Mari’s Blog
A gateway to experience
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. And, increasingly, you are willing to exchange experience for second-hand knowledge and to believe you can come to know through the experiences of others. Yet, in the case of coming to know what lies before you now—coming to know your own Self— it is obvious that another’s experience will not bring this knowledge to you, not even my experience. If this were so, all of those who read of my life and words would have learned what I learned from my experience. While many have learned much of others, this type of learning is but a starting point, a gateway to experience. C 19.15
There’s something about this time of year. I think the first time I noticed it was on July 22 in some year of the last decade. Somewhere close to mid-July the days start turning toward fall, and no matter the heat or humidity or sunshine, it is there, evident in a different quality to the light and air. This year that day is today. It has begun.
Change is all around us all the time. One of the ways we realize change is through experience.
Next month I will be in Santa Fe to be in dialogue with ACOL reader/receivers around the idea of experience. I get invited to these gatherings because of my experience and I couldn’t be more blessed to have that as the reason behind the invitations. The delight in this, for me, goes beyond sharing my own experience, and hearing of how others experience themselves newly through ACOL, but to having experience itself be the umbrella beneath which we meet. We meet to share our experiences. . . yes. But to meet in a way that we come to a new acquaintance with the value and validity of our own experience is what thrills me.
The acceptance of our uniqueness or distinction within unity opens all kinds of additional gateways. Rather than attempting to attain a “type of experience” that another has described as enlightened or awakened; rather than attempting to achieve these states by means of learned ways that are taught; you and I are guided by Jesus to follow our hearts and our inner guidance. In this way, through our own experience, each of us come to know and to share “who we are” and the new states of being that open to us.
[T]he sameness of union is not about becoming clones or one specific type of idealized holy person. Union is being fully who you are and expressing fully who you are. This is the miracle, the goal, the accomplishment that is achieved through the reign of love, the maintenance and finally the sustainability of union. D:Day5.17
I was given a book recently that I won’t share the name of (this same list could come from many, many books). It’s a fine book that uses a lot of the same language as A Course of Love in its introduction. But this language is followed by a list of how we can achieve its ends:
The tools in this book enable us to…
The emphasis here is to modernize the practices…
The methods are …
The goal is…
Learning how to…
There are guideposts and an experiential map.
These are examples of ways that have been unquestionably seen as helpful for a long time. But they aren’t the new way and we can’t get to the new by means of old:
Now, as we embrace the new together, it must be realized again and yet again, that the new cannot be learned. In other words, it must be realized that you cannot come to know the new, or to create the new, through the means of old, including the means of thought. D:9.10
Having an ambition to achieve enlightenment or elevation will actually prevent it. Many of us have realized this as we begin to experience the reversals of this Course. All those actions of “trying” have prevented our acceptance of what is given—including, often, an acceptance of our own experience!
In the Epilogue we hear:
Do not be afraid now to be who you are. Do not think you need to be something different, something other than you have been. Leave all thinking behind. Leave all notions of being better, smarter, kinder, more loving behind. Realize that these were all thoughts and notions of becoming. If you hang on to them, your being will not have the chance to realize and make real its being. You will be different, only if you allow and will yourself to realize and make real this difference. It is a difference between becoming and being. It is all the difference in the world. It is the difference between separation and differentiation in union and relationship. E.20
All of our “trying” alters the experience of what will naturally arise. No source before ACOL had ever given me this feeling of freedom, a freedom to accept all that I feel and all that I experience as the “givens” come to replace learning with love’s transformative power, the power of revelation:
The saying, “The truth shall be revealed to you” is
the same as saying “Your Self shall be revealed to you.” T1:4.22
Revelation can only be . . . experienced!
Revelation is a proper description of the mode by which the art of thought teaches and helps you learn. It is not through study, effort, or reinterpretation but through revelation. Revelation is direct communication with God in the sense that it is direct communication from a Self you have known not, the Self that is one with the Creator. T1:4.23-24
If you are interested in joining the Santa Fe Event, please see the attached flyer: http://spibr.org/Mari_at_Unity_Santa_Fe_Aug_27_2016.pdf
In Remembrance: Douwe van der Zee
The mourning and the manifestation of the new.
I learned yesterday morning that my friend Douwe van der Zee has died. (I wrote of him on May 8th. He’d come from South Africa to meet with as many from the ACOL and ACIM communities as he could, beginning with the ACIM conference in Vegas, and ending with his visit with me in Minnesota.) His death has sparked a time of such raw emotions. Unexpectedly strong feelings.
