Lesson 184
The Name of God is my inheritance.
You live by symbols. You have made up names for everything you see. Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted by a name.
This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world’s perception is achieved. You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will.
What are these names by which the world becomes a series of discrete events, of things ununified, of bodies kept apart and holding bits of mind as separate awarenesses? You gave these names to them, establishing perception as you wished to have perception be. The nameless things were given names, and thus reality was given them as well. For what is named is given meaning and will then be seen as meaningful; a cause of true effect, with consequence inherent in itself.
This is the way reality is made by partial vision, purposefully set against the given truth. Its enemy is wholeness. It conceives of little things and looks upon them. And a lack of space, a sense of unity or vision that sees differently, become the threats which it must overcome, conflict with and deny.
Yet does this other vision still remain a natural direction for the mind to channel its perception. It is hard to teach the mind a thousand alien names, and thousands more. Yet you believe this is what learning means; its one essential goal by which communication is achieved, and concepts can be meaningfully shared.
This is the sum of the inheritance the world bestows. And everyone who learns to think that it is so accepts the signs and symbols that assert the world is real. It is for this they stand. They leave no doubt that what is named is there. It can be seen, as is anticipated. What denies that it is true is but illusion, for it is the ultimate reality. To question it is madness; to accept its presence is the proof of sanity.
Such is the teaching of the world. It is a phase of learning everyone who comes must go through. But the sooner he perceives on what it rests, how questionable are its premises, how doubtful its results, the sooner does he question its effects. Learning that stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning. In its proper place, it serves but as a starting point from which another kind of learning can begin, a new perception can be gained, and all the arbitrary names the world bestows can be withdrawn as they are raised to doubt.
Think not you made the world. Illusions, yes! But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming. When you call upon a brother, it is to his body that you make appeal. His true Identity is hidden from you by what you believe he really is. His body makes response to what you call him, for his mind consents to take the name you give him as his own. And thus his unity is twice denied, for you perceive him separate from you, and he accepts this separate name as his.
It would indeed be strange if you were asked to go beyond all symbols of the world, forgetting them forever; yet were asked to take a teaching function. You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well. They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought that will release you from them. They become but means by which you can communicate in ways the world can understand, but which you recognize is not the unity where true communication can be found.
Thus what you need are intervals each day in which the learning of the world becomes a transitory phase; a prison house from which you go into the sunlight and forget the darkness. Here you understand the Word, the Name which God has given you; the one Identity which all things share; the one acknowledgment of what is true. And then step back to darkness, not because you think it real, but only to proclaim its unreality in terms which still have meaning in the world that darkness rules.
Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. Yet accept them not as your reality. The Holy Spirit uses all of them, but He does not forget creation has one Name, one meaning, and a single Source which unifies all things within Itself. Use all the names the world bestows on them but for convenience, yet do not forget they share the Name of God along with you.
God has no name. And yet His Name becomes the final lesson that all things are one, and at this lesson does all learning end. All names are unified; all space is filled with truth’s reflection. Every gap is closed, and separation healed. The Name of God is the inheritance He gave to those who chose the teaching of the world to take the place of Heaven. In our practicing, our purpose is to let our minds accept what God has given as the answer to the pitiful inheritance you made as fitting tribute to the Son He loves.
No one can fail who seeks the meaning of the Name of God. Experience must come to supplement the Word. But first you must accept the Name for all reality, and realize the many names you gave its aspects have distorted what you see, but have not interfered with truth at all. One Name we bring into our practicing. One Name we use to unify our sight.
And though we use a different name for each awareness of an aspect of God’s Son, we understand that they have but one Name, which He has given them. It is this Name we use in practicing. And through Its use, all foolish separations disappear which kept us blind. And we are given strength to see beyond them. Now our sight is blessed with blessings we can give as we receive.
Father, our Name is Yours. In It we are united with all living things, and You Who are their one Creator. What we made and call by many different names is but a shadow we have tried to cast across Your Own reality. And we are glad and thankful we were wrong. All our mistakes we give to You, that we may be absolved from all effects our errors seemed to have. And we accept the truth You give, in place of every one of them. Your Name is our salvation and escape from what we made. Your Name unites us in the oneness which is our inheritance and peace. Amen.
