See a Grander Picture
Gloria to Mother Divine:
Dear Mother Divine, HEAVEN has a post office box, #16, a bank account, and the subscription letter is out.
Today Lauren shows me how to do data base, finds non-profit organization information on the Web, and whatever else I ask because it is Mother's Day! And I need to enter all the email addresses I have.
What else would you like to tell me, dear Mother?
Mother Divine:
I would like to talk about the word divine. What do you think it means?
Gloria:
Holy, sacred, Godly, pure.
Mother Divine:
It means blossoming from God. Divine is not a static thing. Always the blossoming factor. Divinity does not "arrive". It continues to flower.
I am like a Mother Flower that blooms and blooms, and blooms more. The lotus is in full-bloom and then turns itself inside out, as it were, and blooms again. Infinite blossoming and blooming.
No longer consider life a struggle. Consider it a blossoming. And what is blossoming but unfolding?
As you unfold, more blooms jump out.
Knowing who you are is not one finite discovery. God's children are treasure chests with — not a false bottom — but a hidden drawer. And then another.
Or, like the house you sometimes have in dreams where there is another door and another room, one after the other.
Or, like the sister princesses in fairy tales where the next one is even more beautiful than the one before.
Like a secret garden within a secret garden, within another, and to which there is no finality.
Opportunities to love are opportunities to blossom. Would you restrict yourself?
Gloria:
No.
Mother Divine:
Another way to look at divine is discovery. Discovery is away from covering up the holiness.
Within each being burns a pure flame of light. The process of life is getting to that flame. Getting to that flame is getting everything that is in the way out of the way.
So God's Will for you is to locate the pure flame within.
Other names for that flame are love, joy, peace. Oh, to shine in your own flame of God.
A steady inner candle lights you up. Let it be seen. You can see it reflected in others, and you can help others see their own.
Blossom others. There is a pure streak of light within them.
For others to get to their own, you may have to see it first.
A simple act, to see the divine in another.
Each body walks around and contains a soul. Imagine. There is a soul within each body.
See souls. Forget bodies. See souls.
This is a great simple act. It is the very gift that God gives you with His sight. It is the great simple act of God. This is what God does. And that is why your heart opens to His.
And so, do you the same to yourself. Look at the beauty within, and that is the end of selfishness.
A Course in Miracles, What Are the Characteristics of God's Teachers?:
"The surface traits of God's teachers are not at all alike. They do not look alike…they come from vastly different backgrounds; their experiences of the world vary greatly, and their superficial personalities are quite distinct. Nor, at the beginning stages of their functioning as teachers of God, have they as yet acquired the deeper characteristics that will establish them as what they are. God gives special gifts to His teachers because they have a special role in His plan for atonement. Their specialness is, of course, only temporary, set in time as a means of leading out of time. These special gifts, born in the holy relationship toward which the teaching-learning situation is geared, become characteristic of all teachers of God who have advanced in their own learning. In this respect, they are all alike … the advanced teachers of God have the following characteristics …"
Gloria:
Dear God, is HEAVEN a teacher-training course?
God:
Of course. Each reader becomes a teacher in his own right. Perhaps silent, but a teacher wherever he goes. A teacher of light. A lighter of hearts.
Gloria:
Dear God, Karen has said there are no doors or windows in the spirit world; all is known.
God:
That is how one person in a supermarket, perhaps unnoticed, waves a light around the store that each other person, unbeknownst to himself, picks up and leaves with.
That is how all the people who meditate for world peace can radiate a coherence to the far corners of the world.
If it were left to each individual to open and close his own windows and doors, there would be a lot of stuck windows and doors slamming. The conscious self knows so little.
Yes, no doors, no windows in the land of God.
Gloria:
I am thinking that wars come because people feel an itching and attach that itching to something outside them.
God:
The illusion of virtue, projection of hate, and control make the disturbance called war.
Yes, first one person itches and scratches and then another. They start to think that something outside them is causing their itch, and that the way to scratch it out is to annihilate the "other". For a while, such tactics take their minds off their self-inflicted itch, but soon or late, the itch returns to the surface because the cause was not outside.
If each could acknowledge his responsibility to himself…if the word blame had not been coined… if the discomfort could be seen as coming from within… if each could look for the heart of God…if each could see a grander picture…if each could forswear judgment…if each could foreswear his virtuousness above another's…if each could look up instead of down…
I am giving a sermon, and that is really not in my repertoire.
If the world could forego sermons…"
I will leave it at that.