“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
“Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes.”
“All healing is essentially the release from fear.”
“The ego seeks to divide and separate. Spirit seeks to unify and heal.”
All the above quotes are from A Course in Miracles. I’ve never connected with the Course. For one thing, the text is a lot of words. Lots and lots of words. Even the workbook is cumbersome for me, and I quickly lose interest every time I’ve attempted it. What is “Spirit?” What is “love,” for that matter?
And yet I understand these snippets. They reflect the process of self-examination. I was searching for the first quote and discovered the others. I was thinking of the first quote after an experiment I performed at the beach recently.
I’d walked to the end of the island on a busy Saturday and discovered a cove of boats and people frolicking around the boats. Immediately, I remembered similar boats from a couple years ago, all flying Trump flags. In those days, if you were near the coast, you couldn’t escape the sight of such flags. I found myself wishing then that “these people” could release the religion of politics while recreating, but that was not to be.
And so, I remembered these flags, and assumed these folks formerly flew them. I felt an imaginary shield start to raise between me and them. It was a shield of division, of otherness, of separate. And that shield suddenly felt very heavy. It felt like a burden that I could choose to carry, or I could choose to release. I may not know these people, and I certainly couldn’t pretend I loved them. But holding them as different or distant from me felt like an affliction of my own choosing.
In that perfect moment, beach-side sun and breeze coaxing me towards freedom, I released the shield. I had nothing against these people, who (like me) were products of their own circumstances. Life isn’t easy, and we all cope the best way we can. The best way I can cope is to open fully to the moment, which happens to include the people and circumstances in it. I’ve thought of this often in life: All the people on the planet have one basic thing in common: we are all here in this moment, and we will all be dead and gone and hardly remembered very soon. The best thing we can do is leave the place a little healthier (emotionally speaking) then we found it.
As I walked past the first group, we made eye contact. I could see them eyeing me with a shield like my own. I greeted them warmly, and they greeted me a tad quizzically but friendly. Maybe they were trying to figure me out. I confess I may look like a weirdo on the beach, with all my necessities hanging off me, and sporting a bikini on my aging body. Maybe they were trying to figure out what kind of flag I would fly. But I felt light and free and fully open. I was innocent again, like a child, willing to play with anyone.
I don’t know what the word “love” means, and I’ve given up trying to understand and define it. But there was an obstacle to Open in that moment, and it was of my own making. That obstacle was resistance, and resistance is fear. When I dropped the resistance/fear, I saw myself in them. I saw our commonality, our equality. I fully accepted the people and the circumstances that lead to this perfect moment, which was only soiled by my thoughts. I allowed for the facts of the moment to be exactly what they were, and for these people to be exactly who they are. Seriously, what else would I choose to do, fully aware of the situation? Especially when Open is much easier and more satisfying than contracting in reactivity.
And as I reveled in my liberation and my generosity towards the boaters and to myself, I realized: the absence of fear is love. It’s self-care and self-love, which turns out to be love for everyone else. There is no difference.
“Besides your recognizing that thoughts are never idle, salvation requires that you also recognize that every thought you have brings either peace or war; either love or fear.” A Course in Miracles
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