Lesson 133:

I will not value what is valueless…

I love how the Course constantly grounds us back to the business at hand… Just when we might be feeling particularly out in elusive, abstract space in our minds while we make our way back to the memory of Who we are in truth… ~ “Earth to the dreamer of the dream”~

In this life it does seem we are constantly evaluating… that is what this world is all about. Yet it is critical to remember that the first value judgment, which spawned all the rest, was the seeming choice for specialness, and therefore separation from the knowledge of our Self and God…

Like the lesson says: “The laws that govern choice we cannot make, no more than we can make alternatives from which to choose. The choosing we do and must, yet it is wise to learn the laws we set in motion when we choose, and what alternatives we choose between: there are but two, however many there appear to be. The range is set, and this we cannot change”. This is important to keep in mind when the ego is presenting the myriad of seeming alternatives, to avoid unnecessary time wasted in delay in nothingness, until we arrive at the obvious… There is but one choice that must be made.

Also crucial to awareness is the law: there is no compromise between the real and the unreal, between innocence and guilt, between truth and falsity, between love and fear, between everything and nothing. And there are no degrees in the importance of the choices we make… Each one brings everything… or nothing…The choice is always between all value and no value of any kind….

For today’s lesson practice, the Course is outlining specific, fail-safe(when applied) criteria, by which we can test our seeming choices. This requires a state of detached mind-watching on our part, where we look with the Holy Spirit at what we seem to see and judge and believe and feel; suspending route interpretation in favor of His. And this last piece is no small thing. We cannot accomplish this without the one choice for the Holy Spirit’s influence/interpretation in our observation. We are much to vulnerable to believing the same set of values that got us into this in the first place (perhaps dressed up in a ‘new-age or spiritual’ garb~ but still self-concept instead of Self).

It has amazed me over the years, what an ingenious impersonator the ego is. How slick it can quickly and smoothly mimic every ‘spiritual – ah-ha’ I have claimed as progress: Now this would certainly be a clue to my state of mind and the seduction of the choice for specialness, which is in the nothingness category … My laying claim to anything, secretly in the recesses of my private mind, has to be the ego, yes?. But the thing is that when you’re in the mist of it, it can be quite difficult to see, due to the simulated ‘good’ feeling generated by the ego’s replica.

Here are the real criteria by which to test all the things we think we want:

1). Will the thing I’m choosing last forever? Or is it a thing of time, space and body preference, all of which pass away.

I remember when it dawned on me that if there was a feeling of urgency present, that a choice be made, now, something had to be done, now, etc., I was shut off from the influence of the Holy Spirit. Only the ego deals in time/space ultimatums. I had really already made my choice. And I wanted things to go ‘my way’. This ah-ha about ‘urgency’ (designed by ego to distract), became and awareness and a way of freeing my mind to remember that I don’t know what this particular ‘must-have’ is for in the big picture of all that is. That is the Holy Spirit’s role. I am available to do my part forgive what I judged to be real and of value in surrender to the truth instead.

2). Will my choice give to all…or will someone lose. If there is the idea of loss in any form, the choice is supporting the idea that one can gain… which is just another way of saying that I don’t know I already have everything… again a choice for nothing.

Question the source… I see this as a direct deciphering tool, this is the foundation criteria (not that I’m not effectively aware that inattentiveness at this juncture can be temporarily debilitating ~I am). Here, as always we ask the simple questions:

3.) Why is this choice of value to me… what attracts my mind to it? And, what purpose does it serve?

These questions can only be asked sincerely by the mind that has surrendered its own answer in honest desire for the truth. It is the Holy Spirit within our mind that assists us in honest evaluation.

Just a note: I’ve got the T-shirt from this one~ I have been duped by the ego’s dummied-up substitute ‘good reasons’, more times than I can ever account… seemingly infinite delay by way of seductive reasoning… Thank God, delay is not permanent!…

This brings us to the forth criteria, which actually, once seen and accepted as my own, of my own making, has turned out to be the criteria that, since intolerable by nature, gets my attention, and has become a ‘main-switch’ of sorts in my mind, back to the Holy Spirit’s Charge.

4). If guilt is present in any form, it is allegiance to the ego.

