Lesson 127 from A Course in Miracles which says, “There is no love but God’s,” explains the only type of true love that exists. We also cover how to utilize this love in our professional and personal lives.
The headline for this lesson says, “There is no love but God’s,” and in this article, I will provide some practical application and calls to action for implementing this lesson. The first paragraph of this lesson says, “Perhaps you think that different kinds of love are possible. Perhaps you think there is a kind of love for this, kind of love for that, a way of loving one another, way of loving still another. And yet love is one. It has no separate parts and no degrees, no kinds, nor levels, nor divergences, nor distinctions. It is like itself unchanged throughout. It never alters with a person or circumstance. It is the heart of God and also of his son.”
(I always try to disclaim the somewhat gendered language here of his son, of his child. More inclusive, the heart of God can substitute heart of spirit, heart of higher mind, whatever you'd like. We are not confused or exclusive regarding these technical terms. We want to be as inclusive as possible.)
I know a lot of people who are familiar, for instance, with distinctions that are made about love using Greek terminology. So, for instance, there's eros, which is used to refer to sexual and erotic or even romantic love, the kind of chemistry that's involved there. So the Greek word eros refers to that type of love. Then in this classification system, you can have the Greek word, I guess you say phileo, which is the word we get Philadelphia from, which is brotherly love. So this is really platonic love between people where there's great warmth and affection and caring and connection, but it's not erotic love or sexualized love. Then you've got the Greek word that represents family love, storge. So usually there's a kind of loyalty around family and blood ties that excludes other people. Inheritance systems are usually based on storge.
Finally in this Greek classification system, you've got agape, which is unconditional love and so that would be the closest thing agape to what's being referred to you. The only reason I look at that classification system is because for somebody who's mindful of that, they may be confused to hear that there are no different types of love. So right away we are thrust into this very non-dualistic world that the course is always inviting us into in A Course in Miracles.
There is this zone of non-dualism in which the only thing that's actually real is agape or perfect unconditional love. In the course of metaphysics, everything else that we experience that has divisions or variations or degrees and is not real. I always hastened to add it's not real in the sense that it's like a movie or a dream. So when you're in a dream, things feel real in a dream, and we can get lost in a movie. But compared to this non-dualistic reality that the course is always pointing to, the world of distinctions and degrees and so on, it is an illusion.
Let’s compare this lesson to the principles outlined in the Biblical story of The Prodigal Son (or Prodigal Child, to be more inclusive). I continually refer to this story because it is packed with information about love and in this case, unconditional love, as this lesson is trying to highlight. This type of love is definitely a choice. While the father makes the choice to love his son unconditionally, we see how the other two characters in that story, the mother and brother, don't make the same choice or even understand it.
Going to the next section I want to highlight, underscoring the metaphysics that the course is trying to teach, it says, “Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the father and the son, which holds them both forever as the same.”
This idea that love actually ultimately has no opposite. It's one thing, it's reality, and any opposite it appears to have, such as hate or fear is an illusion and therefore it actually doesn't exist. Now, this can seem like semantics and we're just playing mind games, but at the end of the day, it becomes really powerful. To understand this, there are technical reasons why it's important to understand that love is one thing with no opposite.
So let's look a little bit deeper at the Prodigal Child story and try to flesh this out even more. In summary, there's a father who is wealthy. He has a kingdom and two sons. The younger of the sons comes prematurely and demands his inheritance because he wants to go seek his fortune. The father pleads with him to stay because he has everything he needs in the kingdom that he's a family member in, but to no avail, the father is not able to persuade the son to stay, so he reluctantly gives him his inheritance. The son takes the inheritance, goes off into a far country, and eventually falls on hard times. He squanders his inheritance. There's a famine in the land, and it seems like the best he can do to provide him for himself is to work as a very low level assistant for a pig farmer. He even has to resort to eating the food that he's supposed to be feeding to the pigs, a sad state of affairs.
