A Course of Love states in a number of places that the world we have made is a distorted image of Creation, something close but not quite, an array of symbols that hearken to what we know is True while simultaneously and sadly lacking some critical ingredient.  The Truth is echoed in this world we’ve made, but we’ve gotten something important twisted up.  Inside out and upside down.  We wanted to make something beautiful, and instead our imitation of Creation has turned into a mockery.

Its frustrating as hell for us.  What went wrong!?

I think maybe we’re missing a key ingredient…

…one day we were in the kitchen with God, preparing a great meal that everyone would attend.  Everyone.  (Big lot, that.)  We were so excited!  We were like a pack of giddy four year olds, spilling flour and stirring batter and dropping eggs on the floor and working in teams to pour milk from great carafes into measuring cups the size of 5-gallon pails.  Eight lanky arms reached up from below the counter-top as one, like the legs of an upside down spider, shaky with our laughter, as milk slopped over the sides and into the cups and onto our faces.  We were with our Creator, with our Father, who we looked up to and admired and loved beyond belief, and He delighted equally in our participation.  We had nowhere to be.  No plans.  No sense of time.

God was always Present.  He was continuously and vibrantly alive within us like a great ocean of sunlight flooding through us.  His thoughts poured forth in unceasing succession, adding unto each other like new and unexpected instruments of an ever-expanding orchestra, perpetually adding new timbres to the theme of Love.  Some of those thoughts were one another, in whom we rejoiced.  We lived in and through each other, in seamless and perfect understanding.

We baked with Him, this great Head Chef, for days and days and days and He never had anywhere to go, or anything else to attend to.  Cakes and platters began appearing, and as our wide eyes caught side of the world’s longest banquet table and followed the line of delectables towards a distant point on the horizon, we realized the kitchen opened up into a huge banquet hall.  How did we miss that!?

Now.

Imagine, in an instant, all that is gone.  Gone so completely it is hard to even remember.  It’s only an ancient feeling, a long-forgotten relic.  We are alone in the dark.  We wonder if it ever really happened.  The ocean within us is silent.  We can’t find it or hear it.  Things should be happening, flowing, surprising, creating- but they are not.  We should be having fun together, just being with each other, laughing and hiding and spilling things, but we don’t feel like it.  We feel distant from everything, and alone.

I think of a small human child who suddenly finds herself without her parents, who finds herself utterly alone in a world she cannot comprehend by herself.  She never had to make sense of a world before.  She only knew that before, behind everything, there was the love from her parents.  What does she do?

Perhaps part of what she does is imitate what she once saw…  She repeats the patterns of her parents because it’s all she has of them.  It’s a way to reconnect with them, to bring back the experience of having them with her.  She brushes her preciously fine hair in front of the mirror.  She smears her mother’s makeup in gaudy colors across her face.  She gets a soaking wet cloth and wipes it around on the furniture.  She puts on fancy clothes that don’t match.  She tries to use her father’s tools to fix items that aren’t broken.  She talks to herself about business on a phone that isn’t even on.  These motions are sad renditions- hollow and tragic.  Each and every one painfully belies the fact that something is missing…

And so it was with us.  We started to try and bake cakes in the dark, on our own, to bring Heaven back.  We tried to copy what we knew.  We poured milk and cracked eggs and desperately mixed and stirred and measured and poured, but… nothing.  We were getting in one another’s way.  We had too much of one ingredient and not enough of another.  The dough wouldn’t rise.  The batter was too thin.  The milk- sour.  We made rules to protect progress, refined our strategies, perfected technique, created oven-timers and thermometers and ceramic cookware and never, ever quit trying.  We’ve been trying a long time…  But still, something is missing…

The missing ingredient was, and is, unity- the awareness of our indivisibility from one another, from God, and from our Selves.  While this precious ingredient is missing, our minds think and perceive in ways that can only divide.  As A Course of Love says, “Thought, as you know it, is an aspect of duality.  It cannot be otherwise in your separated state.  You must think in terms of ‘I’ and ‘them’, ‘death and life’, ‘good and evil’.  This is thought.  Thought occurs in words, and words separate.” (CoL, 19.13)

Without the awareness of our unity we don’t know what we’re doing.  We don’t comprehend what we’re seeing.  We see countless seemingly separate “things”, but nothing separate is real…  “You have not known what you do or what to do only because of fear, only because you have been out of accord with the one heartbeat… You have not before now been able to even imagine knowing what you do.  You hope to have moments of clarity concerning what you are doing in a given moment, what you have done, what you hope to do in the future.  But even these moments of clarity are fractional.  They seldom have any relation to the whole.” (CoL, 20.34-35)

A Course in Miracles states, “Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply being.”  (T-4, VII, 2:1)

We see specifics- the brand name of the flour, the date on the milk, the size of each egg, the dimensions of the oven rack- but we are missing the whole, the natural orchestration of all things, through and of God, which always and only results in perfectly baked cakes!  Alone, we cannot recreate this orchestration, for such is what God is!  God is the unprecedented coordination of all things!

Imagine now, attempting to imitate the omniscient, perfect, extemporaneous coordination of all things… by yourself.  How the @#$%???  (No one ever said the ego had the market on sanity cornered.)  Each of us in undertaking this fool’s errand has no choice but to place one’s self in the role of conductor, and try to ensure everything in the world around us performs its apart.  No rehearsals.  No time-outs.  Smart phones help, of course, but holy hell, man!  Good luck, and godspeed.  And yet our motivation is not so absurd- perfect freedom and startling coordination were once our daily bread.  We imitate what we have lost, but in our separated mindset the end product is distorted, twisted, burnt, peeled, and rotted.

It should be apparent that our thoughts in isolation cannot construct a flowing Whole.  We need to link up with others for that…  Further, however, our conscious thoughts are simply inadequate for the task of enabling this re-linking with Everything.   Using thoughts and logic alone is like attempting to mix concrete without water.  There is no active agent to transform the ingredients and bond them together into a unified material.  There is nothing into which they can dissolve, nothing greater to bound and hold them.  For this, we need the language of the heart.  Into the wordless language of the heart, our thoughts of separateness can dissolve and be transformed into thoughts of unity.  As Jesus says in A Course of Love, “Unifying thought is [] a matter of integrating the thought or language of your heart with that which you more normally perceive as thought, the words and images which ‘go through’ your mind…  I have referred to the true language of the heart as communion, or union of the highest level…”  (CoL, 18.20-21)

When the glue of Love permeates, surrounds and holds every thought we have, and we recognize sameness in all that we see, the transformation from separateness to unity consciousness will occur, and we will rediscover our place in the ease and wonder that underwrites all things.  We can stop trying to conduct, which only tends to produce feeble screeches anyway, and take our seat in an orchestra that defies imagination.  We will find we’re infinitely qualified for the role.

The most important element in God’s kitchen was not the flawless technique, the freshness of the ingredients, or the unbounded creativity of the recipes.  It was the fact that countless dynamics were effortlessly and indivisibly unified as a singular whole, that every single element of the scene flowed from a common and brilliant Source.  All of the parts were integral to one another, and yet uniquely positioned and suited to carry out the Great Plan.  This, above all else, we desire.  We’re trying desperately to recreate the experience, waving our baton at the world around us, but this can only result in a harmless tragedy.

We need merely dissolve… into the language of the Heart… into the Truth of one another…