7-16-13
Chapter 4: THE ILLUSIONS OF THE EGO
III. Love Without Conflict, Paragraph 1
1 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? This is the whole message of the Atonement; a message which in its totality transcends the sum of its parts. You, too, have a Kingdom that your spirit created. It has not ceased to create because of the ego’s illusions. Your creations are no more fatherless than you are. Your ego and your spirit will never be co-creators, but your spirit and your Creator will always be. Be confident that your creations are as safe as you are.
The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen.
The Kingdom of Heaven is me. I don’t remember the experience of this, but I accept that it must be true. Just as in the section The Obstacles to Peace, Jesus says of peace: You are the center from which it radiates outward, to call the others in. I am the center of peace? I don’t feel like I am peace, but rather I have to seek peace, and yet Jesus says otherwise. He says that I am peace and I don’t know it because I have placed obstacles to it and now must remove them.
Here he has said that the Kingdom of Heaven is me. I am peace. I am the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the reason I cannot fail! I don’t seek to be someplace else or to become something different. I seek to remove obstacles I placed in my mind to, obstacles to what I already am. How hard could this be? It does feel hard, but only because at times I remain conflicted about what I want.
First Jesus tells me that I am God’s Kingdom and then he tells me that I have a Kingdom that I (my spirit, not my ego self) created. I have fathered creations! I don’t even know what to think about this. I know that I am part of God, created like Him and therefore must also be a creator, but thinking about this in such specifics just leaves me stunned.
I cannot imagine what that must look like which makes me want to cry, because if I can forget my own creations it just underscores just how deeply lost in my dream I am. Jesus must have anticipated this reaction because he goes on to assure me that my creations are no more fatherless than I am, and that I can be confident that my creations are as safe as I am. I am not fatherless and I am safe, and this extends to my creations.
Also in The Obstacles to Peace Jesus calls our present dream like state, the great amnesia in which the memory of God seems quite forgotten. We have self-inflicted amnesia, and an agreement to pretend that we don’t remember who we are, and that we don’t remember our existence in God. It is forgotten, not lost, and we are beginning to waken from that dream.
Now here is a difference between the dreaming we seem to do at night, and the dream of being separate from God. At night when I sleep and I dream, my waking story is on hold. I am in the bed and I am doing nothing else in my life while I lay there. But with the ego’s dream of life, it is different. I dream of all sorts of meaningless things (just as happens to Myron in her night dreams) but in the meantime, my spirit goes on as if nothing is happening (which is appropriate I suppose, since nothing is happening). My real life continues uninterrupted into eternity, and I, as spirit, continue to create even while I dream the ego dream of life.
Yesterday I had two experiences of being outside my self, and I take hope from those experiences that I am closer now to accepting the Atonement. I say this to you because they were so very brief and it would be easy for the ego to discount them as the memory fades, but I want to remember, and I keep only what I share. The ego will not prevail against the Kingdom. Thank you, God, for that. And thank you, sweet brother, for bringing into the dream this reassurance from Heaven.
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