INITIAL INSIGHT: “This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world’s perception is achieved. You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you.”
In Reality, there is unity, but in our world, the one we constructed in our minds, and from our beliefs, there is separation. There is space between all things and each thing is named to give it more reality. Jesus says that we see something where there is nothing. We see a space where there is no space. And, he says that we see nothing where there is unity. That space we imagine between each thing obliterates what is there.
Here is how I visualize this. There is “light” or “energy” and it is in everything and encompasses everything. We imagine that we have broken that energy into parts and placed an imaginary space between these parts. In addition, we have given form to these parts and named them tree, body, pet, ant, water, and on and on.
We have then further divided reality into time segments and thus the world exists as discrete events. And so, we have, in our minds, undone Unity and replaced it with our own creation. In doing this, we have decided that we made a world of our own and given it life and given it a separate will. This, we believe, is reality. And all the while, Reality continues to exist all around us, completely unaffected by our delusions.
“It is hard to teach the mind a thousand alien names, and thousands more. Yet you believe this is what learning means…”
Teaching names and their relative meaning is what we think of as education. I watch this with my granddaughter who is just learning to express through language. Her mom points to her nose and says its name then encourages her to do the same. At first, she points to her mom’s nose but eventually begins to understand that not only is her body divided into parts but that it is separate from her mother’s body. When they get here, they don’t really know that.
We are teaching them that the truth is not true, and yet, it is necessary to do so. We are having the experience of being human and to do so effectively, we must learn what humans learn. We have to be able to navigate this world. Then we spend the rest of our lives learning none of it is real or true. LOL. “Learning that stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning.”
We didn’t really make the world, we just made illusions. But we did not in any way affect what is actually real. Now Jesus says something interesting here. He says: “But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming.” I get that what is true in Heaven is beyond my naming, but I wonder what is true in earth. I suppose maybe he means the Substance of which all things are created. Not the substance of form as we know it, but the light or energy or however we want to imagine it. Since God is All there is, we can call that “substance” God.
One thing I notice is that he says that when we call on our brother as if he is a body, our mistaken belief in what he is hides his true identity from us. He answers to the name we give him and his unity is thus is denied twice, first by how we perceive him and second by his agreement to be so perceived.
“It would indeed be strange if you were asked to go beyond all symbols of the world, forgetting them forever; yet were asked to take a teaching function. You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well.”
We continue to live the world as everyone else does. We use the names and see separation with our eyes. We experience our emotions. We continue to have thoughts. So how is it different? We are no longer fooled by what we see, hear and think. Every day we spend time in Reality through meditation, being with our Self, calling on the name of God, and on the Name which God has given us. When we come back into the world, we do so with the memory of the truth that in spite of appearances, there is no separation. There is only unity.
I just had the most amazing revelation in which these words took on a deeper meaning. I understand now that everything is God. The tree is made of God, the sky above is made of God, the air around the tree is made of God, the soil in which the tree is planted is made of God. So are the bugs and the grass and so am I. There is no difference between us at all, we are identical. The difference we see is the illusion.
Do you know what this means? If the tree must be cut down, nothing has happened. If the bugs must be eliminated, nothing has happened. If the dog dies, nothing has happened. The symbol of these things has ceased to exist for us, but nothing is lost. God continues to exist as It always has. I might miss my symbol of God, but I have not lost God.
If I wanted to imagine that in a very simple way, I could think about chocolate chip cookies. I always feel a little sad when I eat the last one. The symbol of yummy goodness is no longer in my house. But I don’t grieve long because the ingredients continue to exist and so I know I can make more. Kind of a silly analogy but the only one I could think of. ~smile~ The symbols of Life in this world inevitably die away, even the universe will do so, but their essence, the Life Force we call God is eternal so nothing is really ever lost.
And after all this talk of the name of God, and maybe you were wondering what His name could be, Jesus does the great reveal and says that God has no name. I have to admit, that was kind of a let-down. “ And yet His Name becomes the final lesson that all things are one, and at this lesson does all learning end.” I am going to assume that the Name of God is not a word, just as sometimes when I “hear” the Holy Spirit speak to me it is not in words.
