This is a course of love. The time for you to take it is now. You are ready and the miracles of love are needed.
Pray for all those in need of miracles. To pray is to ask. But for what are you asking? This is the first instruction in this course of love. All are in need of miracles. This is the first step in miracle readiness: asking for all to be included in what we do here. By praying for all those in need of miracles you are praying for all to learn as you learn, you are asking to link your mind with all minds. You are asking to end your separate state and learn in a state of unity. This is a basic recognition that this is the only way you learn.
Who can learn from this course?
The separated self or the ego does not learn. Even when the ego has taken many courses and received many teachings, the ego has not learned but has merely become threatened. Spirit does not need to take a course of love. If the ego cannot learn and the spirit does not need to, then who is the course of love and all other such courses for? Learning our true identity, the identity of the Self that is capable of learning, is something everyone must do. Can the ego learn this? Never. Does spirit need to? No. Who, then, is this course for?
This is an essential question. While a course of love is meaningless to the ego and unnecessary to spirit it would seem to have no audience at all if these are the only two states that exist. Since it is impossible to be part spirit and part ego, assuming there would be such a state in which learning could take place would be meaningless.
A new identity
The world as a state of being, as a whole, has entered a time in which readiness for miracle-mindedness is upon it. Earlier courses and writers have opened the door by threatening the ego. All those who, with egos weakened, walked this world with the hope of leaving ego behind, with miracle-minded intent, have awakened human beings to a new identity. They have ushered in a time of ending our identity crisis. Not since Jesus walked the earth has such a time been upon humankind.
What is it in you that is capable of learning? What is it in you that recognizes that ego is not what you are? What is it in you that recognizes your spirit? What is it in you that hovers between two worlds, the world of the ego's dominion and that of spirit? What recognizes the difference? The Christ in you. It is easy to imagine how the Christ in you differs from your ego but not as easy to recognize how the Christ in you differs from spirit. The Christ in you is that which is capable of learning in human form what it means to be a child of God. The Christ in you is that which is capable of bridging the two worlds. This is what is meant by the second coming of Christ.
The ego is what you made. Christ is what God made. The ego is your extension of who you think you are. Christ is God's extension of who He is. In order to end the need for learning, you must know who you are and what this means. While other courses and teachings have succeeded in pointing out the insanity of the identity crisis and dislodging the ego's hold, this is a course to establish your identity and to end the reign of the ego.
Accepting our divine nature
There are still few who dare to believe in the glory of who they are, few who can lay aside the idea that, to think of themselves in the light of God's thought of them rather than their own, is arrogance. This is only because the ego is not yet and finally gone. You are right not to desire to glorify the ego in any way. You know that the ego cannot be glorified and that you would not want it to be. This is why, while the ego remains, you cannot know who you are. The only glory is of God and His creations. That you are among the creations of God cannot be disputed. Thus all glory is due you. All glory is yours, and your efforts to protect it from the ego's reach are valiant but unnecessary. The ego cannot claim the glory that is yours.
Not humility but fear
Many of you desire to be ‘foot soldiers,’ to just live the good life without claiming glory, without having any grand ideas about yourselves. It is possible to do much good without recognizing who you are, but it is impossible to be who you are, and you are what the world is for. Your recognition of your Self and your recognition of your brothers and sisters is what the world is for. To stop before this is accomplished when it is in reach is every bit as insane as belief in the ego. Ask yourself what it is that stops you. As humble as you seem to be in your choice, you are still letting ego make your choice. This is not humility but fear.
When you think you can go only so far and no further in your acceptance of the truth of yourself as God created you, you are abdicating love to fear. You are perhaps making this world a better place but you are not abolishing it. In your acceptance of doing good works and being a good person you are accepting ministry to those in hell rather than choosing heaven. You accept what you view as possible and reject what you perceive as impossible. You thus cling to the laws of man and reject the laws of God. You claim your human nature and reject your divine nature.
What is this rejection but a rejection of yourself? What is this rejection but fear masquerading as humility? What is this rejection but a rejection of God? What is this but a rejection of miracles?