Why would I feel guilty unless I actually, on some level, thought I had gone against God (you) and taken something that didn’t belong to me? The inevitable “being found out” and retribution served, is bound to ensue. A gift of course, comes wrapped within this free-floating fear inherent in the false. ~Even steeped in the seduction of the ego’s dictates that my choices are in my ‘best interest (and even yours), the red flag of guilt can be used as a warning sign to flag me over and re-evaluate, with the guide that knows; the Holy Spirit…

Don’t you just love specific criteria to test our fearful, impotent little self’s choices by? I know I do. And here we have evaluation check points every step of the way, so as to not completely get lost in distraction and delay… Doesn’t this lesson give the feeling that you’ve got the road map now, and can proceed? The methodology employed by the Course lesson structure, not to mention the entire theosophy, is, well, nothing short of miraculous, nés pas?

Let’s give our fifteen minutes twice today for the miracle which brings to mind the awareness of our V A L U E and therefore all that has value in truth… We need but say and mean this: I will not value what is valueless, and only what has value do I seek, for only that do I desire to find. And the Holy Spirit will do the rest… enlightening our minds to recognition… How glorious is God and His simple plan to save us from or dream of self…for we are the value of this world because we are still as God created us and the miracle is enacted through His Atonement principle, which, simply undoes all we thought we thought apart from Him or each other…

Lesson 132:

I loose the world from all I thought it was...

When I first started practicing these lessons, I remember thinking how difficult understanding the meaning of this lesson was for me. “Loose the world”? This seemed almost like it was incorrect English or something ~it didn’t sound right. I couldn’t understand how I loose something. Ah, how simplicity eludes the mind, determined to stay fixed …

I changed my mind, as we all must and will… How easily I see now, that the world, seen from these body’s eyes, and experienced from this body’s senses, is the out-picturing of my internal state. Now.

One choice I made that changed the world forever in my sight; I sought to know my Self~ instead of anything I thought was real before.

As a seeker of ‘truth’, I first came to realize, that the further I sought some external authority, who claimed to have the truth (and believe me, I studied many of the great spiritual philosophies as well as the over explosion of ‘new-age’ philosophy), the further a sense of ‘truth’ from an inner knowing eluded me…

Here’s the thing, it wasn’t the teachings or even the truth they reflected, that what made the search so inwardly compelling. I’m sure that is the natural course of seeking the truth. Then, seemingly all at once, yet in a single, eternal, instant, I let go all the thinking of this world and felt a deep, comforting awareness of being eternally my Self. It was an experience of pure joy. It defies description because the very attempt itself, asks a parameter be placed on limitlessness. It is reality we all share…. I saw that what I sought was what I was~ always, already one Self.

Once the discovery that my body could not be what I was (and only a body is in this cosmos of varied and different perspectives), a certainty of true identity grounded me such that my thinking and feeling and even actions ceased to be on behalf of the body and the world (except, of course, to uncover its falsity within the belief structure).

The cosmos, my so-called life and world at large, was revealed for the out-picturing of what had been wished to be so… They were the beliefs that illustrate the thinking of a mind in consciousness. I saw that I am not this consciousness, but conceiver of this consciousness. I reside beyond, in my identity in Him. I am as God created me. In other words, this consciousness, the world; its time and place and character, the entire cosmos, is within me. I am not within it. I am of the universe of God. And all that is real is because I am. (Actually, this isn’t quite accurate, since in Self there is no ‘I’~ but such is the use of symbols). Consciousness plays out through me.

The first split in mind, consciousness; seemingly occurred~ I have come to see that this all appears before the mind of the dreamer of this dream, without appearance, except by wish to be. I reside beyond.

No dream can alter in anyway, the holy truth, where God the Father and His Holy Son remain, forever changeless, pure Creation. ~L O V E~ Perfect and complete.

To loose the world from all I thought it was ~this is a position of absolute accountability. It is available to those seek the truth instead of personal authorship.

This is what I came to recognize. Every little script being played out in this world, what ever I might think I see, believe is happening, are but wishes of a thought system of the past. Each moment is the present of Now, which virtually changes the world, first through perspective and then the very elements of the past slide off the mind~ present; like water off a duck’s back.

