as the learned thought system ceases to block its realization.
6.2 How is this revelation to take place? It will begin by learning the art of thought as the act of prayer. We have spoken already of memory here, and have presented the acts of reproducing and recollecting that are involved with memory as acts of creation. Prayer is but reproducing and recollecting a divine memory and divine memory cannot help but produce a divine outcome. Said in another way, prayer reproduces the truth and allows the truth to exist as it is. Prayer does this because it is the act of consciously choosing union. Choosing union moves you into the real state of “all” from the unreal state of the in between. Only from within a state that is real can anything happen in truth.
6.3 Prayer must be redefined as the act of consciously choosing union. With this definition, you can see how your life can become a prayer. This does not negate the fact that a prayer is also a constant dialogue of asking, being answered, and responding. This is the aspect of prayer that makes of it an act of creation.
6.4 Prayer and miracles work hand in hand once both are seen for what they are. Do not forget here, however, what union is. Union is the mind and heart being joined in wholeheartedness. It is your union with your Self. Union with your Self is union with God. Your concentration must not stray back to old concepts of prayer or of reaching God through the intercession of prayer as if God were separate from you and accessible only through a specific means of communication. You can see, perhaps, how this attitude toward prayer came about, as it is, like much you have learned, close to the truth without being the truth.
6.5 To use prayer only as a means of reaching out to a god seen as separate is to attempt to use what cannot be used. Such ideas of prayer have had credence because this reaching out does at least recognize that there is something to reach out to. Such ideas of prayer have long been opening doors for those who are ready to walk through them to a real relationship with God and Self. But this is not the concept of prayer of which we speak nor one that can reasonably be called a way of life or likened to the art of thought. Prayers such as these emanate from either heart or mind and have not the power of the wholehearted. Prayers such as these emanate from the state of fear that is the reality of the separated self.
6.6 To pray out of fear is not to pray at all, because such prayer chooses not the union that is the prerequisite. To pray out of fear is to ask from an unreal state of lack for what is seen as missing or desired. In contrast, true prayer, formed in union, is a means of creating, recollecting, or recalling a divine memory and transforming that divine memory into a present moment experience.
6.7 Memory is valuable to us now because it relies not on perception. If perception were all that were available to you, each experience would begin and end and have no ability to relate to anything else at all. Without memory, what you learned one day would be gone the next. A person you met one day you would not know the next. Memory allows relationship. Memory, or how you relate to past experiences, is what makes each individual unique. A family can share many similar experiences without relating to them in the same way. It is the way experience is related to, through memory, which shapes the different personalities, paths, and future experiences of each of you.
6.8 So what happens when memories of past experiences are revisited under the all- encompassing umbrella of a new way of thought? The different personalities become one, the different paths become one path, the future experiences become one. And in this oneness is peace everlasting.
6.9 When this oneness is accomplished divine memories arise to replace perception. This is miracle-mindedness. The accomplishment of this state of being is what you are here for. It is your return to your Self. It heralds the return of heaven through the second coming of Christ, the energy that will bridge the two worlds.
chapter 7
the New Learning
7.1 Suffering is seen as a condition of this world because the world is seen as a world in which who you are can never be accomplished. You have perceived this inability to be who you are in terms of not being able to do as you would desire to do, live as you would desire to live, achieve what you would choose to achieve. The true way in which to see this prerequisite to the condition of suffering is as the perceived inability to be who you truly are, a being existing in union. Take away all, for the moment, that you would strive to be, and the feeling of not being able to be accomplished or complete will still be with you. Recall the many times you felt certain that a particular achievement would complete you and would take away your feelings of lack. Even the most successful among you have found that your worldly success has been unable to bring you the satisfaction and the peace you desire.
7.2 Even the most spiritual and godly among you accept suffering. Even those who understand as completely as possible the truth of who they are accept suffering. My use of the word accept is important here, as these may not see suffering as pain but only as a natural part of being human that calls for acceptance. They thus find peace within suffering rather than abolishing suffering. This acceptance is due to the belief that spirit has chosen a form, and more accurately put a “lesser” form in which to exist, and that this choice includes the choice to suffer. This belief may accept suffering as a learning devise rather than a punishment, but it still, in its acceptance of a false
notion, invites suffering. This belief accepts learning through contrast, that evil is seen in relation to good, peace in relation to chaos, love in relation to fear. This belief exists in the in between, where on the one hand there is darkness, and on the other hand there is light. One or the other must exist at a given time, but never both. Thus the absence of good health is disease; the absence of peace is conflict; the absence of truth is illusion. This belief does not accept that there is only one reality and that it must exist where you are.
7.3 We are moving you now away from all such beliefs to a knowing that precludes the need for belief at all.
7.4 Yes, I have said that contrast is a favored teaching devise of the Holy Spirit. But I have not yet said that the time of the Holy Spirit is ending even though I have stated that the time of the second coming of Christ is here. I have said that the time of parables has ended and asked you not to look to those historical figures that taught in such a way as your examples any longer. I have said a new way of learning is needed and is here. To continue to rely on the ways of old, no matter how effective they were and no matter how much they spoke the truth will be to not learn the new.
7.5 You have advanced, taken steps, climbed to a new level, and acquired an ability to perceive differently in order to make this new learning possible. If you do not let what you have attained serve you, you will not realize what this new learning has been for. You may reach an ideal of human satisfaction and happiness, but you will not go beyond what is human.
7.6 This is why we must speak now of being human in a new way. We must reconcile the differences between the human and divine. We must, in other words, speak of incarnation.
chapter 8
Incarnation and Resurrection
8.1 I was proclaimed to be the Word incarnate, the union of the human and the divine, the manifestation of the Will of God. I have told you that you are no different than I was. Now I call you to be no different than I am.
8.2 As a man, I suffered, died and was buried. As who I Am, I resurrected. “I am the resurrection and the life.” What I was in life was the manifestation, in form, of the Will of God. So too have you been. God is the giver of life, thus life is God’s Will. But with my resurrection, which was accomplished for all, the meaning of life, the reality of life, changed, though you have known this not. The great experiment in separation ended with the resurrection, though you have known this not. For the resurrection and life are now one and the same.
8.3 That they are the same has not meant the automatic realization of this change of enormous proportions. The very nature of change is one of slow realization. Change occurs all around you every day without your realization of it. Only in retrospect are the greatest of changes seen. The understanding of the truth of an historical event changes over time and it may take a hundred or a thousand or even two thousand years for the real truth to be realized. Even though many versions of the truth have been accepted previously, there is only one truth. There was only one truth at the time the event or change took place, and there is only one truth in time or eternity regardless of the variety of interpretations of the truth.
8.4 I have come to you now to reveal the one truth that has existed for the past two thousand years without your comprehension of it. The nature of life changed with the resurrection. I am the resurrection and the life. So are you.
8.5 As I no longer suffer the separation, you need no longer suffer the separation. Even though the resurrection returned not life to the form I once occupied, it returned me to you in the form of the resurrected Christ who exists in all of you, bringing resurrection even unto your forms. I became the Word incarnate upon my resurrection rather than upon my birth. This will seem confusing given your definition of incarnation as the Word made flesh. You took this to mean that flesh took on the definition of the Word or the Almighty when I became flesh and bone through birth. But neither my birth nor my death were consequent with the Word as the Word is I Am, the Word is Life Eternal. My resurrection brought about the Word made flesh in each of you. You who have come after me are not as I was but as I Am. Does this not make sense, even in your human terms of evolution? You are the resurrected and the life.
8.6 How does this relate to your thinking? You have been reborn as god-man, as God and man united. The resurrection is the cause and effect of the union of the human and divine. This is accomplished. This is in effect the way in which the man Jesus became the Christ. This is in effect the way.
