This morning we’re going to talk about a sentence from the Course.
It actually comes both in the text (T-24.II.1:1) and the workbook, “Love makes no comparisons,” (W-pI.195.4:2).
Slightly different in each book but, but that’s a very important concept and this, as so many
other statements in the Course, goes right to the core of the whole theory of the Course.
You always have to recall that the underlying metaphysics of "A Course in Miracles" is that
it is non-dualistic, which is what characterizes the state of Heaven, the state of perfect
Oneness, or undifferentiated unity.
The reflection of that on earth is that we see everyone as the same, and that not so much
in terms of how our physical lives see people because, obviously, on the level of the body
we’re all very, very different.
But in terms of our reaction, we see everyone as the same because our reactions (if we are
in our right mind) would always be the same.
When you’re in your right mind it means that you’re looking at the world through
the eyes of Jesus or the vision of Christ or the perception of the Holy Spirit in which
there are—in which all of the distinctions that our eyes tell us are seen as merely superficial.The
state of love in the mind (in our right mind), which is governed by the principle of the
Atonement says that the separation never happened, which means you and I are the same.
It means God and I are the same.
Perfect Oneness doesn’t make distinctions.
Love is love and perfect Oneness is perfect Oneness.
However, when we place our minds in the service of the ego and we follow the principle of
specialness then everybody is seen as different and that’s what warrants the comparisons.
“I love you, but I don’t love you.
I love this part of you.
I don’t love that part of you.
I love you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but I do not like you on Tuesdays, Thursdays,
and Saturday, and on Sunday I can’t stand you at all;” that we always make comparisons.“I
was happy once in my life but then you came into my life and everything changed.”
Everything in this world is governed by this principle of comparisons, but love makes no
comparisons because love sees everyone as the same.
When we’re told that we should follow the judgment of the Holy Spirit, that either we
see calls for love or expressions of love, what that translates to into terms of our
everyday behavior and the way that we relate to people is if you are calling for love,
and the calls for love come in all kinds of disparate forms.
It comes in the form of being anxious, being afraid, being sick, being angry, being attacking,
of being dependent, and I translate all of that (following the Holy Spirit’s guidance)
into this is just a call for love, then being right-minded in this holy instant I could
only be loving.
You’re calling for love and the love in me calls out and meets the call for love in you.
If, on the other hand, you are expressing love (being right-minded yourself) then the
love in me simply is attracted to the love in you and love meets itself.
So either way, whether you are expressing love or calling for love, my reaction is the same,
and love makes no comparisons.
So that it doesn’t matter in terms of my reaction how you are, whether you’re in
a right-minded or wrong-minded state, I don’t compare how you are today with how you were
yesterday, how you should be tomorrow.
I simply love, and the love will take whatever form will be the most helpful.
But the key in all this is not to see differences.
When special love makes comparisons it is always differentiating and it’s judging
the differences, and judgment and attack are really synonyms; they go hand-in-hand.
You can’t judge without attacking, and if you’re attacking, obviously you’ve made
a judgment and all of this, of course, depends on the prior level of having believed the
ego’s lies of separation.So once you find yourself making comparisons, once you find
yourself choosing up sides, liking certain people but not liking other people; whenever
you like certain parts of yourself and dislike other parts of yourself you are committing—if
the Course believes in sin you'd be committing the sin, which is making the error real.
That’s what happened when we took the tiny, mad idea and remembered not to laugh and instead
took it very seriously.
“Taking it seriously” means saying that I am making a comparison: “God is one way,
and I don’t like the way He is.
He’s being perfectly—His perfect Oneness means I, as a separated individual do not exist."
So I make a comparison with how God is and I do not like it with how I want God to be
and, of course, that’s when we invent God in our own image and likeness, the Bible being
perhaps the best example of that, certainly in the Western world.
So the trick in all this, or the challenge in all this is to be aware of how we make
comparisons, and to kind of discover this as quickly as we can so that we go to the
right-minded correction and hear Jesus say to us, “Love makes no comparisons.
If you want to remain with me and you want to feel my love for you, and you want to take
my loving hand so I could walk with you out of hell back to Heaven then you must bring
everyone with you, and ‘bringing everyone with you’ means that you see everyone as
the same because love makes no comparisons.”