I always thought I was so hungry for the truth, but today I look at it like, not something I needed to get or get to, but rather a ceasing of the false, an unraveling, a relinquishment from even the hunger itself and allowing the homecoming which is my natural state.

The Self /Truth is not something we acquire, but rather something we acquiesce to. Once acquiesced, all movement I seem to be a part of, all events and encounters take their lead from the purpose of healing the mind that forgot its oneness in God, and sought to dream a different dream. This is the Atonement principle played out in replacement for the one idea of separation we made…

Ideas leave not their source… I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was. For I am real because the world is not, and I would know my own reality… Thank you for joining in the one perspective as we loose the world from all we thought it was, and choose our own reality instead…

Lesson 131:

No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth…

It is a relief to finally give up in favor of the truth; to become aware that not one thought I think about my little life or with my little brain is true… Whew…

I want to talk about a moment here that changed everything; I mean a moment that was out of time and space entirely while resting right within my mind. It was that moment when after, lord knows what kind of mind-game searching finally came to an end and like the lesson says, I simply tapped the trapped door at the bottom of my mind. I swung open pulling me with it into the memory of Love and the absence of ‘me’… Not so specific as that, but, in essence… I knew/ am this place/non-place.

It dawned on me that I had been wrong about everything, that not one opinion, plan, assessment, guilty feeling, regret, fear or anticipation, had been pure or true… I mean, seriously, I couldn’t find one thing I could honestly say I’d been right about… and the funny part is, some place in side, I really already knew this, I just couldn’t get to this realization through the maze of ‘right-ness’ I had constructed.

Still somehow it dawned… and aside from the sting of being self-crucified, it was a relief… big, big, big… a moment of true peace…

~“I HAVE BEEN WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING!” I found myself in a house of mirrors ~everywhere I looked the responsibility lay only in my hands, the stain of blood was upon me and it was but invisible ink, and the fault/perpetrator and hopeless victim: me alone. And it was me costuming for each part behind closed doors and revealing each character as the script required… till the final scene revealed “I had done this unto myself”… and it was this that I must undo… The lie… exposed at last…

I’m flashing on those movies where the main character is playing a different role, pretending to be someone different than himself in order to deceive and seduce another or other into eventually seeing his original character the way they want them to… You know what I’m talking about… It always drives me mad watching one of these shows, yet I’ll notice a part of me want the character to get the love or whatever, by way of deception, even though I’m at the same time judging how insane this is… It is insane! That’s the point! None of it is true…

The truth, then, must be found beyond the familiar, beyond the known, beyond any hope that this world can offer… What we think we know is the barrier that keeps the door of truth within our mind from opening wide to reveal our Self… Once again, it’s all or nothing; truth or illusion, not one illusion cherished but casts a shadow on the truth, therefore hiding its light from our awareness.

I remember how scary the idea of not knowing was, oh, my gosh, like death, ya know? Yet, thankfully, we all come, as did I, to a place where, dumbfounded, we say, there has got to be another way! …

It is just a matter of experience, till we feel this statement upon our lips and heart: “I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself”. (T-31.V) Then from here, salvation becomes our infill-structure of the life we lead… And what we are begins to tell us of our Self…

This was, for me, the experience of being teachable. The single most important element about learning is recognizing that I don’t know. Next, that there is One who does know, within my mind, which will speak to me of truth; and referencing the symbols of this world, to the benefit healing my mind and forgiving all I taught myself.

A single purpose has taken the place of different goals…Today I seek and find all that I want… My single purpose offers it to me… No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

When truth is recognized, the search is virtually over; everyone and situation and circumstance unite in one purpose of love: to bring to mind the full awareness of the truth established by the Atonement for use within this world we made. My heart is one with yours as we journey back in time; it, collapsing it in on itself till we find ourselves back Home to the place we never left in truth…

Lesson 130:

It is impossible to see two worlds…

Once again the Course is reminding us that there is no compromise between the real and the unreal, between truth and illusion.

Here we have the Miracle ~ the shift in mind to the Holy Spirit’s sight, which see only truth but recognizes illusion fostered by our belief in it. The miracle is the transformative agent that witnesses to the real (vision) beyond the sights we look upon to reinterpret what we believe is there by placing within the mind, one purpose which changes their meaning, which literally changes the way they look. We begin to see past the figures in front of us, as if they as mere shadows had been eclipsing something more substantial that the essence of our vision has already made known to us and we come to this particular place and time just to see it.

