 Lesson 50. I am sustained by the love of God. Here is the answer to every problem that will confront you, today, tomorrow, and throughout time. In this world, you believe you are sustained by everything but God. Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols. Pills, money, protective clothing, influence, prestige, being light, knowing the right people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness that you endow with magical powers. That's quite a list, David. And we're all familiar with that list and how it torments us and teases us, and it tells us that this is how we can be somebody. I want you to help me with what we discussed before the show about creating and manifesting. I had a friend call the other day and said, Penelope, I don't like the fact that I have to take responsibility for what I'm manifesting. I don't like it. And you just made it so beautifully clear to me. I want you to help my friends with it. Well, it really starts to get simpler and simpler as you go into it, what we learn from the course, and that's such gratitude for an awakened mind because it's like it saves time to learn from the Master's story of the Master's psychology, Jesus, Jesus, and he basically is saying that creation is of God and like God, that God created Christ. So Christ is an idea in the mind of God. And Jesus makes many references to creations with a small fee and says that we have creation. So that Christ has creations as well. It's like, it's an extension. Now, that's all at a pure abstract level, we could say, or I tend to use the word levellessness, because speaking of levels, God and heaven are not involved. What is pure abstraction? And we could say it's eternal, it's changeless, it's infinite. We view some of those words in the previous program, perfection. And so when we talk about making or manifesting, we are speaking at the level of perception. And that is where a lot of error comes in when people will say things like, I'm creating, created this illusion, I created this cancer, I created these circumstances in my life and so forth, and came on me. And basically it's using that word power that comes from the power to create when actually all perceptions are projections of the ego. And so we could say that all things that seem to occur in the world and all of the world in history are projections and our manifestations. So that's all the ego. It gets back to that core thing about people say, the world is so vast. I mean, galaxies and solar systems and black holes and oceans and mountains and so forth. It's like if God didn't create that, then exactly where did it come from? And I say, well, it's just a testimony to how powerful the mind is that to believe in the impossible, to believe in separation, which is what the ego is, that's really what the so-called big bang seems to occur, to try to believe in the impossible or to give power to something that is meaningless. And so we have a vast, fragmented cosmos. It's literally the scattering of stars in many different realms is kind of a symbol of how powerful this mind is that we're talking about. So we're not going to lose track of the fact that God did not create time and space. God did not create this physical universe because it's temporary, it's finite. Even the physicists, the quantum physicists, whether it seems to be expanding or they say it may start contracting, you can see the duality that's involved in all of that. And God is not a God of duality, not a God of pure spirit and oneness. So if we bring it down to the practical level, every time that you attempt to take responsibility for specific circumstances, you know, it's playing right into the hand of the ego and there's a lot of guilt involved in that. And so it's more just an opportunity to call on the miracle and to really say, I want another way of looking at this. Don't have to analyze it, don't have to look back into the past and judge it and figure it out from a linear perspective and just surrender the perspective. Because it doesn't exist. Because it doesn't exist. It's such a big one for us who love guilt, who love to go and go to church and what's the word when you go and you renunciate whatever it is? Be absolved. Be absolved and all of that. We like to do that. But we do that because we do feel guilty. We feel we've created all kinds of awful things and we haven't. And I think our friends need to hear that. That's very inspiring. While we're teaching ourselves and the key metaphysics of it is that the guilt comes from believing in the belief in separation. The belief that you actually could separate from a loving God would be guilt-inducing. But what the ego tries to do in a sneaky way is to protect the source of the guilt away and outside of the mind. I'm guilty because I didn't pay back the money that I owed. I'm guilty because I said some harsh words. I'm guilty because I haven't lived up to my parents' expectations. You can see that what the ego wants is it wants us to find the source of the guilt in the world. And it says, find the source of the absolution. Do enough penance. Do enough penance. Do your course, Michael, that's just perfect. And it would rather us obsess about the form, hoping that we can find the solution and form. And it's a game because who in this world has not tried to live the perfect life? Perfection is our inheritance, but forgiveness is necessary first. What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is going within the mind and examining the belief systems that we live by. But the level of behavior is just the level of outcomes. Jesus really clarifies that in the text when he says what you do comes from what you think. So all of our behavior and modification, all of our things to become the look younger, to be more beautiful, to be more muscular, to all of our vitamins and pills and things that he was just mentioning, all this effort is an effort to improve the self or to maintain the self at the level of behavior. And what he's saying is that those are just effects. You need to change your thinking. Well, when we first start to do this, we find out it's a lot easier to change our behavior even than it was to change our thinking. That these things are very deeply rooted. And when you start to go into the metaphysics a little deeper, you find that your thoughts come from your underlying assumptions, your beliefs about the nature of the world, of yourself and reality. So that's what my life has been. It's literally a life of questioning. Ten years of college, instead of just accepting what the professors would say, I would notice that the different disciplines were like talking about each other, against each other. There was a lot of debate, there was a lot of arguing, but there wasn't a lot of peace and serenity. So I just thought, well, I'm going to use these years to ask questions, to go deeper. The fickle scientists were looking at a different world than the psychologists. And the psychologists were looking at a different world than the sociologists. And I began to say, what's the truth? Yeah, there's got to be something that's beneath all of these assumptions. Much simpler. If there is such a thing as truth, it has to be extremely simple. And it