Love

"Everyone who believes the ego is salvation seems to be intensely engaged in the search for love. And since the ego teaches that it is your identification, its guidance leads you to a journey which must end in perceived self-defeat. For the ego cannot love... The ego will therefore distort love, and teach you that love really calls forth the responses the ego can teach. Follow its teaching, then, and you will search for love, but will not recognize it. Do you realize that the ego must set you on a journey which cannot but lead to a sense of futility and depression? The Holy Spirit offers you another promise, and one that will lead to Joy... The Holy Spirit's Love is your strength, for yours is divided and therefore not real... Only Love is strong because it is undivided." -- A Course in Miracles

An undivided love seems unfathomable to my human self, even as a mother and grandmother. Even knowing the unconditional love that I feel and consciously extend even when it hurts, it is certainly not undivided. There is always a sense that I am extending love in spite of something hurtful. And the very belief that there is something hurtful is my own dividedness, the separation itself.

A Course in Miracles says,"The world you perceive is a world of separation... You have no control over this world you made. It is not a world of will because it is governed by the desire to be unlike God, and this desire is not will. The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless 'laws,' and without meaning of any kind. For it is made out of what you do not want, projected from your mind because you are afraid of it." Yikes. This gives me great pause... because this means that EVERYTHING I perceive is made out of what I do not want, including and most especially the things and people I think I like and want. Yikes indeed.

The world as I know it all proceeds from the original lie, the thought that I could ever be separate from God and special in my separateness... the desire to be special and set apart. Since ideas can never be apart from their source, even the most beautiful projections in this world are based on that original lie, and are therefore unstable, changing, and simply illusory in nature. Nothing is what it seems.

The good news is that what ACIM calls the Real World can be perceived instead of what I have made. This is the miracle that exists for every thought and projection I have. As Jeshua ben Joseph said, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God." Because ideas can never be apart from their source, I can never be other than in the Mind of God, my true Source, my true Self. And every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God, every True Idea, is the Love and Joy that sustains me in reality.

Love is not something I do, or something I give, or something I get. Love is Who I Am. I have never been anyplace but Home in Divine Love. Thank God. And the Holy Spirit, the Voice of my True Self, is my guide and my strength and my sufficiency in every circumstance and relationship within this dream we call life.

"You who have tried to learn what you do not want should take heart, for although the curriculum you set yourself is depressing indeed, it is merely ridiculous if you look at it. You need only offer God your undivided attention. Everything else will be given you." -- A Course in Miracles