We Are a Part of God

“You think your source and your Creator are two separate things, and too seldom remember even that you are not your own creator. You have made this separation based on the idea that what created you cannot be one with you. Again this only points to your lack of recognition of what creation really is.” (ACOL, C:11.2)

Here Jesus is telling us that we are One with the Creator, with God, that we are “made” of “God-stuff.” He is saying that we are not the handiwork of a God Who stands outside His creation.

This assertion is at odds with some of what we learned in traditional Christian doctrine. God was seen to be the Prime Mover, and He was seen to have reached down and made us as His handiwork. This is seeing that He made Adam from the dust of the ground.

There are many interpretations of how God might be understood in relation to creation. Certainly seeing that He is one with creation is an assertion that removes dualism from our range of responses. We are in the realm of monism in Jesus’s assertion from the passage for today. And we feel good to know that God is not over and above us, indifferent to our sufferings.

If God is One with us, then the inner Christ Self is One with Him. And so when we turn to guidance from this Self, we are really turning to God. And no longer afraid of Him, we don’t have to imagine a Holy Spirit Who intercedes for us. We are the stuff of which God is made. We are part of Him, as this blog has said over and over.

So let us realize that when we begin our day, God is beginning it right with us. We want to give a good day to God, don’t we? And we want to give a good day to ourselves. There is no difference, except that God is, in a sense, “larger” than are we.

Contemplate the vastness of Jesus’s message for today. We are meant to create like unto the Creator, but we did not create ourselves. To believe that we did create ourselves is extreme arrogance, not something that we want for ourselves now that we are moving beyond the ego.

Listen to Jesus today. There is comfort in his words.

The Kingdom of Heaven is You. What Else but You Did the Creator Create, and What Else but You Is His Kingdom?

1 – Understandable?

“It is hard to understand what ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you’ really means. This is because it is not understandable to the ego, which interprets it as if something outside is inside, and this does not mean anything. The word ‘within’ is unnecessary. The Kingdom of Heaven is you. What else but you did the Creator create, and what else but you is His Kingdom? (T60)”

2 – Not “Within You” – But “You”

Here Jesus clarifies a quotation from the New Testament: The Kingdom of Heaven is “within” you, but this becomes, in A Course of Miracles, that Kingdom of Heaven “is” you. This interpretation is theological, and we need to be careful about theology—not to let it divide us as students of ACIM. But, for those who are interested, I think that this means, essentially, that we are the body of Christ, or of God, that God does not stand outside His creation, but that the All is He. This differs from traditional Christianity, which sees all that is created as God’s handiwork, and sees God as standing apart from His creation. Here Jesus affirms, “What else but you did the Creator create, and what else but you is His Kingdom?”

3 – God Stuff

The “stuff” of the universe—the totality of all universe(s)—is thus seen to be God stuff. There are worlds upon worlds, much beyond what we can understand. But out of the void, the First Mover moved, knowing that He did not want to be alone. Joseph Campbell gives ancient myths that help to see this dynamic, metaphorically. The Void, that is God, felt fear upon realizing that He was alone. But then He said, “What do I have to fear? There is only Me.” Then he felt lonely, and so He decided to create from within His “body.” And from the undifferentiated Mass of His Body, He created the All that exists. And He is still creating.

4 – Prime Mover

This explanation is a very rudimentary form of explanation, something that we can hold to when we wonder about the Prime Mover, God Himself. It is not the truth, for our minds are too tiny to understand the truth, but metaphorically it answers some of our questions. The “you” in the following question is the One, the All, “What else did the Creator create?”

5 – Tiny, Mad Idea

So we move to the tiny, mad idea that we allowed to happen in our holy minds, the One that was the All, and then seemed to separate:

“You project onto the ego the decision to separate, and this conflicts with the love you feel for the ego because you made it. No love in this world is without this ambivalence, and since no ego has experienced love without ambivalence the concept is beyond its understanding. (T61)”

We thought that we would be controlled too much if we allowed God to direct us. We thought that All should not be One, that to express ourselves demanded diversity. And so the Whole fragmented. And the ego, part of our belief about ourselves—nothing more—separated. Even this was an illusion, for we cannot separate from our Essence, which is God. But we could think that we had, and in the thinking, God could experience with us what He is really like. We head ultimately to being Co-Creators with Him. But right now we are caught in “making,” not “creating.” For we make illusion, a dream.