8.7 Now, how could one man’s resurrection be the way or even a way. How can resurrection provide a path or example for you to follow? You must see the link between resurrection and incarnation, the link between resurrection and the birth of the god-man.
8.8 The heart and mind joined in union accomplished the reunion of the separated self with God. The resurrection was evidence of this accomplishment. It laid aside death’s claim and with it the claim of all that is temporary. The resurrection was witnessed as the proof required, much as proof has been offered to you now in the form of miracles. How could one rise from the dead and others not follow?
8.9 Illusion is the death you need but arise from. Arise and awaken to your resurrected self! There is no longer a god-head to follow into paradise. Take not the example of any of these and know instead the example of woman, of Mary, Mother of God.
8.10 What is a mother but she who incarnates, makes spirit flesh through her own flesh, makes spirit flesh through union. That you have, in your version of creation, made it necessary for woman to join with man in order for new life to come forth, is but another example of how your memory of creation was made to serve what you would have come to be. The separated self could not exist alone and so created a way in which other separated forms could come into existence and live with it in separation. This recognition of union as a prerequisite to creation is proof of your memory’s tenacity and the failure of illusion to completely rid you of what you know.
8.11 The virgin birth was a necessary step in the re-claiming of the real act of creation, the bringing forth of the new through union with the divine Self. Whether you believe the virgin birth was reality or myth matters not, as myth and reality have no concrete distinction in the illusion within which you live. In other words you live as much by myth as by truth and myth often more accurately reflects the truth than what you would call real. This is not a call, however, to embrace myth, but to embrace the truth.
8.12 Mary is called upon now as the myth to end all myths for in this example life alone is the key to the riddle provided.
8.13 You are each called to return to your virgin state, to a state unaltered by the separation, a state in which what is begotten is begotten through union with God. It is from this unaltered state that you are free to resurrect, as I resurrected. It is through the Blessed Virgin Mary’s resurrection in form that the new pattern of life is revealed.
8.14 The new pattern of life is the ability to resurrect in form. The ability to resurrect in life. The ability to resurrect now.
8.15 Thus is the glory that is yours returned to you in life rather than in death.
8.16 The male provided the manifestation or the effect of the cause created by the female in the virgin birth. My mother, Mary, was responsible for the incarnation of Christ in me as I am responsible for the incarnation of Christ in you. This union of the male and female is but union of the parts of yourself expressed in form and story, expressed, in other words, in a visual pattern that aides your understanding of the invisible. It is one more demonstration of the union that returns you to your natural state. It is one more demonstration of cause and effect being one in truth. It is one more demonstration of what needs to occur now, in this time, in order for the truth of the resurrection to be revealed and lived.
8.17 We have talked thus far of union of heart and mind. Lest you think that this union is not all encompassing, we will reflect a moment here on how the art of thought brings all you have seen as parts of the self, such as male and female, conception and action, inspiration and manifestation, together into the wholehearted.
1.5 All that you have experienced in truth is love. All that illusion provided you with was nothing. Your first task as you remember and re-experience is that of separating illusion from the truth. This will require no effort for what you have learned in this Course has prepared you for this task. As each situation that re-enacts a previous learning experience arises, you will, if you trust your heart, be perfectly able to identify illusion from truth. This is a simple act of recognizing meaning. All that you believe you learned from illusion will have no meaning to you now and will allow you to give up any remnants of false learning you acquired. All that you learned in error from identifying love incorrectly will be relearned as love is properly identified.
1.6 Although I have just instructed you to trust in your heart, your reunited mind and heart will now be called to act in unison. That A Course of Love instructed you little in the mechanics of the mind was consistent with its theme and learning goals. The mechanics of the mind can, in truth, be left behind as we concentrate rather on the art of thought.
1.7 The mechanics of the mind were what engaged you in so many daily battles that you became almost too weary to continue. The mechanics of the mind were what were in need of being overcome in order for you to listen once again to the wisdom of your heart. The mechanics of your over-worked and over-stimulated mind were what you were asked to leave behind, as this act of leaving behind was the only means by which you could allow your mind to be restful enough for it to even contemplate union or the new learning required to facilitate your return to union. Your return to union is your return to love and it is accessed at the center or heart of your self. Your mind was in need of silencing in order for you to hear the wisdom of your heart and begin your return. Now, in order to complete your return, mind and heart must work as one.
1.8 You are a thinking being. This cannot be denied nor should it be. A course that left you with an erroneous impression that relying on feeling alone would complete your learning would in actuality leave your learning incomplete. Without this Treatise on the Art of Thought, too many of you would become muddled in your feelings and know not where to turn to explain the many riddles they would seem at times to represent.
1.9 A mind and heart joined in union abolishes the ego. The ego-mind was what was once in charge of all your thoughts. Since the ego is incapable of learning, the ego-mind had to be circumvented in order for true learning to take place. This is what A Course of Love accomplished. This learning was accomplished in you, making you The Accomplished. As The Accomplished, you now are able to access universal mind.
1.10 The joy that will come to you from the thoughts of a mind joined in union will be unparalleled in your experience here. “Ah,” you will say with a relief and joy that knows no bounds, “this is what it is to experience and know the truth.
This is what it is to create for this is what it is like to think as God thinks.” Where once you recognized only illusion, and called it reality, the mind joined in union will now, more and more, recognize only truth and experience only the truly real.
1.11 You can already imagine what an extensive change this will bring. As you are still experiencing change in time, without guidance, this change would be seen as quite difficult no matter how grand its outcome and even in spite of your recognition, at first in mere fleeting moments, that it is a change you would welcome.
1.12 Again your willingness is called upon. Be willing now to apply the art of thought to the experience of truth.
The thought system of the ego-mind is a learned system and this is why it can be unlearned. The thought system of the truth is always present, as the truth is always present, and can be neither learned nor unlearned. The truth will be revealed to you as soon as the learned thought system ceases to block its realization.
6.2 How is this revelation to take place? It will begin by learning the art of thought as the act of prayer. We have spoken already of memory here, and have presented the acts of reproducing and recollecting that are involved with memory as acts of creation. Prayer is but reproducing and recollecting a divine memory and divine memory cannot help but produce a divine outcome. Said in another way, prayer reproduces the truth and allows the truth to exist as it is. Prayer does this because it is the act of consciously choosing union. Choosing union moves you into the real state of “all” from the unreal state of the in between. Only from within a state that is real can anything happen in truth.
6.3 Prayer must be redefined as the act of consciously choosing union. With this definition, you can see how your life can become a prayer. This does not negate the fact that a prayer is also a constant dialogue of asking, being answered, and responding. This is the aspect of prayer that makes of it an act of creation.
6.4 Prayer and miracles work hand in hand once both are seen for what they are. Do not forget here, however, what union is. Union is the mind and heart being joined in wholeheartedness. It is your union with your Self. Union with your Self is union with God. Your concentration must not stray back to old concepts of prayer or of reaching God through the intercession of prayer as if God were separate from you and accessible only through a specific means of communication. You can see, perhaps, how this attitude toward prayer came about, as it is, like much you have learned, close to the truth without being the truth.
6.5 To use prayer only as a means of reaching out to a god seen as separate is to attempt to use what cannot be used. Such ideas of prayer have had credence because this reaching out does at least recognize that there is something to reach out to. Such ideas of prayer have long been opening doors for those who are ready to walk through them to a real relationship with God and Self. But this is not the concept of prayer of which we speak nor one that can reasonably be called a way of life or likened to the art of thought. Prayers such as these emanate from either heart or mind and have not the power of the wholehearted. Prayers such as these emanate from the state of fear that is the reality of the separated self.
