All posts filed under: Course Ideas

The First Step…

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Christ / Course Ideas

The first step in accepting your True nature is to look up from what you are doing, to disengage from the volition that you have become, to take one step back from the thread of responsibility and longing to which you are responding, and consider that the space into which you have stepped is more real, more alive, and more “you” than any place you have previously occupied.  There is no encounter or situation in […]

Not a Choice At All…

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Christ / Course Ideas

Sometimes we lose sight of the sheer unprecedentedness of our awareness.  We are aware.  It’s a worthy subject of reflection.  Some would say, perhaps, that at one point in “time” there was no such thing as awareness, and somewhere along the way, there was.  Thinking this way causes my neurons to enter states of quantum superposition… and get stuck.  I can imagine unawareness, somehow.  As if it existed, and maybe still exists.  I know that […]

Boyhood Ontology and the Promise of Salvation

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Christ / Course Ideas

Time capsules are intriguing.  Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it.  Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess […]

Obstacles to Choosing Love

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Christ / Course Ideas

One of the more challenging topics for me to write about recently was the topic of suffering, and the idea that what Jesus describes as “the choice of love” can end suffering.  It was challenging because I could anticipate resistance to this idea, even as I wrote about it.  I could anticipate potentially alienating a reader or two, (and when you have three readers, all of whom you value dearly, this is indeed a risk), […]

Beyond Ethics. Beyond Temptation. Beyond Suffering. (Part 3)

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Course Ideas

Nearly fifteen years ago I took a six month class on the life and teachings of Walter Russell.  (If you don’t know of Walter, it is worth taking a moment to scan this quick bio.)  Walter was an amazing person, (like you and I), who among other things created a home study course entitled A Course in Cosmic Consciousness.  The group in which I participated met once a month for an eight hour session to […]

Beyond Ethics. Beyond Temptation. Beyond Suffering. (Part 2)

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Course Ideas

One of the aspects of reading A Course of Love that I really enjoyed, aside from the feeling it evoked of having Love itself shovel coal into the furnace of my heart deep into the night, was the string of observations Jesus made about this experience we’re having as personal beings.  Paragraph after paragraph, Jesus tells us about who we are, in ways he couldn’t have known, unless he’s been in there…  through doubt, through […]

Beyond Ethics. Beyond Temptation. Beyond Suffering (Part 1)

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Course Ideas

This is the first of a three part series on the very best that a world rooted in separation has to offer.  We’re going to take a brief tour of three fundamental elements of the world that works for no one, and deconstruct them a bit.  Not because we want to get preoccupied with turning nothing into something, or start marching up and down the streets in protest of false concepts, but because we want […]

Moving Beyond Ideals

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Christ / Course Ideas

One of the principal aims of the Course of Love is to put us in position to respond freely to what is, to be in ongoing and dynamic relationship with all that is, and to move altogether beyond self concepts.  Concepts are images- ideals and patterns.  What lies beyond all of our conceptual selves, is the true Self that we are…  Right now…  Jesus speaks with a sense of urgency in many points of the […]

Towards Wholeheartedness

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Course Ideas

A major theme of A Course of Love is wholeheartedness- the state wherein the heart and mind are unified.  This concept is returned to many times, but like any word, it is just a symbol on a sheet of paper until it somehow becomes our lived reality.  (That somehow would be a miracle…)  Jesus speaks about this movement to wholeheartedness as being the first and principal unification that is required, within ourselves, in order to […]

Accessing the Heart

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Christ / Course Ideas

I have been away for awhile- took some much needed vacation and time for retreat with loved ones and enjoyed a string of days whose “purpose” was unspoken for in advance.  It never seems to fail that the re-immersion into the world of our everyday needs and demands is a challenging re-entry, and that is part of what lies behind this post…  Although, to be fair, the repeated need for movement from disconnectedness to connectedness […]