At some point, he begins to reflect on his earlier life with his father, and he decides to go back to his father's house. His intention in going back is not to have the prerogatives of a son anymore because he's already squandered his inheritance. He's already spent what was coming to him. He no longer has those rights, technically or legally. But he estimates that his father is so well off that he'll probably have work for him and he can make a better living than working for a pig farm. He goes back home, long journey, dusty, he's tattered, he's in rags, he's a pitiful sight. His father spies him from a distance, and to everyone’s surprise, the father runs to embrace him and just is beside himself with joy that his son has come back.
The father stirs up the whole household and has them launched into a party for the son, meanwhile the older brother, who's been at home this whole time faithfully working for the father, becomes upset about this and he takes the father to task and describes what the father is doing, accuses the father as being completely unfair.
This is where as we interpret the story, the idea that love is impartial comes into play, and we want to work that concept into our psychologies and into our miracle mindsets. So essentially what the father says to the older brother is that he loves both of them equally. He doesn't love the younger one any more or less than he loves the older one. The reason for the appearance of a difference is that the younger one he thought was dead but is now alive. He's come back! It's an amazing miracle. And the older brother has always had the keys to the kingdom. So he's not losing anything by the reimburse of the younger brother.
So typically on a personal level and on the professional level of my clients applying this principle, this issue emerges in very interesting ways. It's always very rewarding to work with clients around these two issues.
On the personal side, it can have to do with usually matters dealing with estates, wills and things like that. I'm not a financial adviser and this is not to be a constituent financial advice, but when you have blended families, people remarrying and things like that, you get a redistribution of wealth into new systems and there's sometimes a prenup or all kinds of conditions about how the money is going to be distributed and so on. But this lesson with the leader who's open to it can be very powerful about them taking a stand to exercise love from the agape position and treat everybody in their reconstituted family with a sort of impartial love and not have favorites as in, “This is my original family and I'm partial to them. And you are kind of the new folks are second class citizens in some kind of way.” The reason that this is important is because it actually leads to miracles somehow. Good, powerful, amazing things happen when the leader thinks this way. Now, it doesn't mean that the original family won't get a bigger financial share or that there won't be a prenup or any of that. People do all kinds of different things to ensure that the wealth goes the way they want it to. Just like in our story, the father did give the son his inheritance, and while the younger son while the older son had the whole sort of entitlement of the whole kingdom. So there can be differences in apportioning resources, but if the leader does it with them, does what they're doing with the sense of the love of God, being this uniform, consistent standard for everybody without partiality, it just leads to a better set of outcomes for that leader.
On the professional side, let's say we're dealing with a very high powered CEO and in many cases, everybody wants to be close to what I call “the throne.“ The CEO is the king or queen on the throne, and everybody wants to be “in” with the king or the queen. You may witness people jostling and jockeying in order to prove their status with the important stakeholder(s). If the leader adopts a commitment against playing favorites, and they're not going to pit people against one another, this leads to the best results. A leader of this nature will bring it to the attention of the different people who are involved in this jockeying and that's not the basis for the teamwork to be encouraged.
People are attracted to one another, both on the personal side and the professional side, because of childhood wounds. So what happens is that people then get into conflicts with leaders or sources of wealth and resources based on unresolved childhood wounds. So when we bring it to the attention of the different players in any scenario, that the dynamics of partiality that they're falling into, that the leader is resisting, are based on childhood wounds (and that even though the work isn't about therapy, we're building businesses, and we want the businesses to be successful, it's not primarily a therapeutic endeavor). So if the leader is mindful that people get into these partial arrangements or want to get into special arrangements based on childhood wounds, the agape in the situation helps people to heal. That's where the miracle breakthroughs start to come through. A leader who is not mindful of this will actually foster and encourage unhealthy competition, which is just accelerating the challenge.