6.6 To pray out of fear is not to pray at all, because such prayer chooses not the union that is the prerequisite. To pray out of fear is to ask from an unreal state of lack for what is seen as missing or desired. In contrast, true prayer, formed in union, is a means of creating, recollecting, or recalling a divine memory and transforming that divine memory into a present moment experience.
6.7 Memory is valuable to us now because it relies not on perception. If perception were all that were available to you, each experience would begin and end and have no ability to relate to anything else at all. Without memory, what you learned one day would be gone the next. A person you met one day you would not know the next. Memory allows relationship. Memory, or how you relate to past experiences, is what makes each individual unique. A family can share many similar experiences without relating to them in the same way. It is the way experience is related to, through memory, which shapes the different personalities, paths, and future experiences of each of you.
6.8 So what happens when memories of past experiences are revisited under the all- encompassing umbrella of a new way of thought? The different personalities become one, the different paths become one path, the future experiences become one. And in this oneness is peace everlasting.
6.9 When this oneness is accomplished divine memories arise to replace perception. This is miracle-mindedness. The accomplishment of this state of being is what you are here for. It is your return to your Self. It heralds the return of heaven through the second coming of Christ, the energy that will bridge the two worlds.
chapter 7
the New Learning
7.1 Suffering is seen as a condition of this world because the world is seen as a world in which who you are can never be accomplished. You have perceived this inability to be who you are in terms of not being able to do as you would desire to do, live as you would desire to live, achieve what you would choose to achieve. The true way in which to see this prerequisite to the condition of suffering is as the perceived inability to be who you truly are, a being existing in union. Take away all, for the moment, that you would strive to be, and the feeling of not being able to be accomplished or complete will still be with you. Recall the many times you felt certain that a particular achievement would complete you and would take away your feelings of lack. Even the most successful among you have found that your worldly success has been unable to bring you the satisfaction and the peace you desire.
7.2 Even the most spiritual and godly among you accept suffering. Even those who understand as completely as possible the truth of who they are accept suffering. My use of the word accept is important here, as these may not see suffering as pain but only as a natural part of being human that calls for acceptance. They thus find peace within suffering rather than abolishing suffering. This acceptance is due to the belief that spirit has chosen a form, and more accurately put a “lesser” form in which to exist, and that this choice includes the choice to suffer. This belief may accept suffering as a learning devise rather than a punishment, but it still, in its acceptance of a false
notion, invites suffering. This belief accepts learning through contrast, that evil is seen in relation to good, peace in relation to chaos, love in relation to fear. This belief exists in the in between, where on the one hand there is darkness, and on the other hand there is light. One or the other must exist at a given time, but never both. Thus the absence of good health is disease; the absence of peace is conflict; the absence of truth is illusion. This belief does not accept that there is only one reality and that it must exist where you are.
7.3 We are moving you now away from all such beliefs to a knowing that precludes the need for belief at all.
7.4 Yes, I have said that contrast is a favored teaching devise of the Holy Spirit. But I have not yet said that the time of the Holy Spirit is ending even though I have stated that the time of the second coming of Christ is here. I have said that the time of parables has ended and asked you not to look to those historical figures that taught in such a way as your examples any longer. I have said a new way of learning is needed and is here. To continue to rely on the ways of old, no matter how effective they were and no matter how much they spoke the truth will be to not learn the new.
7.5 You have advanced, taken steps, climbed to a new level, and acquired an ability to perceive differently in order to make this new learning possible. If you do not let what you have attained serve you, you will not realize what this new learning has been for. You may reach an ideal of human satisfaction and happiness, but you will not go beyond what is human.
7.6 This is why we must speak now of being human in a new way. We must reconcile the differences between the human and divine. We must, in other words, speak of incarnation.
chapter 8
Incarnation and Resurrection
8.1 I was proclaimed to be the Word incarnate, the union of the human and the divine, the manifestation of the Will of God. I have told you that you are no different than I was. Now I call you to be no different than I am.
8.2 As a man, I suffered, died and was buried. As who I Am, I resurrected. “I am the resurrection and the life.” What I was in life was the manifestation, in form, of the Will of God. So too have you been. God is the giver of life, thus life is God’s Will. But with my resurrection, which was accomplished for all, the meaning of life, the reality of life, changed, though you have known this not. The great experiment in separation ended with the resurrection, though you have known this not. For the resurrection and life are now one and the same.
8.3 That they are the same has not meant the automatic realization of this change of enormous proportions. The very nature of change is one of slow realization. Change occurs all around you every day without your realization of it. Only in retrospect are the greatest of changes seen. The understanding of the truth of an historical event changes over time and it may take a hundred or a thousand or even two thousand years for the real truth to be realized. Even though many versions of the truth have been accepted previously, there is only one truth. There was only one truth at the time the event or change took place, and there is only one truth in time or eternity regardless of the variety of interpretations of the truth.
8.4 I have come to you now to reveal the one truth that has existed for the past two thousand years without your comprehension of it. The nature of life changed with the resurrection. I am the resurrection and the life. So are you.
8.5 As I no longer suffer the separation, you need no longer suffer the separation. Even though the resurrection returned not life to the form I once occupied, it returned me to you in the form of the resurrected Christ who exists in all of you, bringing resurrection even unto your forms. I became the Word incarnate upon my resurrection rather than upon my birth. This will seem confusing given your definition of incarnation as the Word made flesh. You took this to mean that flesh took on the definition of the Word or the Almighty when I became flesh and bone through birth. But neither my birth nor my death were consequent with the Word as the Word is I Am, the Word is Life Eternal. My resurrection brought about the Word made flesh in each of you. You who have come after me are not as I was but as I Am. Does this not make sense, even in your human terms of evolution? You are the resurrected and the life.
8.6 How does this relate to your thinking? You have been reborn as god-man, as God and man united. The resurrection is the cause and effect of the union of the human and divine. This is accomplished. This is in effect the way in which the man Jesus became the Christ. This is in effect the way.
8.7 Now, how could one man’s resurrection be the way or even a way. How can resurrection provide a path or example for you to follow? You must see the link between resurrection and incarnation, the link between resurrection and the birth of the god-man.
8.8 The heart and mind joined in union accomplished the reunion of the separated self with God. The resurrection was evidence of this accomplishment. It laid aside death’s claim and with it the claim of all that is temporary. The resurrection was witnessed as the proof required, much as proof has been offered to you now in the form of miracles. How could one rise from the dead and others not follow?
8.9 Illusion is the death you need but arise from. Arise and awaken to your resurrected self! There is no longer a god-head to follow into paradise. Take not the example of any of these and know instead the example of woman, of Mary, Mother of God.
8.10 What is a mother but she who incarnates, makes spirit flesh through her own flesh, makes spirit flesh through union. That you have, in your version of creation, made it necessary for woman to join with man in order for new life to come forth, is but another example of how your memory of creation was made to serve what you would have come to be. The separated self could not exist alone and so created a way in which other separated forms could come into existence and live with it in separation. This recognition of union as a prerequisite to creation is proof of your memory’s tenacity and the failure of illusion to completely rid you of what you know.
8.11 The virgin birth was a necessary step in the re-claiming of the real act of creation, the bringing forth of the new through union with the divine Self. Whether you believe the virgin birth was reality or myth matters not, as myth and reality have no concrete distinction in the illusion within which you live. In other words you live as much by myth as by truth and myth often more accurately reflects the truth than what you would call real. This is not a call, however, to embrace myth, but to embrace the truth.