We instinctively ‘focus’ now and the figures themselves meld into the inner essence of the truth beckoning the blend…

Perception is changed. Forgiveness shows its face, holding only the essence of the new perception in mind. A calm sense of forgetting what the original judgment or problem was ensues…

Ok, here’s where we tend to get hooked-up; we don’t, or feel we can’t, empty our minds of what seems like proof that what we believe, and therefore see, is what we have to deal with… We lock ourselves in the body identity and although we want another way, we think we have the only and all ingredients so to speak, from which to make another choice…

This perspective grounds us firmly in unreality and literally blinds us to what we can’t conceive of… The Lesson’s commentary begins with a succinct, specific description about the dynamics of perception: “Perception is consistent. What you see reflects your thinking. And your thinking but reflects your choice of what you want to see. Your values are determiners of this, for what you value you must want to see, believing what you see is really there. No one can see a world his mind has not accorded value. And no one can fail to look upon what he believes he wants”…

For so many years I lived in fear, calling it by many names, not being able to really grasp what transformation could be possible in my life, without it. Oh, I wished, I imagined, I even wanted to want badly to have all fear removed. But I simply couldn’t wrap my mind around what I had no construct for.

This is definitely where the gentle voice of the Holy Spirit saves the day…

The early chapters of the Course text speak to the two levels of the mind which the Holy Spirit bridges and careful study of these introductory ideas that yield the possibility of allowing truth be reflected within the constructs available in mind. Check out the section called Fear and Conflict in chapter 2. It is a wonderful assistant in understanding, this dynamic, which makes implementation of today’s lesson increasingly viable…

Here’s the thing; as long as I am under the influence of the mind that believes the dream real, then I see myself as reliant on the figures of the dream and the timeframe of the dream for any change to happen. It is a victim position of ultimate proportions… Yet, as long as I am afraid to see the truth I will continue in this circular thinking of wishing things would be different, really bad… and nothing really changing…

This is not willing with God. It is wishful thinking (which, by the way, is exactly what got us into this so-called world in the first place, duh…)

An analogy that works for me (due to my love/hate relationship with addiction) is that of attempting to perceive clearly while under the influence of separation, drugged by the time space construct, which continues to make us think and question in a manner that is circular. If we can accept the basic premise that the ‘separation/ error’, with all it constructs in time and space, never really occurred, yet we seem to be experiencing it reality, as a case of being ‘drugged’. I think most of us could agree that we have some personal reference to “believing certain things were absolutely true” when given to a little drink or drug or anger or righteousness, or food, (pick your poison), that later we can’t take too seriously, due to the loaded state we were in.

The thing is, we can’t see what the premise we are operating from dictates. Therefore the answer must be outside of the premise.

There is no compromise in this. Believe me, I know.

Any attempt at compromise; to see the ‘beauty’ of this world made up by fear to eclipse the truth, is a decision already made, whether we cop to it or not. Delay in healing has been our choice and wishful thinking replaces the deep certainty and joy that accompany the choice to see the world God gave instead… It is impossible to see two worlds. Let me accept the strength God offers me and see no value in this world, that I may find my freedom and deliverance.

When the temptation to take that first hit off unreality arises, can we take a minute’s pause to remember: It is impossible to see two worlds. I seek my freedom and deliverance, and this is not a part of what I want. Can we empty our minds for just an instant to allow the strength of God to give meaning to our seeing? We allow our wishful thinking, now, to be replaced by the Strength of God, revealing vision… YES! YES! YES!

Lesson 129:

Beyond this world there is a world I want…

Christ is the one light which unites all, as the host of Heaven. This lesson’s message points to the decision to be host to God and no longer hostage to the ego world with its rules of loss: “seek but do not find”…

We choose instead, everything we want in truth: a peace so intrinsically natural, it cannot be disturbed, utter certainty that all things work together for good, for all. This is the world of eternal life, uncovered from beneath the fantasy of death. Like the sun braking through clouds. The storm is over and the sweet smell of rebirth fills the senses with the

Here is the Voice for God; it’s soundtrack, the song of thanksgiving we intrinsically know by heart, for we and hum its melody as we forgive the shadows of loss that linger still within the mind made ready through miracles, for complete restoration of truth.

