V. The Denial of God 8-14
8. Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgement of Him. When you acknowledge Him, you will know that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgement of you lies your being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His creation, from which He cannot be separated.
9. Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you are of God. Would He allow himself to suffer? And would he offer His son anything that is not acceptable to Him? If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. Yet to do this you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgement of your Father is the acknowledgement of yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.
10. You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, God is not insane. When you deny Him, you are insane. Would you have Him share your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son’s creation, fixed forever in the mind of God. That is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?
11. Out of your gifts to Him the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. His Son removed himself from His gift by refusing to accept what had been created for him, and what he had created in the Name of his Father. Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as a dwelling place of God’s Son. You are not at home anywhere else, or in any other condition. Do not deny yourself the joy that was created for you for the misery you have made for yourself. God has given you the means for undoing what you have made. Listen, and you will learn how to remember what you are.
12. If God knows His children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to perceive them as guilty. If God knows His children has wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. If God knows His children to be holy, it is blasphemous to feel depressed. All of these illusions, and the many other forms that blasphemy may take, are refusals to accept creation as it is. If God created His Son perfect, that is how you must learn to see him to learn of his reality. And as part of the Sonship, that is how you must see yourself to learn of yours.
13. Do not perceive anything God did not create, or you are denying Him. He is the only Fatherhood, and it is yours only because He has given it to you. Your gifts to yourself are meaningless, but your gifts to your creations are like His, because they are given in His Name. That is why your creations are as real as His. Yet the real Fatherhood must be acknowledged if the real Son is to be known. You believe that the sick things you have made are your real creations, because you believe that the sick images you perceive are the sons of God. Only if you accept the Fatherhood of God will you have anything, because His Fatherhood gave you everything. That is why to deny Him is to deny yourself.
14. Arrogance is the denial of love, because love shares, and arrogance withholds. As long as both appear to you to be desirable, the concept of choice, which is not of God, will remain with you. While this is not true in eternity, it is true in time, so that while time lasts in your mind there will be choices. Time itself is your choice. If you would remember eternity, you must look only on the eternal. If you allow yourself to become preoccupied with the temporal, you are living in time. As always, your choice is determined by what you value. Time and eternity cannot both be real because they contradict each other, if you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to understand eternity and make it yours.[1]
This world is incapable of healing us for it is this world which has made us sick. Our healing comes from the God of Love. Only when we accept that God is Love will we know His undying love and devotion for us, and it is in accepting this that we find our very Being. We are not sick; we cannot die for that which is created by the God of Love cannot be perverted and it cannot die.
Do not confuse yourself with things that are sick and that do die for this is the ultimate disrespect toward our Father. When we think of ourselves as flesh and blood, bone and gristle, sick and disheartened, we are looking without love on all of creation. We are accepting the perceptual world made by the lies and delusions of an insane mind bent on opposing all that is everlasting and pure.
Love does not die – it goes on forever – all things of God, and we are of God, are forever. God has no desire for us to suffer nor did He desire His Son to suffer. We must forsake all teachings that tell us that God ordained the crucifixion of Christ. God does not require bloodshed and suffering to appease Him. Christ suffered the crucifixion because His message of God’s Love seemed a rebuke to the religious orders of the day; he suffered the crucifixion to show us that even the most hideous of deaths, humiliation, and torments cannot kill God’s Son. When we devote our mind to Christ, we accept our place in the Sonship of God. We are incapable of suffering, our allegiance to the world of pain, suffering, and sorrow is over for we see it for what it is. We know who we are because we know Who our Father is. We were not created to be unholy, to suffer in any way, shape, or form, or to sacrifice our happiness and well-being. To follow a god that says otherwise is to deny God and to bring thoughts of sin, shame, and sorrow into our perceptual world.
When we misuse our minds to make hellish worlds, where we love war, we love mouth battles, we stand about and say mean things and condemn others we prolong our stint in the very worlds we make. The worlds we make may not be real in the eternal sense of the word but being trapped in such realms can certainly seem to go on forever!