Douwe was in an accident. My friend Rose called to tell me. She’d seen it on Facebook. I called to tell other friends.
Henry (my grandson) was here when I heard the news, but I couldn’t tell him. I carried on with my day. Mom wasn’t feeling well enough for church and so we shared a meal and I did tell her. Mom responded with a whoosh of breath and an unqualified, “I’m so sorry.” (How sweet it 
seems now that Douwe and I walked with Henry. That he joined Mom and me for church and that we heard his rich voice raised in song.)
Very quickly I got the idea of finding a video I hadn’t posted—a video of our first conversation. Editing felt like something I could “do.” I was looking for something “to do.” Ironing, dusting, dishes—they often work for me in the early stages of grief. There was a feeling in the back of my head, a feeling like static or fuzz, a half formed solidity of incomprehension. Another feeling around the nose and eyes, an equal tingling. A heaviness in my chest.
Without knowing it, I was looking for “the pause.”
Douwe and I were in a shared “pause” during our time together. We were recovering from our travels, feeling a need to rest and “take it all in” on a deeper level. So much had happened with us both in the weeks since we’d met. We’d been on separate travels with A Course of Love since then, joining with others who had been affected by it.
Douwe also had not once moved in to fill a “pause” in conversation. We sat in pauses that at times made me uncomfortable. I knew I needed to sit in another uncomfortable pause.
I realized more later as I watched our dialogues, noticed how tired we were, and also the quietude we had together. That is the best word I can find now for what we shared. “Quietude.” I’d be working on my audio in the morning and he’d come in from the cabin with barely a sound. He moved as he did on the trails of Africa; such a big man, able to make himself so very quiet, so at one with his surroundings.
Without a great deal of clues that it was so, I knew that he was thrilled to have my cabin to himself. He slept on a lumpy couch and even said no to a good pillow. He was used to sleeping on the trails. He read Dark Night of the Soul by Pamela Kribbe and began to give shape to his ideas for holding retreats.
In our pause, we realized we’d landed on the same page, gotten the same message: that of “being real.”
A few days before he died, Douwe was very much with me. During that time I was backing up my computer files and came across a message I’d received from Jesus a year before that 
somehow spoke to me as needing to be shared with him. I sent it off with a few personal remarks and the final picture I’d taken of him, realizing at the last minute I hadn’t gotten one of him in the cabin.
In light of his passing, I thought it might be appropriate to share with you, this message that I shared with him:
… The length of your transition is aligned with manifestation. This is your way. You are “held” within the creative act until the manifesting is done. Is this not so?
It most certainly is.
And so, it is as it is. You are held within the creative act of forming new life. I am here to assure you that YOU ARE HELD. You are not “held up” by it. You are not stuck. You are becoming unstuck. A part of you knows this. A part of you is mourning your prison and the fellow prisoners you came to love. A part of you is rejoicing that the time of your bondage and the bondage of those you love is coming to an end. Embrace new life, as it embraces you. Know that you are doing so, even as you mourn. It is all of one piece, the mourning and the manifestation of the new. As the old is thoroughly released…that is when the new can come. No stage you pass through in this release is unnecessary.
But I am going to pass through it? I am going to get to the other side?
You are on that journey…in many ways. There is no end point to reach when you can say “Oh! Change is behind me!” No. And yet you have felt those times of “everything is different” and you have identified the necessity of the human self needing to catch up to that difference. Slow, yet continual change, formed the mountains. The “life of a mountain” is a different lifespan than the life of a human, and the mountain is a different life “form.” You are etched in a different way. The knowing that “everything is different” is a deep knowing that does not negate the truth that change is continual, that your voice is not the same morning to afternoon, that no two days look or feel exactly the same. This will all feel more like gift and less like curse—in a short while.
Yes, Mari. Have faith in something new. Feel hopeful. That is perfectly alright. Feel what you feel. But yes, begin to believe. That will help you more than anything else that I can say.
Your words are not making it so, and I so wish that they would.
My words only acknowledge that it is so. Your words will do this too. As will the work of your hands. What you are doing is feeling what you are feeling. That is the way to come to acceptance. It will come. Begin. Begin to let go. Begin to form, to dream, the new life. Begin the movement and it will carry you.
This sparked Douwe’s final communication with me, an email I received on July 7. In this last paragraph he wrote:
“The new is happening. I know it.”
