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Study of the Text, Chapter 8, VI. The Treasure of God P 9. 9-25-14

VI. The Treasure of God, P 8
8 There is no question but one you should ever ask of yourself;-“Do I want to know my Father’s Will for me?” He will not hide it. He has revealed it to me because I asked it of Him, and learned of what He had already given. Our function is to work together, because apart from each other we cannot function at all. The whole power of God’s Son lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. God would not have us be alone because He does not will to be alone. That is why He created His Son, and gave him the power to create with Him. Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, as holy as He is. Through our creations we extend our love, and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity. You do not understand this, because you who are God’s Own treasure do not regard yourself as valuable. Given this belief, you cannot understand anything.

Oh my, this is such a different vision of me than I had this morning. I had a very strong ego backlash last night and I felt anything other than God’s own treasure. This morning I had an ego hangover and that didn’t help. I didn’t waste my time trying to figure out why I felt like that. Any story I came up with would be an effect of a belief, not the cause of my reaction.

I know that I am waking up and the ego part of the mind wants to stay in the dream. That’s all that is happening, but even so, it is hard to hold onto the truth. I wasn’t going to do this work with Spirit this morning because I didn’t think I could, but of course, that is the most important time to work with Spirit, when I think I can’t.

An effect of ego resistance is often lethargy for me and I felt like going back to bed and going to sleep, but I had to get to work so I resisted. However, I felt very strongly to use a HemiSync meditation for sleep. It seemed crazy to me but I felt like I just had to do this. What happened is that as I completely relaxed and let go of everything, I opened to Spirit. I began by just saying the name of God knowing that when I do, the angels surround me.

In 30 minutes I felt to get up and was relieved to see that my mind was clear and I felt my normal happy self. It feels so comforting to know that I am not alone. When I need help, I receive it. All I have to do is open to the help. It is easier now for me to accept that I am not what I see in this world. This is an experience, not reality.

My reality is so different from this self that I am experiencing that I have to trust that what Jesus says is true. I don’t remember being holy. I don’t remember feeling like God’s holy Son. And I certainly don’t remember my creations. I don’t feel valuable. But I trust Jesus and there must be some memory in me, buried deeply, but still there. Otherwise why would I even trust that these words come from Jesus?

And yet, I do, and because I do, and because I practice what is given me to practice, I witness this incredible change as I awaken. This Course must be true because I have become a different person through doing it. Something fundamental is shifting in me and I am becoming aware of it. Maybe that is why the ego is pushing against it so hard. The part of the mind that thinks this world is a good idea must be seriously worried. It should be.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: VI. The Treasure of God, Paragraph 7 9-24-14

VI. The Treasure of God, P 7
7 An “unwilling will” does not mean anything, being a contradiction in terms that actually means nothing. When you think you are unwilling to will with God, you are not thinking. God’s Will is Thought. It cannot be contradicted by thought. God does not contradict Himself, and His Sons, who are like Him, cannot contradict themselves or Him. Yet their thought is so powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God’s Son, if they so choose. This choice does make the Son’s function unknown to him, but never to his Creator. And because it is not unknown to his Creator, it is forever knowable to him.

Here is what I understand from this paragraph. The chatter that goes on in my mind is not really thought. It is what I do instead; it is what takes the place of thought. I know it is not truly thought because it is not what I think with God. It is not His Thought. I have imprisoned my true thoughts, or have hidden from myself these thoughts, but they are not hidden from God. God knows my thoughts and so they are still available to me.

Because God’s Will is Thought, it cannot be contradicted by my made up thought. My made up thoughts can hide my real thought, but cannot change them. Because of the unchangeable nature of thought this means I cannot will apart from God. We share the same Will and nothing I imagine can change this.

I have nothing to be afraid of. I share the Thought of God and I share His Will. This is an absolute, and cannot be undone. This is true all the time, even when I am confused and try to think apart from God, even when I think I want an individual separate will. My Will and my Thought is preserved for me because that is God’s Will.

