A Course in Miracles

Chapter 10 - God and the Ego

Projection Versus Extension

Either God or the ego is insane. If you will examine the evidence on both sides fairly, you will realize that this must be true.

Neither God nor the ego proposes a partial thought system. Each is internally consistent, but they are diametrically opposed in all respects, so that partial allegiance is impossible.

Remember, too, that their results are as different as their foundations, and their fundamentally irreconcilable natures cannot be reconciled by your vacillations.

Nothing alive is fatherless, for life is creation.

Therefore, your decision is always an answer to the question, “Who is my father?” And you will be faithful to the father you choose.

Yet what would you say to someone who really believed this question involves conflict? If you made the ego, how can the ego have made you?

The authority problem remains the only source of perceived conflict, because the ego was made out of the wish of God’s Son to father Him.

The ego, then, is nothing more than a delusional system, in which you made your own father.

Make no mistake about this. It sounds insane when it is stated with perfect honesty, but the ego never looks upon what it does with perfect honesty, yet that is its insane premise, which is carefully hidden in the dark cornerstone of its thought system. And either the ego, which you made, is your father, or its whole thought system will not stand.

God Created By Extension

You have made by projection, but God has created by extension. The cornerstone of God’s creation is you, for His thought system is light. Remember the rays that are there unseen. The more you approach the center of His thought system, the clearer the light becomes. The closer you come to the ego’s thought system, the darker and more obscure becomes the way, yet even the little spark in your mind is enough to lighten it.

Bring this light fearlessly with you, and hold it up to the foundation of the ego’s thought system bravely. Be willing to judge it with perfect honesty. Open the dark cornerstone of terror on which it rests, and bring it out into the light. There you will see that it rests on meaninglessness, and that everything of which you have been afraid was based on nothing.

My brother, you are part of God and part of me. When you have at last looked at the ego’s foundation without shrinking, you will also have looked upon ours.

I come to you from our Father to offer you everything again. Do not refuse it in order to keep a dark cornerstone hidden, for its protection will not save you. I give you the lamp and I will go with you.

You will not take this journey alone. I will lead you to your true Father, Who hath need of you, as I have.

Will you not answer the call of love with joy?

You have learned your need of healing. Would you bring anything else to the Sonship, recognizing your need of healing for yourself?

For in this lies the beginning of knowledge; the foundation on which God will help you build again the thought system which you share with Him. Not one stone you place upon it but will be blessed by Him, for you will be restoring the holy dwelling place of His Son, where He wills His Son to be, and where he is.

In whatever part of the mind of God’s Son you restore this reality, you restore it to yourself, for you dwell in the Mind of God with your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone.

To be alone is to be separated from infinity, but how can this be if infinity has no end?

No one can be beyond the limitless, because what has no limits must be everywhere. There are no beginnings and no endings in God, Whose universe is Himself.

Can you exclude yourself from the universe, or from God Who is the universe?

I and my Father are one with you, for you are part of us.

Do you really believe that part of God can be missing or lost to Him?

If you were not part of God, His Will would not be unified. Is this conceivable? Can part of His Mind contain nothing?

If your place in His Mind cannot be filled by anyone except you, and your filling it was your creation, without you, there would be an empty place in God’s Mind.

Time Has No Meaning

Extension cannot be blocked and it has no voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your denial of its reality arrests it in time, but not in eternity. That is why your creations have not ceased to be extended, and why so much is waiting for your return.

Waiting is possible only in time, but time has no meaning.

You, who made delay, can leave time behind simply by recognizing that neither beginnings nor endings were created by the Eternal, Who placed no limits on His creation, nor upon those who create like Him. You do not know this simply because you have tried to limit what He created, and so you believe that all creation is limited.

How, then, could you know your creations, having denied infinity?

The laws of the universe do not permit contradiction. What holds for God holds for you.

If you believe you are absent from God, you will believe that He is absent from you.

Infinity is meaningless without you, and you are meaningless without God. There is no end to God and His Son, for we are the universe. God is not incomplete, and He is not childless. Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself.

Do not deny Him His Son, for your unwillingness to accept His Fatherhood has denied you yours. See His creations as His Son, for yours were created in honor of Him.

The universe of love does not stop because you do not see it, and your closed eyes have not lost the ability to see.

Look upon the glory of His creation, and you will learn what God has kept for you. God has given you a place in His Mind which is yours forever, yet you could keep it only by giving it, as it was given you.

Could you be alone there, if it was given you because God did not will to be alone?

God’s Mind cannot be lessened. It can only be increased, and everything He creates has the function of creating. Love does not limit, and what it creates is not limited. To give without limit is God’s Will for you because only this can bring you the joy which is His, and which He wills to share with you. Your love is as boundless as His, because it is His.

