Accomplishment, Our own wisdom, Authenticity

Before I give you my every day examples, let me just say a word first about the overall idea of accomplishment so that I don’t give an erroneous impression. This belief is, simply put, that we’re already accomplished.

Not realizing this, and worrying over being accomplished is a problem for us. Early in A Course of Love (chapter 6) Jesus said that with peace, accomplishment is achieved in the only place where it makes any sense to desire it. With our accomplishment complete, we move on to the freedom and challenge of creation. I take this to mean that when we quit worrying or thinking about our accomplishment and feel it and believe it, we are free…and oh…then, what we can create! We’re not wasting our energy on something that’s a done deal.

Accomplishment is linked to peace. This course is about wholeheartedness: ending the divisions within ourselves, joining mind and heart “in wholeheartedness” and joining the human and divine so that we have one self. It all comes back to this. With wholeheartedness we can gain the peace that is inherent in our accomplished self.

But…we’re accomplished even when we’re about as far away from peace as we can be. That’s the paradox that we must embrace.

Now that I’ve given a bit of a broader perspective, here’s one of two ways I have seen Accomplishment at work in my life. This first one I’ll share today is about when it’s shown up in a way that I could easily see as a help. The second one, that I’ll share next, is about when it showed up in its opposite form, which I’ve seen as a hindrance.

Owning my own wisdom

Last year, when I was invited to give a talk, I was having a fine time preparing for it until I had a sudden realization. The realization was that I wasn’t owning my own wisdom.

I’d had an awareness of this for a while – probably for as long as I’ve been the receiver of this course. When I first ventured out into hosting a Course of Love group at a Unity church, the minister who inspired me to try was a woman who told me a story about owning her own wisdom. She’d felt the same way as me once upon a time – sort of tentative about it, and then she had a realization much like I’d had. After that, she practiced owning her own wisdom – or put another way, her accomplishment…by… well, practicing it in her ministry.

The realization that came to me last year was different than the earlier “awareness” that I wasn’t owning my wisdom. It was so clear that “it was time”. It was like a shift. As if I was suddenly a person who could no longer not do this – not be accomplished – or authentic.

The reason that I was no longer feeling at ease with preparing for my presentation after the realization was that I felt brand new, and too unfamiliar with my new self to be out and about trying to say anything coherent. The newness was total, as if a change had already occurred. It had happened. The realization seemed to come with a full blown agenda of its own. I couldn’t wait, couldn’t pass. It was time. I was ready and I couldn’t continue to ignore my readiness.

This is what I mean by the way things come to us in life. The talk was the call that told me I had something to say – not something derivative – but something that came of my experience, knowledge, heart, soul and that could be expressed as “my own” and in my own voice. And it coincided with the opportunity to practice it. I had to dig for my courage to do it. It wasn’t easy. But I did it. This was a life example. I accepted my accomplishment and put it into practice.

In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson tells a story of asking a man to fill in for her when she was unable to make a presentation. He said, “I can’t give a speech as good as you.” She told him, “Of course you can’t. I have had a lot more practice at it than you.”

Our practice comes in many forms.

The call to our own wisdom, and being authentic are a couple of the ways I’ve seen this belief in accomplishment show up in my life.

Next: Disclaiming – my second example

The basics of practice

I’ve said I’d like to share some from the practices of “A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition.” I’ll start with just the basics.

These are practices to cultivate wholeheartedness. They are very practical, human-centered ideas, stated as beliefs to be practiced:

"As you move into the world with the end of the time of separation and the beginning of the time of unity taking place around you, practice the beliefs that have been put forth in this treatise." 13.4

The beliefs are:

Accomplishment
Giving and Receiving as One
No Relationships are Special
No Loss but only Gain
We Only Learn in Unity
We Exist in Relationship and Unity
Correction and Atonement

What practice is:

“To practice…is to make known. Practice is the merging of the known and the unknown through experience, action, expression, and exchange. It alters the known through interaction with the unknown. It allows the continuing realization that what you knew yesterday was as nothing to what you know today, while at the same time, aiding in the realization that what you come to know has always existed within you …” (from The Dialogues, Day 15, Entering the Dialogue, p. 217)

Even though this definition of practice doesn’t emerge until near the end of The Dialogues, and even though it’s not an easily understood definition, I’m including it to suggest why, for me (as a person not prone to practices) it is so helpful. I’ve always tended to view practices as something you “do.” You sit down and meditate. You practice yoga or Qigong. When you say such things, many people will have an image of what you’re talking about, and so will you. Even with meditation and Qigong though, viewing the practice as only the hour in which you sit, meditate, or do exercises, is inaccurate. With this practice of beliefs, even such a view as the “hour of practice” doesn’t make much sense except perhaps in taking time to be attentive to them.

I’m always saying how in this course, our lives are to be our curriculum. These beliefs are to be practiced in life. Another view of practice that I like comes from The Dialogues. It’s the image of “carrying.”

