Course Contemplations

This page is meant particularly for those new to A Course of Love. Nothing and no one can speak to the power of love better than can Jesus. Here, he speaks through these “Course Contemplations,” brief passages that I’ve drawn from the books. It feels like the very best way to introduce this course of love.

I hope everyone who visits this site will browse through the contemplations. I’ve been putting them together for years. No matter how many times I return to them, they speak to me and call me to my heart. I have more than half of a “day book”, or nearly 200 such quotes compiled and still, each time I read the series again, I find another.

This first set is from A Course of Love alone. It’s not meant to be a summary. This is a partial sharing of the “heart sayings” with just a very few quotes that speak to central themes.  I could have pulled many more but I thought I’d stick with about 20 each time I make additions, and perhaps continue to group them by themes.

Another resource for anyone wondering about what A Course of Love is, is the main website: www.acourseoflove.com.

Many lovely blessings are wished for you as you begin or continue this journey of the heart.

Mari

 

Heart Sayings from A Course of Love

 

LET YOUR HEART BE OPEN TO TRUTH

 

Start with this idea: You will allow for the possibility of a new truth to be revealed to your waiting heart.  Hold in your heart the idea that as you read these words – and when you finish reading these words – their truth will be revealed to you.  Let your heart be open to a new kind of evidence of what constitutes the truth.

ACOL 7.23

 

LOVE’S REALITY

 

Safe within your heart lies love’s reality, a reality so foreign to you that you think you remember it not.  Yet it is to this reality we head as we travel deep within you to the center of your Self.

ACOL 8.9

 

TRAVEL LIGHTLY

 

You travel lightly now where before you walked in chains.  You travel now with a companion who knows you as you are and would show your Self to you.

ACOL 9.9

 

THE END OF THE IDENTITY CRISIS

 

Where the original Course in Miracles was a course in thought reversal and mind training, a course to point out the insanity of the identity crisis and dislodge the ego’s hold, this is a course to establish your identity and to end the reign of the ego.

ACOL p.8

 

STEP AWAY

 

We take a step away from intellect, the pride of the ego, and approach this final learning through the realm of the heart.

ACOL p. 44

 

YOU WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT LOVE

 

…You would not exist without love.  It is there even if you are as unaware of it as you are of the beating of your heart.  A baby is no less alive because it does not realize its heart is beating.  You are no less your Self even though you do not realize that without love you would not exist.

God’s only thought is love.  It is a thought without limit, endlessly creating.  Because of the extension of God’s thought of love, you exist.  I exist with you in this self same thought.

ACOL 1.3-1.4

 

THE HEART YEARNS FOR WHAT IS LIKE ITSELF

 

The heart cares not where love comes from, only that it comes. … The heart yearns for what is like itself.  Love yearns for love.  To think of achieving love “on one’s own” is ludicrous.  This is why love is your greatest teacher.  To yearn for what is like yourself is to yearn for your creator and, when perception is healed, to create like your creator.  This yearning exists naturally within you and cannot be diminished or satiated.

…You are complete only within God where you endlessly abide.

ACOL 1.12-1.13

WHAT YOU ARE

 

Love is not something you do.  It is what you are.

ACOL 2.6

 

A CHANGE IN THINKING

 

Your heart is now your eyes and ears.  Your mind can remain within your concept of the brain, for we bypass it now and send it no information for it to process, no data for it to compute.  The only change in thinking you are asked to make is to realize that you do not need it.

ACOL 3.14

TAKE HEART

 

…Take heart.  Such foolishness as your heart’s desires will save you now.

Remember it is your heart that yearns for home.  Your heart that yearns for love remembered.  Your heart that leads the way that, should you follow, will set you certainly on the path for home.

ACOL 3.18

 

LOVE’S PRESENCE

 

Within you is the light that will show you what love is and keep it not set apart from life any longer. Love cannot be brought to the world of madness, nor the world of madness brought to love.  But love can allow a new world to be seen, a world that will allow you to abide within love’s presence.

