Editor’s Note: This time of personal and social stress is a fiery crucible in which our future experience is forged. We either choose love and compassion, or fear and separation. We are being called to “shelter in the place” to feel that which is True. The following is taken from ACOL — a “Reader’s Digest” version of chapter 20.

This is a call to move now into my embrace and let yourself be comforted. Let the tears fall and the weight of your shoulders rest upon mine. Let me cradle your head against my breast as I stroke your hair and assure you that it will be all right. This is the embrace of the universe, the all of all in which you literally exist. Feel the gentleness and the love. Drink in the safety and the rest. Close your eyes and begin to see beyond thought and words.

You are the beloved child suckled at the breast of the Queen Mother Earth. Your identity no longer stands in form, but flows from life itself. Your beauty is the gathering of the atoms, the order in chaos, the silence in solitude, the grace of the cosmos. Our one heart is the light of the world.

We live in the embrace as one body, experiencing communion, the soul’s delight, rather than in otherness. It is a seamless world.

We have returned to the embrace.

And now we begin to see with the eyes of the heart. We are no longer looking outward, but within. Within the embrace our sight clears and what we see is known rather than understood. Here, rest comes to weariness and gently lays it aside. Time has ended and there is nothing you must do. Being replaces separate identity and you say, I am. I am and there is nothing outside of me. Nothing outside of the embrace. You are cradled gently while your spirit soars. You feel the heartbeat of the world just beneath your resting head.

We are the heartbeat of the world. This is creation. This is God. This is our home.

We exist in the embrace of love like the layers of light that form a rainbow, indivisible and curved inward upon each other. Love grows within as a child grows within its mother’s womb.

Oneness prevails. The reign of Christ is at hand. In the cave on this Earth where my dead body was laid, the Christ in me returned me to the embrace. The singular heartbeat of the man Jesus no longer sounded. My heartbeat was the heartbeat of the world. All share the heartbeat of the world and are at rest within each other, within each other’s embrace and the embrace of God’s love, God’s heartbeat. God’s heartbeat is the Source of the world, existence with no beginning and no end. One embrace. All in all.

There is no longer cause for fear, for alienation, nor for the feeling of abandonment. You are now within the embrace where all such hurts are healed.

The world does not exist apart from you, and so you must realize your compassionate connection. The world is not a collection of cement buildings and paved streets nor of cold, heartless people. It is but the place of your interaction with all that lives within you, sharing the one heartbeat. The heartbeat of the world does not exist apart from God. The heartbeat of the world is thus alive and part of you.

Have you never felt as if you would wrap your arms around the world and bring it comfort if you could? This you can do. Not with physical arms, but with the arms of love.

Have you never cried for the state of the world as you would for one small child in need of love? Are your tears not shed for what lives and breathes and exists along with you? And when you have leapt for joy at the world’s beauty, has it not leapt with you, returning grace for grace? How could it exist apart from you? Oneness with Christ, dear brother and sister, is nothing more than this concept realized. And also nothing less.

Within the embrace you can quit thinking even of holy things, holy books, holy men and women, and even divine beings, even the one God. Is not the embrace itself holy? Sanctity is all that exists within the embrace. How could you be less than sacred? You exist in holiness.

To know the safety and love of the embrace is to know no cause for fear, and thus to come into your true power. True power is the power of miracles. Miracles are expressions of love.

You might think of miracles as acts of cooperation. Your expression of love is unique. It is in the cooperation between unique expressions of love that creation continues and miracles become natural occurrences. This cooperation is natural when fear has been rejected.

The universe, existing in a state of compassionate free will devoid of fear, knows what it does. There are no opposing forces that are not in agreement about their opposing force. No atoms do battle. No molecules compete for dominance. The universe is a dance of cooperation. You are but asked to rejoin the dance. The embrace has returned you to attunement with the heartbeat, the music of the dance. You have not known what you do or what to do only because of fear, only because you have been out of accord with the one heartbeat.

The world, the universe, is your partner—and only now do you hear the music that brings grace to all your movements, all your actions, all your expressions of love. While this may seem to be metaphorical language, it is not. Listen and you will hear. Hear, and you cannot help but rejoice in the dance.