All posts tagged: Peace

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 […]

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 […]

Stay Perfect My Friends

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Christ

It’s an incredible marketing campaign, that Dos Equis Most Interesting Man bonanza, and if that’s what it takes to remind ourselves in a non-threatening way that we are the living, breathing manifestations of perfection, I’m all for it.  Let’s set aside the social commentary about the way the message is dressed up, and the product it is selling, and for just a moment savor the delight that is engendered when a character is willing to […]

The Dangers of Grace

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Poetry

Grace has the consistency of wakefulness. You can rub it between your fingers and never even feel it. But the problem, is that it gets into your bloodstream, and later- when you’re driving in your car, or listening to foreign language tapes, or standing on your tippy toes trying to hang a skillet on a hook- it travels to your brain and shuts out the lights. You have a near death experience, and forget momentarily […]

Thank God…

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Creative / Poetry

We were born adrift, resilient beads of awareness shimmering on a high sea, buoyant. Sparkling. No land in sight. The residue of saturated space- meaning that cooling Emptiness could no longer hold in solution, dew drops from the Night’s sold out Vacancy, falling, caught – splat!- upon a blank canvas. No land in sight. We were all swaddling vulnerabilities, nascent and curious Futures-in-Training, fields of Potential whose every vector pointed away from a singular Discontinuity: the […]

The Sun’s Secret

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Creative / Poetry

A man arose early with the sun. He slipped from the bed, leaving his darling wife to rest. His two daughters were dreaming peacefully in the rooms beside. The dog padded beside him, excited and curious about his master’s early appearance. The man’s life was a cocoon of warmth. The center of his mind was an offering. But today he paced the kitchen, looking to the East, into the brilliant glow of morning, and he […]

Is Love Enough?

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Course Ideas

Faced with a world in which something has gone wrong, it is virtually impossible to encounter the madness and not attempt to envision a solution.  I’m not saying solutions shouldn’t be envisioned, but I think that in A Course of Love Jesus is saying, “Hey, look, if you were a fish on dry land, and your gills were burning, and you were undergoing a total metabolic catastrophe, and you were given the choice between letting […]

We Are One Heart

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Christ / Course Ideas

“Our heart is the light of the world. We are one heart. We are one mind.  One creative force gathering the atoms, establishing the order, blessing the silence, gracing the cosmos, manifesting the light of the heart.  Here we live as one body, experiencing communion, the soul’s delight, rather than otherness.” (CoL, 2nd ed., page 180, 20.4-20.6) This passage from A Course of Love always seems to reduce the vicissitudes of my life to a […]