4,5,6,,,del 2

Creation is not an aspect of this world alone. Creation is an aspect of the whole, the all of all, the alpha and the omega, eternity and infinity. It is not only life as you know it now, but life in all its aspects. It is life beyond death as well as life before birth and life during your time here. It is all one because it is all from the same Source.

4.2 You are not only part of creation, but as has been said many times, a creator, and as such a continuing act of creation. This does not mean that creation is acted out upon you but that you are acted out upon creation. The idea of creation as something static would be completely contrary to the meaning of creation. Yet you continue to think that you stand apart from it and affect it not. This is consistent to the thinking that would tell you that you are at the mercy of fate. Fate and creation are hardly the same thing. You are at the mercy only of your own ego and only until you willingly let it go.

4.3 A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love work hand-in-hand because the change of thinking taught within A Course in Miracles was a change of thinking about yourself. It attempted to dislodge the ego-mind that has provided you with an identity that you but think you are. A Course of Love then followed in order to reveal to you who you truly are. While you continue to act within the world as who you think you are rather than as who you are, you have not integrated these two pieces of learning.
4.4 This is the stage of learning that you are at and what this treatise addresses. This treatise is attempting to show you how to live as who you are, and how to act within the world as the new Self you have identified. Just like learning how to swim, it is a new way of movement. Just as moving through water is a way of movement quite inconsistent with that of moving on land, so too is the new way of acting out or expressing who you are quite inconsistent with the way in which you have formerly acted out or expressed who you are. This is, of course, because you formerly acted out of a set of conditions that corresponded to who you think you are rather than who you truly are.

4.5 You will almost literally continue to “bump into” who you think you are as you complete the process of unlearning. It might be best explained by continuing with the swimming metaphor. If acting in the world as who you truly are is like swimming, bumping into who you think you are could be likened to trying to move within water as you would on land. Why, when moving freely through the water would you suddenly try to move as if on land? The explanation could be as simple as forgetting where you are, or as complex as a sudden panic or fear brought on by any number of factors. Either way, the result would always be the same: a sudden change from ease of movement to struggle, from going with the flow to resistance.

4.6 A first step in learning to recognize when you are acting upon notions of who you think you are rather than on who you truly are, is the appearance of struggle or resistance. As a swimmer quickly learns, the only way to return to ease of movement is to cease to struggle or resist. The ability to let go of struggle is a learned ability for the swimmer, and it is a learned ability for you now as you journey back to your real Self. It requires remembrance, trust, and a wholehearted approach that allows the body, mind, and heart to act in unison. This wholehearted approach is the condition from which unity
is recognized. The water is not taken for granted but always recognized as the condition of the swimmer’s environment. You are no longer confined to the conditions of separation, my dear brothers and sisters, and this is what it is time for you to learn.

4.7 This applies directly to your reaction to all that occurs within your life. Let us look now at your reaction to the idea put forth earlier of having a calling.

4.8 Despite whatever way you currently have of identifying calling as it relates to you, there are few among you who have not reacted to the idea of calling with two sets of feelings and thoughts. One set of thoughts and feelings contain all that one might attribute to the glad acceptance of a gift of high value, or in other words, a treasure. Another set of thoughts and feelings contain all that one might attribute to the somewhat onerous onset of yet another responsibility, another obligation. One set of thoughts recognizes that something has been given. The other set recognizes that something has been asked. The wholehearted response is one that recognizes that giving and receiving are the same in truth.

4.9 While two sets of thoughts and feelings exist, the only way to come to peace with them is through an acceptance of ambiguity. While an acceptance of ambiguity might seem preferable to conflict, an acceptance of ambiguity is a rejection of your power. What is required to claim your power is the willingness to move through the conflict of two opposing sets of thoughts and feelings to the place of unity.

4.10 Thus the next steps in our work with regard to calling are recognizing the dualistic nature of your thoughts and feelings, followed by a willingness to move past both ambiguity and conflict to union.
4.11 This requires an examination of your specific notions concerning calling as you apply them to yourself. Whether you feel that you a have a specific calling, no calling, or many callings, matters not at this juncture. What matters is that you think it does. You think it matters because you compare and judge rather than accept.

4.12 You who have so recently felt the peace of true acceptance are not asked to leave that peace to go in search of calling but are rather asked to listen from within that peace to what you feel called to do. This is not about the past and all those things that at one time or another you thought would bring you fulfillment. This is about recognizing who you are now. This is not a quick fix that calls you to what might have been and tells you that if you had but acted earlier you would have had the life you’ve dreamed of and maybe it is not too late. This is not about examining where the various calls you responded to previously have led you. All these notions are concerned with who you have thought yourself to be, not with who you are. They do not recognize the difference between thinking and knowing.