The term the Course uses for these types of preferential relationships is special relationships. We want to avoid special relationships in order to avoid deifying human relationships and setting them on a kind of pedestal, which is a replacement for the divine unconditional love. So we don't want to confuse eros or phileo or storge for agape, which is a common mistake that people make. They get a hold of of some heroes and they want to make that into the divine. So what we're doing is we are, by holding a position of agape, a mindful leader will prevent people from getting stuck in special relationships based on childhood wounds and can actually heal from them and transcend into an energetically aligned place for miracles to occur.
Moving on, paragraph five says, “No law the world of days can help you grasp love's meaning. What the world believes was made to hide love's meaning and to keep it dark and secret.” This is saying that everything we see in the manifest physical world is all part of a big nightmare that we're all dreaming collectively and individually, and anything we see going on in the nightmare world is intended to seduce us into being more convinced about a world of degrees and partiality and steps and so on. What we're trying to do is wake up from that world into this non-dualistic world in which love is the only thing that exists and has any reality. So it's warning us that to get an eye out of things in the material world is to lose this power of unconditional non-partial love.
For instance, in general, if one does something wrong according to a criminal code, one will be punished by the system of the world, even to the point of taking people's lives through capital punishment all the way up. You might do six months, you might do a year, you might do 20 years, you might do five life sentences. I mean, it's unforgiving what the world can lead to that's just in terms of criminal justice, there's all kinds of other things. But in this world that we're talking about that we just looked at with regards to the prodigal son, there are no negative consequence for the son who comes back, and the older brother can't understand it. The mind wrestles with these two different sort of worlds.
In a lot of these lessons from ACIM, and particularly this one, a lot of the teachings are counterintuitive to mainstream culture. For one extreme example of radical love is whenever an atrocity has happened, some kind of personal attack, where let's say a police officer kills a young man. There are many times when the family will come out and announce, “We forgive him.” They sometimes appear on the news and say this while the world is revolting and rioting and then the family will invite people to stop the violence, especially given there is nothing that will get their family member back. Let's just show forgiveness and radical love to move into a place of peace. And that's not to say that protesting isn't effective and doesn’t serve as a necessary tool in society, but there's this kind of counterintuitive love that is actually stronger than violence, strife, animosity, and grievances that arise out of atrocious situations. Just as in the case of the prodigal child, in today's culture, those parents might be talking to their friends asking for advice on how to handle their child, and the advice that their friends would give them of how to deal with it would be so opposite of what the father actually did.
So I think it's good that the course makes this point to remind us not to get confused in thinking that the laws of and etiquettes that we have in this world are anything close to what true unconditional love looks like. Because just because the law says you can't murder, you can't rape, that doesn't mean that we have a moral ethic agape code in our worldly laws. It's entirely separate. Even though we have some aspects of the law that are morally just, it's nowhere near the type of unconditional love that we could have. And then, of course, you have to balance this out with self protection and boundary setting, while safely tapping into this power that might seem counterintuitive.
Now let’s lead into a practical exercise assigned by the course. Each of these lessons usually has an exercise. It says, “for 15 minutes, twice a day, escape from every law in which you now believe. Open your mind and rest the world that seems to hold you prisoner can be escaped by anyone who does not hold dear. Withdraw all value you have placed upon its meager offerings and senseless gifts, and let the gift of God replace them.” Paragraph twelve says, “at least three times an hour, think of one who makes the journey with you and who came to learn what you must learn. And as he or she comes to mind, give them this message from yourself. I bless you, my brother, and my sister, with the love of God, which I would share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but Gods and yours and mine and everyone's.”
Psychologically, we can extend love to such a person as a prodigal, from the position of the father. And that that actually is just really good karma. That's the bottom line of what this is saying: this practice will bless us. It has been said that if you don't forgive somebody, then you get victimized twice: firstly by what they did the first time, and then you get victimized continually by living your hatred for them. This is saying something on the positive side, we're is not only do you leave the victimization behind, but you actually create enormous freedom for your own self. Practice an act of radical, unconditional self love today, whether it be in your personal life or professional life.