What does this mean to me right now where I think I am? I can take a deep breath and relax. I can let go of the buried fear and dread, the guilt that keeps me hiding out here in my illusion. All the generalized anxiety and the resultant projections are not necessary. There is nothing for me to fear and I am not guilty, because nothing has happened. The mind is very powerful and can project an image of nothing, and can even imprison itself in this image, but it cannot change God’s Will. I’m ok. God is not mad and I am not lost. I am safe.

I will continue to open my heart and mind to God. I will continue to look at my errors with the Holy Spirit and allow them to be undone for me. This doesn’t change, but what can change now is the uncertainty and doubt that has plagued me in the past. The idea that I can will against God’s Will and my true will is not true. My success is guaranteed. I will return to God because that is His Will.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: VI. The Treasure of God, Paragraph 6. 9-23-14

VI. The Treasure of God, P 6
6 Your function is to add to God’s treasure by creating yours. His Will to you is His Will for you. He would not withhold creation from you because His joy is in it. You cannot find joy except as God does. His joy lay in creating you, and He extends His Fatherhood to you so that you can extend yourself as He did. You do not understand this because you do not understand Him. No one who does not accept his function can understand what it is, and no one can accept his function unless he knows what he is. Creation is the Will of God. His Will created you to create. Your will was not created separate from His, and so you must will as He wills.

God created me to add to creation through creating as He does. This is joy. I can’t know my function without knowing myself. So I cannot create unless I know what I am, and thus it is that I cannot be in joy unless I know what I am. So the question, “What am I?” is a good one. It is the only question, really. Once I know what I am, everything else falls into place.

I know I am not this body living in time and space. I am not bad or even foolish. I am not lost or afraid. I am not sad, not angry, not guilty. I am not going to live and then die. I am not suffering or in pain. But what am I? I am Spirit, the holy Son of God. But what does that mean? What does that feel like? Until I know that, these are just words.

In reading the last sentence, I know that my will is the same as God’s Will. Jesus does not say that I used to share the Will of God and now I have my own separate will. He doesn’t say that someday I will share the Will of God. It says that God shares His Will with me, therefore I must will as He does. This means that what I am experiencing now, a will separate from God, must be an illusion. It can only be that I am dreaming of an individual separate will, because I share the Will of God.

This would seem to mean that I do know what I am. I have that memory, and in fact, I am living in joy, living in God, right now. I can stop dreaming any time I want. I can wake up to my true existence, my memory fully restored, because it never went anywhere. If I have amnesia, it is only because I chose to forget, and therefore, I can choose to remember. And how could it be hard when reality has not been suspended while I dream; I am as I always have been.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: VI. The Treasure of God, Paragraph 5. 9-22-14

VI. The Treasure of God, P 5
5 God wants only His Son because His Son is His only treasure. You want your creations as He wants His. Your creations are your gift to the Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for your creation. They do not leave you any more than you left your Creator, but they extend your creation as God extended Himself to you. Can the creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? And what is real except the creations of God and those that are created like His? Your creations love you as you love your Father for the gift of creation. There is no other gift that is eternal, and therefore there is no other gift that is true. How, then, can you accept anything else or give anything else, and expect joy in return? And what else but joy would you want? You made neither yourself nor your function. You made only the decision to be unworthy of both. Yet you cannot make yourself unworthy because you are the treasure of God, and what He values is valuable. There can be no question of its worth, because its value lies in God’s sharing Himself with it and establishing its value forever.

I don’t know what to say about this. I have creations as does God. They are true creations, that is, they are created as God creates. I long to remember my creations. I also realize that those times when I didn’t feel loved were just an illusion of not feeling loved. My Creator loves me and so do my creations. This love never ends, never changes and is always present. I don’t feel that love because I have chosen to feel something else in its place.

