ACIM Chapter 7. IX. The Extension of the Kingdom, P 1, 2. Only you can limit your creative power, but God wills to release it.
IX. The Extension of the Kingdom, P 1
1 Only you can limit your creative power, but God wills to release it. He no more wills you to deprive yourself of your creations than He wills to deprive Himself of His. Do not withhold your gifts to the Sonship, or you withhold yourself from God! Selfishness is of the ego, but Self-fullness is of spirit because that is how God created it. The Holy Spirit is in the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the spirit, mediating between them always in favor of the spirit. To the ego this is partiality, and it responds as if it were being sided against. To spirit this is truth, because it knows its fullness and cannot conceive of any part from which it is excluded.
I was standing at my window watching the rain pour down and thinking about an earlier section of the Course that said, “God honored even the miscreations of His children because they had made them. (ACIM, T-5.I.6:1)” I realized that all these times when I have been feeling guilty for something in my life, I have failed to honor my miscreations and if God honors them so should I. I choose not to identify myself as my miscreations, but I honor them because of what I am.
I am asking Spirit to help me remember this anytime ego thoughts rise up in my mind calling me to guilt. Can I trade guilt for honor? Yes, I can do that now that I understand honoring my freedom and my power even in my miscreations will not cause more miscreations. In fact, honor above guilt will break me out of the paralysis of my self-condemnation and return my mind to the Kingdom.
Today’s paragraph reminds me that only I can limit my creative power.
And it reminds me that this is not God’s Will. He wants me to create and to create fully. My creative power will be released as I release myself from my self-imposed prison of guilt and fear. I release myself by releasing my brothers. Again, I am reminded that I am one with all my brothers, and what I release in them is released in me.
Some years ago, my sister-in-law suffered from COPD. Often, she would be in the emergency room. Because she was in a weakened state, each time she had an emergency like this we knew she might not recover. This was her miscreation, and there was a time when I blamed her for it. I thought she was guilty for the state she is in, that she should have quit smoking, and that she should have taken better care of herself.
I know that guilt is not real and is just part of the illusion, an effect of believing in separation. But it binds us to the illusion, so I asked that my mind be healed. I accepted the Atonement for that and I am so grateful that I did. But then I took it a step further and I honored her miscreation. I honored her choices knowing that her life was her way Home regardless of how it appears in the world. I stand amazed at our power; even when misused, it is astonishing.
Can you imagine what our true creations must be?
If we can make an entire world; if we can make it to be the impossible and make it so real we believe in it, I am unable to visualize what we are creating right now in our true mind. The Holy Spirit was given to us to help us find our way back to the Kingdom where we already are. He is the intermediary between the parts of the mind, the part that remains with God and the part that imagines itself outside of God.
How hard can this be, really? We are powerful creators, we are as we were created, and we have never been anything else. We are only waking up to the truth that we have not gone anywhere and nothing has happened. How funny this predicament will seem when we wake up from it!
IX. The Extension of the Kingdom, P 2
2 Spirit knows that the awareness of all its brothers is included in its own, as it is included in God. The power of the whole Sonship and of its Creator is therefore spirit’s own fullness, rendering its creations equally whole and equal in perfection. The ego cannot prevail against a totality that includes God, and any totality must include God. Everything He created is given all His power, because it is part of Him and shares His Being with Him. Creating is the opposite of loss, as blessing is the opposite of sacrifice. Being must be extended. That is how it retains the knowledge of itself. Spirit yearns to share its being as its Creator did. Created by sharing, its will is to create. It does not wish to contain God, but wills to extend His Being.
Jesus is telling us something about our Self. We are created by God as an extension of Himself. That is, God created us through sharing Himself. That means that we are equal in perfection and power with our Creator. This is so hard to take in because we have made a self that is opposite of Reality and so we feel small and weak and vulnerable.
What we feel is exactly the opposite of what we are. This is why we must let go of what we think we know before we can take our place in the Kingdom. What we think we know is blocking our awareness of our Reality. Recently, I have begun to respond to ego feelings by telling myself, “That can’t be right.”
Here is something that happened some years ago. It describes how I used what I was learning from this paragraph.
Yesterday, I spent the day with my sister-in-law at the emergency room. She is experiencing Restrictive Lung Disease. Her lungs just won’t let her exhale breath so there is a buildup of carbon dioxide. At least this is what I understood the doctor to say. There were a lot of emotions going on as I was there with my family.
When I would feel that hospital personnel were guilty for not responding quickly, I would remind myself of the truth, “That can’t be right.” There is no such thing as guilt. It is just one of those ego things we made up to keep separation in place. When I felt helpless and didn’t know what to say, I could remind myself, that can’t be right. The Holy Spirit is in my mind and always ready to respond through me as I step back and allow that to happen. Why should this be any different.
The ego is always going to react with fear and guilt because that is how it was made, from fear and guilt. But, as Jesus says, the ego cannot prevail against a totality that includes God and any totality must include God. I am beginning to see things differently now. I am beginning to see everyone as part of me, not separate people with separate needs, but one whole thing of which I am a part. And all of us are in God. This changes everything.
These changes require vigilance and practice.
What I noticed yesterday is that I still sometimes react to the unknown as if it is the enemy. I feel afraid and uncertain. Because I feel so at sea, not knowing how to feel, I grab onto any familiar anchor and that is sometimes the ego. But my connection with Spirit is firmly rooted through years of practice as I have turned to Him for guidance and clarity over and over.
So what that looked like is this. I would see myself agreeing with fear stories, or finding fault with the medical system and I would hear myself telling stories to support this fear. I could see myself doing it as if it was someone else. And I even saw the reason I did it, how it was like a drowning person grabbing the first solid object to keep afloat. That was how I felt, like I was drowning in uncertainty and it was better to be egocentric than to drown.
I watched all this happen and it was ok.
I knew what was happening and why and I knew to let it go. This is so much better than when I would stay in it for a long time and when I finally came to my senses, would feel guilty and beat myself up for not doing better. It was also very reassuring to see that the Holy Spirit is still there even when I am confused, stronger than the ego in my mind. When I was finding fault, I was seeing us as separate, and I was allowing fear to block the extension of love, which is creation.
More than once I notice how I felt, tired and weepy. I reminded myself that it is ok to feel whatever I feel. This is an important reminder for me because I can start to feel guilty for not being “stronger.” When this happens, I know that it is the ego wanting to be strong. Over all, I am happy that even though I was caught up in the ego story of Brinda in the emergency room, I was also detached enough to see what was going on. The ego will not prevail. It is not possible. Even when everything seems crazy and scary, part of me knows it is just a story and that it can’t be true.
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