Now, love’s only its reflection is the sight we see within each encounter and situation, making forgiveness the obvious handshake. And trust the only answer. This is a world blessed with the kiss of Atonement, so everyone is seen as holy and every exchange a holy encounter. We are on sacred ground, now. “The holiest place on earth is where and ancient hate has become a present love”.

Boundless joy bursts the seams of limitation when we are allowed to be our Self… We are God’s Son; united in our creator, at one with one another, forever changeless and forever free.

NOW, is where this world resides, complete and healed and whole, collapsing all memory of what it felt like to forget. It is characterized by purpose. All meaning is derived from one purpose: unified and sure. This world reflects only sanity. It is the world the God of Love replaced in the mind of the son that sought to dream a world apart from Him.

This insane premise, from which a world where nothing means anything and there is no hope~ holding nothing that we want, ~is transformed through complete forgiveness resting in unwavering sureness. It is the reflection of Christ Love in every face and loves meaning in every situation. Here all circumstances serve all for love’s realization.

Here truth is the architect. What once was seen as otherness and differences and a million hopeless choices, peels back to reveal the oneness, which makes every value the same through forgiveness. Questioning has ceased…

Undefined tranquility; abides when “why” in no longer present, accompanied with a sense of willing patience natural to the timeless texture of seeing the world from the single perspective…

“Let thine eye be single”… This phrase we’ve heard all our lives, becomes a present experience as we give our ten minutes thrice today, over to timelessness and to sight… Today’s lesson invites us to bring our minds and relax into the place where vision resides… We close your eyes upon the world we see, and in the silent darkness watch the lights that are not of this world light one by one, until where one begins another ends loses all meaning as they blend in one… Today the lights of Heaven bend to you, to shine upon your eyelids as you rest beyond the world of darkness. Here is light your eyes can not behold. And yet your mind can see it plainly, and can understand…

It is ours for the receiving… together as one…

Beyond this world there is a world I want. I choose to see that world instead of this, for here is nothing that I really want…

The light of Heaven illuminates our way on the path forgiveness clears for us…. We need never be afraid again… The Light has come…

Lesson 128:

The world I see holds nothing that I want…

This phrase actually is almost word for word, the prayer I prayed, when disillusioned and defeated, I sat alone with the world of my own making and gave up, gave it all up~

I received a miracle.

It is the design of all though to perpetuate itself, and the thinking that made me enemy to myself, unworthy of trust and untrusting, was no different. The primary aspect was denial.

Done, I turned in my thinking-coach~ or death. I had been wrong about everything. I had mistaken about who I was and why I was here. I became willing to shut up and listen.

There emerged a voice so loving and forgiving that planning and scheming had no resonance here. Even guilt and regret, when bullying their way in, immediately, tails between their legs, slipped out the way they came.

Ah yes. It was indeed a miracle…

I was freed indeed from the bond of the destructive life where I had become predator and prey ~ it was a miracle. Things felt and became so much better. Now here’s where knowing, for sure, this lesson, is essential. The ego waits for attention to wavier, then runs it ‘feel-good’ thoughts through the ancient grooves in the body-brain-mind. Before we realize it, we are mistaking this new-found happiness and world-life related...

Look, I know, I’ve been there too… and maybe a description of my experience of that time would be helpful. I was aware on some deep level, that I was becoming addicted to my new-better-model image. But I felt doing good in the world and peoples lives. I wasn’t willing to look at the price of peace I was paying for it.)

The Course, in The Branching of the Road, offers an appropriate reference: “When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you cannot go ahead. You must go either one way or the other. For now if you go straight ahead, the way you went before you reached the branch, you will go nowhere. The whole purpose of coming this far was to decide which branch you will take now. The way you came no longer matters. It can no longer serve. No one who reaches this far can make the wrong decision, although he can delay. And there is no part of the journey that seems more hopeless and futile than standing where the road branches, and not deciding on which way to go.” (T-22.IV.1)

Now I look back at that time through forgiving eyes. Apparently, I attempted to go straight, and make no choice. It did turn out that it was merely a delay in the inevitable… But I wasn’t willing to choose. Somewhere inside I knew there was really only one choice, but that choice would defraud my whole life and that wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.

