ACIM Chapter 8. VI.The Treasure of God, P 5-7

ACIM Chapter 8. VI. The Treasure of God, P 5-7. God wants only His Son because His Son is His only treasure.

VI. The Treasure of God, P 5

5 God wants only His Son because His Son is His only treasure. You want your creations as He wants His. Your creations are your gift to the Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for your creation. They do not leave you any more than you left your Creator, but they extend your creation as God extended Himself to you. Can the creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? And what is real except the creations of God and those that are created like His? Your creations love you as you love your Father for the gift of creation. There is no other gift that is eternal, and therefore there is no other gift that is true. How, then, can you accept anything else or give anything else, and expect joy in return? And what else but joy would you want? You made neither yourself nor your function. You made only the decision to be unworthy of both. Yet you cannot make yourself unworthy because you are the treasure of God, and what He values is valuable. There can be no question of its worth, because its value lies in God’s sharing Himself with it and establishing its value forever.

This is extraordinary news!

Let’s look closely as what we are being told. I have creations as does God. They are true creations, that is, they are created as God creates. I long to remember my creations. I also realize that those times when I didn’t feel loved were just an illusion of not feeling loved. My Creator loves me and so do my creations. This love never ends, never changes and is always present. I don’t feel that love because I have chosen to feel something else in its place.

I have convinced myself I would rather keep the drama of the separation idea and that this drama is what I want. But it is not what I want. I want love and peace and joy. This is my true desire. Everything else I think I want is just part of the general confusion I am experiencing because of my choice to identify with what I am not.

The solution to this problem is simple.

I notice the times when I think I want something other than God, and I ask that my mind be healed. In this way, I lift the veil of confusion, and the truth is revealed to me. One morning, I felt weepy for no reason I could articulate. I can find a story to explain it, but what would be the point? The story is the effect of the problem, not the problem itself.

At first, it was making me crazy, and that is because I kept asking my ego for an answer and a solution. The ego said it was just a reaction, the pendulum swinging from the excitement and the joy of the weekend to being with others for the purpose of healing. The ego said that I missed my kids and needed to visit them. It says that this weekend was fun and that I liked having the day off and didn’t want to go back to work, and that is the problem. But I knew that these were just stories I made up to explain something I didn’t want responsibility for.

Finally, I just stopped fighting it. I accepted that I felt weepy and that I was willing to feel what I felt without inventing a story to explain it. I remembered that my feelings didn’t hurt me. If I was suffering, it was because I was at war with myself. I asked the Holy Spirit to heal my mind and then let myself feel what I feel. The feeling disappeared. Haha. I stopped fighting it, and it disappeared. There is a really good lesson in that experience.

VI. The Treasure of God, P 6

6 Your function is to add to God’s treasure by creating yours. His Will to you is His Will for you. He would not withhold creation from you because His joy is in it. You cannot find joy except as God does. His joy lay in creating you, and He extends His Fatherhood to you so that you can extend yourself as He did. You do not understand this because you do not understand Him. No one who does not accept his function can understand what it is, and no one can accept his function unless he knows what he is. Creation is the Will of God. His Will created you to create. Your will was not created separate from His, and so you must will as He wills.

God created me to add to creation through creating as He does. This is joy. I can’t know my function without knowing myself. So, I cannot create unless I know what I am, and thus, I cannot be joyful unless I know what I am. Thus, the question, “What am I?” is a good one. It is the only question, really. Once I know what I am, everything else falls into place.

I know I am not this body living in time and space. I am not bad or even foolish. Nor am I lost or afraid, not sad, not angry, not guilty. I am not going to live and then die. I am not suffering or in pain. But what am I? I am Spirit, the holy Son of God. But what does that mean? What does that feel like? Until I know that, these are just words.

In reading the last sentence, I know that my will is the same as God’s Will.

Jesus does not say that I used to share the Will of God, and now I have my own separate will. He doesn’t say that someday I will share the Will of God. It says that God shares His Will with me; therefore, I must will as He does. This means that what I am experiencing now, a will separate from God, must be an illusion. It can only be that I am dreaming of an individual separate will because I share the Will of God.

This means that I do know what I am. I have that memory, and in fact, I am living in joy, living in God right now. I can stop dreaming any time I want. That means I can wake up to my true existence, my memory fully restored because it never went anywhere. If I have amnesia, it is only because I chose to forget, and therefore, I can choose to remember. And how could it be hard when reality has not been suspended while I dream? I am as I always have been. “God creates only mind awake; thus, I must be awake,” is my daily mantra.

VI. The Treasure of God, P 7

7 An “unwilling will” does not mean anything, being a contradiction in terms that actually means nothing. When you think you are unwilling to will with God, you are not thinking. God’s Will is Thought. It cannot be contradicted by thought. God does not contradict Himself, and His Sons, who are like Him, cannot contradict themselves or Him. Yet their thought is so powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God’s Son, if they so choose. This choice does make the Son’s function unknown to him, but never to his Creator. And because it is not unknown to his Creator, it is forever knowable to him.

What a mess we have made! In our attempt to become our own creators, we have succeeded only in imprisoning our minds. In doing so, we think we think, but nothing is actually happening except we are dreaming instead of living. Remember Lesson 15, where he used this phrase, “…the thoughts you think you think…”? I remember being intrigued when I read that but not understanding it. Eventually, I came to realize that I only seem to have thoughts, but as Jesus makes clear here, God’s Will is Thought, and it cannot be contradicted. Since we are like God, we cannot contradict His Will, and therefore, we only think we think when we try to do so.

Because we are a creation of God, our mind is very powerful even in its present limited state. So we can have an impossible experience even if we cannot make it real. Our made up thoughts can hide our real thoughts, though they cannot change them. Because of the unchangeable nature of thought, this means we cannot will apart from God. We share the same Will and nothing we imagine can change this.

Thus, we have nothing to fear.

We share the Thoughts of God because we share His Will. This is an absolute and cannot be undone. This is true all the time, even when I am confused and try to think apart from God, even when I think I want an individual separate will. My will and my thought is preserved for me because that is God’s Will.

What does this mean to me right now where I think I am? I can take a deep breath and relax. I can let go of the buried fear and dread, the guilt that keeps me hiding out here in my illusion. All the generalized anxiety and the resultant projections are not necessary. There is nothing for me to fear, and I am not guilty because nothing has happened. The mind is very powerful and can project an image of nothing and can even imprison itself in this image, but it cannot change God’s Will. I’m ok. God is not mad, and I am not lost. I am safe.

I will continue to open my heart and mind to God. And I will continue to look at my errors with the Holy Spirit and allow them to be undone for me. This doesn’t change, but what can change now is the uncertainty and doubt that has plagued me in the past. The idea that I can will against God’s Will and my true will is not, after all, true. My success is guaranteed. I will return to God because that is His Will.