A Course In Miracles Lesson 84

Review of Lesson 68:  Love holds no complaints.

The mental/emotional roller coaster that occurs between people that we call love is not what love is.  What we experience between people is an energetic bartering system.  The currency we use is our displeasure.  “If you do not ______ I will be unhappy with you.”  This is not love.

The state of love only loves.  The quality of love does not have unhappiness.  Here is where the reader may shout out in righteous defense that it is wrong to suppress feelings of anger towards another.  It is wrong to force feelings of peace upon ourselves that are not naturally occurring in an effort to “love” people we feel anger towards. That is not love either.  To find a loving state does not involve strong-arming one’s self into feeling a certain way.  It does not involve lying about how we feel or pretending things do not bother us when really they do.

Today’s lesson is the foundation for really releasing what might bother us in a dynamic with someone by remembering that if I feel aggrieved, I am giving my attention to something other than what love is.  That does not mean I will immediately know how to locate better feelings.  But it will help me clarify that I am not experiencing qualities of love.

Love is an inherently passive state in the same way vision or hearing is passive.  When you open your eyes you do not need to put any effort into having objects register in your vision.  When a sound occurs, it is heard without effort.  Love is like this.  It occurs.  When you meet another, before there are any exchanges of information, there is peace between you.  Underneath the evaluations of their clothing, their level of cleanliness, and their attitude there is an effortless quality of acknowledgment and peace.  This sense of peace exists beyond the descriptors of evaluation that stream in later.  The peace in you recognizes the peace in them.

To locate what love feels like, it can sometimes be helpful to consider your response to seeing a small animal like a kitten or a puppy.  Or maybe a squirrel or a bird.  In these encounters, the mind does not have any expectations of mutual exchange.  There is only a sense of appreciation for the furry thing.  There is a strong sense of well-wishing.  If animals do not cause these feelings, there is still something in the world that does bring a sense of awe and curiosity without any expectations.  Maybe it is the wonder of plants.  Maybe it is the wonder of music or the mixing of colors. 

Everyone has something in life that brings them to a state of love without any expectations.  Expectations attack the state of wonder that is love.  If I hold an expectation toward a living being, I will eventually be disappointed because the physical world can not come through for me forever.  The physical world is not reliable.  It is a constant state of change.  This course is helping us locate that which does not change, which is a state of love.  Love does not hold grievances.  Love is as it is, there under all the changing.

Releasing people of their obligations to meet our expectations enables us to relocate the quality of curious appreciation for all the different creatures in our world.  When we hold a complaint against someone we block feelings of well-being.  Well-being is our natural state and so we block ourselves.  Releasing the demands we make on others puts us in a state of curiosity rather than expectation and tension.  We discover what unfolds rather than complain about how it did not unfold as we wished.

Today’s lesson wants us to consider the idea of grievances and all the effects it causes.  We are asked to not use our expectations of others sot block ourselves from the qualities of love that can be found within.  We are asked not to use situations of disappointment as a justification for resentment.  And we are asked to stop attacking our inherent capacity for peace by recognizing the effects of being unhappy with others.  People are as they are.  The ability to feel love towards them can not be determined by whether or not they behave in a way that pleases us.  Our ability to feel love is determined by our ability to put down our grievances with how another is.

We are not being asked today to learn how to put grievances down.  This lesson is a preliminary step asking us to first see how we hold grievances in the first place and how those complaints hold us in a pattern of unhappiness.  Just see this dynamic without feeling a need to fix it.  And not if you complain about it.  Note if you think it is asking you to impose ‘positivity’ against your will.  See if this lesson can help you glimpse the state of your mind as longing and in discontent.  What might bring peace to that discontent?  Understanding the effects of grievances is the path to follow to answer that question.