6 – Love

Our loves are tainted. Our loves are not pure in this world. And the reason for this is the ego, which sees ourselves as not needing or wanting others. We try to be independent, but this is not the way of God’s creation, and so we fall on our faces repeatedly. Pain enters, for our will is no longer free. We are not listening to the Holy Spirit, Who chooses the best for us—the will that we would have if we knew what was best for us.

7 – True Want

“Love will enter immediately into any mind that truly wants it, but it must want it truly. This means that it wants it without ambivalence, and this kind of wanting is wholly without the ego’s ‘drive to get.’ (T61)”

We sometimes limit the love that we can receive by specifying that this love must come from a particular source. Such thinking usually signals that one is dealing with a special relationship, not a holy one. But the Course would purify our special relationships, rather than remove them from us by force. All special relationships are meant to become holy eventually.

8- Source of Love

We would do better if we did not specify the desired source of the love that we invite to come to us. Then the real world can deliver our desired love in any number of ways. Love is not always found in a special relationship, even in the beginning. The love of nature, for example, is a great healer in times of stress. The love we desire does not have to be always from another person.

9 – Love Is with Us

When we truly want love in our lives, it is there already. There are no exceptions to this rule, though the ego would often make us think so. God answers our prayer for love by sending into our lives the love that is ours for the asking. We do not have to plead or to struggle. We simply need to ask. And this is truly without the ego’s “drive to get.”

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

I do want love. I want love to enter my life immediately and unconditionally. I don’t want my ego to interfere.

May I drop all desires to have something that my ego dictates. May I have, instead, the love that You have promised me.

May the theology that I posted today be acceptable to some, and may others just drop it from their minds. We are not meant to divide ourselves by theology, but we are meant to enjoy a common experience. And You have pointed out that common experience in A Course in Miracles. Thank You. For this common experience is necessary, whereas a common theology is impossible for individuals with such disparate personalities.

Amen.

Body = Learning Device Given by Loving Creator

“While you have been taught that you are not your body, it is impossible for you to deny the body here.  Yet you can change the function you have ascribed to it, and so its way of functioning.  If you do not see it as the result of a fall, as a curse, as a punishment from God, or as your home, a dwelling place that keeps you separate, then you can begin to see it as what it is, a learning device given you by a loving creator.  (A Course of Love, 18.6)”

Affirmation:   “I would choose a body today that functions perfectly.”

Reflections:

1 – Do Not Deny the Body

A Course in Miracles indicates that to deny the body, even though it is illusion, is a particularly unfortunate way to react.  Here we feel its physicality, and we know when we feel well or ill, when we feel euphoria or pain.  But we can change the function that we see that it has, to catch another fish as bait (also said by the poet John Donne), and see instead that it is a tool of communication when we are in relationship one to another.  Without seeing a body, individuals would perhaps not respond so well to the help that can be given by another who is also in physical form.

2 – Elevated Self of Form

There are many negative ways that we can view the body, and some are spelled out in the passage for today.  But the best way is to see it, now, as a learning device.  As A Course of Love continues, we will see that the time of learning is said by Jesus to have ceased, and we will see that the elevated Self of form is the definition of our body.

3 – The Body Is Real in the Illusion

We need to be conscious of what we recognize as needs exemplified by the body.  When we push too hard, the body becomes overtired.  And if we keep pushing, ignoring the warning sign of pain, we will usually suffer some illness.  So, while we are here, the body is very real, even in dreams, in illusions.