8.12 Mary is called upon now as the myth to end all myths for in this example life alone is the key to the riddle provided.
8.13 You are each called to return to your virgin state, to a state unaltered by the separation, a state in which what is begotten is begotten through union with God. It is from this unaltered state that you are free to resurrect, as I resurrected. It is through the Blessed Virgin Mary’s resurrection in form that the new pattern of life is revealed.
8.14 The new pattern of life is the ability to resurrect in form. The ability to resurrect in life. The ability to resurrect now.
8.15 Thus is the glory that is yours returned to you in life rather than in death.
8.16 The male provided the manifestation or the effect of the cause created by the female in the virgin birth. My mother, Mary, was responsible for the incarnation of Christ in me as I am responsible for the incarnation of Christ in you. This union of the male and female is but union of the parts of yourself expressed in form and story, expressed, in other words, in a visual pattern that aides your understanding of the invisible. It is one more demonstration of the union that returns you to your natural state. It is one more demonstration of cause and effect being one in truth. It is one more demonstration of what needs to occur now, in this time, in order for the truth of the resurrection to be revealed and lived.
8.17 We have talked thus far of union of heart and mind. Lest you think that this union is not all encompassing, we will reflect a moment here on how the art of thought brings all you have seen as parts of the self, such as male and female, conception and action, inspiration and manifestation, together into the wholehearted.
13 del 2
The final call of this Treatise is, in contrast to those put forth previously, a personal call from me to you. By now you have seen that your fears of losing your Self to God were unfounded. By now you have seen that your Self does not need to stand separate and alone in order to be fulfilled under the mantle of individuality. You have been told to put on a new mantle, a new identity. What does this mean?
13.2 Now that you have been made ready, I am ready to return you to your Self. Now that you have been made ready, it is time for us to have a personal relationship. We have, within these lessons, taken you far from your personal self, and I, as your teacher, have all but discounted the personal self I experience in relationship with you. Now, in unity, we are ready to be personal again.
13.3 While the personal self is the subject of the next treatise, this is my invitation to you, specifically, to enter into a holy and personal relationship with me, specifically. While you are here, you have a persona. While this persona is no longer an ego self but a Christ self, it is still a persona. This is the you who laughs and loves and cries and shares with friends in a world now different than the one you once perceived. I know of this world and I am here to guide you through it. I, too, am friend to you.
13.4 I am the corrector of false thinking because I lived among you as a thinking being. Think not that I was different than you and you will realize that we are truly one in being with
our Father. As you move into the world with the end of the time of separation and the beginning of the time of unity taking place around you, practice the beliefs that have been put forth in this treatise. Know that, in the time of unity, the truth will be shared by all.
13.5 Call upon your relationship with me to aid you, as I call upon you to assist me in calling all of our brothers and sisters to their return to unity. We call to one another in gratitude. This is the attitude of the wholehearted, the place from which all calls are sounded and received, the place where the true thinking of those united in mind and heart arises. Gratitude is the recognition of the state of grace in which you exist here and remain forever beyond all time and the passing of all form. It is an attitude of praise and thankfulness that flows between us now. The light of heaven shines not down upon you but is given and received in equal exchange by all who in creation exist together in oneness eternal.
13.6 Forget not who you truly are, but forget not also to be in joy in your experience here. Remember that the seriousness with which you once looked at life is of the ego. Drape your persona in a mantle of peace and joy. Let who you are shine through the personal self who continues to walk this world a while longer. Listen for my voice as I guide you to your purpose here and linger with you in this time to end all time. We are here, together, in love, to share love. This is not such a frightening task. Let fear go and walk with me now. Our journey together is just beginning as we return to the premise put forth in A Treatise on the Art of Thought, that of the elevation of form.
13.2 Now that you have been made ready, I am ready to return you to your Self. Now that you have been made ready, it is time for us to have a personal relationship. We have, within these lessons, taken you far from your personal self, and I, as your teacher, have all but discounted the personal self I experience in relationship with you. Now, in unity, we are ready to be personal again.
13.3 While the personal self is the subject of the next treatise, this is my invitation to you, specifically, to enter into a holy and personal relationship with me, specifically. While you are here, you have a persona. While this persona is no longer an ego self but a Christ self, it is still a persona. This is the you who laughs and loves and cries and shares with friends in a world now different than the one you once perceived. I know of this world and I am here to guide you through it. I, too, am friend to you.
13.4 I am the corrector of false thinking because I lived among you as a thinking being. Think not that I was different than you and you will realize that we are truly one in being with
our Father. As you move into the world with the end of the time of separation and the beginning of the time of unity taking place around you, practice the beliefs that have been put forth in this treatise. Know that, in the time of unity, the truth will be shared by all.
13.5 Call upon your relationship with me to aid you, as I call upon you to assist me in calling all of our brothers and sisters to their return to unity. We call to one another in gratitude. This is the attitude of the wholehearted, the place from which all calls are sounded and received, the place where the true thinking of those united in mind and heart arises. Gratitude is the recognition of the state of grace in which you exist here and remain forever beyond all time and the passing of all form. It is an attitude of praise and thankfulness that flows between us now. The light of heaven shines not down upon you but is given and received in equal exchange by all who in creation exist together in oneness eternal.
13.6 Forget not who you truly are, but forget not also to be in joy in your experience here. Remember that the seriousness with which you once looked at life is of the ego. Drape your persona in a mantle of peace and joy. Let who you are shine through the personal self who continues to walk this world a while longer. Listen for my voice as I guide you to your purpose here and linger with you in this time to end all time. We are here, together, in love, to share love. This is not such a frightening task. Let fear go and walk with me now. Our journey together is just beginning as we return to the premise put forth in A Treatise on the Art of Thought, that of the elevation of form.
10,11,12,,,,del 2
You would have to work mightily to turn the lessons of this course into a tool, but many of you will not tire of this work until you succeed. This is how truths become dogma and dogma becomes tyranny. This happens by accepting a static state. A static state is not a living state because creation is not occurring within it. This is a living course. This is why you are called to live it rather than to take it. This is why you are called to be a teacher and a learner both. This is how the exchange of giving and receiving as one occurs. This exchange is unity.
10.2 Thinking that needs can be met only in certain ways is akin to another belief that has been replaced. This belief was first expressed in A Course in Miracles by the saying Resign as your own teacher. This belief in the self as teacher has now been replaced with the belief that you only learn in unity.
10.3 I ask you to think for a moment of a time when you attempted to recall a specific memory. This may have been a memory of a name or address, of a dream, or an attempt to recall a specific event. At such times, you often feel as if, just as the memory is about to return to you, it is swatted away as easily and routinely as a hand swats away a fly. You know that the information is contained within you and still you are often forced to accept an inability to have access to this information. It is forced from your awareness by something you know not. It is there and yet swatted away as if by some unseen hand. Where has this information gone and what keeps it from you? You might feel frustrated with your memory at such a time and even say something such as “my brain just isn’t working right today.” I want you now to keep this example in mind as we explore learning in unity.
10.3 You might think of unity as you have so often thought of your brain, but rather than thinking of it in the singular, think of it as a storehouse or giant brain in which all that has ever been known or thought is contained. The technology that has created super-computers will immediately come to mind from this illustration. While this illustration may be distasteful to some and intriguing to others, how many of you would not want to replace your ability to know with the ability of a super-computer?
10.5 While just an illustration, the reverse of this is akin to what you have done by replacing unity with singularity. You have narrowed your ability to know to an ability to know that which you have experienced. While what we are speaking of as knowing has little to do with the information stored in super-computers, it is still a worthy illustration. For just as a super-computer needs a knowledgeable operator in order to provide the information sought, so too do you need to become knowledgeable in order to access all that is available to you.