Douwe is now in the New of life beyond form, but I hope we who are still in form will remember him and his beautiful vision of life in form, healed by “realness,” our acceptance of our feelings, and our connection to nature and to one another in unity. You can read of his idea of our human capacity to feel our way to the new here: http://www.douwevanderzee.co.za/
You can view the newly posted dialogue video here: https://youtu.be/_m_E1bsxMBU
If you haven’t seen the dialogues with Douwe on the Center for A Course of Love website, you can view those here: http://www.centerforacourseoflove.org/dialogue/
Below is a sampling of what Douwe shared about his experience with the ACOL community:
Realness heals. As I facilitated group process in the past, I found myself healing. As I shared on the A Course of Love Facebook site and later personally with people who had “worked” through A Course of Love, we found mutual healing happening. Healing happens through authentic sharing – not through one person healing anybody else. What we share is the unity that underlies our pain.
On the ACOL Facebook page I found that even through virtual interaction deep healing could happen. I had many healing experiences on wilderness trails. Then, on a miraculous journey in faith to the USA I actually met and shared in dialogue with many people who had done ACIM and ACOL, I experienced a joy and abundance that I had never known before. I found the whole quality of my life changing. The “kingdom of heaven” is becoming a reality.
In the reality of spirit, which ultimately is the only reality, I learnt from experience that giving and receiving are one. Not once have I not experienced healing when I apparently had a healing effect on others. This was heavily reinforced on my journey to the USA. And so my desire to give – effectively of my authentic Being – has become my passion, for the simple reason that it gives me so such joy and abundance! And what I receive, of course, cannot but be received.
Douwe with me and my grandsons
I posted anew on Facebook saying, “We have lost one of our own.” Afterwards I wondered if some wouldn’t like that expression—that human way of feeling “a loss.” But I am certain. Douwe would want you to feel all that you feel: for him, and for you.
And I’m just as certain: In the end, it is all Love.
A new freedom . . . now
Lilies as good as fireworks!
“I know everybody’s in a bad mood about the country. But the more time you spend in the hardest places, the more amazed you become. There’s some movement arising that is suspicious of consumerism but is not socialist. It’s suspicious of impersonal state systems but is not libertarian. It believes in the small moments of connection.” David Brooks, New York Times columnist.
In the U.S.A., it is the “July 4th Weekend.” Independence Day. A celebration of having broken away from tyranny and gained the freedom to start anew. Spotting this editorial in my local Pioneer Press newspaper, I was inspired by two things: labels not fitting, and moments of connection bringing hope and amazement.
With the exit of Britain from the European Union, the political and social implications of separation versus union are being widely discussed. In A Course of Love, the personal, spiritual and universal effects of separation versus union are highlighted.
We’re looking for a new freedom now and, with A Course of Love, have begun to cast aside the old labels that were used for it, as well as the means of our approach. As we come to the end of the first book of this course, there’s an implication that we’ve realized we can only “come to know” through relationship.
If you can only come to know your Self through relationship, you can only come to know God through relationship. Christ is the holy relationship that exists between all and God, providing the bridge that spans the very concept of between and provides for the connection of unity. Thus your relationship with Christ always was and always will be. Your task here is to come to know that relationship once again. C:27.8
This is why this Course has not concentrated on your thinking. Again you are bidden to turn to your heart for the truth that is hidden there yet waiting to be revealed. Your heart knows of unity and knows not any desire to be alone and separate. Your heart understands relationship as its source of being. You are not separate from your Source. C:27.12
The quote below strikes me today like the “unalienable rights” delineated in the Declaration of Independence. In A Course of Love, this “right” is the inner yearning that leads to choosing anew, and the under-standing that connection rather than isolation or alienation is integral to the choice. All are chosen. Each and all face the now or later choice, and find eventually, that the choice for knowing Self, and knowing God is the same.
The choice that lies before you now concerns what it is you would come to know. The question asked throughout this Course is if you are willing to make the choice to come to know your Self and God now. This is the same as being asked if you are willing to be the chosen of God. This is the same question that has been asked throughout the existence of time. Some have chosen to come to know themselves and God directly. Others have chosen to come to know themselves and God indirectly. These are the only two choices, the choices between truth and illusion, fear and love, unity and separation, now and later. What you must understand is that all choices will lead to knowledge of Self and God, as no choices are offered that are not such. All are chosen and so it could not be otherwise. But at the same time, it must be seen that your choice matters in time, even if all will make the same choice eventually. T4:1.11
In Day 15 of The Dialogues, Jesus says that you may enter a time of walking alone. (D:Day15.27) The manifestations of union and separation do not always take the same form. Connection allows for individuation and a union that exists without becoming a ruling body or ruling the body of humanity. Our choice isn’t concerned with one religion, or way, or country over another. Those are the external manifestations.