should be an aha. It should be something like a child coming upon something with wonderment, not something that's very difficult to struggle with. Easy. It should be easy, natural. And it doesn't seem that way. I mean, the years of questioning where the voices of the world are saying, you know, fit in, you know, find your niche, make a life, make an image of yourself, and something to plant your roots in. To continue and follow that smarter voice has been the real, taken the real willingness because the little voice would always say, step back and see the big picture. This isn't about becoming something in the world or attaining something in the world. This is about seeing the big picture. It takes a lot of faith to keep coming inward. When you're going through all the feelings, the upsets, the emotions, they're heavy at times. They're very intense. And instead of trying to distract away with entertainment and drugs and so on and so forth, it takes a lot of willingness to go through the experience and then to trust that there's something beneath it. And that's pretty much what my life has been about. And we don't think there's something beneath it until we do dare jump. And then we find out, we live through it and everything's all right. It's exactly what we were talking about in the first two shows. Why would you go for God or go for something unless you had an experience that lets you know that it was real? And when people talk about pain and suffering and victimization and the things that are on the news and so prevalent, seemingly in this world, it's like when I started to just say, all right Jesus, I'm just going to give my life over to you. I don't know where this is going, but I'm going to go for it. I'm going to plant all my faith in this thing. Miraculous things started to happen. The people I met, the gathering, the intimate talks that we're having to go from town to town place to place and have these kind of experiences as if you've known these people your whole life. It's extraordinary. It's very much different than anything I've ever experienced. And then that started to become my normal, my natural experience. Instead of the old, which was kind of like a glimpse or a peek here or there, when you really start to surrender into it it starts to just expand and touch all aspects of your perception. And that's the excitement. And you show up and you're in the moment and you just surrender. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to do. With all the college planning out talks and this and that, you show up. The times I'm walking to a bookstore or to the pulpit of the church or to a living room or whatever, don't have a clue about what's going to be said. Sometimes not even an idea of a topic. And then the presence of God orchestrates the gathering. That's right. This isn't about persons that are supposed to be no more than others coming. This is about joining together in an intention and letting the voice for God speak among us. And where two are more are gathered, he is there. And it's so much energy going on here today. It's so exciting. And I knew from the week where I was really very lost that I was so looking forward to joining my mind with you and mine, David and sharing and extending and feeling happy and joyous and being very awake. It's just a beautiful experience. And it's just so simple. And it's so fast. You get more intense and more wonderful and Jesus says you can barely keep your feet on the ground. And this is in a wonderful way. It's not induced by drugs or by, you know, I got the promotion and I got the cotton candy. I wanted to know the ego tries to lure us into thinking that our happiness can be found in getting outcomes that we want. But that shows that once those outcomes is deceived. And that's why it's like the hamster running around, the more we chase, the more we run, the more we seem to be entwined and it takes more effort to bring about those little transitory highs and to battle against those lows, so to speak. And what this is is just a surrender that I am sustained by the love of God, that by minding my mind with God I will be intensely happy. And it's that simple. The things that stand in the way of it is the ego's voice which is screeching. The ego no pool to itself, you know, is much to preserve itself. And so, it's still called life with everything that it's got and quite intensely. When we have self-critical thoughts, when we put ourselves down, the ego is like a spider that sits back at the edge of the web and loves it. When we start to have these loving joyful experiences, it goes into action. I mean, it moves forward in the web and it will pull out everything including the kitchen sink to stop us from remembering how happy we're supposed to be all the time because it's natural. And so, the more you go into it though, you see that as they say in Star Trek, resistance is evil. And you might as well just give way to love because love is the will of God. There's nothing to feel guilty about, is there? There is not. Talk to me about that for a moment. There's nothing to feel guilty about. And I say that for myself who works with guilt a lot and my friends and we all want to hear, but why not? The ego wants us to buy the game that there are certain things that there's a justifiable guilt for. It just wants to break guilt up and as it does with everything, duality. There's good guilt and bad guilt. There's just aifiable guilt like, whoa, you should feel guilty about that and, well, you can let that one go. That's in the lesser camp, you know. But you see how that just perpetuates and holds onto that belief in guilt. When we are coming to an awareness that forgiveness, the real world is an awareness that we haven't done anything wrong. That our guilt came from a misperception of believing in the ego. It's kind of like a little child who has been told, don't go and have any cookies. You leave that cookie jar alone and then looks around and reaches in and then seems to get caught as if I've done something terribly wrong. Well, that's how the deceived mind feels, that believes it is separated from God. The ego has said, you've fallen from grace, you've separated from God and you've got a good reason to feel guilty. You've done something terrible. And to think that you can just pull yourself away from God and think that God's just going to sit back and allow that is not reasonable. So the ego is really trying to convince us that guilt is real. What Jesus does is, he even uses the metaphor from the Bible where the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's like the tree was there and God said, don't eat that fruit. And you know, Adam and Eve, they go ahead, they eat from that forbidden tree. But Jesus says in the Course, he says that God could never put you in a position like that. Would a loving father put his child in a position where something terrible could happen? That God would never put his child, his creation, in that position. Wow. When you start to take a look at that, that's even a release of like an ontological guilt, of guilt that I've done something in my mind, very terrible. When you really start to look at how impossible and incredible separation really is.