A Course in Miracles Lesson 171

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Our theme now is that God is Love and therefore, we are as well. The mantra-like nature of this sequence of lessons is a simple veil masking an exponentially deeper and more powerful idea: that we are not separate from God.

This is not to be understood as “in these bodies, with these personalities and stories, we shall be lifted up and incorporated into the perfect unity of God.”

Rather, it is to be understood as: what you are in truth is already one with God and never was and never will be otherwise. We are confused about what we are – no more than that but also, no less.

The second statement obviates the first. If we think that the egoic self – with its body-identification, its time and space orientation, and its language-based relationshps – is God, then we’re confused.

A Course in Miracles is about undoing that confusion. In this sequence of lessons, it de-emphasizes the intellectual approach that tends to dominate the curriculum, in favor of an almost call-and-response simplicity.

If you hate this simplicity, don’t worry. It’s not a crime against God or Nature.

But if you find yourself responding to it – finding it welcome or easy, finding it affirming or familiar – know that somewhere in the deep past, ancestors praise and celebrate you, while in the future your descendents thank you. This is an old and veritable approach to learning.

So in this lesson, for example, the ancillary ideas are that everything we perceive is an echo of the Holy Spirit, who is the Voice for God, and that we are endowed with the power of decision.

These are not simple ideas. And yet the lesson does not invite us to go into them in an intellectual way – proving them wrong or right, say. Explaining them or theorizing about them.

Rather, the lesson asks us to put right and wrong aside – set analysis aside – and instead focus on something broader – that God is Love and we are not separate from God.

We are being asked to take a very lofty view of ourselves here, one that is beyond the reach of reason and evidence, and thus can only be reached by faith. Intellect is beside the point; sometimes it has to be.

The lesson is asking us to enter what Abhishiktanda called “the Cave of the Heart,” a domain of which Wittgenstein both was and wasn’t signifying when he observed that whatever lay beyond speech could not be spoken of, and thus silence was the better path.

We speak these words – repeat them, mantra-like – and when we are ready and willing, the Holy Spirit will take us to a place of stillness and silence in which the truth of our identity stands so clear and true that we will never again believe the silly idea that you are a body in a world, the latter of which isn’t real, and the former of which is doomed.

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