The choice is an inner choice, a choice for the connection that reveals the truth of who we are in unity and relationship.
Jesus asks us to turn to our hearts to find the connection that has always existed between Self and God, and then to embrace that relationship with all, as God is so clearly in each and all. Jesus tells us that in this way, each of us will find truth, love, and unity. . . . now rather than later.
Let your self be your given self
“What we casually refer to as “normal” behavior is really a state of arrested development.” Gregg Levoy, Vital Signs
For at least a month, Saturdays have been the hottest day of the week. It as if the heat builds and builds, flames out on Saturday, and starts from scratch again on Sunday. If you’ve noticed less reporting on the goings on at Mass lately, it is for this reason. Mom is too frail to be out in the heat, and so instead of going to church, I bring her dinner. (She watches Mass on TV in the morning. I admit that I do not.)
In this morning’s coolness, there are little gnatty things gnatting about. I have heard that the relative lack of mosquitos this year has been due to the early heat being followed by great cool-downs. It seems now, the natural course of the days of this season: coolness and heat.
Surrounded by extremes of change day after day and year after year, change still remains a bugaboo of our own natures. It’s as if we yearn for the unchangeable and yet when we find it in routines it begins to call us to a new cycle of change.
My focus this season, has been on the nature of the “New” that constitutes A Course of Love.
Four or five blogs back I mentioned the call to “Be a big girl now” as the start of my retreat from myself. I was lucky. I was eight at the time. My little brother had just been born. I suppose you could say that being the baby of the family for eight years, I’d been babied a lot longer than most. A “big girl” was something I did not know the mechanics of, and my mom was too busy with my little brother to help. That was, for me, when the expected “normal behavior” began to arrest my development in a big way. All of which I mention because once again, as I contemplate the New of ACOL’s message, I am barely able to divert my focus from the end of learning.
Our whole lives, from at least age eight on, have in many ways been about learning, and learning has been, in as many ways, about turning off what is natural and turning on that which will help us to fit in and to succeed at life as it is in the “real world.” As we age, this drive becomes one of achievement, with constant goals to be reached. I am certain that applying this way to our spiritual lives is actually the greatest detriment to it, and a greater challenge to us than joining mind and heart.
How do we let what we do arise without what you might call “the need” to do it in the old way, for the old reasons?
Jesus is so brilliant in giving us exercises that can help us—but not “requiring” them. He does all he can to keep us from approaching this in the old way by which we so easily can miss the New way that will actually release us from our restrictions and leave us free to be who we are at last. So I invite you to notice the drive to achieve within yourself, and to let it go!
“You are already accomplished.” T3:16.7
I invite you to remember that willingly is not the same as willfully. In striving to learn or achieve, there is an “on our way to something” attitude that is easy to live with. It’s where we’ve been all our lives: “On our way” to the time when we can live the lives we dream of. On our way to being who we are. Doing all we can to “get there.” Our drive to “get there” stands in our way of being there, and stands in our way, too often, of sharing the self we are now.
The self that you and I can be most timid about sharing is the natural one that our sisters and brothers and the world itself are waiting for—our “given” self. (Jesus speaks of the “givens” in The Dialogues, from Chapter 10 through Day 9, a compendium that you can easily access by typing +given into the ACOL search facility found here: http://www.centerforacourseoflove.org/search-phase/)
I’ve just discovered that The Given Self, a book I wrote in 2009, has gone out of print. Oh, how much more it means to me now! Isn’t that the oddest thing! I’ve barely spoken of it in the years since the book was released, but now that it is no longer available I feel it, I miss it, and I want to bring it back! I was so passionate in writing it! The passion I have now does not have that same texture, but it was a fine passion and I’m looking forward to making The Given Self available once again.
