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.