10.6 Just as needs have been shown to be shared in like measure by all, so too is true knowing. Just as needs were shown to be distinguishable from wants by a discussion of their shared nature, so too now must knowing be distinguished from what you consider intelligence.
10.7 While you are being told that you can no longer believe that what you know is related to experience, you are not being told that you have exactly the same knowledge as does every person of every variety and level of experience. Yet no one can know more of the truth than another, and no one can know less.
10.8 Just beyond your mind’s ability to call it forth lies the truth that you and all other beings know. The access to what seems to lie beyond your ability lies in the Christ in you. You might think of the ego as the hand that swats away this knowing.
10.9 The ego is the teacher you have relied upon when you have relied upon your self as your own teacher.
10.10 You forget constantly that the Christ in you is the learner here. What need is there for a computer brain or for the ego to be your teacher when the learner in you is the all-powerful? The learner in you is the unifying force of the universe. The learning you are in need of is the learning that will call who you are back to your united mind and heart. This is the knowing that already exists, the memory that is swatted away by the ego.
10.11 Why, then, is this called learning? Learning simply means to come to know. If what you know has been forgotten, you still are in need of the learning that assists you in coming to know once again.
10.12 But as long as you continue to attempt to learn with your ego, or in other words, as long as you would continue to attempt to learn in the same way that you have previously learned, you will not learn because the “you” that will be involved in the learning process will not be the real you.
10.13 The Christ in you is the real you. The Christ in you is the Self you become when you have united heart and mind once again in wholeheartedness. The union of mind and heart is the first union, the union that must precede all the rest. You are in a state of unity when you have achieved wholeheartedness. You are in a state in which you are able to learn. I am here to show you the way to the Christ in you. I began my teaching by appealing to your heart so as to ready you for the return of wholeheartedness, the state of union in which all that you learn is shared, first by mind and heart, and then in unity with your brothers and sisters. You achieve this state only by listening to one voice, or, in other words, by ending the separated state which is the state in which the ego exists. The end of the separated state or the ego, is the beginning of your ability to hear only one voice, the voice we all share in unity.
10.14 This voice speaks to you in a thousand ways. It is the voice of love, the voice of creation, the voice of life. It is the voice of certainty that allows you to move through each day and all the experiences within it as who you are in truth. It releases you from the feeling of needing to control or protect your treasure. It releases you as well from the static state of trying to hang on to who you were yesterday, or trying to prevent change tomorrow.
10.15 As was said in the beginning, it is realized that it is hard for you to believe that the Christ in you is in need of learning. Think a moment of why this should be so. Is there ever a moment in which coming to know is not appropriate? Is there any reason that coming to know should not be seen as something continuous and ongoing?
10.16 Again your desire for a static state would make you rather listen to your ego as it prescribes learning for certain circumstances that would be quickly put behind you or chosen for specific outcomes. While many love to learn for the sake of learning alone, still they would be loath to give up or let go the ability to choose their lessons. And still we are only talking about learning as you have perceived of it rather than learning from life.
10.17 What difference does it make to your concepts of learning when you think of life as your course work? Would you be any more willing to let another choose your lessons for you?
10.18 What are your plans and dreams but chosen lessons? While you do not think of them as such you do not think of life as your learning ground. You still think of lessons as being about specific subject matter. When life does not go as you have planned, you feel as if your chosen path has been denied to you. You often feel a sense of loss and rarely one of gain. Unless life goes the way you have intended for it to go, you do not feel gifted or blessed, not even when you may have looked back on other situations that did not go as you had planned and seen that they nevertheless gifted you with experiences or opportunities that would not have arisen had your chosen plan come to fruition.
10.19 The Christ in you has no need to plan. A need to come to know…yes. But a need to plan…no. The Christ in you needs not for you to choose a lesson plan, but to let life itself be your chosen way of learning.
chapter 11
the Belief: We Exist in Relationship & Unity
11.1 The Christ in you is relationship. As you were told within the pages of this course, you are a being who exists in relationship. This is how you were created and how you remain. This is the truth of who you are and even, in your own terms, a fact of your existence. Earlier this was pointed out to you so that you would come to accept who you are and so that you would extend forgiveness to yourself and all you hold responsible for this truth. This forgiveness has now extended in two distinct ways. First in forgiving your Creator for creating you in such a way, and second in forgiving a world that has taught you to want to be other than who you are. Now our aim is to show you how to integrate the belief that you are a being who exists in relationship into the living of your life.
11.2 Even though you no longer want to be other than who you are, and even though you now have a much clearer understanding of who you are, you will find living as who you are in the world difficult as long as you perceive others as living under the old rules: the laws of man rather than the laws of God or love. It will seem all but impossible to live in relationship when those around you are still convinced of their separation and still seeking to glorify it. You will still perceive the world as operating under the laws of man and as long as you perceive the world in such a way, you will be forced to live by its laws. This will cause struggle, and as you now know that struggle of any kind alerts you to the presence of ego, you will continue to do battle with the ego rather than leaving it forever behind.
11.3 Doing battle with the ego has become the pre-occupation of many gifted and learned people. This is the classic battle revealed in all myths and tales of war and strife. It is the battle that in your imaginings has extended even to the angels. The ego is the dragon that must be slain, the evil of the despot to be toppled, the one-on-one conflict of all heroes who would take sides and do battle.
11.4 You are called to peace, a peace that begins and ends with ceasing to do battle with the ego. As the ego has been the known identity of your existence until now, it will, in a sense, be forever with you, much as the body that is your form will remain with you until your death. But while your perception of your body as your identity and your home has given way to an idea of it as a form that can be of service to you and your expression, there is no service the ego can do you. The ego is the one untruth, given many names and many faces and the only thing given by you the power to do battle with the truth, or with God. Remember now and always that you and God are one and that what you invite to do battle with God you but battle yourself.
11.5 A God of love does not do battle, for truth needs no protection. The truth is not threatened by untruth. The truth simply exists, as love exists, and as you exist. When we say something is this is of what we speak. When we say all truth is generalizable, all needs are shared, all knowing is shared, this is of what we speak.
11.6 All cannot be threatened by nothing.
11.7 This is why we spent a fair amount of time addressing needs in a way we had not previously addressed them. Only 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. Your true identity must be re-created from the belief in unity that is inherent in the acceptance that you exist in relationship. Separation is all that opposes relationship, and the ego is all that opposes your true identity.
11.8 The ego, having been with you from your earliest remembering, will continue to be with you in the way that all learned behaviors and ideas are with you, until it is totally replaced by new learning. Your new learning must complement your new beliefs. The ultimate goal of this learning is the end of the need for beliefs at all.
11.9 This learning, then, must be seen for what it is. It is the holiest of work and the final evidence of means and end being the same. Your devotion to this learning must now be complete, your willingness total, your way of learning that of a mind and heart joined in wholeheartedness.
11.10 Realize that when you think that this total reversal of thought concerning your self and your world will be difficult you are listening to your ego. The Christ in you knows not of difficulty.
11.11 How can it be that we speak both of the Christ in you and of Christ as being relationship itself? How can it be that we have spoken of Christ being both wholly human and wholly divine? These statements can only be true if there is no division between you and relationship, if there is no division between the human and the divine.
11.12 Separate things must still exist in relationship. This is the key to understanding the truth of these statements. For even while you have chosen separation, this choice did not preclude the existence of relationship and it is in relationship that union still exists. If you had been able to choose separation without relationship, then the image of yourself the ego has put forth would have been a true image. But as life cannot exist apart from relationship, this choice was not available and did not overturn the laws of God. The ego is but your belief that this has occurred; that what could never be true has become the truth.
