Posted by Roberta Grimes • June 26, 2021 • 39 Comments
Jesus, Understanding Reality
If you hear the song I sing, you will understand.
You hold the key to love and fear all in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both! It’s there at your command.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)
It is difficult for us to comprehend the kind of love that Jesus taught. He says, If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them (LK 11:32). Instead of loving so narrowly, the Lord insists that we must “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men (LK 6:35). We read these words, and we are sure that Jesus cannot possibly mean them literally! Oh sure, God can love God’s enemies! God can lend, and then can forgive when the crook absconds with God’s savings. But you and I are not God! How does all this flowery high-mindedness apply to us?
We have struggled in this space to try to understand the peculiar love that Jesus taught. A love that is meant to especially focus on our enemies? We have pointed out that ancient Greek, the language in which the Lord’s Aramaic words were written down and from which they were later translated into modern languages, has at least eight words for love. But if we take the Lord’s words seriously, we realize that even agape – “love for everyone” – is not a sufficiently radical concept to satisfy what the Lord is actually saying. For one thing, Jesus insists that our loving in the way that He loves comes before every other kind of love, and even before our love for those closest to us. It is the highest and purest form of love! He says, “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (MT 10:37).
Read those last words again. If we are being honest, I think we must conclude that Jesus isn’t talking about any of the kinds of love that you and I ever have imagined. Instead, what Jesus means by “love” is the absolute transformation of our minds. When He talks about love and forgiveness, he is talking about the fruits of our minds’ transformations as we have used the Lord’s teachings to effect those transformations. Every Christian denomination tells us to try to love and forgive without first using the Lord’s teachings to transform our minds, which is something like telling us to play real piano music the first time we ever touch a keyboard. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). And it turns out that our following those teachings matters a great deal more than any Christian leader ever has imagined!
A Course in Miracles calls the kinds of love we have for friends and family members “special loves.” And it tells us that “special loves” are as spiritually negative as are “special hates.” In fact, as you will see, in this earthly illusion special loves are related to fear and hatred! They give us a way to continue to hide from the real love to which the Lord is calling us. Apparently this is what Jesus was trying to say in the Gospels in just a few words, but we never really grasped what He meant. So He said it again in the nineteen-sixties, and in profound detail! I can see no way to shorten or to summarize this teaching, so I apologize for the fact that this post is longer than usual. Please read what follows with reverence. Unlike the Gospel words of Jesus, which were part of an oral history that later went through two religion-based translations, this passage from A Course in Miracles is a literal, word-for-word message from Jesus,
Who is an aspect of the Godhead Itself. God is speaking here directly! And to this day, I find it impossible to read to the end of what follows without being brought to tears. The boundlessness of the pure love of God for you in particular is beyond our ability to fathom it.
A Course in Miracles Chapter 16: The Forgiveness of Illusions
The Illusion and the Reality of Love
1. Be not afraid to look upon the special hate relationship, for freedom lies in looking at it. ²It would be impossible not to know the meaning of love, except for this. ³For the special love relationship, in which the meaning of love is hidden, is undertaken solely to offset the hate, but not to let it go. ⁴Your salvation will rise clearly before your open eyes as you look on this. ⁵You cannot limit hate. ⁶The special love relationship will not offset it, but will merely drive it underground and out of sight. ⁷It is essential to bring it into sight, and to make no attempt to hide it. ⁸For it is the attempt to balance hate with love that makes love meaningless to you. ⁹The extent of the split that lies in this you do not realize. ¹⁰And until you do, the split will remain unrecognized, and therefore unhealed.
2. The symbols of hate against the symbols of love play out a conflict that does not exist. ²For symbols stand for something else, and the symbol of love is without meaning if love is everything. ³You will go through this last undoing quite unharmed, and will at last emerge as yourself. ⁴This is the last step in the readiness for God. ⁵Be not unwilling now; you are too near, and you will cross the bridge in perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace. ⁶For the illusion of love will never satisfy, but its reality, which awaits you on the other side, will give you everything.
