Lesson 127
There is no love but God’s.
Perhaps you think that different kinds of love are possible. Perhaps you think there is a kind of love for this, a kind for that; a way of loving one, another way of loving still another. Love is one. It has no separate parts and no degrees; no kinds nor levels, no divergencies and no distinctions. It is like itself, unchanged throughout. It never alters with a person or a circumstance. It is the Heart of God, and also of His Son.
Love’s meaning is obscure to anyone who thinks that love can change. He does not see that changing love must be impossible. And thus he thinks that he can love at times, and hate at other times. He also thinks that love can be bestowed on one, and yet remain itself although it is withheld from others. To believe these things of love is not to understand it. If it could make such distinctions, it would have to judge between the righteous and the sinner, and perceive the Son of God in separate parts.
Love cannot judge. As it is one itself, it looks on all as one. Its meaning lies in oneness. And it must elude the mind that thinks of it as partial or in part. There is no love but God’s, and all of love is His. There is no other principle that rules where love is not. Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds Them both forever as the same.
No course whose purpose is to teach you to remember what you really are could fail to emphasize that there can never be a difference in what you really are and what love is. Love’s meaning is your own, and shared by God Himself. For what you are is what He is. There is no love but His, and what He is, is everything there is. There is no limit placed upon Himself, and so are you unlimited as well.
No law the world obeys can help you grasp love’s meaning. What the world believes was made to hide love’s meaning, and to keep it dark and secret. There is not one principle the world upholds but violates the truth of what love is, and what you are as well.
Seek not within the world to find your Self. Love is not found in darkness and in death. Yet it is perfectly apparent to the eyes that see and ears that hear love’s Voice. Today we practice making free your mind of all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes that you think are part of human destiny. Today we take the largest single step this course requests in your advance towards its established goal.
If you achieve the faintest glimmering of what love means today, you have advanced in distance without measure and in time beyond the count of years to your release. Let us together, then, be glad to give some time to God today, and understand there is no better use for time than this.
For fifteen minutes twice today escape from every law in which you now believe. Open your mind and rest. The world that seems to hold you prisoner can be escaped by anyone who does not hold it dear. Withdraw all value you have placed upon its meager offerings and senseless gifts, and let the gift of God replace them all.
Call to your Father, certain that His Voice will answer. He Himself has promised this. And He Himself will place a spark of truth within your mind wherever you give up a false belief, a dark illusion of your own reality and what love means. He will shine through your idle thoughts today, and help you understand the truth of love. In loving gentleness He will abide with you, as you allow His Voice to teach love’s meaning to your clean and open mind. And He will bless the lesson with His Love.
Today the legion of the future years of waiting for salvation disappears before the timelessness of what you learn. Let us give thanks today that we are spared a future like the past. Today we leave the past behind us, nevermore to be remembered. And we raise our eyes upon a different present, where a future dawns unlike the past in every attribute.
The world in infancy is newly born. And we will watch it grow in health and strength, to shed its blessing upon all who come to learn to cast aside the world they thought was made in hate to be love’s enemy. Now are they all made free, along with us. Now are they all our brothers in God’s Love.
We will remember them throughout the day, because we cannot leave a part of us outside our love if we would know our Self. At least three times an hour think of one who makes the journey with you, and who came to learn what you must learn. And as he comes to mind, give him this message from your Self:
I bless you, brother, with the Love of God, which I would
share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that
there is no love but God’s and yours and mine and everyone’s.
Journal
“Love is one. It has no separate parts and no degrees; no kinds nor levels, no divergences and no distinctions.”
“And thus he thinks that he can love at times, and hate at other times. He also thinks that love can be bestowed on one, and yet remain itself although it is withheld from others. To believe these things of love is not to understand it.”
“Love cannot judge.”
“Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds Them both forever as the same.”
“Love’s meaning is your own, and shared by God Himself. For what you are is what He is.”
What I understand from the first part of this lesson is that God is Love and there is nothing else. If it is not Love it does not exist. The world as I see it with my eyes and experience it through this body is not love and so does not exist. I am not that. I am not here. Me and here are thoughts in my mind and only that.
What I think of as love in this dream is not love at all. How could it be? At its best it is a pale shadow of love. At its worst it would be love’s opposite if an opposite of love were possible. In this world the thing we call love is different for different people, things, and situations. It can be bestowed or withheld according to how these things are judged.
But love is not that. It does not judge, it does not vary from person to person or change in any way. It is not here but not there. Obviously, I have not truly experienced love as it exists. I love my some my children more than other children and I judge who and what is worthy of my love. Even as I begin to understand love, and even as I open my mind and heart to love, I am far from knowing love. Practicing the Loving All Method makes more and more sense as I continue these lessons.
How can it be that I don’t know love? I am love. I am love because my Creator is Love and He created me as part of Himself. So how can I be love and yet not know love. When I sit in quiet and ask to know my Self, I am asking to know Love, to know God. I can do this and will do this because I am asking for what is already mine and is me.
“Seek not within the world to find your Self. Love is not found in darkness and in death. Yet it is perfectly apparent to the eyes that see and ears that hear love’s Voice.”
Jesus says that we only need to give some time to escape from every law in which we now believe. He says I can escape from this world if I do not hold it dear. What law am I holding onto as if it is my salvation? I remember what Regina told me about my son when I was worried. She said that if I remember my Self I will know his Self and then I would not believe his choices could hurt him.
There is a thought in the mind that we have to hold onto what we fear, that we can’t let it go. Even as I surrender my son to God, I feel a frisson of fear, as if there is a law that says my worry is what protects him. That is crazy even to my ego mind. Worry is not love. I have been practicing releasing that insane law.
“Call to your Father, certain that His Voice will answer. He Himself has promised this.”
