Love is a commonly used word, so frequently do we hear it that it’s become both under valued and over valued.  Over valued in it’s fickleness and under valued for the unexamined depth of what it really means.  I’ve sought to discover its true meaning.  It’s been a life long question and the answers change and morph as I do.  At times I’ve found love co-mingling with joy and truth.  A joy that is independent of facts or conditions and truths that remain when all else falls away.

I searched the archives of this blog and it’s over 600 posts many of which are quoting spiritual authors and poets.  Here’s a short collection of what some of them have to say on the subject of love, joy and truth.  Somewhere in there, I’ll slip in my own words.

This isn’t one of those blog posts you’ll want to hurry through and then go about flinging yourself into the day.  No, this is one you’ll want to linger with awhile and let the words melt like warm butter penetrating through the layers of being, softening as it moves deeper within, finally landing in that space that is beyond words.

* * * * *

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken;
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of;
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds;
there are whole rivers of light.

~Kabir~

* * * * *

There will come a time when images have all gone by and you will see you know not what you are.  It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound.  Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is….The truth in you remains as radiant as a star, as pure as light, as innocent as love itself.  ~ A Course in Miracles

* * * * *

“Abandonment,”
we call it. As in: wild, or perfect.
We abandon ourselves
to love.

~Kate Knapp Johnson~

* * * * *

This Union you want with the earth and sky
This Union we all need with love

Stay here quivering like a drop of mercury

(combined words of Rumi & Hafiz)

* * * * *

The real presence slips past our demand for spectacle. it slips past our despair. Not just like a child – sometimes it is a child. She walks down the blistered steps to where you kneel and says the simplest things. She is entertained by butterflies. She has opinions about unicorns. She does not seem to care that you are ruined and lost. She does not even seem to notice. Find an earthworm in the neglected loam and she will make you feel for a moment that your life has not been wasted. Name a flower and she will make you feel that you have begun to learn to speak. ~Tim Farrington

* * * * *

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name….

~Jane Kenyon~

* * * * *

…you must be willing to set fear aside and trust your knowing self,
the truth which lies deep within, that tells you what to do, from a
place of truth and deep connection with all that is. This truth is
beyond fear.

Quado through Carrie Hart

* * * * *

Never mind pleasure.  Search out joy.  Pleasure is
its shadow.  But joy is real, a secret splendor
running through all creation.

Like gold, it doesn’t lie about the streets waiting
to be picked up.  It has to be dug for, with diligence
and passion.  It’s in people, to be found through
the practice of love.  It’s in work, in the rigorous
exercise of powers of mind or body or spirit.  It’s a
gift the created world is perpetually offering; the
price of it is untiring attention to the present
moment.  …

Hunt it down, pursue it, track it to its lair where
it dwells.  Not in pleasures and pastimes, distractions,
piled-up satisfactions, and busyness.  It dwells in truth,
and nowhere else.

That’s why it matters.  It will show you moment by
moment where truth is for you.  And when you know that,
cleave to it, turn not aside, be given up to that.  That,
if you will will, is a way of life worth living.

~Fae Malania~

* * * * *

If you deny what is your nature
you become deeply attached to that denial.
When you accept what is there, in its truth,
then you are released.
One does not release through rejection.
One releases through love.

Emmanuel’s Book I: A manual for living comfortably in the cosmos

* * * * *

Your choice is between illusion and truth.
There is no particular formula for choosing.
There is only your intent.  Will that be enough?
It will be enough to start you on your way.

Keep asking yourselves, “Am I here now?”
Just that question
will make enormous changes in your lives.
If you ask it experientially
rather than philosophically,
you will find that it becomes a mantra
that will bring you back,
breath by breath, to this time, to this place,
for in truth there is no other.

As you set yourself free from your histories,
you will wear your costumes more lightly;
you will smile much more than usual,
and you will release your hearts
to the point where you begin to trust them.
You will, in short,
let yourselves out of prison, bar by bar.

Fear is a habit.
As you recognize it,
you will be able to loosen the viselike grip –
not that fear has upon you –
but that you have upon fear.

Fear will go away
once you give it permission
to leave.

Emmanuel Book III: What Is an Angel Doing Here?