God Will is inevitable, and all the denial and distraction and misbelief known to man, can’t alter the fact; only truth is true and what is not is false and does not exist at all. The world of make-believe cannot change what God created as His Son.

It’s not that I couldn’t have had clarity on this point, had I been wholly willing to, I just wasn’t. I sought to make an alternative plan, which kept the illusion that “I” had some power and was in control of the game. Its sounds ludicrous to me now, putting it down on paper, while seeing from the One perspective, yet, it is my little account of how this one came to Self.

Apparently, I conned myself in to believing there was a way to have my cake and eat it too… Having once seen the light, touched the truth, I attempted to restructure my so-called life, bringing truth to the equation (illusion), trying to incorporate it into my illusory constructs; the beliefs and values I peopled my world with; my residual self-image, the hierarchy of illusions, so as to use ‘truth’ to my advantage. Does that make a lick of sense? How can one use truth to foster illusion? Hello? In any case, a vein attempt I must say, yet, the attempt ensued. I wasn’t trying to be unappreciative of the miracles received, or disrespectful, I was in denial...

The lesson, today says: ”What you value you make part of you as you perceive yourself” Let nothing that relates to body thoughts delay your progress to salvation, nor permit temptation to believe the world holds anything you want to hold you back. Nothing is here to cherish. Nothing here is worth one instant of delay and pain; one moment of uncertainty and doubt. The worthless offer nothing. Certainty of worth can not be found in worthlessness”…

I just cared more about unreality than reality at the time. I cared about the world, people, bodies, status, and pretend happiness. I wouldn’t see that the world I saw was a wish to be special, to be god; the boss of my world... Until I did… Even the career I chose supported this idea. Psychology is the study of the psyche within this world. I was in the downward spiral of absentmindedness and I wouldn’t admit it. Needless to say, I lost contact with the miracle mind. I felt the disorientation of this disconnect happening, yet I was stubbornly trying to do it my way~ to be right. I was too ashamed to admit the true state of my inner world, even to myself. Instead, I planned and tried, blah, blah, blah, and attempted to medicated the building horrible feeling of self- betrayal, the emptiness engendered by the loss of identity with the Self… In its place was a spiraling self-concept discernible only by the residual feelings of quilt, loss and aloneness left in the wake of make-believe… This vicious spiral of guilt and fear, took me down… I had no fight left. And only darkness seemed to remain…

Alone and sad and with no defense left which would render an instant’s more delay, I saw the prayer of the worthy, through the tears of my despair: “The world I see hold nothing that I want”…

At last I saw the choice that I had made. ‘Heaven is the decision I must make’~ and the only one I see…

I found myself in the borderland, that the course talks about. Please join me in this space in mind as we review this excerpt from the Course together: “There is a borderland of thought that stands between this world and Heaven. It is not a place, and when you reach it is apart from time. Here is the meeting place where thoughts are brought together; where conflicting values meet and all illusions are laid down beside the truth, where they are judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven. Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. Here is sin denied, and everything that received instead” (T-26.III.1)

This describes the daily world which through surrender of my own, I live, seeing through forgiving eyes… Nothing in this so-called world has ever been the same. The shadow figures that people it are recognized in the purpose in the Atonement they are to fulfill… And gratitude is the word of the day, everyday, Now!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Lesson 127:

There is no love but God's…

Dear God, Your meaning and existence are my own… Love is my name; along with You… It is my inheritance and the entire fabric of my being… Love is the perfect flow in all directions at once making direction meaningless. It is the beginning and completion of my relationship with You~ amen~

Love’s other name is Oneness… The wholeness that is God the father and His Son, is all that there is; so all that I am: Love… My meaning and my purpose…His love is the ONE relationship. It is how one knows God and He, us. It is how there are no real mistakes, only the ancient fantasies of mind gone mad an instant.