I have convinced myself I would rather keep the drama of the separation idea and that this drama is what I want. But it is not what I want. I want love and peace and joy. This is my true desire. Everything else I think I want is just part of the general confusion I am experiencing because of my choice to identify with what I am not.

The solution to this problem is simple. I notice the times when I think I want something other than God, and I ask that my mind be healed. In this way I lift the veil of confusion and the truth is revealed to me. This morning I felt weepy for no reason I can articulate. I can find a story to explain it, but what would be the point? The story is the effect of the problem, not the problem itself.

At first it was making me crazy and that is because I kept asking the ego mind for an answer and a solution. The ego says it is just a reaction, the pendulum swinging from the excitement and the joy of this weekend, being with others for the purpose of healing. The ego says that I miss my kids and need to visit them. It says that this weekend was fun and that I like having the day off and don’t want to go back to work and that is the problem. But I know that these are just stories I make up to explain something I don’t want responsibility for.

Finally, I just stopped fighting it. I accepted that I feel weepy and that I am willing to feel what I feel without inventing a story to explain it. I remembered that my feelings don’t hurt me. If I am suffering it is because I am at war with myself. I asked the Holy Spirit to heal my mind, and then let myself feel what I feel. The feeling disappeared. Haha. I stopped fighting it and it disappeared. There is a really good lesson in that experience.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8,VII. The Treasure of God, P 4.9-19-14

VI. The Treasure of God
4 Listen to the story of the prodigal son, and learn what God’s treasure is and yours: This son of a loving father left his home and thought he had squandered everything for nothing of any value, although he had not understood its worthlessness at the time. He was ashamed to return to his father, because he thought he had hurt him. Yet when he came home the father welcomed him with joy, because the son himself was his father’s treasure. He wanted nothing else.

Of course his Father welcomes him home! I would welcome my child regardless of what he had done, and I barely know anything about love. My Father, Who is Love, certainly does as well as I. Here is a difference though; I love my children in spite of their mistakes, and my Father sees no mistakes. He sees only his perfect creations acting from their perfect freedom. There is that difference because I sometimes still see with the ego mind that believes in sin.

God does not wait for us to make ourselves better or to atone for our sins. He does not need us to replace the treasure we squandered. He treasures us, just as we are, because we are as God created us. He loves us and wants for us only our joy and freedom. It is the ego mind that believes we have sinned and needs to atone, and believes that God holds our sins against us so we must make up for it somehow.

The ego tells us we must fix ourselves so we have something holy to offer God. Then it tells us we cannot fix ourselves and so must stay in hiding. But in truth there is nothing to fix. The undoing that we are dedicated to is only for the purpose of choosing to awaken. We are learning we want to wake up and learning what it is we have to let go of in order to awaken.

All this work we do, all the dedication and devotion to the process is for us. We are allowing the untrue thoughts to be removed from our mind so that we become aware of what we are, and always have been, and always will be. We are not trying to make of ourselves something different, but just getting stuff out of the way so that we can have what we are revealed to us. God does not need anything from us.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: VI. The Treasure of God, Paragraph 3. 9-17-14

VI. The Treasure of God
3 Let us glorify Him Whom the world denies, for over His Kingdom the world has no power. No one created by God can find joy in anything except the eternal; not because he is deprived of anything else, but because nothing else is worthy of him. What God and His Sons create is eternal, and in this and this only is their joy.

We have made a veil to hide our eternal creations from ourselves. How else could we play this child’s game of making up the impossible and living it as if it were real? We are not guilty for this. After all we are created free to have any experience we want. But we never meant to this illusion to be our home. The veil is thin and the memory of our true home is preserved in our mind so that we could never be lost in our fantasy.

The endgame is to wake up from the dream of play and return to eternity. That is all we are doing now. Jesus found the path out and he has provided us with this book, these lessons and his help so that we, too, can return Home. He is reminding us that we want to end the game and he is reminding us of the Voice that guides our every decision and corrects our thinking.

