VIII. Grandeur versus Grandiosity 7-11
7. Truth and littleness are denials of each other because grandeur is truth. Truth does not vacillate; it is always true. When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something you have made. Perhaps it is the belief in littleness; perhaps it is the belief in grandiosity. Yet it must be insane because it is not true. Your grandeur will never deceive you, but your illusions always will. Illusions are deceptions. You cannot triumph, but you are exalted. And in your exalted state you seek others like you and rejoice with them.
8. It is easy to distinguish grandeur from grandiosity, because love is returned, and pride is not. Pride will not produce miracles and will therefore deprive you of the true witnesses to your reality. Truth is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to you lies in the joy you bring to its witnesses, who show it to you. They attest to your grandeur, but they cannot attest to pride because pride is not shared. God wants you to behold what He created because it is His joy.
9. Can your grandeur be arrogant when God Himself witnesses to it? And what can be real that has no witnesses? What good can come of it? And if no good can come of it the Holy Spirit cannot use it. What He cannot transform to the Will of God does not exist at all. Grandiosity is delusional because it is used to replace your grandeur. Yet what God has created cannot be replaced. God is incomplete without you because His grandeur is total, and you cannot be missing from it.
10. You are altogether irreplaceable in the Mind of God. No one else can fill your part in it, and while you leave your part of it empty your eternal place merely waits for your return. God, through His Voice, reminds you of it, and God Himself keeps your extensions safe within it. Yet you do not know them until you return to them. You cannot replace the Kingdom, and you cannot replace yourself. God, Who knows your value would not have it so, and so it is not so. Your value is in God’s Mind, and therefore not in yours alone. To accept yourself as God created you cannot be arrogance, because it is the denial of arrogance. To accept your littleness is arrogant, because it means that you believe your evaluation of yourself is truer than God’s.
11. Yet if truth is indivisible, your evaluation of yourself must be God’s. You did not establish your value and it needs no defense. Nothing can attack it nor prevail over it. It does not vary. It merely is. Ask the Holy Spirit what it is, and He will tell you, but do not be afraid of His answer, because it comes from God. It is an exalted answer because of its source, but the source is true and so is its answer. Listen and do not question what you hear, for God does not deceive. He would have you replace the ego’s belief in littleness with His Own exalted Answer to what you are, so that you can cease to question it and know it for what it is.[1]
Today in paragraph seven, Jesus reminds us that opposites cannot both be true. Our God-likeness is either true or false. God does not make us one way and then turn around and take the gift that He gave us to make us less than how we were created. If we do not think of ourselves like God, it is because we replaced His grandeur with either a sense of fear and insignificance, or we have replaced it with the ego’s substitute of grandiosity. To hold fast to our exquisite trust in the truth and power of God we seek others who have not lost their grandeur in God. We share appreciation, joy, and mutuality with them.
For though the rest of the world doubts, we know that the grandeur of God will never mislead, toy with us, send us on wild goose chases, or dangle the truth just out of our reach. It will never vacillate between elating us and depressing us. It will never punish us for our mistakes, but rather forgive, correct, and undo them. The grandeur of God does not threaten, curse, or send fire balls to punish His own creations. The law of creation is that we love and take full responsibility for what we create. Because God loves creation, He is patient, loving, and kind and gently awakens us from the deceptions of our egos. He calls to us to shake off our dreams of separation, to free us from the miscreation and accept that which is not flesh, but which is Spirit and Truth.
Illusions on the other hand will always set us against our brothers. Illusions will always have threats, curses, and damnation attached to them because otherwise who would believe in such tripe? Illusions will embarrass us – we will know in our hearts that God is not what we are being taught, but we will feel pressured into “believing” in the fearful God because of tradition, because we have been taught that this is right. No matter how little sense our belief systems make, no matter how many times it lets us down, no matter how many times it simply does not add up, illusions and lies place all the blame for the way in which it fails us upon us! The makers of such belief systems profit from guilt and shame. They delight in playing cat and mouse games with their followers. They love to dangle falsehoods, signs, omens, wonders out to baffle us and keep us going about in circles looking for God in the outer, perceptual world rather than in our hearts and minds where He never leaves us or forsakes us.
When we break free from the illusions of the world, there is no triumph involved for there was no battle. That which opposes God is a lie. That which is not true has no substance. We cannot triumph over that which has no substance, we stop believing in it. No battle, no bloodshed, no terrible plagues – we are not flesh and blood, we are Spirit. Like God. Turning away from that which is a lie, we accept our divinity, we are noble, because God is noble, and all things of God are noble.
God is not a big ego who does not share His glory, His majesty, His very Being with His Creation. Primitive concepts of God teach that God craves to be worshipped forever and ever. However, God has His Grandeur! He already knows how big and bountiful, good and blessed He is. There is absolutely no need for us to keep repeating this to Him for He does not need our flattery, He wants us rather to share in His grandeur. He did not create us to worship Him, He created us to be like Him! When we realize the truth about ourselves in God, we will be exalted, and we will exalt our brothers. We have no more worries about our brothers burning in hell or being ousted from the Kingdom just because they have a different doctrine than we do or call God by another name. Jesus as the Son of God restores to us our sanity and brings us to the truth and for this we rejoice and make happy.
