Willingness is the state of wanting to awaken to truth and being mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ready to do it, even if learning must occur in the process. Willingness is the birth (the beginning) of awakening.
Let’s look more carefully at what willingness is. Let’s begin with the First Principle of God, which is pure, absolute truth. Somehow a motion evolved in the First Principle of God, which created the Second Principle of God. There are stories that try to explain this motion. NTI Romans 2 says it was an idea asking, “What if nothing was as it is?” Kabbalah teaches that the First Principle wanted to create a vessel to receive its love. That vessel is the Second Principle. A Course in Miracles simply calls it “a tiny mad idea.”
All stories are for the mind. They help it to imagine that it understands. I think we are more enlightened when we realize we do not understand, and we are perfectly okay with that. So, I think it is more truthful to say:
Somehow, a motion evolved in the First Principle of God, which created the Second Principle of God. The Second Principle of God is ‘I am’ consciousness, the first sense of self. For that reason, it is often called the Self. It is a subject without an object—the ability for ‘awareness of’ without anything to be aware of.
Therefore, the next motion that occurred was the creation of the Third Principle of God, which is a process through which objects can be created. Through the interaction of ‘I am’ consciousness with the creative principle, the Fourth Principle of God is created.
The Fourth Principle of God is consciousness appearing as something (many things) other than consciousness. In Kabbalah, there is a story about how the vessel (‘I am’ consciousness) exploded into many tiny pieces. That story points to the ego, which appears as many individual aspects of “I am,” each one seeing itself as separate and independent.
Willingness—the state of wanting to awaken to truth and being mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ready to do it—is the next motion in this process. It is a natural occurrence through which the “many” aspects of consciousness begin their return to one unity consciousness. From unity consciousness, an even stronger pull coming directly from the source calls ‘I am’ back into the First Principle of God.
If you examine this process carefully, you will see that willingness is not something that belongs to you, an individual. Willingness is a call coming from the nature of God. In that way, willingness is God, and it calls to you, because it is your time to return to the realization of Self.
What about the billions of others who do not feel the call to awaken?
Willingness lives in them too, like a dormant alarm. The gravity of the return force will eventually activate the willingness in every aspect of consciousness.
When you realize that a return is happening—it is in motion—and all will be pulled into it in their time, you realize the nature of your own call to awaken as a powerful, natural force.
Today’s reading teaches us how to cooperate with this call—with the natural return action—instead of resisting it. It likens learning to cooperate to a dance. Sometimes we step in one direction, and sometimes we step in another direction, but through the total motion of the dance, we twirl and sway our way into unity consciousness.
Note: The next tip will be available tomorrow morning after 3:50am ET at this link.