 We continue today with chapter 11, God or the ego, introduction. Either God or the ego is insane. If you will examine the evidence on both sides fairly, you will realize 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 vacillations between them. 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 believed this question really involves conflict? If you made the ego, how can the ego have made you? The authority problem is still the only source of 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 on 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. You make by projection, but God creates 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 bravely hold it up to the foundation of the ego's thought system. 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 rested 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 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? The gifts of fatherhood. 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 the return to knowledge, the foundation on which God will help build again the thought system 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 dwells his son to be and wills his son to be and where he is. In whatever part of the mind of God's son you restore to this reality, you restore it to yourself. 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 could 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. Extension cannot be blocked, and it has no voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your denial of its reality may arrest 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 or 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, nor have your eyes closed, 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 that is yours forever. If you can keep it only by giving it, as it was given you. Could you be alone there, when it was given you because of God did not will to be alone? God's mind cannot be lessened. It can only be increased for everything he creates as 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 that is his, and that 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 wills 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 do, not know. You do not know. This is not strange when you realize that to deny is to not know. God's will is that you are his son. By denying this you deny your own will, and therefore do not know what it is. You must ask what God's will is in everything, 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 it. Whenever what the Holy Spirit tells you appears to be coercive, it is only because you have not recognized your 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 seems 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. Sleep is not death. What he created can sleep, but 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 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 be 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 keeps, 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. And from the workbook, lesson 78, Let miracles replace all grievances. Perhaps it is not yet quite clear to you that each decision that you make is one between a grievance and a miracle. Each grievance stands like a dark shield of hate before the miracle it would conceal. And as you raise it up before your eyes, you will not see the miracle beyond. Yet all the while it waits for you in light, but you behold your grievances instead. Today we go beyond the grievances to look upon the miracle instead. We will reverse the way you see by not allowing sight to stop before it sees. We will not wait before the shield of hate, but lay it down and gently lift our eyes in silence to behold the Son of God. He waits for you behind your grievances, and as you lay them down, he will appear in shining light where each one stood before. For every grievance is a block to sight, and as it lifts you see the Son of God where he has always been. He stands in light, but you were in the dark. Each grievance made the darkness deeper, and you could not see. Today we will attempt to see God's Son. We will not let ourselves be blind to Him. We will not look upon our grievances. So is the seeing of the world reversed as we look out toward truth away from fear. We will select one person you have used as target for your grievances, and lay the grievances aside and look at him. Someone perhaps you fear and even hate, someone you think you love who angered you, someone you call a friend but whom you see as difficult at times or hard to please, demanding, irritating, or untrue to the ideal he should accept as his, according to the role you set for him. You know the one to choose. His name has already crossed your mind already. He will be the one of whom we ask God's Son be shown to you. Through seeing him behind the grievances that you have held against him, you will learn that what lay hidden while you saw him not is there in everyone and can be seen. He who is enemy is more than friend when he is free to take the holy role the Holy Spirit has assigned to him. Let him be Savior unto you today, such as his role in God, your Father's plan. Our longer practice periods today will see him in this role. You will attempt to hold him in your mind. First, as you now consider him, you will review his faults, the difficulties you have had with him, the pain he caused you, his neglect, and all the little and larger hurts he gave. You will regard his body with his flaws and better points as well. You will think of his mistakes and even of his, quote, sins. Then let us ask of him who knows this Son of God in his reality and truth that we may look on him a different way and see our Savior shining in the light of true forgiveness given unto us. We ask him in the holy name of God and of his Son as holy as himself. Let me behold my Savior in this one. You have appointed as the one for me to ask to lead me to the holy light in which he stands that I may join with him. The body's eyes are closed and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances. What you have asked for cannot be denied. Your Savior has been waiting long for this. He would be free and make his freedom yours. The Holy Spirit leans from him to you, seeing no separation in God's Son. And what you see through him will free you both. Be very quiet now and look upon your shining Savior. No dark grievances obscure the sight of him. You have allowed the Holy Spirit to express through him the role God gave him that you might be saved. God thanks you for these quiet times today in which you laid your images aside and looked upon the miracle of love the Holy Spirit showed you in their place. The world and heaven join in thanking you for not one thought of God must rejoice as you are saved. And all the world with you. We will remember this throughout the day and take the role assigned to us as part of God's salvation plan and not our own. Temptation falls away when we allow each one we meet to save us and refuse to hide his light behind our grievances. To everyone you meet and to the ones you think of or remember from the past, allow the role of Savior to be given that you may share it with him. For you both and all the sightless ones as well, we pray, let miracles replace all grievances. So today we open again to recognize our Father, our Father in heaven. We know that we must accept the Fatherhood of God to accept our own identity as a creation of God, as a creator in spirit. If we choose to make the ego Father, this is an attempt to deny God, deny Christ, and to deny reality. So the text today, the gifts of Fatherhood help us see that there is no reconciliation of attempting to hold on to two different thought systems that have no meeting point at all. We must see that the question who is my Father is underneath everything. Am I the child of a loving spirit God? Or do I believe I can make myself and make up a God as I wish God to be? Different from eternity, different from infinity, this is the choice that I make every second of every day. Yet it is impossible to be separated from infinities. There can be no beginnings and no endings in God. God is one and I am one in God. I need not wait to accept this. I need not delay accepting this. There are no limits upon creation and I am creation. I am spirit. Today I accept myself as God created me. The workbook reminds us that only grievances block the light and the truth of my identity. Each decision I make is one between a grievance and a miracle. Each grievance stands like a dark shield of hate before the miracle it would conceal. Today we go beyond the grievances to look upon the miracle instead. Today we accept ourselves as God created us. Spirit the I am presence. We would have no grievances block the light. We would make no attempt to shield the darkness from the light. And any brother, any sister that seems to cause us grief, that seems to have heard us, that seems to have not fulfilled the role that we assigned to them. We see them today as the living Christ. Let me behold my savior in this one. You have appointed as the one for me to ask to lead me to the holy light in which he stands. That I may join with him. Let miracles replace all grievances.