Could any part of God be without His Love, and could any part of His Love be contained?

God is your heritage because His one gift is Himself.

How can you give except like Him, if you would know His gift to you?

Give, then, without limit and without end, to learn how much He has given you. Your ability to accept Him depends on your willingness to give as He gives.

Your fatherhood and your Father are One.

God willed to create, and your will is His.

It follows, then, that you will to create, since your will follows from His, and being an extension of His Will, yours must be the same.

Yet what you will you do not know.

This is not strange when you realize that to deny is to “not know” it. God’s Will is that you are His Son. By denying this, you denied your own will, and therefore do not know what it is.

The reason you must ask what God’s Will is in everything is merely because It is yours.

You do not know what it is, but the Holy Spirit remembers it for you. Ask Him, therefore, what God’s Will is for you, and He will tell you yours.

It cannot be too often repeated that you do not know. Whenever what the Holy Spirit tells you appears to be coercive, it is only because you do not recognize (know) your own will.

The projection of the ego makes it appear as if God’s Will is outside yourself, and therefore not yours. In this interpretation, it is possible for God’s Will and yours to conflict. God, then, may seem to demand of you what you do not want to give, and thus deprive you of what you want.

Would God, Who wants only your will, be capable of this?

Your will is His Life, which He has given to you. Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death.

What He created can sleep, but it cannot die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son’s will for himself.

God’s Son cannot will death for himself because His Father is Life, and His Son is like Him. Creation is your will because it is His.

You cannot be happy unless you do what you will (want to do) truly, and you cannot change this because it is immutable. It is immutable by God’s Will and yours, for otherwise His Will would not have been extended.

You are afraid to know God’s Will, because you believe it is not yours.

This belief is your whole sickness and your whole fear. Every symptom of sickness and fear arises here, because this is the belief that makes you want not to know.

Believing this, you hide in darkness, denying that the Light is in you.

You are asked to trust the Holy Spirit only because He speaks for you.

He is the Voice for God, but never forget that God did not will to be alone. He shares His Will with you; He does not thrust It upon you.

Always remember that what He gives He holds, so that nothing He gives can contradict Him.

You who share His Life must share it to know it, for sharing is knowing.

Blessed are you who learn that to hear the Will of your Father is to know your own.

For it is your will to be like Him, Whose Will it is that it be so. God’s Will is that His Son be one, and united with Him in His Oneness.

That is why healing
is the beginning of the recognition that your will is His.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 10 - God and the Ego

The Willingness for Healing

If sickness is separation, the will to heal and be healed is the first step toward recognizing (knowing) what you truly want.

Every attack is a step away from this, and every healing thought brings it closer.

The Son of God has both Father and Son, because
he is both Father and Son. To unite having and being is only to unite your will with His, for He wills you Himself. And you will yourself to Him because, in your perfect understanding of Him, you KNOW there is but One Will. Yet when you attack any part of God and His Kingdom, your understanding is not perfect, and what you will is therefore lost to you.

Healing thus becomes a lesson in understanding, and the more you practice it, the better teacher and learner you become.

If you have denied truth, what better witnesses to its reality could you have than those who have been healed by it?

But be sure to count yourself among them, for in your willingness to join them is your healing accomplished. Every miracle which you accomplish speaks to you of the Fatherhood of God.

Every healing thought which you accept, either from your brother or in your own mind, teaches you that you are God’s Son.

In every hurtful thought you hold, wherever you perceive it, lies the denial of God’s Fatherhood and your Sonship, and denial is as total as love.

You cannot deny part of yourself, because the remainder will seem to be unintegrated, and therefore without meaning, and being without meaning to you, you will not understand it. To deny meaning must be to fail to understand.

You can heal only yourself, for only God’s Son needs healing. He needs it because he does not understand himself, and therefore knows not what he does.

Having forgotten his will, he does not know what he wants.

Healing is a sign that he wants to make whole, and this willingness opens his own ears to the Voice of the Holy Spirit, Whose message is wholeness. He will enable you to go far beyond the healing you would undertake, for beside your small willingness to make whole He will lay His Own complete Will and make yours whole.

What can the Son of God not accomplish with the Fatherhood of God in him?

And yet the invitation must come from you, for you have surely learned that whom you invite as your guest will abide with you.

The Holy Spirit cannot speak to an unwelcoming host because He will not be heard. The Eternal Guest remains, but His Voice grows faint in alien company. He needs your protection, but only because your care is a sign that you want Him.

Think like Him ever so slightly, and the little spark becomes a blazing light that fills your mind so that He becomes your only Guest.

Whenever you ask the ego to enter, you lessen His welcome. He will remain, but you have allied yourself against Him.