3. The special love relationship is an attempt to limit the destructive effects of hate by finding a haven in the storm of guilt. ²It makes no attempt to rise above the storm, into the sunlight. ³On the contrary, it emphasizes the guilt outside the haven by attempting to build barricades against it, and keep within them. ⁴The special love relationship is not perceived as a value in itself, but as a place of safety from which hatred is split off and kept apart. ⁵The special love partner is acceptable only as long as he serves this purpose. ⁶Hatred can enter, and indeed is welcome in some aspects of the relationship, but it is still held together by the illusion of love. ⁷If the illusion goes, the relationship is broken or becomes unsatisfying on the grounds of disillusionment.
4. Love is not an illusion. ²It is a fact. ³Where disillusionment is possible, there was not love but hate. ⁴For hate is an illusion, and what can change was never love. ⁵It is sure that those who select certain ones as partners in any aspect of living, and use them for any purpose which they would not share with others, are trying to live with guilt rather than die of it. ⁶This is the choice they see. ⁷And love, to them, is only an escape from death. ⁸They seek it desperately, but not in the peace in which it would gladly come quietly to them. ⁹And when they find the fear of death is still upon them, the love relationship loses the illusion that it is what it is not. ¹⁰When the barricades against it are broken, fear rushes in and hatred triumphs.
5. There are no triumphs of love. ²Only hate is at all concerned with the “triumph of love.” ³The illusion of love can triumph over the illusion of hate, but always at the price of making both illusions. ⁴As long as the illusion of hatred lasts, so long will love be an illusion to you. ⁵And then the only choice remaining possible is which illusion you prefer. ⁶There is no conflict in the choice between truth and illusion. ⁷Seen in these terms, no one would hesitate. ⁸But conflict enters the instant the choice seems to be one between illusions, but this choice does not matter. ⁹Where one choice is as dangerous as the other, the decision must be one of despair.
6. Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ²It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false. ³Every illusion is one of fear, whatever form it takes. ⁴And the attempt to escape from one illusion into another must fail. ⁵If you seek love outside yourself you can be certain that you perceive hatred within, and are afraid of it. ⁶Yet peace will never come from the illusion of love, but only from its reality.
7. Recognize this, for it is true, and truth must be recognized if it is to be distinguished from illusion: The special love relationship is an attempt to bring love into separation. ²And, as such, it is nothing more than an attempt to bring love into fear, and make it real in fear. ³In fundamental violation of love’s one condition, the special love relationship would accomplish the impossible. ⁴How but in illusion could this be done? ⁵It is essential that we look very closely at exactly what it is you think you can do to solve the dilemma which seems very real to you, but which does not exist. ⁶You have come close to truth, and only this stands between you and the bridge that leads you into it.
8. Heaven waits silently, and your creations are holding out their hands to help you cross and welcome them. ²For it is they you seek. ³You seek but for your own completion, and it is they who render you complete. ⁴The special love relationship is but a shabby substitute for what makes you whole in truth, not in illusion. ⁵Your relationship with them is without guilt, and this enables you to look on all your brothers with gratitude, because your creations were created in union with them. ⁶Acceptance of your creations is the acceptance of the Oneness of creation, without which you could never be complete. ⁷No specialness can offer you what God has given, and what you are joined with Him in giving.
9. Across the bridge is your completion, for you will be wholly in God, willing for nothing special, but only to be wholly like to Him, completing Him by your completion. ²Fear not to cross to the abode of peace and perfect holiness. ³Only there is the completion of God and of His Son established forever. ⁴Seek not for this in the bleak world of illusion, where nothing is certain and where everything fails to satisfy. ⁵In the Name of God, be wholly willing to abandon all illusions. ⁶In any relationship in which you are wholly willing to accept completion, and only this, there is God completed, and His Son with Him.
10. The bridge that leads to union in yourself must lead to knowledge, for it was built with God beside you, and will lead you straight to Him where your completion rests, wholly compatible with His. ²Every illusion you accept into your mind by judging it to be attainable removes your own sense of completion, and thus denies the Wholeness of your Father. ³Every fantasy, be it of love or hate, deprives you of knowledge for fantasies are the veil behind which truth is hidden. ⁴To lift the veil that seems so dark and heavy, it is only needful to value truth beyond all fantasy, and to be entirely unwilling to settle for illusion in place of truth.