It seems that the hardest part of this is believing that there is something joyful and eternal that I could have instead of what I have come to believe is my life. How can I believe in something I cannot even imagine? But that is the flaw in the ego’s argument for remaining in the illusion. I can imagine. I can remember. This is possible because the memory of eternity is in my mind right next to the illusion that I made up. It isn’t hidden from me, but hidden by me. I can change my mind at any time and make a choice for reality.

This slow undoing of the ego is just a way to remember that I want to undo the ego. I have allowed myself to notice how uncomfortable I am in the illusion. I have become very sensitive to the pain and suffering of this world, and at the same time the Holy Spirit has drawn my attention to the truth in my mind.

So, slowly as I become aware of discomfort, I look at the belief that caused the discomfort. I realize that I chose this and that I can choose differently. I choose differently as I ask the Holy Spirit to choose for me. My mind becomes clearer than it was before and I notice discomfort and make new choices more quickly and with more enthusiasm. I am learning that not only do I no longer want to play the game of separation, but there is a way to stop and there is something infinitely better waiting for me. I am learning that I want to do this and that I can do this.

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: VI. The Treasure of God, Paragraph 2. 9-16-14

VI. The Treasure of God
2 The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true. I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours to make. If it were, you would have destroyed yourself. Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity. His Will has saved you, not from yourself but from your illusion of yourself. He has saved you for yourself.

Clearly, I can accept what I experience with the body’s senses as true, or I can accept that Jesus is right and this is an illusion. I can accept that I am spirit, that I am the Son of God and all that implies, or I can accept the ego version of myself as the real me. It is up to me. Those are the only two choices I have and the one I choose will not change anything God created, but it will determine my experience.

How do I stop beholding the world? That seems impossible at first, but this is what I understand about it now. I behold the world when I see guilt, when I am afraid, when I feel confused, alone or unhappy. I see the world when I look with the body’s eyes and believe what I see is the truth. I stop seeing the world as I realize my error and ask that my mind be healed. Then what I “see” will be different.

The circumstances may or may not change, but how I see them will change. For instance, I used to think that when my grown children didn’t call me or come to see me it was because they didn’t love me. I thought they judged me for not being a very good mother, and that they held my mistakes against me. I would feel sad and lonely and hopeless because I couldn’t imagine how to fix this. Every problem they had seemed to be my fault because I had not done a better job raising them. I constantly looked for reassurance from them that I was loved and forgiven by them.

Slowly, over time, my mind was healed and I began to see things differently. When they fail to call or come see me, I assume they are busy living their lives and that makes me happy. I have forgiven myself and so I don’t see their actions as a condemnation. I don’t feel guilty so I don’t perceive their actions as proof of my guilt. Now when I notice I miss them, I call them or invite them over. If they are busy then I do something else. It is the same circumstance, but my experience of it is completely different.

Before when I believed in my guilt I saw the world the ego made, and it was painful. Now that more guilt has been removed from my mind, I see the love that was there all the time. I see more of the real world than I did before. I guess you could say that the veil is thinner now. I see the ego world but I also see through it to the truth. What if they really did hold my mistakes against me and resented me? I could still see through their behavior to the truth.

When someone is living an ego belief in blame and guilt they are suffering. They are suffering because they are confused and cannot see that they are loved. If my kids blamed me and thought I was the cause of their unhappiness I could see it as if they were punishing me, or I could see it as the call for love it is. I could also remember that this is all just a story and that when the soul sheds the body, it sheds the story as well. Behind the story are beautiful souls. We are not really against each other, but for each other. We are living the life that will help us all wake up and that is all that is happening here.

The perception that leaves me feeling bereft of love and guilty for my mistakes is beholding the world. The perception that leaves me feeling grateful and compassionate is beholding the truth. When I behold the world, I lose sight of God. When I believe in the world of the ego, I believe that God is like the ego and so I no longer know God. But God didn’t change and He didn’t go anywhere. As my mind heals and I see the real world more clearly, I also draw closer to God.

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