We are set free of our false kingdoms when we no longer want them. God has nothing to do with what we have made to take the place of the Kingdom of God. Do not see God in the events that happen here for to give God glory for anything at all that happens in this Kingdom is to deny Who and What He is. One day you may seem to have all your prayers answered, but as long as there is one soul in the world that does not know of God’s Love, your pleasant dreams must not be mistaken for God’s favor. God does not interfere with the dreams of His Son. God does not come into our dreams and intervene on our behalf. God is not in the weather no matter how pleasant and blissful the day may be. God is not in the beauty of the moon or the beautiful face of our beloved. God is not part of this dream, for if He were part of this dream, we would have an insane God who bestows health on one and disease upon another, who creates one person whole and deforms another. It would seem as if God played tricks on us, giving first-world citizens obesity-related diseases while giving third world countries starvation-related diseases. Let us not deny God by believing that He has anything to do with this made-up kingdom! For this is insanity and God is not insane, but we are until we see the perceptual kingdom for what it is.
Our return to sanity depends upon our acceptance of who and what we really are as God’s Son. We are as God created us – Spirit and not flesh, fixed forever in the Mind of God. Outside the Mind of God there is nothing and in that nothingness we falter and lose our minds – alone and adrift in a sea of invention and devices that being made of nothing amount to nothing.
Our gift to God is accepting the laws of His Kingdom. What are the laws of His Kingdom? The acceptance of our mutuality, the laying down of our separateness, the putting away of any ideas that we can have and be more than everything there is. Just as our eyes would be useless apart from the rest of our body, so are we useless without God, for we are part of His Kingdom but not all of His Kingdom. Heaven awaits our return.
We have the means to undo all the lies that landed us in a perceptual world far from Home. We can remember our true identity. We can wake up to His Kingdom even while we live in this one:
Stop focusing on what other people are doing wrong – and know others as God knows them. It is blasphemy to perceive others as they are perceived in this world. We are to see others with the Vision of Christ – there are no ugly people, there are no disgusting people, there are no irksome people. We are not to see sickness; we are to see health. We are not to see sinners; we are to see saints. We are not to see sorrow; we are to witness joy and gladness. We will never know God as long as we look to the newsreels of this kingdom to determine what we believe and what we think because this world is a blasphemy against the Creation of God. This world is what happens to the created when they refuse Creation. Because God created you perfect, that is how I must learn to see you to learn of your reality. As part of the Sonship of God, that is how I must see myself to learn of my own reality.
Perceive anything in this world and we deny the Fatherhood of God and the fatherhood of all that we create in Him. We can try to extend love, peace, and joy to ourselves all we want but no matter how much try, our gifts are meaningless until we extend them to others. When we give to others we give in the name of God for nothing can be shared without Him.
Make no mistake that the inventions in this world are not our creations. Nor are the human forms of those we call friend and foe. In the perceptual world everything is twisted and perverted apart from its original Creation. To look upon the perceptual world as our truth and as our guide is to be misled and sadly mistaken. The truth about you and the truth about me can only be found in accepting ourselves as Sons of God, our perfection is of Spirit and of truth. We do not judge ourselves or others in the flesh but rather love one another for this is the law of the Kingdom. If we accept anything else, we have nothing and we are nothing – to deny God is to deny ourselves.
Egoism makes a mockery of love. Egoism withholds love and does not share it unless there are stipulations met. Love is commodity to the egotistical and the egotistical withhold love for they do not know what it is. God is Love and God shares of Himself. He does not withhold His Love for Love is What He is. There is no choice in this matter. To believe that there is a choice between ego and God is only a fiction that exists in time for to choose ego is to choose nothing; to choose God is to choose all things.
We can choose however to stay in time for as long as we need to remember eternity and practice looking upon and learning only the eternal. As long as we perceive this world, we are stuck in time. Time and eternity cannot both be real because they contradict one another. So when we are stuck in time, we are stuck in go-nowhere rounds of that which amounts to nothing. Lots of stuff seems to happen, but nothing really does.
As we come to the close of our text reading of Chapter 10 The Idols of Sickness, Jesus tells us that when we accept the timeless as real, will we begin to understand eternity and make it our own. This is a drastic step in the right direction and will determine our freedom from the idols of the perceptual kingdom and open our mind to the reality of the eternal Kingdom. In your personal devotions, ask Holy Spirit to help you to see beyond the perceptual kingdom to the eternal one beyond. As we determine to look upon one another with love, we see beyond our human imperfections, our personality quirks, our egotistical strutting and striving and see the glory of God in each other. Relating to the divine in each other is our salvation and our sure escape from the enchantment of the idols that pervert us and turn us against each other. Relating to the divine in each other is our gift to God for He yearns to see His Sons at peace with one another – for peace is not only an attribute of God but our escape from the perverted kingdom.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 10 The idols of sickness. V. The denial of God 8-14. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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