* * * * *

I want to linger inside the silence
void of sound and distraction

long enough to see for myself that love’s only obstacle
fear, really is just a paper dragon

I want to let every barrier to love fall away

I want to liberate what sleeps within me

and awake resplendent in all that remains:
your pure and perfect love

~Bethie~

* * * * *

“In this,” she says (this vision or, as she always calls it, shewing)–”In this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my understanding it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon and thought: ‘What may this be?’ And I was answered in a general way, thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it could last, for methought it might fall suddenly to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts and ever shall last because God loves it, and so hath all-thing its being through the love of God.”  -Fae Malania, The Quantity of a Hazelnut

* * * * *

And now finally and ultimately we come to the end of describing something that really is beyond description.  Though it can be experienced, it is formless and cannot be held nor heard nor seen.  With a twist of paradox, I leave you with this from Suzanne Vega:

I won’t use words again …

They’re just the crust of the meaning
With realms underneath
Never touched
Never stirred
Never even moved through

If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be

* * * * *

Image props in order posted:

1. artstyleonline.com
2. freefoto.com
3. worldphotographicarts.com
4. digitalcribs.net
5. flickr.com
6. kids-fun-and-games.com

Apparently all that deep inner work happened rather quickly.  It is within hours of my last blog post, Feel the Fear, that I updated a group of Internet gal pals on my progress.  I’ll quote that directly below and then add to it.

“Dawn came to Bethie today.  First it started with it’s ok to feel the fear.  Or insert whatever emotion in that.  Next it was waves of nausea.  I pushed against it, until dawn came to Bethie and I said it’s ok to throw up and every time a wave came I rode the wave and just kept saying it’s ok to throw up.  Now the next dawn that came to me: it’s ok to have nightmares.  It never was ok to have them.  Never have I embraced them.  Tonight when I lay my head down on that pillow, I’ll say it again — it’s ok to have nightmares.  That’s it, see non-physical is popping the cork even now, I feel it in my goosebumps.  They are jumping up and down yelling yippee, she gets it, she gets it.  SHE GETS IT.  Embrace it all, love it all, don’t push, hide, stuff any of it.  Let it be in the wide open spaces, just let it be.  She gets it!! Hallelujah!”

Oh yes, did I mention I get nightmares?  No, probably not.  I was hiding them.  Nope, no more.  I’d even go so far as to say I get to have nightmares now.  No more pushing anything away.  In the nightmares I replay allowing others to usurp my personal authority.  It’s something I unwittingly gave others permission to do in “real” life, too.

Do you remember that game we used to play as kids — Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose.  Well, it’s as if I’ve been playing a version of it — Wanted, Wanted, Wanted, Unwanted …. woops, unwanted get up and run, flee from it!  Nothing, including allowing others to usurp my personal authority can be healed as long as I’m fleeing from it.

Well guess what happens when you don’t get up and flee from it, you find out its not the big scary monster in the closet you thought it was after all.  There might even be a treasure or two tucked in the hairy hand of the once scary monster — learning that fleeing from anything is the very same thing as usurping my OWN personal authority.

One little phrase: It’s OK to feel _______, it’s OK to have _______, it’s OK to say no to________, it’s OK to cry.  It’s OK, it’s OK, all of it was always OK.  I was just dreaming a dream, that it wasn’t OK.  That darkened tunnel I just walked through was surrounded in the Light the whole time.

I remember this is exactly what I wrote about weeks ago.  I met a British gal named Lori at a conference.  When she spoke of the possibility of cancer and the accompanying fear she felt, she said to herself — clearly, I want to have this experience.

Well, clearly I had to come to this conclusion on my own and with my own experience and language for it.  Now it’s like writing myself a free and clear permission slip to have it all.  It’s how I’ll step out into the world now, sampling the full smorgasbord of life.  My channels wide open and set to receive.  It’s all good, it’s all God.  I am God in expression.  I am pure love.  I see me!  I do, I really do.  And I do see you, too.  Namaste, Jaibhagwan and Aloha.

I leave you with a short quote from A Course in Miracles and one more comment after that:

“Look not upon the little wall of shadows.  The sun has risen over it.  How can a shadow keep you from the sun?  No more can you be kept by shadows from the light in which illusions end.  Every miracle is but the end of an illusion.  Such was the journey, such its ending.  And in the goal of truth which you accepted must all illusions end.

There is a hush in Heaven, a happy expectancy, a little pause of gladness in acknowledgment of the journey’s end.”

And following the hush in non-physical, comes a round of applause, the cork popping and the champagne flowing, glasses clinking in toasts and the happy dance that looks like the minuet, or the Charleston, or the Watusi, or the Bump — just depends what century or decade you last visited.  I kind of like the Bump myself.  Happy days, happy trails, and a happy, happy journey to us all.

I’ve gone back to finding my religion again, loosely translated that means I am believing something about my precious oldest daughter that is painful for me to believe.  Lately, every day I pick up ACIM and let a page fall open and speak to me. Today it opened to Lesson 54.  All ACIM quotes will appear in bold, the remainder will be my comments.

