. . . ye know not what hour your Lord doth come (Matthew 24:42).
This is an old expression of an idea that still has meaning: God is not absent from us and what we are in truth is capable of directly knowing God right now.
As students of A Course in Miracles, we might put it this way: There is no separation - there is only a mistaken belief in separation. This mistaken belief is ego. Yet when we look gently and closely at ego and its belief system - which is simply to raise it into the light of understanding - then it naturally dissolves, like a sandcastle washing away with the tide.
A Course in Miracles teaches us how to raise ego to the light in order to remember what we are in truth, which is also to remember that on what God creates is real.
We need do nothing but give attention because "[t]ruth comes of its own will unto its own" (T-13.XI.6:5). Who looks will see, and who sees perceives correctly, and who perceives correctly knows at last "what is capable of being wholly shared" (T-13.XI.4:2).
We do not need to know right now "what is capable of being wholly shared." We only need to know that we don't know. Our honesty is a light which undoes the confusion obscuring the truth of what we are.
What we are - like truth itself, like love itself - is perfectly abstract and altogether without form. When we focus on bodies and other objects that seem to comprise the world, we get confused. This is where ego wants our attention because it begets confusion which is ego.
But the Holy Spirit asks us to see past bodies and world and the dense fog of confusion that surrounds them. Give it no attention at all, says Spirit, and I will show you the truth. I will show you reality.
So we simply give all our confusion, guilt, hatred and fear away, which is simply to remind ourselves over and over: "I do not want to suffer. This brings me suffering. Therefore I will let this go."
You and I did not invent love. We did not create peace. The words, yes. The images and ideals, yes. But the essence of love and peace? The truth of love and peace? No. Those transcend the limitations of our apparently separated selves. Yet they are available right now within us because separation is an illusion. It is possible to go beyond the images we make and the words we use. What happens when we do? And if we can't, what stops us?
These are important questions to our salvation.
Truth is here: Love is here. Both can be met outside the limits of time and space in the realm of the perfect and perfectly abstract. Indeed, there is no other way to know Love and Truth. And to know them in this way is to know our own self at last.
When you have learned that you belong to truth, it will flow lightly over you without a difference of any kind . . . Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient; God wills you to be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, nor it from you (T-13.IX.6:6, 7:1).
When we make attention our gift to the world - which is to say, when we offer it without condition or exclusion of any kind - then it is given us to become aware of the perfect Stillness that is Heaven, and the Love and Peace that abide there as they abide in us. We can call it whatever we like because the words are not what matters: perfect knowledge is beyond the separation words naturally make.
We are not what appears and then passes from view. We are not forms which come and go, nor are we the world in which those forms appear to come ago. Nor can we be contained in language.
We dwell in perfect peace beyond (but not opposed to) the reach of change. A Course in Miracles merely asks us to question our belief that this is not so, and to be open to the possibility of learning what is so.
You do not have to know that Heaven is yours to make it so. It is so (T-13.XI.10:5-6).
The hour is now: the doors are open.
This is reminiscent of another New Testament passage: Paul's argument to the Thessalonians that they need to be on heightened alert with respect to their Savior's return. He wrote that "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2).
But as students of A Course in Miracles, we know that this "thief" is neither a stranger nor a criminal but a friend and a savior. He comes not to steal from us but to offer a gift: remembrance, through truth, of the peace and love forever composing us. To know our brother and sister in this way is to know God (T-4.VI.7:3).
And it is in that relationship that the inevitability of Heaven is revealed to us as the very essence of our own being.
[H]ow can you remember what was never true, or not remember what has always been? It is this reconciliation with truth, and only truth, in which the peace of Heaven lies (T-13.XI.11:7-8).
In the end it is simple, so simple we are apt to miss it: we don't have to say yes (much less no) and we don't have to beg. We only have to be willing to see what is already given to us. Indeed, we are given to each other for no other purpose.
Love,
Sean