“You are in God.”
1. GOD IS THE ROCK
“There is no time, no place, no state where God is absent.”
There have been times in my life—and they still happen today, though they’re more the exception now than the rule—when I have felt as though sadness would overwhelm me. Something didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to, or I was in conflict with someone, or I was afraid of what might or might not happen in the future. Life in those moments can be difficult to bear, and the mind begins an endless search for its escape from pain.
What I learned from A Course in Miracles is that the change we’re really looking for is inside our heads. Events are always in flux. One day people love you; the next day you’re their target. One day a situation is running smoothly; the next day chaos reigns. One day you feel like you’re an okay person; the next day you feel like you’re an utter failure. These changes in life are always going to happen; they’re part of the human experience. What we can change, however, is how we perceive them. And that shift in our perception is a miracle.
There’s a biblical story where Jesus says we can build our house on sand or we can build it on rock. Our house is our emotional stability. When it is built on sand, then the winds and rain can tear it down. One disappointing phone call and we crumble; one storm and the house falls down.
When our house is built on rock, then it is sturdy and strong and the storms can’t destroy it. We are not so vulnerable to life’s passing dramas. Our stability rests on something more enduring than the current weather, something permanent and strong. We’re depending on God.
I had never realized that depending on God meant depending on love. I had heard it said that God was love, but it had never kicked in for me exactly what that meant.
As I began to study A Course in Miracles, I discovered the following things:
God is the love within us.
Whether we “follow Him,” or think with love, is entirely up to us.
When we choose to love, or to allow our minds to be one with God, then life is peaceful. When we turn away from love, the pain sets in.
And whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day.
2. LOVE IS GOD
“Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right.”
Love taken seriously is a radical outlook, a major departure from the psychological orientation that rules the world. It is threatening not because it is a small idea, but because it is so huge.
For many people, God is a frightening concept. Asking God for help doesn’t seem very comforting if we think of Him as something outside ourselves, or capricious or judgmental. But God is love. We were created in His image, or mind, which means that we are extensions of His love. This is why we are called the Sons of God.
We think we authored God, rather than realizing that He authored us. The Course says we have an ‘authority problem.’ Rather than accepting that we are the loving beings that He created, we have arrogantly thought that we could create ourselves, and then create God. Because we are angry and judgmental, we have projected those characteristics onto Him. We have made up a God in our image. But God remains who He is and always has been: the energy, the thought of unconditional love. He cannot think with anger or judgment; He is mercy and compassion and total acceptance. The problem is that we have forgotten this, and so we have forgotten who we ourselves are.
I began to realize that taking love seriously would be a complete transformation of my thinking. A Course in Miracles calls itself a ‘mind training’ in the relinquishment of a thought system based on fear, and the acceptance instead of a thought system based on love. Now, over a decade since starting the study of A Course in Miracles, my mind is hardly the touchstone of holy perception. I certainly don’t pretend to consistently achieve a loving perspective of every situation in my own life. One thing I’m very clear about, however, is that when I do, life works beautifully. And when I don’t, things stay stuck.
In order to love purely, we must surrender our old ways of thinking. For most of us, surrendering anything is difficult. We still think of surrender as failure, as something you do when you’ve lost the war. But spiritual surrender, although passive, is not weak. Actually, it is strong. It is a balance to our aggression. Although aggression is not bad—it is at the heart of creativity—it needs to be tempered by love in order to be an agent of harmony rather than violence. The mind that’s separate from God has forgotten how to check in with love before it saunters out into the world. Without love, our actions are hysterical. Without love, we have no wisdom.
To surrender to God means to let go and just love. By affirming that love is our priority in a situation, we actualize the power of God. This is not metaphor; it’s fact. We literally use our minds to co-create with Him. Through a mental decision—a conscious recognition of love’s importance and our willingness to experience it—we “call on a higher power.” We set aside our normal mental habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That is what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives.
Once we get to the point where we realize that God is love, we understand that following God simply means following the dictates of love. The hurdle we have to face next is the question of whether or not love is such a wise thing to follow. The question is no longer “What is God?” The question we ask now is, “What is love?”
