You will never fully understand what unity means, but you will come to feel what unity means, and this I promise you. This is what we work toward in this Course, for once you have experienced the feeling of unity, you will need no understanding of it. C:13.1 (emphasis mine)

I started my morning wondering why “experience” and “feeling” are often separated into distinct categories, and if these categories have any validity. Can we experience without feeling or feel without experiencing? Has “experience” been so separated into the realm of “external” life that “inner” experience is discounted as nothing “more” than feeling and thought, and so consequently, feeling and thought are not seen as experience?

Then, as I sat, I remembered the on-line event that I will be part of this week. It is on The Return to Christ Consciousness Through A Course in Miracles & More. There’s this incredible movement taking place—a movement home to the heart, to felt experience. This event seeks to explore that. The summit provides a series of interviews. In addition to me they include Marianne Williamson, Alan Cohen, Jayem, Michael Mirdad, and James Twyman. For mine, I was just sitting at home at my dining room table, blissfully unaware of much other than being in conversation with the lovely Cindy Kubica who was interviewing me. When she called to schedule the interview we talked for an hour. We had so much in common! I don’t really recall what we spoke of in our interview. But I know that A Course of Love is a big part of the “more” that is bringing the heart back into our spiritual lives.

Having found ACIM in the midst of sharing life and death and a dawning of the spiritual dimension of life with my friends Mary Love and Julieanne Carver,* gave ACIM a particularly heartfelt relevance. It did so because ACIM suggested that its many descriptions of our way of thinking, (which described me perfectly!) were merely depictions of how we currently “think we think” … and not the way it really is or needs to be. That idea rested in me like a hope until ACOL came. Then A Course of Love began to give me more than hope.

The way ACIM told me how I was thinking and what that was doing to me—that was confirmation. Yes, this is the way I am.

ACOL told me that something real existed beyond thinking—that how I felt mattered. That was confirmation. Yes. This is the way I am.

I am a feeling being. So is Cindy. That is why we “connected” as we did and talked so easily. And somehow it seems to me that this “Is” at the heart of what’s happening now. The need for a feeling of connection, for an end to our isolation, for an end to all that divides us and a return of all that unites us. This simple form of connection we do personally, one to another, in conversation, in friendship, in kindness—these are among the ways that we experience unity in our human forms.

Unity is an experience and it is also a feeling.

Here’s something I’ve come to see. We cannot think anything into being, but experiencing knowing newly can create a new state of being—a fullness of being—and the only way we can know it is to FEEL it. And the whole deal may end up being that we’re trying too hard. We’re looking for something beyond what’s in front of us, beyond what’s right there in our “ordinary” lives, with all its opportunities to love and extend love into the world. All the opportunities to know and be known. All the opportunities to feel and experience the love that we are and the love that surrounds us.

The thinking mind can really make this all seem so complicated!

So getting back to the podcast, I am actually excited to be participating and to find out along with you (I have not previewed anything!) how this movement is being described.  If you’d like to join me, here is a link from which you can register.

Return_To_Consciousness_Affiliate_Ad_650x342_Mari_Perron2

Below are a few of my favorite “feeling” oriented and Christ-consciousness quotes, included for any new people (Welcome!) who may visit this page.

When feelings are shown, or made visible, the new is created. This has always been the way of creation. Each blade of grass, each flower, each stone, is a creation of feelings. All you need do is look about you to know that feelings of love still abound. Beauty still reigns. D:Day18.11

Allowing others to accept you as you are is a gift that releases them from judgment and any notion that may have remained within them that Christ-consciousness is a form of “group think.” Never will you feel more like an individual than when you are made known through the informing of spirit! Day 15:15.16

You embrace sadness, grief, anger, and all else that you feel because these feelings are part of who you are in the present moment. When you remain in the present moment you remain within Christ-consciousness where all that is exists in harmony. To embrace is the opposite of to escape. To hold all within yourself in the embrace of love is the opposite of holding onto what you have already responded to with fear and made separate. There is no escape for there is only the embrace. The embrace is Christ-consciousness. D:Day16.10

Realize that I love your smile, your teeth, the hair upon your head, the warm, smooth shape of your skull. Realize that I love your hands and that as you take another’s hand, you hold my own, and that I am with you as well as within you. Realize that I love all that you are, and that as you snarl in anger, cry in despair, hang your head in weariness, howl with laughter, I am with you and within you. D:Day39.43

 

*Mary, Julie and I shared our experience in The Grace Trilogy, available here: http://acourseoflove.com/other-books/