11. Would you not go through fear to love? ²For such the journey seems to be. ³Love calls, but hate would have you stay. ⁴Hear not the call of hate, and see no fantasies. ⁵For your completion lies in truth, and nowhere else. ⁶See in the call of hate, and in every fantasy that rises to delay you, but the call for help that rises ceaselessly from you to your Creator. ⁷Would He not answer you whose completion is His? ⁸He loves you, wholly without illusion, as you must love. ⁹For love is wholly without illusion, and therefore wholly without fear. ¹⁰Whom God remembers must be whole. ¹¹And God has never forgotten what makes Him whole. ¹²In your completion lie the memory of His Wholeness and His gratitude to you for His completion. ¹³In His link with you lie both His inability to forget and your ability to remember. ¹⁴In Him are joined your willingness to love and all the Love of God, Who forgot you not.
12. Your Father can no more forget the truth in you than you can fail to remember it. ²The Holy Spirit is the Bridge to Him, made from your willingness to unite with Him and created by His joy in union with you. ³The journey that seemed endless is almost complete, for what is endless is very near. ⁴You have almost recognized it. ⁵Turn with me firmly away from all illusions now, and let nothing stand in the way of truth. ⁶We will take the last useless journey away from truth together, and then together we go straight to God, in joyous answer to His Call for His completion.
13. If special relationships of any kind would hinder God’s completion, can they have any value to you? ²What would interfere with God must interfere with you. ³Only in time does interference in God’s completion seem to be possible. ⁴The bridge that He would carry you across lifts you from time into eternity. ⁵Waken from time, and answer fearlessly the Call of Him Who gave eternity to you in your creation. ⁶On this side of the bridge to timelessness you understand nothing. ⁷But as you step lightly across it, upheld by timelessness, you are directed straight to the Heart of God. ⁸At its center, and only there, you are safe forever, because you are complete forever. ⁹There is no veil the Love of God in us together cannot lift. ¹⁰The way to truth is open. ¹¹Follow it with me. (ACIM, T-16.IV.1:1–13:11)
Please read this passage from A Course in Miracles a few times this week. Inhabit it. Try to make it your own. Then next week we’ll use it to seek a better understanding of the perfect love that Jesus taught.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)
Hi Roberta, hi everybody! There is nothing to add here. Thank you!
Thank you, dear Mike!
Jesus and God both prefer not to be called “Lord” as this is a human-based designation which is very archaic, male dominant, and thus inaccurate.
Good point, Adri. There is no question that the word “Lord” is human based and it certainly is archaic and male dominant. It also is a word that would be used to describe someone with an ego, which would eliminate any high level being who would have shed their ego eons ago.
Dear Lola, There is no indication whatsoever in anything that I ever have seen that God or Jesus disapproves of any human mode of address. I had hoped that Adri would say where it came from, but no such luck, which might confirm my belief that it is yet another voguish modern idea that has nothing to do with the eternal Godhead.
Archaic? Male dominant? Ego-based? These are all 21st century faddish ideas that have nothing to do with God, or with Jesus. Indeed, for us to self-importantly claim that God or Jesus “prefers” anything is pretty strong evidence of an out-of-control human ego on our part, wouldn’t you say?
I am no bible scholar, so I assumed Adria was referring to something she read in the bible. I don’t feel that God or Jesus “prefers” to be addressed in any particular way. She seemed so confidant of it that I thought she read it somewhere, but if that’s not the case, then the whole thing is irrelevant.
Roberta, thank you for this reply.
Dear Marilyn, I love that you have found it helpful!
Dear Adri, since this is a statement that I cannot remember ever having seen before, and you say it so confidently here, it would help everyone if you told us where you got it? How do you know God’s preference in our address?
Although I do not advocate Buddhism, it well makes the point that any passions and lusts, e.g., sex, eating, drugs, create the basis for disappointments, fear and pain (I do not advocate Buddhism, because this recognition of sources of anguish alone may lead to sterile withdrawal from the perfect love that Christ was teaching).
There is a way to think about what Christ is saying by considering the difference between the mortal life of the material body living on the Earth and the life of spirit when in Heaven. In our mortal lives, we exist as entities separated from all else, compete endlessly for resources, and are driven to fear and anxiety. By contrast, our spirit when in Heaven, and freed from bodily needs and desires, exists as a part of God, as a droplet in the ocean that is God, and is bathed in God’s love. In Heaven, we are not separated from all else, but are a seamless part of all that exists.