“Carry,” Jesus said, “what you have been given.” Carry it like “air carries sound, as a stream carries water, as a pregnant woman carries her child.”

“What you have been given is meant to accompany you, propel you, and to be supported by you. You are not separate from what you have been given, and you do carry what you have received within you.” (p. 246)

So you can see where I couldn’t really begin without referring to these ways our practice is spoken of, even if they come later in this course.

I like particularly that what you have been given is to “be supported by you.” That really translates into support of ourselves…support or nurture as opposed to an idea of obligation or responsibility.

I guess you could say that what I’m looking to do through these practices, is get myself in a mood that supports what I’ve been given.


I’ll start next time with Accomplishment.

Deep Root Investigating (and The Practices)

As soon as I get any kind of idea of changing myself – with change basically meaning self-improvement (only phrased in a way I find more palatable), I get loaded down with negative feelings and a certain kind of focus that, believe me, does not help me change. The same is true of goals. If I get determined to accomplish something, I’m in trouble. All I do is think about it more.

Just ask my husband and kids how I act, and even worse, how I look when I get determined. I am told, “You should see your face.”

Being as I know this about myself, I lit on the idea – prevalent in AH Almaas’ Diamond Heart Series, Buddhist thought, and even Centering Prayer in a more roundabout way – of investigating what arises. If I find myself with a concern that’s weighing on me, or a feeling that seems to reach back and push buttons with memories from another time, I stay with it and investigate…but very loosely. I don’t declare myself to be investigating; I just stay with it.

I can’t say that this makes me feel good, but I will say that it brings insight, and the insight feels good. If I feel like I’m getting at the truth of the matter, I know that’s what I need. I’m seeing what I’m really dealing with.

So here’s the drill: I feel uneasy in some way…sometimes due to a particular circumstance, and sometimes for reasons that are very vague but still insistent. I investigate. You could say I feel worse, but I’m going deeply into the feeling as if pulled. I don’t feel crabby about what I’m feeling and I’m not berating myself for it, because it came up of its own and, the benefit I get for staying with it is it pulls me down where it needs to take me. I might feel all kinds of feelings – sad, or lonely, or humiliated, but I’m definitely interested. It’s like the feeling has roots and stories attached to it and what started out as a feeling caused by a spat with my husband sends me back to feelings that I had about my dad and some long buried pain that gets released for being looked at. It’s rarely an instant healing but it lets me see where the pattern originated and what it’s really about. Without seeing the origin of the pain, it is like treating the symptoms without finding the cause, and you might feel better, but only for a while, and only as long as you lean on the treatment.

I’d call this deep root investigating brutal but gentle and still, I prefer it to the self-improvement style of change.

A self-improvement idea would look like this in me: I’m going to once and for all figure out what I do wrong with men so that I never again feel this icky feeling, and so that I always keep my sense of self at the forefront. Something like that.

I’d start out crabby and remain crabby. Crabby, determined, hard, cold, already feeling wrong, and in my head. What might come out of it is new rules: I’m going to do this or that and if things don’t improve the consequences will be this or that. (My thoughts go to that sterile place often enough even without ideas of self-improvement – or maybe you could say with ideas of “others-improvement.”)

So you might ask why I’m writing of practices, and I’ll tell you the truth – I’m doing it because I’m still feeling the division between seeing the truth and living from it. I turned to these practices with the hopes that they can help me. I’m sharing them because maybe they can help you too.

The practices of A Course of Love are about coming to know the unknown, and so, right off the bat, they don’t have that disadvantage of coming at me like a self-improvement dictum. We all have our ways and this is probably the only way that might have a chance of working for me. (Our favorite spiritual messages are our favorites for a reason! They fit us!)

A Course of Love is all about wholeheartedness and I’ve been practicing wholeheartedness for over ten years. All that was said about it is in me, rattling around, messages sending me signs and clues and reminding me of who I am. The practices in the treatises are about the beliefs of this course and they’re there to lead us beyond belief to knowing. I don’t have a doubt about these basic descriptors of what it’s all about. But if I’m not living by what I know, then maybe there’s a disconnect somewhere, and this is what I turned to these practices to find.

Even as I say this, though, I want to add that I think it’s the rare person who is not working through things, basically, for a lifetime. It’s part of the beauty and challenge of being human and I truly wish spiritual texts didn’t make it sound so easy.

I believe what they’re saying is that once your motivation has moved from fear to love, you’ve done the hard part, and that’s the part that can happen really fast – even before you’ve realized it. In fact, realizing it – making real what it means to live from love instead of fear, is the basis of the rest of the course work – which is basically defined in ACOL as a life curriculum. (I would add, as a curriculum for our whole, entire lives!)

It goes something like this: Return to love. Then work out the details.

(Some of those pesky details, i.e. life practices, forthcoming.)