I have no neutral thoughts.

Neutral thoughts are impossible because all thoughts have power.  They will either make a false world or lead me to the real one.

Believing in my daughter’s condition is a false world.  It’s a world in which I believe she is not whole.  It’s a world of separation both by my belief in the condition and by my suffering with these thoughts about it.

I see no neutral things.

Let me look on the world I see as the representation of my own state of mind.

Let me remember that the world I currently see represents my departure from the real world where I let my fears take hold and make manifest this false world.

I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing.

I am alone in nothing.

What a relief.

I am determined to see.

I would behold the proof that what has been done through me has enabled love to replace fear, laughter to replace tears, and abundance to replace loss.  I would look upon the real world, and let it teach me that my will and the will of God are one.

Ok, I have one bone to pick here.  “I am determined”, sounds too willful and efforting to me.  I change it to: I surrender so that the real world may be revealed to me.  I surrender so that I might know where I thought there was darkness, there is light, where I thought there was pain, there is healing, where I thought there was something to fear, there is something to love, where I thought there was something missing, I find wholeness.

I surrender to remembering I don’t have the resources to see the bigger picture.  I surrender to remembering resting in the peace and stillness of God is worth more than any niggling fear could ever reap.  I surrender to make room for every little miracle to take the place of my false perceptions.  I surrender.  Again.

]]> http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2010/03/21/there-is-light/feed/ 0 Beth/Bethie light http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2010/03/02/not-the-same-now/ http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2010/03/02/not-the-same-now/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:02:37 +0000 heartsdeesire http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/?p=2519 ]]> Image by Rassouli

As events unfolded through the latter part of last month, I found myself blowing into my little God Whistle asking for strength.  It was a February of change and challenges that shook me more than anything had for quite some time.  The strength did come and right beside it flowed wisdom and comfort.

I dubbed this last month a period of “Bethie finding her religion”.   There is nothing like situations that metaphorically or literally bring me to my knees to remind me I’m not in charge here and frankly, there’s very little I’m in charge of around here.  And isn’t that a relief?  If I had to rely on myself to spin the planets, orchestrate thousands of different processes in my body, raise the sun, set the tides, we’d be having a lot of chaos in the world.

Often I don’t post about the particulars of the sh*t hitting the fan in my life.  It is found in between the lines of my poems and posts.   What I do tend to write about is the place I finally land, a little stronger, a little wiser and ultimately returning to what remains when all else falls away — that all consuming Love that’s back of Everything.

I’ve not yet reached the point where I’m grateful for all the contrast and challenges when I’m in the thick of it but I know enough now to see that I’m always grateful for the delicious expansion that comes just as soon as I’m willing to take my own hands off the levers of control.  As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote “in the difficult, are the hands that work on us”.  Yes … the hands … not my hands.  Once again I am reminded of the humility and surrender in a simple prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.  Surrender is so much a part of the fabric of this Universe.  As surely as the day must surrender to the night, so must I give right of way to the “hands that work on us”.

I’m going to post some quotes from A Course in Miracles which played a big part in “Bethie finding her religion” again.  In the ensuing weeks I’ll post some lessons from the workbook.  There is much in ACIM I don’t understand but I’m comprehending more of it than I have in the past and I find the lessons to be so liberating that I believe they actually could be life-changing.

“There will come a time when images have all gone by and you will see you know not what you are.  It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound.  Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is.  When every concept has been raised to doubt and question, and been recognized as made on no assumptions that would stand the light, then is the truth left free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt.  There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this.

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.

Yet in this learning is salvation born.  And What you are will tell you of Itself.”

Chapter 31, V:17

“The truth in you remains as radiant as a star, as pure as light, as innocent as love itself.”

Chapter 31, VI:7

This is the final passage in the text:

“And now we say “Amen.”  For Christ has come to dwell in the abode You set for Him before time was, in calm eternity.  The journey closes, ending at the place where it began.  No trace of it remains.  Not one illusion is accorded faith, and not one spot of darkness still remains to hide the face of Christ from anyone.  Thy Will is done, complete and perfectly and all creation recognizes You, and knows You as the only Source it has.  Clear in Your likeness does the Light shine forth from everything that lives and moves in You.  For we have reached where all of us are one, and we are home, where You would have us be.”

Chapter 31, VIII:12

And finally I leave you with a passage from the poem entitled Today, by one of my favorite poets: William Stafford.

“Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now, You could close your eyes and go on full of light.”

Imagine a world where
“not one illusion is accorded faith”

If it isn’t the voice of strength,
if it isn’t the voice of love,
if it isn’t the voice of confidence,
it is the voice of illusion.