4.13 Being who you are is what you are called to do. You are asked to live a life as seamless as that of the birds of the air. You are asked to live a life where there is no division between who you are and what you do. This place of no division is the place of unity.

4.14 Now you may feel as if this treatise has led around in a circle, bringing you back only to contemplate again the acceptance of where you are now. To accept where you are is not the same as accepting who you are. Accepting where you are, as if it is a static place at which you have arrived, is not the goal that has been set. Accepting who you are includes acceptance of creation. The acceptance of creation is the acceptance of change and growth but neither of these are concepts that you understand truly. Change is not negative and growth does not imply lack.

4.15 You must be beginning to see that your thought processes, the very thought processes that tell you hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute how to perceive of and live in your world, are still often based on old concepts. This does not mean you have not changed nor that you are in need of accomplishment rather than the already accomplished. What this means is that you are still in need of unlearning, of undoing old patterns of thought. This is atonement and it is continuous and ongoing until it is no longer needed. Anything continuous and ongoing is part of creation. The very act of undoing old patterns is an act of creation. As the old is undone, a vacuum is not created. The new is created.

4.16 You are in the process of unmaking what you have made. The old structure is coming down so that the new, what might be likened to a building with no frame, can rise.

4.17 This process too is union for it is giving and receiving as one although you recognize it not as such. It is not a process of waiting until one thing is accomplished for another to begin. What is happening now is happening in unison. As the old goes, the new arrives. There is no time-lapse in this learning and so it is a condition of miracle-readiness. The old is replaced by the new simultaneously.

4.18 This is why you do not have to “wait” to hear your calling even though some of you may feel as if you are in a time of waiting for you hear no such call. The call is to be who you are and this is happening at lightning speed, a speed that cannot be measured because of its simultaneous nature. As was said within A Course of Love, time is but a measurement of the “time” it takes for learning to occur. As this notion of time dissolves, the state of miracle-readiness becomes your natural state.

4.19 While this adjustment of your thinking may not seem to be the miracle that it truly is, as your awareness of it grows, it is going to rise to a level you will come to think of as an ability. As your old way of responding to life causes you to struggle or resist and the new way of thinking replaces that old pattern with a new pattern of response, you will begin to see that each new response is the answer to a call that your heart alone can hear. Your heart has now become your eyes and ears. Your heart hears only one call, one voice, the language of one source…that of unity.
chapter 5
the Source of Your Call

5.1 In order for you to more fully understand the life that this course calls to you, we must also talk of another aspect of being called. While we have concluded that when you listen to your heart you hear and are able to respond to the one call, this does not mean that this one call has but one request to make of you, as in a call to be a minister, nor that it will come in but one form, as in a call to action. We have talked heretofore about a calling you feel from within, as if you are listening to a new voice that reveals your talents and desires to you. This type of calling comes as a light shone into the darkness and is revelatory in nature. Other calls will come as announcements, signs, or even as seeming demands. All call you to the present where response is able to be given. All call you “back” to who you are.

5.2 Again let me stress the present-moment nature of being called. A call is, at its most basic level, a means of communication. If you are not listening, you will not hear the calls that are meant for you. If you are looking only for a specific type of call, you will miss many unlearning and learning opportunities. Thus recognition of the different calls that may now be heard is necessary.

5.3 The call that comes in the form of an announcement is the call that carries with it no ambiguity. The certainty of an announcement can alert you that it is time to act. This might be considered the highest form of call, the call from the already accomplished to the already accomplished. Such a call signals an end to learning from the lessons of the past and a beginning
of learning from the new. This Course itself is such a call, an announcement of your readiness for the new. This is the all-encompassing call and is not about specifics. Because it is not about specifics you may find yourself still wondering what to do. Thus you must be aware of the calls that assist you in knowing what to do.

5.4 These calls you may think of as signs. Like literal signposts along a roadway, they alert you to turn your attention in a particular direction.

5.4 Calls that seem to come in the form of demands are often calls that come to you from within the teaching and learning ground of relationships. You may be literally “called to account” for certain attitudes or behaviors. You may also be called upon to call others to account for their attitudes or behaviors.

5.6 These last two calls, the call that appears in the form of a sign and the call that comes in the form of a demand, are about specifics in a way that the call that comes as an announcement is not. They represent the remnants of learning from the past, the final breaking of old patterns. They may seem to signal difficult times, but they are times that must be gotten through and lessons that need to be allowed to pass through you.