It does seem that while we are in physical reality, we are forced to compete for well paying jobs, status, and sometimes recognition. This takes up the great majority of our time and always, without exception, leads to problems with fear and anxiety. Without the need to compete, we would be free to think differently in a more loving way. Thank you for posting this, Dr. Hiller. It is not only a great thought, but it is so true and sums everything up very nicely.
Dear Lola, we are not “forced” to do anything. We choose to buy into the ego’s lies, to toil and sweat and fight for the world’s wealth and to put it before the much greater spiritual wealth that we came here to accumulate! That is the literal point of what Jesus tells us in that lengthy quote above! Not even the world’s special loves are more important than following the teachings of Jesus and gaining God’s kingdom. Please read that quotation again!!
By all means, we are never “forced” to fight for the world’s wealth etc. I just meant that many people are trying to feed families and often have more than one job in order to do so. In other words, I was just talking about mere survival. Fighting for the world’s wealth always ends in disaster, as does the illusion of the need for power.
Dear Lola, even if we are less well off financially, we still do have choices! There are two ways to be financially secure: one is to have more, but the other and better way is to figure out how to be content with less.
Dear Jack, if we want the reward of being a seamless part of all that exists, we are going to have to raise our personal consciousness vibrations by a lot, which is why we chose to come to earth where we can experience all these stressors and these hard choices! If we don’t deal with the world’s issues while we are here, and while tough choices must be made, then this lifetime is altogether wasted. We will remain at barely the third level, which is pretty but is spiritual kindergarten.
As Jesus said,
If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own (MT 6:30-34)
Roberta: There is no doubt that many people have wasted their current lifetime (me included) by paying such close attention to earthly concerns, They will not immediately go to a very high level, but isn’t it possible to study and learn over there if you so desire? I heard that it was if you sincerely put your mind to it and that help is gladly available for the asking. The problem seems to be that many reject the help and are satisfied to remain at a lower level – sometimes out of fear due to false religious beliefs they are holding onto, and for a whole truckload of other reasons.
Short answer: NO.
Longer answer: My dear Lola, nobody wants to come here! We do it BECAUSE it is so hard to make spiritual progress there! Yes, there are classes. Yes, there is tutoring. Yes, we try. Then we see people who have made good use of a lifetime on earth leave us very briefly (remember: no objective time) and return having made light years of spiritual progress! So we enter another earth-lifetime. We plan a life that will give us lots of opportunities to grow, but then we flub it by getting distracted by daily nonsense. No wonder Jesus so often expressed His frustration with us!
I have never heard of anyone who was happy just lolling around on level three, and not growing any further. People there are taught by upper-level beings and encounter them in other ways, so they vividly know how much better it is in every way at the fourth, fifth, and sixth levels!
NO. There is no substitute for living this earth-lifetime with as much determination as we had in entering it.
People not in bodies want to grow spiritually, and they come to this difficult, painful, no-fun illusion in order to grow spiritually. It is apparently actually possible to make almost any earth-lifetime your final earth-lifetime, but instead most of us waste hundreds of earth-lives not doing very much at all!
Many waste their earth lives, so that is very true. I know Jesus taught centuries ago what the actual situation was, but obviously his words got twisted by the power hungry Constantine and others like him, which resulted in the fear based religion of Christianity, resulting in much confusion.
There still is not a good explantaion for being victims of serial torturer/killers. Unless all victims are able to dissociate during the traumatic experiences.
Dear Ali, we are told – and the evidence of afterlife communications strongly suggests – that when death will be the outcome of trauma, we are generally out of the body before there is much pain or distress suffered. For example, people dying in auto accidents routinely describe being lifted out of the body and out of the car before the crash. People dying in battle are out of the body so quickly that they often don’t realize they have died, and sometimes a significant time passes – even years – before they can be persuaded by rescuers that they have died. I once read an account of someone’s being regressed to a death under torture, and he reported that he left the body as the torture began. We can’s say this happens in every such case, since there are exceptions to every rule; but it seems to be pretty close to universal that we are cared for and protected in this way.
Thank you, but I have to ask, what about survivors of these incidents?