Jesus assures us that no one fails who seeks the meaning of the Name of God. I suppose I will just keep calling God, God. But I open my heart wide to a deepening meaning. I can only receive this meaning through the experience of God but first I must accept the Name for all of reality. In the only way I know to do this is to allow Vision to show me what lies beneath the illusion of a separate thing.
I will keep reminding myself that God is All That Is and that there is nothing that is not God. So, when I see a tree maybe I will see more than the symbol I call tree. If I call on the Name of God when I look at that tree or that person, for any and all aspects of God’s Son, I will be given strength to see beyond them to their Essence.
DAILY APPLICATION: Once again, Jesus is reminding us of the necessity for meditation. There is a world we can see, there is a way we can see that does not distort creation. We need meditation so that we can return to reality and give our tired minds a rest from keeping the illusion in place and to remind ourselves that this experience we are having is not reality.
But we cannot give up the illusion from within the illusion. As long as we are dreaming this life story, we must participate in it. I have heard people try to talk to each other using only symbols that accurately represent reality and it can’t be done. The only thing that happens is a failure to communicate. I am giving as much time as I can to meditation, even when that time is only a few minutes here and there.
INSIGHTS FROM HOLY SPIRIT: Here is how Holy Spirit helped me to see differently when my mind was making separation real.
Something miraculous happens when I open my mind to healing and to vision. I begin to perceive the world and my brothers differently. Recently, my brother died and his family was planning the funeral. Our beliefs are quite different and I was dreading the funeral, having to listen to a preacher talk about sin and damnation. I was assuming this because of a past funeral. But thinking about the funeral and these people in that way was painful and I don’t stay in pain anymore.
So, I let go of my beliefs (the world as I saw it) and asked for clarity. The next morning when I went to the funeral, my mind was clear and what I heard from them was a reflection of truth. I saw that if I wanted to hear what was the same then that is what I heard. If I wanted to hear what was different than I believed, then that was what I heard. Just that little bit of clarity represented our oneness. For a few minutes that morning, I did not see separation. I didn’t see a space between us where God was not. I just saw God and more God.
GRATITUDE: Thank You, God. I love You, God.
REGINA’S TIPS
It has always amazed me that a huge dog, like a Great Dane, and a very small dog, like a Chihuahua, recognize each other as the same animal. The huge Great Dane does not mistake the Chihuahua for a squirrel or rodent, and the Chihuahua doesn’t think the Great Dane is a monster. They recognize each other as the same.
Today’s workbook lesson asks us to be more like the Great Dane and the Chihuahua. You see, we have a tendency to focus on differences. In fact, we do more than that. We define a thing based on its difference from another thing. We also define circumstances based on their difference from other circumstances. The lesson says, “By this split, you think you are established as a [individual] unity which functions with an independent will.”
In other words, we get our sense of separation from the tendency to focus on and define by differences.
Today’s workbook lesson says, “Such is the teaching of the world. It is a phase of learning everyone who comes must go through. But … Learning that stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning. In its proper place, it serves but as a starting point from which another kind of learning can begin, a new perception can be gained, …”
We are not asked to drop the many names and descriptors that humans have given to things. These, the Course admits, are helpful to communication. But we are asked to drop believing that these many named differences have any real meaning. We are asked to look to the “one Identity which all things share.” We are asked to remember the “single Source which unifies all things within Itself.”
The workbook lesson says, “God has no name. And yet His Name becomes the final lesson that all things are one, and at this lesson does all learning end. … No one can fail who seeks the meaning of the Name of God. Experience must come to supplement the Word. But first, you must accept the Name for all reality, and realize the many names you gave its aspects have distorted what you see, but have not interfered with truth at all. One Name we bring into our practicing. One Name we use to unify our sight.”
Today we will continue to use the Name of God mantra. However, as we use this mantra today, let’s contemplate the sameness in all things as it relates to the Name of God, a sameness that is represented by the Name of God.