At the time, I was searching for a way to describe being who we are together (and the need of it). Here’s a snippet:
“[T]here are many, many, more centered among us than are being seen, many more meetings that could be taking place. We look into each other’s eyes and see the hint, catch the glimpse, turn the first page . . . but can’t get beyond it. “
“Drastically and recreatively, Fellowship searches friendships, burning, dissolving, ennobling, transfiguring them in Heaven’s glowing fire.”2
You might feel that such light can’t be hidden, and yet, don’t you fear that it’s hidden in you? Aren’t you almost literally dying to have your small flame become a glowing fire? To have it be seen? It’s not as if this is something you can do, like taking off your clothes and running naked, but this welcoming of the given self is akin to ceasing to hide your light beneath a bushel basket. Allowing people “in” and letting your flame “out” can be the same action.”
2 Kelly, Thomas. A Testament of Devotion
Response and responsiveness
A gift has been given. What is your response? T1:2.15
When we are young, being highly sensitive is seen as a liability. Well . . . this often doesn’t get much better as we mature! Sensitivity can be felt like something waiting to bring us down.
There was a boy in my grade school, Walter, whom I’ve wondered about from time to time. He would turn very red in the face over reasons that weren’t ever clear to me, and from time to time he would explode, as in a fit of temper. I always felt bad for him, certain he couldn’t help himself.
I thought of him this morning because I am prone to say “My sensibilities changed after A Course of Love.” My senses, you might say, were heightened. And I felt, often, about as frail and exposed as Walter. Noise began to bother me tremendously. My sensitivity to sights, sounds, touch—my sensitivity to stimulation—all were greater.
Think of the term “incoming” used for a flight of bomber pilots! There can be a feeling of being bombarded! Incoming! And so the need for “less” begins to arise.
I have thought of this, I’m guessing, due to my work recording the audio of the Treatises. There’s a lot in them about response, and response and sensibilities are surely linked. Heightened sensibilities are, in effect, a different level of responsiveness to what goes on around you and within you. This can often leave us feeling vulnerable.
When I speak of being vulnerable, a word I have associated with this susceptibility, I am at times reminded that vulnerability has to do, etymologically, and popularly, with wounds. Accepting and sharing our woundedness seems to me a sure way to both intimacy and relief—a way of transformation really. Wounds accepted and shared so readily become wisdom and strength and solace.
But today I want to speak more of sensitivity. You and I “receive” not only this Course, but begin to “receive” the world around us newly. We are aware of transmissions, impressions, messages and signs. You and I are “affected” to a greater degree than we once were. There are new influences and hosts of new feelings. We have a responsive relationship to unity and are in a responsive relationship with unity.
The idea I am trying to open to you here is the idea of a responsive relationship with unity that does not exist only within the mind of the wholehearted. It is the visible world, the outer world, through which your wants find provision. It is the world of unity, the true reality, through which your desires are responded to. This does not mean that the place of unity is a place that does not interact with the place of form. It is interacting with the world of form through you. Do you not see? You are the entry point, the only channel through which all that is available in unity can flow. D:Day 3.41-43
The Treatises offer a wonderful prelude to this new state, especially as response and responsibility are contrasted:
Response is given and thus genuine. It is a natural act of giving and receiving as one. Responsibility is a demanded response, a necessary response, an obligation. Response happens from within. Responsibility is all about dealing with an outside world. While both may result in the same or similar actions does not negate the need for the difference to be realized. Charity is a responsibility. Love is a response. See you not the difference? Can a father not be guided by responsibility and still fail to give love? Can a dancer not struggle mightily to perfect her talent without experiencing its joy? T1:4.13
In becoming more sensitive (Alert? Awake? Aware?) staying away from the idea of “responsibility,” and sticking with the idea of response and responsiveness is essential.
Unlike with the young Walter, our sensitivity doesn’t have to be a source of shame or lead to fits of temper. Sensitivity asks for a new response. It takes some “care” really. Some self-care. Some listening in. It is a gift, and our gifts have to be accommodated as well as appreciated if they’re going to enter that zone of giving and receiving as one. Recognizing our responsiveness is often a time of realizing that what comes to us from unity can’t be figured out—something that at first feels very odd indeed, and one of the reasons for the primacy given the “end of learning” in ACOL. If “figuring it out” continues to be our way, we will not sustain our new state of being.
Responsiveness dead-ends “figuring it out” as well as interpretation, and leads to true expression of who we are.
A response is not an interpretation. A response is an expression of who you are rather than of what you believe something else to be. . . . Response reveals the truth to you because it reveals the truth of you. (emphasis mine) T1:4.18
Let’s welcome all the new ways the “incoming” arrive and accept our ways of responding with care and love.
