V: The Undivided Will of the Sonship
- Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace? Dissociation is not a solution; it is a delusion. The delusional believe that truth will assail them, and they do not recognize it because they prefer the delusion. Judging truth as something they do not want they perceive their illusions which block knowledge. Help them by offering them your unified mind on their behalf, as I am offering you mine on behalf of yours. Alone we can do nothing, but together our minds fuse into something whose power is far beyond the power of its separate parts. By not being separate, the Mind of God is established in ours and as ours. This Mind is invincible because it is undivided.
- The undivided will of the Sonship is the perfect creator, being wholly in the likeness of God, Whose Will it is. You cannot be exempt from it if you are to understand what it is and what you are. By the belief that your will is separate from mine, you are exempting yourself from the Will of God which is yourself. Yet to heal is to make whole. Therefore, to heal is to unite with those who are like you, because perceiving this likeness is to recognize the Father. If your perfection is in Him and only in Him, how can you know it without recognizing Him? The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself. There is no separation of God and His creation. You will realize this when you understand that there is no separation between your will and mine. Let the love of God shine upon you by your acceptance of me. My reality is yours and His. By joining your mind with mine you are signifying your awareness that the Will of God is one.
- God’s Oneness and ours are not separate, because His Oneness encompasses ours. To join with me is to restore His power to you because we are sharing it. I offer you only the recognition of His power in you, but in that lies all truth. As we unite, we unite with Him. Glory be to the union of God and His holy Sons! All glory lies in them because they are united. The miracles we do bear witness to the Will of the Father for His Son, and to our joy in uniting with His Will for us.
- When you unite with me you are uniting without the ego, because I have renounced the ego in myself and therefore cannot unite with yours. Our union is therefore the way to renounce the ego in you. The truth in both of us is beyond the ego. Our success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I share this confidence for both of us and all of us. I bring God’s peace back to all His children because I received it of Him for us all. Nothing can prevail against our united wills because nothing can prevail against God’s.
- Would you know the Will of God for you? Ask it of me who knows it for you, and you will find it. I will deny you nothing, as God denies me nothing. Ours is simply the journey back to God Who is our home. Whenever fear intrudes anywhere along the road to peace, it is because the ego has attempted to join the journey with us and cannot do so. Sensing defeat and angered by it, the ego regards itself as rejected and becomes retaliative. You are invulnerable to its retaliation because I am with you. On this journey you have chosen me as your companion instead of the ego. Do not attempt to hold on to both, or you will try to go in different directions and will lose the way.
- The ego’s way is not mine, but it is also not yours. The Holy Spirit has one direction for all minds, and the one He taught me is yours. Let us not lose sight of His direction through illusions, for only illusions of another direction can obscure the one for which God’s Voice speaks in all of us. Never accord the ego the power to interfere with the journey. It has none because the journey is the way to what is true. Leave all illusions behind and reach beyond all attempts of the ego to hold you back. I go before you because I am beyond the ego. Reach, therefore, for my hand because you want to transcend the ego. My strength will never be wanting, and if you choose to share it you will do so. I give it willingly and gladly because I need you as much as you need me.[1]
We can not have or be peace and true joy if we have dissociated ourselves from Who is Peace and Joy. Trying to have anything else or be anything else deludes us and would have us be afraid of what we are, what we were created to be, and the very Source of all which we truly love, yearn for, and are part of forever. Still, we learn to be afraid of truth and prefer the stories we make up. And make up stories we do! We make up stories about God and tell each other of His great anger and spite toward us. We blame God for the state of the world, which is not God’s Kingdom, but our own fairy tale realm. We distort the gospel of Jesus and make it seem as if God demanded sacrifice and suffering in His righteous indignation toward His Own creation. We make up all kinds of rites and meaningless rituals to take the place of seeking and knowing God. And we go to battle against anybody who dares to question our delusions!
Jesus calls us to help the deluded by offering them the undivided mind of Christ, even as He offers His mind to us. Jesus is not a magical being that is set apart from us to worship and adore. Nor is He replaceable by another symbol. Jesus is our holy brother. He is created in the same order that we were created. He is not God; He is the personification of the Sonship. The only difference between Jesus and us is that Jesus never forgot what He was. He never split His mind between humanity and His Sonship. He always knew. And because He always knew, because Jesus never allowed his body and his ego to delude him, His mind was whole. His undivided mind gave Him the power and the glory that He offers to us.
The world inflicted upon Jesus just about everything that separated minds will do to punish those who dare to question its delusions. He was beaten, spit upon, mocked, and crowned with thorns. He was stripped of his clothing, nailed on a cross for all of His family, followers, and enemies to see. He was offered vinegar to quench His thirst and ease His pain, humiliation, and suffering. Through all of that, He did not change His mind about what He was because He knew. Because He knew that was not the end of His story. He rose again. He defeated the ego, He defeated all the ploys and devices of the ego, He stood for truth and in that undivided mind He resurrected to restore the Sonship of God.
The story of Jesus may distress us. We hate to think of what humanity did to Jesus. We can project our sorrow about this onto the Romans or the Jews, we can blame it on Judas, we can say oh that would never be us. But what happened to Jesus, happens all over the world when we project our sense of guilt, shame, and sin onto the innocent and justify our terrible revenge upon their bodies, their homes, their cities, their livelihoods. We can lie to ourselves and say, “But they are not innocent. They are evil. They are our enemies. They stand for all that is wrong, inhumane, selfish, and ignorant.” But we are all innocent Sons of God, deluded and afraid of the truth, preferring the flesh and blood miscreations of the ego over our everlasting creation in and of God.