4 – Temporary Dwelling Place

And we would do well not to deny that which is our temporary dwelling place.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

I would take care of my physical body today, knowing that, even though illusion, it hurts when illness invades.  And if I strike my hand against an obstacle, the physical pain is real.  So I do not deny that the physical is important to me.  Help me to treat my dwelling place gently and with respect.

Be with me today as I go out into the world and meet my brothers and sisters.  They, at least some of them, will respond only to another physical body, and they will not be frightened by me, seen in a form that is familiar.  Perhaps a vision might provide insight that I cannot provide, but visions are sometimes frightening to their recipients.  I can do much, with Your help, by just being in physicality.

Help me to know that beyond this physical body is one that is truly real, but I will not go there today.  I will be contented with living in the physical, and I will hope for the sustainability of the elevated Self of form, when You are ready for me to have that blessing.

Amen.

The Authority Problem: Who Created Us?

“You must realize it is your desire to make of yourself your own creator that has caused all your problems.  This is the authority problem.  It is pervasive in the life of your physical form and in the life of your mind.  It is only your heart that does not consider this an issue of concern.  This is another reason we appeal to the heart.  (A Course of Love, 1.11)”

Affirmation:  “Listen to my heart today.”

Reflections:

1 – Did We Make Ourselves?

We sometimes, when especially trapped by egoic thinking, believe that we made ourselves, that we are our own creator.  This is an understandable belief, because we are told in many places (especially in Jane Roberts’s Seth books) that we “create our own reality.”  We do, in all likelihood, make the world that we see.  It is a tenet of A Course in Miracles that projection makes perception.  And another tenet:  “There is no world!”

2 – We Are Never Told that We Created Ourselves

But we are not ever told that we created ourselves.  In some of our grandiosity, we may think this, and it is a major stumbling for some of us.  We think that somehow the world evolved with us ourselves somehow creating ourselves.  This could not be farther from the truth.  We may find it difficult that we could make the world of illusion, the universe of illusion, in which we live.  Traditional religion sees a guiding hand behind all of this.  But nowhere, in no religion, are we taught that we created ourselves of our own volition.  Yet we somehow believe this, sometimes.

3 – Made the World but Not Ourselves?

Do we understand this how we could make our world and not ourselves?  Of course not.  And we do not have to rely on exhortations to have “faith.”  We can simply entertain the possibility that these interpretations of illusion are accurate.  If we do accept that what we are seeing is an illusion, and a dream, then we do not have to try to make sense of everything that we see.  None of us accords much credence to the fantastical things that happen in our nighttime dreams.

4 – Are We Real?

We may even doubt, sometimes, that we are real, and instead think that we too are as illusory as the world in which we find ourselves.  But when we look out, projecting from within, we need to know that there is an invisible divinity within.  We are not in touch totally, for we are human.  But the divine is within, and we project the perceptions outwardly that we see.

5 – Our Heart Does Not Fret about These Matters

But our heart does not worry about such things.  This passage makes that clear.  And, if we disregard the body and the mind for a bit, we will see that we really don’t care to get involved in controversies that body and mind would have us seek out..  Our heart knows that love is the only true answer–that, and the forgiveness that brings us to accept our brothers and sisters, and to correct our own mistakes and thereby forgive ourselves as well.

6 – Listen to Your Heart

So let’s listen to our hearts today.  What does our heart say to do or say?  We will find ourselves easily in a forgiving spirit if we listen to our heart.

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

May I listen with my heart today.  May I rest in the understanding that You have given me (I believe) that while the world is illusory, I am not.  There is a divinity in back of all this illusion, and though this is my interpretation, not stated precisely in either A Course in Miracles or A Course of Love, this belief is one that I find comforting and palpable.  Thank You for granting to my questioning mind this level of understanding.

But, as I told You, I will listen to my heart today.  I will leave aside metaphysical interpretations that perhaps cannot be accepted by everyone who reads this blog.  May we join together in common ground that celebrates the wonders of You and this world, however difficult, in which we find ourselves.  This world’s beauty is unmistakable, and it is this in which my heart finds resonance.

Amen.