You were your Self before you began your learning, and the ego cannot take your Self from you but can only obscure it. (Prelude, P:43)

I started a post—one of my posts about nothing in particular—early this morning. It’s now nearly eleven o’clock p.m. and I’ve just completed my final recording of The Prelude that begins A Course of Love. Everything else had been recorded at least once, but not this. The Prelude is the lengthy and somewhat difficult opening to A Course of Love.

Everything else I’d intended to get done today fell victim to completing The Prelude. Since I’ve been doing these recordings, I’ve come to see how tenacious I am. I dig in. In fact, it’s pretty humorous, because as I started my day, I was writing about having the luxury of doing just as I please. Oh, this is a new sensation! I was puttering and getting the house tidied up precisely in preparation for my Sunday “time to myself.” Spending the whole day getting this recording done, wasn’t how I thought things would go, but it was doing exactly as I please, even if I have to admit that I did not expect it to take me so long. I could even elevate tenacious to devoted because that is true too—it’s just that the “worker bee” part of me that feels so compelled toward this work, IS at least as tenacious as my heart is devoted.

To get done is such a satisfaction! It has me pumped-up enough to want to just sit down and knock off a new post. Or maybe I’m tired enough that I’m a little more clear in that odd way that is like being punch-drunk and goofy but at the same time direct. Because The Prelude carries the clearest message possible that Jesus is speaking most particularly to those who have taken A Course in Miracles, and it’s the beginning of him being very clear about the need to leave the ego behind. In fact, I love this simple statement:

[T]he teachings you need now are to help you separate the ego from your Self. (P.43)

A paragraph earlier he asks, “Why do you seem…not to have advanced, or to have advanced only a little bit, when your willingness is mighty?” and then he answers: “Only because you have not vanquished the ego.”

A Course in Miracles spent so much time helping us to understand the workings of the ego, that to give up “working on the ego” or “vigilance of the ego” in favor of attention to a true Self, feels rather odd. But it’s clearly time. “You learn,” Jesus says, “and then you let the ego come and take all you have learned from you again and still again.”

The Prelude begins: This is a course in miracles.

It ends this way:

This time we take a direct approach, an approach that seems at first to leave behind abstract learning, and the complex mechanisms of the mind that so betray you. We take a step away from intellect, the pride of the ego, and approach this final learning through the real of the heart. This is why, to end confusion, we call this course A Course of Love.

This is what I really want to say. It’s time to leave the ego in the dust. Let’s let love do this for us. Let’s just give up and give in to love.