You who have rejected yourself are likely to feel increasingly burdened. Although an initial burst of energy may have followed your discoveries of other forms of the truth, although you may even have experienced what seemed to be miracles happening ‘to' you, as you continued to reject yourself, this energy and these experiences that lightened your heart would have begun to recede and to seem as distant and unreal as a mirage. All that you retain is a belief in effort and struggle to be good and to do good, a belief that clearly demonstrates that you have rejected who you are.
We are here to awaken
Oh, Child of God, you have no need to try at all, no need to be burdened or to grow tired and weary. You who want to accomplish much good in the world realize that only you can be accomplished. You are here to awaken from your slumber. You are here not to awaken to the same world, a world that seems a little more sane than before but still governed by insanity, a world in which it seems possible to help a few others but certainly not all others, but to awaken to a new world. If all that you see changed within your world is a little less insanity than before, then you have not awakened but still are caught in the nightmare your ego has made. By choosing to reject yourself, you have chosen to try to make sense of the nightmare rather than to awaken from it. This will never work.
By rejecting who you are, you are demonstrating that you think you can believe in some of the truth but not all of it. Many of you have accepted, for instance, that you are more than your body while retaining your belief in the body. You thus have confused yourself further by accepting that you are two selves – an ego self represented by the body and a spirit self that represents to you an invisible world in which you can believe but not take part. You thus have placed the ego at odds with spirit, giving the ego an internal and invisible foe to do battle with. This was hardly the purpose of any teachings of the truth that have as their aim the exact opposite of this conflict-inducing situation. The truth unites. It does not divide. The truth invites peace, not conflict. Partial truth is not only impossible, it is damaging. For sooner or later in this lopsided battle, the ego will win out. The spirit as you have defined it is too amorphous, too lacking in definition and believability to win this battle against what you perceive as your reality.
Turn around
You who have come close to truth only to turn your back and refuse to see it, turn around and look once again. You have travelled your path and the end of the journey is in sight. You stand at the precipice with a view of the new world glittering with all the beauty of heaven set off at just a little distance in a golden light. When you could have seen this sight you turned your back and sighed, looking back on a world familiar to you, and choosing it instead. You do not see that this choice, even made with every good intention of going back and making a difference, is still a choice for hell when you could instead have chosen heaven. Yet you know that choosing heaven is the only true way to change the world. It is the exchange of one world for another. This is what you fear to do. You are so afraid to let go of the world that you have known that, even though it is a world of conflict, sickness and death, you will not exchange it, will not relinquish it.
While God remains unknown to you and you remain unknown to yourself, so too does heaven remain concealed. Thus, in turning your back on heaven, you turn your back on your Self and God as well. Your good intentions will not overcome the world and bring an end to hell. In all the history of the world, many have done good, heroic, and at times miraculous deeds without the world changing from a place of misery and despair. What is more arrogant? To believe that you alone can do what millions of others have not been able to do? Or to believe that you, in union with God, can? What makes more sense? To choose to try again what others have tried and failed to accomplish? Or to choose to leave behind the old and choose a new way, a way in which you become the accomplished, and in your accomplishment bring the new into being?
What is the difference between your good intentions and willing with God? The difference is in who you think you are and who God knows you to be. While this difference remains you cannot share your will with God or do what God has appointed you to do. Who you think you are reveals the choice you have made. It is either a choice to be separate from God or a choice to be one with God. It is a choice to know yourself as you always have, or a choice to know your Self as God created you. It is the difference between wanting to know God now, and wanting to wait to know God until you have decided you are worthy or until some other designated time, such as at death.
What are good intentions but a choice to do what you can, alone, by yourself, against great odds? This is why good intentions so often fail to come to be at all, and why, when every effort has been made, the outcome seldom seems worth the effort. You cannot earn your way to heaven or to God with your effort or your good intentions. You cannot earn, and will not ever feel as if you have earned, the designation of a person of such worth that you are deserving of all that God would freely give. Give up this notion.
Your good intentions neither please nor displease God. God simply waits for your return to heaven, for your acceptance of your birthright, for you to be who you are.
From A Course of Love, copyright 2001 by Mari Perron and Dan Odegard, published in the UK in 2002 by Hodder Mobius.
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Inspirational features 
