V. The Denial of God, P13
13 Do not perceive anything God did not create or you are denying Him. His 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.
Journal
As I read this I wondered how I could perceive nothing God did not create, and then I realized I was thinking of perceive as “see.” I could not imagine how I could look around with my eyes and see only the real. Of course that makes no sense, because the eyes show me only the ephemeral and what is real is eternal. The eyes show me only illusions.
Obviously, Jesus is telling me not to believe what I see, not to believe it is real and valuable, and something I would long for and give to myself. I will still need a house and a car and money, or at least something that passes for these things, depending on my circumstances. But they are not gifts to myself. I used to long for a special car, a special house, a lot of money, and now I expect to receive all that I need. If I don’t have it I must not need it.
Jesus says that I believe the sick things I have made are my creations, and while this is true I will not remember my real creations. The thought given me as I read this passage is to return to Lesson 325, “All things I think I see reflect ideas.” The world is filled with images of the ideas in my mind. I think I want something and I make an image of it and project it outward and value it.
This is where the idea of positive thinking and The Secret come from. We have made an image of a world and then we go another step and try to make an image from within that world. I think that as we recall some vague memory of how we made this world, we try to duplicate it, and we “discover” that what we want very much, we tend to get.
The problem with this idea is that we have many ideas in our mind. We have the idea of love and joy and happiness, and we also have the idea of guilt and fear, suffering and death. On both levels, as the maker of our experience, and as the conscious manipulator of that experience, we make images from a grab bag of beliefs and thoughts.
We don’t understand anything and we don’t know what anything is for. How could we be surprised at the resultant mess? It is at this point that we pretend it all just showed up and we don’t know where it came from. We pretend that we are just victims of circumstance and of unkind and sometimes vicious people. We give away our identity and with it our power and hide in the closet afraid to come out, afraid that the Creator of Reality is offended by our dream world.
We need not be afraid to acknowledge our Father. He is no more offended by our fanciful play than we are offended by our children as, when in play, they pretend to be something they are not. And we must acknowledge our Father if we are to remember who we are, if we are to reclaim the memory of our power and our place within Him.
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