ROBERTA’S RESPONSE:
Dear Ali, I have never seen this issue specifically addressed. We do know that physical suffering does happen on earth, and it has happened through all of human history. Cancer, for example, can be very painful, as is death from hunger, gradually fatal battlefield wounds, and so on. The source of the nonfatal pain doesn’t matter so much, although of course having to watch someone enjoy inflicting pain on you is a pretty severe psychological burden. And we know from a few post-death accounts that sometimes suffering is a tremendous opportunity for spiritual growth. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross reported this after her protracted death from cancer, for example – she said then that she was glad it had happened.
Sometimes, down through all of human history, people have suffered greatly on earth, whether physically or mentally, and have eventually died and gone home psychologically damaged by their suffering here. Then they receive tremendous counseling and support – whatever they need – and they recover and go on with their eternal lives. I don’t think it is possible to know any more than that until after we have gone home ourselves!
“We will take the last useless journey away from truth together, and then together we go straight to God, in joyous answer to His Call for His completion.”
This line reduced me to tears, Roberta, realizing how much I am an integral part of God, necessary for His completion. My pea brain barely comprehends this statement. I am overwhelmed and will continually seek to understand this. I have read these words before, but today this is the message for me. Thank you for posting.
My dear Vicki, now you understand why it makes me tear up, too! And Jesus comes to earth to take us Home to God. His teachings are the way, the truth, and the light, and it is only our own stubborn clinging to earth-based illusions that delays our beautifully going home with Him!
You probably understand this much more than I do, Vicki. I have no idea at all what this statement means. I can’t imagine myself or anyone else being necessary for “God’s completion.”
Dear Lola, as we have been saying here over the past few years, we have been learning from bits of evidence and insights received from beings not in bodies that:
1) What we experience in a dim way as consciousness is all that exists.
2) At its highest vibration, Consciousness is the Godhead that continuously manifests this reality; but each of our minds is also inextricably part of that same Consciousness.
3) The genuine Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings. Effectively, God is us, perfected. And outside of time, it is probable that all of us already have rejoined and are One with God!
4) Jesus is a Perfected Being who came to earth and inhabited a human body, and told us how to achieve the highest spiritual level (He called it the kingdom of God).
5) So when each of us is spiritually perfected, then we, too, will elevate within Consciousness and join the Godhead Itself. And each one of us who achieves that will further complete the Godhead.
Now do you better understand?
I understand the process but I’m not sure what these spiritually perfected beings do once they join the Godhead. Maybe the choices are endless, but my knowledge is limited to no higher than level III. I assume that they lose their interest in the illusions of the earth plane.
My dear Lola, they JOIN THE GODHEAD. They join their newly perfected Consciousness of limitless power to the only Power there is! Not only do they NOT lose interest in the illusions of the earth plane, but they join in CREATING THOSE ILLUSIONS freshly in each micro-instant, including the entire “past,” which – since time is part of the illusion – only ever exists as memory, so, like the present, it is always changing. And all of that is a pretty big job!
There is a lot of evidence that the sixth level, where Mikey Morgan is – is where we learn to focus and use our powerful minds. It also seems to be where the whole afterlife illusion and the astral plane are created. Indeed, when I was young in doing this research, the old-timers called the sixth level the “causal level” and they called entering the seventh level and joining the Source the “second death.” They thought your individuality was extinguished at that second death, which of course is not true at all!
Dear Lola, sometimes I think that you ask these questions here so I will answer them for the benefit of others. And I’m grateful 🙂
Dear Roberta,
I can’t thank you enough for presenting this.
I have always felt that my love for my children was disproportionate. They are grown up now.
I love and loved them so deeply to the exclusion of so much else. This “special love” for them will never go away but I understand its purpose and weakness. I am familiar with ACIM and love it but have not given it the attention it deserves.
In “The illusion and the Reality of Love ” the words and concepts are so simple, and yet so counterintuitive. It requires what seems to be an all encompassing unnatural paradigm shift but absolutly necessary to understand the illusion and reality of Love and the kind of Love that Jesus tried to and is still trying to teach us.
Every sentence in those passages describe such deep sared truths in such a way that could only have been written by Jesus himself.