11.13 So let us now, for the sake of continued learning, speak of separation in a new way. Let us speak of separation as a state that exists rather than as a state that does not exist. If you exist as a separate being but your being is contingent upon relationship for its existence, is this not the same as saying that you are a being who exists in relationship? Is this not similar to saying that a living human body does not exist without its heart? Is not what is essential to a living body a fact of that body’s existence? While this illustration is not attempting to say that life does not exist apart from the body, it is attempting to reveal, in an easily understandable way, that there is a condition under which you are here and able to experience life as a separate being. That condition is relationship and relationship is what keeps you forever one with your Creator.
11.14 Here that relationship is being called Christ in order to keep the holiness and importance of this relationship forever and foremost in your mind. Here, that relationship has been given a name, as we have given your relationship with your separate identity the name of ego. Here, we are asking you to choose the one real relationship and to vanquish the one unreal relationship.
11.15 It is from these two separate ideas of relationship that the concept of doing battle has emerged. This concept of doing battle can only remain if you remain convinced that the ego is real. As long as you believe that the ego is real, you will feel as if there are two identities that exist within you and you will see yourself as doing battle in countless ways and forms. There will never actually be a battle going on between Christ and the ego, but you will perceive that such battles exist. You will be prone to calling upon the Christ as your higher self to defend you against the ego self. This is highly akin to your former notion of prayer and assumes that there is something real that you need defense against or saving from. This is how the notion of Christ as savior arose. This is the belief in a good self and a bad self with Christ acting as conscience and defender of good and the ego acting as devil and defender of evil. This is nonsense, or but a form of the insanity that is prevalent still, even in your thinking. You do not realize that this source of conflict is the source of all conflict that seems real to you within your world. This battle of good and evil, while you believe in it still, will be demonstrated before you just as it has been from time immemorial. Is this what you would have continue? Does this not but reveal to you a fraction of the power of your thinking and its ability to shape the world you see?
11.16 An alternative to this insanity exists. The alternative is removing all faith from your belief in the ego self. The alternative is replacing belief in an ego self with belief in a Christ self. Total replacement. As long as you hang on to both identities the world will not change and you will not know who you are. You may think you know, and you may waste much time in perceived battles, valiantly fighting for good to win out over evil. But this is not the new way and the lack of value from this type of effort can surely now be seen.
11.17 I have said that the ego will remain with you as the identity you have learned since birth until you replace it with new learning. While you have learned much here, you may be thinking that your ego is still very much with you, and wondering, if you have not yet replaced it, how this miracle will come about. This replacement is indeed a miracle and the very miracle you have been prepared for within this course of learning.
chapter 12
the Belief: Correction and Atonement
12.1 Miracles are thoughts and I am the corrector of false thinking. You have been made ready for this correction and your belief in correction, or atonement, is the final belief that must be put into practice.
12.2 Miracles are a service provided through love. Your readiness for miracles has been achieved through the learning you have accomplished. Miracles cannot be used, and so your learning needed to include an ability to distinguish between service and use. Service, or devotion, leads to harmony through right action. Until you were able to distinguish the false from the true, you were not able to receive the power of miracles.
12.3 The power of miracles is but the culmination and the integration of the beliefs we have put forth here. The miracle I am offering you here is the service I offer you, the precursor of the service you will offer to others.
12.4 Miracles are intercessions. As such they are agreements. They do not take away free will but free the will to respond to truth. They are the ultimate acceptance of giving and receiving being one in truth.
12.5 While you continue to feel as if you do not understand miracles, you will be reluctant to believe in them or to see yourself as a miracle worker. Your belief in miracles and your belief in atonement or correction are the same. When you
believe there is anything other than your own thinking that is in need of correction you think falsely. Right-thinking is the realm of miracles.
12.6 As with the learning goal being set here of going beyond belief to simply knowing, the learning goal in relation to the miracle is the same — it is one of going beyond belief in the miracle to simply knowing. Knowing is knowing the truth. Knowing is right-thinking. Your return to knowing or right-thinking is both the miracle and the end for the need of miracles. As you live in the world as who you are, you become a miracle and the constant expression of the miracle.
12.7 The power of thought and the power of prayer, once aligned, call constantly upon the same power of intercession that is the miracle. This is why we also devoted a fair amount of this treatise to a discussion of calling. Calling is not only something you receive but something you must learn to give. As you have come to see calling as a gift and a treasure as well as a learning device, so you must come to see your own ability to call forth intercession as a gift and treasure you are able to give in service to your brothers and sisters.
12.8 If callings come to alert you to the treasure within, how can it be that you, as a miracle-minded being, are not called upon to also call forth the treasure that exists around you? When you call to those whom you meet in relationship, you call but to the already accomplished.
12.9 There, between you and the “other” whom you have previously only perceived, is the relationship and the miracle waiting to happen. As we spoke within A Course of Love of relationship being not one thing or another but a third something, this is what we speak of here again. If Christ is relationship, and if the Christ in you is the real you, then this all-encompassing relationship, both within you and without you, both you and all you are in relationship with, is that third something that is the holy relationship.
12.10 This holy relationship is what you are called to cultivate as a gardener cultivates her garden. The gardener knows that although the plant exists fully realized within its seed, it also needs the relationship of earth and water, light and air. The gardener knows that tending the garden will help it to flourish and show its abundance. The gardener knows she is part of the relationship that is the garden. A true gardener believes not in bad seeds. A true gardener believes not that she is in control. A true gardener accepts the grandeur that is the garden and finds it beautiful to behold.
12.11 This metaphor is akin to acceptance of the holy relationship. It is acceptance of what occurs with the joining of many factors, one no more important than another. While the Christ in you has been compared to the seed of all you are, what you have had revealed to you here is that the Christ is also the relationship of all that would bring the seed to fruition. The ego could be here compared to a gardener who believes that the seed alone is all that is important. As intently as this gardener might struggle to cause the seed to grow, without the relationship of earth and water, light and air, the seed would but remain a source of struggle. The ego would hang on to what is already there within you, and never let you express, through relationship, all that you are. As valuable as the ego would tell you that you are, it still would thwart you from being who you are through its denial of the relationships essential to that which you truly are.
12.12 This cultivation then, of the all-encompassing holy relationship that exists within you and without you, both in all you are and all you are in relationship with, is how you are called to live your life and the call you are asked to sound to all your brothers and sisters.
12.13 Let the beliefs we have set forth become one with you so that they enable you to live and express and act as who you are in every moment and in every circumstance. Let these abilities serve you and your brothers and sisters. Let this way of living be the expression of who you are and all that you now remember. Let this remembrance grow and flourish as the garden that is you.
12.14 Recognize now that unity is within you and without you, in all you are and in all with whom you are in relationship. Feel the embrace and the love that is this unity and know that it is you, and me, and our Creator, and all that was created.
10.2 Thinking that needs can be met only in certain ways is akin to another belief that has been replaced. This belief was first expressed in A Course in Miracles by the saying Resign as your own teacher. This belief in the self as teacher has now been replaced with the belief that you only learn in unity.
10.3 I ask you to think for a moment of a time when you attempted to recall a specific memory. This may have been a memory of a name or address, of a dream, or an attempt to recall a specific event. At such times, you often feel as if, just as the memory is about to return to you, it is swatted away as easily and routinely as a hand swats away a fly. You know that the information is contained within you and still you are often forced to accept an inability to have access to this information. It is forced from your awareness by something you know not. It is there and yet swatted away as if by some unseen hand. Where has this information gone and what keeps it from you? You might feel frustrated with your memory at such a time and even say something such as “my brain just isn’t working right today.” I want you now to keep this example in mind as we explore learning in unity.
