To have experienced only separation is to have known only half of any experience.

After I completed A Course of Love, what consumed me for a long while was a desire to understand my own experience. I don’t remember precisely when this began, and admit there may have been varying stages of it. But I’ve recently revisited some of the books that helped me explore this when it was an ardent question.

My quest then was not to understand “the book” and what it said, but my experience  of “receiving” the course. As you are each “receivers” too, I hope you can relate, because the extraordinary thing I’ve been seeing since then, is that A Course of Love simply is an experience. In some ways, we don’t know what to make of ACOL because it will not stay contained within its own pages. It moves out into our lives and moves our lives along in ways we could never have foreseen.

I’m moving into a time of adding to my experiences. New experiences await. You’ may have heard that I’ll be in Vegas for the ACIM Conference, (details of which can be found on ACOL’s website), but I’ve received an additional invitation to speak in St. Louis next month. ACIM St. Louis will hold the event March 12, from 10-4. Here’s a link to the flyer for the event: http://acimstlouis.org/sites/default/files/MariPerron2016Flyer.pdf

I am in the midst of what I’m calling my “Yes” year. I am going to give my all to some new experiences and see how they suit me. The gentleman who contacted me about St. Louis said he’d heard I was a bit of a recluse and I was secretly quite pleased. I am a bit of a recluse. What will a more active, and interactive life feel like?

I’ll report back about ten months from now!

In the meanwhile, I took a look at some of the ways the word experience, mentioned more than 500 times in ACOL, was used. Here are a few:

C:18.10 The only way to make the unbelievable believable is to alter what you experience.

T4:1.25 All have become aware that a new experience awaits and that they stand at the threshold of choice.

In Day 28 Jesus says that our time on the mountain provided “The experience required in order to realize a new possibility.”

The following quote may best describe the difference I was attempting to realize—almost as if you can’t see the new experience alone, but only in contrast to what was. We know union as a new experience because of the experience of separation that was once all we knew:

Day 31.5 To have experienced only separation is to have known only half of any experience, to have seen every experience in only one dimension—in short, to have seen experience as happening to you rather than as you. By realizing the unity of the relationship in which experience becomes manifest, you not only realize oneness, but realize that you are a creator and that you always have been.

I’ve described receiving in many ways over the years, and I know that to think of it only as receiving the words of this course would be terribly limiting.  I know that receiving is not about seeking, but being sought. It is there in thousands of ways, ways that wait for us to be receptive to what is constantly given. It is a re-connection to our givens. (To re-connect, by the way, is the original sense of meaning of the word religion.)

I bring this up partially because I want to share this stunning quote from R. D. Laing. His book The Politics of Experience was one of my sources of exploration.

“What we think is less than what we know; what we know is less than what we love: what we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are . . . .”

With the experience of A Course of Love, we are becoming “more” of what we are. Alleluia!