ACOL 4.24

 

THE PURPOSE OF THE WORLD

 

This is the purpose of the world and of love most kind: to end your self-deception and return you to the light.

ACOL 6.22

 

IMAGES OF HEART AND MIND

 

Your heart already sees in a manner much more whole than the perception of your split mind.  Even your language and images reflect this truth, this difference between the wisdom of your heart and that of your mind.

Your heart may be said to break, but the image that these words call forth is of a heart cracked open, not of a heart in separate pieces.  Your brain, on the other hand, is separated into right and left hemispheres.  One side has one function, one side another.

Let this image go and concentrate on the wholeness of your heart, no matter how you view its current condition.  Be it wounded, bleeding, broken, or full, it rests in wholeness within you at the center of who you are.

It is from this center that truth will light your way.

ACOL 7.18-19

 

LOVE FILLS YOUR EMPTINESS

 

Love is all that will fill your emptiness, and all that will never leave you empty again as it extends from you to your brothers and sisters.  Love is all that will not leave you wanting.

You exist, quite simply, because of your relationship with love.  Love is the unity you seek.

ACOL 11.17-18

 

THIS IDEA CALLED LOVE

 

…All of you believe that you have tried this idea called love, and all of you believe you have evidence that it is not the answer at all.  What is your evidence?  Your own failure to be happy and the unhappiness of the world you see.

You are looking for the rest and quiet joy that only comes from love.  You are looking for the safety and security of a loving home, even if it is one only of philosophy.  You look for the soft assurance of certainty, not of your mind but of your heart.

ACOL 12:3, 5

 

LOVE GIVES REASON ITS FOUNDATION

 

You who have made a god of reason and of intellect, think carefully now of what your reason and your intellect have made for you. …

Think you not that reason opposes love, for love gives reason its foundation.

ACOL 14.7, 9

 

LOVING FREELY

 

…When you have loved freely and without fear…your memory returns to you of who you are, and you are innocent and joyous and one with love itself.

ACOL 14.28

 

YOUR BIRTHRIGHT

 

Your birthright is simply the right to be who you are, and there is nothing in the world that has the power to take this right from you.

The only way you lose it is by giving it away.

ACOL 16.23

 

A STATE OF LOVE

 

To think without thought or know without words are ideas quite foreign to you, and truly, while you remain here, even experiences beyond thought and words you will apply word and thought to.  Yet love has often brought you close to a “thought-less” and “word-less” state of being, and it can do so again.  As you join with your own Self in unity, all that in love you have created and received returns to its home in you, and leaves you in a state of love in which the wordless and formless is very near.

ACOL 19.16

 

WE ARE ONE HEART

 

“Thingness” is over, and your identity no longer stands in form but flows from life itself.  Your beauty is the gathering of the atoms, the order in chaos, the silence in solitude, the grace of the cosmos.  Our heart is the light of the world.

We are one heart.

ACOL 20.4-5

 

THE ARMS OF LOVE

 

Have you never felt as if you would wrap your arms around the world and bring it comfort if you could?  This you can do.  Not with physical arms, but with the arms of love.  Have you never cried for the state of the world as you would for one small child in need of love?  Has the world then not lost its thingness?  And has it not as well lost its personalness?  Are your tears not shed for what lives and breathes and exists along with you?  And is the you who sheds such tears a personal being?  A thing?  A mass of flesh and bone?  Or are you, like the world you cry for, devoid of thingness and a personal self?  And when you have leapt for joy at the world’s beauty, has it not leapt with you, returning grace for grace?

ACOL 20.19

 

SHARE YOURSELF

 

…In order to be your Self, you have to share yourself.  What you keep you lose.  This is the principle of giving and receiving that, being finally and totally understood, will free you to be wholehearted.

My dear brothers and sisters, what you truly are cannot be improved upon.  But because you are in a state of unremembering, you must relearn who you are.  You can only relearn who you are by being who you are.  You can only be who you are by sharing who you are.

ACOL 31.14, 17