This is a time of knowing who you are and who I Am while at the same time, holding, or carrying, the mystery within you. That mystery is the tension of opposites. It is time and eternity. Love and hate. Good and evil. In other words, All and Nothing. It is the tension of individuation, a tension that has existed since the beginning of time, between time and eternity, between the attributeless love and the attribute laden being. Between the one being of love and the many beings of form, between love’s extension and form’s projection. (The Dialogues, Day39.38)

This course was written for the mind—but only to move the mind to appeal to the heart. To move it to listen. To move it to accept confusion. To move it to cease its resistance to mystery, its quest for answers, and to shift its focus to the truth and away from what can be learned only by the mind. I.1

Sunday morning. The cabin. Over the fence, the sunrise produces a bold Japanese style painting. Blue mountains, both rolling and steep, neon pink above, one strand of cloud held within the neon pink, as blue as the mountains.

Honestly, it is as if that mountainous far horizon is real. Henry (my grandson) once called the horizon – “the lake.” We would sit on the cabin stoop and he would talk about the lake over there on the other side of the freeway fence. It was not sunrise or sunset when he said this. The sky was vast and blue. I did not deny him his “lake.” Maybe the borderlands of sunrise and sunset are like that, and represent, as humans do, the truth of our state of being here. Sort of in between. Always coming and going.

The sky lightens. The mountains are gone. The glow remains.

A friend wrote me the other day, saying “The Course seems to have become your life.” He asked, “Is that so?” He said that when he met me, only a few years ago, it didn’t seem to be. I wondered. Is this so? Have I crossed another borderland of acceptance? One that says that I am not only giving my full attention to living in this dynamic and creative way that has been revealed, but that I’m willing to have it be my life, to be a voice for it? Had I been hanging out with the creative tension of that question, as I hung out with the sun’s dramatic rising? Was it coming on for a day? Or for the last 17 years?

The question sat. Then . . . I found definitions yesterday. Definitions within A Course of Love about the words used within it. So many times I’d try to find them and they’d refuse to be found. All was amorphous, like a sort of teasing or a gentle asking: How do you feel about this? What meaning does this have to you? How does this idea meet you where you are right now? The requirement: to let an idea pass through you, and not know what it was about for as long as it might take for knowing to come. The certainty that you couldn’t look up the answer. It didn’t exist apart from you.

Still, momentarily excited, I took note of these definitions. Finally! I thought. Then, by evening, without thinking about it at all, I had begun, I now see, to question. Somewhere I knew not, those definitions were at work in me, turning from answers to questions. This morning, as the sun rose, I begin to feel the tension.

C:19.15 Philosophy applies thought to mystery and that is why philosophy becomes such a muddle of words. It is difficult for you to accept that what you most need to know cannot be achieved through the same methods you have used in order to know about other things.

We don’t see the definitions until we see them. Perhaps until we’re meant to see them. Perhaps until we don’t need them anymore. There’s a reason these definitions I found (and I won’t say where) come near the end of The Dialogues. There—they confirm rather than tell.  There, they contribute—when we even see them—to what we have already discovered. Can we trust that we don’t need the definition in advance of knowing?

I may be joined with this Course so that it is not defined. As long as I live, and perhaps beyond the years of my life, I can hold the mystery, and respect each one’s right to hear this Course directly, in their way, in the uniqueness of their own joining with its giver; with the joining of the giver with their own life.

Yet the matter is broader than definitions. It runs all the way through the Course in our change of mind about who we are. With the change to our way of knowing. And it is particularly relevant to the notion of the ideal self, so thoroughly discussed in The Dialogues, and often amongst ourselves, where the quest for the ideal comes couched in many guises.  It is wonderful to be able to be a voice that can suggest that we are each the mystery that is spoken of. Each of us are called to embrace the mystery of ourselves and to embrace the mystery of our relationship with our Creator, and the givens of our creation. There is no need to compare, to give undo attention to the attitude of those who suggest that the answer is known, that there is a right way to be, a better way to be, an accomplished way to be. No one else has my life to live . . . or yours.

Can we look at one another and see the marvel in whatever creative tension we are carrying at the moment? Can we see that our turmoil is no less than another’s peace? Our peace no more than another’s tender vulnerability? Can we trust that each one is where they’re meant to be and that there is no ideal other than being one’s own Self and embracing the tension and the mystery and even the dark mystery, that allows one’s own Self to be revealed?

This is the beginning of individuation in union and relationship. This is the beginning of wholeness. What you strive for here is revelation. For only through revelation can you know all and still hold the mystery. D:Day39.5