In paragraph two of our text today, Jesus tells us that the undivided will of the Sonship creates as perfectly as God, because it is like God and it is God’s Will for the Sonship to create. None of us can be exempt from the Sonship. Jesus is not the Lone Ranger. He is not the Superhero that comes in and saves us with His supernatural skills and maneuvers and is harked by one and all. Our belief system that worships and adores Jesus yet keeps our will separate from His, thinks of ourselves as different, He the perfect; we the abject sinners, – deny that we, too, are the Will of God. We deny our healing because we deny our Sonship, for only in the wholeness of Sonship can we be healed. We can only recognize our true Selves in the Sonship. We unite with Jesus because we recognize our Selves in Him. We recognize the perfection we forgot. Through Jesus we recognize God, and remembering God is remembering our Sonship. We are not separated from God and His Creation, dear brothers, for that is the lie and entrancement of our hostage taker.
We realize this when we understand that our will and the will of Jesus is one and the same. We are not here for ourselves alone! The Love of God shines upon us when we accept Jesus, when we accept His reality as our reality, as God’s reality. We join our minds with Christ, when we get over the fear of His crucifixion, over the fear of martyrdom, of weakness, of the pansy way in which Jesus has been portrayed. We join our minds with Christ when we see past the ego’s mean lies about the cost of our salvation, about the punitory God and His call for sacrifice, suffering, and shame. When we accept Christ, we accept that we are the beloved Son of God, and that our will and the will of the Sonship are one.
To join with Christ is to restore the power and the glory of God to ourselves because we are part of the Sonship. The wholeness of God and the wholeness of us is not separate, but one. In the recognition of what we are in Christ, is all truth for as we unite with Christ we unite with God. There is no glory in any sense of separation, in estrangement, in believing that God is vengeful, volatile, or violent. Just as no healing, no acts of love, blessing, or everlasting goodwill come from denying Jesus His place in the Atonement. There is no symbol that would ever stand in the place of Christ for His very mission is to reunite the Sonship with God, to restore the minds of those who have been led astray, to show that death is not the end of our story.
Every act of love, every time we choose to forgive and forget the hurtful, wrongful deeds of another, every time we refuse to gossip or collect meaningless facts about others and instead respect and love the Sonship as we love Christ, we bear witness that we are the will of God. Christ is God’s gift to us. Without Him we are nothing, for without the mind of Christ our individual lives, our divided efforts, our hard work and our sacrifices hold no meaning.
Make no mistake. We can be good-enough people without the mind of Christ. We can refrain from lying, practice wise decision-making, respect our colleagues, give to the poor, love our family and friends, and pay our taxes but in the end, this story ends in death. We can pretend to be content with that. We can say oh well, it is what it is, and I have led a wonderful life and tried my best not to hurt anybody. You may tell this story to yourself and even come to believe it.
But we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God. We cannot change the truth about our Sonship. We are the Will of God and His Son and while we have the freedom to choose to disbelieve this for as long as we want, our Sonship does not rely upon our belief in it.
When we unite with Christ, we come without the fear and denial of this fact. We put aside all the ego’s lies, perversions, and delusions. Jesus does not unite with our egos, brothers. We cannot use Jesus to defeat our enemies or conversely, to bestow special favors for those we love. When we come to Jesus we renounce the divisiveness, disrespect, and distress of the ego because our truth is far beyond anything that would separate and dispose or oppose any particular one of us. Transcending this human tendency is guaranteed by God only when we join our minds with the mind of Christ. The simple recognition that without the mind of Christ we are nothing, restores the prodigal minds of the Sonship to the Kingdom of God where our wholeness, our happiness, our love and peace towards God and one another is certain forever.
Jesus is the Will of God for you and for me. Jesus leads us back to God where we belong, and this is God’s Will. We are not asked to sacrifice. We are not asked to martyr ourselves. We are not asked to convert those who are not ready for this journey. We are simply asked to lay down our egos, for we cannot take its lies, delusions, and oppositions with us on this journey. This journey takes us to territory dangerous to the ego and to its kingdom. No longer can this world’s lies and torments control our minds, for we have placed our trust in that which cannot be perceived with its flesh eyes or esteemed by its false values.
Jesus tells us that we may experience a sense of retaliation and rejection from the lower part of our minds and the lower minds of those who do not walk with us. Ego-based relationships in our lives will dwindle while our love-based relationships flourish. The ego will do its best to call us back to its spells; if that does not work it will try to hitch a ride on our spiritual journey. Do not let it come along! Jesus is our companion on a direction that does not align with egoistic aims and desires. Taking our egos with us, making the mistake of thinking of our ego as our little friend will only delay our journey for while Jesus does not compete for our minds nor go to battle against our egos, He has nothing to do with the ego’s nonsense and when we join our minds with Him, neither will we!
Our Holy Spirit has only one direction for our mind and for all minds. Ego on the other hand separates minds that go every which way but loose. Scattered in divided directions, we lose sight of the only real direction. The ego chatter of our lower brains attempts to drown out the Voice for God which is our real and holy Self that abides in the higher mind of Christ. Jesus cannot and does not force us to join our minds with His, but Jesus does ask us to reach for His Hand for this is our strength, this is our guidance, this is our decision to make. Turning our backs upon our lower minds and joining with Him gives us the power to overcome any interference from the ego. Joining with Him we are no longer alone; we have the power and glory of Jesus who died as a human and resurrected as the Son of God to lead our way. He did not come to earth to restore a few to the Sonship, but to restore all to the Sonship. And it is not the Sonship without you and without me!
Let us thank Him today for suffering the crucifixion to demonstrate to us that no amount of pain, suffering, and humiliation can defeat a Son of God for all power and all glory belong to Him as God’s perfect Son.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 8 The journey back. V. The undivided will of the sonship. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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