10.3 You might think of unity as you have so often thought of your brain, but rather than thinking of it in the singular, think of it as a storehouse or giant brain in which all that has ever been known or thought is contained. The technology that has created super-computers will immediately come to mind from this illustration. While this illustration may be distasteful to some and intriguing to others, how many of you would not want to replace your ability to know with the ability of a super-computer?
10.5 While just an illustration, the reverse of this is akin to what you have done by replacing unity with singularity. You have narrowed your ability to know to an ability to know that which you have experienced. While what we are speaking of as knowing has little to do with the information stored in super-computers, it is still a worthy illustration. For just as a super-computer needs a knowledgeable operator in order to provide the information sought, so too do you need to become knowledgeable in order to access all that is available to you.
10.6 Just as needs have been shown to be shared in like measure by all, so too is true knowing. Just as needs were shown to be distinguishable from wants by a discussion of their shared nature, so too now must knowing be distinguished from what you consider intelligence.
10.7 While you are being told that you can no longer believe that what you know is related to experience, you are not being told that you have exactly the same knowledge as does every person of every variety and level of experience. Yet no one can know more of the truth than another, and no one can know less.
10.8 Just beyond your mind’s ability to call it forth lies the truth that you and all other beings know. The access to what seems to lie beyond your ability lies in the Christ in you. You might think of the ego as the hand that swats away this knowing.
10.9 The ego is the teacher you have relied upon when you have relied upon your self as your own teacher.
10.10 You forget constantly that the Christ in you is the learner here. What need is there for a computer brain or for the ego to be your teacher when the learner in you is the all-powerful? The learner in you is the unifying force of the universe. The learning you are in need of is the learning that will call who you are back to your united mind and heart. This is the knowing that already exists, the memory that is swatted away by the ego.
10.11 Why, then, is this called learning? Learning simply means to come to know. If what you know has been forgotten, you still are in need of the learning that assists you in coming to know once again.
10.12 But as long as you continue to attempt to learn with your ego, or in other words, as long as you would continue to attempt to learn in the same way that you have previously learned, you will not learn because the “you” that will be involved in the learning process will not be the real you.
10.13 The Christ in you is the real you. The Christ in you is the Self you become when you have united heart and mind once again in wholeheartedness. The union of mind and heart is the first union, the union that must precede all the rest. You are in a state of unity when you have achieved wholeheartedness. You are in a state in which you are able to learn. I am here to show you the way to the Christ in you. I began my teaching by appealing to your heart so as to ready you for the return of wholeheartedness, the state of union in which all that you learn is shared, first by mind and heart, and then in unity with your brothers and sisters. You achieve this state only by listening to one voice, or, in other words, by ending the separated state which is the state in which the ego exists. The end of the separated state or the ego, is the beginning of your ability to hear only one voice, the voice we all share in unity.
10.14 This voice speaks to you in a thousand ways. It is the voice of love, the voice of creation, the voice of life. It is the voice of certainty that allows you to move through each day and all the experiences within it as who you are in truth. It releases you from the feeling of needing to control or protect your treasure. It releases you as well from the static state of trying to hang on to who you were yesterday, or trying to prevent change tomorrow.
10.15 As was said in the beginning, it is realized that it is hard for you to believe that the Christ in you is in need of learning. Think a moment of why this should be so. Is there ever a moment in which coming to know is not appropriate? Is there any reason that coming to know should not be seen as something continuous and ongoing?
10.16 Again your desire for a static state would make you rather listen to your ego as it prescribes learning for certain circumstances that would be quickly put behind you or chosen for specific outcomes. While many love to learn for the sake of learning alone, still they would be loath to give up or let go the ability to choose their lessons. And still we are only talking about learning as you have perceived of it rather than learning from life.
10.17 What difference does it make to your concepts of learning when you think of life as your course work? Would you be any more willing to let another choose your lessons for you?
10.18 What are your plans and dreams but chosen lessons? While you do not think of them as such you do not think of life as your learning ground. You still think of lessons as being about specific subject matter. When life does not go as you have planned, you feel as if your chosen path has been denied to you. You often feel a sense of loss and rarely one of gain. Unless life goes the way you have intended for it to go, you do not feel gifted or blessed, not even when you may have looked back on other situations that did not go as you had planned and seen that they nevertheless gifted you with experiences or opportunities that would not have arisen had your chosen plan come to fruition.
10.19 The Christ in you has no need to plan. A need to come to know…yes. But a need to plan…no. The Christ in you needs not for you to choose a lesson plan, but to let life itself be your chosen way of learning.
chapter 11
the Belief: We Exist in Relationship & Unity
11.1 The Christ in you is relationship. As you were told within the pages of this course, you are a being who exists in relationship. This is how you were created and how you remain. This is the truth of who you are and even, in your own terms, a fact of your existence. Earlier this was pointed out to you so that you would come to accept who you are and so that you would extend forgiveness to yourself and all you hold responsible for this truth. This forgiveness has now extended in two distinct ways. First in forgiving your Creator for creating you in such a way, and second in forgiving a world that has taught you to want to be other than who you are. Now our aim is to show you how to integrate the belief that you are a being who exists in relationship into the living of your life.
11.2 Even though you no longer want to be other than who you are, and even though you now have a much clearer understanding of who you are, you will find living as who you are in the world difficult as long as you perceive others as living under the old rules: the laws of man rather than the laws of God or love. It will seem all but impossible to live in relationship when those around you are still convinced of their separation and still seeking to glorify it. You will still perceive the world as operating under the laws of man and as long as you perceive the world in such a way, you will be forced to live by its laws. This will cause struggle, and as you now know that struggle of any kind alerts you to the presence of ego, you will continue to do battle with the ego rather than leaving it forever behind.
11.3 Doing battle with the ego has become the pre-occupation of many gifted and learned people. This is the classic battle revealed in all myths and tales of war and strife. It is the battle that in your imaginings has extended even to the angels. The ego is the dragon that must be slain, the evil of the despot to be toppled, the one-on-one conflict of all heroes who would take sides and do battle.
11.4 You are called to peace, a peace that begins and ends with ceasing to do battle with the ego. As the ego has been the known identity of your existence until now, it will, in a sense, be forever with you, much as the body that is your form will remain with you until your death. But while your perception of your body as your identity and your home has given way to an idea of it as a form that can be of service to you and your expression, there is no service the ego can do you. The ego is the one untruth, given many names and many faces and the only thing given by you the power to do battle with the truth, or with God. Remember now and always that you and God are one and that what you invite to do battle with God you but battle yourself.
11.5 A God of love does not do battle, for truth needs no protection. The truth is not threatened by untruth. The truth simply exists, as love exists, and as you exist. When we say something is this is of what we speak. When we say all truth is generalizable, all needs are shared, all knowing is shared, this is of what we speak.
11.6 All cannot be threatened by nothing.
11.7 This is why we spent a fair amount of time addressing needs in a way we had not previously addressed them. Only 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. Your true identity must be re-created from the belief in unity that is inherent in the acceptance that you exist in relationship. Separation is all that opposes relationship, and the ego is all that opposes your true identity.
11.8 The ego, having been with you from your earliest remembering, will continue to be with you in the way that all learned behaviors and ideas are with you, until it is totally replaced by new learning. Your new learning must complement your new beliefs. The ultimate goal of this learning is the end of the need for beliefs at all.
11.9 This learning, then, must be seen for what it is. It is the holiest of work and the final evidence of means and end being the same. Your devotion to this learning must now be complete, your willingness total, your way of learning that of a mind and heart joined in wholeheartedness.