All power to imagine still has its being in Love. The power to value comes from the One value ~the Love of God…

Making this seeming journey back to the memory of God, in the re-acquaintance with Self as the love that one is in Him, one begins to see that this ancient fantasy of ‘special-ness’ as the chunk out, separated constructs that dimension-ize the regurgitated replay…

On a personal note: as I ‘opened my mind and rested in His Love, letting go my evaluation of reality was, I saw that I had peopled my world with the constructs of my beliefs and values. I looked about me and saw that ‘special ness’ was the meaning of love in my so-called world. And I felt desperate for it.

On the one hand, it seemed only fair that I have love. I had a deep sense that everyone was entitled to love, and that seemed to be at the heart of my desire. Yet, it seemed my tuner was off, or something. The reference dictionary I had was of no use to me. The definition of love I believed; being a kind of ‘more special to someone than anyone else’ kind of thing, didn’t match up with this deeper sense of innate value… Yet it was the value I held, and coping to this was the first step. Being willing to be wrong ~ all together~ was the next. Opening my mind and allowing God’s gift to replace them all~ was the homecoming…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As I began to open to a real answer, I found my mind saw from a whole different view point (Holy Spirit), kind of like a magic-eye painting. So I was able to take a gander with an honest review and appraisal of my thought system. What I saw, was that this value (false love) ran interference in all my attempts at love, so I couldn’t actually experience the constant flow of love in continual circulation. I saw that with this mere shift in perspective, the impossibility that I not be apart of the wholeness that is love. Yet, with my thought system the way it was, I was unaware of it because my mind was set to interpret love instead of be and allow it.

This is the thing, too, I thought that I ‘got’ that God was Love and therefore so must I be. Yet the experience of completion, of constant, unmitigated joy I now feel, eluded me… Instead, there was competition, and fear of being ‘wronged’… This recognition allowed for fresh appraisal.

Just being willing to take honest stock of my life as I saw it revealed some very powerful awareness about what love is not. Love is not romance. It’s not the way I feel about ice cream. It is not my achievements or looks~ nor yours. Love is not the enticing feeling that comes with doing something better than someone else. It is not winning at the games of life. It is not being or having the ‘special someone’ I can call my own. It isn’t being wanted or needed or helpful or right. Love is not ‘working things out’, or ‘finding a compromise’ or ‘taking care of myself’…. Love is not great, mind-blowing sex, nor any kind of ‘intimacy’ with other bodies at all. It isn’t love if it has degrees… Nor if I think I’m more important than you ~ or my children, more important than others ~ my partner, more important than you or yours… These are the construct of fear, fathered by the core value of specialness.

Being special is not love. All the ideas that sacrifice is required and “if you really love someone you will (fill in the blank), reside here, in fear’s kingdom.

As I began to trust looking at my life and my self from the new/one perspective, I saw the dark shading that valuing specialness had smudged across the mirror of my identity in love.

This self same mirror is the means by which I see my thought of who I am reflected; where I see you and me and all that is; either overlaid with special love or the pure, beaming love of the face of Christ.

The Course talks a lot about special love and special hate and special relationships verse Holy relationships. I truly had no idea until I actually let my will go blank for a second to accept God’s Will, God’s Love ~

For just one instant, I did not see another’s interests separate from my own… That is all… It is enough… The Love of God bloomed within me, a present awareness of myself in you. A new meaning of love and relationship was ushered in… This meaning, gave all relationship One meaning… I began to see love as oneness and the beginning of love accepted and expressed transformed the structure of relationship itself. Once we drop our guard and accept holiness where special interest once reined, we experience today’s lesson as our daily life practice. We notice that it is not only the greatest gift we have to give, but the only one we have to offer anyone. Nothing else exists at all. The awareness of God’s Love is all we want and His presence is easily felt, by giving up all design on anything else we might think to value by ourselves. Turns out, love is the way that reflects exactly where forgiveness lies, showing that the Love of God remains and continues, unaffected by our fantasies of love/hate.

We are the ONE, united by our Fathers Love… Oneness is the love we share, our being and identity in God the Father, which we give and receive:

I bless you, brother, with the Love of God, which I would share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God's and yours and mine and everyone's… We walk together today in quiet awareness that There is no love but God's...

May we keep our minds tuned to God’s Love and see it reflected everywhere and in everyone and recognizing our identity in Him and allowing vision to unify our sight, that we look gently with eyes of love and see our world transformed from separation to Oneness… it’s right before our eyes…