The
rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. Joy is never permitted, for
depression is the sign of allegiance to him. Depression means that you have forsworn God.
Many are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not understand what it means. They do not
realize that to deny God is to deny their own Identity, and in this sense the wages of sin
is death. The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its
opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is with what is not. No one can really do
this, but that you can think you can and believe you have is beyond dispute.
Do not
forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will
believe that others and not yourself have done this to you. You must receive the message
you give because it is the message you want. You may believe that you judge your brothers
by the messages they give you, but you have judged them by the message you give to them.
Do not attribute your denial of joy to them, or you cannot see the spark in them that
would bring joy to you. It is the denial of the spark that brings depression, for whenever
you see your brothers without it, you are denying God.
Allegiance
to the denial of God is the ego’s religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the
denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. But consider
what this means to you. Unless you are sick you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in
sickness could you possibly want them. Blasphemy, then, is self-destructive, not
God-destructive. It means that you are willing not to know yourself in order to be sick.
This is the offering your god demands because, having made him out of your insanity, he is
an insane idea. He has many forms, but although he may seem to be many different things he
is but one idea; - the denial of God.
Sickness
and death seemed to enter the mind of God’s Son against His Will. The “attack on
God” made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god
of depression. This was his alternative to joy, because he would not accept the fact that,
although he was a creator, he had been created. Yet the Son is
helpless without the Father, Who alone is his Help.
I said
before that of yourself you can do nothing, but you are not of
yourself. If you were, what you have made would be true, and you could never escape. It is
because you did not make yourself that you need be troubled over nothing. Your gods are
nothing, because your Father did not create them. You cannot make creators who are unlike
your Creator, any more than He could have created a Son who was unlike Him. If creation is
sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what it is. Depression
is isolation, and so it could not have been created.
Son of
God, you have not sinned, but you have been much mistaken. Yet this can be corrected and
God will help you, knowing that you could not sin against Him. You denied Him because you
loved Him, knowing that if you recognized your love for Him, you could not deny Him. Your
denial of Him therefore means that you love Him, and that you know He loves you. Remember
that what you deny you must have once known. And if you accept denial, you can accept its
undoing.
Your
Father has not denied you. He does not retaliate, but He does call to you to return. When
you think He has not answered your call, you have not answered His. He calls to you from
every part of the Sonship, because of His Love for His Son. If you hear His message He has
answered you, and you will learn of Him if you hear aright. The Love of God is in
everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers, and
God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.
Do not
look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the
acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him you will know that He has never ceased to
acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment of you lies your being. You are not sick
and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do. Remember, though,
that to do this is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and
His creation, from which He cannot be separated.
Only
the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you
are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He offer His Son anything that is
not acceptable to Him? If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be
incapable of suffering. Yet to do this you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is
not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of
your Father is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly
without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him
you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. Your
mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is
free.
You do
not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not
have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he
were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane.
When you deny Him you are insane. Would you have Him share your
insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him.
That was the condition of His Son’s creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To
know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave Himself to you in your creation, and
His gifts are eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?
Out of
your gifts to Him the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. His Son removed himself from
His gift by refusing to accept what had been created for him, and what he had created in
the Name of his Father. Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling
place of God’s Son. You are not at home anywhere else, or in any other condition. Do
not deny yourself the joy that was created for you for the misery you have made for
yourself. God has given you the means for undoing what you have made. Listen, and you will
learn how to remember what you are.
If God
knows His children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to perceive them as guilty. If God
knows His children as wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering
anywhere. If God knows His children to be wholly joyous, it is blasphemous to feel
depressed. All of these illusions, and the many other forms that blasphemy may take, are
refusals to accept creation as it is. If God created His Son perfect, that is how you must
learn to see him to learn of his reality. And as part of the Sonship, that is how you must
see yourself to learn of yours.
Do not
perceive anything God did not create or you are denying Him. His is the only Fatherhood,
and it is yours only because He has given it to you. Your gifts to yourself are
meaningless, but your gifts to your creations are like His, because they are given in His
Name. That is why your creations are as real as His. Yet the real Fatherhood must be
acknowledged if the real Son is to be known. You believe that the sick things you have
made are your real creations, because you believe that the sick images you perceive are
the sons of God. Only if you accept the Fatherhood of God will you have anything, because
His Fatherhood gave you everything. That is why to deny Him is to deny yourself.
Arrogance
is the denial of love, because love shares and arrogance withholds. As long as both appear
to you to be desirable the concept of choice, which is not of God, will remain with you.
While this is not true in eternity it is true in time, so that
while time lasts in your mind there will be choices. Time itself is your choice. If you
would remember eternity, you must look only on the eternal. If you allow yourself to
become preoccupied with the temporal, you are living in time. As always, your choice is
determined by what you value. Time and eternity cannot both be real, because they
contradict each other. If you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to
understand eternity and make it yours.