Lesson 174: Review: “God is but Love and therefore so am I.”  “Into His Presence would I enter now.”  “Today I learn to give as I receive.”

The Course is teaching us how to experience God.  

We learn from the words of the philosophy and then we get to a point where we no longer need words to think about and be with God.  We simply experience God.

This is the blessing of living in peace when we allow the words of God to be quieted in our minds. 

It serves a purpose to get us to the place where we understand enough that then we simply begin to feel God.

We practice through words so eventually we can throw the book away; this is one of the last lines of text in the Course’s message.

We feel God’s energy because this is Universal. 

Everyone feels energy whether they describe it using their own terms in the specific tongues or experience it silently, this does not matter.  Everyone on this planet and in the Universe as we know it are energetic beings.

This is why we are learning to transcend words.  Allow them to be trivial. 

The Course teaches us to be vigilant in choosing what words and the thinking that crosses our minds.

This is simply so we end up with an experience of gentleness and kindness and presence of mind.  We want the feeling because it is the true power of the human experience.

We find out that words are helpful in the life we are currently living because this is one of the ways we communicate on this planet.  Then we just need to allow words to exit from our minds.  What is lasting and powerful is the energetic experience we have.

The Course says we can bless words for helping us communicate to some degree, but just understand that what is important in the end is how we feel.  

Giving and receiving are meant to be gifts to ourselves.

Everything we do in life is a series of gestures of giving and receiving 

We communicate with our brothers and sisters this way here.  We are in a continual motion of engaging in these.  The Course says that giving and receiving are one in truth.

We want to appreciate them equally for being the means through which we interact with all others.

We have the opportunity to enjoy them both.  The Course wants us to understand that they are not different.  

The world claims that there is a lack in quantities and that the giver ends up with less in the bargain.  The Course says- change the way we think about this.

We want to believe that the plentifulness is unlimited in our experience as God’s children in the world. 

When we expect that the world’ s supply as infinite then we approach giving and receiving  without coming to the situation with the expectation that we will encounter lack.  If we do then we actually bring lack with us in our minds.

Then, we end up promoting lack in our experience because we carry lack energy into the situation. 

The Course teaches that we can change the situation by changing the energy we bring to the situation.

When we give and receive, we have the opportunity to understand that God’s style of giving and receiving means that it is only God’s energy we are exchanging when we give and receive.

The Course also says that no matter what physical gifts we exchange in the world, this matters not at all, what matters is the love we bring with them.

This means then that God’s Love simply increases for both the giver and receiver as we are bringing Love with us, so both people end up with more Love in the end. 

When we focus on this Love it expands within us and around us.  This is why giving and receiving are always equally blessed blessings.