Love is energy. It’s not something we can perceive with our physical senses, but people can usually tell you when they feel it and when they don’t. Very few people feel enough love in their lives because the world has become a rather loveless place. We can hardly even imagine a world in which all of us were in love, all the time, with everyone. There would be no wars because we wouldn’t fight. There would be no hunger because we would feed each other. There would be no environmental breakdown because we would love ourselves, our children and our planet too much to destroy it. There would be no prejudice, oppression or violence of any kind. There would be no sorrow. There would only be peace.
Although we may not realize it, most of us are violent people—not necessarily physically, but emotionally. We have been brought up in a world that does not put love first, and where love is absent, fear sets in. Fear is to love as darkness is to light. It’s a terrible absence of what we need in order to survive. It’s a place we go where all hell breaks loose.
When infants aren’t held, they can become sick, even die. It’s universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.
3. ONLY LOVE IS REAL
“God is not the author of fear. You are.”
So the problem with the world is that we have strayed from God, or wandered away from love. According to A Course in Miracles, this separation from God first happened millions of years ago. But the important revelation, the crux of the Course, is that in reality it never happened at all.
The introduction to A Course in Miracles states:
“The Course can be summed up very simply:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
What that means is this:
A Course in Miracles says that only love is real: “The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.” When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.
The Course teaches that fear is literally a bad dream. It is as though the mind has been split in two; one part stays in touch with love, and the other part veers into fear. Fear manufactures a kind of parallel universe where the unreal seems real, and the real seems unreal.
Love casts out sin or fear the way light casts out darkness. The shift from fear to love is a miracle. It doesn’t fix things on the earth plane; it addresses the real source of our problems, which is always on the level of consciousness. The only real problem is a lack of love. To address the world’s problems on any other level is a temporary palliative—a fix but not a healing, a treatment of the symptom but not a cure.
Thoughts are like data programmed into a computer, registered on the screen of your life. If you don’t like what you see on the screen, there’s no point in going up to the screen and trying to erase it. Thought is Cause; experience is Effect. If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.
Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven.
Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.
A shift in how we think about life produces a shift in how we experience it. To say, “God, deliver me from hell,” means “God, Deliver me from my fearful thinking.” The altar to God is the human mind. To “desecrate the altar” is to fill it with non-loving thoughts.
Adam and Eve were happy until she “ate of the knowledge of good and evil.” What that means is that everything was perfect until they learned to close their hearts, to say, “I love you if you do this, but not if you do that,” or, “I accept this part of you, but not that part.” Closing our hearts destroys our peace because it’s alien to our nature. It warps us and turns us into people we’re not meant to be.
Freud defined neurosis as separation from self, and so it is. Our real self is the love within us. It’s the “child of God.” The fearful self is an impostor. The return to love is the great cosmic drama, the personal journey from pretense to self, from pain to inner peace.
So then it might go like this, or at least it did for me. I’d get myself into some terrible mess, and I’d remember that all I needed was a miracle, ‘a shift in perception’. I’d pray, “God, please help me. Heal my mind. Wherever my thoughts have strayed from love—if I’ve been controlling, manipulative, greedy, ambitious for myself—whatever it is, I’m willing to see this differently. Amen.”
So, the universe would hear that, and “Ding!,” I’d get my miracle. Relationship transformed, situation healed. But then I’d go back to the same kind of fearful thinking that had gotten me down on my knees to begin with, and I’d repeat the pattern. I’d get myself into some emotional car crash, once again end up on my knees, once again ask God to help me, and once again be returned to sanity and peace.
Finally, after a lot of repetition of those embattled scenarios, I said to myself, “Marianne. Next time you’re down on your knees, why don’t you just stay there?” Why don’t we stay in the realm of the answer, rather than always returning to the realm of the problem? Why not seek some level of awareness where we don’t create these problems for ourselves all the time? Let’s not just ask for a new job, a new relationship, or a new body. Let’s ask for a new world. Let’s ask for a new life.
When I was down on my knees completely, and I knew what it meant to feel sincerely humbled, I almost expected to feel God’s anger or contempt. Instead, it was as though I heard a gentle voice say, “Can we start now?” Until that point, I was hiding from my love, and so resisting my own life. The return to love is not the end of life’s adventure, but the beginning. It’s the return to who you really are.