Thank you, thank you, thank you
With much love and gratitude for your hard work
Christine Pitliangas
Oh my dear Christine, I have children too! I understand how overwhelming that special love can be, and I can tell you that the universal love that prevails in us after all special loves are stripped away is not a lesser love than what you have had for your children, but rather it is more tender and yielding, less needy, and not possessive at all. I appreciate my own children so much more now, because I no longer need anything at all from them. I’m sending you a big hug – you are on your way!!
“On this side of the bridge to timelessness you understand nothing. But as you step lightly across it, upheld by timelessness, you are directed straight to the Heart of God. At its center, and only there, you are safe forever, because you are complete forever. There is no veil the Love of God in us together cannot lift. The way to truth is open. Follow it with me.”
– ACIM, Chapter 16, 13: 6-11
Gosh Roberta, this is the invitation of Jesus Himself to Oneness with God. God is inviting each of us – personally – into His very own Heart.
He is speaking to each of us at core.
There should be a word for ‘beyond awe’ by which I am hearing this and feeling it.
This is everything I ever yearned for. 🙏🏼🌅
Oh my dear beautiful Efrem, you express this central truth so well! This is why I can’t read that passage from ACIM without tearing up at its final words. And this is why I sign off each episode of Seek Reality by saying something like, “You – most of all in the universe! – you are infinitely loved!”
“Beyond awe” indeed, my darling friend! Each of us is the “Son” to which ACIM refers. The Son with whom God yearns for reunion. Without which the Godhead is not complete. Outside of time, the separation within Consciousness was ended as soon as it began, but within time it continues. With joy, you and I can have the perfect delight of knowing that beyond time we are already back in God!
❣️🙏🏼🌅
This thought might be helpful. If God is the fire then we are like sparks off the fire and are actually fire. The fire (Godhead) is not complete unless It becomes one with all the sparks. Hope that makes sense.
Dear Tom and Scott, this is a lovely metaphor! So long as we always understand that each spark is both the entire flame and the entirety of the fuel being consumed. We will understand this better when we reunite with our vast, eternal minds, but even now it feels amazing!
I love that metaphor Tom. The sparks seek to return to, and/or be perfected copies of the Fire that will never cease, aka God.
Hi Roberta. I used to find lines such as those you quote from MT 10:37 oddly cold, harsh, even venal, and didn’t really understand them, but now that I read them in light of the teachings of Jesus we have discussed here – that we are all one, all part of the same consciousness – they make a lot more sense to me. I can imagine him trying to get this through to his disciples and being a bit frustrated. Truly integrating that teaching aligns our consciousness with the highest form of love, unity consciousness, and then we see Jesus (or God, or ourselves) in every man. As facets of God’s mind we, to paraphrase Jesus, are to be reflections of God. To be so, we need to be perfectly clear mirrors, like Paul was getting at in that inspired piece from 1 Corinthians 13. The section of chapter 16 in ACIM that you quote really breathtakingly hit me between the eyes as a perfect description of the kind of shadow work, deep healing, and reintegration we need to do to become that perfect reflection of God’s love. When we speak of this kind of love we can truly say, “Only Love is real,” and the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit will cascade down upon us.
My dear Scott, I found those lines hard to deal with, too, until I first did A Course in Miracles. And seeing now the breadth of understanding that we need in order to really “get” the Jesus of the Gospels, I have lamented the fact that so much of what He said during those teaching years must have been lost! But Thomas reminds me that history is being freshly re-created in each micro-instant, and that everything that is supposed to be in the Gospels already is there. I gather that is the point of Liberating Jesus, which is a restatement of the Gospels in simple terms that was dictated by Jesus when ACIM proved to be too complicated for most of us to understand. There are no accidents, my friend keeps telling me. It’s just that our understanding with only a small part of our minds available to us is sadly so small!
Only love is real. And as we come to ever better understand God’s infinite love for each of us, then it is also true that only joy is possible!
“each spark is both the entire flame and the entirety of the fuel being consumed.” That’s beautiful Roberta. I look forward to the better understanding of which you speak. Thanks for all you do.
My dear Scott, one of the delights for me of doing this work is watching people grow in their understanding. And in particular, I have seen you grow so much! Thank you for sharing that experience with us – I know seeing it must delight others as well!