Grandeur and grandiosity are as different as night and day. Grandeur is loving, joyful, and calm. Grandiosity is arrogant, afraid, and clamorous. Arrogance does not bless others, nor does, arrogance love others. Grandiosity deprives us of witnesses to our reality in God because when other people look at us and see our pride, our egotistical bluff and bluster, they do not witness love, peace, and joy which are the witnesses to our reality in God’s Kingdom.
Truth is not hidden. God does not play hide and seek with us. He does not give us clues and ciphers and expect us to run about chasing after truth. When we bring joy to others, when we show them love, when we bless them with our peace, our calm, our quietness – our brothers respond to us with joy, this is our witness. Our brothers attest to our grandeur by the joy they receive from us, the peace they receive from us, the love and trust and goodness.
Nobody can attest our arrogance because arrogance cannot be shared. If I come to you to tell you how you must believe, what books you must read to be as spiritually advanced as I am, brag to you about all the ways in which God has revealed Himself to me and drown out what you have to say because I am too full of my own self to let you get a word in edgewise – I am not sharing my arrogance with you, I am keeping it all for myself! I may think that I am so blessed, but I cast aside blessings and grace when I decided to put you beneath me and forgot that you had something to teach me. Grandiosity can only work for so long before even the ego cannot stand it anymore and will begin to attack the one that accepts this “gift,” bringing them low and filling them with shame.
Grandeur on the other hand never fills us with shame, but with a deep sense of appreciation and awe. God wants us to behold our grandeur because He created it for His Joy. There is no arrogance in grandeur because it is of God. A beautiful sunset is exalted because it shares its grandeur for all to see. So too must we accept our grandeur for it is a gift from God and to the God which is in us. We cannot hide in our closets and be filled with grandeur for ourselves alone. Grandeur is exchanged for grandiosity when it is not accepted, acknowledged, and shared.
Ego can never replace the things of God. We are incomplete without God and God is complete only with His Creation. God cannot be incomplete. We can not be missing from Him nor from His grandeur which God created and ordained, but we can think we are missing from it. We can lay it aside. We can go trotting down the road thinking we are all that and find our way without Him.
We are irreplaceable in the Mind of God and nobody can fill our spot. When we leave our spot empty, our spot merely waits for our return from a sleep in which we dream the fictional kingdom of opposites and opposition. No matter what nightmare we can fathom, no matter what happens in the illusional realm, God our Father keeps our love, peace, and joy and all the other beautiful attributes in which we created, safe within His Thoughts.
Just as the father in the story of the prodigal son kept his place for him at the table and in his heart, so does God keep us. The father awaited his son’s return in love, in faith, and in trust that his son would wake up and remember what he was and where he belonged. Never once did the father disown his son, cast out his name as evil, or come after him with vengeance and spite. The father who brought his son into the world took full responsibility for his son. His son made some mistakes, chose a wrongful path, believed that he could find his happiness in a world opposite of the place he called home – and the entire time he was gone, his father kept his spot waiting for him. The son was his father’s treasure, even as we are our Father’s treasure. The son never lost the grandeur that was his from birth, he simply misplaced it and chose a path of grandiosity that left him feeding pigs, despairing of his next meal.
Filthy, stinking, feeding pigs and despairing of his next meal, never took the truth away from the son and it will never divide the truth about us. We can think of ourselves as dirty rotten sinners; in our arrogance we can lift up the illusions of might that the world boasts about and think that God is going to fight against that which has absolutely no substance. We can blame the bombs and the terror upon God and say that He is going to avenge us for all our sins. We can take sides in the world’s name-calling, finger-pointing blame game. We can feel obligated to keep up to speed on the latest news feed – but this world is not our home. This world is not God’s Kingdom and our flesh and blood do not define us.
Truth cannot be divided and so our evaluation of ourselves must match God’s evaluation of us. God established our worth and we never need to defend God or defend our worthiness. There is absolutely no power in the world that can attack what we are in God nor triumph over it. Truth is true. I cannot be saved one day and lost the next for God does not throw away or turn His back upon His creation.
In your personal devotion today ask Holy Spirit to show you what you are in God. He will show you. Do not be afraid. Do not shrink back and say that this cannot be so. Because God loves you. He shared everything He is with you. He shares His divinity, His nobility, His grandeur. Listen and do not question what you hear, Jesus tells us. For God does not deceive.
Ask Holy Spirit to help you replace the ego’s belief in littleness and grandiosity with God’s Answer to what you are. This is who we are in God – do not question it but accept it and know it for what it is.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 9 The acceptance of the atonement. VIII Grandeur vs grandiosity. 7-11. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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