11.10 Realize that when you think that this total reversal of thought concerning your self and your world will be difficult you are listening to your ego. The Christ in you knows not of difficulty.
11.11 How can it be that we speak both of the Christ in you and of Christ as being relationship itself? How can it be that we have spoken of Christ being both wholly human and wholly divine? These statements can only be true if there is no division between you and relationship, if there is no division between the human and the divine.
11.12 Separate things must still exist in relationship. This is the key to understanding the truth of these statements. For even while you have chosen separation, this choice did not preclude the existence of relationship and it is in relationship that union still exists. If you had been able to choose separation without relationship, then the image of yourself the ego has put forth would have been a true image. But as life cannot exist apart from relationship, this choice was not available and did not overturn the laws of God. The ego is but your belief that this has occurred; that what could never be true has become the truth.
11.13 So let us now, for the sake of continued learning, speak of separation in a new way. Let us speak of separation as a state that exists rather than as a state that does not exist. If you exist as a separate being but your being is contingent upon relationship for its existence, is this not the same as saying that you are a being who exists in relationship? Is this not similar to saying that a living human body does not exist without its heart? Is not what is essential to a living body a fact of that body’s existence? While this illustration is not attempting to say that life does not exist apart from the body, it is attempting to reveal, in an easily understandable way, that there is a condition under which you are here and able to experience life as a separate being. That condition is relationship and relationship is what keeps you forever one with your Creator.
11.14 Here that relationship is being called Christ in order to keep the holiness and importance of this relationship forever and foremost in your mind. Here, that relationship has been given a name, as we have given your relationship with your separate identity the name of ego. Here, we are asking you to choose the one real relationship and to vanquish the one unreal relationship.
11.15 It is from these two separate ideas of relationship that the concept of doing battle has emerged. This concept of doing battle can only remain if you remain convinced that the ego is real. As long as you believe that the ego is real, you will feel as if there are two identities that exist within you and you will see yourself as doing battle in countless ways and forms. There will never actually be a battle going on between Christ and the ego, but you will perceive that such battles exist. You will be prone to calling upon the Christ as your higher self to defend you against the ego self. This is highly akin to your former notion of prayer and assumes that there is something real that you need defense against or saving from. This is how the notion of Christ as savior arose. This is the belief in a good self and a bad self with Christ acting as conscience and defender of good and the ego acting as devil and defender of evil. This is nonsense, or but a form of the insanity that is prevalent still, even in your thinking. You do not realize that this source of conflict is the source of all conflict that seems real to you within your world. This battle of good and evil, while you believe in it still, will be demonstrated before you just as it has been from time immemorial. Is this what you would have continue? Does this not but reveal to you a fraction of the power of your thinking and its ability to shape the world you see?
11.16 An alternative to this insanity exists. The alternative is removing all faith from your belief in the ego self. The alternative is replacing belief in an ego self with belief in a Christ self. Total replacement. As long as you hang on to both identities the world will not change and you will not know who you are. You may think you know, and you may waste much time in perceived battles, valiantly fighting for good to win out over evil. But this is not the new way and the lack of value from this type of effort can surely now be seen.
11.17 I have said that the ego will remain with you as the identity you have learned since birth until you replace it with new learning. While you have learned much here, you may be thinking that your ego is still very much with you, and wondering, if you have not yet replaced it, how this miracle will come about. This replacement is indeed a miracle and the very miracle you have been prepared for within this course of learning.
chapter 12
the Belief: Correction and Atonement
12.1 Miracles are thoughts and I am the corrector of false thinking. You have been made ready for this correction and your belief in correction, or atonement, is the final belief that must be put into practice.
12.2 Miracles are a service provided through love. Your readiness for miracles has been achieved through the learning you have accomplished. Miracles cannot be used, and so your learning needed to include an ability to distinguish between service and use. Service, or devotion, leads to harmony through right action. Until you were able to distinguish the false from the true, you were not able to receive the power of miracles.
12.3 The power of miracles is but the culmination and the integration of the beliefs we have put forth here. The miracle I am offering you here is the service I offer you, the precursor of the service you will offer to others.
12.4 Miracles are intercessions. As such they are agreements. They do not take away free will but free the will to respond to truth. They are the ultimate acceptance of giving and receiving being one in truth.
12.5 While you continue to feel as if you do not understand miracles, you will be reluctant to believe in them or to see yourself as a miracle worker. Your belief in miracles and your belief in atonement or correction are the same. When you
believe there is anything other than your own thinking that is in need of correction you think falsely. Right-thinking is the realm of miracles.
12.6 As with the learning goal being set here of going beyond belief to simply knowing, the learning goal in relation to the miracle is the same — it is one of going beyond belief in the miracle to simply knowing. Knowing is knowing the truth. Knowing is right-thinking. Your return to knowing or right-thinking is both the miracle and the end for the need of miracles. As you live in the world as who you are, you become a miracle and the constant expression of the miracle.
12.7 The power of thought and the power of prayer, once aligned, call constantly upon the same power of intercession that is the miracle. This is why we also devoted a fair amount of this treatise to a discussion of calling. Calling is not only something you receive but something you must learn to give. As you have come to see calling as a gift and a treasure as well as a learning device, so you must come to see your own ability to call forth intercession as a gift and treasure you are able to give in service to your brothers and sisters.
12.8 If callings come to alert you to the treasure within, how can it be that you, as a miracle-minded being, are not called upon to also call forth the treasure that exists around you? When you call to those whom you meet in relationship, you call but to the already accomplished.
12.9 There, between you and the “other” whom you have previously only perceived, is the relationship and the miracle waiting to happen. As we spoke within A Course of Love of relationship being not one thing or another but a third something, this is what we speak of here again. If Christ is relationship, and if the Christ in you is the real you, then this all-encompassing relationship, both within you and without you, both you and all you are in relationship with, is that third something that is the holy relationship.
12.10 This holy relationship is what you are called to cultivate as a gardener cultivates her garden. The gardener knows that although the plant exists fully realized within its seed, it also needs the relationship of earth and water, light and air. The gardener knows that tending the garden will help it to flourish and show its abundance. The gardener knows she is part of the relationship that is the garden. A true gardener believes not in bad seeds. A true gardener believes not that she is in control. A true gardener accepts the grandeur that is the garden and finds it beautiful to behold.
12.11 This metaphor is akin to acceptance of the holy relationship. It is acceptance of what occurs with the joining of many factors, one no more important than another. While the Christ in you has been compared to the seed of all you are, what you have had revealed to you here is that the Christ is also the relationship of all that would bring the seed to fruition. The ego could be here compared to a gardener who believes that the seed alone is all that is important. As intently as this gardener might struggle to cause the seed to grow, without the relationship of earth and water, light and air, the seed would but remain a source of struggle. The ego would hang on to what is already there within you, and never let you express, through relationship, all that you are. As valuable as the ego would tell you that you are, it still would thwart you from being who you are through its denial of the relationships essential to that which you truly are.
12.12 This cultivation then, of the all-encompassing holy relationship that exists within you and without you, both in all you are and all you are in relationship with, is how you are called to live your life and the call you are asked to sound to all your brothers and sisters.
12.13 Let the beliefs we have set forth become one with you so that they enable you to live and express and act as who you are in every moment and in every circumstance. Let these abilities serve you and your brothers and sisters. Let this way of living be the expression of who you are and all that you now remember. Let this remembrance grow and flourish as the garden that is you.
12.14 Recognize now that unity is within you and without you, in all you are and in all with whom you are in relationship. Feel the embrace and the love that is this unity and know that it is you, and me, and our Creator, and all that was created.
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