ACIM Chapter 7.VII. The Totality of the Kingdom, P 1

ACIM Chapter 7.VII. The Totality of the Kingdom, P 1. Whenever you deny a blessing to a brother you will feel deprived, because denial is as total as love.

VII. The Totality of the Kingdom, P 1

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.

Three things stand out to me in this paragraph.

First is the sentence, “You cannot be totally committed sometimes.” I think this sentence is more responsible than any other for changing my attitude toward the work we do on this path. I realized at once that my commitment, dedication, and devotion must be complete. A Course in Miracles is not something I can do when I am in the mood. Forgiveness is not something I do for some and not for others. I must be totally committed all the time, or I am not committed at all.

When I divorced my last husband, I realized that my commitment to forgiveness meant that I could not throw a relationship away and just start over with someone else. All relationships must be healed, and so I did that. I forgave him, and I forgave myself. It took me thirteen years to know this relationship was completely healed, but that doesn’t matter. Forgiveness is the right use of time.

At first, forgiveness took time and seemed hard sometimes. Now, I forgive quickly and easily. I understand the purpose of relationships. I know what I am to do with them. If someone gets on my nerves, I ask for the Atonement in that situation. I know it isn’t about them but about something in my mind that needs to be healed. If someone or something triggers fear in me, I know what to do with that. I asked for the Atonement in that situation, and I accepted the Atonement. There might be action to take for the story’s sake, but the purpose is forgiveness.

All guilt must be eradicated.

If I experience guilt, that is, if I see myself as guilty or someone else as guilty, my purpose is to forgive it. There are no exceptions. No one stands guilty and outside God. This is what I am teaching myself, and through teaching guiltlessness, I am learning that guilt has never existed except in my mind. It is a belief that I made real for myself through the power of my belief.

As I learned to make no exceptions to forgiveness, I was being released from the belief in guilt. Every time I made an exception and believed that some action or thought was unforgivable, whether in myself or someone else, I reinforced the belief in guilt. This is why I became totally committed all the time. Otherwise, I would have spent my time dancing back and forth between belief and disbelief, getting nowhere.

Fear is another false belief that I had made very real for myself.

My commitment was to back out of that belief. I still feel fear sometimes, but much less so than before, and it will be undone. The Holy Spirit does this for me, but only with my permission. As I cling to some particular fear that feels more real to me than another, I keep fear itself in place. It doesn’t matter what form the fear takes. It could be a fear of heights, a fear of poverty, or a fear of relationships. But it is just fear projected as a story in my life, and so they are all the same, and the solution is the same.

I accept the Atonement in each seemingly different problem. By accepting that the solution to each problem is the same regardless of the form it takes, I teach myself that there is only one problem. I also teach myself that there is a solution and that I can and will accept the solution. This lesson is not learned if I make exceptions, so I must be totally committed all the time.

Denial of reality must go.

“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 become anxious. There are many ways we misuse the power of our minds and believe there is nothing we can do about it. We fall in and out of love and hurt each other, which 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 in 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 it to ourselves.

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 is no simple thing. We must overcome our 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. And 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 accept 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 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. So, 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 prepare myself for our return to God.

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