In the Dialogues of A Course of Love, Jesus describes the process of “becoming”.  In this state, we have realized or glimpsed unity consciousness, but we have yet to fully shed the conditions of our past.  This joyous wholeness that tickles us still often feels like the movement of an outside hand.  Creation is witnessed as a beautiful and awe-inspiring dynamic, albeit one we still perceive as taking place- at times- “out there”.  We experience moments of completeness, joyous moments in which we are wholly present and wholly alive, interspersed with moments of incompleteness in which arise feelings and conditions that are fractured images, vestiges of an old identity.

These are where I am.

* * * * *

It is the time of reaching the point of no return, of swirling around the drain and instead of kicking free of the current at the last minute, and returning to shore, of dropping through the needle’s eye into a delicious falling that will never cease.  For a time perhaps, we tread water in the center of this swirling pool, while our hearts bathe in the glow that shines up through the needle’s eye.

* * * * *

Sometimes in this time of becoming I am still not certain of who I am, or where I have arrived, and in contrast to the joyous moments, these times are heavy and sticky.  Like feeling alone at a party.  I find this process to be like walking out into a meadow and taking off all my clothes, all my coverings, all my thoughts, and laying them down in the grass.  The thing about this meadow is that is in sight of a highway, and people in cars that drive by, well, they might see me.  This is uncomfortable.    So, I kind of position myself behind some extra tall grass, and whisper to Love to meet me halfway.

Have I not technically met the conditions of which You spoke?

Love, ever honest, says no.

I wonder what I have not given, and Jesus says, the idea of yourself who is setting those things down.  Give that to me also.  Oh- and nostalgia.  That isn’t exactly helping, either.

How exactly does this work? I ask.

Stop loitering in the conditions of your discarded past.  You are surrounded by souvenirs of a life you have already ended, and when you pick them up, like a song on the radio that takes you back to a former time, you allow yourself to be transported to a time and a place you have already outgrown.  It feels very real, but you are just reliving memories.  Fill with the desire, instead, to hear the new songs Creation is writing, the ones with your Name on them.

* * * * *

All of my self-consciousness is uncertainty.  In A Course of Love, Jesus says that all doubt is self doubt.  I doubt the very reality that I am.  It is harder to postulate a sadder state of affairs, yet these conceptual self-images we have crafted and lived for so long are all we know.  They offer, at least, familiarity.  Familiarity and discomfort can be traveling companions I have found.

* * * * *

The time of becoming is also wondrous.  There is no desire to be elsewhere.  We have reached this fixed pole in the rotation of time by moving ever northward across the globes of our lives.  We are no longer deceived by misdirection.  There is no real desire to pick up those things we have put down and begin walking again, because every step we’re capable of taking within the world we once knew would be southbound.  Every step is a movement away from this fixed axis, and back into a world whose only purpose was to discover this location, this terminus.

We know there is nowhere else to go within the only dimensions we have ever known, and in this knowing we begin to receive the knowledge of dimensionless existence.

Here, in this meadow, where the very air we breath is life itself, we begin to learn of genuine sustenance.  At night, we can hear the hymns that drift in along the shores of time, lapping gently along the boundary.  A great emptiness blows through periodically, not a storm, but a gathering breeze that arises simultaneously from every point around us.  We forget momentarily, the artifacts that lay on the ground around us.  We begin to discover the others who also have picked their way along ancient, lonesome trails to rest for a time in this meadow.  Joining with them, we discover what it is like to share a common Vision.

One by one our souvenirs fade into the grass, as meanwhile, we find we are building the vessels of relationship in which we will now travel.  They are balloons, held together by mutual recognition, filled with the warm vapor all hearts offer.  At dawn, we will see countless balloons lifting skyward.  We are watching ourselves now, cutting the last bags of sand free from the buckets.

Arising.

The Vision of Christ passing up and down the line like a reverent secret we’ll never again forget.