Imagine according your faith only
to the voice of strength, love and confidence.

Imagine withdrawing your consent,
your agreement with all else.
Imagine paying all else no mind.

Imagine.

["not one illusion..." is taken from ACIM]

This world is full of miracles.

They stand in shining silence next to every dream of pain and suffering.

They are the dream’s alternative, the choice to be the dreamer, rather than deny the active role in making up the dream.

The body is released because the mind acknowledges ‘this is not done to me, but I am doing this.’

And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead.

~ A Course in Miracles ~

Home is where Dorothy wants to return and finds that she always had that power to get back home via the ruby slippers. Yet, when she wakes up in her own bed, she’s told she never left home at all.  She was just dreaming a dream that she had left it.

Home then becomes a metaphor for Who We Really Are, the stuff of God.  And, we, too, can never leave it.  We can only dream a dream that we have left it.  Dream a dream that we are separate and not whole.  But it’s only a dream that we leave home.  We can’t ever really leave home.  We don’t undock from the
“mother ship”.  It’s not possible, not even in death.  So the perception of separateness becomes the dream we are dreaming.

And then we wake up, little by little, in stages at times and remember that Who We Really Are is whole and perfect and so much an integral part of this beautiful, friendly, benevolent, grace filled and peaceful Universe.

I believe that promise of waking up from the dream of separateness, pulses at all times within each of us.  Call that promise the ruby slippers, if you will, but it’s no magic.  It’s real and any moment is a moment to stop what we are doing, take a deep and conscious breath and remember Who We Really Are right now.  We are that beautiful, peaceful, benevolent, friendly, grace filled Universe, too.

Breathing in beauty, I remember.
Breathing in peace, I remember.
Breathing in benevolence, I remember.
Breathing in friendship, I remember.
Breathing in grace, I remember.

I remember, I am home.  I never really left it, after all.  And yes, Dorothy, there is no place like Home.

Simply do this:

Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is;

all concepts you have learned about the world;

all images you hold about yourself.

Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad,

of every thought it judges worthy, and all ideas of which it is ashamed.

Hold onto nothing.

Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught,

nor one belief you ever learned before from anything.

Forget this world,

forget this course,

and come with wholy empty hands

unto your God.

~A Course in Miracles~

We can let our lives be directed
by the same force that makes
flowers grow.  {…}

To trust in the force
that moves the universe
is faith.

Faith isn’t blind it’s visionary.
Faith is believing that the universe
is on our side, and that the universe
knows what it’s doing.

Faith is a psychological awareness
of an unfolding force for good,
constantly at work in all dimensions.

Our attempts to direct this force only
interferes with it.
Our willingness to relax into it allows
it to work on our behalf.

Marianne Williamson
A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

“You cannot wake yourself.
You can let yourself be awakened.”

~A Course in Miracles

I like the emphasis here on letting.  Not forcing but allowing.
And then an interesting synonym for “let” is: sit still for.  This
is to suggest that to let something come about requires no
action on our part except perhaps a releasing of individual will
and a resting in stillness.  No forcing, no action.  Just resting.
Stand still and allow, let the Universe support you.

This theme is also found in the The Field Center studies.
Here we find the Four Noble Truths:

1) Anything can happen.
2) You can’t make it happen.
3) You can let it happen.
4) If you let it happen to make it happen, it won’t happen.*

Interesting paradox isn’t it: if you let it happen to make it happen,
it won’t happen.  That is because the letting entailed in making
something happen is just another method of forcing the individual
will, albeit tying it up in a sophisticated bow.

This helps explain how sometimes when we find ourselves “at
the end of our rope”, an answering soon follows.  Why? because
finally personal will has been surrendered.  We have ceased to
bang anything into place, we have even come to the conclusion
that we don’t have all or even any of the answers.  In this state
of surrender and uncertainty, we have lost our grip on forcing
our will and have entered the portal of willingness.  A willing-
ness to finally concede that we don’t have the answers; we can’t
make anything happen and a corresponding receptivity to the
creative force of the Universe.  And miraculously it seems, at the
moment we are literally brought to our knees in surrender, answers
soon follow and manifestations appear just at the 11th hour.

So then it would behoove me to let go of my headstrong reasonings
that I have any of the answers, to let go of any forcing or trying to
make something happen.  To rest in that sweet spot where I don’t
stop caring about what I want.  On the contrary, I care deeply but
I now have the wisdom to know that an entire Universe can work it’s
magic far better than anything little me could possibly bang into place.
May that wisdom deepen in me so that I no longer have to be at the
end of my rope for answers to be let in.

*©www.fieldcenter.org