1. Idols are quite specific. But your will is universal, being limitless. And so it has no form, nor is content for its expression in the terms of form. Idols are limited. They are the belief that there are forms that will bring happiness, and that, by limiting, is all attained. It is as if you said, “I have no need of everything. This little thing I want, and it will be as everything to me.” And this must fail to satisfy because it is your will that everything be yours. Decide for idols and you ask for loss. Decide for truth and everything is yours.
2. It is not form you seek. What form can be a substitute for God the Father’s Love? What form can take the place of all the love in the Divinity of God the Son? What idol can make two of what is one? And can the limitless be limited? You do not want an idol. It is not your will to have one. It will not bestow on you the gift you seek. When you decide upon the form of what you want, you lose the understanding of its purpose. So you see your will within the idol, thus reducing it to a specific form. Yet this could never be your will, because what shares in all creation cannot be content with small ideas and little things.
3. Behind the search for every idol lies the yearning for completion. Wholeness has no form because it is unlimited. To seek a special person or a thing to add to you to make yourself complete, can only mean that you believe some form is missing. And by finding this, you will achieve completion in a form you like. This is the purpose of an idol; that you will not look beyond it, to the source of the belief that you are incomplete. Only if you had sinned could this be so. For sin is the idea you are alone and separated off from what is whole. And thus it would be necessary for the search for wholeness to be made beyond the boundaries of limits on yourself.
4. It never is the idol that you want. But what you think it offers you, you want indeed and have the right to ask for. Nor could it be possible to be denied. Your will to be complete is but God’s Will, and this is given you by being His. God knows not form. He cannot answer you in terms that have no meaning. And your will could not be satisfied with empty forms, made but to fill a gap that is not there. It is not this you want. Creation gives no separate person and no separate thing the power to complete the Son of God. What idol can be called upon to give the Son of God what he already has?
5. Completion is the function of God’s Son. He has no need to seek for it at all. Beyond all idols stands his holy will to be but what he is. For more than whole is meaningless. If there were change in him, if he could be reduced to any form and limited to what is not in him, he would not be as God created him. What idol can he need to be himself? For can he give a part of him away? What is not whole cannot make whole. But what is really asked for cannot be denied. Your will is granted. Not in any form that would content you not, but in the whole completely lovely Thought God holds of you.
6. Nothing that God knows not exists. And what He knows exists forever, changelessly. For thoughts endure as long as does the mind that thought of them. And in the Mind of God there is no ending, nor a time in which His Thoughts were absent or could suffer change. Thoughts are not born and cannot die. They share the attributes of their creator, nor have they a separate life apart from his. The thoughts you think are in your mind, as you are in the Mind Which thought of you. And so there are no separate parts in what exists within God’s Mind. It is forever one, eternally united and at peace.
7. Thoughts seem to come and go. Yet all this means is that you are sometimes aware of them, and sometimes not. An unremembered thought is born again to you when it returns to your awareness. Yet it did not die when you forgot it. It was always there, but you were unaware of it. The Thought God holds of you is perfectly unchanged by your forgetting. It will always be exactly as it was before the time when you forgot and will be just the same when you remember. And it is the same within the interval when you forgot.
8. The Thoughts of God are far beyond all change and shine forever. They await not birth. They wait for welcome and remembering. The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there. Yet still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was no time it was not there; no instant when its light grew dimmer or less perfect ever was.
9. Who knows the Father knows this light, for He is the eternal sky that holds it safe, forever lifted up and anchored sure. Its perfect purity does not depend on whether it is seen on earth or not. The sky embraces it and softly holds it in its perfect place, which is as far from earth as earth from Heaven. It is not the distance nor the time that keeps this star invisible to earth. But those who seek for idols cannot know the star is there.
10. Beyond all idols is the Thought God holds of you. Completely unaffected by the turmoil and the terror of the world, the dreams of birth and death that here are dreamed, the myriad of forms that fear can take; quite undisturbed, the Thought God holds of you remains exactly as it always was. Surrounded by a stillness so complete no sound of battle comes remotely near, it rests in certainty and perfect peace. Here is your one reality kept safe completely unaware of all the world that worships idols, and that knows not God. In perfect sureness of its changelessness and of its rest in its eternal home, the Thought God holds of you has never left the Mind of its Creator, Whom it knows as its Creator knows that it is there.
11. Where could the Thought God holds of you exist but where you are? Is your reality a thing apart from you, and in a world which your reality knows nothing? Outside you there is no eternal sky, no changeless star and no reality. The mind of Heaven’s Son in Heaven is, for there the Mind of Father and of Son joined in creation which can have no end. You have not two realities, but one. Nor can you be aware of more than one. An idol or the Thought God holds of you is your reality. Forget not, then, that idols must keep hidden what you are, not from the Mind of God, but from your own. The star shines still; the sky has never changed. But you, the holy Son of God Himself, are unaware of your reality. [1]
We come to our devotional practice because we want to know who and what we are. We have tried to find completion in the world of form, the world of birth and death cycles, the world of eating and drinking, the world of accumulating, the world that offers that which is good and that which is evil. We have come to the end of the realm of idols, the idolatry and the idolatrous. We want to know our Creator, our Father, the meaning and purpose beyond the realm of idols.
When we try to find completion in this realm, we are looking to one little part of Creation and saying, “These few things will complete me. I will not be happy or settle down until I have a million dollars, until I am happily married, until I have a baby, until I own some land or write a best seller.” We all think that if we get this, we will be satisfied, that the hungry, yearning part of us that cannot be still or happy or at peace will finally calm down and settle in and be content with growing old and eventually dying, surrounded by all that we have accumulated and accomplished. But when we decide for this, we ask for loss for we have continued asking for that which everyone else who has gone before us asked for. To every generation, the idols seem more modern, shinier, newer, and grander, but they are the same repeating cycles of those who have gone before, trying to find completion and satisfaction outside ourselves, leaving us bankrupt, bewildered, confused, and empty in the end. We hand down traditions of this lie, pretending to some great wisdom, pretending that there is a point to all the years we seem to live before we die. And we carry forward this realm where we live to please the outward eyes, the outward approval, the outward acceptance of a world that kills us off in the end. Looking to idols to complete us, we find only depletion and death.
Today Jesus tells us that we are already complete and forever. There is no striving for God’s Love for this is a given. He would not have created us to make us work and earn His Love and His devotion. We do not have to jump through hoops of any kind. We do not have to perform rites and rituals that would cleanse us from the stains of sin in a world of form and fiction. We do not chase after idols that suck up our time, money, and effort and waste us in return. In other words, we do not ask for what is already ours. Only in a world of form, separated from the whole, could we feel a need of any kind. There are no idols, no forms of any kind that could give us what we already have in Christ. To ask for idols is to ask God for what has no meaning to Him and therefore has no meaning at all.
When the memory of our Sonship stirs within us, it is a call to awaken. When you awaken, you do not have to shout and scream and be otherwise discourteous to those who still sleep content in their separate dreams of form and fiction. The desire to awaken others before you yourself are fully awakened is just another form of idolatry, of seeking without that which can only be found within. Today take time to go within to the Kingdom beyond idols, to your Holy Self that never lost its mind to dreams that would oppose the Love of God.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 30 The new beginning iii beyond all idols. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
For daily 2021 Workbook lessons, visit www.i-choose-love.com courtesy of Linda R.
Audio credit: www.eckiefriar.com.
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