VII. The Totality of the Kingdom, Paragraph 1 Continued
1 Whenever you deny a blessing to a brother you will feel deprived, because denial is as total as love. It is as impossible to deny part of the Sonship as it is to love it in part. Nor is it possible to love it totally at times. You cannot be totally committed sometimes. Denial has no power in itself, but you can give it the power of your mind, whose power is without limit. If you use it to deny reality, reality is gone for you. Reality cannot be partly appreciated. That is why denying any part of it means you have lost the awareness of all of it. Yet denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as well as negatively. Used negatively it will be destructive, because it will be used for attack. But in the service of the Holy Spirit, it can help you recognize part of reality, and thus appreciate all of it. Mind is too powerful to be subject to exclusion. You will never be able to exclude yourself from your thoughts.
This is what I want to contemplate today:
“Denial has no power in itself, but you can give it the power of your mind, whose power is without limit. If you use it to deny reality, reality is gone for you.”
Again and again in the Course Jesus reminds us of the power of our mind. Here he says it is unlimited. This is so hard for us to comprehend. We have denied this power so thoroughly that we can’t say no to chocolate, or we procrastinate to the point we cause our self grief and think there is nothing we can do about it. We fall in and out of love and hurt each other and it seems just to happen to us. We feel like we have no power over our lives at all. And yet, Jesus says we have unlimited power. So we must be doing this to ourselves.
We are talking about the power of denial, specifically. We are told that denial has no power of itself, but the unlimited power of our mind lends it power, so much so that what we deny is no longer true for us. If we deny reality, then reality is gone. At least it is gone from our awareness, just as we desired. That is why we can live as if we have no control over what we eat, that we cannot help being addicts, that we just stumble into and out of relationships and don’t know how it happened.
We do all of this to ourselves and then we deny any knowledge of how it happened and through the power of our minds we believe the lie. It becomes true for us and we are left helpless victims of circumstance. It’s the craziest thing! As insane as this is, backing out of it is no simple thing. We must overcome our own desire and choose to see differently.
We must first understand how it could have happened and then accept that, weak as we seem, we must actually be powerful beyond limit. We must put aside our fear of this power and embrace the idea as something we love and want. That is all we have to do because the rest is done for us, but lord knows, that’s enough.
This would be impossible if we did not have so much help. We accomplish this one step at a time, and I find it very helpful to take the step of realizing that, “Reality cannot be partly appreciated.” Knowing this I have stopped believing that I can love some and hate others and still know Reality. I no longer believe that I can forgive some and hold others imprisoned in my grievances, or that I can hurt someone without hurting myself.
Knowing this one thing helped me to see that awakening is possible after all. There is nothing to decide other than that all of God’s creation belongs to Him. If I want to remember the Kingdom and know myself beside Him there, I must appreciate, equally, all that He created. Nothing can be left out, nothing can be seen as less than, and nothing can be seen as condemned. All must be forgiven and accepted. You cannot get any simpler than that.
I don’t give my blessing begrudgingly anymore. I want my brothers to be innocent, because I understand now that I am only as innocent as they are. I wholeheartedly want them forgiven because their forgiveness is my forgiveness. I am learning to use the unlimited power of my mind to return myself to sanity and to make myself ready for our return to God.
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