In the amazing book A Course in Miracles you get a path that shows you your little personal and separated self. It is referred to as the ego. It is separate because it does not come from love or all that is. Since it does not have love as its source, it is not true. And if it is not true, it can be likened to a dream or illusion. In A Course in Miracles we kind of shake the ego and the ego often does not like the book's message.
The book consists of a textbook with a very good basis for understanding the message, 365 lessons and a tutorial for teachers. You choose which order you want to read. The lessons or exercises are absolutely incredible! They can be challenging at times, often exhausting, but really, really wonderful. I can only say that they work!
If you haven't read the book A Course in Miracles, I encourage you to do so if it feels right to you and you long for it. A Course in Miracles is a book for the mind. I longed for something for over twenty years but I didn't know what it was until I found this book. It changed my life and it can change yours too if you want to.
The book A Course of Love came to me thirty years later and here it is the heart that comes in and plays a big role. A Course of Love is a book for the heart. Here it is described as the state of wholeheartedness, which is the union between mind and heart. This book is like a wave that washes over you and you get a gift that you know is very important even though you don't understand everything. You just know. Here you can rest, you can read the book completely without effort and without many exercises. It feels like you actually think with your heart. Here you are asked to simply "live" by the truth.
Through both of these books, I have come to a way of living, where I see life in two different ways. Partly the "ordinary" way of seeing in this world and by that I mean thoughts from the small personal, separated mind or ego. Partly a completely "new" way of looking at the world, where I see love in every person and know that I am one with that person and with all living things. Within me I feel that the ego is on the way out or as it even says in the book A Course in Love, that the ego is now gone but that old patterns may remain from the previous way of seeing. Less and less ego and more and more love. A new reality is created.
In the book A Course of Love, I read the following in the chapter "The True Self in Observable Form":
“The injunction that you resign as your own teacher originated in A Course in Miracles and was furthered here. Along with this resignation is the concept of receiving rather than planning. Your feeling that a specific role is required of you, or that you have a specific thing to do of which you need to be aware, are functions of the pattern of the planning process that once so ruled your mind. To be willing to receive instead of plan is to break the pattern of planning.”
“Receiving is not an inactive state, nor one familiar to most of you. While you cannot "work" at being receptive, and while I also do not ask you to "work" to break the pattern of planning, I do ask you to let it go and to replace it with observation.”
“Observation is the active state of reception, a state not confined to receiving, but a state of giving and receiving as one. Observation, as I am speaking of it and teaching it, makes you one with what you observe. Being one with what you observe causes you to know the proper response. It is in responding properly that you will know what to do.”
At first when I read this about letting go of planning, it didn't feel easy, because a lot in this world has to do with planning and control. But since I trust what is written, I try everything to the best of my ability. I want to emphasize once again that I trust the text and messages of both books for the reason that they have so far not once in all these years failed me or proved to be wrong. They are true and they are simply love!