A Course of Love: Combined Volume: Part 3: 40 Days and Night with Jesus. DAY 16: Paradise Re-Found through the first receiver, Perron, Mari. A Course of Love: Combined Volume. Take Heart Publications.

16.1 Everything that can’t be seen but is, is consciousness. Accepting everything that can’t be seen, including the unknown, is full consciousness. Acceptance is key. You can’t accept what you fear.

16.2 Because all that is not physical exists only in consciousness, it simply exists. It is simply “there” within consciousness. All that you “know” because you have felt it, is still there because consciousness is eternal. All that you have learned that has touched your heart is there because you felt it. All that you have thought is still there because you thought it.

16.3 What is of form comes and goes and is impermanent. What is of spirit, or consciousness, is eternal.

16.4 Sickness has been defined as rejected feelings, feelings about which consciousness was not chosen. With this rejection, these feelings became physical. What is not of consciousness is of physical form. The rejected feelings that became physical were made separate from the self and yet were maintained within the body, thus interrupting the body’s natural means of functioning. Sickness is not sickness but rejected feelings. The rejected feelings exist as separate and forgotten physical manifestations until they are willfully remembered and accepted back into the spacious Self. Rejected feelings are those for which you blame yourself. Sickness is the form of manifestation of rejected feelings. These manifestations come to you to prove to you what you think you know—that you are responsible for the sorry circumstances of your life.

16.5 Ejected feelings are projected outside of the body. These are the unwanted feelings that are blamed on others. These manifest in your interactions with the world, taking on form in the actions of others, in instances where acts of nature or accidents seem to thwart plans, or in “situations” or crises of all kinds. These manifestations also come to you to prove what you think you know—that others, or the world in general, are to blame for the sorry state of your life.

16.6 This is what is meant by no escape. No escape does not mean that anyone is bound to the past and to their former pain but that each is still bound to, and affected by, all that has been rejected or ejected. All that has been expelled is part of the wholeness of the Self. As what was ejected or rejected and became “real” is returned to the Self, the physical manifestation dissolves, because the source, which was separation, is no more. In other words, illness is no longer observable once what was rejected rejoins the spacious Self. The illness was but is no more. Because it was physical it came only to pass. Because the feeling that generated the physical manifestation was not physical to begin with—was not of the physical world—it returns to its non-physical nature within the spacious Self. Thus it was not escaped but reintegrated into the oneness of the Self.

16.7 This reintegration requires, of course, a change in what you want to prove to yourself. All you may now continue to seek proof of is that your feelings, rather than your thoughts about your feelings, reflect who you are, and that by acting on them, you will act in accord with who you are and thus in accord with the universe. Reintegration is the process through which you discover this proof, proof of the benevolence of your feelings and of the benevolence of the universe itself.

16.8 What happens when feelings of loneliness or despair, anger or grief join with the spacious Self? This joining occurs only through acceptance. Without acceptance, the separation remains along with the physical manifestation.

16.9 It is only in the present that acceptance can occur. There is no “going back” or reliving of the past required. There is also no escape, however, because in Christ-consciousness, you must become fully aware of the present. The present is the time of no time, wholeness, where all that is real and all that was ever real exists. While the physical manifestations of all that you feared and expelled were not real because they were projections rather than creations, the feelings were real because you felt them. Had you not feared and expelled them, you would have seen that they were nothing to fear.

16.10 You have no feelings that are bad. Fear is not a feeling but a response to a feeling. Emotions are responses. You have been told there are but two emotions, love and fear. What this is really saying is that there are but two ways to respond to what you feel—with love or with fear. If you respond with fear you expel, project, and separate. If you respond with love you remain whole. You realize that you have no feelings that are bad. You embrace sadness, grief, anger, and all else that you feel because these feelings are part of who you are in the present moment. When you remain in the present moment you remain within Christ-consciousness where all that is exists in harmony. To embrace is the opposite of to escape. To hold all within yourself in the embrace of love is the opposite of holding onto what you have already responded to with fear and made separate. There is no escape for there is only the embrace. The embrace is Christ-consciousness.

16.11 This relates to everything, not only your response to sickness or crisis situations, because it relates to whether or not you are able to remain in a state of constant coming to know. What you expel is what you do not want to know. What you try to control is what you do not want to know. You do not want to know every time you predetermine, in advance of knowing, what something is or will be. You predetermine, or decide, for instance, that a physical symptom is bad, and then choose to find out what is “wrong,” in which case your “decision” rather than your “feeling” is only confirmed. When you feel uneasy or uncomfortable about a situation, you determine that you already know that the situation is bad or is most likely going to be bad, and then you “think” that through your effort or control you can alter the situation for the better. Only when you accept that no feelings are bad will you allow yourself to come to know what they truly are.

16.12 When you feel an “intuition” you respond differently than you do to unwanted feelings that you are quick to want to “do something” about. If all feelings were treated more like intuition is treated—with a “knowing” that the feeling has come to tell you something that is as yet unknown to you, but nevertheless for your benefit, you would go a long way toward acceptance.

16.13 All that you predetermine you have come to know will be cause only for suffering, arrogance, and righteousness if you attempt to hold onto it as the “known” and do not remain in a constant state of coming to know. What you would hold onto is based on fear and expelled into solidity where you can keep your eyes upon what you have “formed” an opinion about. What you hold within the embrace is held in love and so exists along with you in the spacious state of constant coming to know.

16.14 Consciousness, or the spacious Self, thus includes feelings of sadness, loneliness, and anger as well as feelings of happiness, compassion, and peace. Consciousness does not, however, include your responses. Consciousness thus does not include either love or fear. This is because love is everything and fear is nothing.

16.15 Consciousness began as all feeling and all thought, all of which were of love because love is everything. All feeling and all thoughts of love extended into the paradise of creation. This was the Garden of Eden, the Self, the All of All. Unwanted feelings that you attempted to expel from the Garden of Eden were not expelled from consciousness, but from your awareness. This created the separate and the unloved in your perception, and your perception created an unreal reality of the separate and unloved, often referred to as hell or hell on earth. Love and fear existed simultaneously as did paradise and hell. This became your world, which slowly grew from a world primarily made up of paradise and love, to a world primarily made up of hell and fear because as more was expelled from paradise, more was perceived as hellish or fearful. Less of love was extended. More of fear was projected.

16.16 The expelled feelings that seemed to cause this duality still exist in consciousness. Once these expelled feelings are returned to the spacious Self and the spacious Self embraces them with love, the spacious Self will be whole, for it will embrace everything, as love—which is everything—embraces it. This is paradise re-found.

Perron, Mari. A Course of Love: Combined Volume (pp. 504-506). Take Heart Publications. Kindle Edition.