5.7 Until you have fully integrated the truth that giving and receiving are one, you will not fully believe that needs are not lacks. Until you have fully integrated the truth that giving and receiving are one, you will not realize that dependency is a matter of the interdependency of all that exists in relationship. All the calls that come to you in the form of signs or demands will be calls that assist you in integrating this learning and making it one with who you are. These lessons will bring who you are into focus within your mind through the vehicle of your heart.
chapter 6
the Belief: Accomplishment


6.1 The source of what we have been speaking of as “calling” is your heart. It is what alerts you to the treasures that lie within. There is no time in the place we are calling within and your heart knows not of time even while it adheres to the rules of time you would place upon yourself. Cease adhering to the rules of time and see how much more the language of your heart becomes known to you.

6.2 I speak here not of the rules of time that govern your days and years but the rules of time that you believe govern your days and years and that you thus allow to govern your thinking. If time is but a measure of learning and if your learning is now at the stage at which it occurs in unison with unlearning, then the end of time as you know it is close at hand. If you can begin now to think without the barriers of time you but place upon your thinking, you will advance this process and more quickly bring about the end of the pattern of learning that you refer to as time. The end of the pattern of learning that you refer to as time is the beginning of the time of unity.

6.3 This return to unity is reliant upon the changes in your beliefs that this Course has brought about. Let us review these beliefs and how they relate to your concept of time.

6.4 Only you can be accomplished and your accomplish-ment is already complete.

6.5 What does this mean in regard to time? You might think of being accomplished as all of your work being done. If
there is no work to be done, nothing for you to do, what do you need time for? Have you ever conceived of accomplishing anything without taking into account the time that it will take? Relate this question to our discussion of treasure and you will understand what it is of which I speak. You believe that your treasures only become accomplished abilities within time. You believe that your treasures only become part of your identity when you have passed beyond the time it takes for those treasures to become abilities. Thus all that you might wish to accomplish stands separate from you and beyond you in time. That your mind projects what you desire to accomplish onto an unknown future time is what would seem to keep you from accomplishment. I say that it is what would “seem to” purposefully. If you are already accomplished, this trick of your mind has not worked. And yet if you believe that this trick of your mind has worked, you act as if you are being kept from accomplishment by time and this “seems” quite real to you. This “seems” quite real to you because of what you believe.

6.6 Accomplishment is not an end point but a given. It is not an outcome but a certainty. It says I am rather than I will be. I will be is a statement that presumes a future in which you will be someone other than who you are in the present. Unity exists only in the here and now of the present. There is no will be in unity. There is only what is. The limits you would place on the concept of something being what it is, must be part of this discussion.

6.7 Your mind would tell you that a chair is a chair and regard it as a fact. Through the learning you have done since your birth, you have come to recognize a chair as having certain properties, the most essential of which is that it is a structure on which to sit. The exercises of A Course in Miracles began with asking you to call into question these beliefs in known, observable, facts. You may have regarded these exercises as silly or you may have thought of the lessons of physics and felt as if you understood these exercises on an intellectual level. But what these exercises have prepared you for is an acceptance of the ongoing change that is creation; an acceptance that something can be what it is, a known fact, an object with an identity, but also part of the ongoing nature of creation. Could this be true of a chair and not be true of you?

6.8 It is your belief that change and growth are indicative of all that can be accomplished rather than of what is already accomplished that needs adjustment now. As a tree exists fully accomplished within its seed and yet grows and changes, you exist fully accomplished within the seed that is the Christ in you even while you continue to grow and change. Physical form and action of all kinds are but expressions of that which already exist within the seed of the already accomplished.

6.9 The recognition that you are already accomplish-ed is a condition of your recognition of the state of unity. It is a recognition that you exist in unity outside of the pattern of time. Miracles create an out-of-pattern time interval. Living in a state of miracle-readiness is the creation of a new reality outside of the pattern of ordinary time. Although this state exists as the already accomplished, it is up to you to create it for yourself. You must create it for yourself only because you believe you replaced what was already accomplished with what you made. This is what is happening as you unlearn and learn in unison. You are creating the state of unity as a new reality for your Self even though it is actually a return to what has always been. You are changing the world you perceive by perceiving a new world. You are changing from who you have thought yourself to be to who you are.

6.10 As I have already said that your heart must exist where you think you are, you can begin to see that this change in thinking will release your heart, returning it to its natural realm. Thus does mind and heart join in unity in the present, in the here and now, so that you exist, even within form, as the only Son of God, the Christ, the word made flesh. Remember that the phrase, the Son of God, and the name Christ, but represent the original creation and are not to be mistaken for heavenly deities separate from you. The Christ is your Self as you were created and remain. The Christ is the accomplished Self.