I say that I am practicing letting go of the law that says I have to worry and be afraid because every time I am certain it is done, I notice fear rising up again. But it is working because the fear is not so intense and each time it is easier to release. I call to God to replace my laws for His and His Voice does answer me. I accept the answer as I can and then I call on Him again and He answers again and I accept more.
“…we cannot leave a part of us outside our love if we would know our Self.
Since worry is not love, when I worry about my son, I am not loving him and I am not seeing him as the love that he is. How I see him is how I will see myself. As I change my mind and choose to know my son as the perfect creation he is, I will know my Self. So, it works both ways, I think. I can know my Self and so know his Self, or I can know his Self and so know my Self.
“I bless you, brother, with the Love of God, which I would share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God’s and yours and mine and everyone’s.”
Regina’s Tips
I remember the first time I read this lesson. I DID think “there is a kind of love for this, a kind for that; a way of loving one, another way of loving still another.” Back then, if a mother had told me that she loves a bug in the same way she loves her daughter, I would have either been appalled or simply unable to imagine it. But today, I am that mother.
The only reason it would be difficult to understand how a mother can love a bug in the same way she loves her daughter is because one has a misunderstanding about what love is. Don’t get me wrong. I have a more intimate relationship with my daughter, a longer-lasting relationship with my daughter, and a human-to-human relationship with my daughter. All of that is different than my relationship with a passing bug. But the love is the same.
My Thoughts
Ha ha. I was having trouble with the idea of loving other children as I loved my children and here Regina takes it to the next level. Can I love my children in the same way I love a bug? But that is the wrong way to ask the question. I love them in different ways but the love is the same. As Regina pointed out, the relationship with my child is different than the relationship with the bug. But the love is the same because all love is the same or it is not love. Again, I am reminded of the Loving All Method. Before I started that practice, I would not have thought of loving a bug and so I would have been even further from knowing love as it exists.
Regina also says this about love.
How does one describe love? Love is openness. It could be described as embracing, accepting or allowing. It is joyous or compassionate, depending on the response that is pulled forth from it by the appearance. It has no lack in it, no need. One could say it is patient, although that is simply an aspect of its openness and allowance. Judgment is an impossibility for it.
My thoughts
That is a good, succinct description and one that calls for contemplation to fully understand and accept. I am particularly drawn to the idea that love has no need in it. I have often said that neediness is not the same thing as love and until neediness is gone from a relationship, I cannot know love. When I need my son to be healthy, I am not loving him.
Past Entry
Because the world is the thought of separation, it tries to splinter even love, making it into different kinds, bestowed on some and not others, withheld where we don’t see it as deserved. If we could do this to love then we would have destroyed love because love is complete and cannot be changed or divided or withheld. It simply is.
This splintered and destroyed shadow of love that we claim as our own is not the love that is God. But love remains, unchanged and unharmed by our foolish dreams, and waits for our acceptance. We only need make a place for it in our lives and it will fill us with its light and beauty, bringing an undisturbed state of peace and joy with it.
Jesus says this: “And He Himself will place a spark of truth within your mind wherever you give up a false belief, a dark illusion of your own reality and what love means.” I will watch my thoughts closely, and those that are not love I will give up as a false belief. If I judge or withhold love or imagine that one person is more special than another, then I have tried to make of love something it is not. I will give those up as false beliefs.
I have made such a mess of the idea of love that it is hard to believe I can ever undo it. I do have special love objects, and I do judge some more worthy of love, and some, less so. But, it is not in the world of darkness that I am looking for light. Just as I have done before, I use the world to see where I need correction. To receive correction I sit with God and allow the correction to be made. I wait and God places a spark of truth in my mind wherever I have given up a false belief.
This is not at all difficult. It seems difficult only when I allow myself to become mesmerized by the story and do not look away from it. Then I start to believe it, and if I don’t choose differently I can find myself in despair, lost in the darkness and certain there is no way out. Then I remember to look away. I remember that salvation is not found in the world. I pick up the Course and read something like this lesson, or I find inspiration someplace else. At that point, I know to sit with God releasing the insane thoughts and receiving that spark of truth in its place.
We are love, and because we are love we are indivisible. As Jesus has told us over and over in all parts of the Course, we are not separate from each other except in our dreams. To end the dream and return to Reality, we must release all forms of the idea of separation. Just as there are not different degrees and types of love, there are not separate individual forms of Self.
We are one Self in God, right now, even as we dream we are different. If we keep looking at the world of form and we believe in what we see, it will be impossible to know that all these separate bodies are not real and are not representative of the truth, but only of a false idea. We must look away from the world as often as we can, and allow our minds to be corrected.
As we continue this practice, one day we will look at the illusion and know it is an illusion. We will see only Christ everywhere we look. We will not be fooled by the appearance of separate bodies. So it is with joy that I bring into mind one that has been seen as enemy and allow my mind to be healed. Jesus says this: “We will remember them throughout the day, because we cannot leave a part of us outside our love if we would know our Self.”
It is such a little thing that I am asked to do, and the reward is so great. I know just the one I want to use as I begin the practice of the day. Yesterday I spent much of the day feeling tired and weepy. I kept asking for help, asking for healing and it just didn’t come. I know that God does not fail me, so it must be my own mind in rebellion that was the problem, but obviously, I wasn’t ready to look at it.
This morning, while doing the lesson I saw what I had obscured, and it is so evident that I had to laugh. I wanted to hold onto a grievance and yet to receive the benefits of letting it go. I refused to see that it was the grievance that was causing everything else. This morning, doing this lesson, I saw in my mind an image of the one I separated out through my judgments. Then I heard that still small Voice whisper into my heart, “Let it go.”
I gladly do that now. I bless you, sister, with the Love of God, which I would share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God’s and yours and mine and everyone’s.