One We Remain

"Any relationship in which the body enters is based not on love, but on idolatry. Love wishes to be known completely and understood and shared. It has no secrets; nothing that it would keep apart and hide. It walks in sunlight, open-eyed and calm, in smiling welcome and in sincerity so simple and so obvious it cannot be misunderstood. Then lay aside the body and quietly transcend it, rising to welcome what you really want. And from His holy temple, look you not back on what you have awakened from. For no illusions can attract the mind that has transcended them, and left them far behind." -- A Course in Miracles

In both the Bible and A Course in Miracles, there are many statements that seem impossible to live. As a result, people throughout time have read these statements through the filter of trying to understand... in other words, trying to make it fit with what they already think is true. When read with an open mind and heart, there is simplicity and honesty and authenticity in these statements. The hard life, the difficult life, is the one we have tried so hard to believe... that we are a body that is mostly out of our control and that tells us what we want and when we want it. That our relationships revolve around a body and its resulting personality, and that people either 'love' it or 'like' it, or they don't. A body and a personality can be either good or bad, or a combination of both. But never can a body and a personality be One, with itself or with others. It's a set-up.

The organic life, the effortless life, is one where we don't identify with a body any more than we do with a car or a house. Where we don't identify ourselves through our so-called relationships, with people or with things, at all. Yes, we get in our car to go from point a to point b, at least for now. And yes, we seem to inhabit a body to move through the dream of time and space. Laying aside the body can be done in any instant we cease to identify with it. This is what ACIM refers to as the Holy Instant, time out of time, when we pause an instant and remember Who We Are. As the Workbook in ACIM reminds us again and again, "I am not a body. I am free. And I am still as God created me."

God created us One, and One we remain. Our illusions of bodies and their relationships and activities and problems and grandiose solutions all are self-created idols with the single purpose of hiding from that Oneness. And yet, when given to the Holy Spirit it is all reinterpreted as a means for Awakening. We are able to let it all go, and trust the organic and effortless unfolding of Self.

"You who are learning this may still be fearful, but you are not immobilized. The Holy Instant is of greater value now to you than its unholy seeming counterpart, and you have learned you really want but one. This is not time for sadness. Perhaps confusion, but hardly discouragement. You have a real relationship and it has meaning. It as like your real relationship with God as equal things are like unto each other. Idolatry is past and meaningless." -- A Course in Miracles